Basic Call to Consciousness

Continued from last week.

Phillip Deer sat in a straight-backed chair, with a red blanket folded on his lap. Now it was late at night, and we were in the basement of a building in Geneva and before him, sitting in a circle, were the group of six men who had been selected by all the delegates to be the principal speakers, to make the initial unifying presentation, on that first day of the conference.

There were, Oren Lyons, from the Iroquois Confederacy; Juan Condori, Aymara from Bolivia; Jose Mendoza, Guaimi from Panama; Russell Means, Lakota from the United States and Larry Red Shirt and Francis He Crow, both also Lakota, pipe carriers who were to open up the first day’s proceedings with a Pipe Ceremony.

Phillip had his hand up, and with his forefinger, was pointing at each of the men, and he had a light smile on his face, a sort of proud and knowing smile, a confident smile.

It had been a small but important meeting. We had come together in that room to discuss the various speeches that these men would deliver on the next day and thus to eliminate any possible repetition and yet something much stronger, something much more telling of what had been carried to Geneva, had emerged.

Oren Lyons spoke first. He explained how he would address the duty of all human beings to respect not only “human rights,” but the rights of all the beings of the Creation. This he went over carefully and seriously, explaining that this was the foundation for any life that would be full and decent, and which would begin to guarantee the rights of future generations. Then Jose Mendoza spoke – and he spoke of territory, land, of the elements of the land and how a people grew and developed according to that land and that sky and what it offered and what it taught. He spoke of his people, the Guaimi, and of the other Indian nations, which in Panama, like in so many other countries, constituted a so-called minority within the larger state. “But we are not a minority,” he said. “Within our territories we are simply us – the people- and it is only when we go outside of this – of our land – that we become ‘minorities’, and then an even worse oppression begins. We become as the peasants, losing all identity – family, language, representation – to be absorbed and thus hidden, manipulated, and exploited.” Then Juan Condori spoke, and he knew a thing or two about exploitation. Juan Condori is an Aymara from Bolivia where the Indian people are a majority – about four million in a country of five million – and he spoke about what it means to be an Indian and a peasant, because in his country, the two words can mean the same, because everyone has been displaced and the Indians live on but own no land, are considered inferior, less-than-human, by the controlling white minority.

He spoke about humiliation and poverty, and hunger – real hunger – where children don’t eat, and grow malformed and their minds don’t work well and where the parents work and work and produce so little, and even that is taken away, and all this time of racist white Rhodesians on the run from that part of the world and invited by the Bolivian government to settle a whole new region – more white settlers – 60,000 men of arm-bearing age – ideologically trained in apartheid, tied into the development of the oppressive mining and the vast economic interests which control the country and everything going out, all the labor, all the minerals, and the land destroyed.

Russell Means spoke then. He also knew about the destruction of land, he said, referring to the Great Plains of North America. He had wanted to be last, he said, because he had a very special mission, and that was to nail the head of the monster. And the monster, the base, and control of overwhelming exploitation – the force, economic and military, behind this process – this was the United States of America. It was there that the multi-nationals were based. It was there the counter-insurgency programs were generated. It was there the sterilization programs were mapped out. It was there where the governments of Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Bolivia, Panama, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Argentina, Mexico got their military aid. And it was there where a society had been created that lived so richly, so grandiosely on the destruction of other people’s lands, the exploitation of their labor, the extraction and theft of their natural resources and finally, and most fundamentally, the very rape and destruction of the Natural World – the basis of all life – the foundation, specifically, of everything the Indian represented – the Sacred Mother Earth.

Continued next week