Towards Preservation of Humanity by Mirek Vodrazka

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Towards the Preservation of Humanity by Mirek Vodrazka

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE IN CZECH
Translation 2001 (c) Gwendolyn Albert

PICTURES FROM PRAGUE 2000 CONCERT OF BLACKFIRE

Pictures from Czech and Slovak Tour 2001

English translation of the article "Red Man's Legacy and Prague STREET Party 2001" about Blackfire written by Bushka Bryndova

When on November 17, 1990, the American president George Bush and Vaclav Havel spoke, for security reasons, from a bulletproof glass aquarium on Wenceslas Square, various vocal and visible groups were also present. For example, one group chanted "Long Live Havel," a small group of Republican skinheads was there mostly in observance of itself, and even back then the anarchists were already expressing their disagreement. Only one group was not quite visible, since the whole time it stood quietly apart from the other participants, listening proudly. I didn't really notice it until the Czech president took the microphone and spoke of his joy at being visited by a politician from a country where "200 years ago the oldest democracy in the world came into being, a democracy which has become a safe haven for her own citizens." Then he posed the rhetorical question: "How did the United States reach this goal and how can we also attain it?"

Questions

It was only after hearing this question that I first saw the various invisible representatives of the murdered Indian tribes who were there that day, and it seemed to me that I understood their silence; for them the words delivered by these global politicians were just falling, political, autumn leaves. In spite of this, I read many questions in their faces and eyes, as if they were asking, with surprise: What, doesn't this intellectual politician know anything? Doesn't he know that during the so-called glorious era of building American democracy, the transports of Indians to the San Carlos collection camp took place?

Doesn't he know anything about their being deported from their original settlements? About the death marches, like the one which entered history under the name Trail of Tears, when 4,000 Cherokee died under the surveillance of 7,000 American soldiers?

Why does this white western intellectual politician separate his question about American democracy from the ethnocide of her original inhabitants, when he does not separate the question of the nature of European totalitarian systems from that of genocide?

Does he know nothing about the mass graves of murdered Indians, whose metaphor is Wounded Knee from the year 1890?

Why does he talk about human rights and say nothing about Leonard Peltier, who has been sitting in an American prison for 24 years as the result of manifestly manipulated trial?

Why do the defenders of human rights take no notice of the dozens of murdered Indian activists at the Pine Ridge reservation after it was occupied by radicals of the Indian movement in the 1970s?

Why do white politicians not point the finger at the unkept promises from the government of American democracy, about which one of the most significant North American Indian chiefs, Sitting Bull, proclaimed before an American government commission: "White people have not honored a single treaty they made with us."

Why are the admirers of American democracy not interested in the "Indian" policy of the United States, for example, the relocation law of the 1950s which made it possible for irresponsible companies to easily take over the mineral wealth on the territories of individual reservations?

Why do they study only neoliberal works, like Hayek's Road to Slavery, and not the work of the Indian theoretician Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society?

In the eyes of the silent Indian representatives I saw many questions for which the white media culture has only one response - ignorance. But Vaclav Havel was so carried away by his own speech that he didn't notice a single one of the invisible representatives and continued: "America was the first to reach an agreement on one of the basic laws on Earth, the American Constitution, which firmly established basic human rights and freedoms and has protected them to this day." He finished his speech with the words: "Democratic, prosperous America is the result of the efforts of generations of free citizens."

Once again I looked at the representatives of the many nations and found among them the face of Goyathla, better known by the garbled Spanish version of his name, "Geronimo," which seemed to say: "Yes, on the East coast they already had telephones and lightbulbs, in Tucson a pharmacy, civic meetings, and ladies' unions fighting against alcoholism, but at the same time the Supreme Court of the United States designated Indians as foreigners and refused them their civil rights."

Ten years ago, in response to the President's speech, I wrote in the post-underground magazine VOKNO (no. 23): "The Final Solution belonged not only to Nazi Germany, but also to democratic and prosperous America." And I mentioned the American state official of the Bureau for Indian Affairs in Washington, E.A. Greves, who in the 19th century of Havel's "generations of efforts" wrote the following: "There can be no doubt that the Indian race is condemned to a quick and final extinction. From an enlightened and Christian government such as ours we cannot expect anything less than that it ameliorate and facilitate their final exit from the land of the living."

