I Am Indigenist [Ward Churchill]

I Am Indigenist

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19679

Notes on the Ideology of the Fourth World

February 27, 2009
By Ward Churchill

[This essay is part of the ZNet Classics series. Three times a week
we will re-post an article that we think is of timeless importance.
This one was first published September 20, 2000.]

The growth of ethnic consciousness and the consequent mobilization of
Indian communities in the Western hemisphere since the early 1960s
have been welcomed neither by government forces nor by opposition
parties and revolutionary movements. The "Indian Question" has been
an almost forbidden subject of debate throughout the entire political
spectrum, although racism, discrimination and exploitation are
roundly denounced on all sides. ­Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

Indians of the Americas

Very often in my writings and lectures, I have identified myself as
being "indigenist" in outlook. By this, I mean that I am one who not
only takes the rights of indigenous peoples as the highest priority
of my political life, but who draws upon the traditions­the bodies of
knowledge and corresponding codes of value­evolved over many
thousands of years by native peoples the world over. This is the
basis upon which I not only advance critiques of, but conceptualize
alternatives to the present social, political, economic, and
philosophical status quo. In turn, this gives shape not only to the
sorts of goals and objectives I pursue, but the kinds of strategy and
tactics I advocate, the variety of struggles I tend to support, the
nature of the alliances I am inclined to enter into, and so on.

Let me say, before I go any further, that I am hardly unique or alone
in adopting this perspective. It is a complex of ideas, sentiments,
and understandings which motivates the whole of the American Indian
Movement, broadly defined, here in North America. This is true
whether you call it AIM, or Indians of All Tribes (as was done during
the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz), the Warriors Society (as was the
case with the Mohawk rebellion at Oka in 1990), Women of All Red
Nations, or whatever.1 It is the spirit of resistance that shapes
the struggles of traditional Indian people on the land, whether the
struggle is down at Big Mountain, in the Black Hills, or up at James
Bay, in the Nevada desert or out along the Columbia River in what is
now called Washington State.2 In the sense that I use the term,
indigenism is also, I think, the outlook that guided our great
leaders of the past: King Philip and Pontiac, Tecumseh and Creek Mary
and Osceola, Black Hawk, Nancy Ward and Satanta, Lone Wolf and Red
Cloud, Satank and Quannah Parker, Left Hand and Crazy Horse, Dull
Knife and Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Roman Nose and Captain Jack,
Louis Ríel and Poundmaker and Geronimo, Cochise and Mangus, Victorio,
Chief Seattle, and on and on.3

In my view, those, Indian and non-Indian alike, who do not recognize
these names and what they represent have no sense of the true
history­the reality­of North America. They have no sense of where
they've come from or where they are and thus can have no genuine
sense of who or what they are. By not looking at where they've come
from, they cannot know where they are going or where it is they
should go. It follows that they cannot understand what it is they are
to do, how to do it, or why. In their confusion, they identify with
the wrong people, the wrong things, the wrong tradition. They
therefore inevitably pursue the wrong goals and objectives, putting
last things first and often forgetting the first things altogether,
perpetuating the very structures of oppression and degradation they
think they oppose. Obviously, if things are to be changed for the
better in this world, then this particular problem must itself be
changed as a matter of first priority.

In any event, all of this is not to say that I think I am one of the
significant people I have named, or the host of others, equally
worthy, who've gone unnamed. I have no "New Age" conception of myself
as the reincarnation of someone who has come before. But it is to say
that I take these

ancestors as my inspiration, as the only historical examples of
proper attitude and comportment on this continent, this place, this
land on which I live and of which I am a part. I embrace them as my
heritage, my role models, the standard by which I must measure
myself. I try always to be worthy of the battles they fought, the
sacrifices they made. For the record, I have always found myself
wanting in this regard, but I subscribe to the notion that one is
obligated to speak the truth, even if one cannot live up to or fully
practice it. As Chief Dan George once put it, I "endeavor to
persevere," and I suppose this is a circumstance which is shared
more-or-less equally by everyone presently involved in what I refer
to as "indigenism."

Others whose writings and speeches and actions may be familiar, and
who fit the definition of indigenist­or "Fourth Worlder," as we are
sometimes called­include Winona LaDuke and John Trudell, Simon Ortiz,
Russell Means and Leonard Peltier, Glenn Morris and Leslie Silko,
Jimmie Durham, John Mohawk and Oren Lyons, Bob Robideau and Dino
Butler, Ingrid Washinawatok and Dagmar Thorpe. There are scholars and
attorneys like Vine Deloria, Don Grinde, Pam Colorado, Sharon Venne,
George Tinker, Bob Thomas, Jack Forbes, Rob Williams and Hank Adams.
There are poets like Wendy Rose, Adrian Louis, Dian Million,
Chrystos, Elizabeth Woody and Barnie Bush.

There are also many grassroots warriors in the contemporary world,
people like the Dann sisters, Bernard Ominayak, Art Montour and Buddy
Lamont, Madonna Thunderhawk, Anna Mae Aquash, Kenny Kane and Joe
Stuntz, Minnie Garrow and Bobby Garcia, Dallas Thundershield, Phyllis
Young, Andrea Smith and Richard Oaks, Margo Thunderbird, Tina Trudell
and Roque Duenas. And, of course, there are the elders, those who
have given, and continue to give, continuity and direction to
indigenist expression; I am referring to people like Chief Fools Crow
and Matthew King, Henry Crow Dog and Grampa David Sohappy, David
Monongye and Janet McCloud and Thomas Banyacya, Roberta Blackgoat and
Katherine Smith and Pauline Whitesinger, Marie Leggo and Phillip Deer
and Ellen Moves Camp, Raymond Yowell and Nellie Red Owl.4

Like the historical figures I mentioned earlier, these are names
representing positions, struggles, and aspirations which should be
well-known to every socially-conscious person in North America. They
embody the absolute antithesis of the order represented by the "Four
Georges"­George Washington, George Custer, George Patton and George
Bush­emblemizing the sweep of "American" history as it is
conventionally taught in that system of indoctrination the United
States passes off as "education." They also stand as the negation of
that long stream of "Vichy Indians"5 spawned and deemed "respectable"
by the process of predation, colonialism, and genocide the Four
Georges signify.

The names I have listed cannot be associated with the legacy of the
"Hang Around the Fort" Indians, broken, disempowered, and intimidated
by their conquerors, or with the sellouts who undermined the
integrity of their own cultures, appointed by the United States to
sign away their peoples' homelands in exchange for trinkets, sugar,
and alcohol. They are not the figurative descendants of those who
participated in the assassination of people like Crazy Horse and
Sitting Bull, and who filled the ranks of the colonial police to
enforce an illegitimate and alien order against their own. They are
not among those who have queued up to roster the régimes installed by
the U.S. to administer Indian Country from the 1930s onward, the
craven puppets who to this day cling to and promote the "lawful
authority" of federal force as a means of protecting their positions
of petty privilege, imagined prestige, and often their very
identities as native people. No, indigenists and indigenism have
nothing to do with the sorts of Quisling impulses driving the Ross
Swimmers, Dickie Wilsons, Webster Two Hawks, Peter McDonalds, Vernon
Bellecourts and David Bradleys of this world.6

Instead, indigenism offers an antidote, a vision of how things might
be that is based in how things have been since time immemorial, and
how things must be once again if the human species, and perhaps the
planet itself, is to survive much longer. Predicated on a synthesis
of the wisdom attained over thousands of years by indigenous,
landbased peoples around the globe­the Fourth World or, as Winona
LaDuke puts it, "The Host World upon which the first, second and
third worlds all sit at the present time"­indigenism stands in
diametrical opposition to the totality of what might be termed
"Eurocentric business as usual."7

Indigenism

The manifestation of indigenism in North America has much in common
with the articulation of what in Latin America is called indigenismo.
One of the major proponents of this, the Mexican
anthropologist/activist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, has framed its
precepts this way: "[I]n America there exists only one unitary Indian
civilization. All the Indian peoples participate in this
civilization. The diversity of cultures and languages is not an
obstacle to affirmation of the unity of this civilization. It is a
fact that all civilizations, including Western civilization, have
these sorts of internal differences. But the level of unity­the
civilization­is more profound than the level of specificity (the
cultures, the languages, the communities). The civilizing dimension
transcends the concrete diversity."8

The differences between the diverse peoples (or ethnic groups) have
been accentuated by the colonizers as part of the strategy of
domination. There have been attempts by some to fragment the Indian
peoples...by establishing frontiers, deepening differences and
provoking rivalries. This strategy follows a principle objective:
domination, to which end it is attempted ideologically to demonstrate
that in America, Western civilization is confronted by a magnitude of
atomized peoples, differing from one another (every day more and more
languages are "discovered"). Thus, in consequence, such peoples are
believed incapable of forging a future of their own. In contrast to
this, the Indian thinking affirms the existence of one­a unique and
different­Indian civilization, from which extend as particular
expressions the cultures of diverse peoples. Thus, the identification
and solidarity among Indians. Their "Indianness" is not a simple
tactic postulated, but rather the necessary expression of an
historical unity, based in common civilization, which the colonizer
has wanted to hide. Their Indianness, furthermore, is reinforced by
the common experience of almost five centuries of [Eurocentric] domination.9

