John Trudell and the Spirit of Life

Abstract

The Santee Sioux activist, political philosopher, and poet/musician John Trudell died of cancer on December 8th, 2015. I was sitting in my office when I read the news. His death had been reported erroneously four days before, so it didn’t come as a complete surprise. Nevertheless, I experienced the same kind of sadness I felt when John Lennon died, as though, somehow, I had lost someone close to me even though we had never met. Trudell’s work had inspired me. He fought fearlessly for tribal rights. He also reached across class, gender, and racial lines in order to draw public attention to the oppressive treatment of indigenous people as a symptom of a larger ruling class imperative to colonize the western world. In numerous poems, speeches, and songs, he argues that western society has lost touch with what he calls the “spirit of life.” Industrial capitalism has led to the fall of western society’s natural relationship to the earth. The value of human life no longer resides in the reality that we are made of the earth. Instead it depends on advancing the interests of the very historical forces that had perpetrated our “spiritual genocide.” This learned disrespect for the earth cuts us off from the ancestral knowledge of what it means to be a human being. Trudell claims that we must rediscover this knowledge if we intend to take back the land from the ruling class. Only through reestablishing our place in the natural order of the world can we liberate ourselves from the diseased thinking and behaviors that have resulted in class division, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and global war. Trudell points to industrial capitalism as the stimulus for the United States’ policies that have informed U.S.-Indian relations. It was the precise articulation of this observation that encouraged me to include his poetry, music, speeches, and a documentary about his life in an upper-level literature and film course I was designing on the American West. His work would help me to establish westward expansion as an economic development intended to exploit environmental resources and create new consumer and labor markets, whatever the cost to tribal communities and their lands. His analysis