Leonard Peltier and the primal needs of Capital* (2004)

From Issue 19 of the World Socialist Review

In a remote section of South Dakota just north of Nebraska lies an Indian reservation known as Pine Ridge. At one time largely agricultural, it became hugely attractive to the U.S. government when it was discovered that beneath the Indian lands lay one of the largest uranium reserves in the United States. All through the years, treaties with the Indians had been consistently violated because of the major mineral reserves beneath the Indian territories.

When Pine Ridge became the focus of the United States government, the Indian residents were strongly opposed to uranium development on their turf. Bitterness grew as problems were exacerbated with the increasing threat of U.S. intervention. Turning to the American Indian Movement (AIM) for assistance led to military conflict with the FBI, which refused to listen to the complaints of the Indians. The struggle lasted 71 days, resulting in the deaths of two Pine Ridge natives and the outlawing of all activities at Pine Ridge.

During the following three years, now referred to as the “Reign of Terror,” violent assaults continued to take place in which vast numbers of Indians were murdered or maimed. With the government intent on destroying the AIM and thereby removing a major obstacle in their plans to exploit the uranium booty, homes were burned, shootings and beatings became rampant. So many native Americans were killed that Pine Ridge had the highest annual murder rate in the U.S. Again the AIM came to their assistance, and among those who responded was Leonard Peltier. The conflict led to three murder indictments including that of Leonard Peltier, accused of shooting two FBI agents. No evidence was ever introduced to support the accusation. Subsequently, Peltier escaped to Canada, convinced that he would never receive a fair trial in the U.S. Less than a year later, he was apprehended.

Myrtle Poor Bear was an Indian woman who had never met Leonard Peltier. Terrified under interrogation by the FBI, she testified against him. This terror-induced accusation led to the extradition of Peltier to the U.S. All of her incriminating statements were later withdrawn, and Myrtle Poor Bear confessed that her fear of the FBI had led her to make false statements. With the government determined to pin the guilt on Peltier and thus remove the bête noire from their uranium quest, her confessions were thrown aside and ignored.

Despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence, the trial was rigged against him with perjury and manufactured evidence. No witness was ever found who could identify Leonard as the man who shot and killed two FBI agents. Hundreds of thousands of pages of critical evidence pinpointing the unprovoked attack on Pine Ridge were withheld from the trial.

The events here described and the part played by Peltier were detailed in a book by Peter Matthieson, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. This revealing report was kept out of print for eight years, while the FBI sued the author and publisher for libel. Although the Supreme Court eventually denied the suit, the stunning evidence produced by the book was unavailable at the time of Leonard Peltier’s trial.

Today Pine Ridge has an 86 percent unemployment rate, the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. The government’s vindictiveness toward the Lakota people led to the ruin of innumerable lives. The ongoing penal servitude of Leonard Peltier at Leavenworth Prison is the direct consequence of the FBI’s unabated pressure to keep him confined.

Despite worldwide appeals from human-rights organizations, and the publicity given to the merits of his case, 500 FBI agents marched in Washington to oppose clemency for him. They continue to use their authority to thwart all efforts to obtain his freedom, now denied him for 28 years.

Leonard Peltier is not in prison for the murder of two FBI agents. Of that he is demonstrably not guilty. Leonard Peltier is in prison because he is a potential threat to governmental forces intent on exploiting the mineral resources that lie buried beneath In- dian territory. The facts of Leonard’s conviction are well known. Well known also is the bitter massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, which left an entire community devastated.** Terror-stricken families and ruined lives draw little compassion from those whose motives are purely profit-driven. They are “collateral damage.” The drive for profit under capitalism overrides all human considerations. Like the conflict in Iraq, the huge loss of lives and the obliteration of the infrastructures are a price worth paying for the control of huge oil reserves needed for the operation of the capitalist machine.

Such reports are not unique to America. All over the world human values are subordinated to the primal needs of capital.

Indeed, they scream out for a change from this power-driven, cash-oriented social system to one that emphasizes cooperation, and in which human values are the measure of all human action. They send a message to all who will listen that the world hungers for a society that will eliminate needless suffering and re- place it with opportunities for all human beings to lead fulfilling lives.