"The past is also unifying," Bonfil Batalla continues. "The
achievements of the classic Mayas, for instance, can be reclaimed as
part of the Quechua foundation [in present-day Guatemala], much the
same as the French affirm their Greek past. And even beyond the
remote past which is shared, and beyond the colonial experience that
makes all Indians similar, Indian peoples also have a common historic
project for the future. The legitimacy of that project rests
precisely in the existence of an Indian civilization, within which
framework it could be realized, once the 'chapter of colonialism
ends.' One's own civilization signifies the right and the possibility
to create one's own future, a different future, not Western."10

As has been noted elsewhere, the "new" indigenist movement Bonfil
Batalla describes equates "colonialism/imperialism with the West; in
opposing the West...[adherents] view themselves as anti-imperialist.
Socialism, or Marxism, is viewed as just another Western
manifestation."11 A query is thus posed: What, then, distinguishes
Indian from Western civilization? Fundamentally, the difference can
be summed up in terms of [humanity's] relationship with the natural
world. For the West ... the concept of nature is that of an enemy to
be overcome, with man as boss on a cosmic scale. Man in the West
believes he must dominate everything, including other [individuals].
The converse is true in Indian civilization, where [humans are] part
of an indivisible cosmos and fully aware of [their] harmonious
relationship with the universal order of nature. [S]he neither
dominates nor tries to dominate. On the contrary, she exists within
nature as a moment of it.... Traditionalism thus constitutes a potent
weapon in the [indigenous] civilization's struggle for survival
against colonial domination.12

Bonfil Batalla contends that the nature of the indigenist impulse is
essentially socialist, insofar as socialism, or what Karl Marx
described as "primitive communism," was and remains the primary mode
of indigenous social organization in the Americas.13 Within this
framework, he remarks that there are "six fundamental demands
identified with the Indian movement," all of them associated with
sociopolitical, cultural, and economic autonomy (or sovereignty) and
self-determination:

First there is land. There are demands for occupied ancestral
territories...demands for control of the use of the land and subsoil;
and struggles against the invasion of...commercial interests. Defense
of land held and recuperation of land lost are the central demands.
Second, the demand for recognition of the ethnic and cultural
specificity of the Indian is identified. All [indigenist]
organizations reaffirm the right to be distinct in culture, language
and institutions, and to increase the value of their own
technological, social and ideological practices. Third is the demand
for [parity] of political rights in relation to the state... Fourth,
there is a call for the end of repression and violence, particularly
that against the leaders, activists and followers of the Indians' new
political organizations. Fifth, Indians demand the end of family
planning programmes which have brought widespread sterilization of
Indian women and men. Finally, tourism and folklore are rejected, and
there is a demand for true Indian cultural expression to be
respected. The commercialization of Indian music and dance are often
mentioned...and there is a particular dislike for the exploitation of
those that have sacred content and purpose for Indians. An end to the
exploitation of Indian culture in general is [demanded].14

In North America, these indigenista demands have been adopted
virtually intact and have been conceived as encompassing basic needs
of native peoples wherever they have been subsumed by the sweep of
Western expansionism. This is the idea of the Fourth World explained
by Cree author George Manuel, founding president of the World Council
of Indigenous Peoples:

The 4th World is the name given to indigenous peoples descended from
a country's aboriginal population and who today are completely or
partly deprived of their own territory and its riches. The peoples of
the 4th World have only limited influence or none at all in the
nation state [in which they are now encapsulated]. The peoples to
whom we refer are the Indians of North and South America, the Inuit
(Eskimos), the Sami people [of northern Scandinavia], the Australian
aborigines, as well as the various indigenous populations of Africa,
Asia and Oceana.15 Manuel might well have included segments of the
European population itself, as is evidenced by the ongoing struggles
of the Irish, Welsh, Basques and others to free themselves from the
yoke of settler-state oppression imposed upon them as long as 800
years ago.16 In such areas of Europe, as well as in "the Americas and
[large portions of] Africa, the goal is not the creation of a state,
but the expulsion of alien rule and the reconstruction of societies."17

That such efforts are entirely serious is readily evidenced in the
fact that, in a global survey conducted by University of California
cultural geographer Bernard Neitschmann from 1985 to 1987, it was
discovered that of the more than 100 armed conflicts then underway,
some 85 percent were being waged by indigenous peoples against the
state or states which had laid claim to and occupied their
territories.18 As Theo van Boven, former director of the United
Nations Division (now Center) for Human Rights, put it in 1981, the
circumstances precipitating armed struggle "may be seen with
particular poignancy in relation to the indigenous peoples of the
world, who have been described somewhat imaginatively­and perhaps not
without justification­as representing the fourth world: the world on
the margin, on the periphery."19

The Issue of Land in North America

What must be understood about the context of the Americas north of
the Río Grande is that neither of the nation-states, the United
States and Canada, which claim sovereignty over the territory
involved has any legitimate basis at all in which to anchor its
absorption of huge portions of that territory. I am going to restrict
my remarks in this connection mostly to the United States, mainly
because that is what I know best, but also because both the United
States and Canada have evolved on the basis of the Anglo-Saxon common
law tradition.20 So, I think much of what can be said about the
United States bears a certain utility in terms of understanding the
situation in Canada. Certain of the principles, of course, also
extend to the situation in Latin America, but there you have an
evolution of nation-states based on the Iberian legal tradition, so a
greater transposition in terms is required.21 The shape of things
down south was summarized eloquently enough by the Peruvian freedom
fighter Hugo Blanco with his slogan, "Land or Death!"22

The United States, during the first ninety-odd years of its
existence, entered into and ratified more than 370 separate treaties
with the peoples indigenous to the area now known as the 48
contiguous states.23 There are a number of important dimensions to
this, but two aspects will do for our purposes here. First, by
customary international law and provision of the U.S. Constitution
itself, each treaty ratification represented a formal recognition by
the federal government that the other parties to the treaties­the
native peoples involved­were fully sovereign nations in their own
right.24 Second, the purpose of the treaties, from the U.S. point of
view, was to serve as real estate documents through which the United
States acquired legal title to specified portions of North America
from the indigenous nations it was thereby acknowledging already owned it.

From the viewpoint of the indigenous nations, of course, these
treaties served other purposes: the securing of permanently
guaranteed borders to what remained of their national territories,
assurance of the continuation of their ongoing self-governance, trade
and military alliances, and so forth. The treaty relationships were
invariably reciprocal in nature: Indians ceded certain portions of
their land to the United States, and the United States incurred
certain obligations in exchange.25 Even at that, there were seldom
any outright sales of land by Indian nations to the United States.
Rather, the federal obligations incurred were usually couched in
terms of perpetuity. The arrangements were set up by the Indians so
that, as long as the United States honored its end of the bargains,
it would have the right to occupy and use defined portions of Indian
land. In this sense, the treaties more nearly resemble rental or
leasing instruments than actual deeds. And what happens under
Anglo-Saxon common law when a tenant violates the provisions of a
rental agreement?

The point here is that the United States has long since defaulted on
its responsibilities under every single treaty obligation it ever
incurred with regard to Indians. There is really no dispute about
this. In fact, there is even a Supreme Court opinion, the 1903
Lonewolf case, in which the good "Justices" held that the United
States enjoyed a "right" to disregard any treaty obligation to
Indians it found inconvenient, but that the remaining treaty
provisions continued to be binding upon the Indians. This was, the
high court said, because the United States was the stronger of the
nations involved and thus wielded "plenary" power­this simply means
full power­over the affairs of the weaker indigenous nations.
Therefore, the court felt itself free to unilaterally "interpret"
each treaty as a bill of sale rather than a rental agreement.26

Stripped of its fancy legal language, the Supreme Court's position
was (and remains) astonishingly crude. There is an old adage that
"possession is nine-tenths of the law." Well, in this case the court
went a bit further, arguing that possession was all of the law.
Further, the highest court in the land went on record boldly arguing
that, where Indian property rights are concerned, might, and might
alone, makes right. The United States held the power to simply take
Indian land, they said, and therefore it had the "right" to do so.
This is precisely what the nazis argued only thirty years later, and
the United States had the unmitigated audacity to profess outrage and
shock that Germany was so blatantly transgressing against elementary
standards of international law and the most basic requirements of
human decency.27

For that matter, this is all that Sadam Hussein stood for when he
took Kuwait­indeed, Iraq had a far stronger claim to rights over
Kuwait than the United States has ever had with regard to Indian
Country­with the result that George Bush began to babble about
fighting a "Just War" to "roll back naked aggression," "free occupied
territory," and "reinstate a legitimate government." If he were in
any way serious about that proposition, he would have had to call air
strikes in on himself instead of ordering the bombing of Baghdad.28

Be that as it may, there are a couple of other significant problems
with the treaty constructions by which the United States allegedly
assumed title over its landbase. On the one hand, a number of the
ratified treaties can be shown to be fraudulent or coerced, and thus
invalid. The nature of the coercion is fairly well known; perhaps a
third of the ratified treaties involved direct coercion. Now comes
the matter of fraud, which assumes the form of everything from the
deliberate misinterpretation of proposed treaty provisions to the
Senate's alteration of treaty language after the fact and without the
knowledge of the Indian signatories.

