Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, territory of the Oglala Lakota Sioux.
It was here in 1890 that two cultures, two dreams collided, and one dream was seemingly laid to rest in cold December snow.
On December 29, 1890, the United States 7th Cavalry slaughtered somewhere between 150 and 300 men, women and children who were being relocated to the Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge.
It was an event and confrontation that had repeated itself over and over ever since the white settlers came to America. Land was needed for expansion, for farms and industry, for a new civilization, and a new way of looking at things. Where commerce and money dictated, treaties were repeatedly broken, and the boundaries of Indian reservations moved westward.
It was the collision of two different universes.
John Muir, the great American naturalist, writer and conservationist, who spent years in Yosemite and the Sierras, once wrote of the Indian’s and the white man’s different impacts upon the environment:
“How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows, probably a great many, extending far beyond the time that Columbus touched our shores, and it seems strange that heavier marks have not been made. Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.
“How different are most of those of the white man, especially on the lower gold region – roads blasted in the solid rock, wild streams dammed and tamed and turned out of their channels and led along the sides of canyons and valleys to work in mines like slaves. Crossing from ridge to ridge, high in the air, on long straddling trestles as if flowing on stilts, or down and up across valleys and hills imprisoned in iron pipes to strike and wash away hills and the skin of the mountain’s face, riddling, stripping every gold gully and flat. These are the white man’s marks made in a few feverish years, to say nothing of mills, fields, villages, scattered hundreds of miles along the flank of the range. Long will it be ere these marks are effaced, though Nature does what she can, replanting, gardening, sweeping away old dams and flumes, leveling gravel and boulder piles, patiently trying to heal every raw scar.”
The dreams that seemed to die that day at Wounded Knee are actually still alive and continue to surface – in 1973, in the Wounded Knee Incident, when followers of the American Indian Movement seized and occupied the town to protest the United States government’s failure to fulfill treaties with Native American people – and again in 2016 and 2017, when large protests broke out against the building of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
Justice, the environment, and a worldview are at the real heart of these protests.
Rebecca Adamson, world-renowned American Cherokee social entrepreneur and advocate for the rights of Indigenous Peoples, characterized this clash of worldviews as “one that sees all life as interconnected and interrelated, and another that sees the world comprised of fearful individuals competing for scarce resources.”
She also states:
“The indigenous understanding has its basis of spirituality in a recognition of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living things, a holistic and balanced view of the world. All things are bound together. All things connect. What happens to the Earth happens to the children of the earth. Humankind has not woven the web of life; we are but one thread. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”
This is in complete agreement with a Buddhist view of life.
Buddhism further explains that since one’s life and one’s environment are deeply interconnected, a transformation in the inner realm or life state of one person can lead to a dramatic transformation in the environment. It is ultimately a philosophy of deep, personal empowerment.
These modes of thought and living are on the ascendancy.
Here in America, we are witnessing a government that has fully embraced the impulses of unbridled capitalism and greed, trashing the environment, destroying relationships with nations and people all around, seeking to retreat into a narrower, hopelessly bygone world.
It will never last. The intent of the universe itself is being violated, the urge to expand oneself, to grow beyond oneself into a greater inclusive being, recognizing brothers and sisters everywhere, unleashing a fountain of compassion and respect for all of life, for the limitless potential of each of our individual lives, and revealing – amid the turmoil, the division, and the gathering chaos – eternity here and now.
The Buddha is coming to America.
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Traveling to a New America is a journey to the heart of a new America – voices and stories of people past and present; talks and discussions in towns and cities all across the country; a national conversation about who we really are, and what the future of America is really about here in these fifty States.
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Author website: http://www.jameshilgendorf.org
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