Wen’ de ya ho, Wen’ de ya ho,
Wen’ de ya, Wen’ de ya,
Ho ho ho ho,
He ya ho, He ya ho,
Ya ya ya
-Cherokee sunrise song
“I love you sun”
*******
Not sure if the Sun was up late last night or what, but I beat him to his own dance. A little chilly out this morning, especially considering the unrelenting heat we’re anticipating as we navigate this circular ceremony, and considering the minimal attire that each dancer has clad themselves in. The dancers are barefoot, men are topless, and both sexes wear long skirts over their lower halves. Heads, wrists and ankles are circumferenced by rings of ceremonial Sage, a measure to prevent opposing energies from affecting the building prayer vibrations of the dancers. The dancers will not touch another human over the next four days, if they must lead one another, they will use the Sage rings to offer guidance. They each carry an Eagle bone whistle, a thin tonemaker that they must exhale every single breath through - not as easy as it sounds. Most also carry a ceremonial fan made out of an Eagle’s wing, a sacred instrument of prayer and energy that can help to bring healing to the people.
Boom boom, boom boom, the heartbeat of Unci Maka grows louder, a drumful of voices reach to the sky with a unified message, we are here to pray.
Harvey enters the Sun Dance arbor armed with an Eagle staff - his conductors baton for the upcoming vibrational orchestration. He was pursued by a few assistants to the Sun Dance chief, followed by the men, and finally the women. The dance itself would hardly fit into any colonized categorizations of cha cha, it was really just a simple two step routine, left left, right right, it’s strength came not from the fancy footwork, but from the collective choreography of their combined vibrations.
The group moved sunwise around the arbor, facing outward in each direction for an extended amount of time, always dancing, always praying, concentrating their flow to the single antennae in the center, our Sun Dance tree, and regularly prompted to raise their arms both in praise to the tree, and as an active method of transferring their internal energy to this cosmic collector. There are going to be lots of rounds like this, four days of them, most with a specific intent and intense specifics, like this year’s three Eagle dancers.
*******
Let’s give it up for sacrifice. One of the big twelve, so you know it’s important, but what’s it really about? Growing up I had a book that talked about sacrificing one of God’s own, like Mary’s little Lamb, to that very same God. Now, I understand that Lamb to be as much a piece of God as I, and I’m in no position to slaughter another in order to beg for my own salvation, though I do offer a spirit plate to the other side of the table.
Sacrifices must be made in the name of progress, like the sheep, the pawns, the unsuspecting public whose domain is dwindling. They must also be made in the name of standing up to the destructive progression, like the great Lakota warriors who sacrificed their lives for the people and for Unci Maka, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and now a whole new generation of Lakota warriors who are standing up to the exact same monster. Except they brought backup this time.
We know the sacrifice of another is superficial at best, the whole point of it is to give a piece of yourself up for the greater good, your energy, your vibration, and to not be looking for anything in return. Like sacrificing creature comforts, those that I’ve never seen anything classified as a ‘creature’ ever using. And once you understand the amount of creatures that make the ultimate sacrifice for your nuclear powered comfort level, it starts to get a little warm in here when we cut the AC all the way down.
Certainly sacrifices to be made in order to break free of capitalism, I meant that on a personal level, but don’t let me hold you back. Living a no money lifestyle is not necessarily convenient, though it does magically leave space for some pretty convenient coincidences, but expect to be walking a lot.
Sacrifice my God-given able body’s renewable resource to save from adding another stinking car to the road? In a second. Plus, that cuts a lot of costs right out of the gate. No phone, obviously, why would anyone halfway revolutionary want a wiretap in their pocket anyway? No house or anything, but don’t really need it, after Standing Rock I gave away everything I owned and generally prefer to sleep outside. I travel with my couple of items, and that’s all I got, but I’m under no delusion of having zero baggage.
I may not touch it, but the money machine turns in my name, it still burns oil, it still pollutes the water, it still mistreats our plant and animal brothers. Just because I don’t buy it, if I allow another to do their good deed for the day, then I’ve just defeated the whole point of trying to live with minimal footprint. I can’t simply tell myself that it counts against their tab of plastic containers brought into this world, as I clear my own conscience of consequence. That math just doesn’t hold up once you’ve taken money out of the equation.