On a number of occasions, the United States appointed its own
preferred Indian "leaders" to represent their nations in treaty
negotiations.29 In at least one instance, the 1861 Treaty of Fort
Wise, U.S. negotiators appear to have forged the signatures of
various Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders.30 Additionally, there are about
400 treaties which were never ratified by the senate and were
therefore never legally binding, but upon which the United States now
asserts its claims concerning lawful use and occupancy rights to, and
jurisdiction over, appreciable portions of North America.31

When all is said and done, however, even these extremely dubious
bases for U.S. title are insufficient to cover the gross
territoriality at issue. The federal government itself tacitly
admitted as much during the 1970s in the findings of the so-called
Indian Claims Commission, an entity created in 1946 to make "quiet"
title to all illegally taken Indian land within the lower 48
states.32 What the commission did over the ensuing thirty-five years
was in significant part to research the ostensible documentary basis
for U.S. title to literally every square foot of its claimed
territory. It found, among other things, that the United States had
no legal basis whatsoever­no treaty, no agreement, not even an
arbitrary act of Congress­to fully one-third of the area within its
boundaries.33

At the same time, the data revealed that the reserved areas still
nominally possessed by Indians had been reduced to about 2.5 percent
of the same area.34 What this means in plain English is that the
United States cannot pretend to have even a shred of legitimacy in
its occupancy and control of upwards of thirty percent of its "home"
territory. And, lest such matters be totally lost in the shuffle, I
should note that it has even less legal basis for its claims to the
land in Alaska and Hawai'i.35 Beyond that, its "right" to assert
dominion over Puerto Rico, the "U.S." Virgin Islands, "American"
Samoa, Guam, and the Marshall Islands tends to speak for itself.

Indian Land Recovery in the United States?

Leaving aside questions concerning the validity of various treaties,
the beginning point for any indigenist endeavor in the United States
centers, logically enough, in efforts to restore direct Indian
control over the huge portion of the continental United States that
was plainly never ceded by native nations. Upon the bedrock of this
foundation, a number of other problems integral to the present
configuration of power and privilege in North American society can be
resolved, not just for Indians, but for everyone else as well. It is
probably impossible to solve, or even to begin meaningfully
addressing, certain of these problems in any other way. But still, it
is, as they say, "no easy sell" to convince anyone outside the more
conscious sectors of the American Indian population itself of the
truth of this very simple fact.

In part, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, this is because even
the most progressive elements of the North American immigrant
population share a perceived commonality of interest with the more
reactionary segments. This takes the form of a mutual insistence upon
an imagined "right" to possess native property, merely because they
are here, and because they desire it. The Great Fear is, within any
settler-state, that if indigenous land rights are ever openly
acknowledged, and native people therefore begin to recover some
significant portion of their land, the immigrants will
correspondingly be dispossessed of that which they have come to
consider "theirs" (most notably, individual homes, small farms,
ranches and the like).

Tellingly, every major Indian land recovery initiative in the United
States during the second half of the twentieth century­the Western
Shoshone, those in Maine, the Black Hills, the Oneida claims in New
York State are prime examples­has been met by a propaganda barrage
from right-wing organizations ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the
John Birch Society to the Republican Party warning individual
non-Indian property holders of exactly this "peril."36

I will debunk some of this nonsense in a moment, but first I want to
take up the posture of self-proclaimed leftist radicals in the same
connection. And I will do so on the basis of principle, because
justice is supposed to matter more to progressives than to rightist
hacks. Let me say that the pervasive and near-total silence of the
left in this connection has been quite illuminating. Non-Indian
activists, with only a handful of exceptions, persistently plead that
they cannot really take a coherent position on the matter of Indian
land rights because, "unfortunately," they are "not really conversant
with the issues" (as if these are tremendously complex).

Meanwhile, they do virtually nothing, generation after generation, to
inform themselves on the topic of who actually owns the ground they
are standing on. The record can be played only so many times before
it wears out and becomes just another variation of "hear no evil, see
no evil." At this point, it does not take Einstein to figure out that
the left does not know much about such things because it has never
wanted to know, or that this is so because it has always had its own
plans for utilizing land it has no more right to than does the status
quo it claims to oppose.

The usual technique for explaining this away has always been a sort
of pro forma acknowledgment that Indian land rights are of course
"really important stuff" (yawn), but that one "really does not have a
lot of time" to get into it (I'll buy your book, though, and keep it
on my shelf even if I never read it). Reason? Well, one is just
"overwhelmingly preoccupied" with working on "other important issues"
(meaning, what they consider to be more important things). Typically
enumerated are sexism, racism, homophobia, class inequities,
militarism, the environment, or some combination. It is a pretty good
evasion, all in all. Certainly, there is no denying any of these
issues their due; they are all important, obviously so. But more
important than the question of land rights? There are some serious
problems of primacy and priority imbedded in the orthodox script.

To frame things clearly in this regard, let us hypothesize for a
moment that all of the various non-Indian movements concentrating on
each of these issues were suddenly successful in accomplishing their
objectives. Let us imagine that the United States as a whole were
somehow transformed into an entity defined by the parity of its race,
class and gender relations, its embrace of unrestricted sexual
preference, its rejection of militarism in all forms and its abiding
concern with environmental protection (I know, I know, this is a
sheer impossibility, but that is my point).

When all is said and done, the society resulting from this scenario
is still, first and foremost, a colonialist society, an imperialist
society in the most fundamental sense and with all that this implies.
This is true because the scenario does nothing at all to address the
fact that whatever happens is on someone else's land, not only
without their consent, but with an adamant disregard for their rights
to the land. Hence, all it means is that the immigrant or invading
population has rearranged its affairs in such a way as to make itself
more comfortable at the continuing expense of indigenous people. The
colonial equation remains intact and may even be reinforced by a
greater degree of participation and vested interest in maintenance of
the colonial order among the settler population at large.37

The dynamic here is not very different from that evident in the
American Revolution of the late eighteenth century, is it? And we all
know very well where that led. Should we therefore begin to refer to
socialist imperialism, feminist imperialism, gay and lesbian
imperialism, environmentalist imperialism, Afroamerican and la Raza
imperialism? I would hope not.38 I would hope this is all just a
matter of confusion, of muddled priorities among people who really do
mean well and who would like to do better. If so, then all that is
necessary to correct the situation is a basic rethinking of what it
is that must be done, and in what order. Here, I would advance the
straightforward premise that the land rights of "First Americans"
should be a priority for anyone seriously committed to accomplishing
positive change in North America.

But before I suggest everyone jump up and adopt this priority, I
suppose it is only fair that I investigate the converse of the
proposition: If making things like class inequity and sexism the
preeminent focus of progressive action in North America inevitably
perpetuates the internal colonial structure of the United States,
does the reverse hold true? I will state unequivocally that it does not.

There is no indication whatsoever that a restoration of indigenous
sovereignty in Indian Country would foster class stratification
anywhere, least of all in Indian Country. In fact, all indications
are that when left to their own devices, indigenous peoples have
consistently organized their societies in the most class-free manner.
Look to the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) for an
example. Look to the Muscogee (Creek) Confederacy. Look to the
confederations of the Yaqui and the Lakota, and those pursued and
nearly perfected by Pontiac and Tecumseh. They represent the very
essence of enlightened egalitarianism and democracy. Every imagined
example to the contrary brought forth by even the most arcane
anthropologist can be readily offset by a couple of dozen other
illustrations along the lines of those I just mentioned.39

Would sexism be perpetuated? Ask the Haudenosaunee clan mothers, who
continue to assert political leadership in their societies through
the present day. Ask Wilma Mankiller, recent head of the Cherokee
Nation, a people who were traditionally led by what were called
"Beloved Women." Ask a Lakota woman­or man, for that matter­about who
owned all real property in traditional society, and what that meant
in terms of parity in gender relations. Ask a traditional Navajo
grandmother about her social and political role among her people.
Women in most traditional native societies not only enjoyed
political, social, and economic parity with men, but they also often
held a preponderance of power in one or more of these spheres.

Homophobia? Homosexuals of both genders were, and in many settings
still are, deeply revered as special or extraordinary, and therefore
spiritually significant, within most indigenous North American
cultures. The extent to which these realities do not now pertain in
native societies is exactly the extent to which Indians have been
subordinated to the morés of the invading, dominating culture.
Insofar as restoration of Indian land rights is tied directly to the
reconstitution of traditional indigenous social, political, and
economic modes, one can see where this leads; the Indian arrangements
of sex and sexuality accord rather well with the aspirations of
feminism and gay rights activism.40

How about a restoration of native land rights precipitating some sort
of "environmental holocaust?" Let us get at least a little bit
realistic here. If one is not addicted to the fabrications of
Smithsonian anthropologists about how Indians lived,41 or George
Weurthner's eurosupremicist Earth First! fantasies about how we beat
all the woolly mammoths and mastodons and sabertoothed cats to death
with sticks,42 then this question is not even on the board. I know it
has become fashionable among Washington Post editorialists to make
snide references to native people "strewing refuse in their wake" as
they "wandered nomadically" about the "prehistoric" North American
landscape.43 What is this supposed to imply? That we, who were mostly
"sedentary agriculturalists" in any event, were dropping plastic and
aluminum cans as we went?