Mardon Cooper

* Sources: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Anthony Rayson (Prison Abolition), Matt Sherman (AIM) and Leonard Peltier (“Prison Writings”).

** The massacre at Wounded Knee took place on December 29, 1890. See, for example, http:// www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm. The siege at Wounded Knee, referred to above, began on February 27, 1973 and lasted 71 days.

Leonard Peltier has provided us with words that should resonate with those who share this vision:

The Message 

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
Just as doing nothing is an act. 

Let who you are ring out and resonate
in every word and every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There’s no sidestepping your own being
or your own responsibility. 

What you do is who you are.
You are your own comeuppance.
You become your own message. 

You are the message.

The McMasters (1971)

Film Review from the July 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The McMasters (Directed by Alf Kjellin.)

Benjie, a negro, returns after four years civil-warring on the side of the North to the ranch of his adopted father, McMaster in the deep south.

McMaster (Burl Ives) is the only one to offer a welcome, since Benjie’s blue uniform is resented in the Bible-thumping, Reconstruction — pulverised, poverty stricken, secessionist, racist cattle community.

Benjie gets half the ranch from McMaster, who realises he is past managing it alone. The ranch hands leave in disgust. Benjie saves some half-starved Indians from a lynching for cattle-rustling, and offers them work which they accept. Benjie’s generosity to his employees is partly fired by his realisation that he himself is, to the hostile community, scum like the Indians: "Everyone knows them niggers aint people— they aint got souls”, is how the town storekeeper justifies riding with the local Ku Klux Klan, and brainwashes his young son, who already longs to watch his first lynching.

Benjie gets an Indian squaw as "a gift"(!) from the tribe of grateful wage-slaves. Finally Benjie’s incongruous landowner status, his bloody defence of his cattle from salt-poisoning Klansmen, his marriage in the white man’s church to his squaw, his new found self-respect and refusal to be intimidated into selling-out drive the local Klan, led by Gilby, (Jack Palance) the confederate war-hero embittered by the loss of his arm, to attempt to lynch him. The first attempt ‘only’ gets Benjie’s wife, Robin, raped and two Klansmen killed before they are driven off the ranch.

The cattle season over, Benjie realises that with the Indians who have returned to their village, he and McMaster will be unable to protect the ranch or his wife in the event of further brawls. He sends Robin back to her tribe for safety, and tries to enlist the aid of the Indians but the tribal elders make it clear that Benjie is in their eyes the same as the whites, who, as property owners will spill blood for it, and they want no part in a property war . . . "The land belongs to no-one—you like us Benjie, you homeless”.

The inevitable showdown with the Klan follows—a burning cross is the signal for a bloodthirsty finale in which McMaster is shot dead, the ranch buildings are razed and Benjie himself is only saved from a coldblooded burning by the inexplicable intervention of the younger Indian braves—his former employees—led by the articulate primitive communist ideologist, brother of Benjie’s wife. Gilby is killed, the Klan are temporarily routed, but after Benjie recovers from his wounds at the Indian village, to the complete bewilderment of Robin’s brother he once again staggers back to rebuild his smallholding, to face the Klan and probable death with Robin.

Robin’s brother's cries ring out as the film closes: "You’re crazy Benjie, you got no home, you like us, you got no home”. . . but Benjie, pathetically mesmerised by his title deeds, already has his values fixed—property before his own, his friends, his wife, his Indian brothers’ lives.

All in all, a film expressing all the contradictions of the class and caste-ridden society of post civil war America. The Indian elders alone attract sympathy, with their humanism and refusal to sacrifice themselves for property. But they, one senses, are doomed to an ever-more precarious nomadic existence and probable extinction from starvation (despite their rustling activities) or from epidemic.

