Something i post from time to time... as a reminder

I have been actively engaged in a series of trilogues discussing the singular importance of protecting the wisdom and knowledge of planetary survival that is embedded in indigenous tribal languages. We are losing these languages, this wealth of information required for sustainability, the tribes themselves, and most of our co-dependent species each and every day. If we do not actively and aggressive assert their huge importance, we will, as a species, lose our own capability to survive on a damaged and dying planet. One of the outgrowths of this effort is to remind those attending our panels that if we keep insisting that our children and grandchildren are our future energy resources (we live in an information age and the US is the fount of all informational wealth, and we must make our next generations successful and productive, yada yada) we will kill them. John Trudell, the outstanding and singularly important American Indian native poet, recited the following several years ago at the Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley, CA (used w/ permission). Please give him credit, but do pass it on.

WE ARE BEING MINED
By John Trudell

See I think --Of the things that are going on
See I think --We are being mined
See and I think--That the whole objective of life
Is to come through it with some type of understanding, about life
And to leave it—no more disturbed than it was,
As when we got here
And they’re your own ethics
And that takes care of the future --And that takes care of the past
And our relationship to power is connected in this kind of understanding
About what life is

But we live in a technologic perception of reality
And this technologic perception of reality is very real, because it’s here
But I think in this technologic perception of reality we have been turned into fuel
See sometimes I feel I live in a reality with nobody people nobody recognizes,
They don’t know who they are, they don’t know where they are, and they don’t understand
The language they’re speaking
They can say the words, they know many answers
But they understand very little of what they know
They have knowledge without understanding
It is like we are being mined
So we need to recognize who we are
We are human beings, that’s who we are
We are human beings
Human, bone, flesh, blood, metal, mineral, liquid
The DNA, the physical reality
The physical aspect of the human being
The physical aspect of our reality
The human form
The visible aspect
Is made up of the metals, minerals, liquids of the Earth
So we are shapes and forms and parts of the Earth
This is our shape our form--we have being

All the things of the Earth are made up of the same DNA
The same metal, mineral, liquid
And they have their shape and their form and they have their purpose
And they have being

And we live in a technologic perception of reality
Where we understand they can take the other shapes and forms of the Earth
And put them through mining processes
And as a result of them, we take the uranium from the Earth
Put it through a mining refinement process
And convert the being part of that DNA
Convert the being part of that Earth, into a form of energy
A mutation of power, but a form of energy that they tell us is power
But it is really a different thing

And we know they can do it with fossil fuel
They can take the DNA of the Earth and put it through the mining refinement process
and convert the being
The Being part of that physical DNA into a form of energy to run their electrical systems

So I think it would be in our best interests and the best interests of future generations
And the best interest of any type of understanding with Life
To consider the possibility that the human is being put through a mining refinement process
And that the being part is being converted into a form of energy
to run these authoritarian systems
We are being turned into fuel

Feel like something is missing from your life and as we understand
You take the uranium, the DNA of the Earth that is the shape of uranium
And put it through this mining refinement process
And covert it into a form of energy
We understand that leaves behind a toxic waste, a pollution
We understand this with all the fossil fuels

So we need to understand that as part of this process
of being part of the human being that’s mined
That the toxic waste that is left
These are the fears, and the doubts, and the insecurities that dominate
Most human beings’ lives, these days
And it keeps them from understanding what it means to be a human being
And the slight of mined is to convince us that it is all our fault

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society
Building to the new world order
We’re expected to carry the stone

Emperors and the feeding Class
Human beings being used up fast
The miners keep on mining
Intelligence is the mother-load
Imagination as an energy source
In this predators way of dining

Defining how and what we think
As we’re led to the way to believe
Conditioned reaction
We call thought
Our reality rides
In how we perceive

In the ways of being lost and alone
Who runs from their doubt and fear
In the mask of everything’s normal
Who’s not feeling or seeing too clear

Could be we’re being programmed
Anyway our spirit bleeds
All over our lives.
Our lives become fuel
For predator needs

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society

And about this mining process--Everything that ever happens to us, that has ever happened to us
What we have in common because of this DNA
We literally are children of the Earth--We are all descendents of tribes
Each and every one of us is a descendent of a tribe
At some point in the evolution of our DNA and within the evolution of our DNA
We all have a genetic memory, we carry the experience of our evolution
So we have this in common, we all come from tribes

And what happened to the tribes of this hemisphere happened to the tribes of Europe
and the descendents of the tribes of Europe over,
the two to three thousand years period of time before they got here
And by the time the tribes of Europe got here, they no longer knew they were human beings
Because they had been serfs and peasants, and they were owned by the landlords and the royalty
And all these wars for the possession of their souls, all this shit had taken place

So they no longer knew they were human beings, they didn’t understand
It was not a perceptional reality of theirs anymore, in any living practice
They did not know they were not human beings
They were subjects to something other

So all the things that ever happened to the tribes of Europe
and to the descendents of the tribes of Europe
and then their behavior when they got here
Had to do to affect and disconnect our perception of reality
It had to change our perceptional realities
And all of these things had to take place within our intelligence
Because, as human beings,
We were given protection, we were given medicine, we were given self-defense
And that’s our intelligence and we all have it
And this is what we are given

In order for this to be self-defense, and for it to be protection, and for it to be medicine
It must be clear and it must be coherent
But we have had programmed into us these fears, and these doubts, and these insecurities
As a part of the mining process, to keep us from being clear and coherent
Because a clear coherent human being, and a society of clear coherent human beings
Would not live the way that this society lives
No matter what it says
All of these things took place to our intelligence
That is the protection that we were given, is our intelligence
Our imagination, our creativity, our thoughts and our action upon these things
And this is where our access as human beings to power is
Is to clear, coherent use of our intelligence

This is our access to power
Everything else is an access to an illusion of power, authority systems
Do not confuse authority systems and electrical energy systems created by man as power
These are imitations of power
Power is another reality
And our true access to it is in our earthly connection and coherent use of our intelligence
This is our true access to power

And how powerful this is—
everyone just go into their own reality
Go inside their own reality, how much time
Do the fears, doubts, and darksides
How much time, do these things consume, in the individual realities
And how do they affect the others that you are close to, in the individual realities
This is power, it is—incoherently used
No offense, I mean that in a positive way

As a part of this reality check, we should always be honest with ourselves
No matter what it is
If we can’t be real to ourselves,
We can never synchronize the reality of our intentions
And all our good intentions and good motives
If we can’t be real to ourselves—are lost
It is the first step
We must be real to ourselves
Whether our reality is glorious or shameful
It doesn’t matter what it is, what it is
Is it must be recognized
We must be real to ourselves