As I said, let us get real. Read the accounts of early European
invaders about what they encountered: North America was invariably
described as being a "pristine wilderness" at the point of European
arrival, despite the fact that it had been occupied by fifteen or
twenty million people enjoying a remarkably high standard of living
for nobody knows how long. 40,000 years? 50,000 years?44 Longer? Now
contrast that reality to what has been done to this continent over
the past couple of hundred years by the culture Weurthner, the
Smithsonian and the Post represent, and you tell me about
environmental devastation.45

That leaves militarism and racism. Taking the last first, there
really is no indication of racism in traditional indigenous
societies. To the contrary, the record reveals that Indians
habitually intermarried between groups and frequently adopted both
children and adults from other groups. This occurred in precontact
times between Indians, and the practice was broadened to include
those of both African and European origin, and ultimately Asian
origin as well, once contact occurred. Those who were naturalized by
marriage or adoption were considered members of the group, pure and
simple. This was always the native view.46

The Europeans and subsequent Euroamerican settlers viewed things
rather differently, however, and foisted off the notion that Indian
identity should be determined primarily by "blood quantum," an
outright eugenics code similar to those developed in places like nazi
Germany and apartheid South Africa. Now, that is a racist
construction if there ever was one. Unfortunately, a lot of Indians
have been conned into buying into this anti-Indian absurdity, and
that is something to be overcome. But there is also solid indication
that quite a number of native people continue to strongly resist such
things as the quantum system.47

As to militarism, no one will deny that Indians fought wars among
themselves both before and after the European invasion began.
Probably half of all indigenous peoples in North America maintained
permanent warrior societies. This could perhaps be reasonably
construed as "militarism." But not, I think, with the sense the term
conveys within the European/Euroamerican tradition. There were never,
so far as anyone can demonstrate, wars of annihilation fought in this
hemisphere prior to the Columbian arrival. None. In fact, it seems
that it was a more-or-less firm principle of indigenous warfare not
to kill, the object being to demonstrate personal bravery, something
that could be done only against a live opponent. There is no honor to
be had in killing another person, because a dead person cannot hurt
you. There is no risk.

This is not to say that nobody ever died or was seriously injured in
the fighting. They were, just as they are in full-contact
contemporary sports like football and boxing. Actually, these kinds
of Euroamerican games are what I would take to be the closest modern
parallels to traditional Indian warfare. For us, it was a way of
burning excess testosterone out of young males and not much more. So,
militarism in the way the term is used today is as alien to native
tradition as smallpox and atomic bombs.48

Not only is it perfectly reasonable to assert that a restoration of
native control over unceded lands within the United States would do
nothing to perpetuate such problems as sexism and classism, but the
reconstitution of indigenous social standards that this would entail
stands to free the affected portions of North America from such
maladies altogether. Moreover, it can be said that the process should
have a tangible impact in terms of diminishing such things elsewhere.
The principle is this: Sexism, racism, and all the rest arose here as
a concomitant to the emergence and consolidation of the eurocentric
nation-state form of sociopolitical and economic organization.
Everything the state does, everything it can do, is entirely
contingent upon its maintaining internal cohesion, a cohesion
signified above all by its pretended territorial integrity, its
ongoing domination of Indian Country.

Given this, it seems obvious that the literal dismemberment of the
nation-state necessary for Indian land recovery correspondingly
reduces the ability of the state to sustain the imposition of
objectionable policies within itself. It follows that realization of
indigenous land rights serves to undermine or destroy the ability of
the status quo to continue imposing a racist, sexist, classist,
homophobic, militaristic order upon non-Indians.

A brief aside: Anyone with doubts as to whether it is possible to
bring about the dismemberment from within of a superpower state in
this day and age, ought to sit down and have a long talk with a guy
named Mikhail Gorbechev. It would be better yet if one could chew the
fat with Leonid Breznev, a man who we can be sure would have replied
in all sincerity, only twenty years ago, that this was the most
outlandish idea he'd ever heard. Well, look on a map today, and see
if you can find the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It ain't
there, folks. Instead, you are seeing­and you will see it more and
more­the reemergence of the very nations Léon Trotsky and his
colleagues consigned to the "dustbin of history" clear back at the
beginning of the century. These megastates are not immutable. They
can be taken apart. They can be destroyed. But first we have to
decide that we can do it and that we will do it.

So, all things considered, when indigenist movements like AIM advance
slogans like "U.S. Out of North America," non-Indian radicals should
not react defensively. They should cheer. They should see what they
might do to help. When they respond defensively to sentiments like
those expressed by AIM, what they are ultimately defending is the
very government, the very order they claim to oppose so resolutely.
And if they manifest this contradiction often enough, consistently
enough, pathologically enough, then we have no alternative but to
take them at their word: that they really are at some deep level or
another aligned, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding,
with the mentality that endorses our permanent dispossession and
disenfranchisement, our continuing oppression, our ultimate genocidal
obliteration as self-defining and self-determining peoples. In other
words, they make themselves part of the problem rather than becoming
part of the solution.

Toward a North American Union of Indigenous Nations

There are certain implications to Indian control over Indian land
that need to be clarified, beginning with a debunking of the "Great Fear," the

reactionary myth that any substantive native land recovery would
automatically lead to the mass dispossession and eviction of
individual non-Indian home owners. Maybe in the process I can
reassure a couple of radicals that it is okay to be on the right side
of this issue, that they will not have to give something up in order
to part company with Pat Buchanan on this. It is hard, frankly, to
take this up without giggling, because of some of the images it
inspires. I mean, what are people worried about here? Do all of you
really foresee Indians standing out on the piers of Boston and New
York City, issuing sets of waterwings to long lines of non-Indians so
they can all swim back to the Old World? Gimme a break.

Seriously, one can search high and low, and never find an instance in
which Indians have advocated that small property owners be pushed off
the land in order to satisfy land claims. The thrust in every single
case has been to recover land within national and state parks and
forests, grasslands, military reservations and the like. In some
instances, major corporate holdings have also been targeted. A couple
of times, as in the Black Hills, a sort of joint jurisdiction between
Indians and the existing non-Indian government has been discussed
with regard to an entire treaty area.49 But even in the most hardline
of the indigenous positions concerning the Black Hills­that advanced
by Russell Means in his TREATY Program, where resumption of
exclusively Lakota jurisdiction is demanded­there is no mention of
dispossessing or evicting non-Indians.50 Instead, other alternatives,
which I will take up later, were carefully spelled out.

In the meantime, though, I would like to share with you something the
right-wing propagandists never mention when they are busily whipping
up non-Indian sentiment against Indian rights. Recall that I said
that the quantity of unceded land within the continental United
States makes up about one-third of the landmass? Let's just round
this off to thirty percent, because there is the matter of 2.5
percent of the overall landbase still set aside as Indian
reservations. Now juxtapose that thirty percent to the approximately
35 percent of the same landmass the federal government presently
holds in various kinds of trust status. Add the ten or twelve percent
of the land the individual states hold in trust. That adds up to
a thirty-percent Indian claim against a 45 to 47 percent
governmental holding.51 Never mind the percentage of the land held by
major corporations. Conclusion? It is, and always has been, quite
possible to accomplish the return of every square inch of unceded
Indian Country in the United States without tossing a single
non-Indian homeowner off the land on which they live.

Critics­that is the amazingly charitable self-description employed by
those who ultimately oppose the assertion of indigenous rights in any
form and as a matter of principle­are always quick to point out that
the problem with this arithmetic is that the boundaries of the
government trust areas do not necessarily conform in all cases to the
boundaries of unceded areas. That is true enough, although I would
just as quickly point out that more often than not they do
correspond. This "problem" is nowhere near as big as it is made out
to be. And there is nothing intrinsic to the boundary question which
could not be negotiated once non-Indian America acknowledges that
Indians have an absolute moral and legal right to the quantity of
territory which was never ceded. Boundaries can be adjusted, often in
ways which can be beneficial to both sides involved in the negotiation.52

Let me give you an example. Along about 1980, two Rutgers University
professors, Frank and Deborah Popper, undertook a comprehensive study
of land-use patterns and economy in the Great Plains region. What
they discovered is that 110 counties­one quarter of all the counties
in the entire Plains region falling within the western portions of
the states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and
Texas, as well as eastern Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New
Mexico­have been fiscally insolvent since the moment they were taken
from native people a century or more ago.

This is an area of about 140,000 square miles, inhabited by a widely
dispersed non-Indian population of only around 400,000 attempting to
maintain school districts, police and fire departments, road beds and
all the other basic accoutrements of "modern life" on the negligible
incomes which can be eked from cattle grazing and wheat farming on
land which is patently unsuited for both enterprises. The Poppers
found that without considerable federal subsidy each and every year
none of these counties would ever have been "viable." Nor, on the
face of it, will any of them ever be. Bluntly put, the pretense of
bringing Euroamerican "civilization" to the Plains represents nothing
more than a massive economic burden on the rest of the United States.

