From: Case (Case@iSpots.com)
Date: Sun Sep 25 2005 - 19:49:29 BST
In two recent threads Platt has responded with the following:
[khaled ]
General Custer, keep marching on.
[Platt]
How many whites did Indians scalp?
[Case]
What is shameful is that we have never learned from our mistakes.
[Platt]
Like what?
[Case]
>> Have you ever heard of the Ghost Dance?
[Platt]
No. Is it a rock group?
I present the following in an unabashedly "liberal' fashion mostly for the
sake of brevity. My personal view of history is that we have no more hope of
understanding the past than we do of predicting the future, but this summary
comports with the facts fairly well. I know this may be seen by some to be
little more than a lame attempt to annoy Platt. But I think it is relevant
to the MoQ in a couple of ways. As I point out at the end of this lengthy
rant, it forms the back drop for the incite that Pirsig says led him to
formulate the relationship between Static and Dynamic Values. It also
illustrated how the static forces of whole cultures where swept away by the
Dynamic values of power and greed.
By the time the English and French starting sending colonists to the Western
Hemisphere the Spanish had gobbled up all the really nice places. For about
150 years the Spanish had been looting Central and South America for
precious metals. They basically enslaved the populations and converted them
to Christianity. The impact of this on Europe was enormous. The dynamic
influx of silver and gold caused inflation on a scale unheard before and
seldom repeated since. At the same time the Spanish introduced the newly
discovered potato into the European diet. This allowed farmers to produce
more calories per acre than had ever been possible before. The result was an
increase in population. The Spanish in typical affluent fashion started
outsourcing production of their ships and other goods. This eventually
boosted the economy in England to the point that they could rival the
Spanish fleets.
When the English began to occupy North America in the early 1600s and for
nearly 150 years after, almost every conceivable strategy for dealing with
the whites was tried by the indigenous tribes. The Cherokees totally bought
into white society, adopting their farming, trading, even housing techniques
and creating a written version of their language. Others especially the
Lakota of North and South Dakota and the Seminoles in Florida were somewhat
successful militarily. The Lakota held the US army at bay during Red Cloud's
War just before the civil war and afterwards at Little Big Horn. The
Seminole War lasted nearly 40 years involved future presidents Andrew
Jackson and Zachery Taylor and finally ended with the Americans declaring
victory and bailing out.
But in the end the result was the same for all the tribes. Our government's
response was based on a rationale rather like what Platt has advocated and
sounds disturbingly like the rhetoric coming from Washington today. It was a
product of mistaken interpretation Darwin's Theory applied to societies and
called Manifest Destiny.
These people were inferior.
They did not know what was good for them.
They were threatening us.
They were standing in the way of progress.
The strategies used by the military were shameful. In Florida and South
Dakota they captured military and political leaders under flags of truce and
imprisoned them. In prison Crazy Horse was shot by quisling guards, Osceola
died of malaria in Platt's neck of the woods: Fort Moultrie, South Carolina.
They conducted forced marches to relocate entire populations. The hardships
of the Cherokee Trail of Tears were not duplicated until the Bataan Death
March of prisoners during World War II.
They made treaties at gun point then abandoned them when they were
inconvenient.
Scalping may or may not have been practiced in the New World before the
European occupation. It reached its full flower when the Americans began
paying bounties to scalp hunters. A scalp was a scalp, age and sex didn't
matter much.
They attempted to slaughter the buffalo herds to starve the hold outs.
By the 1880s Native Americans across the continent were pretty much beaten
down. I think the situation was remarkably similar to what happened in
Palestine in the 1st century when the Roman occupiers finally wiped out the
Jewish people and started the Diaspora. See if this sounds familiar if not
in detail at least in general:
In Nevada there was a Paiute named Wovoka. He had made a living working for
a white rancher and was heavily influenced by the Christian Shaker Movement.
At some point he declared himself to be the Indian Messiah. He worked a few
minor "miracles" like making ice fall from the sky and appear in a river. He
started what became known as the Ghost Dance movement. The movement was
avowedly peaceful but its goals where apocalyptic. Wovoka preached that if
faithful danced the Ghost Dance, they would usher in the Kingdom of God.
The world of the white man would be rolled aside and a new world would take
its place. In this "new Jerusalem" the buffalo would return and the faithful
would be allowed to resume their way of life without the white man. This had
obvious appeal among peoples who had witnessed the distruction of their ways
of life, many in a single generation.
Ghost Dances, from what we know of them, seemed to be a bit like the Sufi
dances where ecstasy and mystical revelation result from exhaustion. After
dancing all night, Ghost Dancers, men and women, would fall into trance
states. When they awoke, they reported that they had talked to dead
relatives and heard prophecy of the coming age. You see this kind of stuff
in Pentecostal detonations today.
