An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and . . . [be eaten] up by the wolves. The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false looks, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to let us alone; but they followed on and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterers, lazy drones, all talkers, and no workers.
As for baptizing Indians and Negroes, several of the [white] people disapprove of it, because they say it often makes them proud, and not so good servants: but these, and such objections, are easily refuted . . . for Christianity encourages and orders them to become more humble and better servants, and not worse, than when they were heathens.
FOR SEVERAL thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox. A woman is attacked by men who brutally rape her and leave her for dead. Indians are murdered in order to force impoverished mixed-Indians to gather rubber in the forest under conditions that doom the rubber-hunters themselves to miserable deaths. Small countries are invaded so that an entire people and their resources can be exploited. Human beings of all colors are seized or ensnared in debts, and are forced to live out their brief lives as slaves or serfs. Boys are raised to obey orders and serve as cannon-fodder, while girls are raised to give their children over to armies, factories or plantations. People and other living creatures are tortured in the most fiendish ways imaginable.
The “cult of aggression and violence” reigns supreme, and the prisons and insane asylums are full to bursting. Imperialism, colonialism, torture, enslavement, conquest, brutality, lying, cheating, secret police, greed, rape, terrorism—they are only words until we are touched by them. Then they are no longer words, but become a vicious reality that overwhelms, consumes and changes our lives forever.
This is the disease, then, with which I hope to deal—the disease of aggression against other living things and, more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism, and I shall try to explain why. But whatever we call it, this disease, this wétiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man. The rape of a woman, the rape of a land, and the rape of a people, they are all the same. And they are the same as the rape of the earth, the rape of the rivers, the rape of the forest, the rape of the air, the rape of the animals. Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. Arrogance knows no frontiers. Deceit knows no edges. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. From the raping of a woman, to the raping of a country, to the raping of the world. Acts of aggression, of hate, of conquest, of empire-building. Harems of women and harems of people; houses of prostitution and houses of pimps.
Many centuries ago a Mexican (Aztec) father said to his son: Son of mine, jewel of mine, my rich quetzal plumage: You have arrived at life, you are born, the Creator and Owner has made you come to the world. The Creator conceived you, he formed you, he made you born, the One for whom all live . . . Very well: for a brief time you have come to contemplate things, you have come to go evolving, you have come to make a way in your person, you have come to grow . . .
What will be the plan of the One for whom all live? Will you perhaps attain a goal? Are you going to live on the earth? If only that you will grow peacefully and in sweet calm . . . Be very careful of lies and falseness: Such a way is not straight, upright, they are not good . . . Are you, perhaps, as an ear of corn, as a spike of grain, therefore releasing that which is in your inner being? Can you see that which you have inside yourself? Well harnessed, well guided, very recondite you are in your inner being, as in a chest or in a strong-box . . . If you live well, if you work as has been indicated, you will be very well respected and your life will serve as an example to others 1 . . .
Many people have examined the subjects of aggression, violence, imperialism, rape, and so on. I propose to do something a little different: first, I propose to examine these things from a Native American perspective; and, second, from a perspective as free as possible from assumptions created by the very disease being studied. Finally, I will look at these evils, not simply as “bad” choices that men make, but as a genuine, very real epidemic sickness. Imperialists, rapists and exploiters are not just people who have strayed down a wrong path. They are insane (unclean) in the true sense of that word. They are mentally ill and, tragically, the form of soul-sickness that they carry is catching. In many respects, the twentieth century has been the most disappointing period in modern human history.
We have witnessed the failure of the so-called “western democracies” to solve their most pressing internal problems, the failure of Marxist-Leninism to come to grips with the issues of bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and the self-interest of newly- empowered elites, the failure of so-called mass education, the failure of technology, the failure of organized religion, and the failure of the most highly-trained and “educated” generations of human beings in all of history to do more than paper over the great problems facing the world. We have witnessed devastating wars, the deaths of millions upon millions, the squandering of the earth’s resources, and the continuing exploitation of the smaller nationalities (especially of folk peoples) and of the politically weak in general.
The brutality and hypocrisy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would not be so frightening if, indeed, the leadership of the world were in the hands of uneducated soldiers (of the Idi Amin type) or of openly criminal elements. But by and large such is not the case. People like Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein could not stay in power without “technocrats” and trained civil servants who collect necessary revenues and maintain a structure of governance. Neither Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Huey Long, Ferdinand Marcos, nor Augusto Pinochet could govern without the active support or cooperation of many thousands of “educated ” experts, technicians and bureaucrats.
