A Cultural Beacon of Light in Murky Times...

[Doug DeWitt]

The day I came into the fold, "into the light" as it were, I was asked by AyAnna-Admin to comment further on the United Nations of America as my "home" here on earth... Ana Sophia's reception of the phrase "sovereign integrals" spoke to me this morning, bringing to mind the very core of my attraction to, and thereby my association with, the indigenous peoples of the Americas.  With your indulgence, I felt the connection between those comments and this Group, a strong sense of Home, here in and of itself...

As the United States government moves inexorably down a path of military oligarchy in this new millenium, the cries of its citizenry futile in its pleadings for the continuation of the democratic experiment, barely heard in a political arena now overwhelmingly dominated by corporate funding in the wake of the Citizens United decision, there is but one beacon of light in the abyss...

By some quirk of Divine Intervention in a time when indigenous peoples the world over were on the brink of extinction, the US government established a set of rules for the governance of "Indian tribes" that placed them generally outside the jurisdiction of the US government.  And while the first 200 years of this relationship nearly devastated the last surviving remnants of America's native societies, its peoples decimated by "white man's" diseases, forced to give up their religion, their dress, their language in pursuit of the government's agenda to fully assimilate the natives into "white society" and Christianity "for their own good", know that this agenda failed... For those nations are even now awakening to their unique position, still in the main just beyond the reach of the US government. 

Where once it was dangerous for indigenous peoples to speak openly of resuming their ancestral life, today younger native Americans are openly relearning the language of their grandmothers, embracing the religious beliefs of their medicine clans, wearing the traditional dress that puts them in touch with their roots.

More nations in each succeeding generation are developing their own resources, and exercising independence from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Secretary of the Interior, rejecting the condescending charity of a society that in so many ways is inferior to the Native Life Way.  The Southern Ute, and other nations who perhaps would prefer not to be mentioned here in hopes of remaining under the radar, enjoy per capita income levels well in excess of the average US citizen, their "reservations" cared for as one might expect to see an upscale European country. As those Nations grow in wealth, as they assist neighboring Nations in cutting economic ties with the Whites, in growing in financial independence, common bonds and a spirit of cooperation is replacing the acrimony and jealousy among the tribes promoted by the white government to keep them easily controlled.

A vision of an economically powerful United Nations of America is not so far a stretch as one witnesses the progress down this path. Economic independence will one day very soon deliver political independence, and a quality of life to be the envy of the political sewer that surrounds it. As the Nations' clans reclaim their way of life, hunting and gathering, as one with the Great Mother, with Gaia... raising their children as their grandmothers' grandmothers did, before a white political agenda told them how they were "supposed to" raise them, in the instinctively communal way imprinted in their genetic code by Gaia herself, as she does for every animal and plant... humanity will have at last rejected the exploitative political agenda begun by the invention of agriculture.

For mankind commits the gravest of sins when it alters natural land use for its own economic benefit, forever abridging the rights of other species to equal use of Gaia's earth...

As the United Nations of America grows and is able to protect those indigenous rights recognized by the United Nations of the World (Resolution 61/295. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), American native cultures represent humanity's best and perhaps only hope to remember, to regain, and to re-live the way in which we were all meant to live... as one with Gaia.