The Wisdom of the Native Americans: Including The Soul of an Indian and Other Writings of Ohiyesa and the Great Speeches of Red Jacket, Chief Joseph, and Chief Seattle

INTRODUCTION

In 1492 Columbus and his crew, lost, battered, and stricken with dysentery, were helped ashore by a people he described as neither black nor white . . . fairly tall, good looking and well proportioned. Believing he had landed in the East Indies, he called these people Indians. In fact, they were part of a great population that had made its home on this continent for centuries.

The inhabitants of this land were not one people. Their customs differed. Their languages differed. Some tilled the earth; others hunted and picked the abundance of the land around them. They lived in different kinds of housing and governed themselves according to differing rules.

But they shared in common a belief that the earth is a spiritual presence that must be honored, not mastered. Unfortunately, western Europeans who came to these shores had a contrary belief. To them, the entire American continent was a beautiful but savage land that it was not only their right but their duty to tame and use as they saw fit.

As we enter the twenty-first century, Western civilization is confronting the inevitable results of this European-American philosophy of dominance. We have gotten out of balance with our earth, and the very future of our planet depends on our capacity to restore the balance.

We are crying out for help, for a grounding in the truth of nature, for words of wisdom. That wisdom is here, contained in the words of the native peoples of the Americas. But these people speak quietly. Their words are simple and their voices soft. We have not heard them because we have not taken the time to listen. Perhaps now the time is right for us to open our ears and hearts to the words they have to say.

Unlike many traditions, the spiritual wisdom of the Native Americans is not found in a set of scriptural materials. It is, and always has been, a part of the fabric of daily life and experience. One of the most poignant reflections of this spiritual message is found in their tradition of oratory.

Traditionally, Indians did not carry on dialogues when discussing important matters. Rather, each person listened attentively until his or her turn came to speak, and then he or she rose and spoke without interruption about the heart of the matter under consideration. This tradition produced a measured eloquence of speech and thought that is almost unmatched for its clarity and simplicity.

Indian reasoning about governmental and social affairs was also carried on with the same uncompromising purity of insight and expression.

It is from these orations, recorded observations of life and social affairs, and other first-person testimonies that the materials for this book have been drawn. The wisdom has been available for some time, but much of it has been recorded only in imposing governmental documents and arcane academic treatises.

The Wisdom of the Native Americans gathers three of New World Library’s volumes of Indian oration into one collection. In addition to the short, distilled passages of Native American Wisdom, a smaller volume I compiled with Louise Mengelkoch, this book includes the thoughts of one of the most fascinating and overlooked individuals in American history: Ohiyesa, also known by the Anglicized name of Charles Alexander Eastman.

Ohiyesa was, at heart, a poet of the spirit and the bearer of spiritual wisdom. To the extent that he dared, and with increasing fervor as he aged, he was a preacher for the native vision of life. It is my considered belief it is his spiritual vision, above all else, that we of our generation need to hear. We hunger for the words and insights of the Native American, and no man spoke with more clarity than Ohiyesa.

Ohiyesa was born in southern Minnesota in the area now called Redwood Falls in the winter of 1858. He was a member of the Dakota, or Sioux, nation. When he was four, his people rose up in desperation against the U.S. Government, which was systematically starving them by withholding provisions and payment they were owed from the sale of their land.

When their uprising was crushed, more that a thousand men, women, and children were captured and taken away. On the day after Christmas in 1862, thirty-eight of the men were hanged at Mankato, Minnesota, in the greatest mass execution ever performed by the U.S. Government. Those who were not killed were taken to stockades and holding camps, where they faced starvation and death during the icy days of the northern winter.

Ohiyesa’s father, Many Lightnings, was among those captured.

Ohiyesa, who was among those left behind, was handed over to his uncle to be raised in the traditional Sioux manner. He was taught the ways of the forest and lessons of his people. He strove to become a hunter and a warrior. Then, one day while he was hunting, he saw an Indian walking toward him in white man’s clothes. It was his father, who had survived the internment camps and had returned to claim his son.

During his incarceration, Many Lightnings had seen the power of the European culture and had become convinced that the Indian way of life could not survive within it. He despised what he called reservation Indians who gave up their independence and tradition in order to accept a handout from the European conquerors.

He took Ohiyesa to a small plot of farming land in eastern South Dakota and began teaching him to be a new type of warrior. He sent him off to white schools with the admonition that it is the same as if I sent you on your first warpath. I shall expect you to conquer.

Thus was born Charles Alexander Eastman, the Santee Sioux child of the woodlands and prairies who would go on to become the adviser to presidents and an honored member of New England society.

