Native American Culture in the Light of Revolutionary Possibilities

This is the edited text of a speech I gave at the Cultural Workers Conference, February, 1975, in San Francisco. This picture is the drawing I did for a mural on the Wounded Knee occupation that was painted on a wall of the San Francisco Indian Center on 16th and Valencia in 1975.

I would like to give a little history of Native American culture because I think our culture provides a link with the history of this land. I think most people know that Native American people have a very close relationship with the land. We have lived here for thousands of years, living off the land, with hunting, fishing and some farming. Our culture grew out of this relationship to the land and was an expression of our unity with the Natural World.

In this period of our people, we had many ceremonies every year all across the country and even across North and South America. These followed a fairly slow rhythm, because the only thing that changed our ways were like changes in Nature, which is usually very slow.

At about the time that Europeans started coming over to this land, changes began to be introduced fairly fast, especially as the people who began to call themselves ‘Americans’ began to spread out over the West, where most of our tribes were concentrated. They began deliberately destroying our way of life, in order to take over the land. They destroyed the buffalo, which was the center of the Plains tribes lifestyle, in order to destroy them.

When they could not completely physically destroy us, they then tried to assimilate us. They put us on reservations and in government boarding schools where we were forbidden to speak our languages — they forbid us to perform our ceremonies, to relate to our spiritual ways and literally drove our culture underground. So at that period in our history, any attempt to keep our culture, would become an act of resistance.

The government tried to destroy our culture because it realized that culture keeps alive the spirit of the people and enables them to remember what life was like before colonization.

For many years after this policy of forcibly attacking our culture, it began to stagnate and much of our languages were lost. Slowly we had to adjust to these changes, especially in Oklahoma, where a lot of Eastern and some Western tribes were forcibly removed from their land and forced to live in close proximity to each other in Indian Territory.

But in the fifties, after the Second World War, a change began to happen. Tribes started exchanging different cultural experiences, started singing each other songs and adopting parts of each other’s ceremonies, especially the sweat lodge. One result of this interchange was the ‘49er’, a traditional song with something added, which was the English language. English was understood by all the tribes by then, and for them to communicate more fully in intertribal powwows, they started making up songs in English, but still using the drum and traditional singing styles. The songs usually dealt with what was going on at the time—like drinking, trying to get girl friends and driving one-eyed Fords from one powwow to another—like the Blues in a way.

By the 50’s and 60’s, I think our people were beginning to be influenced by the so-called ‘youth culture’. Rock and roll songs, folk songs, people like Buffy St. Marie were finally able to reach a mass audience. Rock groups like Redbone and Xit started coming out and speaking about our history of colonization

My long time friend, Eldy Bratt on Alcatraz. She was originally from Peru.

Richard Oakes, a young Mohawk college student, was the leader of the occupation of Alcatraz, in San Francisco, 1969.

That was about the time of Alcatraz. The occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco by Indians of All Tribes signaled the rebirth of the spirit of our people. The Traditional movement at that time became very strong. There were some traditional people like Mad Bear Anderson, going from reservation to reservation, tribe to tribe, very quietly, without much publicity, holding powwows and singing the old songs and reviving the old ceremonies, teaching the young people who had not be taught by the elders. A lot of our people, especially our young people, felt that was a good thing. It gave them a new pride and a new hope. This was the time when a lot of struggles were just beginning, Alcatraz, Pit River and the Fishing Rights struggle in the Pacific Northwest.

I think the turning point of all this came at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which was a much more serious struggle—we were facing massacre by the U.S. Government again. It showed us that the Government had not changed much since the original massacre in 1890, that it was still ready to commit genocide.

At Wounded Knee, as other tribes, Chicanos, Vietnam Vets against the war and other revolutionaries stood with the Lakota and American Indian Movement occupiers, we began to look at our culture in the light of revolutionary possibilities. We began to see that revolutionary ideas could create a powerful unity among our people and all oppressed people. This unity could lead to our liberation and the freedom of our culture and to allow us to regain control over our destiny.

We want to emphasize the positive aspects of our traditions, and we have many positive values, like balance, love for our Mother Earth and cooperation as opposed to greed. Our societies thrived by working together collectively. It was democratic—everyone had a right to speak at the councils. It was based on common ownership of the land and equal sharing of the benefits of the land. We need to hang on to these values against the destructive cultural imperialism of the U.S. Government.