All of the modern secret police of the world depend upon well-trained personnel, scientific equipment, advanced social science studies of human behavior, and bureaucratic management systems (either pre-computer or post-computer). Even organized crime depends upon college-trained lawyers, administrators and executives, and upon the technology of modern society.
The people who rule the world today are, on the whole, highly educated (or at least highly trained). They are graduates of the “great” military schools or the elite universities of their respective countries. They have (by and large) “refined” tastes and cultivate the “finer” things of life (at least for public consumption). In spite of this, they have given us the most brutal epoch in history and, currently, a collection of military dictatorships, totalitarian societies, racist-exploitative “representative” republics and resource-gobbling states of such a nature as to lead one to predict that there may soon be very few places in the world where a nonaggressive person can survive except as a lackey or a slave.
The truth of the matter is that Harvard or Yale graduates, for example, are quite capable of lobbying for a “concession” of territory in Brazil, or Colombia, or Bolivia, the development of which causes the utter annihilation of thousands of Native Americans. Of course, the refined gentlemen will not personally order the liquidation of the First Americans, but they will set in motion a chain of events leading inevitably (under conditions current in South America) to the enslavement, removal and death of the indigenous tribes. “Education” of the kind we know in the modern world usually has little to do with ethics or with bringing forth the individual potential of the learner. On the contrary, it is largely technical in nature (whether in natural science, social science, or whatever) and seldom (in and of itself) serves to alter the class and ethnic “interests” of the graduates.
In any case, the wétiko disease, the sickness of exploitation, has been spreading as a contagion for the past several thousand years. And as a contagion unchecked by most vaccines it tends to become worse rather than better with time. More and more people catch it, in more and more places, and they become the true teachers of the young. Thus the youth in twentieth century societies are taught not primarily by underpaid public school teachers or “ivory-tower” professors, but by their parents, by movies, by television and the Internet, and in fact, by what they observe in the society. And this type of learning is often reinforced by the structure and content of school disciplines, such as history, that exalt the aggressive and the exploitative (Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Cecil Rhodes, James K. Polk, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, who was both a dedicated slave owner and an insatiable imperialist against Native Americans) and tend to categorize as “backward” or “uninteresting” persons who do not conquer others or acquire vast amounts of stolen property.
In any case, the great human problems of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and greed have not been brought under control. Ask the Kurds, or the Tibetans, or the Bretons, or the Chechens, or the Ainu, or the Sioux, or the Inuit, or the Aché, or the Colla; or ask the migrant farm workers of the United States, or the rural Afro-Americans of the South, or the near slave-laborers of South Africa; or ask the often terrorized populations of Guatemala, Palestine, or El Salvador. And in the United States and other so-called “advanced” societies, billions upon billions of dollars are being spent on prisons and mental institutions, and still crime rates climb upward and more and more people go “crazy.”
On top of that, the pornography industry thrives and the fundamentalist Christian revival seems to go hand in hand with rape, child abuse, child pornography, sadism, and a hatred for women. Exploitation, in other words, is thriving. The exploitation of children, of love, of women, of old people, of the weak, of the poor and, of course, the intentional commercial exploitation of every conceivable thing, from the hair around women’s vaginal areas (as in Playboy, for example) to worry over natural body odors, to adolescent insecurity, to the fear of growing old, to thirst (for example, persuading people to drink liquid chemicals and sugar in place of water or natural beverages).
This is a no holds-barred modern society in which college graduates are expected to be willing to “give their all” to developing or selling a product, even if the product is harmful or worthless, where technicians are expected to kill and torture captive animals because they are ordered to do so by some government experimenter or paper-producing professor, and where the opportunities for being “one’s own boss” in a non-exploitative, non-crooked, or non-demeaning role are precious few indeed.
People who are concerned about violence, about the environment, about decency, and about human authenticity must have the means for analyzing the objective conditions which today surround us all. It is my hope that by enlarging upon the concept of the wétiko disease and by discussing its origin, epidemiology, and characteristics that I can be of some help to such people.
I will also try to present some ideas relating to antidotes for the disease, but I cannot pretend to have all of the answers for the most fundamental problem of human life. How to live in this life? is the real question we all face. All other subjects are insignificant when compared with this one. - Introduction, Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack D. Forbes