The film will appeal to all those who flock to watch ketchup being spilled in great quantities, who are titillated and thrilled by the depiction of inexorable violence. The stark scenes in it are overtly commercial. No relief from the all-pervading atmosphere of brutalising and dehumanising 1865 Bible Belt Society is offered, indeed the producer seems to want us to project the despair into the present day. Certainly no relief is realistically possible in the historical context of absolute scarcity and the dominance of property, status and compensatory racialist ideas do not lend themselves to any. But a hundred years later scarcity is a myth; competition and the hostility, mutual suspicion, atomization and savagery it engenders are archaic and unnecessary; the Benjies of the world need no longer cling to tangibles at such a cost; the day of the Indian is near again, at a much higher and more secure level of technology and culture.

C. H.

Human Nature? (1934)

From the September 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

The critics of the Socialist case are legion, but the diversity of their arguments is very limited. At street corner or in public hall, from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, in Great Britain and abroad, one hears the same arguments, couched in similar words, from those who would refute the case for Socialism. It would almost appear as if they vied with one another in their efforts to be unoriginal.

One of these stock arguments is the one which the Socialist designates as "The Human Nature argument.” It is frequently the first question which rises to the lips of the but recently interested worker, and it is often the last line of defence of the opponent who has been driven from every other point of vantage by the logic of the Socialist case.

It is usually worded thus: “Ah! But you cannot change human nature”; or “Socialism is desirable, but human nature would not allow it.” However the query is worded, the answer is the same—the Socialist calls upon the members of the working class to organise consciously and politically for the capture of the machinery of government in order that this machinery may be used to establish a Socialist system of society. A revolutionary proposition this, which human nature and the laws which govern social development demand. Let us explain.

First of all, what is this human nature? What is there in the nature of human beings which can prevent the establishment of Socialism? It is the nature of the human being to be social. Man is essentially a social being, not merely because he enjoys the companionship of his fellows, but out of sheer necessity. It has been a part of the process by which man has evolved from a lowly primitive state to his present "exalted” civilised condition. Had he not developed a social sentiment early in this process of evolution, even before he assumed the form of man, the species would have become extinct. And to-day no one ever dreams of man living the life of a Robinson Crusoe, with, of course, the possible exception of some imaginary beings who people the textbooks of the orthodox economists and capitalist apologists. So let us repeat, it is the nature of humans to be social.

“Ah!” we can hear the critics saying, “that’s agreed, but man, having become a social being, then proceeds to behave towards his fellow men in a most unsociable manner.” Therein our critics reveal their error, for in using the word “behave” they expose their illogical argument. Human nature and human behaviour are not quite identical, although one is the product of the other. We have said that man has become a social being out of sheer necessity, likewise his behaviour is determined by necessity, the necessity to live. Man needs to live and in order to live he must have food, and some shelter from the elements. It is in order that he may procure these that he enters into relations with his fellows, or, in other words, forms society, and it is the manner by which he procures his subsistence that determines the relations entered into, or, the form which society takes. When, as was once the case, the method of obtaining the necessities of life was by the use of such primitive tools as the bow and arrow, then men's relationships were framed accordingly, and most certainly did not include such relations as those of employer and employee, nor did this early society include such institutions as trade unions. The means of production being primitive, and, in consequence, each member of society being able to produce only just sufficient for his own maintenance, it was not possible for one man to enslave another. A man who needs to devote all his time to obtaining the things necessary for his own existence is useless as a slave and so, in primitive society, the institution of slavery did not arise. Men lived in tribes, and within the tribe the things necessary to the tribe's existence were communally owned. This determined the behaviour of tribesmen to one another. Many explorers and travellers have testified to the behaviour of men living under such conditions, as, for example, the following.

Lewis Morgan, who lived for a considerable period among North American Indians, in his book, “Ancient Society,” wrote: “If a man entered an Iroquois house, whether a villager, a tribesman or a stranger, and at whatever hour of the day, it was the duty of the woman of the house to set food before him. If hungry, he eats, if not hungry, courtesy required that he should taste the food and thank the giver.”

Likewise, Paul Lafargue, in his “Evolution of Property,” quotes from James Adair's "History of the American Indians": “To be narrow-hearted, especially to those in want, or to any of their own family, is accounted a great crime, and to reflect scandal on the rest of the tribe."