We must also look at any aspect of our culture that tends to hold back our struggles. Any aspect that tends to pit one tribe against another, or that says that Indians only are the greatest race in the world. We want to struggle against any aspect that tries to put women below men. We want to struggle against any aspect of our culture that emphasizes too much mysticism over reality, especially the current harsh reality that we have to live with now.

Now I want to speak some about what we call prophesies and visions—these are old, old legends, but they have survived and gained new force because they emphasize some of the more positive aspects of our culture. For instance, the prophesy of the Warriors of the Rainbow. This is a legend about a new breed or type of people, that would struggle to bring unity, not only to Indian people, but to all people. The rainbow has long been a symbol to Native American people, and a positive symbol to many indigenous people. Now I know that the rainbow is a symbol of revolution in this country also. I thing there might even be a connection between the rainbow of , say, the Weather Underground and that of the Warriors of the Rainbow. Black Elk himself speaks of a flaming rainbow in the book of his great vision. I one part of his vision there is singing—“Look, a new nation is coming.” I use the rainbow in my artwork too, and the idea that a new American nation is coming.

At this stage in our struggle we are trying to regain our destiny, to make our own history and a new culture based on the best of our old, to carry us forward. When Black Elk said that the nation’s hoop was broken, he was talking about the destruction from imperialism. And I think that what we are trying to do is rebuild, rebuild that broken hoop of our nations and to link that hoop with other people’s hoops so that it will extend all around the world—in revolution.

Our people are the original link that connects all of you to the Western Hemisphere. Our culture and our history is the link to the overall history and culture of this land. We invite all people to join us as real Native Americans in a new revolutionary society for this Turtle Island, now known as America.

My Speech at the Reclaiming Columbus Day rally, in Portland, Maine, 2007

Roberto Mendoza, of the Eagle-Quetzal-Condor Media Project talks at the Reclaiming Columbus Day rally in Portland, ME on the need for a new civilization based on indigenous values in the Western Hemisphere. Click on the link below:

Creating the New Rainbow Warriors: Liberation and Restorative Justice – vs Gangs and Civil War

 

As we look at our communities across the U.S. we see deep problems and hopeful possibilities, especially among our youth. The scourge of poverty, drugs and crime have torn apart families, killed and incarcerated too many of our youth and raised the level of gang violence in our neighborhoods/barrios. A ruling class policy of massive criminalization, through the ‘Drug Wars’, of our young people has led to incarceration/warehousing unprecedented in scope. This policy has created a vicious cycle of recidivism and led to massive physical and sexual abuse in the prisons and jails. In addition, the criminal war in Iraq has also killed and wounded too many of our youth, who were caught up in the ‘poverty draft’. Thousands of our young people have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, injured, brutalized and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

A new twist in the governments war on youth of color is to treat gangs as real or potential ‘terrorist’ organizations. The viciousness of the U.S. and Salvadorian governments campaign against the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang has shown how the ruling elites and opinion makers try to create new internal enemies to justify their increasingly oppressive laws and new prisons. In El Salvador, the only alternative offered to imprisoned gang members is fundamentalist Christianity.

All of our movements have slipped back from the high points of the Civil Rights and Liberation movements of the previous decades. African-Americans, under fierce FBI/CIA COINTELPRO wars that destroyed Malcom X, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King, have had their youth recolonized by the internalized racism and sexism of gangsta rap (“nigga, bitch, ho”) and the materialist glitter of ‘bling’, ‘pimp my ride’. This gangsta subculture has also spread its colonizing effects to Latin, Asian and Native gangs.

A few years ago Native gang culture exploded. It is a new phenomenon, far from the committed AIM/Wounded Knee liberation struggles. It has even spread to rural reservations and communities, along with crystal meth and crack cocaine.

The whole gang culture of oppressed youth of color contains the seed of a positive future, if we do not give up on them. Through a process of restorative justice, we could begin a healing process in our communities that could lead them to decolonize their minds and spirits. In addition, we need to them offer a new form of community service, where they could become the Warriors of the Rainbow that Betita Martinez spoke of in the introduction to her book, De Colores Means All of Us.

The energy and enthusiasm of young people are still seeking more positive outlets. despite a campaign of cooptation to keep them seeking materialist solutions from the ruling elites capitalist advertising system, and to keep them divided by race and class in competition for diminishing jobs, careers and status, they are still looking for an uplifting vision.

