Book Review: Black Elk Speaks - a First Nations memoir

 John G Neihardt: "Black Elk Speaks", University of Nebraska Press, 1988, 298 pages

                       This text is an oral memoire of a Lakota medicine man "transmitted through" - and rendered into an "elevated" English by - J G Neihardt way back in the early 1930s when Black Elk was an old man approaching his seventh decade. Black Elk speaks of the old ways of his people and of the unequal, doomed struggle against the encroaching Wasichus, their army, lies and canon. But above all, Black Elk speaks of the Great Vision that was granted him when he was a mere boy of 9 years (1872). Many, such as activist and teacher, Vine Deloria, consider this text to be a sort of "Native North American Bible", rescueing a portion of dying native spiritual traditions from oblivion and granting it, at least, the opportunity for rebirth in the hearts of generations who have come to understand the vacuity at the heart of Wasichu culture.

                      This can be described as a "portal text", opening on a parallel universe in which magic works and which only partly intersects that (? those ?) of Caucasian North Americans. Even editor Neihardt claims that it was "obvious" that the old man possessed "supranormal powers". Be that as it may, one can only marvel at the incredible richness and wisdom of the vision recorded by the mind of a nine year old boy.

                      My own reactions in finishing this book were quite mixed: anger, frustration, sense of loss, wonder. Once more, in its revelation of the demented rapaciousness of Wasichu culture, I could only see reinforced the conviction that an era, begun with Christopher Columbus' voyage to the New World, is ending. One point will suffice: to conquer the Indian, Wasichu destroyed his food source. Buffulo were simply slaughtered to extinction. The mind can only recoil at the overt obscenity. This era ends, of course, because we have no more world left to plunder. For commercial purposes the hoop of the finite world was belted in the mid-nineteenth century. Now we deplete the remaining stocks of non-renewables to exhaustion and seem not to possess the will nor the intelligence to limit our activities to what the planet can sustain though its living - renewable - bounty..

                       I also found myself in disagreement with Black Elk himself. He felt he had failed the Great Vision:

‎"Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw: for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.", (page 43)

                         True, Black Elk did not lead his people to the Flowering Tree of life. They were conquered, killed, forced onto reserves, humiliated.. But perhaps, as has been noted in the past, prophecy does not necessarily accord with our personalized time frames. Vision does, after all, have its roots in the intemporal world of Forms, of Totems and Archetypes. In the Great Vision, Black Elk tapped into the powerful Archetypal drama of death / rebirth / regeneration: the Archetype of healing / making whole / Initiation (transcendance - metamorphosis). There are of course - as there must be - culturally specific motifs in Black Elk's Great Vision of collective salvation and rebirth but the Archetype itself is universal and intemporal in nature. The Vision is a portal, Black Elk has opened a door. It is up to us who follow - and understand (gnosis) - to materialize that Vision, to bring it into fulsome materiality. So it was with the Bhuddha and Jesus; they, too, opened a door through which we are invited to enter a new world, a new way of being in the world. Black Elk, then, was not, as he thought, a loser, a failure in life but a "Bearer of the Logos (the Word)" (Carl Jung, psychologist). He was one of those who bring a powerful, regenerative vision into the world. The Archetype of Healing as presented in the Great Vision is, if anything, even more apropos today that it was 140 years ago - May the Sacred Tree flower!

Elizabeth May pleads for realism on Energy policy

By Elizabeth May, Green Party Leader on 9 January 2012 - 3:10pm (from her blog: http://greenparty.ca/)

An Open letter to Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources Minister of Natural Resources


“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.
No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.

These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”

- From your open letter of today’s date, January 9, 2012.

Dear Joe,
Your letter caught my attention. I respect you and like you a lot as a colleague in the House. Unfortunately, I think your role as Minister of Natural Resources has been hijacked by the PMO spin machine. The PMO is, in turn, hijacked by the foreign oil lobby. You are, as Minister of Natural Resources, in a decision-making, judge-like role. You should not have signed such a hyperbolic rant.

I have reproduced a short section of your letter. The idea that First Nations, conservation groups, and individuals opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline are opposed to all forestry, mining, hydro-electric and gas is not supported by the facts. I am one of those opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline. I do not oppose all development; neither does the Green Party; neither do environmental NGOS; neither do First Nations.

I oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the project requires over-turning the current moratorium on oil tanker traffic on the British Columbia coastline. The federal-provincial oil tanker moratorium has been in place for decades. As former Industry Canada deputy minister Harry Swain pointed out in today’s Globe and Mail, moving oil tankers through 300 km of perilous navigation in highly energetic tidal conditions is a bad choice. In December 2010, the government’s own Commissioner for the Environment, within the Office of the Auditor General, reported that Canada lacked the tools to respond to an oil spill. These are legitimate concerns.

Furthermore, running a pipeline through British Columbia’s northern wilderness, particularly globally significant areas such as the Great Bear Rainforest, is a bad idea. Nearly 1200 kilometers of pipeline through wilderness and First Nations territory is not something that can be fast-tracked.

