"And no matter what they ever do to us, no matter how
they ever strike at us,
we must never become reactionary. The one thing
that has always bothered
me about revolution, every time I have seen the revolutionary,
is they have
reacted out of hatred for the oppressor. We
must do this for the love of our people.
No matter what they ever do to us, we must always
act for the love of our people
and the earth. We must not react out of hatred
against those who
have no sense." - Trudell
Black Hills Survival gathering, 1980
POWER
"We must not become confused and deceived by their
illusions. There is no
such thing as military power; there is only military
terrorism. There is no
such thing as economic power; there is only economic
exploitation. That is
all that it is. They try to program our minds and
fool us with these
illusions so that we will believe that they hold the
power in their hands
but they do not.
All they know is how to act in a repressive,
brutal way...Power...we are
a natural part of the earth. We are an extension of
the earth, we are not
seperate from it. We are a part of it. The earth is
our mother. The earth is
a spirit and we are an extension of that spirit. We
are spirit. We are
power. They want us to believe that we have to believe
in them and depend
upon them and we have to consume these consumer identities
and these
religious identities and these political identities
and these racial
identities. They want to seperate us from our power.
They want to seperate
us from who we are.
Genocide. Genocide is just an intellectual
way of saying: murder, because
we live in a so-called civilized industrialized world,
and because this
world is allegedly civilized and allegedly has laws,
they can't go out and
call an act of murder "murder" anymore, so they call
it genocide to throw
another illusion in our eyes."
RESISTANCE
"We want to be free of a value system that is being
imposed on us. We do not
want to participate in that value system. We
don't want to change that value
system. We want to remove it from our lives
forever.
"We must never underestimate our enemy. Our enemy
is committed against us
twenty-four hours a day. They use one hundred
percent of their effort to
maintain their materialistic status quo. One
hundred percent of their effort
goes into deceiving us and manipulating us against
each other. We have to
devote our lives, we have to make our committment,
we have to follow a way of
life that says we are going to resist that forever
... a resistance: something
that we can pass on as strength to the coming generations."
- Trudell
"A resistance where organizational egos don't get in
the way. A resistance
where individual egos do not get in the way.
A resistance where the
infiltrators and the provocateurs and the liars and
the betrayers and the
traitors, they do not get in the way ... a resistance
of consciousness. This
is our obligation to the earth. And only by
fulfilling our obligation to the
earth can we fulfill our obligations to the people.
"We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights.
We must go beyond the
ignorance of civil rights. We must step into
the reality of natural rights
because all of the natural world has a right to existence
and we are only a
small part of it. There can be no trade-off."
- Trudell
The above excerpted from: "STICKMAN" - John Trudell (Pg. #: 28 =//= ISBN 0-9625119-8-6
An approximate 90 minute radio interview with John Trudell is available
on line in two parts audio .RAM file Part
1 and Part 2