This post is in response to starkravinglunaticradical's post to Cindy Sheehan entitled
"How Dare You, Cindy Sheehan"
Mitakuye Oyasin. This is a Lakota saying that literaly translated means "to all my relations" or "we are all related." To say "mitakuye oyasin" is to acknowledge, almost like a prayer, everyone and everything on Earth.
When the Lakota enter and exit the Inipi (sweat lodge), it is customary to say "Mitakuye Oyasin." It honors the sacredness of each person's individual spiritual path, acknowledges the sacredness of all life and creates an energy of awareness which strengthens not only the person who prays but the entire planet.
But beyond all this, the concept of "mitakuye oyasin" is at the core of walking what is known as the "Red Road". It is a simple way of acknowledging our common bonds.
So when I see starkravinglunaticradical get incensed with Cindy Sheehan because Cindy Sheehan used the term "trail of tears," I am saddened. I am saddened because starkraving is attempting to claim possession of the genocide of the Native Americans. But in reality, we are all related. The pain is all of ours. As such, the genocide of the Native Americans is mine too! I feel that pain. And it is Cindy Sheehan's. Certainly she can relate to the pain to some degree. We don't have to be of a certain bloodline to feel the pain felt by our brothers and sisters around the world who suffer from oppression. Mitakuye Oyasin. We are all related.
In speaking about the Jewish Holocaust, historian Howard Zinn righteously penned the following:
Fifteen years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War II, the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-eighties, and the U.S. government was supporting death squads in Central America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy.
My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be circled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated from other atrocities in history. To remember what happened to the six million Jews, I said, served no important purpose unless it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in the world.
Likewise, my brother, the genocide of the Native Americans should not be encircled and kept isolated from other atrocities in history. Zinn continues:
A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter from a faculty member who had heard me speak. He was a Jewish refugee who had left Europe for Argentina and then the United States. He objected strenuously to my extending the moral issue from Jews in Europe during the war to people in other parts of the world in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred memory, a unique event, he said. And he was outraged that, invited to speak on the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to speak about other matters.
.....
If the Holocaust is to have any meaning, we must transfer our anger to today's brutalities. We must respect the memory of the Jewish Holocaust by refusing to allow atrocities to take place now.
When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history and look away from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly what the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen.
.....
My point is not to diminish the experience of the Jewish Holocaust, but to enlarge upon it.
Likewise, if the genocide of the Native Americans is to have any meaning, we must transfer our anger to today's brutalities. We must respect the memory of the Indian Holocaust by refusing to allow atrocities to take place now.
That is precisely what Cindy Sheehan is doing. And I thank her for all she does.
Zinn concludes:
For others, whether Armenians or Native Americans or Africans or Bosnians, it means to use their own bloody histories not to set themselves against others but to create a larger solidarity against the holders of wealth and power, the perpetrators and collaborators of the ongoing horrors of our time.