Black Fire in Prague

When, ten years later (September 2000), the representatives of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and top global managers convened in a different and much larger Prague aquarium - the Congress Center, once known as "Pakul" or "Palace of Culture" - The Benally Family, an American group of Indian dancers and singers from Arizona, also traveled to Prague as part of a European tour. This group is led by one of the Navajo chiefs, Jones Benally, who is a defender of the traditional politics of indigenous peoples. This political approach is as follows: "The white man is a guest in my country. He should behave as such!" His three progeny, Jeneda, Klee and Clayson, are part of the group as well; besides traditional song and dance, they perform independently as an Indian rock trio under the name Blackfire. They play grunge-core, which is really "alter-native" punk music with a strong social and political message about government oppression, the involuntary resettlement of indigenous populations, human rights, genocide, domestic violence and eco-cide. This group is also known in America thanks to their performances in films with Indian subject matter, for example, in Geronimo.

The word "blackfire" has two political meanings. In the past this expression meant a visual sign used by Indian tribes to warn each other of the approach of the enemy, a sign made by damping a fire until it produced only black smoke. Blackfire is also the name of the spontaneously combusting surface deposits of coal which are the real political motivation behind the American government's and supranational mining companies' interest in the territory where the Navajo (Dineh) live.

Prayer for the Vltava

It is necessary to note that the group almost didn't make it to Prague. The night before the official opening ceremony of the global financial conference, their German guide Marion called me from the Rozvadov border crossing and told me with great surprise that the car they had used to travel across half of Europe was not being allowed into Bohemia. I immediately contacted the highest official at passport control and that person confirmed to me that they were not being let in due to the technical state of their vehicle. While they traveled back to Nuremberg that night in order to take the train the next day, I reflected on the past tactics of the communist regime, which during the 1980s made an innovation in the persecution of dissidents by confiscating their car papers, thus limiting their ability to travel around their own country.

Prague welcomed the Navajo Indians not only with torn-up paving stones, police roadblocks, cordons and the "black fire" of burning barricades, but primarily with her River. Once on the Charles Bridge, as soon as they saw the Vltava, they immediately pulled out a small crucible with Indian sage in it, and each one took a pinch in their fingers and slowly crumbled the small specks into the water while reciting a traditional Navajo river prayer with great humility. They were the first visitors I have ever seen on Charles Bridge for whom the river was not just part of an interesting tourist attraction, but an actual living Being - a River dancing between Heaven and Earth.

The first part of the performance that evening did not take place in the Ball Court of Prague Castle or any other tabernacle of official culture, but started at sundown at the Papírna squat in Holešovice, on a small back courtyard with paint peeling off the surrounding walls.

The Navajo chief Jones Benally spoke of how the members of his tribe honor Mother Earth, how his ancestors taught him 99 ceremonies so that he could become a medicine man. He sang and drummed, 27- year-old Jeneda invited the audience to dance with them, and after a while in the little courtyard under a single tree and the Prague night sky everyone was dancing to the shamanic rhythm.

Gwarsila - Indian political prisoner of conscience

After half an hour the musical trio Blackfire changed into jeans and black leather jackets and began their first Prague rock concert in the cellar of the squat with the proclamation: "They always told us that there are two worlds: the traditional and the modern. But it's really all one world." And they started with a piece about the Navajo land where they were born and from which, against the resistance of the Indians, the American government gradually expelled more than 15,000 Navajo in 1974, because one of the largest coal deposits in North America is there. Today only 300 Indians remain there, those who refuse the efforts to expel them and the pressure of institutions like the World Bank or the supranational corporations, in this case primarily the American mining company Peabody Coal, the largest coal producer in the USA.