We need to develop new spiritual healing ceremonies as a way to recapture our youth from the deadly oppressor culture. Where they could let go of the hurts that set up negative patterns of acting out. Where they could see that they could begin a new transformative journey along the Red Road. Then they could redeem and transform themselves through community service by joining a new Rainbow Warriors movement. Going beyond warrior societies to a new social, political and cultural movement that includes Chican@s mixed bloods and anyone committed to defend the Earth and Pachamama. Rainbows Warriors would accept leadership from the wise elders and would be accountable to the whole community and Nation. They would give leadership roles to women and be in service to the people, not their rulers.

In the coming decades of the breakdown of Empire, we will need access to alternative food supplies—community gardens, organic farms and food coops. We will need our own self-defense security services, project oriented popular educational centers, indigenous arts and cultural centers, etc. We will need to create these community based restorative/transformative justice projects in every community, barrio and reservation in this country.

Then we need to unite Native and Latino youth under a common struggle for Indigenous human rights from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. A strong Native Youth Movement has developed recently in Canada and the U.S., especially in Vancouver and the British Columbia, First Nations struggles. But it needs to acknowledge that our Chicano and Latino brothers and sisters are also indigenous and are equal partners in our liberation struggle in the Americas.

And we need to spread this model to our allies in the African-American, Asian-American and European-American communities.

The danger lies in forces that would use the rise of militant gang based organizations to create sectarian militias that would only protect their turf on a larger scale. This could grow out of, for example, the Bloods and Crips uniting in Los Angeles as a way to confront the much larger Latino gangs.

Amongst Muslim and Arab communities, their youth could be drawn into jihad gangs inspired by Al Queda, which would make the whole community a target for Homeland Security. Another possibility would be the formation of militias modeled on Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite community based movement.

Hopefully, they would take the best from them and leave the worst, from the internalized of sexism of fundamentalist Islam and the dependence on outside forces. But if we in the Indigenous community could successfully create workable models of restorative justice that reintegrates our youth into our communities, then the Muslims communities in North American might be convinced to follow suit, using the best of Islamic culture.

The collapse of ruling class consensus around the War in Iraq is leading to demoralization and a possible civil war in the U.S. This was alluded to in Immanuel Wallerstein’s recent commentary, “The Tiger at Bay: Scary Times Ahead”. http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/192en.htm

Carol Swain in her 2002 book, The New White Nationalism in America , writes:

White nationalism is “the next logical stage for identity politics in America,… making the United States “increasingly at risk of large-scale racial conflict unprecedented in our nation’s history.” The most powerful stimulus to such white nativism will be the cultural and linguistic threats whites see from the expanding power of Hispanics in U.S. society.

Johann Galtung, in his January 28, 2004 essay — On the Coming Decline and Fall of the US Empire , also talked about the possibility of civil war arising out of the cancellation of the next Presidential election: But the other nations in the USA, the Inuits, Hawai’ians, First Nations, Chicanos, African Americans, could be pitted against the Anglo-Saxon, Southern Baptist, militarized Deep South, now in command. Hopefully they will not create an emergency to cancel elections they may not win.

If civil war does eventually break out, we need to have recaptured our youth, or they could easily end up in sectarian militias, with white youth joining racist, neo-Nazi militias’; Native youth joining ‘warrior societies’ and Chicano youth joining ‘Aztlan’ or ‘Mexica’ militias. Ethnic militias, each fighting to defend their ‘turf’, with a winner-take-all mindset is not what we need to achieve true liberation for all of our different nations and communities. We need to raise out struggle to a new level and create a new movement whose weapons are effective organizing, creative strategies and tactics, new forms of expression and communication, and a deep love for Mother Earth/Pachamama.

Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas best expressed the organizing bias of the new movements: “The movement has no future if its future is military. If the EZLN [Zapatistas] perpetuates itself as an armed military structure, it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world. The worst that could happen to it apart from that, would be for it to come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army.”

The scenario of warring ethnic militias or ‘revolutionary’ armies battling for supremacy and State power does not have to happen, but we need to seriously brainstorm on how to best welcome and honor our youth by giving them a positive role to play in the liberation of our communities and Nation. Their energy, creativity and courage are greatly needed as we face the chaos and violence of a crumbling U.S. Empire. Galtung predicted the fall of the Soviet empire, and predicts the fall of the U.S. empire in as little as 15 years from now. We need to recreate our new revolutionary Indigenous movement as soon as possible.

