Alce Nero parla - J.G. Neihardt

We just collectively removed - at least, I do not remember it being really taught during school - how native americans were essentially wiped out without even pretending that a reason existed. A whole culture was disintegrated over two generations, and how old was that culture?

It is horrible per se and it is horrible because these were human beings living closer to nature that Europeans were already back then. In this book Black Elk, now old, talks about the genocide through the tale of (part of) his life.

There are many things that I liked and found interesting, the book overall is worth reading. I understand that there is some controversy in the way the interviews were recorded.

Black Elk remarks at some point that while the colonists just go on and butcher all the bisons - to make place for themselves or just because they’re a nuisance -, the native tribes were just taking what they needed for nourishing themselves and trying to respect the balance of nature. This is the kind of thought one can expect to hear in western culture from a philosopher, but in this case it seemed embodied in the whole tribe. Are then humans not naturally greedy? How does such a thought grow to fill a whole society? Are these the true “natural” humans? There is a general “ranger” vibe, like in Eden.

I also liked how Black Elk disliked living in square houses. A home needs to be circular, is the argument, because that’s just the “natural religion”, also birds have circular nests, etc etc. We lived all our life in square homes - would one unexplainedly feel better living in a circular one just because of the hard-wiring?

How much could we have learned from what went lost? How much of it was more or less meaningless and growing from habitude, how much responded to primeval needs? How many of these unexpressed needs are we neglecting? It is hard to learn these things from scratch, also because the feedback loop is not that short. It’s not like - my knee hurts, let me move in a circular home, oh now I can walk again. If something like this exists, it is a net of weak correlations that must be allowed to coexist and grow over time. It takes a lot of time, and these cultures developed over generations, and then they were just wiped it out - first we forgot it and then killed those who still knew.