“To me, it’s really an issue of how we recognize ourselves.”
In honor of Earth Month, Sprouts, on April 9, offered an encore presentation of Earth Riot Radio entitled “A Child from the Future.”
The program opens with Reverend Billy’s call for a baby to be saved. We then hear from activist John Trudell about how, through the power of human intelligence–our gift from nature– that rescue might actually be possible.
John Trudell’s comments are excerpted with permission from a 2005 interview for the 11th Hour with Layla Conners.
The introduction to that interview provides this biographical information:
John Trudell was a Native American author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz. During most of the 1970s, he served as the chairman of the American Indian Movement, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
After his pregnant wife, three children and mother-in-law were killed in 1979 in a suspicious fire at the home of his parents-in-law on the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada, Trudell turned to writing, music and film as a second career. He acted in films in the 1990s. The documentary Trudell (2005) was made about him and his life as an activist and artist.
These comments have been lightly edited.
John Trudell
I’m not going to call it deprogram ourselves. To me, it’s really an issue of how do we recognize ourselves. We need to recognize that we’re human beings and [that] our connection to the reality of power is in that identity, human, [in] our bone, flesh and blood, our DNA.
We’re literally made up of the metals, minerals and liquids of the Earth. We’re shaped [by], we’re part of the Earth. We’re shapes of the Earth, like everything of the earth.
And we have being. Our being, our spirit, comes from our relationship to the sun, sky, universe. Sunlight is literally the sperm that brings life to the water-bearing womb [that] is the earth. Our being is connected to that.
And all things of the earth have being because we’re all made of the same stuff, just arranged differently. [We all] have the same relationship as sun, sky, universe. The reality of our relationship to power and purpose, so to speak, is in that identity.
Now, how do we recognize and get back to that identity? I don’t have a specific answer, but the closest I can say is that a part of recognizing ourselves is to recognize our intelligence, [to] understand the value of our intelligence, because, as human beings, our ability to access the reality of our power is through clear and coherent use of our intelligence. Our intelligence is the portal we manifest; and access to our relationship into the reality of power as humans is through the use of our intelligence,
But we’ve been imprinted and programmed. We’re now, in the evolution of human beings, in a period of time in this industrial, technologic world where the majority of the [us] participate in this reality based upon fears and doubts and insecurities, so through the perception of [our] inabilities. All that was imprinted in there to make us not recognize ourselves.
[Consider–], to understand and recognize the power of our intelligence, [we] say to our fears and our doubts and our insecurities ‘how bad can we make ourselves feel’ and how that affects the people around us. Well, that’;s power. That’s our power. That’s a manifestation of our personal power. But we’ve been imprinted to use it in this kind of a way.
We do have power. It’s in how we recognize it and choose to direct it and use it. So I would say the first step through this is to recognize the value and the power of our intelligence. I think that any person or people that would be concerned about saving the Earth and saving creation [must] have this type of an awareness, I think a necessary component is to give thanks to their Creator–however one perceives that Creator. Give thanks to the Creator, number one for life, and number two for the gift of intelligence, to show respect for this, maybe because we need to show respect to our intelligence and maybe [because] it’s a part of our thanks that we give on a daily basis in a ritualistic way.