Word of Wovoka and the Ghost Dance movement spread to most of the Indian
reservations on the continent. Many tribes sent delegates to meet Wovoka and
learn about the dance. In Lakota territory, Sitting Bull, by then an old
man, was skeptical of the whole deal. But in the spring of 1990 the Lakota
tribes sent a delegation of three or four by train to met Wovoka. About the
time the Lakota delegation arrived, a new concept was being entertained by
the movement. Wovoka, in an effort to built support, had decorated muslin
shirts with the signs of the sun, moon and stars and ordered a follower to
fire at him with a shotgun. After the shot rang out he clasped his chest and
let a handful of shot drop from his hand. He proclaimed that if the Ghost
Dancers had enough faith they would become invulnerable. It is unlikely that
he perceived the consequences of this stunt.
When the Lakota delegation returned they began attracting followers to the
movement immediately. The Indian agent at the time was particularly
incompetent. The Lakota had given him the Indian name "Man Afraid of His
Indians." Even nearby Nebraskan newspapers commented on his bumbeling. He
ordered a stop to the religious expression of the people in their own land.
This of course did little good. Over a period of months, incited by the
agent's insecurity and a rabble rousing eastern press, tensions mounted.
Because of the introduction of railroads and telegraph, the army was able to
mobilize and deploy a military force in fairly short order.
In the winter of 1890 a band of Indians led by an older chief named Big Foot
had been holding Ghost Dance services and was moving from their camp to join
up with another band of Lakota at Pine Ridge Reservation. It was in the dead
of winter and food supplies were low. Many including Big Foot were sick. On
Dec. 28 the band of about 350 Indians was met by a troop of the 7th Calvary
numbering about 500. In the morning the soldiers ordered the band to put all
of their weapons in a pile in the center of camp. Since they were not
heavily armed to begin with and what arms they had were needed for hunting
and feeding themselves there was resistance. Who did what to start the
shooting is unclear but when it ended 350 Indians were killed. Two thirds of
them were women and children. The soldiers had 25 dead and 39 wounded mostly
because they had encircled the Indians and were shooting into the circle
with small arms and cannons. In the end the army charged the commander with
the murder of innocents but found him not guilty. In addition they awarded
18 Congressional Medals of Honor to members of the 7th Calvary. With the
exception of sporadic fighting in the swamps of Florida and the deserts of
Apache territory, this was the end of Indian resistance in the United
States.
In the early 1900s anthropologists had begun record and interpret the
beliefs of tribes all over the country. Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture
published in 1934 was part of that effort. She was attempting to show that
entire cultures exhibited certain "personality types." She used examples
from North America and New Guinea. It was pretty much Freudian psycho-babble
but in the chapter mentioned by Pirsig she was talking about how individuals
with personalities different from the dominant type in their culture adapted
to the pressure of living in their society. She gives three examples but
Pirsig seized on only one of them to gain his incite into Static and Dynamic
forces. He quotes almost everything relevant to the story directly from
Benedict. It is the tale of the Zuni Brujo. Clearly something is missing
from the tale. The brujo as described appears to be a quisling. He is
friendly with the whites and sets them on the tribe to save his own skin and
prosecute his persecutors. The leaders of the tribe end up in jail with
their power broken. Unfortunately Benedict source for this material is long
out of print and unavailable, at least to me. If anyone has access to:
Publications of the American Ethnological Society, XV:44-52. New York, 1933
by Ruth Bunzel. I would love to get my hands on it.
Here is what Benedict says about another of her case studies in the chapter
Pirsig cites:
"Altogether he was an ideal interpreter of Crow life. These traits, however,
were not those which were the password of honour among the Crow. He had a
definite shrinking from physical danger and bravado was the tribal virtue.
To make matters worse he had attempted to gain recognition by claiming a war
honour which was fraudulent. He was proved not to have brought in, as he
claimed, a picketed horse from the enemy's camp. To lay false claims to war
honours was a paramount sin among the Crow and by general opinion,
constantly reiterated, he was regarded as irresponsible and incompetent."
I laughed out loud when I read this. It sounded like she was describing
Angel Martin from the TV show "The Rockford Files." It sure gives some
incite into how history gets written by the winners.
The point of this is that the story which became Pirsig's koan for
unraveling the interplay on Static and Dynamic forces is rooted in a sad
chapter of human history. The forces he identifies as being Static are in
fact an entire way of life that was on the brink of extinction. The Dynamic
force was the power of empire, sword and cannon. Whether the brujo helped
shelter his people against the winds of change or sold them out is unknown.
But the story should make it abundantly clear the Dynamic Quality is not
always a happy mystical walk in the playground.
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