by Frank Paynter on October 27, 2007
by Frank Paynter on October 27, 2007
I would have been here tonight to speak to you directly, but I felt that perhaps I could be of better use if I went to Wounded Knee to help forestall in whatever way I can the establishment of a peace which would be dishonorable as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow.
– Marlon Brando, in a speech delivered by Shasheen Littlefeather to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, March 27, 1973.
The US government, in the nineteenth century, displaced an entire population of native people with the promise that the lands they were being given would be theirs for “as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow.” Current events across the nation, from the inferno in San Diego County to the drought in Atlanta, indicate that time is just about up on those treaties. But never-mind, they were broken within a few short years of being written, broken in the name of a “manifest destiny” that the white-man assumed as an ideological framework for expansion and exploitation. “Expansion” and “exploitation” are words with baggage. Ask Dick Cheney what he thinks of exploitation, of the collateral cultural damage to New Guinea as the guts are ripped out of the mountains to extract the gold. Now ask the people whose way of life has been disrupted.
To one group of people, the god fearing Christians of the Bechtel and Bohemian Club bunch, “exploitation” is really just an extension of the stewardship that god commanded in Genesis. To the animists in the mountains of new Guinea exploitation means removal, alienation, and depression at best; or, for those unable to come to terms with global corporate expansion, it means blood, death and destruction.
But now the rivers are drying up, the land is on fire, and the grass no longer grows. What changes might be coming for the people of the owl?