The same author quotes Catlin, who also lived among the wildest of Indian tribes in North America, as saying: "Morality and virtue, I venture to say, the civilised world need not undertake to teach them.” And men behaved like this when, and because, the means of life were commonly owned; and the means of life were commonly owned because it was the necessary form of ownership at that stage of social development.

Just one other of Lafargue's references from the book already mentioned, a quotation from the Jesuit Charlevoix: "The brotherly sentiments of the Redskins are doubtless in part ascribable to the fact that the words MINE and THINE, . . . are all unknown as yet to the savages. The protection they extend to the orphans, the widows and the infirm, the hospitality which they exercise in so admirable a manner, are, in their eyes, but a consequence of the conviction which they hold that all things should be common to all men.”

Since those times, in Europe at least, the means of production have evolved from the bow- and-arrow stage to the present highly complicated machine stage. The spear has given place to the plough, the hand-operated machine to the modem mechanical wonder, the horse-drawn cart to the motor-car, or steam-driven or electrically-driven train or tramway system. Hand-in-hand with this development has gone on a change in the relationships between the individuals who make up society and a corresponding change in the social form, until to-day we live in capitalist society wherein the relationships are based on the private ownership of the means of living, with the consequent division into classes of those who own these means and those who own nothing but their ability to work, their labour-power.

Within capitalist society production is for sale, even the energy of the workers. Before the worker can draw his wage he must sell his energy, for which the wage is the price. Before the capitalist can draw his dividend the products of the workers' toil must be sold. Buying and selling —always buying and selling. It is the very essence of the system we live under. Worker must compete with worker in an effort to sell his labour-power; shopkeeper must compete with shopkeeper; combine with combine; nation with nation.

Competition implies struggle, struggle means strife. Woe to him who gives up the struggle, the penalties are heavy. Nations fight it out in wars, combines seek to establish and maintain monopolies, shopkeepers cut prices and the losers pass, by way of the bankruptcy court, into the ranks of the dispossessed, there to compete with millions of others for an opportunity to sell their labour- power to the highest bidder. Each must scramble with his fellows to get the necessities of life and can only rise by climbing on the backs of others.

It is this that determines human behaviour—the necessity to get a living. It is this that our critics call human nature. It is this that makes men Socialists. It is this that determines that Socialism must follow capitalism. Human nature has not changed since man first appeared, nor will it while he exists; but human behaviour—that undergoes a process of continuous change. The workers to-day, realising more and more that their cut-throat behaviour results in a weakening of their power to resist the encroachments made on their conditions by their masters, are changing that behaviour, as witness the manner in which some, who, although disagreeing with the actions of fellow workers in trade disputes, frequently “fall into line” in order to assist in an attempt to achieve some improvement of their lot. The development of society has produced a working class, and that class has evolved its own class conduct, its own behaviour of members towards one another. Class-solidarity it is usually termed, but no matter what it is called, it is part of human behaviour, and when the working class shall overthrow capitalism and establish a system of society in keeping with its own and society's interests, then that new form will, in its turn, determine human behaviour.

The Socialist does not propose a “change of heart,” but a change in the basis of society, a change from private to common ownership of the means of living. No Utopian idea this, but a dire necessity determined by social development. Not the struggle of a sect, but an historical revolutionary movement, guided by principles based on a scientific investigation of society and the laws which govern its development.

When man has access to the wealth he produces, and has no further need to struggle and compete with his fellow men for a portion of that wealth, then, and not till then, will his behaviour correspond with his nature and become social. There can be no “peace on earth” while there remains a class society; there can be but little" “brotherly love” whilst there is capitalism. The solution lies not in exhorting men to be charitable to their enemies, but in establishing a Socialist society wherein men will not be angels, but just men; wherein competition will give place to co-operation, and all humans, without distinction of race or sex, will live secure, full, and pleasurable lives.

