Genocide – Spiritual and Otherwise
by Laura del Fuego

In the film, ISHI, THE LAST YAHI, by anthropologist Kroeber, Ishi wandered out of the Northern California hills where he had hidden for forty years, all his life, from white men who were hunting Indians like wild game. In 1911 he left the steep craggy cliffs as the last survivor of the Yahi where he, and the dwindling members of his tribe, had lived sequestered in the rough inhospitable terrain of the Sierra Nevada mountains, until all were systematically murdered by white settlers, often paid fifty cents a piece for their and their childrens scalps.

Some sources say that there were more Indians on the California land before the white man came than any other state. At the turn of the 20th century the U.S. government had paid over a million dollars to the settlers for the proof of dead Indians. Now archeologists from our countries' top colleges travel to the land of the last Yahi, ostensibly to better understand the ancient tribe and how they survived this hostile life. I believe these scholars come more to study the land in search of their own lost souls, their lost common spirituality. They come from the wasteland of modern America to recapture the lost essence, the essence of the reverence for life that the so called modern world has murdered off in its quest for power and dominance. But it is gone, completely vanished along with the ancient tribes... Vanished forever from this landscape of power lines, freeways, traffic choked towns lined with fast food chains, car washes, drive up banks, parking lots, smog and the nuclear family unit.

So they send their educated teams, probably spending as much government money as they originally spent to kill off the tribes, hoping to find something...anything to take them back to that place that no longer is.

Master cultists, appeal to the spiritually bankrupt, who have no physical relationship with the earth or sense of identity or community. They think they can buy and sell spirituality. But they are mistaken. It is time to take off the masks. Stop and contemplate that spiritual void. Look back at the past, feel the loss, accept the consequences. To acknowledge that emptyness, that grief is almost too much to bear. But it can be done if one choses to face it for what it is. To not do so is to court disaster. To cut ourselves off from our own vital roots to become that which we have vowed in our liberal hearts to despise.

To the victors belong the spoils. What we have here are the spoils. No, not even the real spoils. Those are on the reservations, in the prisons and madhouses. But the synthetic spoils, manufactured by white middle class Americans, escaping the past. To the modern victors belong the synthetic spoils and their own spiritual cannibalism.
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