At Ben’s, we were close to living with zero plastollution, only checking into the system for the most auxiliary of items, and we probably could have cut those back as well. But what made all that possible? Well, money. He had worked for it, traded his life energy, as well as the energy of the racehorses he trained, and in return received enough financial compensation to enable himself to purchase the title to the land he had already been working. Expensive piece of paper, took a bunch of those other paper scraps to trade for it, but apparently this title of the entitled transforms its possessor into the supreme law of the land. (But I thought that was treaties?)
And Benjamin was surely as just a ruler as the land had ever seen, at least since the original occupants had been evicted, probably far more fair to his subjects than the capitalist he’d taken over from. And then he quit the cash game, made enough to walk away from civilization and begin living in a good way, the low impact lifestyle that he’d known all along was imperative to the health of our planet. But he had to make that money first.
Plenty of people have the dream of escaping the Rat race to live off the land out in the middle of nowhere, and maybe one day, but the only way to ever do it is to commit a lifetime of labor, all in the name of escaping this laborious way of life. It might not be pretty, whichever branch of colonization your career falls under, but if you do your job obediently, then once you’ve used up all of your vibrant years to spread our message of destruction, you’ll be free to disappear into the wilderness. If there’s any left.
Sounds hard enough to escape the money pit when you can build a ladder out of dollar bills, most don’t have that luxury though, or any luxury at all really, it seems that a majority of our maximized population endure a life of minimal means. It’s one thing to feel indebted to the system until your SUV is paid off, or once you have enough to buy some ecosystem and install a pool, almost there and then you can float your way through life. But what if there was no end in sight as you work two jobs that still don’t total a living wage, and just so that you can rent a roof to put over your family’s head? How could someone struggling to keep their head above water, while desperately clinging onto the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, ever stand a chance of surviving as the rising water levels threaten our entire species?
They don’t, they were never meant to, our systematic philosophy of low prices at any cost, requires that a lower class of fellow humans must suffer so that we may meet our excessive expectations. How could so many people be blinded to the true cost of doing business? How could someone live this extravagant lifestyle of convenience once they realize the broken backs it’s built upon? Well, it’ll be my privilege. My white privilege.
*******
This one makes the white people uncomfortable sometimes, defensive, even more so than the truths about indian massacres and police shootings. No need to get worked up, it’s not your fault that you’re white, you never slaughtered another race of people, you worked hard for everything you ever got, anybody can work that hard and pull themselves out of the slum, it’s not your fault that everyone else is a lazy bum.
And I only use the colonial label of 'white people', because of its socially accepted connotations. My own caucasian skin tone has no effect on my current path of re-indigenizing, or the dissonance I feel from the dominant culture of our current civilization. The more accurate terminology for the privileged few who hold the keys to unlocking the cages of the many, would be 'those born of settler descendance.'
Hard to argue an advantage when your forefathers wrote the handbook for the control grid, which just so happens to be written in your king's language, or maybe it's just coincidence that the descendants of colonization are the collegiates calling for continued colonization. So we could replace the phrase 'white people' for the sake of continuing the comfort of the white people, but that would drastically increase my word count, and I'm just a lazy old Earth-lovin hippie.
See, I’m on your side, I’m a white dude too, for years I worked hard to save enough money to go to college to pursue my dream of becoming a broke musician. Easy to deny a leg up in life as I lived in sketchy neighborhoods where I was in the minority, but I was the only one on the block privileged enough to dream of a way out.
There was that one dude who had a dream that time, a fantasy of equality, and ever since the civilization rights movement, I’m pretty sure it’s been fair and square for all the colors of the medicine wheel. Now, it would certainly be hard to deny that up until that point, the system had been a little rigged. We did have the whole slavery thing, not the most optimal starting position, but somehow still ahead of the fate of the obviously inferior indian peoples. So yeah, there for a while we kept humans in chains, our bad, but now you guys are free - to become lower-class citizens of a system built on white supremacy.
I’m not talking about the dunce cap wearing band of bigots who openly share their closed minded opinions, they’re just another instrument of the empire, another herd of cattle used to keep the sheep separated. They were being oppressed too, as were all of the working class, then they were handed a convenient scapegoat to blame for the declining prosperity, an even lower class citizen who had way less rights than even the trashiest white person. So no rules basically, the kops were in the klan, and now these poor white folk finally had someone to take their aggression out on. Musta made them forget their own troubles, definitely made them blind to the big picture, but I’m pretty sure their white Jesus bible approved of hating blacks, so they hanged out most every weekend.
