Book Review: Long and Terrible Shadow

This is a revised version of a book review of Thomas Berger’s A long and terrible shadow : white values, native rights in the Americas since 1492 submitted for a course, Native Worldviews, in the Indigenous Learning Program at Lakehead University in the fall of 2014.

Introduction

I am going to begin where Berger ends: the need for “the second discovery of America”.[1] As he describes it: “a discovery of the true meaning of the history of the New World and of the Native peoples’ rightful place in the world”.[2] This is a need for a new discovery as well as a new form of social being, one which flows from the past but is not likely to be found ‘whole’ as it were, in that past. So it is an event and process which is only part discovery, the other key part is ‘creation’. The creation of a new form of social being.

Berger’s historical outline offers us insights into what this new form of being-in-the-world might be, as well as, what it should not be. For Berger’s account is as much the history of all the false discoveries, the dead-ends of being, perhaps better described as the stories of non-being, with illusions and delusions based on ignorance and prejudice.

So our task here is to recover the path of being which was made possible by Contact but not always taken after Contact: a vision of being perhaps best manifest in the Medicine Wheel which I will consider as bearing within itself (as within the womb of Mother Earth) a vision of Contact and the path of being not taken. In Canada, the path not taken has a number of crucial turning points: the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Treaty of Niagara of 1764, the War of 1812, and Confederation, each of which we will note in passing.

Being, Non-Being, Rationality & Irrationality

In his introduction Berger identifies some key points. He says, assuming our (European’s) goal was not “extermination”, then it was “assimilation”. The goal was to recreate a form of social being where there would no longer be Indians, Indian languages, no Indian view of the world, no Indian communities, nor Indian land.[3] Indians would pass from being into non-being. He then goes on to ask a fundamental question which runs as a plea throughout the book: “By what right did we take their land and subjugate them?” It is a recurring call for “reasons” that afford justification and justice for taking possession of the New World.[4]

The question of the goal (extermination or assimilation) and the justification (reasons) are interdependent. For an essential part of the justification was that European societies were more advanced (rational) and thus had rights (to domination) which Indians and Indian societies did not.[5] So interdependent are they, that if the rationality of the justification fails, then the justification fails and we are left with a very different story of what happened in the course of the last 500 years. Rather than the story of Reason and Progress, we have the story of Unreason and Violation.

So we need to be alert to the symptoms of non-being (deception, ignorance and illusion) at the heart of the story about the claims about social being that occur after Contact. The story of Reason and Progress needs to be heard with a critical ear alert to the stratagems and tactics of lies and deception. It is just this critical ear that Berger brings to the story of Contact and its aftermath. As Berger notes, at the end of his introduction, “Indians have waged—and are waging today—a battle to survive as a distinct peoples…”[6] Survival is a word that clearly introduces the question of being versus non-being. So the crucial question for us is: what form will being take in our time?

Las Casas & Valladolid 1550

Berger devotes a couple of chapters to Las Casas and the process of rights and justifications which occur in the early post-Contact period. The central focus is the rights and justification regarding “subjugation”. Berger suggests that the role of Spain in the New World should be seen as an extension of the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. As such, it could be seen to be an extension of the military adventure understood in terms drawn from that conflict as a conflict between Christianity and Muslim infidels (non-believers.)[7]

As Berger indicates, the “conquistadores came to the New World in the name of the King but also in the name of Jesus.” In sixteenth century Europe, Church and State formed an interdependent bond of ambitions: gold and souls. It was the Church, through such protocols as the “Requerimiento” (the test of fidelity), which provided the reason or justification for stately ambitions: material conquest. A choice was presented to Indians: slavery or death.[8] Slavery in the form of the “encomienda”, a system of forced labour, represented the material goals of the State: exploiting the material wealth of the New World. The primary role of the Church was to provide the ideological veil of justification, the role of alleged Reason and Faith combined in exploiting the New World for gold and souls.

It was against this system of slavery and death in the name of Jesus which Las Casas, the cleric, protested as a system that was “unjust and tyrannical”.[9] This protest created a conflict of being between the material and the spiritual. The goal of material wealth came into conflict with the rationality of the moral justification. The king (Charles of Spain) was forced to choose. From the West Indies, to Mexico, to Peru, the same system prevailed with the same fundamental terms of conflict: slavery or death, exploitative levels of material wealth, and Christian moral justification.

