Songs of the Dead

by Derrick Jensen

  “The world of life has become a world of ‘no-life’; persons have become ‘nonpersons,’ a world of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; men are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass. But the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Man, in the name of progress, is transforming the world into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic). He pollutes the air, the water, the soil, the animals— and himself. He is doing this to a degree that has made it doubtful whether the earth will still be livable within a hundred years from now. He knows the facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical ‘progress’ and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. In earlier times men also sacrificed their children or war prisoners, but never before in history has man been willing to sacrifice all life to the Moloch—his own and that of all his descendants. It makes little difference whether he does it intentionally or not. If he had no knowledge of the possible danger, he might be acquitted from responsibility. But it is the necrophilous element in his character that prevents him from making use of the knowledge he has.”

  Earlier I asked who is in charge. I ask now, What is God so afraid of, that he must through his servants destroy all life on earth?

  thirteen

  confusion

  I’m at Wal-Mart. I’m supposed to buy something. I don’t remember what. I’m confused. Wal-Mart doesn’t normally confuse me so much as it infuriates and demoralizes me, but today I’m confused. Time is shifting quickly, jumping, not like before.

  I see a small man with dark hair, walking alone, wearing a red shirt with the slogan “Butt man.” The shirt has a five-by-five grid of stencils of people in different positions having anal intercourse. He’s carrying a case of diapers, a case of Sam’s cola, and a bag of Doritos.

  I see a woman wearing sweats, a “Jesus Saves” t-shirt, and a gold ring with a large diamond. The skin on her face is stretched. She has too few wrinkles for her age. Her hair is blond, her eyebrows dark.

  I see fantail guppies swimming back and forth in tiny tanks.

  I hear two different pop songs piped in to different parts of the store.

  And then I don’t see or hear any of this. I’m standing in an open ponderosa pine forest. The grass is sparse, dry, brittle. There are few bushes, lots of large orange-bellied pine trees. I smell vanilla. I hear a flicker call, then a woodpecker drum. I see a blue lizard on a rock.

  And then I don’t. I see an overweight father and mother and their three overweight children standing next to a cart filled with electronic equipment, dvds, peanut clusters, potato chips, more Sam’s cola, two rolled-up posters, and a handful of slender white paper bags of prescription medicines.

  And then I don’t. I see empty shelves, broken aquariums, pieces of paper and plastic, old feces, and the disarticulated skeleton of a rat.

  And then I don’t. I see a man, rail thin, speed thin, with long greasy hair, teeth rotted by crank. I see him carrying 2-cycle oil, the sort used in lawnmowers.

  And then I don’t. I see rubble. The sun is bright. The wall where moments ago I saw tanks of tropical fish has collapsed. Beyond, I see other buildings, some fallen in, some still standing, all with broken windows.

  And then I don’t. I see a forest. I see a man—obviously an Indian—walking quietly by. Of course he doesn’t see me. It’s cloudy, and the air is cold. I feel the first stinging spits of freezing rain.

  And then I don’t. I can’t move. I don’t know where or how to step. I don’t know if I’m perceived by the butt man or the woman without wrinkles. I’m guessing they didn’t notice me. I’m guessing they saw me no more than did the Indian or the meth addict or the red-shafted flicker.

  I continue to flip through time. Backward and forward. I see Indians making love. I see whites building houses. I see deer and elk and bears. I see stars at night, more stars than I’ve seen in my life. I see forests, I see fires, and then I see forests. And then I see the aisles of Wal-Mart, and I see people, and I see people, and I see people. I know I’m back where I started. I walk, at first carefully, and then with more confidence, out of the store and into the day.

  I don’t know what causes these dislocations, or what triggers them. I’ve tried to find patterns, but there are too many variables. I don’t know if I cause the dislocations or someone else does, or many someones, or no one at all. Does fatigue, hunger, restedness have anything to do with it? How about location? Do some places call me more strongly to fall through time? And if I do fall, what determines how far forward or back I see? Is it all chance? Or are there those beings who want me to see certain things?

  Not all of the dislocations are unpleasant. Some are beautiful. The salmon I see in Hangman—Latah—Creek. Of course the salmon make me cry, not only at their beauty, but at the sorrow of them no longer being there. I see the region as it was long before it was destroyed by our culture. And sometimes the dislocations are pleasant for other reasons. Several times over a few day period I walked into the bedroom and saw Allison and me making love. The first time felt slightly intrusive, but that night I asked Allison if she minded me watching, and she said of course not: she just wished she could get dislocated, too, and we could watch ourselves together. So the next couple of days I watched. Over the next few weeks I popped into the bedroom far more often than usual (I’d say fifteen or twenty times an afternoon is more than usual, wouldn’t you?) but it hasn’t happened again since.

  Damn.

  The dislocations don’t happen at regular intervals. Sometimes they happen many times in one day—for shorter or longer periods—and sometimes they don’t happen for weeks. I also can’t tell if they happen in clusters. I began graphing the occurrences, but I ran into the problem we run into with any set of even slightly complex relationships: how do you separate signal from noise?

