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“Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them”
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from his poem
“Pity The Nation”
“Wave a flag, wave the bible, wave your sex or your business degree
Whatever you want -- but don't wave that thing at me”
- Bruce Cockburn,
from “Mighty Trucks of Midnight”
The wave is upon us, or should I say, US. But this isn’t a mere baseball game crowd wave, it’s a holiday origin-story with a dose of amped-up, post-pandemic back to abnormal euphoria.
And by “upon” I mean virtually literally on top of, as in super-imposed over Native lands, because that is a gist of the origin-story of US nationalism.
Here’s a salient highlight from Margaret Kimberley’s recent article at Black Agenda Report, “Freedom Rider: The Terrible Origins of July 4th”[1], which hits at the crux of the hypocrisy and the let’s just look the other way while we fire up the grill.
“’He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.’ -- Declaration of Independence
“The July 4 holiday in the United States commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.”
The ongoing sense of “independence” is as snarky as a teenager with car keys on a weekend night, and by years, a mere 245, the US is not even a teenager when compared with the thousands of thousands of years the Native Peoples have, to paraphrase Ram Dass' book title, 'been here now'.
The “He”, by the way, refers to the English king. For starters, “our frontiers” while sort of, technically accurate is also part of the delusory origin-story. Technically accurate because “frontier: circa 1400, frowntere, 'front line of an army;' early 15c., fronture, 'borderland, part of a country which faces another.’”[2] Yet arrogantly inaccurate was the presumption that it's “ours” anything.
“Savage” actually comes from the root meaning “of the forest”: “‘Wild, undomesticated, untamed, strange, pagan,’ from silvaticus ‘wild,’ literally ‘of the woods,’ from silva ‘forest, grove.’ Of persons, the meaning ‘reckless, ungovernable’ is attested from c. 1400.”[3]
As far as trees, again, sort of technically accurate because there are Native Nations sometimes referred to as “Eastern Woodland Indians”, (though a Shinnecock woman once told me that their People are labeled as that by colonizers); strange b/c they live next to the Shinnecock Bay which connects with the Atlantic Ocean, though there are some woods nearby, as well.
As to “merciless”, wait, aren't these the same Peoples who shared their foods and survival skills and with whom Thanksgiving celebrates the sharing of a meal? (the latter another delusory holiday origin-story).
And “ungovernable” could be considered as from the colonizers' perspective.
As to “known rule of warfare”, the US has been at war over 90% of the time since its inception (and that's a “known known”, as the late, former Secretary of Defense and a key proponent of the invasion of Iraq and subsequent slaughter, Donald Rumsfeld might have put it).
And as to “destruction of all ages, sexes”, here's where the racism and biases go global. When thinking of cultures who respect and revere elders, the most prominent I know of are Native and East Asian Peoples. Those same Peoples, and many others, also have a long history of respect and reverence for what is now called genderbender sexual whatever identities. Sadly interesting is that the WW II unnecessary bombing (because they were already surrendering) of the Japanese, plus the Vietnam and Korean wars, and the current Great Power Competition fabricated tensions with China (meanwhile a huge percentage of what gets bought at Wal-Mart is 'fabricated' in China) reveal a long-standing racist bias against East Asian Peoples. I heard Lawrence Ferlinghetti mention the racism aspect with regard to the WW II bombings. And he went there; the following are his words:
“When we went over to Nagasaki, it was total devastation. It was like a landscape in hell. What was left of bodies had all been cleared away by the time we got there, which was about seven weeks after the bomb had been dropped…. It was acres of mud, with bones and hair sticking up out of it. And as I’ve said before, it really made me an instant pacifist. Up to that time, I’d been a good American boy, in the boy scouts, etc…Nagasaki really woke me up.”[4]
And from another interview:
“I was there seven weeks after the bomb was dropped. It was just like walking around in some landscape that wasn’t on Earth. It was an unearthly feeling. The site had been cleaned up—somewhat—or they wouldn’t have let us in. I was just off my Navy ship down in southern Kyushu, and we had a day off and went up by train to Nagasaki. It was pretty horrible to see. And that was just a toy bomb compared to the ones that are available today.”[5]
So if we could re-frame the grill conversations and talk about sexuality, talk about the traumas of “bone and hair”, talk about what some of the words of the document blindly revered actually mean, talk about the elders and the world that the new-born are facing instead of just getting our Plymouth rocks off watching fireworks (probably “made in China” along with the little flags), those conversations could actually create a new wave, a new direction for the overlapping consciousnesses stewing in the melting pot but having forgotten that the pot itself (made of clay), the land itself is, if you are a non-Native like myself, not “ours”.
NOTES:
[1] See here.
[2] See here.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See here.
[5] See here. “Lawrence Ferlinghetti”
https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/lawrence-ferlinghetti
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is an essayist and resident poet at Axis of Logic. His forthcoming book is Moving Through The Empty Gate Forest: inside looking out. In addition to his work as a writer and small press publisher, he travels a holistic mystic pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. His website is here.
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