This is a call for Rainbow Warriors, united under the banner of the Eagle-Quetzal-Condor. It is a call for warriors of all ages, races, genders and sexual orientation, to first defend our living places, our nations, and finally our Mother Earth. It is a call to defend our ancient heritages, starting from Turtle Island, Aztlan, Pacha Mama – to all the different races whose blood has intermingled with ours, our mestizaje/mixed bloods. It is a call to listen to the wisdom of our elders, to be inspired by the words of fire from our poets and writers/prophets and to take heart from the energy and hope of our youth/juventad. It is a call not only to defend, but to create –­– from energy, ideas and dialog – the revolutionary process of transforming our civilization from a deadly corporate empire to a life affirming, democratic community of Indigenous and Bioregional Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

All my relations.

A CALL TO CREATE A NEW CIVILIZATION IN OUR AMERICAS

A CALL TO CREATE A NEW CIVILIZATION IN OUR AMERICAS

INTRODUCTION

My name is Roberto Mendoza. My mother’s people, the Muscogee Nation were removed from our ancestral homelands in Georgia to what is now Oklahoma. My father’s family is Chicano—part of the great Diaspora of Mexicans to the U.S. after the Mexican Revolution. I have participated in the Native American movement, the anti-war, Chicano, Bioregional and Green Movements. My experiences as a worker, political activist, student, father, now grandfather, has molded my political and social views.

As a mixed Native and Chicano man, I have long thought about the future of my two peoples. Native people do not have power of numbers but we have the basic spiritual core that all Americans need. Chicano/Latino people now have the numbers but need to reconnect to their indigenous spirituality in order to really move in a powerful way. I believe that our future lies first in merging our struggles first with that of indigenous people all up and down the Western Hemisphere, then with all the other peoples who live here.

I call this the vision of the Eagle-Quetzal-Condor—making all people in the Western Hemisphere truly indigenous, with a deep love and connection to the many bioregions that make up Turtle Island/Abya Yala, based on the story of the Eagle-Quetzal-Condor, an ancient legend that I have adapted to this new time.

I am also here to remind us of the Iroquois or Hau de no see no people’s Basic Call to Consciousness, which comes from an ancient, yet contemporary Native nation.

And finally I am here to issue a Call for Rainbow Warriors, as Betina Martinez wrote in the Preface to her book, De Coloris Means All of Us:
…the legend continues with all the races and religions banding together against the disaster. Under the symbol of the rainbow they spread the great wisdom of living in harmony with each other and with all the creations of the world. “Those who teach this will be the Warriors of the Rainbow,” …Armed only with the truth, after a great struggle they will bring an end to the destruction. Eventually they will save life itself.”

All of these ideas can be found in my on-line blog: Eagle-Quetzal-Condor. aguilahombre.wordpress.com

WHY THE EAGLE-QUETZAL-CONDOR?

Because these three great birds symbolize the spiritual heights from which we want to look at the Western Hemisphere—that of the Indigenous peoples of the North, Central and South America. At the Encuentro, the First Continental Meeting of Indigenous Peoples on the 500 Years of Indian Resistance, held in Quito, Ecuador in 1992, an ancient prophecy was retold:

Many thousands of years ago the Eagle of the North and the Condor of the South joined their tears to form Central America, concentrating their wisdom on that small piece of earth. Indian nations developed there oriented to the laws of Nature. Those nations passed through great trials, and were eventually split and dispersed into the four directions. Prophets instructed the elders to maintain the traditions during the dispersal, and to search for their paths to liberation. Every five centuries the life of the nations would be nourished and renewed. For our time period, the beginning of liberation would be symbolized by this prophesy: “When Condor of the South and the Eagle of the North come together again, the union of their tears will heal the wounds of the Indian peoples and fortify their spirit, body and thought. A new generation will spring forth who will reach out their hands to end oppression, exploitation and injustice, and will write the word liberty in the sky.”

John Curl, in his 1993 article, ‘The Dance of the Condor’ talks about this meeting from a Euro-American perspective:

“Perhaps it is time for us to grow up and face the historic realities of the European invasion of the Americas in all its pain, time for us to turn to a new mythology, based on truth instead of lies…In looking for new myths, where is there to turn but backwards, to the very oldest stories of our hemisphere. Here in the Americas (or in Abya-Yala, as they say in the Andes), perhaps our greatest hope for a livable future lies in the joining of the Condor’s and Eagle’s tears.”

