Running Dog Speaks
Running Dog Speaks
By Craig Pyes
Running Dog Speaks: My people were a proud people and they roamed freely over all the Americas, making a nation strong and brave. They lived in tribes and communes, they could tell the movements of the planets and the flights of the stars, they could read the future in the flights of birds, and decipher the convoluted entrails of dead animals. This and more could my people do-before the white man came. My people were a decorous people, wearing beads and brightly coloured garments, colours on their faces, existing in a jumble of symbols and glyphs and signs, taking rare herbs and medicines from the earth which made them see great visions and made them feel great things, and made them langorous and phlegmatic. This and more could my people do-before the white man came.
But when the white man came my people were extinguished, like the wet promises of the white eyes thrown over the fires of our camps. Not one treaty did they hold, not one promise did they keep. The white man lies! Even today the Great White Father talks, and not one word is truth.
But long ago we did not understand this, and we believed them. And for believing them, our land was taken from us, and our best warriors slain, our seed was plundered and our lives salted, the spirit of revolt faded out slowly like the fires of our camps. But in the small and fragmented hopes of our people, a myth was woven, and told generation to generation. It said that a new nation will rise up out of the earth from the grave of the old, and reconquer the earth, and reconstitute it for our people. And so it will be.
PAPER TIGER SPEAKS ON GENOCIDE: I am older than Running Dog and have gone to the schools the white eyes have built for me and our people, and for them and their people, and have learned to read the stories of other nations and other races and other people. I have learned not only do the white eyes speak with a forked tongue to us and among themselves, but their schools teach lies and inculcate their young braves with perfidy. Often in the history of the white eyes have their young braves nobly for bad causes. Their history is one of struggle, of truth being pummeled by falsity.
They cali America the Melting Pot, but the metals do not run together, people of different clays do not fuse into one great people. It is the tradition of the Melting Pot, that the People of the Red Clays, and the People of the Yellow Clays, and the People of the Black and Brown Clays do not melt with the People of Clay Without Colour. The People of the Clay Without Colour are against Melting and they are against Pot. ;
But we must make useful distinctions! It is not the People of the Clay Without Colour but their Chiefs who will it so, The People say, "It cannot happen here", and this they believe. But across the Big Water six million people who would not melt were murdered, and then melted in the crematoria to make soap. The people who would not melt were called "Dirty Jews"; their murderers cleaned themselves from soap made of Dirty Jews.
The people who would not melt had a movement going to get land of their own. It is partly from this movement, and from another movement with humanitarian purposes, called EUTHANASIA, a gentle killing by gas of the old, the weak, and the infirm (mercy killings), that the seeds of their most horrible death were sown. The world calls this not "Genocide,'' The white eyes are blind to it because to them it is doing good.
Genocide is now being committed against the heroic people of the yellow eyes in Vietnam and Laos. In the northern reservations of Laos, those who are left, are forced to live by day in caves, and farm their fields by night. In Vietnam, more bombs have been dropped than all the bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in the Second World War, and on Korea in that war. There are not crematoria in Vietnam, but napalm makes whole villages crematoria, and wherever else it strikes.
When the white man moved against the people of the Red Clays, it cost him 1 million dollars for every Indian he killed; today he is more sophisticated and has more and better weapons. It cost the white man only $500,000 for every Viet Cong he kills... Only $500,000- half as much, after one hundred years of unbridled technology.
The ways of the white eyes are not mysterious, nor are they strange. But they are devious ways. They promise anything with the left hand, while the right hand kills with evil spirits and bad medicines, with blankets they say are to keep us warm, but are swarming with invisible colonies of smallpox, cholera, influenza, and measles; with showers they say are to keep us clean, but pour forth vile, noxious gases that choke and strangle us; with lands they say are to keep us fed, but blister, open, and devour us.
Such are the ways of the white man. They attack sleeping villages, and kill men, women, children, level the houses, kill the horses, destroy our clothing and foolstuffs. Remember the massacre at Sand Creek? at Washita River? at Wounded Knee? at Lydice at My Lai?
RUNNING DOG CONTINUES:
Paper Tiger is older and wiser than I, and has made some interesting points. He has pointed out that genocide is preceeded by an emigration or concentration of a race into a fixed geographical boundary, a desire of oppressed peoples, and equally out of a desire for merciful elimination on the part of the oppressors. Any problem (such as the Race Question) can be eliminated either through finding an answer to the problem, or eliminating the problem entirely. The first method offers a rational solution; the other method is a 'final solution', where everything is permissible.
In 1830 Congress signed the Indian Removal Act, which legalized the taking of our land (that which was not already claimed by the so-called 'Right of Discovery') in the East, and started the five nations of the South on the Trail of Tears. It is defined in your book of definitions, that "rape" is "to take by force". Since before you came we have called the land our Mother. We could not sell you our Mother. Since you took her by force, polluted our rivers, stripped her of her virginal forests, and desecrated her valleys. To us, white man, "for as long as the grass shall grow and the water run', you will be a Motherfucker.
The People of the Red Clays were moved into the Great American Desert; and a hundred treaties made and a hundred treaties broken. Each time the land allotment grew smaller and smaller, until the great if our people were reduced to helplessness on small islands of desperation. In six years, from 1871-77, the great white hunters killed 10 million buffalo, and we no longer could hunt and live in the way of our fathers.
At the time of the Nuremberg Laws (1935) a policy of forced emigration went into effect covering the Jews. After confiscating their lands and taking their possessions, the Nazis tried to move them to a Jewish State in Poland. This was the Jewish Removal Act. In America, each state tried to be first to free itself of its Indians; in Europe, each territory tried to be first free of its Jews (JUDENREIN).
