Since writing this piece I have read more than 20 additional books on the subject. I would like to add, that on no other continent conquered by Anglo-Europeans has such reverence for native place names [particularly of rivers] been equaled. The warriors that died fighting many of the longest rearguard actions in military history, and the holy men that advised them, literally still haunt this land, from the names of the rivers we canoe on, to the name for that ingenious little boat, to the tactics of our modern special warfare soldiers, and most of all in the person of the rural deer hunter so much despised by our current political establishment. There seemed to have been a sense all along, that there was something to be learned from the American Indian, even as an enemy.

“The greatest object of their lives seems to be to acquire possessions—to be rich. They desire to possess the whole world…their Great Chief compels every man to pay him for the land he lives upon and all his personal goods—even those he needs for his own existence—every year. I am sure we could not live under such a law.”

-Ohiyesa’s uncle

“I will ask him to help me understand his ways, then I will prepare the way for my children. Maybe they will outrun the white man in his own shoes.”

-Many Horses

We have recently discussed the Mayan prophecy of our worldwide doom on this site. I have given a few weeks time before emerging from my ancient astronaut version of a white-supremacist bunker to declare the danger past; even illusory. There are others waiting in the wings of our dread too; the Hopis in the Southwest have an end-time prediction I am told, and one must remember that not all ancient astronauts are as benign as I am.

That is because they are not from Regal, my superior system, but from Sirius—those people are worse than the Alpha Centurions and should be—but I digress. Back to your more pressing terrestrial squabbles…

Recently a reader asked me if I believed in prophecies and predictions and if I thought there had been any sustainable predictions made by Native Americans. What follows is my answer, which necessitates some setup.

My working theory is as follows: that, after hundreds of years of direct and indirect contact with European invaders, Native American visionaries and war-leaders decided A. that the white menace could not be resisted and that their way of life was doomed; and B. that the white way of life was tantamount to a spiritual death sentence upon all of humanity, and it was therefore desirable to perish defiantly instead of join the white man in his evil pursuits.

There were many variations on this, and many Native Americans who physically survived did so at the cost of their values. While the war-chiefs perished the last visionaries did make an attempt to project into the white man’s future a vision of what they saw as the truth; a world of spirit rather than a world of things. I suspect, as these folks did not generally expect their blood lines to survive, that these messages were given to the whites that recorded their words in hopes that some white man in the distant future might come to his senses and see the world as it had, or might have, been.

For further reading see Cleanse the Land and Someone Has Got Our Horses on this site.

“How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong look like right.”

-Black Hawk

I have two friends with some Native American blood who will refuse to read this—because I don’t, as a white have the right to comment on the subject of Native Americans.

Likewise, those that know me understand my penchant for the underdog and can expect me to be biased in the favor of the losers in any conflict. As far as my own ancestry I was told by my French Canadian grandmother that she had one uncle killed by Indians around the great lakes and that her father, Elzear, had an Indian friend by the name of ‘Mister Short-step.’ It seems to be a hereditary bias wash there.

I will attempt to be unbiased. However, since I largely reject the mores of our current society, my claim to unbiased coverage should be held as suspect, and the following my opinion, except where I can offer checkable arguments, like in the military section below. I must admit though, that I watched a lot of westerns as a kid in which I cheered on the Indian-killing heroes. If my Cherokee friend got this far he’s probably clicking off the site as you read this line.

“In war they have leaders and war-chiefs of different grades. The common warriors are driven forward like a herd of antelope to face the foe. It is because of this manner of fighting—from compulsion and not from personal bravery—that we count no coup [take no credit] on [for killing] them. A lone warrior can do much harm to a large army of them—especially when they are in unfamiliar territory.”

-Ohiyesa’s uncle

When I suggest that the Native American warrior of North America was generally superior and outfought his European counterpart, my military history buff friends [all white guys] howl with indignation. Yes we did, after 400 years of setbacks, win. The Mongol khans would laugh—they conquered more people and more land in 40 years than the British, American, French, Canadian, Spanish and Mexican military establishments did in aggregate over 400 years.

Many of my friends still hold to the belief that the white is a genetically superior killer and has hence conquered the globe. I have some black friends who believe this too; that whites are like poorly treated pit-bulls, prone to killing. The question is not one of genetics but of culture. In Central and South America a few thousand Spanish conquistadors wiped out and conquered millions in a few decades. In North America a few thousand Native warriors withstood and terrorized millions for hundreds of years.

