Drug War: Euroamerica

Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: Euroamerica

The central sacrament of Incan culture, coca leaf, a medicinal chew and tea leaf, was determined to be un delusio del demonio by Pizarro's priests, who proceeded to save Incan souls by working them to death as beasts of burden under the lash.

There is nothing whatever dangerous about whole coca leaves; they are as harmless as orange pekoe tea. Cocaine, which wasn't isolated until 1860, comprises about ½ of 1% of the weight of a coca leaf. It takes a ton of coca leaves to make about 5-20 pounds of cocaine. There are far more dangerous alkaloids in potatoes, tomatoes, celery and fava beans, all of which are perfectly safe to eat.

Sacramental herbs are vegetables, not drugs. Refined alkaloids are drugs. This book is largely the political history of that intentional confusion, a confusion rooted in the unconscious contents of our political culture. That is, in the planted axiom that "the drug problem" can be discussed in terms of modern politics. The Drug War can't be separated from the cultural compulsion of our conquistador history, or from the evolutionary function of inebriative herbs.

Euro-American political condescension toward Native America was ruthless, while, at the same time, the medical respect for their sophisticated shamanic herbalism was automatic. Europeans were amazed at the superiority of Native American trauma treatment. Indians from Peru to Canada understood the use of arboreal oleoresins, antiseptic and healing herb juices, honey and egg whites. William Wood, in 1639, wrote, "Some of them have been shot in at the mouth, and out of the ear, some shot in the breast; some run through the flank with darts, and other desperate wounds, which either by their rare skill in the use of vegetatives, or diabolicial charms, they cure in a short time." This respect pervaded the culture.

Carl Jung, on a visit to America, noticed not only the enormous influence of African America on American behavior in general, but the completely disproportionate influence of Native America, given their isolation and extremely small numbers in the 1920's. "....it was only in the course of very thorough and deep analyses that I came upon symbols relating to the Indian. The progressive tendency of the unconscious, as expressed for instance in the hero-motif, chooses the Indian as its symbol, just as certain coins of the Union bear an Indian head. This is a tribute to the once-hated Indian, but it also testifies to the fact that the American hero-motif chooses the Indian as an ideal figure. It would certainly never occur to any American administration to place the head of Cetewayo or any other Negro hero on their coins...."

"Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being."

Prohibitionism and racism were the neurotic -isms of choice in the 1890's, and they are most definitely two sides of the same coin. A conqueror who lived Jung's psychological dichotomy was Captain John Gregory Bourke, who went up against Crazy Horse's Sioux and the Northern Cheyennes and was Crook's aide-de-camp when he penetrated the Sierra Madres to force the surrender of Geronimo. Although he spent the early part of his life killing Indians, he got to know not only his scouts but his adversaries personally, and became fascinated by their humanity and their shamanism, becoming their political defender in later life.

But Bourke was no Dances-with-Wolves. The following letter, published in The Nation, was dated November 28, 1890, exactly one month before the massacre at Wounded Knee. It will seem like a racist document to the modern eye, but it represents the liberal sentiments of the power elite of the 1890's. Bourke's fascination with shamanism turned into uncomprehending condescension. His equation of the religion of "our interesting savages" with medical quackery was accepted at the time as learned and compassionate, as was his proud advocacy of cultural genocide. Our contemporary drug laws are based largely on Bourke's equations.

"The remedy suggests itself that we should take up the whole matter of the medicine-men with earnestness and intelligence, and do our utmost to remedy the mental condition which permits their existence, whether as a premeditated or unintentional menace to the frontier....When a scholar returns from one of our Indian schools, he at present finds himself instructed in some handicraft, and able to read and write pretty well, but he is still no match for the vaunted pretensions of the medicine-men, who leave to him the knowledge of the material world, but retain for themselves the mysteries of the supernatural."

Two medicine men Bourke knew well weren't charlatans, and Bourke knew it; the war shaman Crazy Horse and the war shaman Geronimo each outfought Bourke's divisions of the U.S. Army for years with a few hundred lightly armed warriors. Obviously they didn't need any lessons in military science, and when he got sick on the frontier, Bourke went to their healers.