What the Poppers proposed on the basis of these findings is that the
government cut its perpetual losses by buying out the individual
landholdings within the target counties and converting them into open
space wildlife sanctuaries known as "Buffalo Commons." The whole area
would in effect be turned back to the bison which were very nearly
exterminated by Phil Sheridan's buffalo hunters back in the
nineteenth century as a means of starving "recalcitrant" Indians into
submission. The result would, they argue, be both environmentally and
economically beneficial to the nation as a whole.

It is instructive that such thinking has gained increasing
credibility and support from Indians and non-Indians alike, beginning
in the second half of the 1980s. Another chuckle here: Indians have
been trying to tell non-Indians that this would be the outcome of
fencing in the Plains ever since 1850 or so, but some folks have a
real hard time catching on. Anyway, it is entirely possible that we
will see some actual motion in this direction over the next few years.53

So, let us take the Poppers' idea to its next logical step. There are
another hundred or so economically marginal counties adjoining the
"perpetual red ink" counties already identified. These do not
represent an actual drain on the U.S. economy, but they do not
contribute much either. They could be "written off" and lumped into
the Buffalo Commons with no one feeling any ill effects whatsoever.
Now add in adjacent areas like the national grasslands in Wyoming,
the national forest and parklands in the Black Hills, extraneous
military reservations like Ellsworth Air Force Base, and existing
Indian reservations. This would be a huge territory lying east of
Denver, west of Lawrence, Kansas, and extending from the Canadian
border to southern Texas, all of it "outside the loop" of U.S.
business as usual. The bulk of this area is unceded territory owned
by the Lakota, Pawnee, Arikara, Hidatsa, Crow, Shoshone, Assiniboine,
Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Jicarilla and Mescalero Apache
nations. There would be little cost to the United States, and
virtually no arbitrary dispossession or dislocation of non-Indians if
the entire Commons were restored to these peoples. Further, it would
establish a concrete basis from which genuine expressions of
indigenous self-determination could begin to reemerge on this
continent, allowing the indigenous nations involved to begin the
process of reconstituting themselves socially and politically and to
recreate their traditional economies in ways that make contemporary
sense. This would provide alternative socioeconomic models for
possible adaptation by non-Indians and alleviate a range of
considerable costs to the public treasury incurred by keeping the
Indians in question in a state of abject and permanent dependency.

Critics will undoubtedly pounce upon the fact that an appreciable
portion of the Buffalo Commons area I have sketched out­perhaps a
million acres or so­lies outside the boundaries of unceded territory.
That is the basis for the sorts of multilateral negotiations between
the United States and indigenous nations I mentioned earlier. This
land will need to be "charged off" in some fashion against unceded
land elsewhere and in such a way as to bring other native peoples
into the mix. The Poncas, Omahas, and Osages, whose traditional
territories fall within the area in question, come immediately to
mind, but this would extend as well to all native peoples willing to
exchange land claims somewhere else for actual acreage in this
locale. The idea is to consolidate a distinct indigenous territory
while providing a definable landbase to as many different Indian
nations as possible in the process.

From there, the principle of the Buffalo Commons cum Indian
Territory could be extended westward into areas that adjoin or are at
least immediately proximate to the Commons area itself. The fact is
that vast areas of the Great Basin and Sonoran Desert regions of the
United States are even more sparsely populated and economically
insolvent than the Plains. A great deal of the area is also held in
federal trust. Hence, it is reasonable, in my view at least, to
expand the Commons territory to include most of Utah and Nevada,
northern Montana and Idaho, quite a lot of eastern Washington and
Oregon, most of the rest of New Mexico, and the lion's share of
Arizona. This would encompass the unceded lands of the Blackfeet and
Gros Ventre, Salish, Kutenai, Nez Percé, Yakima, Western Shoshone,
Goshutes and Utes, Paiutes, Navajo, Hopi and other Pueblos, Mescalero
and Chiricahua Apache, Havasupi, Yavapai and O'odam. It would also
set the stage for further exchange negotiations to consolidate this
additional territory in order to establish a landbase for a number of
other indigenous nations.

At this point, we have arrived at an area comprising roughly
one-third of the continental United States, a territory that,
regardless of the internal political and geographical subdivisions
effected by the array of native peoples within it, could be defined
as a sort of "North American Union of Indigenous Nations." Such an
entity would be in a position to assist other indigenous nations
outside its borders but still within the remaining territorial corpus
of the United States to resolve land claim issues accruing from
fraudulent or coerced treaties of cession (another fifteen or twenty
percent of the present 48 states).

It would also be in a position to facilitate an accommodation of the
needs of untreatied peoples within the United States, the Abenaki of
Vermont, for example, and the Hawaiian and Alaskan natives.
Similarly, it would be able to help secure the self-determination of
U.S. colonies like Puerto Rico. One can see the direction the
dominoes would begin to fall.

Nor does this end with the United States. Any sort of indigenous
union of the kind I have described would be as eligible for admission
as a fully participating member of the United Nations as, say,
Croatia and the Ukraine have recently shown themselves to be. This
would set a very important precedent, insofar as there has never been
an American Indian entity of any sort accorded such political status
on the world stage.

The precedent could serve to pave the way for comparable recognition
and attainments by other Native American nations, notably the
confederation of Incan peoples of the Andean highlands and the Mayans
of present-day Guatemala and southern Mexico (Indians are the
majority population, decisively so, in both locales), and from there,
other indigenous nations elsewhere around the world. Again, one can
see the direction the dominoes would fall. If we are going to have a
"New World Order," let us make it something just a bit different from
what George Bush and his friends had in mind. Right?

Sharing the Land

There are several closely related matters that should be touched upon
before wrapping this up. One has to do with the idea of
self-determination or what is meant when indigenists demand the
unrestricted right for native peoples. Most non-Indians, and even a
lot of Indians, seem confused by this and want to know whether it is
not the same as complete separation from the United States, Canada,
or whatever the colonizing power may be. The answer is "not necessarily."

The unqualified acknowledgment of the right of the colonized to total
separation ("secession") from the colonizer is the necessary point of
departure before any exercise of self-determination can occur.
Decolonization means the colonized can then exercise the right to
total separation in whole or in part, as they see fit, in accordance
with their own customs and traditions, and their own appreciation of
their needs. They decide for themselves what degree of autonomy they
wish to enjoy and thus the nature of their political and economic
relationship(s), not only with their former colonizers, but with all
other nations as well.54

My own inclination, which is in some ways an emotional preference,
tends to run toward complete sovereign independence, but this is not
the point. I have no more right to impose my preferences on
indigenous nations than do the colonizing powers; each indigenous
nation will choose for itself the exact manner and extent to which it
expresses its autonomy, its sovereignty. To be honest, I suspect very
few would be inclined to adopt my sort of "go it alone" approach
(and, actually, I must also admit that part of my own insistence upon
it often has more to do with forcing concession of the right from
those who seek to deny it than it does with putting it into
practice). In any event, I expect there would be the hammering out of
a number of sets of international relations in the "free association"
vein, a welter of variations of commonwealth and home rule governance.55

The intent here is not, no matter how much it may be deserved in an
abstract sense, to visit some sort of retribution, real or symbolic,
upon the colonizing or former colonizing powers. It is to arrive at
new sets of relationships between peoples that effectively put an end
to the era of international domination. The need is to gradually
replace the existing world order with one that is predicated in
collaboration and cooperation between nations. The only way to ever
really accomplish this is to physically disassemble the gigantic
state structures­structures that are literally grounded on systematic
intergroup domination; they cannot in any sense exist without
it­which are still evolving in this neoimperialist era. A concomitant
of this disassembly is the inculcation of voluntary, consensual
interdependence between formerly dominated and dominating nations and
a redefinition of the word "nation" itself to conform to its original
meaning: bodies of people bound together by their bioregional and
other natural cultural affinities.56

This last point is, it seems to me, crucially important. Partly, this
is because of the persistent question of who gets to remain in Indian
Country once land restoration and consolidation have occurred. The
answer, I think, is, up to a point, anyone who wants to. By "anyone
who wants to" I mean anyone who wishes to apply for formal
citizenship within an indigenous nation, thereby accepting the idea
that s/he is placing him/herself under unrestricted Indian
jurisdiction and will thus be required to abide by native law.57

Funny thing­I hear a lot of non-Indians asserting that they reject
nearly every aspect of U.S. law, but the idea of placing themselves
under anyone else's jurisdiction still leaves them pretty queasy. I
have no idea how many non-Indians might actually opt for citizenship
in an indigenous nation, but I expect there will be some. And I
suspect some native people have been so indoctrinated by the dominant
society that they will elect to remain within it rather than availing
themselves of their own citizenship. So there will be a bit of a
trade-off in this respect.

Now, there is the matter of the process working only "up to a point."
This point is very real. It is defined not by political or racial
considerations but by the carrying capacity of the land. The
population of indigenous nations everywhere has always been
determined by the number of people that could be sustained in a given
environment or bioregion without overpowering and thereby destroying
it.58 A very carefully calculated balance, one that was calibrated to
the fact that in order to enjoy certain sorts of material comfort
human population must be kept at some level below saturation, was
always maintained between the number of humans and the rest of the
habitat. In order to accomplish this, native peoples have always
incorporated into the very core of our spiritual traditions the
concept that all life forms and the earth itself possess rights equal
to those enjoyed by humans.