This is the dynamic of hunter versus city-slicker. The conquistadors hunted down and exterminated the urbanized Aztecs, Mayans and Incas, with methods perfected against the Moors and Canary Islanders over hundreds of years. The interesting fact is that the Indians never saw it as a genetic question. To them the white man was an inferior warrior only because of how he lived. This contention was borne out to their sorrow when the best and most effective warriors on the frontier turned out to be white men who had lived like the Native warrior: Lewis Millet; Simon Girty; Simon Kenton; Blue Jacket; Kit Carson…

Eventually the adoption of their own ways by a small cadre of enemies permitted those dauntless men to lead the ever multiplying hordes of non-warrior soldiers into the interior, from where they could resist the Natives from within fortified positions. The writing was really on the wall when the Union military, after losing virtually every battle to the Confederate military during the Civil War, won the war through attrition.

When an industrialized nation finds the will to kill, it can only be stopped by a bigger economic engine that out-produces it; as the Nazi war machine was ground to dust while inflicting 15 to 1 casualties against the Soviets and 3 to 1 casualties against the Allies in World War Two.

It has ever been the curse on warrior societies that their attention to virtue over gain produces less weaponry, fewer weapon-wielders, and less supply to sustain hostilities. As technology progresses and casualties mount this, not excellence, becomes the key to victory; with the mediocre mass prevailing over the elite few. During the same period that the Indian was driven to extinction and the Confederate warrior was starved into a barefoot skeletal killer, the Japanese were giving up warrior ethics for industrial mores at the same time; resulting, by the 1930s, in the singularly most horrific killing machine ever let loose on the field of battle [check into the Rape of Nanking]; fortunately devoured by the might of American industry.

Virtually the entire history of warfare can be viewed as elite predation on the effeminate masses, followed by mediocre aggression-by-attrition upon the society that supports the elite warriors that once ruled the battlefield. Napoleon should not have been surprised when Britain—that damned ‘nation of shopkeepers’—would prevail over his warrior nation.

To their credit the Native American war-chiefs and peace-chiefs generally saw this coming a long way off and were not blindsided by the defeat of their warriors at the hands of inferior slave-soldiers.

“We send our little Indian boys and girls to school, and when they come back talking English, they come back swearing. There is no swear word in the Indian languages, and I haven’t yet learned to swear.”

-Zitkala-Sa

As a writer I am uncomfortable discussing religion and spirituality in a nonfiction format. To me spirituality and its state of social bondage [religion] are deeply subjective and are most appropriately explored through fiction. If you want to examine some variances and enjoy divergent spiritual and religious viewpoints than I suggest any of my Sunset Saga novels featuring Three-Rivers, Randy Bracken or Richard F. Burton.

This is not a primer on Native American beliefs. I just want you to be suspicious in your own readings of the fact that most of their stated beliefs came to us through Christian translators and transcribers [sometimes negatively, and sometimes positively, biased]. When they could put their own theological pen to paper, they had already been living under Christian influence for generations.

My personal impression, my vision of how the Native American spiritualists saw Christianity, is based on the writings of Red Jacket, Ohiyesa, Black Elk, and Chief Seattle, and has a Tolkienesque spin.

To me the vision of the last Native spiritualists was one of the Christian God as a dark lord; presiding over a bleak gutted land of things. To nature worshipping traditionalists a God that sanctions ecological warfare can be nothing but evil. I know I am treading on thin ice here, equating the Biblical Almighty with the ethereal villain of a blood-drenched fairytale. But honestly, I think Tolkien did a better job of painting the picture that was the Native American window on the world of the late 19th Century, in his epic work, than I could here.

If you are old enough to remember the 1991 Gulf War, then you probably shared my horror when the Iraqi dictator set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields to cover his army’s retreat. That act elicited a worldwide gasp of horror. Imagine, if our entire world ecology was attacked like that? That is what the Native Americans witnessed, an attack upon their planet—not just them—by an alien invader; a successful attack.

“It is recorded of him [Jesus Christ] that a bruised reed he never broke. Cease, then, to call yourselves Christians, lest you declare to the world your hypocrisy. Cease, too, to call other nations savage, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty then they.”

-Thayendanegea

We now see Christianity, as it is marketed in a heavily materialistic postindustrial world, as a value system devoid, even opposed to, materialism. You must understand, however, that the material products, weaponry, and even whiskey produced by European and later American industry, was presented by white evangelicals, as well as military and civic leaders packing The Bible for their own purposes, as one in the same. The entire European economic system, including chattel slavery, was depicted as a result—indeed the promised benefits of—adherence to the Scripture and Gospels that comprised The Bible.

So, when a Native American was ‘witnessed to’ in the 19th Century and before, he was being sold an entire lifeway; everything from the suit and the haircut to the eradication of the Buffalo and the superiority of whites over red-men, black-men and yellow-men, as part and parcel of the Christian experience.

