A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen Read Free Book Online

a bitch; I can hit him.' He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped."
    Now picture another scene, this of the soldiers riding home, victorious. You know that they scalped every body they could find, even digging up those which by accident had been buried with their heads full of hair. You sec so many scalps that, as The Rocky Mountain News will soon report, "Cheyenne scalps are getting as thick here now as toads in Egypt. Everybody has got one and is anxious to get another to send east." You know also that the soldiers cut off fingers and ears to get at the jewelry of the dead. But now you look closer, and closer still, and you see that the soldiers "cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows, and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks."
    Now picture, if you will, a third and final scene. Congress orders an investigation into what Chivington calls "one of the most bloody Indian battles ever fought," and what Theodore Roosevelt later calls "as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier." The investigating committee calls a meeting with the governor and with Chivington, to be held at the Denver Opera House. Open to the public, the meeting is well-attended. You are in the back. You smell sweat, smoke, and you cannot be sure, but you think liquor. During the meeting someone asks whether, as a solution to the obvious Indian problem, it would be better to civilize or exterminate them. The crowd explodes. As a senator later wrote, "there suddenly arose such a shout as is never heard unless upon some battlefield—a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof of the opera house—'EXTERMINATE THEM! EXTERMINATE THEM!'"
    Chivington did not act alone.
    Chivington was neither reprimanded nor otherwise punished, and parlayed his fame into fortune as an after-dinner speaker. The University of Colorado named a dormitory after his second-in-command.
    That these Indians were killed was in no way surprising. They were never considered human. The women were "squaws" and the men "bucks." The children? They counted even less. They should be killed because, as Chivington was fond of saying, "Nits make lice."
    My father never beat anyone who didn't deserve it. My brothers were often beaten because the horse tank was only two-thirds and not completely full, or because they received sub-par grades, which meant anything below an A. As teenagers, my sisters were awakened for a beating because the dishes were not clean enough. I remember that one sister was beaten because a litter of puppies fell into our swimming pool and drowned: instead of fishing them out, she called a brother to do it; she was beaten for not doing it herself, and also because the puppies were worth money. The bombastic stupidity of his reasoning was irrelevant to what he was going to do. On feeling an urge to beat someone, he found an excuse to do it. In another sense, however, his nonsensical reasons were the point, perhaps more than the physical violence itself. Had he provided valid reasons for his violence—were such to exist—we victims could have maintained a semblance of control by fulfilling his requests. Joe could improve his grades; my mother (and presumably my sister and myself) could be better lovers; my sisters could make damn sure the dishes were always spotless. On the other hand, had he not given any reasons we could more readily have seen his violence for what it was: utterly senseless. Yet by fabricating nonsensical reasons for his actions, he was able to rationalize them to himself, and was able to get us to play an active role in our own victimization. We would meet demand after demand. The demands were insatiable, and ever changing. Today, it was spelling, tomorrow, dead puppies, the day after, dirty dishes. He shifted, we shifted. It was simply an