Indigenous people: They Did Not Return to Thank Us for the Original Gifts

Indigenous people

They Did Not Return to Thank Us for the Original Gifts

By Darryl Wilson

The following letter was addressed to the Dali Lama, on occasion of his visit to Siberia, in the former USSR, to commemorate 250 years of Buddhism there. The letter was hand-delivered to him at Lake Baikal in the summer of 1992 by Frank Lake of the Native American Student Union at the University of California at Davis.

Your Eminence:
We understand you will be celebrating the 250th year of Buddhism being practiced within the boundaries of the Soviet Union.
As professors and students of history, we are well aware of the parallels between your people and our Original Native Nations. Tibet is currently smothered under an ocean of Chinese military might, even as the native nations of the Americas are smothered under a blanket of arrogance calling itself Democracy.
The Americans came to our homeland with the same purpose the Chinese Imperial powers came to your door. They came to kill, to conquer, to colonize, to capture, to torture, to take and to destroy that which they could not take. They created laws which claim that they, the intruders, are the rightful owners of our sweet and precious motherland. And they manufactured the name for themselves: Americans.
They demanded gold and other precious gifts. And when we gave them the amount deemed sufficient by our Council of Elders and our Chiefs, they decided it was not enough and cut off the hands of the gift bearers. They razed our homes, decimated our tribes and nations, and decided that our homeland was too good for us – a homeland given to us to care for by the awesome powers that scattered the stars in the vastness and gave us songs to sing to them. The Americans came with an invisible God, a God who told them to take our homeland for their own. This God-who-cannot-smile issued many commandments to them – one commandment was to destroy us to the last child.
The Europeans penetrated our domain without welcome. They kidnapped our people and spirited away our food staples, so they could pump fresh life back into a Western Europe that was facing its own created demise.
The Europeans came in wave after diseased wave. Today that tide refuses to ebb. In the holds of their ships were strange animals from the European continent. And in their holds also, another possession: black people from the African continent, chained one to another and to the planks of the vessels.
They did not return to thank us for the original gifts. And today and tomorrow they feverishly prepare for what they see as their 500th “birthday.”
Since 1492 the Original Natives of this hemisphere have received only criminal treatment from “Americans” and their government. The strangers came and with barbed wire, fenced us out of our most sacred places of worship. They built roads upon the graves of our ancestors. They constructed Universities (including the University of California at Davis) upon our sacred burial grounds.
They have not yet asked pardon from our Chiefs for their original trespass. They may not even possess the ability to realize they are out of balance with the powers of the universe.
On October 12, 1992, some “Americans” and many Europeans will be celebrating the Europeans’ destruction of our peoples. They will cheer and they will commit further crimes against our people to prove their original trespass was just. All people who care for justice know that the Euro/Americans are trespassing upon this land even as the Chinese Imperialists are trespassing in Tibet.
Let us unite our songs to float across the vastness of time, and mark the beginning of the ending of atrocities that are visited upon us daily. Our languages, our traditions and our dances are our foundation. Knowing this, the Americans are constantly stripping these precious elements from us.
In which season will the earth people unite in the struggle for that which belongs to us, not by the “political power that comes from the barrel of the gun (Mao),” but by the power that turns the earth around the sun and the sun around a greater wonder?
Until that time we ask you to join us in protesting any “celebration” that might be devised by those who identify 1992 as 500 years of freedom – for it has not been freedom for the Original Native Nations any more than it has been freedom for Tibetans, your precious people, since the invasion by the Chinese Imperialists.
The Americans would rather destroy us than give us the recognition Great Wonder gives us every moment of every day.
This letter to be delivered to your hands by Frank Lake, President of the Native American Student Union, University of California at Davis.
Thank you and we are sincerely,

Dr Steve Crum, for the Native American faculty,
Denni Shultheis for the Native American Society of Medical Students,
Darryl Wilson and Frank Lake for the Native American Student Union, University of California at Davis

Darryl Wilson is a Pit River Indian from the Northeastern corner of California. He recently graduated from the University of California at Davis and is about to enter a Master’s program in Native American Studies at the University of Arizona.





Turning Wheel Summer 1992

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