by Gene Denardo

Created on: June 28, 2009   Last Updated: July 02, 2009

Prisoners are always impoverished. While most Native Americans do not reside behind bars, they are living in a imposed state that imprisons all their archetypal beliefs. They are a people without a homeland.

The present can never be analysed without the perspective of history. What a people are for millenniums does not change in a couple of centuries. You cannot drop a nation onto foreign soil and expect to keep its culture and tradition intact. And, you cannot impose and force a new and strange world on those whose roots reach deep into the old and expect to see the new reflected in their spirit.

Native Americans are Anarchists. This is not the commonly accepted term used interchangeably for the word, chaos. This is the political term that defines societies and cultures that exist without "government". They exist without the "monopolized force" of a governing body. Native Americans were and are Anarchists. It is their nature.

Without government, they existed in harmony. This is not to say they didn't war and fight, that needless lives were not lost over disputes. It means that they went about their lives and provided for themselves for thousands and thousand of years. They survived without the force of the outside, that of government, to dominate their lives. It was the Natives who were the individualistic pioneers, it was the European settlers who were ushering in the omnipotent presence of the outside, governing force.

They had chiefs and shamans, they had warriors and hunters, they possessed hierarchal frameworks. One earned one's position, but they did not subscribe to a "political" system. They had no need for constitutions or laws. What they had was inside. There was no need for doctrine or indoctrination, proclamation or legislation. They accepted and lived by what was.

All were free to go. There were no chains of society to contain an individual. It was one's choice to stay with the tribe. The white haired conventions touting the "newfound" freedoms and liberties were unnecessary in their lives. Freedom was not something to talk about or enforce, freedom was the natural state of the native.

They did not own the land, they were the land. They did not "work" the land and carve "products" out of the land, they were the product of the land. They lived and hunted and roamed, where they were and where they needed and wanted to be. There was nothing to fence out or fence in, land was not something to be contained. Land had been given to them by the

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>