Before the White Man
by Chief Noble Red Man,
Lakota Wisdomkeeper Mathew King
 No
people on Earth ever enjoyed a freedom like we Indians enjoyed before the White
Man came to this country. Everything was free. We were free and so were the
animals and the birds and the rivers and the whole wonderful land from end to
end. All free. All pure. All happy.
This was the freest and purest and happiest place in the whole Universe.
We were the Great Spirit's forest children, living free according to His Law.
Then Columbus and his gang hit this country by accident. We're sorry that
they did.
Our Instructions didn't tell us what to do about the White Man. We welcomed
him when he came here. We fed him. We took care of him. We believed God had sent
him here to help us.
God gave the White Man powers we never saw before -- material powers. He was
supposed to share those powers to make life better for all of us. He was
supposed to use the material power in the service of the spiritual power. He was
supposed to connect them. He didn't. Instead, he used his material powers to
steal our land and our freedom.
Now our great chieftains are gone. Our buffalo are gone. The country we loved
is lost. They built roads over the fading trails where we once walked. Our
weapons, our bows and arrows, our tomahawks are in the museums. They sell our
arrowheads and even our bones for souvenirs. Maybe if we didn't remember how it
once was it wouldn't be so bad for us. We could just become like everyone else.
Only one thing's sadder than remembering you once were free, and that's
forgetting you once were free. That would be the saddest thing of all.
That's one thing we Indians will never do.
A MESSAGE TO THE WHITE MAN
God put us both on this Earth, the Red Man and the White Man. I don't know
why. There's a reason. I've looked for it all my life and I'm sorry to say I
haven't found it. I can't understand why He sent you here to destroy His own
Creation. It's a mystery. But God is always a mystery. I try to work with the
mystery even when I don't understand it.
We're both God's children. When White Man came here he said he was our
Father. But he's not. Only God is our Father, and the Earth is our Mother. We
Indians have proof of that, because our skin is the color of Mother Earth. God
meant us to live in peace. He has a purpose for each of us. He doesn't want one
of us to kill the other.
It's been a long war between our two peoples. Five hundred years. We want it
to end. Maybe White Man thinks he's already won. But you can't win when you go
against God, against Nature. All you win is God's wrath and God's judgment.
God will always be the winner.
White Man has his own Way. He brought that Way here from across the ocean. He
believes in it, though nothing good has come out of it that I can see. We don't
believe in it. It's not our Way.
You've got your Holy Bible, and we've got our Sacred Pipe. Maybe God wants
there to be both a Bible and a Pipe. We're not trying to convert you, and we
don't want you to try to convert us. We only want our two peoples to live
together in peace and mutual respect, each of us serving God in our way.
Isn't that acceptable to the White Man?
We don't condemn all white people. There are many good white people. They
lead a good life. They don't do evil to others. They live with God.
We don't hate anybody. Hating hurts the hater more than the one who's hated.
We have no hate in our hearts. We hope there's none in yours. We open our hearts
and our arms to you.
To tell you the truth, I don't know if we can ever really come together.
But I'm a dreamer, and I'll tell you my dream.
Someday Red Man and White Man will sit down with all the races of humankind
and we'll solve our problems together. We'll all follow God's Law. We'll even
pray together. You'll do it your way and we'll do it our way, but we'll all do
it together.
Someday we'll have ceremonies together, and the eagle will come and join us.
He'll dance with us. You'll learn what it's like to dance with the eagle.
It's true. We can all dance with the eagle. We can all fly with the eagle.
God would like that, I know. That's coming close. I'll be gone soon, so I
probably won't see it, but maybe my grandchildren will see it -- or their
grandchildren.
Yes, it can happen. We'll all dance together with God!
This
article was excerpted from:
 Noble Red Man
compiled and edited by
Harvey Arden.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Beyond Words Publishing Inc. ©1994.
www.beyondword.com
Info/Order this book.
About the Author
Noble
Red Man (Mathew King), longtime spokesman for the traditional chiefs of the
Lakota (Sioux) nation, was one of the preeminent leaders of the great Indian
Reawakening that began in the late 1960s. He gave political and spiritual
counsel to the American Indian Movement (AIM) during and after the 1973
"Occupation" of Wounded Knee. He passed on to "the Great
Reality" on March 18, 1989. More articles by this author.
Harvey
Arden, former National Geographic senior writer, compiled and edited
Noble Red Man: Lakota Wisdomkeeper Mathew King.
He was also co-author of
Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders
where he first presented the words of Mathew King.
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