Ohiyesa, or Eastman, went to Beloit College where he learned English and immersed himself in the culture and ways of the white world. Upon graduation he went east. He attended Dartmouth College, then was accepted into medical school at Boston University, which he completed in 1890. He returned to his native Midwest to work among his own people as a physician on the Pine Ridge reservation, but became disenchanted with the corruption of the U.S. government and its Indian agents. After a short-lived effort to establish a private medical practice in St. Paul, Minnesota, he turned his focus back to the issue of Indian-white relations.

For the next twenty-five years, he was involved in various efforts to build bridges of understanding between the Indians and non-Indian people of America. He worked first for the YMCA, then served as an attorney for his people in Washington, then returned to South Dakota to spend three years as physician for the Sioux at Crow Creek.

In 1903 he went back to Massachusetts and devoted himself to bringing the voice of the Indian into the American intellectual arena. He became deeply involved in the Boy Scout program, believing it was the best way to give non-Indian American youth a sense of the wonder and values that he had learned growing up in the wild.

Eventually, with the help of his wife, he established a camp of his own in New Hampshire in which he tried to recreate the experience of Sioux education and values for non-Indian children.

But financial troubles and the fundamentally irreconcilable differences between Indian culture and white civilization ultimately took their toll. In 1918 he and his white wife separated, and in 1921 he left New England for good. He continued to believe that the way of civilization was the way of the future, but he had lost much of his faith in its capacity to speak to the higher moral and spiritual vision of humanity. He returned again to his native forests of the Midwest, devoting more time to his traditional ways, often going into the woods alone for months at a time.

But he never ceased believing that the two cultures that had clashed so tragically on the soil of the American continent somehow had to become one if there ever was to be a true America with an honest and indigenous soul. Even though he had come to believe that white civilization was, at heart, a system of life based on trade, he still felt that it was the task of the best people, both Indian and non-Indian, to help America find a shared vision. As he said at the end of his autobiography, From Deep Woods to Civilization, I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. I am for development and progress along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce, nationalism, or efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American.

As an observer of Indian life, Ohiyesa was unlike any other. He was at once completely secure in his Indian identity, yet gave himself over completely to the search for meaning within the context of a European America. He tried with his whole heart and spirit to believe in the wisdom of each of the ways he had learned. If there was struggle, it was because the two ways coexisted so uneasily within one person.

Though he lamented the passing of the Indian ways, he accepted it as the workings of the Great Mystery, and set himself to the dual task of bringing the ways of the whites to the Indians and the ways of the Indians to the whites. He never lost his grounding in his traditional ways, even while exploring the intricacies of the Christ Ideal and dining with presidents. He was ever the observer, journeying ever deeper into the ways of white culture, trying, as his grandmother had always instructed him, to follow a new trail to the point of knowing.

The writings he has left are the documents of that journey, crafted by a man with a warrior’s heart, an orator’s tongue, and human spirit of such dignity that it transcends boundaries of race and belief.

Like much of the material here, the third part of this volume — the great speeches of Chiefs Red Jacket, Joseph, and Seattle — is best approached with an understanding of the Indian oral tradition these speeches represent.

Most of us are trained to read with our minds. We pass over words, compressing them into ideas, and we use these ideas as the measure of our understanding. But there is another way to read, where the words themselves take on a life of their own, and the rhythms and cadences open a floodgate of images and sympathies, until we feel the heartbeat of their author and sense the lifeblood of experience that they contain.

It is a way of reading that is more akin to listening to music, where the sheer power of the sound can move the hearer to tears.

This is the way we should read these great speeches. Like the insistent beat of ceremonial drums, their words weave a hypnotic spell, and the passion of their vision enters into the hearts as well as the minds of their listeners.

These speeches are the songs of the spirit of great men who spoke for a great people. In their words, between their words, beneath and above their words, is the love, the faith, the anger, and the pathos of a people who believed in the ways of their ancestors and could not make these ways understood to the European settlers who were so intent upon changing them.

Today the battle is over. This continent is, at least on the surface, a distant mirror of the European continent, controlled in its shape and direction by the descendants of the Europeans who were once raw immigrants on its shores.

But the spirit of the Native people, the first people, has never died. It lives in the rocks and the forests, the rivers and the mountains. It murmurs in the brooks and whispers in the trees.

The hearts of these people were formed of the earth that we now walk, and their voice can never be silenced. The three speeches gathered here give us a chance to hear that voice again.

The selection of these particular speeches was made with care and love. I could have chosen more; I could have chosen otherwise. But these three, each imbued with its own individual genius, work together in a way