Rephrased, this means it would be a fundamental violation of
traditional native law to supplant or eradicate another species,
whether animal or plant, in order to make way for some greater number
of humans or to increase the level of material comfort available to
those who already exist. Conversely, it is a fundamental requirement
of traditional law that each human accept his or her primary
responsibility of maintaining the balance and harmony of the natural
order as it is encountered.59

One is essentially free to do anything one wants in an indigenous
society so long as this cardinal rule is adhered to. The bottom line
with regard to the maximum population limit of Indian Country as it
has been sketched in this presentation is some very finite number. My
best guess is that a couple of million people would be pushing things
right through the roof. Whatever. Citizens can be admitted until that
point has been reached, and no more. And the population cannot
increase beyond that number over time, no matter at what rate.
Carrying capacity is a fairly constant reality; it tends to take
thousands of years to change, if it changes at all.

Population and Environment

What I am going to say next will probably startle a few people (as if
what has been said already has not). I think this principle of
population restraint is the single most important example Native
North America can set for the rest of humanity. It is the thing that
is most crucial for others to emulate. Check it out. I just read that
Japan, a small island nation that has so many people they are
literally tumbling into the sea, and that has exported about half
again as many people as live on the home islands, is expressing
"official concern" that its birth rate has declined very slightly
over the last few years. The worry is that in thirty years there will
be fewer workers available to "produce" and then to "consume"
whatever is produced.60

Ever ask yourself what is used in "producing" something? Or what is
being "consumed"? Yeah. You got it. Nature is being consumed and with
it the ingredients that allow ongoing human existence. While it is
true that nature can replenish some of what is consumed, this can
only be done at a certain rate. This rate has been vastly exceeded,
and the excess is intensifying by the moment. An overburgeoning
humanity is killing the natural world, and thus itself. It is no more
complicated than that.61 Here we are in the midst of a rapidly
worsening environmental crisis of truly global portions, every last
bit of it attributable to a wildly accelerating human consumption of
the planetary habitat, and we have one of the world's major offenders
expressing grave concern that the rate at which it is able to consume
might actually drop a notch or two. Think about it. I suggest that
this attitude signifies nothing so much as stark, staring madness. It
is insane, suicidally, homicidally, and ecocidally insane. And, no, I
am not being rhetorical. I mean these terms in a clinically precise
fashion. But I do not want to convey the impression that I am
singling out the Japanese. I only used them as an illustration of a
far broader pathology called "industrialism"­or, more lately,
"postindustrialism"­a sickness centered in an utterly obsessive drive
to dominate and destroy the natural order (words like "production,"
"consumption," "development," and "progress" are no more than code
words masking this reality).62

It is not only the industrialized countries that are afflicted with
this dis-ease. One by-product of the past five centuries of European
expansionism and the resulting hegemony of eurocentric ideology is
that the latter has been drummed into the consciousness of most
peoples to the point where it is now subconsciously internalized.
Everywhere, you find people thinking it "natural" to view themselves
as the incarnation of god on earth ("created in the image of God")
and thus duty-bound to "exercise dominion over nature" in order to
"multiply, grow plentiful, and populate the land" in ever increasing
"abundance."63 The legacy of the forced labor of the latifundia and
inculcation of Catholicism in Latin America is a tremendous
overburden of population who devoutly believe that "wealth" can be
achieved (or is defined) by having ever more children.64 The legacy
of Mao's implementation of a "reverse technology" policy­the official
encouragement of breakneck childbearing rates in his already
overpopulated country, solely as a means to deploy massive labor
power to offset capitalism's "technological advantage" in
production­resulted in a tripling of China's population in only two
generations.65 And then there is India...

Make absolutely no mistake about it. The planet was never designed to
accommodate six billion human beings, much less the ten billion
predicted to be here a mere forty years hence.66 If we are to turn
power relations around between people and between groups of people,
we must also turn around the relationship between people and the rest
of the natural order. If we do not, we will die out as a species,
just like any other species that irrevocably overshoots its habitat.
The sheer number of humans on this planet needs to come down to about
one quarter of what it is today, or maybe less, and the plain fact is
that the bulk of these numbers are in the Third World.67 So, I will
say this clearly: not only must the birth rate in the Third World
come down, but the population levels of Asia, Latin America, and
Africa must be reduced over the next few generations, beginning right now.

Of course, there is another dimension to the population issue, one
that is in some ways even more important, and I want to get into it
in a minute. But first I have to say something else. This is that I
do not want a bunch of Third Worlders jumping up in my face screaming
that I am advocating "genocide." Bullshit. It is genocide when some
centralized state or some colonizing power imposes sterilization or
abortion on target groups. It is not genocide at all to recognize
that we have a problem and take the logical steps ourselves to solve
it. Voluntary sterilization is not a part of genocide. Voluntary
abortion is not a part of genocide. And, most importantly, educating
ourselves and our respective peoples to bring our birth rates under
control through conscious resort to birth control measures is not a
part of genocide.68

What it is is taking responsibility for ourselves again; it is taking
responsibility for our destiny and our children's destiny. It is
about rooting the ghost of the Vatican out of our collective psyches,
along with the ghosts of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It is about
getting back in touch with our own ways, our own traditions, our own
knowledge, and it is long past time that we got out of our own way in
this respect. We have an awful lot to unlearn and an awful lot to
relearn, and not much time in which we can afford the luxury of
avoidance. We need to get on with it.

The other aspect of population I want to take up is that there is
another way of counting. One way, the way I just did it, and the one
that is conventionally done, is to simply point to the number of
bodies or "people units." That is valid enough as far as it goes, but
it does not really go far enough. This brings up the second method,
which is to count by relative rate of resource consumption per
body­the relative degree of environmental impact per individual­and
to extrapolate this into people units.

Using this method, which is actually more accurate in ecological
terms, we arrive at conclusions that are a little different than the
usual notion that the most overpopulated regions on earth are in the
Third World. The average resident of the United States, for example,
consumes about thirty times the resources of the average Ugandan or
Laotian. Since a lot of poor folk reside in the United States, this
translates into the average yuppie consuming about seventy times the
resources of an average Third Worlder.69 Every yuppie born counts as
much as another seventy Chinese.

Lay that one on the next soccer mom who approaches you with a baby
stroller and an outraged look, demanding that you to put your
cigarette out, eh? It is plainly absurd for any American to complain
about smoking when you consider the context of the damage done by
overall U.S. consumption patterns. Tell 'em you'll put the butt out
when they snuff the kid and not a moment before. Better yet, tell 'em
they should snuff themselves, as well as the kid, and do the planet a
real favor. Just "kidding" (heh-heh).

Returning to the topic at hand: multiply the U.S. population by a
factor of thirty­a noticeably higher ratio than either western Europe or

Japan­in order to figure out how many Third Worlders it would take to
have the same environmental impact. I make that to be 7.5 billion
U.S. people units. I think I can thus safely say the most
overpopulated portion of the globe is the United States.

Either the consumption rates really have to be cut in this country,
especially in the more privileged social sectors, or the number of
people must be drastically reduced, or both. I advocate both. How
much? That is a bit subjective, but I will tentatively accept the
calculations of William Catton, a respected ecologist and
demographer. He estimated that North America was thoroughly saturated
with humans by 1840.70 So we need to get both population and
consumption levels down to what they were in that year or preferably
a little earlier. Alternatively, we need to bring population down to
an even lower level in order to sustain a correspondingly higher
level of consumption.

Here is where I think the reconstitution of indigenous territoriality
and sovereignty in the West can be useful with regard to population.
You see, land is not just land; it is also the resources within the
land, things like coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, and maybe most
important, water. How does that bear on U.S. overpopulation? Simple.
Much of the population expansion in this country over the past
quarter-century has been into the southwestern desert region. How
many people have they got living in the valley down there at Phoenix,
a place that might be reasonably expected to support 500?

Look at LA: twenty million people where there ought to be maybe a few
thousand. How do they accomplish this? Well, for one thing, they have
diverted the entire Colorado River from its natural purposes. They
are siphoning off the Columbia River and piping it south. They have
even got a project underway to divert the Yukon River all the way
down from Alaska to support southwestern urban growth and to irrigate
a proposed U.S. agribusiness penetration of northern Sonora and
Chihuahua. Whole regions of our ecosphere are being destabilized in
the process.

Okay, in the scenario I have described, the entire Colorado watershed
would be in Indian Country, under Indian control. So would the source
of the Columbia. And diversion of the Yukon would have to go right
through Indian Country. Now, here's the deal. No more use of water to
fill swimming pools and sprinkle golf courses in Phoenix and LA. No
more watering Kentucky bluegrass lawns out on the yucca flats. No
more drive-thru car washes in Tucumcari. No more "Big Surf" amusement
parks in the middle of the desert. Drinking water and such for the
whole population, yes.

Indians should deliver that. But water for this other insanity? No
way. I guarantee that will stop the inflow of population cold. Hell,
I will guarantee it will start a pretty substantial outflow. Most of
these folks never wanted to live in the desert anyway. That's why
they keep trying to make it look like Florida (another delicate
ecosystem which is buckling under the weight of population increases).71

And we can help move things along in other ways as well. Virtually
all the electrical power for the southwestern urban sprawls comes
from a combination of hydroelectric and coal-fired generation in the
Four Corners area. This is smack dab in the middle of Indian Country,
along with all the uranium with which a "friendly atom" alternative
might be attempted and most of the low sulfur coal. Goodbye to the
neon glitter of Las Vegas and San Diego. Adios to air conditioners in
every room. Sorry about your hundred-mile expanses of formerly
streetlit expressway. Basic needs will be met, and that's it.

