The Indians lived with the land.

Honored it.

Did Europe lack this profound respect
for its land?

Was the corruption of monarchy
so corrupt, so abusive, that
the free-thinkers and free-believers
had to cross an ocean to be free?

Perhaps.

***

Then the hosts, the Native Americans,
they pitied their guests, helped them through
a winter or two.

The natives thought rightly that it
was their duty under God to help
fellow humans get through their hard
times.

But surely they would not stay there
long. And surely, there would not be
many more, would there?

For how many white men and women
could possibly stand uprooting, and leaving
their birth countries to settle in “America?”

How many could stomach abandoning the graves
of their fathers and mothers?

***

So thought the Indian at first, most of them
anyway. And most of them had it wrong.

***

A cold edge came. The rifle. The warlord. Fear
and racism. Lies that come with any
bedeviled people.

Sickness, disease. Alcoholism, greed.

“You cannot change the world.
It cannot be done,” said Lao Tzu in
600 BC, and he was probably right.

But it is ours to try. Just to try.

***

And we try by standing up for Truth.
Writing about it. Seeking it. Expressing
it.

Truth in this case was the sad lie
told again and again by the sick, Godless
and greedy white man—

set up I suspect by Satan himself, to lie and
cheat the Indians out of God’s land.

The native peoples were its great and
honorable caretaker.

Not a perfect people, but imperfect only
in the way that a buffalo has a scar,
or a bear cub stumbles on the way down
to the river.

The Indian was one with the land, one
with nature.

Admired the rocks, the cold running water
and the animals that inhabited their glorious
home.

They were and are human, like us, one doesn’t
have to reach to great unknowns to imagine
the life of the Indian.

It was natural. Naked. True.

***

So, who wins? The group that admires
the rock? Or the group who knows how
to grind the rock down, make gravel and cement,
make square blocks of building blocks,
roads and walkways to separate man from
other animals?

Man from dirt. Man from Nature…

We’re the same species, the Indian and the
white man—different in that the Indian
loved and gloried nature, fit itself to honor
it and live gratefully within it.

While the white man for some reason had
always a mind to cover it up, to be the
head “creators” on board, to exert power and
control on it—

then marvel at our achievements over God’s.

***

Then laugh with me at the notion of a Catholic
missionary trying to give the Indians a lesson
in spirituality!!!!

It was and is always the Native American, not
the missionary, with the more true
and honest conception of God, of true
living and humility.

Dress, pomp, and ceremony in fancy robes?

Haha!!