But this supreme small-mindedness wasn’t a new thing, our country was built on european superiority before it was even built, obviously caucasians are a far more evolved being than any savage indigenous types. That kinda goes without saying, even the least racist of the ruling class have to agree about the supremacy of the civilized. Certainly it’s no sin to slaughter such a lowly lifeform as we overlay the foundation of high society. Just making the world a better place is all. For us at least.
So thirteen rich european families took all the money they’d made by stealing spices from sacred lands, and invested in a new business plan, a new model of corporate capitalism, a start-up that took the country by storm. The Virginia Company was now open for business. White owned, white operated, and most assuredly we only serve whites at our counters. Sounds like my segregated south, but this was back in 1606, and they kept it up for a hundred and seventy years, and even then they simply changed their name and began using independent contractors. They kept the same ownership, as well as their white collar management, but now they could operate on a nationwide scale, the company would now be called, “the united states of america.” The America Corporation.
I could go an about this for a while, already did once, and I might yet, but right now I’m just digging into the depths of a country’s white creamy filling. So right out of the gate, rich white men wrote the company bylaws, and since they got the only vote, it stayed that way. Rich white men had the privilege of prioritized plantation politics, gotta keep the one percent happy so they can trickle down on the rest of us, good thing they own 83% of the stock market. The laws were all written in their best interests, because they wrote them, and they generated a generational game plan of passed-down perpetuity.
The sons became even more powerful, even though they hadn’t worked near as hard for it, but the rich white men were the only ones raised for this type of work, so by default, we still lived under a white flag of defeat. And rich white sons were the only ones privileged enough to attend the earliest colleges, which made them the only ones qualified to do important stuff, like own businesses, or filibust the floor over the preferred profits of a conflicting business law. And this cycle continued as rich white men got richer (and maybe whiter) because they were the only ones writing the rules.
*******
Then the slaves caught that train to freedom. No longer the property of a supposedly supreme being who believes that a piece of paper can prove ownership over life. So they should start living it up pretty soon, right? Maybe the world’s still a little rigged against them, but as long as they work hard, they should be able to come up out of poverty and make something of themselves. Resume’s not looking that good, it’s been a cotton picking minute since they’ve done anything other than field work, so I guess their new found freedom comes complete with a callused career of cultivation. Hard to put a kid through college on a farmhand’s salary, especially since they weren’t allowed to attend anyway, so they passed down a lineage of servitude as the rich whites continued to build an empire.
They, of course, had come from a land of strong heritage, a generational connection to their Odudua, Mother Earth, Unci Maka, a way of life full of prayer and song and drum and love. Definitely not good for business. We tried our best to whitewash their inheritance, a little ethnic cleansing, same deal as with the natives really, no songs or praying or even your own Earthbound language, or we’ll kill you. Took their names and gave them ours, explains why I’ve met more black people with my last name than white. :( And more Washingtons and Jeffersons too. Oh, and they’re definitely not allowed to read, you never know what kind of uprising could come about from ingesting the words of a revolutionary.
But now they were free to become an even lower class citizen of a system specifically built to inhibit their survival. Hard to deny the privilege experienced by someone born into the family farm franchise, free to enjoy a carefree childhood, brought up with the etiquette required by white society in order to be a part of white society. Sent off to school to study under white professors about the wonders of civilizing the world in the image of our white God, only ever knowing a world of inequality where whites run the show, and that’s the way we wanna keep it. We’re better than they are, the laws are pretty clear about that one, so don’t feel bad exploiting these lesser humans in the name of expanding our empire. Why, they can’t even read.
The privileged considered their eliteness a birthright, an unquestioned destiny of greatness, that’s just the way it was. They had only ever known a life of excess, with little thought for the human suffering required to make it happen, but they were still 'good people.' Hmm... I guess that pretty much describes current day americans too, go figure.
And so the Freemans rent a place down the street, 'rent' itself being a contrived Ponzi scheme designed to disable the working class, but I got a whole thing on that coming up later. Plenty of other disadvantages to an underprivileged birthwrong, like the rampant racism of the entire world around you. Business owners and authority figures certainly playing their part in keeping you down, and that’s not even counting their klub meetings, but the hate is in the eyes of the common man too.
Just because the north won, don’t think that an entire society built on the lashed backs of blacks is gonna be buddy buddy with their new neighbors. We were actually kind of upset that we lost. You could say that this depth of racism was just in the backwards south, but that kinda feels like a copout considering that the south was where all the black people were. It was where this new sub-human class of laborer entered the workforce at cutthroat wages, which for some reason had a negative impact on poor whites, creating ill will towards the newcomers, who in actuality had the most shared interests with their own sociopolitical group.
