A Language Older Than Words (8 page)

Had the dart landed a little higher, we would have been in Australia, where between 1790 and 1920 the population of Aborigines fell from 750,000 at the first arrival of Europeans to 70,000 some hundred and thirty years later. We would read in
scientific journals the reason for this decline: "the races who rest content in . . . placid sensuality and unprogressive decrepitude, can hardly hope to contend permanently in the great struggle for existence with the noblest division of the human species. . . . The survival of the fittest means that might—wisely used—is right. And thus we invoke and remorselessly fulfill the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the inferior Australian." We would read reports of settlers burying live Aboriginal infants up to their necks, then forcing parents to watch as contests were held to see who could kick an infant s head the farthest.

And then we would pass on, back to our lives, back to watching
our televisions, back to listening to our music, back to this book, and we would say, "I did not do this. This was not my doing."

I throw the dart again, again, again. Each time a thousand horrors. Each time enslavement, rape, murder, genocide. The dart strikes Africa, where somewhere between thirty and sixty million people (who, according to those responsible were "bestial and sordid," and "the very reverse of human kind," and who would each have otherwise "idly spent the years of a useless, restive life") died after having been captured for the slave trade. Another twelve to fifteen million survived to spend the rest of their lives working the plantations and mines of the New World. The dart strikes New Zealand, where "taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race." The dart strikes Hawai'i, where a missionary stated that a ninety percent reduction in the population was like "the amputation of diseased members of the body."

The dart strikes my home. I live about a mile from Hangman Valley, near Spokane, Washington, and thrice that far from Fort George Wright Drive, one of the city's arteries. Prior to Colonel Wright's tenure in this city, Hangman Valley and the creek that runs through it were known as Latah, which means in the native
tongue
stream where little fish are caught.
At the time, 1858, whites
had not been able to bring all of the region's Indians to terms. Then Wright had an idea. Under a flag of truce he called the Yakama warrior Qualchan and his wife to Wright's residence, telling them he was going to proffer a peace treaty. Having already put Qualchan's father in chains, Wright arrested Qualchan, led
him directly to a tree and with Qualchan's wife as witness hanged him. As Wright noted in his report to headquarters: "Qual-chew came to me at 9 o'clock this morning, and at 9 1/4 a.m. he was hung." The next day Wright similarly hanged six Palouse Indians. He was a hero.

Four years ago a group of students tried to change the name of Fort George Wright Drive to Qualchan. The citizens of Spokane, those who cared at all, were outraged, and a political cartoonist—my next-door neighbor—drew a cartoon with two frames. On the right, a bunch of hippies with cigarettes and beads, captioned "Wrong." On the left, a drawing of the Colonel, captioned "Wright." The road, which I drive often, remains named in his honor.

I had a fairly hard time of it in school. It's not that my grades weren't good, for they were. Instead it's that the questions I cared about often seemed at odds with what I was being taught. When my teachers told me
how,
I wanted to know
why,
and when they gave me abstractions, I asked them to make the lessons real. Not that
how
isn't important, but I sensed even as a child—in a vague, entirely unarticulated fashion—that to ask
how
without asking
why
might be dangerous: only recently have I grown to name my earlier misgivings, and to know that such an imbalance causes nuclear bombs, nerve gas, napalm, and other examples of inexcusable technology. When teachers tired of my questions, which were for obvious reasons often childish, I would be sent to a room by myself with a book. I was supposed to learn the next year's math. But I taught myself snatches of whatever caught my fancy—one month it was a little Latin, another it was Egyptian Hieroglyphics 101, but often it was my favorite invented game; pitching erasers across the room onto bookshelves or into trash cans (bank shots: double score).

In junior high, I nearly failed Algebra on philosophical grounds. I was told, for example, that the quantity x minus y squared equals x squared minus 2xy plus y squared. Because the two sides are equal, I asked, why should I waste my time working with them? Frustrated, the teacher turned aside the question. Day after day I returned with the same question, and day after day she ignored it. Finally she came up with an answer that seems at this distance to characterize much of my early schooling. She said, "Because if you don't, I'll flunk you." I did the manipulations.

I did them well enough to pass through calculus in high school, and then I did what most people who finish calculus in high school do; which is to study science in college. I had learned by this time to keep my mouth shut, at least on occasion, and had even learned to quiet the inner voice always asking why. Still I gained enough of a reputation among my physics instructors to cause some to laugh good-naturedly each time I raised my hand, and say, "Let me guess: Derrick wants to know why we're doing this. He's going to ask how it applies to his own life." I would smile back, and they would tell me (when they could).

But I still didn't fit in. Although the stars had long since stopped speaking to me—as had trees, horses, birds, garter snakes, crawdads—or at least I had long since stopped listening, when I tried to dive into this brave new world of equations I couldn't fully do it. If the statement "Do this or I will flunk you" characterizes my formative schooling, a weekend assignment for an advanced physics class characterizes the later years.

The assignment, interesting enough on its own, was this: If you spin a coin on its edge atop a flat surface, it will follow a looping pattern of small and large circles. Given a host of initial conditions and simplifying assumptions, we were supposed to find an equation that would describe this path. I spent much of the weekend doing page after page of calculus, differential equations, and lots of old-fashioned algebra (Yes, Mrs. Glass, I eventually did learn my algebra), and finally arrived at an answer. The answer—an indecipherable mass of variables, constants, and integrals that covered the better half of a page—is as meaningless to me now as it was at the time. I see no hint of silver in those symbols, no relation to the sound of a coin as it spins, then slows, then collapses on the Formica with its metallic cicada chatter.

