The Sun News - Editor, Leland Lehrman

“…since the French Revolution, what goes as art, and literature and science is only an artificial, youthful- looking, blooming skin stretched tight over a crumbling skeleton.” - Erwin Chargaff 1978. His work led to the discovery of DNA.

It is a rare moment when one receives a letter from a native elder speaking on behalf of her people, her land, and the earth at large. In April 1999 I got Roberta Blackgoat’s exhortation to the larger world to understand that the government has been trying to evict her and her people for decades for the coal and uranium under the earth. That she has been able to resist for so long is a mark of her extraordinary spirit, one which speaks for an exhausted Earth. Her’s is a voice that speaks for the real church of the world which is the land on which we live. Hers is a battle we will all have to partake in to reclaim the consonance and coherence of what is left of the planet.

“...we are being told to move off the land. This is our altar that we can’t give up. We can’t sell it, we can’t buy it, we just have to take care of it...the government…what they want this land for is what Mother Earth is living on. She is supposed to have a liver, lungs and a heart, and all these things are what we are sitting on. Just like our bodies, the Mother Earth has internal organs…these are the precious and valuable minerals that she needs…even ourselves is made out of the Mother Earth. And now the greed is always working against our Mother Earth, and Mother Earth is suffering."

Roberta’s work was captured in the moving documentary BROKEN RAINBOW over twenty years ago. Now that she has passed on, her legacy must stand as that vision which sees the first peoples worldwide as true custodians, they who must be allowed to live on the land. The earth is suffering, the tornadoes and storms and coming earthquakes are the warning signs of a planet’s convulsing breath. “The great loss on the mountains…the wildlife people, the people that fly, are all losing their homes…. And even the water…the people that live in the water are struggling with the pollution, and the sickness in the spirit of the water.” Now that she has joined the Holy Ones, the dominant society will not have to face her singular stalwart pride, her poetic primal sense of the environment, her candid, at times flaring use of language beside which all the parlance of modern eco-philosophy is just a pale drawn out whimper. Hers was the voice of a matriarch who understood that the Creator has told us that we MUST LOOK after the land. Her vehement spirit was the kind that wanted politicians to know that if they want the Dine, who are still battling the forces that be against uranium mining, to move off our sacred land they should SUE THE CREATOR.

During our second visit to her land, people from all over the world including many Japanese, marched in solidarity with the Dine whose uranium had been used to make the Hiroshima bomb. Hundreds walked from the sacred San Francisco peaks all the way to Roberta’s home. Observation-spy planes watched from high above lest the concerned prayers and rants of an aging Dine grandmother prove too subversive. The jet noise of jets that regularly terrorized the Dine are the antithesis of the song cycles and myths with which the native peoples honor the land and Creation. In merely flying our vaunted planes, who of us can say how much the air that transmits power and spirit has not been disturbed? One day when we can no longer fly or are not allowed to due to climate change, who will remember the warnings of the elders who have been telling us not to disturb the Holy Ones, the ancestors in the wind? Who are the truly primitive ones? Who are the truly human ones? Roberta would sometimes wear her dark glasses outside, like a movie star, like an activist elder who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. Hers will be an impossible legacy to follow. The ground may slowly heal itself after the long march of the ignorance of the dominant society fades. Hers may be one of the last voices one hears as one awaits the snows in winter, the blanket of white that covers the enormous gashes the industrial society has inflicted on some of the most exquisite land in North America. Her voice may be among the sounds the rains produce in the spring to raise the crops to life. Hers was the pulse of a conscience larger than the interregnum we call America.

To have visited Roberta is to have reckoned with a single minded vision who had the strength and bravura to battle the ignominy and shameful racism of US policy toward its native people and land. Her helper and sheepherder friend Jake, a Welsh computer expert moved off the grid to live with her without electricity or running water for five years. Jake also managed to live and thrive without keys, money or a clock! He simply made due with corn and goat meat, living on what is left of the “American” frontier. Whenever he could, his statements -Views from the Hogan- were sent the outside world:

Why do you need to count the livestock when you already know exactly how many animals the people have. Your “ monitors” have been observing, counting, and photographing the people’s flocks for years now. Could the reason be to harass and intimidate these elderly, traditional people?

