The World According To The 3 Cousins

(This was written on 9/10 2002)

Hau Mitakiapi:

Brace yourselves for the deluge. We are hours away from the inundation. Red white and blue waved and worn in every way conceivable. It will be difficult to separate the saber rattling from the sorrowful. Try as we may, we will have a hard time differentiating the political from the poignant. September 11, the day the three cousins collided.

According to the Republicans, zealots who do not like the freedom and goodness of America attacked the United States. According to a reported suicide note written by one of the hijackers, it was the waste and excess of the American way of life at issue. Immediately after the fall of the World Trade Center, President Bush was on television promising a “crusade” against the perpetrators. Afghanistan was summarily attacked and subdued, and the world, by and large fell in step with the U.S. wishlist for a New World Order.

Now here we are one year later, what has really changed in the interim? We have the Patriot Act impinging upon our electronic correspondences with utter impunity. We have rampant jingoism masquerading as some sort of God inspired manifest destiny. We have an attack upon the sovereign State of Iraq looming in the imminent distance, (ironically a mere 60 days before the upcoming elections). The warmongering stance of the United States has been assailed by international voices as diverse as former U.N weapons inspectors to former South African President Nelson Mandela. No American allies other than the reliable aircraft carriers Great Britain and Israel back an Iraqi attack. The Arab League warns of the polarizing effect of a war upon Iraq.

Polarizing. Saber rattling. God inspired. Paternalism being stripped to it’s bare essence. The base ra-ra-pro-wrestling-meets –football- and- God mentality of the Three Cousins at it’s most refined. Demonization and polarization. Op-ed pieces about how down homey and sweet it is for all Americans to be waving God’s own Red White and Blue as one big ol’ goofy family. America, land of the free…as long as you are marching in lock step that is, (God help the voice of dissent, or even worse, reason). We haven’t seen this much righteous Patriotism since the McCarthy era.

Brothers and Sisters do not be fooled by the wiles of the trickster. This entire argument is a family fight between the Three Cousins- Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. All three of them are so off their sacred, ancient path that they fail to recognize or be recognized by Nature herself. They forgot how to be related and mimic the ways of Iya and Iktomi. They bask in their dominance of Nature and revile as less than, those of us who still hold on to our traditional matriarchal ways. They see us all as “Native Americans” rather than People of some 500 diverse Nations. They fail to consider our suffering even though they now have similar pain. We as Lakota People are still in mourning over Wounded Knee, which took far more of our People as a percentage of our population than 100 World Trade Centers could equal to America.

The United States promises us that the People of Iraq want Saddam Hussein overthrown. I am sure that sort of “the People’s Will” logic does not extend to the Lakota Peoples Will, or our Aboriginal Rights and 1868 Treaty Rights. They speak out of both sides of their mouth and still find time to consume natural resources at a disproportionate rate. Truly they are Iya, the great consumer. Grandmother Earth will not continue to allow the Three Cousins to run amuck. Nature has her own ways of ebb and flow. The United States is a mere 4 percent of the World’s two-legged population. She has become the self-appointed policeman of the world, yet cannot and will not clean up her own back yard.

As far as consolidation of rhetoric, influence, and power is concerned, the U.S. warmongers have benefited from the tragic and unnecessary loss of life on September 11, 2001 far more than anyone else has. They have dampened domestic voices of dissent and spread their colonial power to the very doorstep of Islam. Now they are preparing to kick their Cousin’s door in…If Abraham could see them now. Pray for the living, Brothers and Sisters.

Mitakuye Oyasin.

James H. Starkey