W. Waters

Between the Lines: From Soweto to the Indian Reservations (1986)

The Between the Lines Column from the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

From Soweto to the Indian Reservations

It is not only in South Africa that the natives have been forced into second-rate "homelands" by the property-owning minority. Capitalism is a global system and its robbery extends far. In On Indian Land (C4, 7 July. 9.55) we were shown how the native Indians, who had once owned 22.000 square miles of land in Northern British Columbia, were placed in reserves of 45 square miles. Some of the older Indians told how Christian missionaries had come and told them not to resist as their land was taken away from them.The fisheries which they once possessed are now the property of Canadian capitalists. Capitalism's defenders boast of the freedom of cultural individuality. This documentary put the lie to that boast.

American dreams

We are all individuals, so the story goes. And if we try hard enough, climbing every mountain and taking on every opponent JR-style. we'll make it — whatever "making it" is. This is the old American dream: free market individualism dripping with sugar to make the poison of the rat-race culture taste sweet. In two programmes for children this ideology is presented in all its sickly silliness: Fame (BBC1. 5.10pm. Mondays and Tuesdays) and The Flintstones (BBC1. 5.10pm various days). It should be conceded at once that both programmes are really well made — the former to make viewers join in the soppy sentimentalism which guarantees that every character is either weeping or hugging someone at least once an episode — and the latter because the characters are rich, the humour novel and Fred is the sort of American with a baseball conception of world politics. What unites the two programmes is their picture of history. The Flintstones is the totally unhistorical story of "a prehistoric family" They are depicted as living in the Stone Age, a technological millennium or two ago, in the age of the dinosaurs. But all the social relations of our lives — the family, property, money, employment, unemployment, atomised lifestyles — are present. What a simple depiction of the human nature myth — "however much the productive forces have changed over the centuries the basic features of capitalism have always existed and always will: they are natural and inescapable". Next time you argue with an unhistorical thinker who tells you that, you can bear in mind that s/he has probably picked up such nonsense from childhood exposure to the likes of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.

In the 1950s there were American cartoon programmes for kids about "Little Black Sambo" and other racist caricatures. Ideology creeps in all over the place: even the apparently innocuous Academy For The Performing Arts in New York in which the jolly lads and lasses of Fame strive for Success with a capital D for dollar. My word, it is sentimental to the point of making Nixon's puppy speech look clinical and it is a classic in the art of showing little American (and British) viewers that if they have enough drive they too can shine out in this miserable old world. All the kids from Fame are after stardom (that thing which capitalism gives to one in a million workers before it kills them with a drug overdose) and we are supposed to be after the same big goal. All good fun (that thing which capitalism sells in fun fairs, discos and brothels) but why not have a show about the losers? Failure: an everyday story of highly-talented musicians, clowns and dancers who were too poor to go to the academy and ended their lives existing on a pension and a lot of memories about what could have been.

Hard life

Fighting Back (BBC1. 9.25pm. Mondays) is the nearest thing to Failure available at present. Hazel O'Connor is a one-parent family, retreating from her past and discovering that the system does not permit retreats from poverty and degradation. The first episode (the only one seen at the time of writing) was reminiscent of that desperate frustration engendered by a hopeless system which was so brilliantly highlighted by Jeremy Sandford's Cathy Come Home several years ago.

Commodities

We live in a commodity society which is dominated by the buying and selling of wealth which, in a sane world, would be freely accessible to all human beings on the sole basis of need. So a programme called Commodities (C4. 10pm. Mondays) had to be of interest. Its main use was in showing the interdependence of the capitalist world economy — the fact that we really are living in one world which is dominated by one economy. The programme on coffee (4 August) was especially educative, showing that those who produce the coffee which is drunk across the globe are the last to get rich out of its production; indeed, it is the tragic paradox of capitalism that many of those people whose hard toil produces the coffee cannot even afford the price of a cup of it.

Wedding of the decayed

Talking of commodities, how many readers will own up to watching the parading of the latest royal commodity (justified on the grounds that she attracts tourists) as another pretty young idler was admitted to the royal parasites' enclosure (23 July, all day. every channel, non-stop)? As Upper Class Twit of the Year married Betty Rubble it was time for all good Marxist TV reviewers to switch off their sets and read A L Morton's vivid account of England in the 1640s.