So nobody liked them, everybody hated them, made ‘em eat bugs and stuff, ew, and certainly never considered considering them equals. So junior grows up only ever knowing oppression, and all they can teach him is unskilled labor, so guess what bud, you’re gonna grow up to be an unskilled laborer. Just another repeating cycle, and one pretty similar to the working class whites, except that black folks weren’t pre-qualified for a fair shot at a loan from a white banker, who was the son of a white banker, who was the son of a white banker.
*******
But most whites weren’t bankers either, we lived minimally and worked excruciatingly hard, only in the last few generations have we seen the rags to riches story come to life. Our grampas were dirt poor, and had to work their whole life away as they built a name for themselves, though the bank loans didn’t hurt. And our fathers, with either a hand-me-down enterprise or a cosign on a college fund, plus they could just ask pops for a small business bankroll. Then our generation, the ones that get a car at sixteen and drive to a minimum wage job as a novelty, not as a necessity, kinda sounds a bit privileged to me. In just a few generations of come-uppance, through a small scale mirroring of the empire building elite - amassing money, knowledge and power - we transformed from the lower class to the consumer class.
We just did this, recently, and I’m pretty sure we had a head start. So imagine a life not lived on the legacy of your family tree, your roots instead holding you back from forward momentum, and the nepotism of the establishment ensures that you’ll never work hard enough to climb the corporate ladder. Generations of whites working towards generational wealth, building a chance at the american dream for their little ones, and building a sense of american privilege at every turn.
As compared to the generations of blacks, resigned to a life of menial labor and minimal advancement, no management, so no benefits, so no inheritance, or insurance, or career to pass down, or credit to extend for college, or basically anything to make the life of your children any better than that of your father. And this is how it went from then til now, as we built a modern society undeniably biased in favor of the white man. A fair skinned kingdom where less than 4% of the fortune five hundred CEOs represent a minority, and even less have served as president.
You’re not still caught up on the past being the past are you? You think we’ve possibly reparated ourselves back to a free and just land of equal opportunity? A place where an eleven-year-old has to join a gang to feel safe on his own block, at least until another police shooting takes away that security too, and good luck finding a real job when your application’s always at the bottom of the stack. Or a home loan. Or a good school. Or a fair trial. And then of course, you have the actual KKK to deal with.
*******
Seems like this blast from the past was never actually a bygone, they’ve been hating the game all along, and now with their first official endorsement of our racephobic president, it seems they’ve started stirring around a bit. While I was staying with Ben in the east, the KKK protested the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in charlottesville, virginia. Plus, they brought their partners in hate grime, the neo-nazis and the alt-right. What a fun little bunch. I’m def down for protest and free speech, even from hate mongers who stand on their heritage, though I do doubt that most of the rebel flag toters I’ve known could name many other historical facts.
Like, perhaps the part about the dukes and general Lee losing the war. As much as some southern white folks are still in denial of defeat, this part’s just basic war strategy, we don’t honor statues of the leaders we take down. They stand for values that we’re willing to risk our children’s lives to combat, even if the public is grossly misinformed as to the true nature of the war machine, so I guess that would be like erecting a statue of Osama or Saddam. You might say that’s a bit extreme, comparing a defeated war hero to murderous racists with american blood on their hands, who after being funded by the US, saw something in our system of domination that they felt the need to stand up against. But what I consider extreme, is when a current day KKK member kills a counter-protester in public over the removal of a hunk of bronze.
There were more people protesting the protesters than the initial turnout of bigotry, I guess I could see where that might be upsetting to a group’s morale. So much so, that a twenty-year-old with a youthful passion for hate, drove right into the crowd of lovemongers, injuring many and killing one young woman. Second degree murder. Over a statue that supposedly doesn’t represent hate, only a heritage of hate.
Mr prez even had to speak up against the white supremacy groups, probably upsetting to his loyal supporters within their ranks, which might be why it took him a few days to even acknowledge any of it. And how much of that was just for show? I mean, this is the dude banning travel for muslims and walling out all of mexico. A man who one said that laziness was a trait of the blacks. He’s the one that got our racist underbelly fired back up, and once again made it politically correct to spread hatred in the name of greatness. Considering that I don’t believe much that he says, or anybody else in the government for that matter, I’ll assume that his initial reaction was not quite as condemning of the rousing rebels.
