Dak'i ñ'ago äho'ähe'dal, Gâ'dal-gâ'ga äho'ähe'dal, Do'm-gâ'ga äho'ähe'dal.
The spirit host is advancing, they say. They are coming with the buffalo, they say. They are coming with the (new) earth, they say.
-Kiowa Ghost Dance Chant, as translated by James Money 1894
The Ghost Dance of 1890 wailed eastward across the prairie like a forlorn wind. It sang to a false hope that has probably reverberated deeply, if privately, through every impoverished Native American born since. 128 years later their living and their dead are all still out their. They are forever unredeemed by Manifest Destiny’s crowned Goddess: Liberty. They are down on the hot wide Gila and up in the cold bleak abandonments of Pine Ridge. They are east in Maine where on July 6th 1776 the Ulustuk became not only the first foreign entity but the first entity of any kind to both recognize and make treaty with the United States of America. They are northwest in Alaska where The Taak'w Aan alone, among dozens of tribal villages, chose to shun oil money and thus retained their tribal homeland. There are many stories and many borders in Native America.
The children of The Ghost Dance live in a lot of hard places that politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, will drive past once or twice and claim forever to have regularly visited. If we are upset about how our nation briefly treated a few immigrant children we should be up in arms about our discounted treatment of thousands upon thousands of Native American children over the years. But the savage truth is we don’t want to face any of that. The deep water mistake with Warren’s failed attempt at an “ich bin ein Berliner” moment is not that very few swing voters can see the desolation of Native American life. The mistake is that they don’t want to. She just gave Donald Trump the power to protect them from having to look.
Elizabeth Warren just threw Donald Trump’s crayons into the Melting Pot. It did no good for Dante’s lost souls boiling away in the bottom. Uniformly, our tribal lands are home to a National Sin of abused, neglected, disenfranchised, cold and hungry survivors. They are an unusually young population (a 600% above average tuberculosis fatality rate doesn’t help). Sure, the native sense of humor is unequalled to those who learn to see it and their astonishing capacity for optimism might be the last antidote to America’s pedantic rage. But they are not “way out there in the blue” as the man once said. They are out there in a brown blowing wasteland where the bones of every failed promise from moral democracy lie bleached and unburied. Our reservation system is (and by design) a vast gulag of economically unvested and essentially stateless non-citizens. They are an unmentionable one percent. When Elizabeth Warren pretends that they are part of us as a political nation she only highlights the reality that we are none of them as a suffering few.
Now the future of everything your dad once called “The “Free World” rides on a different one percent: The swinging center of moderate and youth votes. A lot of them pray daily that a nationally cogent, sophisticated and non extremist Democratic Party will emerge to slow the GOP. Those hopes remain dead until the losing strategies and bland vanities of the people Trump defeated are put out to pasture. The people who lost the last war should not be given control of the new one.
Warren’s campaign just embraced the campaign attitudes that got us to a place no one wants to be. One wonders if her speech writers will follow this childish “Ich bin ein Sitting Bull” stuntism with an “I have a dream - of one day having many black friends” speech. Swing voters and young people clearly remain unconvinced. The Senator released this DNA madness for a lot of reasons. Some of them seemed smart but all of them were personal and all of them made the enemy stronger. The world needs a warrior spirit to breakstop Trumpism. Elizabeth Warren just channelled up the magic of Sarah Palin.
There are many stories about Native American history but most Americans only want to see the ones with Kevin Costner or perhaps Clint Eastwood in them. And by “most Americans” we just mean moderate and young swing voters who will actually matter anytime soon. No one anywhere wants to hear the one where Nancy Reagan and Peggy Goldwater helped found Planned Parenthood in Arizona specifically to provide birth control and abortion services for the hundreds of forcefully relocated and sexually abused young girls being housed by the Federal government at the business end of Indian School Road in Phoenix. Nonetheless, if we ever want to regain adulthood as a nation both sides might need to hear a few more honest stories like that and few less PR puff pieces like Elizabeth Warren’s.
Warren’s DNA misfire exposed the lifeless heart of a strategically defeated Democratic party. The un-inspirational and strategically incompetent rearguard “leadership” of the post Obama Left just reminded a few million moderates why they (still) aren’t going to vote for a Democrat in two years. The Democratic party needs to stop finding the DNA of dead ghosts and start finding the DNA of living warriors.
The closest America ever came to a Native American unification was probably the Ghost Dance. But that old song never stopped a single bullet. It was a last desperate run to save their faith, their identity and perhaps some of their homelands. It was also a form of surrender - and they all understood that. Personally (as one of those oft-maligned swing voters in a very, very purple state) I am more likely to give the dying center’s last arrow to a battle cry than a surrender prayer.
How about saying this in a speech: If Native Americans had a unified voice today they would hold a near monopoly over America’s Uranium, Coal and Domestic Oil production. They would make more money from gambling than the entire Las Vegas Strip. They would own most of the fresh water Salmon fisheries in North America. They would control most of the Missouri River watershed and every drop in the Colorado system. Five million Americans on 49,900 square miles. Another Iowa by scale if they had their own primary.
Alas, The Peoples of the Rez remain, much like the Democratic Party, divided and conquered by the armies of absolute history. When Elizabeth Warren wants to stop saying “me me me” and actually do something for native Americans, give Lake Powell back to the Dine’ for example, or take some corn ethanol subsidies from Iowa and use them to help starving Native Americans grow food, then give me a call. You’ll have to leave a message though, the service out here is terrible.
Until then, y’a ta hey mutherfuckers.
And
Ride for the High Country