When Bourke's commanding officer, Gen. Crook, a Civil War hero and very experienced Indian fighter, came along in 1870 and offered those Apaches who would stop raiding a subsidized farmstead and military security, in exchange for the ruthless warfare he was currently meting out, it split them politically. Many Apaches came to resent their own hostiles, to whom they had no political ties, as an obstacle to a peaceful life. It was the hostiles who fueled the fires of racist genocide and mass deportation; Crook's policy was the only hope of holding on to Arizona land. For this reason, Crook was able to enlist as many as two hundred Apache scouts, some of whom are pictured below, who became the terrifying spearhead of his unit.

By 1875 the Apache war was over, but it was to flare up again in the 80's as racist pressure grew to evict all the Apaches and steal their remaining land. In the meantime, Crook was sent to Red Cloud's war, in the Department of the Platte. Red Cloud's 1868 victory, the Treaty of Fort Laramie, closed the Bozeman Trail and the forts on it and gave the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting rights in the Powder and Big Horn river region of Montana and Wyoming, and in the Dakotas. Below is Alexander Gardner's photo of Red Cloud's war chief Man Afraid of His Horses smoking the Peace Pipe in acceptance of the army's withdrawal, Fort Laramie, May, 1868.

But anti-Indian feeling was running high, especially after Quanah Parker's spectacular 1874 shoot-out with well-armed buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls, Texas. Here is Quanah's description of his preparations for battle: "Tonkawas kill him [and] make my heart hot and I want to make it even. That time I little big man - pretty young man, but knew how to fight pretty good. I wait one month and go to Noconie Comanche camp on head of Cache Creek. Call in everybody. I tell him about my friend kill him [in] Texas. I fill pipe. I tell that man, 'you want to smoke?' He take pipe and smoke it. I give it to another man - he say I not want to smoke. If he smoke pipe he go on warpath - he not hang back. God kill him [if] he afraid."

In March of 1876 Bourke accompanied Crook in command of the nine hundred man Big Horn Expedition to break the power of the Sioux and Cheyenne. The campaign collapsed in a month after its only "battle," the completely unnecessary bushwhack by Col. Reynolds' column of a peaceful mixed Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux hunting village, at dawn on a bitterly cold morning.

Bourke, attached to the 300-man column, wrote that "Just as we approached the edge of the village we came upon a ravine... We got down this deliberately, and at the bottom and behind a stump saw a young boy about fifteen years old driving his ponies. He was not ten feet off. The youngster wrapped his blanket about him and stood like a statue of bronze, waiting for the fatal bullet; his features were as immobile as if cut in stone. The American Indian knows how to die with as much stoicism as the East Indian. I leveled my pistol. 'Don't shoot,' said Egan, 'we must make no noise.' We were up on the bench upon which the village stood, and the war-whoop of the youngster was ringing wildly in the winter air, awakening the echoes of the bald-faced bluffs."

Caught with nothing but their bed clothes, the freezing and wounded old folks, women and children had to trek upriver for days to Crazy Horse's camp, while the warriors covered their retreat; many died on the trail. Crazy Horse's Oglalas and the battered Cheyennes then went to Sitting Bull's powerful Hunkpapas, who called a rising of the tribes. This saw the formation, along the valley of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana, of some 1000-1300 lodges, 8-11,000 people, about a quarter of whom were the best light cavalry in the world. Thanks to the lively fur trade, they were well-armed enough to prove it.

Just eight days after Crook's bloody near-disaster on the Rosebud, in which a tenth of his unit was killed, Custer led 240 men to their death by directly attacking the combined Sioux encampment on the Little Bighorn. He not only disdained to wait for Col. Gibbon's large column, but even mistimed his coordination with his own small columns. Bourke estimated that the Sioux and Cheyenne couldn't have lost more than fifty men. Below is Custer with his 1874 Black Hills grizzly. Bloody Knife, left, Custer's Arickaree scout, died with him at the Little Bighorn.

Bourke boasted, quite honestly of Crook, that "If there was one point in his character which shone more resplendent than any other, it was his absolute integrity in his dealings with representatives of inferior races: he was not content with telling the truth, he was careful to see that the interpretation had been so made that the Indians understood every word and grasped every idea..."