  I realized, though, that I was facing an even deeper problem, which has to do with my reasons for wanting to separate signal from noise. In this case it was because I wanted to control these dislocations, when and where and how they occurred. I realized that instead of trying to figure this all out, maybe I should just experience it, and see what these experiences could or would teach me. Saying it like this, it seems so obvious to me, but the truth is that allowing myself to fall into experience—allowing myself to learn—is often much harder than I would like to think.

  Allison and I go for a picnic. For once, our story doesn’t include sex. We’re going to a public place, and though we make jokes— hinting in a restaurant, for example, that we’re going to sweep the dishes onto the floor so we can make better use of the table—the truth is that we’re both quite shy and modest, and would be mortified if someone else saw too much of our skin, and even moreso if someone else saw us doing anything. It’s one thing for me to watch us, and quite another for someone else.

  We’re going to where Latah Creek runs into the Spokane River, beneath the Interstate. In retrospect, it was stupid of me to suggest we go there. I should have known what I might see, what I might hear. But I—and I suspect this is true for many of us—have paid so little attention to the land where I live, and to the scars it carries, that I actually thought I could go and have a nice picnic with Allison. I did not mean to see a man die, and I certainly did not mean to see a people lose their land.

  We arrive. We park. We get out of the car. I hear a gunshot. I turn to Allison. She doesn’t stop reaching into the back seat for the paper bag of sandwiches.

  I hear another shot, and another. She doesn’t flinch at any of these.

  “It’s starting,” I say.

  “Do you want to sit?”

  “I’m okay.”

  And then I hear the boom of cannon. I’ve never heard cannon before, but I know this is the sound they make. I think I see smoke, but I’m not sure.

  And then nothing. Back to normal. I
grab the water from the car, and begin to walk away from the road, down a small road that has undergrowth on either side.

  I stop.

  Allison: “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say. And we walk.

  We get to a small ledge overlooking the river, perhaps ten feet up. The road ends here. We continue down a path to the river. I hope to see salmon, but I do not. For a few moments I don’t see anything unexpected.

  Then suddenly it begins. I see men running for the river, men riding horses painted with brown and red figures of animals. I see men with feathers in their hair and blood on their skin. I hear gunshots. I hear cannon-fire. I hear whoops, and I see men in blue uniforms riding horses, chasing these others. I see men jumping into the river, trying to cross. I see other men stopping on the banks to shoot at them. I see many of the fleeing men fall.

  “Allison,” I say.

  I want to go back to the car, but I can’t turn away. I hear bullets fly past. I wonder, Can these bullets hit me? If one hits me, will I die? I wonder, Can they hit Allison, even though she doesn’t see them?

  But then I stop thinking, because I see a man running toward me. He’s an Indian. He wears a white buckskin shirt and a tanned skin hat. He comes closer, and closer still. He doesn’t see me. I hear a shot, see a red rose appear on the breast of his shirt. He stumbles, rights himself, keeps running. Closer and closer he comes. The rose expands. He slows, sways, stands not a foot from me. He looks me in the eye. I cannot move.

  I say, “I—”

  The rose gets larger. He reaches with both hands, grabs my shoulders, says something to me in a language I don’t understand.

  I want to help him, but I don’t know what to do. I search his eyes as he searches mine. He falls. I watch him die at my feet.

  And then he’s gone.

  Finally I take a step back, turn to face Allison. There are no more gunshots, only the sounds of cars on the interstate. Without a word she comes to hold me. I start to cry.

  But I don’t learn my lesson. We try again, another picnic, another day. This time we drive east of Spokane, to the Idaho border. We stop, get out of the car. I don’t fall through time. We walk away from the road, find a nice spot near the river, put down a blanket, lay out the food: fried chicken, biscuits, and jojos. We bought the jojos, and Allison cooked the chicken and biscuits. They’re good. Had I cooked them, the chicken would have been dry, the biscuits tasteless and hard.

  After lunch we sit, Allison cross-legged watching ants in the grass, me leaning slightly back, legs extended. I’m looking far away, at nothing in particular.

  This time it begins with a smell.

  Have you ever smelled fear? I don’t mean anxiety or tension. I don’t even mean dread. I certainly don’t mean resignation, a smell too familiar to too many of us. I mean animal terror. That is what I smell.

  I hear gunshots. Many of them. The same sort of gun I heard at the mouth of Latah Creek. I stand. Out of the corners of my eyes I see Allison look up at me. I shake my head, begin to walk. She stands, follows.

  The smell gets stronger, mixing now with gunpowder, sweat, and the smell of horses. The sounds get stronger too: rifles, laughter, the whinnying of horses, and in my chest—not my ears—I hear the rumble of thousands of horse hooves pawing the ground.

  I walk toward the sound, around a bend in the river, Allison a couple of steps behind me and off to the side.