It is these conflicts which come to a head in the debate at Valladolid in 1550, for if the State could not justify the right to domination, then the wealth, land and system of servitude developed in the New World would fall outside the legal and moral system of the day. The King’s moral and legal right to lands, wealth and relations of domination depended upon the Christian-grounded character of his undertakings. If the case could not be made then, as Berger points out, Las Casas’ advocacy of Indian land claims and Indian sovereignty would nullify the European State’s rights in the New World.[10]

Kings, Colonists & Native Peoples

The Spanish king had attempted, through the New Laws in 1542, to dismantle the encomienda (system of forced labour). However, Berger notes, “the king was virtually powerless to enforce his will on the now numerous Spanish colonists.”[11] In effect, Spanish settlers and colonists had come to represent a semi-autonomous economic and political force setup between opposing interests in the New and Old Worlds.

Thus, to understand the dynamic in the post-Contact era, we need to see not simply two centres of interest: European states and Indigenous societies. But rather, we need to see three centres of interest and two points of Contact: Indigenous societies, colonial setters and Old World states. Berger’s discussion of the dynamic around the regime of the New Laws makes this clear.

The goal of the New Laws, rooted in the Old World Christian ideology of statehood, was “designed to protect the Indians” while also serving as a “means of enlarging royal authority, to check the power of the conquistadores.” Faced with the threat of colonial rebellion and losing “profitable possessions”, the European Christian state backed down and chose instead the path of moral and legal contradiction, of non-being, in favour of “a regime of gold and greed, silver and serfdom.”[12]

Economies of Domination & Deception

It is at the juxtaposition of the economic and the moral and legal, that the paths of being and non-being pursue their jagged itineraries. As Berger summarizes, the economic model in the New World in the form of the encomienda was a model of lord and serf, wealth and poverty,[13] we might say of Progress and Degradation. It is these contradictions in European culture and society which came to a head at Valladolid in 1550. At the heart of the conflict, I will argue, was the intelligibility of European culture and society, which was put upon a moral and legal stage. Would Europeans choose an intelligible path of reason and being (truth and justice) or an unintelligible path of irrationality and non-being (illusion and self-deception.)

The debate at Valladolid pits Las Casas versus Sepúlveda, the latter arguing for the legitimacy of the system of domination by Europeans in the New World. The argument for domination was based on Aristotelian grounds of a natural order of superiority-inferiority, of lords and slaves. The Indians are by nature and natural law, barbarians, “retarded in their development”, thus, “their subjection did no injustice to them.” Berger notes, this notion of comparative under-development might apply to the West Indies but not the great cities of the Aztecs and Incas.[14] Thus, moral justification would be built upon mis-representation and deception, upon non-being, to validate the path of being (economic, political and cultural) which the Europeans sought to create in the New World.

Christianity & Technology

As Berger goes on to point out, European superiority turned as much on technology as it did upon Christianity. Sepúlveda argued that the “blessings” which Europeans brought to the New World (iron, farming, writing, culture, laws) were both material and spiritual, and together more than justified what was taken (gold and silver.)[15] The merger of technological development with spiritual development as the basis of justification for European domination is explicit in Sepúlveda’s arguments.

“Sepúlveda’s hierarchical idea of man was derived from Aristotle, Las Casas’s idea of the equality of man from Christ.” Berger notes that the terms of the debate, technological progress, minus the appeal to Christian principles, was largely still in operation when he participated in the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (1974–77).[16]

However, I would be inclined to suggest that the appeal to Christian principles remains implicit, if not stated explicitly in the appeal to technological progress as a moral justification for the relationship of domination vis-a-vis European-based colonial societies and Indigenous societies. As Berger says, “Native people are not simply a rural proletariat, nor just another ethnic minority. Neither can we explain their resistance, their refusal to assimilate.” Indigenous peoples and Indigenous rights can not be intelligibly recognized, understood, or explained by the representations European settler societies have constructed to perceive and justify their relationship of domination. As a result, Berger notes, “We cannot do justice to the Native peoples unless we are prepared to acknowledge the cruelty, compromise and indifference that disfigure the history of the New World.”[17]

Colonialism & Non-Being

This takes us to the heart of our point about being and non-being. The disfigured representations and self-deceptions of truth and justice are the cultural path of non-being settler societies have chosen in order to rationalize relations of domination. The internalization of these disfigurements has led to, I will claim but not argue here, the moral psychosis that disfigures cultural mentalities of colonialism. Colonialism is a mental and moral illness.