*******
Not that I’m against rebelling, definitely all about the revolution, we must stand up to the corporate corruption of the united states government. If we don’t let our voice be heard in the coming days, we’ll soon be silenced into submission as martial law is used to push their agenda even further. However, if somehow we end up losing the battle against tyranny, I don’t expect Donny T to erect a statue of me in DC. But then again, I don’t expect we’ll lose either.
*******
You may not be knowingly racist, but if you’re white, then you’ve experienced a different world than everyone else. An existence of unspoken eliteness, and unless you can acknowledge the depths to which our society is overtly geared towards caucasian domination, then your disbelief of a biased world is just another cog in the machine of systematic oppression. I’m still unraveling the levels of privilege that I take for granted, subtleties that in a colonized white setting, simply seem standard protocol, but from a perspective of the oppressed, are obviously just another spit in the face.
So maybe you get it now, but what good does that do? What can you do with this new understanding of a system that you already knew to be faulty? You didn’t ask to be white, you know? It’s not your fault that you were born where you were, why is it up to you to change the world into a better place?
Most kings don’t choose their fate either, a birthright or a birthcurse, either way, with great power comes great responsibility. They may not ask for it, but because of their inherited privilege, the lives and well-being of an entire nation are in their hands. They could take their privilege and enact tyranny on the lower class. Or they could just turn a blind eye on an empire full of injustice, as they pretend to stand for all. Or perhaps they could rise to the occasion, acknowledge the travesties that their own throne is built upon, and begin the healing process of rebuilding a unified kingdom. If you woke up and realized that you were part of the ruling class, which one of these three kings do you think you’d be?
And how privileged is it for me to keep going on about transitioning to a no money way of life, not owning a thing and sleeping outside, when for plenty of folks, that’s just the way it is? Me hating on GMOs and fast food, but what else can a handful of borrowed change put in your kid’s belly? I’m so incredibly lucky and grateful to be where I am today, but I’m not naive to the privilege that enabled my journey.
So what will I do about it? I will show understanding, and humility, and patience, as I lead my brothers and sisters to a path of healing. I know that I still have no clue about just how messed up it’s all been, but as I share my genuine concern for repairing the generational trauma, and as I share compassion for those who are only victims of circumstance, I pray that the love of our movement will overcome the hate of stagnation.
Or if that’s too yadda yadda for you, there’s some actual action type things you can do with your new found white savior super power. Acknowledge your privilege, and then own it, denying it only keeps it inaccessible. We have to use our unfair skin color to tilt the biased world into their favor.
First off, if you see something unfair happening, say something. You have a voice. People will listen to you. White people will listen to you. Imagine trying to function in a world where a definite percentage of the population, even in the progressive cities, will treat you differently than anyone else, up to and including the complete refusal to acknowledge your existence altogether. Geez, probably gonna be tough to acknowledge the privilege too, huh? Tough to grasp the psychological effect it would have to experience a lifetime of being unseen, because if you have white skin, you’ve simply never experienced anything like it.
So speak up. Don’t let racism be ignored. Share another perspective when your civilized community says something that they don’t even realize is offensive. Back up your brother of another color with affirmation if you see him unfairly targeted. Share the message with your friends list and spend time enlightening your family about the privileges they’ve always known, you do know them better than anyone else. But not in a combative way, that never works, always from a place of love and understanding.
Speak about white privilege openly, that’s the way to bring change, we need awareness among the only race that can do anything about a system built in their own favor. Make it a household term, not something that makes people squirm. It’s not something to be ashamed of, to the point of denying the blatantly obvious truth, it’s something to see for what it is, to objectively acknowledge the faults in the system, and to use our voice to create a world where everyone feels welcome.
Still not enough for you? Need some stunts? Well, you could stand between the militarized police and whichever oppressed population they’re threatening in your neck of the woods. It’s everywhere. Do some research.
Look at the banks too. Divest. Pull out your money and credit from financial institutions that fund oppression, speak to your employer about divesting, speak to your city council. Some water protectors have already gotten several major cities to divest from the inhospitable company of Wells Fargo, from Seattle’s $3,000,000,000, to the little known town of New York City and their entire pension fund. Keep this going.
Not only will banks listen to the white populous, so will senators, and news outlets, and the legal system. And protest passersby who take an extra moment to look