This means we can also start saying goodbye to western rivers being
backed up like so many sewage lagoons behind massive dams. The Glen
Canyon and Hoover dams are coming down, boys and girls. And we can
begin to experience things like a reduction in the acidity of
southwestern rain water as facilities like the Four Corners Power
Plant are cut back in generating time and eventually eliminated
altogether.What I'm saying probably sounds extraordinarily cruel to a
lot of people, particularly those imbued with the belief that they
have a "God-given right" to play a round of golf on the well-watered
green beneath the imported palm trees outside an air- conditioned
casino at the base of the Superstition Mountains. Tough. Those days
can be ended without hesitation or apology.

A much more legitimate concern rests in the fact that a lot of people
who have drifted into the southwest have no place to go to. The
places they came from are crammed. In many cases, that's why they
left. To them, I say there's no need to panic; no one will abruptly
pull the plug on you or leave you to die of thirst. Nothing like
that. But quantities of both water and power will be set at minimal
levels. In order to have a surplus, you will have to bring your
number down to a certain level over a certain period. At that point,
the levels will again be reduced, necessitating another population
reduction. Things can be phased in over an extended period­several
generations, if need be.72

Provision of key items such as western water and coal should probably
be negotiated on the basis of reductions in population and
consumption by the United States as a whole rather than simply the
region served. This would prevent population shifts being substituted
for actual reductions.73 Any such negotiated arrangement should also
include an agreement to alter the U.S. distribution of food surpluses
and the like, so as to ease the transition to a lower population and
a correspondingly greater self-sufficiency in hardpressed Third World areas.

The objective inherent in every aspect of this process should be, and
can be, to let everyone down as gently as possible from the long and
intoxicating high that has beset so much of the human species in its
hallucination that it, and it alone, is the only thing of value and
importance in the universe. In doing so, and I believe only in doing
so, can we fulfill our obligation to bequeath our grandchildren, and
our grandchildren's grandchildren, a world that is fit (or even
possible) to live in.74

I Am Indigenist

There are any number of other matters that should be discussed, but
they will of necessity have to await another occasion. What has been
presented here has been only the barest outline, a glimpse of what
might be called an "indigenist vision." I hope that it provides
enough shape and clarity to allow anyone who wishes to pursue the
thinking further to fill in at least some of the gaps I have not had
the time to address, and to arrive at insights and conclusions of
their own. Once the main tenets have been advanced, and I think to
some extent that has been accomplished here, the perspective of
indigenism is neither mystical nor mysterious.

In closing, I would like to turn again to the critics, the skeptics,
those who will decry what has been said here as being "unrealistic"
or even "crazy." On the former score, my reply is that as long as we
define realism, or reality itself, in conventional terms­the terms
imposed by the order of understanding in which we now live­we will be
doomed to remain locked forever into the present trajectory. We will
never break free, because any order, any structure, defines reality
only in terms of itself. Consequently, allow me to echo a sentiment
expressed during the French student revolt of 1968: "Be realistic;
demand the impossible!"75 If you read through a volume of American
Indian oratory, and there are several available, you will find that
native people have been saying the same thing all along.76

As to my being crazy, I would like to say thanks for the compliment.
Again, I follow my elders and my ancestors­and R. D. Laing, for that
matter­in believing that when confronted with a society as obviously
insane as this one, the only sane posture one can adopt is what that
society would automatically designate as crazy.77

I mean, Indians were not the ones who turned birthing into a
religious fetish while butchering off a couple hundred million people
with weapons of mass destruction and systematically starving another
billion or so to death. Indians never had a Grand Inquisition, and we
never came up with a plumbing plan to reroute the water flow on the
entire continent. Nor did we ever produce "leaders" of the caliber of
Ronald Reagan, Jean Kirkpatrick and Ross Perot. Hell, we never even
figured out that turning prison construction into a major growth
industry was an indication of social progress and enlightenment.
Maybe we were never so much crazy as we were congenitally retarded.

Whatever the reason­and please excuse me for suspecting it might be
something other than craziness or retardation­I am indescribably
thankful that our cultures turned out to be so different, no matter
how much abuse and sacrifice it entailed. I am proud to stand inside
the heritage of native struggle. I am proud to say I am an
unreconstructable indigenist. For me, there is no other reasonable or
realistic way to look at the world. And I invite anyone who shares
that viewpoint to come aboard, regardless of your race, creed, or
national origin.

Maybe Chief Seattle said it best back in 1854: "Tribe follows tribe,
and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. Your time of
decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the white man
whose god walked with him and talked with him as friend with friend,
cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after
all. We will see."78
--

Notes

1. For what is probably the best available account of AIM, IAT, and
WARN, see Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York:
Viking, [2nd ed.] 1991). On Oka, see Linda Pertusati, In Defense of
Mohawk Land: Ethnopolitical Conflict in Native North America (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1997).

2. On James Bay, see Boyce Richardson's Strangers Devour the Land
(Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, [2nd ed.] 1991).

3. While it is hardly complete, a good point of departure for
learning about many of the individuals named would be Alvin M.
Josephy's The Patriot Chiefs (New York: Viking, 1961).

4. The bulk of those mentioned, and a number of others as well,
appear in The Indigenous Voice: Visions and Realities, 2 Vols.
(London: Zed Books, 1988).

5. The term "Vichy Indians" comes from Russell Means. See his "The
Same Old Song," in my Marxism and Native Americans (Boston: South End
Press, [2nd ed.] 1989) pp. 19-33.

6. Ross Swimmer is an alleged Cherokee and former Philips Petroleum
executive who served as head of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs
under Ronald Reagan and argued for suspension of federal obligations
to Indians as a means of teaching native people "self-reliance."
Dickie Wilson was head of the federal puppet government on Pine Ridge
Reservation during the early 1970s, and while in this position, he
formed an entity, called the GOONs, to physically assault and
frequently kill members and supporters of AIM. Webster Two Hawks was
head of the National Tribal Chairman's Association funded by the
Nixon administration. He used his federally-sponsored position to
denounce Indian liberation struggles. Peter McDonald­often referred
to as "McDollar" in Indian Country­utilized his position as head of
the puppet government at Navajo to sell his people's interests to
various mining corporations during the 1970s and '80s, greatly
enriching himself in the process. Vernon Bellecourt is a former
Denver wig stylist who moved to Minneapolis and became CEO of a
state-chartered corporation funded by federal authorities to
impersonate the American Indian Movement. David Bradley is a
no-talent painter living in Santa Fe whose main claim to fame is in
having made a successful bid to have the federal government enforce
"identification standards" against other Indian artists; he has
subsequently set himself up as a self-anointed "Identity Police," a
matter which, thankfully, leaves him little time to produce his
typical graphic schlock. To hear them tell it, of course, each of
these individuals acted in the service of "Indian sovereignty."

7. See Winona LaDuke's "Natural to Synthetic and Back Again," the
preface to Marxism and Native Americans, op. cit., pp. i-viii.

8. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Utopía y Revolución: El Pensamiento
Político Contemporáneo de los Indios en América Latina (Mexico City:
Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1981) p. 37; translation by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.

9. Ibid., pp. 37-8.

10. Ibid. p. 38.

11. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Indians of the Americas: Human Rights and
Self-Determination (London: Zed Books, 1984) p. 83.

12. Ibid. p. 84.

13. For an excellent overview on the implications of Marx's thinking
in this regard, see the first couple of chapters in Walker Connor's
The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

14. Dunbar Ortiz, Indians of the Americas, op. cit., p. 85.

15. George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian
Reality (New York: Free Press, 1974).

16. On the Irish and Welsh struggles, see Peter Berresford Ellis, The
Celtic Revolution: A Study in Anti-Imperialism (Talybont: Wales: Y
Lolfa, 1985). On the Basques, see Kenneth Medhurst, The Basques and
Catalans (London: Minority Rights Group Report No. 9, Sept 1977).

17. Dunbar Ortiz, Indians of the Americas, op. cit., p. 89.

18. Bernard Neitschmann, "The Third World War," Cultural Survival
Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1987).

19. Geneva Offices of the United Nations, Press Release, Aug. 17,
1981 (Hr/1080).

20. For an excellent analysis of this tradition from an indigenist
perspective, see Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in
Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990).

21. On the Iberian legal tradition, see James Brown Scott, The
Spanish Origin of International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).

22. Hugo Blanco, Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru (New
York: Pathfinder, 1972). Blanco was a marxist, and thus sought to
pervert indigenous issues through rigid class analysis­defining
Indians as "peasants" rather than by nationality­but his
identification of land as the central issue was and is nonetheless valid.

23. The complete texts of 371 of these ratified treaties can be found
in Charles J. Kappler, ed., American Indian Treaties, 1778-1883 (New
York: Interland, 1973). The Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., has
also collected the texts of several more ratified treaties which do
not appear in Kappler, but which will be published in a forthcoming collection.