The contemporary site of this conflict of being and non-being, I will suggest is found, where Berger points us, in the ideological nexus of economic and political interests implicit and explicit within the concept of “technological progress”. The term “technology” carries within it all the material references with which the dominant society perceives and identifies itself. The term “progress” carries within it all the old Christian values minus the accoutrements of regalia, chiming bells and incense.

In order to understand this nexus as the nexus of conflicting paths of being and non-being, we will need to follow how the Christian ideology of moral progress remains inherent as the justification for domination within the ideology of technological progress, so very much the hegemonic paradigm in contemporary globalization.

Disease, from smallpox to alcoholism, disrupted Indigenous societies.[18] However, the economic models establish by Europeans in the New World significantly contributed to this disruption. In Mexico and South America the Spaniards utilized the forced labour of the settled Indian populations, rather than outright slavery, to extract rich metals from Indigenous territories. However, the plantation economies of the Atlantic lowlands had two requirements, which Berger notes: clearing the land of its traditional inhabitants and a new form of labour—slavery.[19] Berger notes that slavery was “deeply rooted” in Mediterranean societies. While enemies captured in a “just war” could be enslaved, in the New World Europeans went further, “Europe had created an international market in which human beings were bought, sold and transported in bulk.”[20] Once again, Europeans faced a dilemma of justification, a moral dilemma about their economic business models.

Forced Labour, Slavery & Fur Traders

The New World business models thus varied between: i) forced Indigenous labour, ii) enslaved Indigenous labour, iii) imported exogenous (African) slaves, iv) exogenous colonial settlers.

As with Las Casas, Jesuits in the late 1500s attempted to advocate in the Portuguese court on behalf of the Brazilian Indians against the atrocities subjected upon them by plantation settlers who characterized the Indians as “barbarians”.[21] “Like Charles V of Spain, the kings of Portugal found that their unruly colonial subjects would not submit to laws that impeded their exploitation of Indian labour by force.”[22] In the Carolinas, the English colonies depended upon Indian slavery. However, by contrast the fur trade emerged based upon “a commercial relationship wherein the Europeans and the Indians were in effect partners…in Canada, a nation was to be built on it.”[23] As Berger notes, what was peculiar about Indian slavery in the Carolinas, it was not simply a source of plantation labour, but an export economy feeding slave economies overseas.[24]

Thus to our above summary of business models we need to add: v) an export market in Indigenous slaves, and ii) economic partnerships between Indigenous peoples, colonists and European states.

However, as Berger notes, the English, being Protestants, were under no obligation to Christianize the Indians. The English colonists were entrepreneurs with primarily economic purposes. Nevertheless, as Berger points out, “If the English were animated by an idea, it was the idea of progress, which was realized by the pioneer’s relentless movement across the Atlantic and across North America. Commanded by God to subdue the earth, the English and then the Americans believed they had a mandate to conquer the wilderness.”[25] This idea of economic and material progress, I argue, incorporated Christian themes, as much as those ideas that animated the Spanish, Portuguese and French Catholics.

Let’s quote Berger at length here:

…for the colonists, Indians and their works did not qualify as human…the Indians living in the midst of the wilderness had to be subdued along with it. To the English the Indians were proof of man’s ascent from savagery to civilization…Insofar as he was savage, he was morally and intellectually deformed. As a consequence, the Indians were not truly human.[26]

Berger goes on to summarize European relations with Indians in the Americas in 3 ways: the encomienda system (forced labour), the fur trade, and slavery. Each has evolved into separate contemporary strategies. The descendants of Indigenous fur traders seek to secure land, fishing and hunting rights in the courts. From Mexico to Chile, Indians seek agrarian reform legislation to restructure the land base deformed by the encomienda system. However, in the Atlantic seaboard where Indian slavery prevailed that “killed, absorbed or expelled” the Indians, they are “for the most part silent.”[27]

Treaties & Allies

In North America, the English and French sought Indian allies in their wars with each other. Initially Europeans sought only fur trading and not settlement in what became Canada. There was little desire for Indian land or labour, only fur trading business partners.[28] “The Iroquois language was the language of diplomacy among Indians along much of the English colonial frontier.” Communal ownership of property was the norm among the Iroquois as was typical of North American Indian tribes. Poverty was shared as was wealth.