Steve Coleman

Social Evolution (1969)

Book Review from the September 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man's Rise to Civilisation as Shown by the Indians of North America, from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State by Peter Farb. Secker & Warburg, 55s.

Those whose ideas about North American Indians have been moulded by Western films and novels will find Peter Farb's book a revelation. The author takes his readers on a three-dimensional trip, north to south, east to west, and past to present, calling on all the familiar names like Cheyenne, Apache, Pawnee, Seminole, Iroquois, Eskimo, and Aztec, as well as lots of lesser-known ones. He sheds a lot of light on their customs and behaviour.

When 'white' men invaded America they met a confusing babel of languages and a multiplicity of different social organisations. They experienced varying reactions from the different groups of Indian natives. Some were warlike, others peaceful; some honoured agreements, others broke them; some were passively resistant, others fled; some were regarded as noble red men and others as ignorant savages. Some were organised under powerful chiefdoms with strong military institutions. Some were groups of families which looked to a senior member for advice which they did not necessarily have to take, and in consequence did not consider themselves bound by agreements supposedly made on their behalf. Some had well-defined social classes with a state machine to protect the interests of the the privileged class. Farb classifies these under four main headings: 1. The Band, 2. The Tribe, 3. The Chiefdom and 4. The State—the first two with sub-headings.

Farb shows that the stage of social organisation to which each Indian group had evolved determined its attitude to the white explorers and invaders, from Columbus and Cortes to the Puritan pilgrims and the westward-thrusting farmers and traders. He also explains the effects of the white man's institutions on the native organisation: how fur trading affected the communal organisation of the Indians in the Hudson Bay and Labrador areas and how the introduction of the horse and the gun affected the Plains Indians.

The book attempts to explain social evolution by cultural development and Farb understands culture to be "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Those 'other capabilities' must include technology; in fact, Farb says so later in his book when he refers to cultural reasons as "social, political, economic, and technological" ones.

To explain social organisation by cultural development is like explaining that the reason a man crosses a road is to get to the other side—it leaves us wondering why he wanted to get to the other side. For a more complete understanding of social organisation we must isolate one part of the culture, and without ignoring the other parts see how its influence is decisive in determining social development.

If we isolate the technological aspect we can see how a social group has been able to extend its control over nature by the discovery and invention of tools and processes and we shall see how this aspect is the foundation of all human activities, determining their condition and defining their limits.

Peter does not miss the technological aspect, far from it, but by failing to emphasise its fundamental importance he lessens the weight of his words. By lumping it in with what we would call 'the social superstructure' he blurs what would otherwise be an excellent definition. 

With the advantage of an additional hundred years of archaeological research behind him, Farb shrugs aside the classifications of men like Lewis Morgan and Frederick Engels as being too general to be useful. We appreciate that when people at different levels of social organisation come into contact they absorb aspects of one another's culture and this makes the pieces of the historical jig-saw more difficult to piece together.

Man's rise to civilisation has not been determined by his laws, arts, customs, religions, etc. but by his increasing inventiveness and adoption of more efficient tools, machinery and techniques of production. Although much of what Morgan, Engels, and others of their day wrote is outdated, the historical milestones they uncovered are still there to point the way. If history is to have a meaning it must reveal the motivating factor of social development so that we may gauge progress into the future.

Just as the digging stick and the rabbit snare were fundamental to the social organisation of the Shoshonean Indians, so modern methods of production are fundamental to capitalism and are the driving force towards Socialism.

Farb may be able to prove that man has not travelled the road to civilisation by a strict rotation of steps, there may have been leaps forward or steps backward, but he cannot prove that the type of social organisation of any people has not been limited by the technology of the time and place.

The latter chapters of the book deal with the recent aspirations of the Indians and the attempts at a cultural revival. These read like the story of the Maccabees and other people who have been swamped by a society at a higher level of social development. They looked for a messiah to lead them back to the good old times. But Farb's portrayal of Karl Marx as a messiah, Lenin as a prophet, and Stalin and Trotsky as disciples is amusing.