“I think our civilization has not yet made its peace with this continent: we are on it but not yet of it. We are not yet indigenous. To become indigenous people, European-Americans must first make our peace with history and with the Indian people. What has been lost in the European-American version of liberty, is community. We have gained mobility but have paid the price of rootlessness.”

In this period in our history we can see that in Central America, in the Mayan bioregion, which includes not only Chiapas in Mexico but also Guatemala, a powerful unifying force has arisen among the Indigenous and Mestizo peoples there, the Zapatista movement and its army the EZLN. For this reason I feel compelled to include the Quetzal Bird, sacred to the Mayan people in this area, as the third great bird of the Western Hemisphere. The Zapatistas arose to confront the North American Free Trade Agreement, (NAFTA) which marked the end of all land rights in Mexico and the end of the way of life of millions of indigenous farmers—and sent the Quetzal Bird up to guide the Eagle and the Condor to their rendezvous with destiny.

In this new Millennium, the leadership of this hemispheric movement is coming out of the Indigenous people of Central America. Subcomandante Marcos and Mayan Noble Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu have inspired us to speak out, for a new Movimento from El Norte. In the Monday, March 12, 2001 issue of the Los Angeles Times, and I quote: The rebel leader, who, like the majority of Mexicans, is of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, emphasized the richness of the nation’s rainbow of cultures, calling out the names of many of the Indian groups. “What they fear is that there is no more ‘you’ and ‘us,’ because we are all the color of the earth,” Marcos said.

In Bolivia, the Indigenous people have embarked on a revolutionary path to reclaim their natural resources, including water and natural gas from the rapacious grasp of multinational corporations. Evo Morales, the first indigenous president there in 500 years, has allied with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his Bolivarian movement and with Fidel Castro and the Cuban people. Their struggle is the clearest rejection of capitalist globalization and the IMF’s neoliberal policies in the hemisphere.

A BASIC CALL TO CONSCIOUSNESS

A Basic Call to Consciousness, The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World, was first delivered in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1977. It says in part:

… the Hau de no sau nee (Iroqouis) position is derived from a philosophy which sees The People with historical roots which extend back tens of thousands of years. It is a geological kind of perspective, which sees modern man as an infant, occupying a very short space of time in an incredibly long spectrum. It is the perspective of the oldest elder looking into the affairs of a young child and seeing that he is committing incredibly destructive folly…

The traditional Native peoples hold the key to the reversal of the processes in Western Civilization, which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And we, the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, are among the worlds surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. We are here to impart that message.

The early Christian settlers from Europe came with their vision for our lands, which was based on what Daniel Quinn described in, Beyond Civilization:

“The meme we brought with us to the New World was nothing new…Ours is the one RIGHT way for people to live and everyone should live like us.

Before being cultivated, this land was merely going to waste…The natives were letting it go to waste, and by taking it away from them [the natives] and putting it to the plow, they were performing holy work.”

Elizabeth Satouris, in her article, http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/survival.html
The Survival Path, put it this way:

“Nature, according to John Locke, the principal philosopher architect of this tradition, has no value in itself, gaining value only when transformed by industrial man.
Small community societies of indigenous and traditional peoples survived in health for many thousands of years without overpopulating because they were composed of living systems in balance with their environments; industrial society, by contrast, threatens its own extinction within a few hundred years of existence because it has created overpopulation and has violated most principles of living systems.
… the role of science is to study nature objectively—as though from outside—by reducing this machinery to its parts; to understand it so that human society can gain control over it and exploit it for human purposes.”

To indigenous people, the earth, land and life are all sacred. All beings in it are related and interdependent and all had value because they were expression of the Creator, not just as a way to accumulate wealth and power. People could take from Mother Nature to survive, but this relationship was based on reciprocity, in which humans were expected to give back to Nature. It was based on honoring and respecting Mother Earth never taking more than you need—greed was not a value in tribal cultures. Neither Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedism, Capitalism nor Marxism holds the Earth and all living things sacred. This is the primary dividing line between Indigenous tribal values and the dominant religions and worldviews of the present.