Unlike the Aztecs, the Iroquois did not have a centralized empire. Rather, vast kinship groups, structured along matrilineal lines, formed the basis of the Iroquois political system. Unlike the Aztecs or Incas, the Iroquois had nothing resembling the European state, no authority similar to monarchs and central authorities found in Europe. There was nothing which corresponded to the relationship between the “state and subject.”

In 1701, the Iroquois signed treaties with the English and the French to preserve their own sovereignty. The covenant chain formed the basis of alliance, not of dependency.[29]

The Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War by Americans) saw the French-Indian alliance sustain itself versus the English and Americans in the interior. However, the English navy controlled the flow of supplies across the Atlantic and France’s empire in North America was lost. The result was the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which sought to avoid conflict between Indians and settlers by establishing a Proclamation Line (Appalachian mountains) blocking westward advancement by settlers.

Along with the Quebec Act of 1774 which asserted the same restriction, the Proclamation formed a significant cause of the American War of Independence. Although the British would attempt to set up an Indian buffer state in the peace of 1783 (and again at the end of the War of 1812), the American settler colony would have none of it. The betrayal of its Indian allies by the British in 1783 and in 1814 marked significant turning points in the relationship between Indians and the British in what would become Canada.[30]

With the fur trade and the military significance of Indian alliances in decline after the War of 1812, the settler need for land became the defining factor in Indian-settler relations. Getting land and assimilating Indians became the dominant aspiration of settler society and colonial governments. Indigenous communities often divided internally between preserving tradition and accommodating contemporary circumstances.[31] In other words, assimilation meant more being (social, economic, cultural) for us (settlers), more non-being for them (Indians).

Marshall & Discovery

As Berger points out, John Marshall was the “greatest judge of the new nation forged in the War of Independence”, whose judgements provide the legal concepts of Indian title to ancestral lands and Indian sovereignty which are still with us today. He stands as the pivot point, picking up where the debate of Valladolid left off, and passing his judgements on to the present “regarding the place of Indians in the political and legal order in the New World.” As such, we are back to the questions of justification and imperial claims in the New World. Many reasons had been given for imperialism up to Marshall: progress, Christianity, inferior Indian cultures, just war, or settler occupancy. Marshall’s judgements represent “the most compelling attempt, in the post-colonial era” to rationalize the U.S. occupation of Indian land.[32]

In the United States, the idea of an Indian state “persisted for a century” to deal with relations between Indian Country and the federated United States. In 1783 Congress sought to mimic the Royal Proclamation and protect Indian Country from avaricious settlers. However, settlers simply ignored such legal restrictions and continued to encroach on Indian lands. “A pattern had emerged: encroachment by White settlers on Indian lands, failed attempts by the federal government to impose order, further concessions by the Indians, guarantees for the Indians, and then the repetition of the whole process.” It is worth noting the similarity and continuity of moral and material conflicts with the earlier period of Spanish colonialism and Las Casas.

What becomes clear is that local settler interests remained hostile to Native sovereignty and Native land tenure. “Virtually every president who came after Washington sought— or pretended to seek—federal authority to protect the rights of the Indians, yet each of them surrendered to the settlers’ rampant desire for Indian land.”[33]

It is here that Marshall enters the story, attempting to legally explain “the relationship between American sovereignty and Indian self-government and between American dominion over the land and Indian title.” He acknowledged “the legitimacy of Native sovereignty, Native institutions and Native title to the land”. And that they retained a “legal interest” in their lands, known as Aboriginal or Indian title. The American constitution also embraced the concept of natural law beyond state legislated law, and with that came the notion of the relationship between property and freedom. “Property made a man independent both economically and politically.” And yet, Indians and their relationship to the land were seen as an obstacle to economic development, civilization and progress, and thus, had to be removed.[34] Of course, again for an advanced rational and just society, this removal required explicit justification.

Into this legal realm of contested sovereignty, Marshall invokes the “principle of discovery” which gave Europeans “sovereignty over the indigenous peoples of America and dominion over the land.” However, the “assumption of sovereignty by the United States did not extinguish Indian title nor deny tribal sovereignty”, although they were “necessarily diminished”.[35] In response to criticism regarding the case of the Cherokee Nation and the United States, Marshall developed a theory of Indian tribes as “domestic, dependent nations.” Marshall goes on to say “Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”[36] Returning later to this conflicted discussion between American sovereignty and Indian title, Marshall argued that Indians are nations with rights to land and a measure of self-government based on their distinct and original existence that is not extinguished.[37]

Legal Domination & Reservations

Despite Marshall’s efforts, colonial settler societies continued to attempt to justify legal domination. As Berger goes on to say: “We believe in a linear idea of progress, the movement of humankind through stages…Europe represents an advanced stage of development, the Indians a primitive stage.”[38] This is, of course, simply a notion of hierarchy as evolving over time—progress. Like getting to heaven by travelling the echelons of the Christian hierarchies across time.