What is the cost of this massive paramilitary operation to the taxpayer? Last century, when the US government ordered the extermination of the Buffalo, they did not hide behind the excuse of “ Range Management”, they simply told the truth, that it was to “starve the Indians into submission.”

To the people on Hopi- Dine land and to their many visitors, you are appearing to behave like terrorist thugs. Hopefully they are mistaken.

In Roberta’s house, that last afternoon as she was speaking on the radio to the world, we sat by a concerned young woman called Julia Butterfly Hill who had just come down from the Redwood Luna, one of the tallest trees in the world, after spending two years protesting the arborcide of the pacific northwest forest. Afterwards, I asked Roberta if she would be willing to share any special dream. Without holding back, in her wonderful urgent voice, she said she had had a dream not long ago in which she saw her hair as the forests of the world and the forests were all burning! The trees were on fire. The hundreds of thousands of pinons that were razed on Shoshone land to push its first peoples off. The Redwoods that were cleared to build San Francisco. Parts of the Amazon, the Congo and Indonesia leveled and burning so the West and now China can consume hamburgers.

Today, the technological society, and the US seek to build new bombs. Why?

There is no defense against Creation’s scourges and climate change except to honor and live by Nature and Nature’s God. It is stated there in the second line of the Declaration of Independence. It is the only way to be truly free. And this country the technological society has neglected its principles since its inception. Maybe the scourges that afflict us could be reversed if the seduction of money and “gadget gods” were not numbingly transfixing an entire species. Today the total pool of the world’s energy needs to be realigned. If not, one day the technological society could fold under the auspices of a much larger power. Roberta’s prayers will have been answered. The defense of America that is prevalent in politics today, could have been realized in adopting some of the immense beauty the Dine walk in , in at least respecting their remarkable songs and creation myths. We who have no true songs, who have no sacred myths to live by, who have no initiations and vision quests are rogue misfits on a sentient orb. We live in a grand delusional fabrication of abstractions and ideologies. But these too shall eventually pass, for they do not serve Creation. If the last elders should completely disappear, and their lessons remain unheeded, the dominant society will shed tears larger than the bomb that first ignited over the sands of the Trinity site over sixty years ago.

One Dine elder told me that it is a privilege to be able to live the uniqueness of this time, to be able to say we lived in the era of purification. Another has said that the stargazers mention a date- 2025- by which the destruction of the planet must stop AND be reversed. If only the five fingered ones upon this earth could understand that the timeline for life may be ebbing in our lifetime. The estimated cost of combating global warming may be only a fifth of the worldwide trillion dollar military budget!! What we have known as organic evolution stands at the crossroads of immense new possibilities and terminus. Let the last words be from Jake, a member of the dominant society who was able to live in consort with the Dine vision of life and who, once seduced by the cybernetic stare, finally saw through the veil of illusion that fosters industrial society:

I try to understand the motives and make up of the people who organize and carry out this harassment. Do they feel as Eichmann did when at his Nuremberg trial he said,” Who was I to judge?” Who was I to have my own thoughts in this matter?” Do they separate themselves from their actions? Or do they actually enjoy their work? Are they driven by hate?

I think this is the crux of the drive for the continued destruction of these people and all the remaining traditional people. Warmaker teaches us that Homo Economicus is the high point of human evolution. We are taught that “getting ahead” is our national aim, no matter that it is at the expense of others and the planet. We are taught that competition and greed, and fear are our national condition and possessions can give us the feelings of satisfaction, peace and happiness and love that we crave. We are taught that “ this is the way life is”. So long as people and cultures exist who get along fine without these things, there is the possibility of doubting the “ truth” of the dominant societies hegemonistic ideology.