In the U.S., it is clear that the so-called American Dream is just a nightmare—of overwork, poverty of life and spirit, war, destruction of community and of Nature. It is time to begin building the foundations of a new American civilization, based on the values and life ways of the original indigenous people of this Western Hemisphere, but also including the best values of all the peoples who currently live here, with or without documents. We cannot go back to ancient tribal ways, but we can go forward to a new tribal society based on renewable energy, respect for the Earth and smaller scaled nations that agree to live peaceable and harmoniously with their neighbors, both the human, animal and plant nations.

WAR ABROAD AND AT HOME

The most aggressive and destructive ideology is of course Global Capitalism. Its aggressive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are creating chaos, violence, destruction and genocide in the Middle East and South Asia, which could spin out of control into a new global war.

Just as decline in U.S. (and therefore also Israeli) power is causing a militaristic lashing out against the Muslim world externally, internally it causing a lashing out against so-called ‘illegal aliens’, who just happen to me brown skinned indigenous/mestizos from the South of the so-called border. Armed right-wing militias like the ‘Minutemen’ are a prelude to what in Iraq is called ‘the Salvador Option’—in other words: death squads. Just these as these death squads of militiamen are creating civil war in Iraq, the Minutemen and other Patriot militias are sowing the seeds of civil war here in the U.S.

A SLEEPING GIANT IS AWAKENING!

The tremendous explosion of marches and school walkouts in Los Angeles, Dallas and Chicago, heralds the rise of a new civil/human rights movement among undocumented workers and their allies. In Max Blumental’s March article in The Huffington Post, I quote:

“I have just returned from the largest, most energized demonstration I have ever witnessed in my life. Over 500,000 people filled the streets of downtown Los Angeles to march against HR 4437, a bill authored by Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner (heir to the Kotex fortune) which would turn 11 million undocumented immigrants into felons, punish anyone guilty of providing them assistance, and construct an iron wall between the US and Mexico.

The rally reached a crescendo as thousands of demonstrators lined the walls and bridges above the 101 freeway waving flags and cheering while an endless parade of cars and trucks blasted their horns in support. It was the sound of a sleeping giant awakening.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/sensenbrenner-awakens-a-s_b_17894.html

The recent huge marches for the rights of immigrant workers are only the beginning of a broad movement for human and civil rights for these workers and their families. Undocumented workers in the U.S. along with black workers are part of a huge internal colony that is used for cheap labor and as scapegoats for white nationalists resentment.

We need to organize educational forums—a decolonization process—in which we become conscious that we are a part of a Western hemisphere indigenous movement. This movimiento will be the basis for new Civil/Human rights movement of the 21’s century, and if it can rise to the challenge to become more spiritually indigenous, can lead all of the other races here in a revolutionary movement to re-civilize America. Our shared love for the land (Kanata/Aztlan/Turtle Island) will dissolve these artificial borders.

ALLIANCE WITH AFRICAN-AMERICANS IS KEY

We need to align this movement with the black movement, especially its youth and mixed blood component. They are also part of an internal colony that needs to regain consciousness of its power and its need for allies. White liberals and progressive Jews were their old allies, but they have been compromised by their fear of the resurgent Right and the Israeli lobby. African Americans need to reach out to the immigrant rights and Chicano/Latino movements in order to make any real progress toward liberation. The white nationalists scapegoat them too, especially around the issues of crime, gangs and welfare. Their young men by the millions are also packed into the prisons along with Native and Latino young men.

If we can ally with them, it can send a powerful current of hope that could revitalize their movement. Elements of Jessie Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, with its emphasis on multicultural organizing could be reclaimed in this new period. Plus the grass roots organizing and multiracial leadership of the movements around the Boggs Center (to rebuild, redefine, respirit Detroit from the ground up—Detroit Summer) is a place where this alliance building could begin to take place. If only blacks and Latinos join together, we could remake this nation.

But to create a new civilization out of the ashes of the old, we need to reach out to all the different races (including European-Americans) of the hemisphere.

LET US BEGIN A NEW DIALOG BASED ON MUTUAL RESPECT AND TRUTH

I want to invite you to join in a much-needed dialog about creating a new civilization here in the Americas. I want you to consider what it means for ourselves to transcend the limitations of a settler state formed on the theft of the land of the Indigenous people and the labor of black slaves.

To be fair, the American Constitution was an advance in the direction of democratic ideals, especially in its latter amendments, where blacks, women, non-property owners and Native Americans were finally included. But it is important that we have a clear-eyed view of our past history. The truth, however painful, needs to be acknowledged before we can make a clear break with the past – this Nation was founded as a racist settler state. This is necessary in order for us to clear our minds and hearts and spirits for the new transformative struggles ahead.

