On Language

On Language

I think I should talk about words. Your language. It is another thing that bothers me, and I think I should take away the burdens of the things that bother me. That is what I heard from the old ones.

I grew up speaking the language of my people. It wasn't until school I had to learn English. What was important to Indian people was saying something the best way. In English you had to learn to say things a hundred ways. I still watch white people talk and I'm surprised at all the words. Sometimes they will say the same thing over and over and over in different ways. They are like a hunter who rushes all over the forest trying to bump into something instead of sitting quietly until he can capture it.

I don't mind this, mostly. But I don't like it when it is used to hurt us or other people. Now I'm going to tell you some of those things that hurt because of the way people say them.

The first one is about the battles. Whenever the white people won it was a victory. Whenever we won it was a massacre. What was the difference? There were bodies on the ground and children lost their parents, whether the bodies were Indian or white. But the whites used their language to make their killing good and our killing bad. They 'won'; we 'massacred'.

I don't even know what a massacre is, but it sounds like dead women and little babies with their throats cut. If that's right, it was the white people who massacred more than we did. But I hardly ever heard anyone talk about the white massacres.

Here's another one: uprising. You use that word to talk about anytime our people couldn't stand what was happening to them anymore and tried to get our rights. Then you should call your Revolutionary War an uprising. But you don't. Why not? There was a government taking freedom away from you and you stood up against it. But you called it a revolution, like maybe the earth was turning to something better. When we did it, it was called an uprising, like everything was peaceful and orderly until we 'rose up'.

What about 'warpath'? When you came out against us you 'formed an army'. When we came out to defend our families we 'went on the warpath'. I won't even talk about words like 'bloodthirsty' and 'savage'.

My little great grandson came home one day and told me they were studying the frontier in American history. I asked him what it was. He told me it was where civilization stopped. Just look at that! They were teaching him that civilization only existed up to where the white men had reached. Well, we were on the other side of that line. We had governments and laws, too. Our people were better behaved than the people that came into our lands. But here is my little great grandson talking about the frontier and civilization. It was like we didn't exist.

Every time you talk about the frontier you are telling us that we don't matter. You teach about the frontier. You talk about the wilderness and how empty the land was, even though to us the land was always full. You talk about civilization like we didn't have any, just because we didn't try to haul big chairs and wooden chests across the desert in a cart.

The way you teach it, America started from some ships that came to Massachusetts and Virginia. The people got off and had to push their way through some big empty land that was full of danger. It was like the place was empty and you filled it up, and history is the story of how you filled it up and what happened while you were filling it.

That's not the way it was to us. For us, this was a big land where people lived everywhere. Then some people came and landed on the shores in the east while others came up from the south. They started pushing us. Then some others came down the rivers from the north. All these people were fighting each other. They all wanted something from us —furs, land, gold. They either took it or made us sell it to them. They all had guns. They all killed us if we didn't believe that God was some man named Jesus who had lived in a desert across the sea.

Our land was taken from us from every direction. We can look at the same facts as you, and it is something completely different. But you build your history on words like 'frontier' and 'civilization', and those words are just your ideas put into little shapes that you can use in sentences. The big ideas behind them are weapons that take our past from us.

Without even knowing it, you made us who we are in your minds by the words you used. You are still doing that, and you don't even know it is happening. I hope you'll learn to be more careful with your words.

There was an old man who told me when I was a boy that I should look at words like beautiful stones. He said I should lift each one and look at it from all sides before I used it. Then I would respect it. You people have so many words that you don't respect them the way you should. There is always another one, so you just throw them out there without thinking. Those words are like stones. Even if they are beautiful, if you throw them out without thinking, they can hurt someone.

Silver Eagle