The 18th and 19th Century Native American rejection of Christian/industrialism has its closest parallel in the American rejection of Nazi Germany and the Ku Klux Klan in the second half of the 20th Century.

Note: In the 1920s and 30s Nazism and the KKK were—to a shocking degree by our modern standards—accepted as forces for moral good by white America.

My sister belongs to a young non-denominational Christian congregation. My mother attends Catholic mass. When I attend services with these ladies I listen to sermons that would have closer parallels with Native American ethics lectures in the mid 1800s then what was then being preached from Christian pulpits. If you brought a good Christian preacher foreword in a time-machine from 1850s America he would either end up selling sealant on late night infomercials or preaching ethnic cleansing on a neo-Nazi website.

Just as the modern idea of what constitutes political liberalism has reversed poles from the 1800s to present, so has the idea of what it is to be Christian. I tuned into the Christian Broadcast Network recently, and heard not a word in favor of military conquest, racial superiority, or ecological exploitation.

“We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God, as the Catholics and Protestants do. We do not want to learn that.”

-Chief Joseph

The major points of the rejection of Christian/Industrial values by Native Americans in North America are as follows:

1. White children are treated badly, and when adopted after capture into Indian families never wish to return to their white parents.

2. A white husband and wife are regarded as owner and property whereas an Indian husband and wife are regarded as partners.

3. Men who come of age in white society cannot fight and therefore will not be able to protect their society from evil.

4. White elders are discarded and set aside rather than being cherished and consulted for their wisdom.

5. The equating of the teachings of Jesus to the tenets of European warfare and capitalist industry are so ludicrous that any preacher or leader extolling the two as compatible –let alone as a seamless life ethic—can be regarded as nothing other than deluded or hypocritical.

“Death will come, always out of season.”

-Big Elk

Ohiyesa, who was actually educated at a major university and was instrumental in the formation of the Boy Scouts of America, stated that white society or ‘civilization’ was ‘a way of living based on trade’. He admitted that it was good for the accumulation of goods, the expansion of population and the subjugation of traditional [primitive] peoples. He did his best, without risking the leveling of intolerable insults at the conquering society who had tolerated him as a convert, to offer warnings: that religion-as-mind-control; rampant materialism; and ecological subjugation as an economic model were not sustainable in the long term.

Part of the three conclusions above is based on my reading between his lines. He was treading on thin ice, attempting to preach ethics and ecology to a nation that was embracing the KKK in the White House and hanging black men for sport every day. If he had any hope that his words would survive to be read during some distant awakening of conscience among the descendents of those who had conquered his people, and raped his home, then he had to talk softly; in a whisper that would hopefully travel across the generations to be heard by someone morally equipped to listen.

Since you now insist on eating tuna that has not resulted in the tormented death of your closest aquatic relative, perhaps you are so equipped.

“If my warriors are to fight they are too few; if they are to die they are too many.”

-Hendrick

Once the hope of a society has been lost, the leaders tend to focus on trying to preserve a trace of their people. For some, like Many Horses, it comes down to an attempt to prepare his descendents to survive a long cultural night, in hopes that there will be a morning somewhere down through the ages; like a hope for a second coming, a chance for a rebirth.

For others, like Ohiyesa, it comes down to an attempt to craft a message that might be heard by some future generation of his conqueror’s offspring, to preserve a voice for his people.

Chief Seattle, was, I think, one of the later, an admonishing ghost, serving up a reminder for those who drove his kind to extinction, though he uses the terms ‘dust’ and ‘mist’.

“It is but an old woman’s dream. Then I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the river, and tears come into my eyes. Our Indian life, I know, is gone forever.”

-Waheenee

What is the Native American End-time prophecy that I suggested in the title?

A world where the young are neglected and abused…

A world that has been raped and stripped of its natural resources...

A world where some Great Chief is supported by involuntary gifts demanded from the common man, actually living in a ‘great house’ at public expense...

A world of hypocrisy, whose leaders and holy men do not abide by the laws and ethics they extol…

A world in which people care so much about material possessions that they, themselves, become nothing but the material possessions of others…

A world where the virtues of a warrior are nothing before the devil’s workshop of death-dealing devices controlled by the Great Chief...

A world where the old are cast aside, separated from the young ones they should be educating and the adults they should be advising; having returned to the status of their childhood; either abused or neglected just as they began their lives among us.

This is the collective prediction of the long-dead Native American spiritualists, a number of warnings based on long observation of those who hunted them across the face of what had once been their world.

I hope none of the above predictions come to pass.

I would not get too worried, however, unless four out of the seven dire predictions actually come to pass.

-Extraterrestrially yours, Regal M-116-S