Theirs was a conscious rejection of racism, since all ethnic groups must pass through the same stages before they can reach the mental height of Euroamerican industrialization. It was also an unconscious affirmation of racism, since the inherent presupposition was that they have to learn from us, and not us from them. Progressive magazines, like The Survey, talked of "the Americanization" of the Indians, as if they had actually just come from India.

"Savages," then, were children, our children, in need of "tough love," just as our children, today, are "savages" in need of "tough love." In fact, of course, it was the condescending paternalism of these pioneering anthropologists that was childlike. As both their art and material achievements indicate, Europe’s Upper Paleolithic hunters could outfight, outrun and outthink most moderns with ease, just just as Geronimo and Crazy Horse did against some very tough pony soldiers. Picasso was awestruck by the genius he found on the ancient cave walls of the Pyrenees.

We are not more intelligent and less mammalian than our forbears because we are more industrialized; mechanical evolution is a mechanical process. We eat, sleep, procreate, love our children, play, pray, sing, get sick and medicate ourselves, and our sophistication regarding these largely unconscious biological processes, the most important in our lives, is demonstrably inferior to that of many tribal cultures.

Herbal knowledge, like knowledge of animal ways, is instinctive, biological knowlege, knowledge that connects us to our identity, our roots in the Earth. There is no distinction between plant biochemistry and human biochemistry. This is our food. Many human neurotransmitters are chemically identical to herbal alkaloids. Most sacramental herbs actually work by triggering or repressing our own neurotransmitters. Since we share our evolution with these sacred foods, their identity is dream-knowledge, accessible in cultures that foster such knowledge.

Pater dazzles us with the techno-trees so as to obscure the forest. There are only three historical epochs: Prehistory, which is the reptilian-mammalian spine and medulla oblongata; Ancient History, which is the advent of Homo sapiens, the Upper Paleolithic; and Modern History, which began with the industrial organization of human culture in the Neolithic.

If you think the Neolithic experiment in mammalian cybernetics isn’t present and ongoing, just contemplate the industrial destruction of the ecosphere. The bacterial plagues seem to have been replaced by viral plagues, the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels seems to be warming the ocean and the atmosphere at an evolutionarily suicidal rate, the destruction of the Earth’s lungs, the rainforests, continues unabated, there is a massive die-off of species, an apparent change in the ratio of key atmospheric gases - the list goes on and on.

There is no guarantee, as the oceanographers and atmospheric scientists are warning, that a combination of these disasters won’t careen out of control. If the poles heat up just a few more degrees, their cold water will cease to sink. It is this massive underocean river, which rises, heated, at the equator, that drives the ocean food chain. Imagine what a stagnant ocean will do to the atmosphere, and the life that depends on it. Here is the evolutionary necessity to control industrial fascism - it won’t control itself. Black Elk, or me, or you, smoking an inner peace pipe, communing with the vegetal source, refusing to make the assembly line a religion, ain’t the problem.

Said Hunkpapa war shaman Sitting Bull, "The life of White men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I see nothing that a White man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion." It is ironic that an 1872 photograph of a Hunkpapa Lakota, a look-alike and relative of Sitting Bull, the strikingly handsome Running Antelope, was used as the frontispiece of the 1899 five dollar bill. Many turn-of-the-century stamps and coins were stamped with Native faces.

Bourke's complaint about the power of Sioux shamans was prompted by the last rising of the tribes, the Ghost Dance of 1890. Sitting Bull sent emissaries to the Paiute prophet Wovoka ("Cutter") in Nevada, who prescribed the Ghost Dance of Resurrection for all Indians in preparation for the Messiah, who would cause a thick layer of fresh soil to cover the earth, burying the White world beneath a sea of sweet grass, tall trees, edible herbs, buffalo and game. All those who "made ready to join the ghosts" would be lifted up to watch the Earthly Resurrection and then set down to join their ancestors and loved ones lost in the wars.

Prayer-trees and medicine lodges sprang up on camp grounds throughout the Sioux lands as thousands danced and sang for hours, days, weeks, months. Below, Mooney's photo of Arapaho Ghost Dancers on the Cheyenne/Arapaho reservation, Oklahoma, 1891. Indians forgot to cut their hair, to speak English, to go to church, to till their fields; the authorities panicked. Sitting Bull was the first to die in their attempt to stop it.