Although by that time I was for the most part inured to the abstract nature of much of what I was being taught, this time something snapped. Maybe the sun was shining that weekend, and
I watched it too much from the table where I worked, or I lost
too much sleep over the assignment. Perhaps the hours I spent
on this problem contrasted too sharply with the burgeoning awareness of my own mortality, and the knowledge that, whatever I may do with the rest of my life, the sun would never slan
t
exactly this same way through these same trees, never again would precisely this air course through my twenty-one-year-old
lungs. If I had possessed then the confidence and knowledge I have now—confidence in the validity of my own experience—I would have strode into class on Monday, pulled a coin out of my pocket, spun it on the teacher's desk, and said, "There's your answer."

Of course, if I then possessed the confidence and knowledge I have now, I probably would have flunked the class.

Most everyone I knew hated being at the Colorado School of Mines. Nearly all of us viewed it as a four- or five-year ordeal, something to be endured, like a mule endures the whip. A friend was fond of recalling that he first heard AC/DC's
Highway to Hell
while driving to register for classes. I'm certain the thought that college could be an enjoyable learning process never occurred to most of my peers: we merely wanted to survive it. This attitude was actively encouraged by many of the professors. I remember one class, a required part of everyone's sophomore core, that fully two-thirds of the 300 or so students each semester flunked or dropped. There was another class—quantum mechanics, an advanced physics elective no one in his (the student body was overwhelmingly male) right mind ever took—in which five of six students failed and the other received a "D."

There is only one reward that would cause so many people to endure such an unpleasant and extended trial: money—or rather the promise of money. Students and faculty alike were explicit about this. At the time, graduates from the Colorado School of Mines were virtually guaranteed high-paying jobs with major petroleum or mining transnationals. Headhunters for these corporations knew that Mines’' students, having survived these four (or more likely five) years, would have what it takes to thrive in the corporate world.

I differed from many of the students in two significant ways. The first is that until my parents divorced, my family had been wealthy, so I already had an intimate knowledge of the truism that money does not equal happiness: thus I did not have the same burning drive—"When I get out of here, the first thing I'm gonna do is get a red Porsche. And then a black Mustang"—as many of my fellow students.

The other difference, an advantage that in many ways counterbalanced the disadvantage of my dimmed enthusiasm for money, was the long, intimate practice of denying my feelings. If there was one thing I could do well—one area in which my confidence soared—it was in the ability to endure. I was at the time proud of, though also troubled by, my capacity to not show emotion.

I can remember a day in fifth grade, a bright blue January day in Montana, the sun so piercing you had to squint even to look at its reflection in the dulled metal of the monkey bars. Sitting here in front of this computer, twenty-six years and one month later, I can see the short grass of the football field bend in waves before the cold wind, and still feel that wind on my neck. I was standing alone that particular day, that particular recess, and I was crying—something I rarely did. It was something I was not to do again for many years, until I was a junior in high school and a puppy died in my arms. My tears that cold day were not from sorrow, something I dared not feel for fear the sorrow would never end, but instead the tears came from resolve. I had seen—I had felt—the damage that my father's anger could do. I had told my mother that I couldn't say "I love you" because those were words my father often repeated—like a mantra—after he beat someone. So I resolved that cold day in fifth grade to never again feel anger, to never again feel anything. I was well prepared for school.

The monotony of our culture's genocidal impulse extends not only across space, but also through time; the God of our culture has always been jealous, and whether going by the name of God the Father, Yahweh, Jesus Christ, Civilization, Capitalism, Science, Technology, Profit, or Progress, He has never been less than eager
to destroy all those He cannot control.

The
Old Testament seems at times little more than a glorification of this genocide. I open to Numbers, and read, "If thou Wilt Indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy
their cities." I turn a few pages and read again, "And the Lord our God delivered him [Sihon] before us; and we smote him,
and his sons, and all his people." A few pages later: "And when the
Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee: thou shalt smite them;
and
utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. ..." It never stops. Follow the rise of civilization, and necessarily you follow the outward
path of an expanding circle of death, from the destruction of the barbarians of northern Greece to the rape of the Sabines, from the eradication of Europe's indigenous peoples to the
enslavement of Africans, from the conquest of the New World to the
intentional introduction of syphilis to the Pacific Islands. The story is the same. The murder of men, women, and children. Think for a moment about the toddler shot in the aftermath of Sand Creek—"Let me try the son of a bitch. I can hit him." Multiply this child by a million, and place him in the once-forested
hills of the Middle East, the once-forested hills of northern Greece, the once-forested hills of north Africa, place him anywhere on the globe, and you will see him being murdered to serve
our God: "Some Christians encounter an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mother's arms and flung it still living to the dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mother's eyes."

One more example among millions: "At about 1:00 p.m., the soldiers began to fire at the women inside the small church. The majority did not die there, but were separated from their children, taken to their homes in groups, and killed, the majority apparently with machetes....

Then they returned to kill the children, whom they had left crying and screaming by themselves,without their mothers....
The soldiers cut open the children's stom
achs with knives or they grabbed the children's little legs and smashed their heads with heavy sticks." This last example occurred in the 1980s. Troops equipped and trained with United
States assistance took part in a systematic program that killed 10,000 people a year in Guatemala, and intentionally dispossessed more than 1,000,000 of that country's 4,000,000 Indians.

Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. Every day I tell myself I should continue to write. Yet I'm not always convinced I'm making the right decision. I've written books and I've been an activist. At the same time I know neither a lack of words nor a lack of activism kills salmon here in the Northwest. It is the presence of dams.