Native people have been trying for generations to get white Americans to respect the Earth and to realize that all living things are connected (ecology). From the beginning we welcomed the first settlers and helped them in their early attempts to survive. The Iroquois Nation invited Ben Franklin to their governmental deliberations and inspired the early revolutionaries to adapt recall and referendum as tools to curb the power of elected leaders. We showed them examples of public servants, who served only for the respect and honor of their peers, never for money or personal gain.

In the last few decades scientists have confirmed through the study of living systems that everything is connected, even global weather patterns and human use of fossil fuels. Our voices were lost in the clamor to conquer nature and produce the vast amounts of mostly unneeded consumer goods. The U.S. in its latest incarnation as Empire, has become beholden to giant multinationals plus cheap foreign labor and credit from China.

Sensing the end, neoconservative and fundamentalist Christians seized control of the Executive branch of government through an electoral coup during the Bush years and tried desperately to hang on to their status of “full spectrum dominance” by threatening any nation that tries to match the U.S. in economic or military power. This new cult of preemptive war and “the clash of civilizations” threatened the peace of the world and may even lead to civil war in the U.S.

Now the Obama administration, dominated by old Clinton advisors and appointees, has raised the peoples hopes, only to be dashed by his lack of a radical vision and his constant accommodation to corporate power and the rising clamor of the Astro turfed ‘Tea Baggers’ and ‘Town Hall shouters’ of the far right.

In 1992 some Euro-Americans started to face the truth about the past 500 years of ‘Columbusism’. But all Euro-Americans need to grieve for the psychic wounds that they have suffered since then—for the lost connection to whole communities of people living in ghettoes and barrios just across their cities; for the lost connection to the animal and plant nations; for the loss of their indigenous spiritual cultures like Wicca and Goddess worship.

A CALL FOR RAINBOW WARRIORS

Lastly, this is also a call for Rainbow Warriors, united under the banner of the Eagle-Quetzal-Condor. It is a call for warriors of all ages, races, genders and sexual orientation, to first defend our living places, our democratic liberties, and our Mother Earth. It is a call to listen to the wisdom of our elders, to be inspired by the words of fire from our poets and writers/prophets and to take heart from the energy and hope of our youth/juventad. It is a call not only to defend, but also to create – from energy, ideas and dialogue- the revolutionary process of transforming our civilization from a deadly corporate empire to a life affirming, democratic movement in Our America.

We do need love, organization, fresh ideas, commitment, and bravery in the face of blind patriotism. We can join together the passion and energy of youth, the organizing experience and love of parents and the wisdom and vision of the grandparents/elders. Marcos says the Zapatistas do not seek to seize power like traditional guerillas, but instead, pursue “a revolution to make a revolution possible”—opening a space for dialogue within civil society on how to re-conceive the world. Let us re-conceive Civilization here, first by creating the dialog/consultas here that opens space for a cultural, spiritual revolution in the Western Hemisphere.

Under the banner of the Eagle-Quetzal–Condor, we Warriors of the Rainbow can create a new indigenous Earth based civilization for all who live in Turtle Island/Abya Yala. For a place where the Eagle, Quetzal and the Condor can look down from their great heights and no longer feel the need to cry, but to exult in the fresh air of justice and liberation.

A Political Earthquake of Historic Proportions

The tremendous explosion of marches in Los Angeles, Dallas and other cities across the U.S. heralds the rise of a new civil/human rights movement among undocumented workers and their allies. Max Blumental’s reported on the Los Angeles march on The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/sensenbrenner-awakens-a-s_b_17894.html I have just returned from the largest, most energized demonstration I have ever witnessed in my life. Over 500,000 people filled the streets of downtown Los Angeles to march against HR 4437, a bill authored by Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner … which would turn 11 million undocumented immigrants into felons, punish anyone guilty of providing them assistance, and construct an iron wall between the US and Mexico.

The rally reached a crescendo as thousands of demonstrators lined the walls and bridges above the 101 freeway waving flags and cheering while an endless parade of cars and trucks blasted their horns in support. It was the sound of a sleeping giant awakening.

The past weeks has been nothing less than a political earthquake, comparable to the beginnings of the African-American Civil Rights movement. The rumblings of this new movement are part of a continent wide indigenous awakening, starting among the Native and Inuit peoples and spreading to Mestizos/Chicanos/Cholos and mixed bloods. It will lead to the new Western Hemisphere/Turtle Island/Pacha Mama civilization of the Eagle-Quetzal-Condor.