However, we might ask, how is it that this higher stage society has so much difficulty coming up with an intelligible description and explanation of the justification for its self-identity? The twisted knot that is the legal doctrine of discovery, appears to build the claim to superior rationality upon a near-irrational foundation. What is going on here? The conflict of reason and desire? The dominant society wants land and domination, but can not produce a coherent account of its own self-justification, even though its claim to rationality is part of its claim to rightful domination. Perhaps we should conclude the obvious, the dominant society is not as advanced, is not the embodiment of progress, that it claims to be. Self-deception and delusion are the expression of non-being at the heart of this claim to being-in-reality.

The next stage of settler encroachment on Indian lands would take the form of reservations—a much diminished land base of self-government. An era of Indian wars ensued from the 1850s through to the 1870s in the United States. The massacre at Wounded Knee in 1896 was largely a footnote. However, the legal concept of the reservation and Indian self-government has persisted.

At this point, Berger notes a number of characteristics of the native view of their relationship to their land. It is inalienable. It is held in common by all members in a perpetual political community which passes from generation to generation. By contrast, Europeans believe land is alienable, “a commodity to be bought and sold”. Inalienability would undermine land’s “profitable use”.[39] As a result, the United States developed the “allotment” system which broke up tribal lands into individual parcels of private property in an effort to destroy tribal ownership and governance.[40]

In addition the United States developed boarding schools to assimilate the people along with the assimilation of land. Similar developments occurred in Canada. “Through all of these stages—removal, reservations, allotment and assimilation—the constitutional position of the Indian remained unchanged.” However, as Berger notes, in the U.S. the reality of Indian sovereign government was much diminished.[41]

In summary of this period, Berger says, “It was the idea of progress in the form of individual ownership of land, of the destiny of the White landowner to acquire Indians’ land that excluded any notion of Indian forms of land tenure.”[42] Berger notes that both right and left ideologues seek to suppress indigenous land tenure arrangements, either by division into private holdings or assimilation to the state.

In this context, Berger considers whether common property may be the “best way to manage certain resources”.[43] He notes that the continued existence of the Indians in Latin America is a reminder to elites and oligarchies of their “counterfeit culture”.[44] These military oligarchic regimes have made war on Indigenous communities and allied themselves with large North American mining and petroleum companies. Again, as a counterfeit culture they signify the non-being of deception and fraud at the heart of these regimes.

Subsistence vs Modernity

“Subsistence is considered to be the antithesis of modernity.”[45] Industrial societies see subsistence as an obstacle to growth and development. However, the changes brought about by science and technology are now seen to entail risks and costs in the form of social, economic and environmental effects. Berger considers this to be especially true for subsistence communities in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

The conflict with large-scale industrial projects by subsistence economies is typically addressed as an issue of the latter undermining wage employment opportunities.[46] However, Berger notes, from his experience on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, that Indigenous Peoples do not oppose industrial development, but they are opposed to its destruction of their subsistence economies and they seek governmental powers to protect them. He quotes an Tlingit villager: “Sovereignty derives from the people.”[47] Berger concludes “Culture must have a material basis” and thus self-determination which depends upon subsistence culture requires urgent attention in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.[48]

Berger finishes by considering the legal context in Canada where treaty-making was the legal norm in British North America based upon the policy enshrined in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. He notes the dynamic of its application in nineteen century British Columbia. The governor, James Douglas, sought to compensate Indians for access to land gained through treaty-making. However, the Colonial Office in London refused to provide the funds, and local settlers, while initially acknowledging aboriginal title, refused to pay and “began to insist there was no such thing as aboriginal title and no obligation to compensate Indians for their lands.”

After 1871, when British Columbia joined Confederation, “the dispute over Indian title and Indian reserves became a continuing source of acrimony between Ottawa and British Columbia.[49]” Berger notes that under John A MacDonald “the federal government became less and less willing to intervene in provincial affairs to protect the rights of the Indians.”[50]

The above example helps us break out the centres of interest that make up the dynamic of colonial relations after Confederation. Pre-Confederation, the main players were the home office government in England, the local settler colonial interests and finally the Indians. Post-Confederation, we add the federation of colonial interests. Now Indigenous peoples must deal with local settlers, provincial governments, the Confederation federal government and the home office in London, insofar as all these players have a stake in ‘Indians and lands reserved for Indians’.