Most fundamentally, shipping unprocessed bitumen crude out of Canada has been attacked by the biggest of Canada’s energy labour unions, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, as a bad idea. The CEP estimates it means exporting 40,000 jobs out of Canada (figure based on jobs lost through the Keystone Pipeline). They prefer refining the crude here in Canada. (The CEP is also not a group to which your allegation that opponents of Gateway also oppose all forestry, mining, oil, gas, etc is anything but absurd.)

The repeated attacks on environmental review by your government merit mention. The federal law for environmental review was first introduced under the Mulroney government. Your government has dealt repeated blows to the process, both through legislative changes, shoved through in the 2010 omnibus budget bill, and through budget cuts. In today’s letter, you essentially ridicule the process through a misleading example. Your citation of “a temporary ice arena on a frozen pond in Banff” requiring federal review was clearly intended to create the impression that the scope of federal review had reached absurd levels. You neglected to mention that the arena was within the National Park. That is the only reason the federal government was involved. It was required by the National Parks Act. The fact that the arena approval took only two months shows the system works quite well.

Perhaps most disturbing in the letter is the description of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline as coming from “environmental and other radical groups.” Nowhere in your letter do you mention First Nations. (I notice you mention “Aboriginal communities,” but First Nations require the appropriate respect that they represent a level of government, not merely individuals within communities.)

The federal government has a constitutional responsibility to respect First Nations sovereignty and protect their interests. It is a nation to nation relationship. To denigrate their opposition to the project by lumping it in with what you describe (twice) as “radical” groups is as unhelpful to those relationships as it is inaccurate.

“Radical” is defined as “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.” (Merriam Webster).

By that definition, it is not First Nations, conservation groups or individual opponents that are radical. They seek to protect the fundamental nature of the wilderness of northern British Columbia, the ecological health of British Columbia coastal eco-systems, and the integrity of impartial environmental review. It is your government that is radical by proposing quite radical alteration of those values.

Your government has failed to present an energy strategy to Canada. We have no energy policy. We are still importing more than half of the oil we use. Further, we have no plan to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, even as we sign on to global statements about the need to keep greenhouse gases from rising above 450 ppm in the atmosphere to keep global average temperatures from exceeding a growth of 2 degrees C. The climate crisis imperils our future – including our economic future – in fundamental ways which your government ignores.

By characterizing this issue as environmental radicals versus Canada’s future prosperity you have done a grave disservice to the development of sensible public policy. There are other ways to diversify Canada’s energy markets. There are other routes, other projects, and most fundamentally other forms of energy.

I urge you to protect your good name and refuse to sign such unworthy and inaccurate missives in the future.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth May, O.C.

Member of Parliament

Saanich-Gulf Islands

Leader

Green Party of Canada

Comment: Once again, in the use of loaded language - "radical", the deilberate misrepresentation of the intentions of environmentalists as threatening jobs, etc - we catch the Harper government stooping to cheap populist demogogy. This is the "politics of fear", a tactic employed in the 20th century by totalitarian governments  at both extremes of the political spectrum (fascist, communist). Such language should be taken as an insult to the public intelligence. It is inevitably a smoke screen used to deflect public attention from the real issues at stake. In reality, green energy will produce the greatest number of stable, permanent jobs: virtually all the economic studies I have encountered conclude that green energies - not centralized, capital intensive fossil energy projects - produce the greatest number of jobs per dollar invested. Green energies are labor intensive, fossil energy is capital (infrastructure, financing) intensive. Populists though are interested in Power, not Truth..

Do YOU have a shadow?

          This one is a little too bizarre to be true but then, with the Harperites, you never know..

           Cindy Blackstock is a small, middle aged, non-radical, non-separatist aboriginal activist working for children's rights and services on reservation (a Federal jurisdiction). For some unknown reason she managed to get herself on someone's surveillance list. When she showed up for a meeting with the feds, she found herself barred from access and even had a security guard assigned to watch over her while her colleagues conferred with the feds. Why? What was her crime?

              The only thing anyone can come up with to date: a complaint with the human rights commission accusing the feds of willfully underfunding child welfare services on First Nations reserves.

http://wmtc.blogspot.com/2011/11/cindy-blackstock-another-victim-of.html

              To get to the bottom of things, Ms Blackstock filed under the freedom of information act. She discovered that she had a thick dossier. As Professor Papillon, an expert on Aboriginal autonomy issues, argues, it is normal that government employees attend meetings relevant to their area of expertise and take notes. Check the audioclip from CBC radio program, The Current, 17 nov, 2011:

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2011/11/17/govt-surveillance-of-native-youth-advocate-cindy-blackstock/index.html

                 What is not normal, though, is that Ms Blackstock alone be singled out. Files released under the freedom of information act contained verbatim notes of Ms Blackstock's presentations at meetings but not those of other activists. Ms Blackstock seems to have grown a tail! Shades of the MacCarthy anti-communist "witch hunts" back in the 1950s and early 1960s in the USA..


                  Another expert, appearing on The Current, Tom Powers, himself a Conservative party strategist, and who worked with aboriginal affairs also found the behavior of the government puzzling. And this on the part of a government who ran on a platform of responsible democracy and transparency! What, oh what, is the world coming to?

                   Just wondering. Have you  done something to find youself with a tail, an extra shadow. Have I got one for posting these blogs..