It took over 60 years to disenfranchise and murder the Indians. Germany, which had no prior history of genocide, it took less than 12 years to murder the Jews. Not the policy of extinction is acceptable foreign policy of America. They have not learned. Not only in S.E. Asia, but the CIA sponsored slaughter of 500,000 Indonesian Communist of Chinese descent in Indonesia, and the slaughter of Cambodians of Vietnamese descent in Cambodia.
Now the greatest threat of all is to the People of the Black Clays. They are the most vulnerable, say the elders, because their reservations are in the middle of the cities. If it took 12 years to kill the Jews, it will take less to kill the Blacks. "They stand out like spots on a leopard, the elders say.
The People of the Clay Without Colour say that it can't happen here. But the graves of my people stain the earth like wounds in their mother's flesh. I caution you to remember, good people, that it HAS happened here.
MOURNING DOVE SPEAKS ON THE SYSTEM:
I am the sister of Running Dog, I am not his blood sister but he sleeps with me and I with him, and I have helped him come a long way. Before the enlightenment, I grew up a colonized squaw, and learned the ways of discretion and intrigue that were once a woman's province. Because of this, I can see deception yelping like bitches in the white eyes' white lies, and hear it bark in the chambers of their black hearts.
Historically it is not true that evil manifests itself absolutely; that my people were killed and the rest of the country stayed quiet or sullen. As far as what the people could see, every effort was made to protect the Indian; as far as what the people could NOT see, the covert and insistent use of violence was for our destruction. In Germany, the people were largely ignorant and indifferent to what happened, because they could not or would not see. And when agencies demanded to investigate, they were shown only the model camps. In the ghettoes, every citizen could be killed one day, and the only way the white eyes would know, or suspect, is when their domestics did not show up to clean their houses, and sweep their streets. And in the metropolitan states, the struggle was being waged against the same enemy: international finance capital under its external and internal forms of exploitation, imperialism and capitalism.
During the long, undeclared war against my people, the white eyes in the East were sympathetic to our plight and protested at the news of each new massacre. And when their army was defeated at Ft. Kearny, even then a wave of sympathy swelled their hearts. Their chiefs issued a report, which rather than (See page 29) (Running Dog From Page 5) go to the root of the problem, tried to give operationaI malfunctions to rationalize the trouble. It claimed that the problem of poor Indian relations was in the split administrative jurisdiction between the War Dept. and the Dept. of the Interior, in the denial by white men of the civil rights of Red men, in the bad relations of the army with the people of the reservation. The exact same problem that was described in the Kerner Report, written one hundred years later. And they believed it because they could not see and would not study the truth.
In 1867 the Congress appointed a Board of Peace Commissioners, enlisted the aid of "philanthropists", the Great White Father appointed religious members to fill the posts in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and even members of the liberal press like HARPERS Magazine and Greely's N.Y. TRIBUNE heralded our cause while concerned citizens wrote their congressmen and demonstrated their sympathy. And while this activity agitated the system, and gave the illusion that change was near, nothing changed, but the population of my people which steadily diminished.
RUNNING DOG CONTINUES:
The cunning of the white eyes knows no limits; he is not honourable in peace, and he is like a jackal in war. His strategy is to increase the repressive mechanism of the state, while at the same time he offers more phony social programs to sooth the fires of revolt. We were forced by the army to go to the reservations, and by the lure of annuities (welfare) to stay there; he killed our leaders who called for self-defense, Crazy Horse (he killed Crazy Horse with an Indian policeman like he killed Hampton with a black pig) and Capt. Jack and Chief Joseph, and he bought off other leaders by phony promises of peace like Spotted Tail, Black Kettle and White Antelope. He talked them into non-violence and they talked us into laying down our guns, and he killed us without our being able to defend ourselves.
We call the white man's lackeys "Hang-around-the-forts" and "cut-hairs", we call the brave warriors and fighters of liberation "long-hairs". We called Custer "long-hair", but before the battle of Greazy Grass (Little Big Horn), he cut his hair at Ft. Reno, and that's why we defeated him in that battle.
Now the path lies open to the New Nation, to be a cut hair or a long hair, to hang around the fort or go to the field of battle. When Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux defected to the white eyes after defeating them on the field of battle, he gave this cynical recommendation for braves wanting to become wealthy like the white eyes, "You must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and forget the hungry. When your house is built, your storeroom filled, then look around for a neighbor you can take advantage of and seize all he has." This is truly what Red Cloud said.
We must show what happened to White Antelope. After he had convinced the Cheyannes to be peaceful, the Colorado militia attacked his village and killed many women and children. But White Antelope refused to run. He sat there, this 70 year old man of honour, while the other peace Chiefs ran, and sang his death song: "Nothing lives long, except the earth and the mountains." And after he had finished his song, he was struck by an army bullet and killed. And afterward one of the soldiers came across his body, and cut off his balls to make a pouch for his tobacco.
As the white eyes used their liquor to trick us land make us crazy, we will use our herbs and medicines against the white eyes to make HIM crazy. We have a tradition of great medicine men, Sitting Bull and Tim Leary.
We must use all our braves in the coming encounter, the men and the women, because we are all brothers and sisters. This was a mistake of the old nation, and lead to our defeat.
We must cure individualism, and our war councils must elicit the support of all our people. No more games like counting coup, throwing rocks, fighting when we feel like fighting. We must fight when the time is right and wait until the coming victory. Then we will have peace, and pass the pipe of peace.
We will begin again the Ghost Dance, and keep on moving so we can reclaim the earth: this is the Movement. And our musicians will play loud music, and the white eyes will see activity all over the globe, and we will keep moving. It will be the beginning of' our prophecies, the beginning of a new nation, and the earth will belong to the people.