However, Confederation, despite trying, can not outrun the legacies of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The legal status of aboriginal title, post-Confederation, is initially interpreted as “belonging to a world of the past.” In the Indian Act of 1927, it was made illegal to “raise funds for the purpose of pursuing any Indian land claim.” This prohibition was repealed in 1951. In 1967, the Nisga’a filed a lawsuit claiming Indian title had never been extinguished.[51] Provincial courts sided with British Columbia that aboriginal title had been extinguished pre-Confederation by the colony’s policy of granting land to settlers even though no mention was made of extinguishment.

As Berger points out, the crux of the problem is the view that “Native culture cannot be viable in a contemporary context”.[52] In other words, because Native culture is perceived to be incompatible with modernity, the existence of modernity is enough to confer extinguishment in favour of the dominant society.

SCC & Aboriginal Title

When the Nisga’a took their appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1971, they technically lost, but in the process the Court acknowledged aboriginal title. Justice Judson asserted that when settlers arrived Indians were living in organized societies occupying traditional territory for generations.[53] Further, Justice Hall concluded that the Nisga’a had “their own concept of aboriginal title before the coming of Europeans and were entitled to assert it today.” He argued that “unless legislation evinced a clear and plain intention to extinguish Indian title, it could not be said to have been extinguished.”[54]

Finally, the Constitution 1982 contains a guarantee of Native rights by stating that “existing aboriginal rights and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.” The test of extinguishment for the courts is that the “Sovereign’s intention must be clear and plain if it is to extinguish an aboriginal right.”[55]

With this judgement and constitutional protection, the legal and moral balance between Indigenous societies and settler societies in Canada has been reset to something closer to the conditions at the time of Contact. However, the reality of that resetting will need to include a creative process of re-creating social being, preferably without the disfigurements and distortions of non-being in the form of deception, self-deception, ignorance and illusion. Furthermore, as Berger notes, “just because Native people use the technology of the dominant society, the fact does not mean…that they should be governed by European institutions alone.”[56]

Berger closes by reconsidering Las Casas’ questions about the right of one society to impose its laws and institutions upon another. Similarly, Berger asks “by what measures can we establish a fair and equitable relationship between dominant societies, cast in the European mould, and the Native peoples?”[57] In this context, Berger goes on to note that industrialized nations see the city as the “mirror of progress”, the result of pushing back the wilderness, cultivating the land, populating it with an industrial way of life.[58]

Tradition, Modernity & Rights?

This brings Berger back to the question of rights. In this contest or contact between modernity and indigenous societies, how are rights determined? Are there “human rights” which form the basis for both? Or is there simply the contest of rights with no common basis for adjudication? Is there a level of international law which provides a “fair accommodation with the Native peoples”? How will indigenous self-government be accommodated with colonial governments’ assertions of sovereignty? How will distinct Native societies and political communities live alongside settler societies, given Native loyalties to family, kinship group, tribe and first nations, loyalties which come “before their loyalty to the nation-state”?[59]

How will native forms of traditional decision-making by consensus, with their respect for elders, their extended families, their special relationship with the land and the environment, and their willingness to share, how will these values persist in contemporary society? How will this happen in a form that preserves Native culture, languages and economic modes of societal reproduction, that preserves the distinctness of Native societies while having “access to the social, economic and political institutions of the dominant society”?[60]

This brings us to the point where we began and Berger ends, the problem of discovery re-created in our own time—the problem of creation and re-creation, the problem of being which, I will simply suggest at this point without further elaboration, is the problem or story of being at the heart of the Medicine Wheel.

How do we continue to live inside the story of the hierarchical development of civilization that subjugates the lower ranks and destroys the non-human as the “just” struggle between being and non-being? How do we live inside a story of equality, which Las Casa saw in the story of Jesus, given the path that was actually taken and which Berger has outlined? Can we re-create the story and path of equality if our vision for which we quest is powerful enough. After all, since the time of Contact, the story of the Medicine Wheel was told for all to hear, if only all would listen. And, after all, everyone participates in the Medicine Wheel, and there, everyone’s social being shares a dynamic equivalence through time and space across life’s stages, seasons and directions.