The next piece, Injustice, was dedicated to the Indian leader of the young fighting Indians associated with the AIM organization (American Indian Movement), Leonard Peltier, also called Gwarsila, who, as an American political prisoner from the Anishinabe-Lakota tribe, has already spent 24 years in prison despite the fact that the American government has admitted on many occasions that it doesn't even know who is responsible for the crime for which he has been sentenced. Leonard Peltier is the recipient of several international awards. At a recent summit of human rights protectors in Paris to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, he was declared an official protector of human rights. He is also known as a talented artist for his paintings with Indian subject matter.

"The American government proceeded in his case as it had in its conflicts with the Navajo. The entire trial was manipulated and Peltier was sentenced on the basis of falsified evidence. And today, the American government does not want to permit evidence of his innocence. This is yet another example of how the United States, which constantly points the finger at how human rights are violated in other countries, has a mess in its own backyard," proclaimed the frontman of the group, guitarist and singer Klee Benally. Leonard Peltier himself has announced that if he does not get out of prison and return to freedom within the next year, there is a great probability that he will die there, and therefore the Navajo singer called on the audience to sign a petition to free this prisoner of conscience supported by many organizations and personalities, among them Amnesty International, the European Parliament, the Italian Parliament, the Belgian Parliament, 50 members of the American Congress, the National Congress of American Indians, Mother Teresa, former President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Tibetan Dalai Lama, Robert Redford and Jesse Jackson.

Presidents don't sign these things!

It is typical of Czech politics, which today is just as uncritically pro-American as it was pro-Soviet in the 50s, that in Prague in 1996, when an American group managed to present a petition for Peltier's amnesty to Vaclav Havel for him to sign, his reaction was: "Presidents don't sign this." The American philosopher Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The well-known French thinker Julien Benda wrote his famous work La Trahison des Clercs on this theme (translated into Czech as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals).

The group's next song, Exile, was introduced by the Navajo rocker with the words: "Just as Hitler built the concentration camps, the American government did something similar back home." In this composition two distinct cultures are combined into one message: traditional Indian dance and the rock singing of the young Indian generation. In the next piece they even invited their father to the podium to sing with them. The frontman of the group then told the story of how before the white man's civilization arrived, the Indians had a different system of values, whose criteria was not financial success, but the harmonious relationship of a person to his surrounding environment, from which real success is derived. "If your mind, body and soul are in harmony, if your relationships in your community are healthy, then you are successful. This is not something that we have to reinvent in our society. All we have to do is recall it."

The Fence

Then they played the piece Resist!, which they dedicated to "everyone who fights for human rights." In this song they told the story of the Navajo territory Big Mountain, where in 1974 the American government built a fence-wall with the explanation that they wanted to divide the Navajo and Hopi nations from one another. "Both nations, whose tribes had long been neighbors, who behaved peacefully toward one another, who for years had exchanged songs and shared their cultures, between whom there had been many intertribal marriages, who had always honored one another, were suddenly cut off from one another. When the American government erected this fence-wall, they did not just separate the Navajo from the Hopi, but they separated them from themselves and from their families, from their traditional holy places and from the wells which were their water sources. Since then they have evacuated more than 14,000 Navajo and hundreds of Hopi from those places. Today there are only a couple hundred, mostly older, people resisting the government pressure. Federal agents are threatening to push them off their land. Even the European Parliament has made an official declaration of support for the resistance of these last remaining members of our nation, and we would be glad if you would influence your institutions, Parliament and government, to make a similar declaration, because the only hope that something will change is if the United States is pressured from all sides. This fence-wall between two Indian tribes is really a slash into the guts of Mother Earth. But our Mother Earth has a voice, and we are that voice. Therefore we would like to make you aware of what kind of injustice the American government is wreaking on society."

Then they played their last rock piece with the title Common Enemy, about alliance, unity and the common enemy - ignorance. They put out the smoke signals of Black Fire on the stage of the squat and the musicians expressed their modesty through hands folded in prayer. The complete group The Jones Benally Family then said goodbye to the audience with a traditional Navajo song from their still-proud nation, a song which is also the anthem of the AIM organization and which, characteristically, is called Hope. They ended their concert with the words: "We are very humble people and our stage is the street, so hang onto your life fire, because the fact that you are going to protest in the streets is our Hope."

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