  And then I see before me a sea of horses, contained on one side by the river, on two sides by steep banks, and on the final side by a rope fence. They’re the Indians’ horses. Or they were. Men in blue surround the horses. Men in blue stand beyond the rope fence. Men in blue shout orders. Men in blue throw back their heads and laugh. Men in blue wade into the sea, clubbing the smaller horses and shooting the larger horses once in the head, just behind the ear. I look at one horse among the many hundreds, and I see the whites of her eyes as her child is killed, and then I see her fall, too. I hear another shot, and see another horse fall. And another. And another.

  I stop, stand, stagger, say, “I can’t. . . .”

  The dust below turns to mud, mixing soil, blood, piss, and shit. The slaughter continues. The men in blue laugh and laugh and laugh.

  Allison stands next to me, takes my hand.

  “What,” I say, ‘is wrong with these people?”

  I knew what I saw and I knew of course the larger cultural context in which what I’d seen took place—takes place—but I went to the library to learn the specifics. That first day I’d seen the end of what’s called the Battle of the Spokane Plains, where in September, 1858, a combined force of Spokane, Palouse, Yakima, and Coeur d’Alene Indians attempted to drive a column of U.S. soldiers commanded by a Colonel George Wright from the Indians’ land. It’s a story we’ve heard tens of thousands of times, in tens of thousands of places at the frontiers of this culture. It’s the story that the wétikos never seem to tire of realizing. It’s the story of wétikos encountering a people who’ve lived on a land—with a land—for as long as that people can remember, who’ve become a part of that land as it has become a part of them. Or maybe that’s not the story, since the non-wétikos do not exist, but are merely a barrier to the wétikos getting what they—we—want: a barrier to resource extraction, a barrier to the destruction of a piece of land, no different than thorns on a blackberry bush, no different than a snake who strikes at you before you cut off its head and sell its skin. It’s the story of the wétikos, the civilized, those suffering from—or, from their perspective, blessed with—the cannibal sickness, those driven to conquer, to fulfill their manifest destiny. And it’s the story of resistance by some members of the noninfected group, flight by others, the death of others, and the conversion or infection of still others.

  In this case, as in so many, the Indians won a few battles, but the wétikos kept coming, wave after wave, until, finally, in the Battle of the Spokane Plains, the Indians were routed.

  Soon, Indians came to speak with Colonel Wright, to tell him they wanted to fight no more. Colonel Wright responded, in words perfectly capturing the wétiko mentality of this entire culture, “I did not come into this country to ask you to make peace; I came here to fight. Now, when you are tired of the war, and ask for peace, I will tell you what you must do: You must come to me with your arms, and your women and children, and everything you have, and lay them at my feet; you must put your faith in me and trust to my mercy.” Sounds like God, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s because it is.

  Wright held one of the chiefs who had come to speak with him as his prisoner, and a few days later hanged him at sunset.

  Colonel Wright and his wétiko soldiers also captured—stole would be the less polite term—most of the Spokane Indians’ horses. Of course, from the beginning of civilization the wétikos have instituted scorched earth policies everywhere they’ve gone—and I mean scorched earth in its most literal as well as figurative senses—systematically ruining all foods, fouling all waters, wrecking everything they cannot carry off to sell, enslave, or destroy elsewhere. Wright called a meeting of his officers to determine what to do with the horses. One officer later wrote, “I told him I should not sleep so long as they remained alive, as I regarded them the main dependence and most prized of all the possessions of the Indians.” Wright and the rest of the officers evidently agreed with this logic, because they allowed themselves and other favored officers to “select a certain number” of horses, and they gave one or two to each of the “friendly Indians”—in other words, those already infected—who had fought beside them. The other horses they ordered killed. The same officer who would not sleep so long as these horses lived later wrote, “They were all sleek, glossy, and fat, and as I love a horse, I fancied I saw in their beautiful faces an appeal for mercy. Towards the last the soldiers appeared to exult in their bloody task; such is the ferocious character of men.”

  Or maybe such is the ferocious character of wétikos. The Indians had a different response. As I read in one
book I found in the library, “Indians who heard of these latest developments now had very good reason to keep a great distance away from Wright. Entering Wright’s camp clearly resulted in death.”

  This is the story we have heard so many times: encountering the wétikos clearly results in death.

  What are we going to do about the fact that civilization— the dominant culture, the cannibals, the wétikos, whatever— is killing the planet? I’ve written book after book describing this culture’s destructiveness—and certainly I’ve read hundreds more—and I still don’t understand it. I don’t understand the motivations for the destruction—as we already talked about, what’s the use of retiring rich on a planet being murdered, or more to the point, being rendered uninhabitable?—and I don’t understand its wantonness. I don’t understand the hatefulness on any level, from the most personal to the most global.

  Today I learned that a friend of a friend was recently raped by an acquaintance of hers, in the presence of others of their social group. Although she actively tried to fight the man off, other members of this group later tried to convince her she had brought it on, and she had enjoyed it. She told them she was going to press charges, and every one of these people suddenly changed stories: far from her precipitating the rape, it never happened at all. One called her home and left a message threatening her with (more) physical harm if she pursued this case. The man’s girlfriend has threatened her. Most of her friends are telling her not to ruin this man’s life. Her bosses—a couple who live next door to the rapist’s girlfriend—told her that if she pressed charges they would fire her.