Mr. Schlesier’s foreword to Penucquem Speaks is approximately a 1,300-word essay on alienation using the case of Ronald Thomas West in relation to his adoption by the Blackfeet people as his reference. For any readers disenchanted with our modern materialistic megaculture, this makes insightful reading as Mr. Schlesier breaks the culture into three components in reference to alienation and inclusion. What he refers to as the greater white society is in itself also a disintegrating culture that is suffering the same thing that the Blackfeet suffered at the hands of white, Christian America. This white, Christian America in its various subcontexts is being dismantled for a greater good—the greater good of globalism. Schlesier singles out the greatest threat to a culture as being those people from that culture who assimilate into the greater entity and work toward its dismantling for the good of the greater outside entity. Below is the three-part scheme that Schlesier lays out. To help understand this, when you read Blackfeet, read American; and when you read American, read globalism or liberalism or whatever extra-national ideology or entity you wish.

1. Cultural Entity: “Blackfeet culture today, as it survives on and off the reservation, has lost much of its complexity and splendor of old but still maintains features and behavior patterns and values that are attractive. The Blackfeet people still exist, and many are much like the people as they used to be a long time ago. Today they are often burdened by sets of problems they have no control over.”

2. Cultural Orphans: “There are also Blackfeet who are lost, who seem to belong nowhere, neither to the Blackfeet world nor to the White world.”

3. Cultural Traitors: “And there are those who work against their own people for the benefit of surrounding Whites and for local and national schemes to defraud them.”

“Of these three groups the first can be assisted, the second must be left to the ceremonial people to heal, and the third group must not only be endured but must be fought.”

In this reader’s view what Karl Schlesier refers to when he speaks of whites and white society is materialism, for at the point of contact with white Christians, Christianity in its American form was part of an industrial, mercantile sales package—the embedded theology that came with the secular goods. If we look to our own situation as Americans, whatever type we see ourselves as, we see our leaders making decisions to benefit a greater, global good that is forever about increased profit, reduced labor costs, increased centralization, and has only one end, which is the reduction of a human being to an economic unit.