John Curl, a European-American man went to the First Continental Conference of 500 Years of Indian Resistance in 1992 in Quito, Ecuador. His report back, The Dance of the Condor begins: Many thousands of years ago the Eagle of the North and the Condor of the South joined their tears to form Central America, concentrating their wisdom on that small piece of earth….[land of the Quetzal bird and the Zapatistas]“When the Condor of the South and the Eagle of the North come together again, the union of their tears will heal the wounds of the Indian peoples and fortify their spirit, body and thought. A new generation will spring forth who will reach out their hands to end oppression, exploitation and injustice, and will write the word liberty in the sky.”

This vision is elaborated further in my on line journal: Eagle-Quetzal-Condor:
http://fc.umit.maine.edu/~robert.mendoza/newjournal.htm

We may have a coup by an openly right wing Christian fascistic government in 2008, if it the defeat of the Republican candidate cannot be prevented by fear tactics and vote rigging. This new fascism, if it can direct this hatred against undocumented workers from Mexico, could lead to race/civil war. Samuel Huntington sets the stage for this in his book, The Hispanic Challenge: The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.

A plausible reaction to the demographic changes …could be the rise of an anti-Hispanic, [really anti-Native] anti-black, and anti-immigrant movement composed largely of white, working- and middle-class males, protesting their job to immigrants and foreign countries, the ‘perversion’ of their culture, and the displacement of their language.

White nationalism is “the next logical stage for identity politics in America,” … making the United States “increasingly at risk of large-scale racial conflict unprecedented in our nation’s history.”
“Such a transformation would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it…There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”

But this Anglo-Protestant dream has never been Indigenous peoples dream.

Actually, the Indian-Dream-in-America was one of harmony and peace with the land and co-existing with all of the elements on Mother Earth. Since the European-Dream-in-America had little to do with peace and harmony, it became a nightmare for Native peoples.
Ramon Lopez-Reyes

While Huntington and his ‘Clash of Civilizations’ ideas speak for the elites of this country, I think that we Native and Chicano people need to follow the example of the Zapatistas. To organize our people as a revolutionary force for democratic change, and to set our goal as nothing less than a new Indigenous based civilization in the Western Hemisphere. The old Anglo-Protestant dream has turned into a nightmare for our people and for all poor and working class people in this hemisphere. It is time to start building a new civilizing movement in the U.S. that will replace it. Young people, poor/working class people of all races—all who also have a great love for this America/Turtle Island—will join us in this great undertaking.

John Curl talks further about the role of European-Americans in this new movement:

“…our civilization has not yet made its peace with this continent: we are on it but not yet of it. To become indigenous people, European-Americans must first make our peace with history and with the Indian people. What has been lost in the European-American version of liberty, is community. We have gained mobility but have paid the price of rootlessness. “

“… it is time for us to grow up and face the historic realities of the European invasion of the Americas in all its pain, time for us to turn to a new mythology…In looking for new myths, where is there to turn but backwards, to the very oldest stories of our hemisphere. Here in America (or in Appia-Yala, as they say in the Andes), perhaps our greatest hope for a livable future lies in the joining of the Condor’s and Eagle’s tears.”

Our people will lead this new movement, just like Blacks led the earlier civil rights movement. But we must reach out and makes alliances with other oppressed groups, especially Blacks and Asian Americans. We must also join with the anti-war, anti-globalization and environmental justice movements. Encourage them to take heart in the courage and organization shown in these huge marches. Imagine how large the size of the movement to stop the war in Iraq (and possibly Iran) could be if these movements joined together as allies in a common fight for justice, peace, economic democracy and environmental justice. This is how we can rise above strictly identity politics and become a broad based movement that will create lasting change for the better in the U.S. Si, si puede! Yes, we can!

Bio: I am Native (Muscogee) and Chicano (Spanish/Tarascan/Basque) and have been a writer and political organizer for the Native, Latino, anti-war, Bioregionalist and Green movements for over 35 years. I am currently helping organize a Maine Social forum and starting a new Journal of spiritual politics called: Eagle-Quetzal-Condor. I am also an intern with the Mexico Solidarity Network.
I can be reached at: quetzalhombre<<>>gmail.com