W. Waters

Indigenous Suicides (2015)

The Material World Column from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Throughout the world indigenous peoples suffer from high rates of alcoholism and suicide. Relocation, epidemics, depopulation, and subjugation have put indigenous peoples everywhere at high risk of depression and anxiety. Every culture provides ways by which individuals may satisfy their needs for meaning, prestige, and status. Small-scale, hunter-gatherer societies provide several: excellence in hunting, storytelling, or as a healer. Whatever its size, complexity or environment, a central task of any culture is to provide its members with a sense of belonging and purpose. What happens, then, when a people's way of life is destroyed through disease, genocide, loss of territory, and repression of language and culture? It leads to self-destruction. James Anaya, former United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples said suicides among indigenous youth, across the globe, are common in situations where tribe members have seen the upheaval of their culture, which produces in the indigenous a lack of self-confidence and grounding about who they are. ‘They see taking their own lives as unfortunately and sadly an option,’ he said.

In the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death for American Indian and Alaska Native men ages 15 to 34, and is two and a half times higher than the national average for that age group. 75 percent of Native American men and one third of Native American women can be classified as alcoholics or alcohol abusers. These numbers are amazing, and do not even accurately reflect the far-reaching effects of alcohol abuse, such as physical problems, mental illness, community violence, unemployment, and domestic abuse. Indians die from alcohol-related causes at a rate four times higher than the rest of United States citizens. In fact, four of the top ten causes of death among Indians are alcohol related.

Australian Aboriginal people commit suicide at a far younger age than non-Aboriginal Australians, with reports of prepubescent children, some as young as eight committing suicide. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men ages 25 to 29 have a suicide rate four times higher than the general population in that same age group in Australia.

Among the indigenous peoples in Brazil, the suicide rate was six times higher than the national average in 2013. In the Guaraní tribe, Brazil’s largest, the rate is estimated at more than twice as high as the indigenous rate over all, the study said. In fact it may be even higher. The Guaraní have long made their home in the fertile land of Brazil’s southwest, where swaths of vast forests and savannas have been transformed into farms and ranches. In the process, the tribe has been dispossessed and uprooted from its traditional way of life. Many in the tribe face extreme discrimination and live in abject poverty close to the farmers and ranchers who occupy land that was once theirs. ‘Living in this non-place, they commit suicide,’ said Professor Alcantara, an anthropologist at the University of São Paulo who has studied adolescent suicides among the Guaraní. Nearly 100 years ago, the Guaraní, who today live primarily in Brazil and Paraguay, were forced off their ancestral land when the Brazilian government granted farmers and ranchers the legal title to that land. Tribe members were placed in crowded reservations, and often separated from family members. Distress, poverty and violence against tribal leaders have led to despair among Guaraní teenagers, who feel they don’t have a future. Professor Alcantara said that over the past 10 years tribe members have come to live between two cultures — the culture of nearby cities, where they are discriminated against, and the culture of their own tribe. Young tribe members, in particular, feel that they don’t belong either to the city or to the tribe, she said.

Professor Colin Tatz of the Australian National University suggests that when you are engaged in a struggle, a struggle to survive, suicide rates are very low

Dr Norm Sheehan, from Swinburne University of Technology sees suicide as the direct result of colonialism:

‘Colonialism deprives the colonised of positive self-images and for me, that’s a crucial part of the Aboriginal experience. …cultural disconnection was a major cause of suicide especially amongst Aboriginal youth,’ Sheehan explained ‘… Aboriginal people were deprived of a true understanding of self because their biological make-up was seen as an impediment, something that had to be erased. That’s a crime against humanity. But Aboriginal people have had to live with that legacy and develop a concept of self in a zone like that, so understanding what culture is in that context is almost impossible.’

Psychiatrist Professor Martin Graham from the University of Queensland, believes ‘There is a deep sadness among Aboriginal peoples and that translates to a sense of anomie perhaps. A kind of deep sense of sadness and boredom and dispiritedness relating to loss of land, loss of culture, loss of languages in some cases and a sense that none of it can be changed.’

Historians and politicians should stop boasting about progress and civilisation of capitalism until they understand the brutality and falsehood it brought yet while we call for a new understanding, it’s more important to advocate social change to make real change.

ALJO