24. The constitutional provision comes at Article I, Section 10.
Codification of customary international law in this connection is
explained in Sir Ian Sinclair, The Vienna Convention on the Law of
Treaties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, [2nd ed.] 1984).

25. See generally, Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford E. Lytle, American
Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).

26. Lonewolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903). For analysis, see Ann
Laquer Estin, "Lonewolf v. Hitchcock: The Long Shadow," in Sandra L.
Cawallader and Vine Deloria, Jr., eds., The Aggressions of
Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since the 1880s (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1984) pp. 215-45.

27. Probably the best exposition of the legal principles articulated
by the U.S. as being violated by the nazis may be found in Bradley F.
Smith, The Road to Nuremberg (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

28. A fuller enunciation of this thesis may be found in my "On
Gaining 'Moral High Ground': An Ode to George Bush and the 'New World
Order,'" in Cynthia Peters, ed., Collateral Damage: The "New World
Order" at Home and Abroad (Boston: South End Press, 1992) pp. 359-72.

29. For the origins of such practices, see Dorothy V. Jones, License
for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982). A good survey of U.S. adaptations
will be found in Donald Worcester, ed., Forked Tongues and Broken
Treaties (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1975).

30. The travesty at Fort Wise is adequately covered in Stan Hoig's
The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961) pp. 13-7.

31. Deloria compilation, forthcoming.

32. On the purpose of the commission, see Harvey D. Rosenthal,
"Indian Claims and the American Conscience: A Brief History of the
Indian Claims Commission," in Imre Sutton, ed., Irredeemable America:
The Indians' Estate and Land (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1985, pp. 35-86). One must read between the lines a bit.

33. Russel Barsh, "Indian Land Claims Policy in the United States,"
North Dakota Law Review, No. 58 (1982) pp. 1-82.

34. The percentage is arrived at by juxtaposing the approximately
fifty million acres within the current reservation landbase to the
more than two billion acres of the lower 48 states. According to the
Indian Claims Commission findings, Indians actually retain unfettered
legal title to about 750 million acres of the continental U.S.

35. Concerning Alaska, see M. C. Berry, The Alaska Pipeline: The
Politics of Oil and Native Land Claims (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1975). On Hawai'i, see the Haunani-Kay Trask, From
a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i (Monroe,
ME: Common Courage Press, 1993).

36. A good exposition on this phenomenon may be found in Paul
Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy,
and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1985).

37. The problem is partially but insightfully examined in Ronald
Weitzer, Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal
Security in Zimbabwe and Northern Ireland (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).

38. It is entirely possible to extend a logical analysis in this
direction. See, for instance, J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of
the White Proletariat (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1983).

39. Sharon O'Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

40. These matters are covered quite well in Janet Silman, ed., Enough
Is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out (Toronto: Women's Press, 1987).

41. The Smithsonian view of Indians has been adopted even by some of
the more self-consciously "revolutionary" organizations in the United
States. For a classic example, see Revolutionary Communist Party,
USA, "Searching for the Second Harvest," in Marxism and Native
Americans, op. cit., pp. 35-58.

42. The thesis is, no kidding, that Indians were the first
"environmental pillagers," and it took the invasion of enlightened
Europeans like the author of the piece to save the American ecosphere
from total destruction by its indigenous inhabitants; George
Weurthner, "An Ecological View of the Indian," Earth First! Vol. 7,
No. 7, Aug. 1987.

43. Paul W. Valentine, "Dances with Myths,"Arizona Republic, Apr. 7,
1991 (Valentine is syndicated, but is on staff at the Washington Post).

44. A fine selection of such early colonialist impressions can be
found in the first few chapters of Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The
Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New York: Schoken,
1980). On the length of indigenous occupancy in the Americas, see
George F. Carter, Earlier Than You Think: A Personal View of Man in
America (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980). On
precontact population, see Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become
Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).

45. For a succinct but reasonably comprehensive survey of actual
precontact indigenous material and intellectual realities, see Jack
Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas
Transformed the World (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988).

46. Jack D. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Race, Color
and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988).

47. On federal quantum policy, see my essay, "The Crucible of
American Indian Identity: Native Tradition versus Colonial Imposition
in Postconquest North America," American Indian Culture and Research
Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1998.

48. Probably the best examination of Indian warfare and
"militaristic" tradition is Tom Holm's "Patriots and Pawns: State Use
of American Indians in the Military and the Process of Nativization
in the United States," in M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native
America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance (Boston: South End
Press, 1992) pp. 345-70.

49. Referred to here is the so-called "Bradley Bill" (S.1453),
introduced before the Senate by Bill Bradley in 1987. For analysis,
see the special issue of Wicazo Sa Review (Vol. XIV, No. 1, Spring
1988) devoted to the topic. Also see "The Black Hills Are Not For
Sale," in this volume.

50. Russell Means and Ward Churchill, TREATY: A Platform
For Nationhood (Porcupine, S.D.: TREATY Campaign, 1982); appended to
the present volume.

51. Barsh, "Indian Land Claims," op. cit.

52. A number of examples may be found in Mark Frank Lindley's The
Acquisition and Government of Backward Country in International Law:
A Treatise on the Law and Practice Relating to Colonial Expansion
(London: Longmans Green, 1926).

53. Probably the only accessible material to date on the Buffalo
Commons idea is unfortunately a rather frothy little volume. Anne
Matthews, Where the Buffalo Roam: The Storm Over the Revolutionary
Plan to Restore America's Great Plains (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992).

54. For one of the best elaborations of these principles, see Zed
Nanda, "Self-Determination in International Law: Validity of Claims
to Secede," Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, No. 13, 1981.

55. A prototype for this sort of arrangement exists between Greenland
(populated mainly by Inuits) and Denmark; Gudmundur Alfredsson,
"Greenland and the Law of Political Decolonization," German Yearbook
on International Law, No. 25 (1982).

56. Although my argument comes at it from a very different angle, the
conclusion here is essentially the same as that reached by Richard
Falk in his The End of World Order: Essays in Normative International
Relations (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983).

57. This is the basic idea set forth in TREATY, op. cit.

58. The concepts at issue here are brought out very well in William
R. Catton, Jr., Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary
Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).

59. For further elaboration, see Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red (New
York: Delta, 1973). The ideas have even caught on, at least as
questions, among some Euroamerican legal practitioners; see
Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal
Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman, 1972).

60. CNN "Dollars and Cents" reportage, May 27, 1992.

61. The idea is developed in detail in Jeremy Rifkin's Entropy: A New
World View (New York: Viking, 1980). It should be noted, however,
that the world view in question is hardly new; indigenous peoples
have held it all along.

62. One good summary of this, utilizing extensive native
sources­albeit many of them go unattributed­is Jerry Mander's In the
Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of
Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991).

63. If this sounds a bit scriptural, it is meant to. A number of us
see a direct line of continuity from the core imperatives of
Judeo-Christian theology, through the capitalist secularization of
church doctrine and its alleged marxian antithesis, right on through
to the burgeoning technotopianism of today. This is a major
conceptual cornerstone of what indigenists view as eurocentrism (a
virulently anthropocentric outlook in its essence).

64. The information is in André Gunder Frank's book, but the
conclusion is avoided; André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and
Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and
Brazil (New York: Monthly Review, 1967).

65. See Jerome Ch'en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967).

66. Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

67. Extrapolating from the calculations of Catton in Overshoot, op. cit.

68. Sound arguments to this effect are advanced in Paul R. Ehrlich
and Anne H. Ehrlich, Population/Resources/Environment (San Francisco:
W. H. Freeman, 1970).

69. Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, from their book Healing the
Earth, quoted in CNN series The Population Bomb, May 1992.

70. This would be about fifty million, or less than one-fifth the
present U.S. population; Catton, Overshoot, op. cit., p. 53.

71. This is essentially the same argument, without ever quite
arriving at the obvious conclusion, advanced by Marc Reisner in his
Cadillac Desert (New York: Penguin, 1986).

72. A good deal of the impact could also be offset by implementing
the ideas contained in John Todd and George Tukel, Reinhabiting
Cities and Towns: Designing for Sustainability (San Francisco: Planet
Drum Foundation, 1981).

73. For purposes of comparison, see Funding Ecological and Social
Destruction: The World Bank and International Monetary Fund
(Washington, D.C.: Bank Information Center, 1990). By contrast, the
concept described in the text might be dubbed "Struggling for
Ecological and Social Preservation."

74. Many indigenous peoples take the position that all social
policies should be entered into only after consideration of their
likely implications, both environmentally and culturally, for
descendants seven generations in the future. Consequently, a number
of seemingly good ideas for solving short-run problems are never
entered into because no one can reasonably predict their longer term
effects. See Sylvester M. Morey, ed., Can the Red Man Help the White
Man? A Denver Conference with Indian Elders (New York: Myrin Institute, 1970).

75. Allan Priaulx and Sanford J. Ungar, The Almost Revolution:
France, 1968 (New York: Dell, 1969).

76. See, for example, Virginia Irving Armstrong, ed., I Have Spoken:
American History Through the Voices of the Indians (Chicago: Swallow
Press, 1971).

77. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1967).

78. Armstrong, I Have Spoken, op. cit., p. 79.

.