On Feb 11 of this year two groups of American Indians left San Francisco on foot with Washington, DC in their sights. Five months and 2,700 miles later travelers of the Southern and Northern routes will walk into the town where their collective fate is kept. If you know anything about the relationship between native people and the government of this country, you’ll expect the walkers to be greeted with a smile and a handshake from a distracted presidential appointee and briskly shown the door. Indians. They’re so . . . irrelevant.

Until very recently they haven’t had much money (the vast majority still don’t) or formed a significant voting block. By the time they got the vote in 1948, most of them had been rubbed out. Their main lobbying group, the National Congress of American Indians, can’t hold a candle to the American Chamber of Commerce, Northrop Grumman, or the Jewish Defense League. A lot of Indians speak with an accent and there are even those who don’t use English much at all. But that doesn’t stop them from complaining.

In fact, it’s their embarrassing lack of American values that will render them invisible in the eyes of the nation at the completion of Longest Walk Two on July 11, thirty years after a similar trek was officially ignored by President Jimmy Carter. Over and above their lack of political power, Indians are ignored by America because they know too much.

First, the Indians know smiling faces tell lies. Since the dawn of relations with European colonizers, gifts and flowery words of friendship have consistently ended with the same results: broken promises and concessions by the original landlords, usually accompanied by deadly force. While native North American tribes did engage in warfare, imprisoning whole populations in areas considered by the aggressors to be of no economic value was a unique Euro-American tool to enable the plundering of liberated lands (now regarded as “real estate,” “holdings,” or “property”). Likewise, the insistence on establishing the appearance of legitimacy through “signed treaties” was the peculiar invention of the whites. A current example of the “smiling faces” principle is the “official apology” now being extended to the marchers by the U. S. Senate in a vain effort to turn them back before they cause a fuss in Fort Washington.

Very soon the natives discovered the next big secret – the U.S. government was (and is) the organizing instrument of an insatiable need for more: more agricultural land, more living space, more minerals, more water, more trees, more oil, more gas. Hitler’s equivalent for “Manifest Destiny” was “Lebensraum” (source Wikipedia.org).

The stated criteria for peace with the white man were demonstrated to be false. Despite dutifully converting from economic, political, linguistic, and even religious systems that had served them (and the land) well for untold centuries, the Cherokee were in the end rounded up at bayonet point and forced onto reservations like all the other tribes. Since 1776, American Indians have served in the U.S. military at the highest per capita of any ethnic group in the country, yet were not granted the right to vote until 1948.

The Indians know the characters change but the process continues. Since the beginning of the Cobell vs. (Interior Secretary Gale) Norton class-action case in 2002 the Federal Government consistently admitted their own mismanagement of trust funds held on behalf of generations of individual Indian people, even as it stonewalled the court with endless stalling tactics. Collective and ongoing losses to Indian people are estimated to be between 10 and 58 billion dollars. Now as the day of court reckoning nears, Interior has released a glossy new brochure proclaiming the funds were adequately managed after all.

But the worst-kept secrets in the eyes of people indigenous to this continent are the conquerors’ anguished relationship with the natural world and the comparatively brief arc of their civilization. Since arriving on Turtle Island their way of relating to nature has been to steal, alter, sell, and destroy; to fear and seemingly to hate, that which nurtured them. Was this because their ancestors did not reside here, or their god told them there was a better place, or because they believed their technology freed them from their responsibilities to the living earth?

On July 11 the Long Walkers will threaten Washington not with guns but with personal testimony of their visits to troubled places along their path: poisoned waters, leveled forests, Superfund sites, vanishing species, and of course, memorials to massacre. The conversion of sacred land into sacrificial areas will weight heavy in their hearts, on their lips, and in the words of the manifesto they are preparing as they go. It remains to be seen whether they will be noticed by anyone other than those in distant countries.

The progress of Longest Walk Two can be followed at www.sacredrun.org. Dave Wheelock, davewheelock (all one word) at yahoo.com, is a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin who lives in Socorro. Mr. Wheelock's views do not necessarily represent those of Socorro News, but frequently do.

Copyright 2008, Dave Wheelock; all rights reserved.