PRELUDE

“Once, everyone on this Earth was Indigenous, Once, we all lived among our kin in communities of people that raised their own children and set their own standards of conduct. We knew everyone and everyone knew us, so we behaved with respect toward one another. We lived on the land, were part of it, felt we could not live without it – so we respected the Earth and everything on it.”

“In their arrogance, science addicts who call themselves environmentalists blather about those who are destroying the Earth. They miss the point. They are destroying themselves, not the Earth. No matter what industrialized societies do to themselves and to the human race, the Earth has eons to heal itself.”

Russell Means, who died on October 22, 2012, believed that saving the Indigenous worldview is the last and only hope for the future. I wholeheartedly agree with him, hence the following transcript of a 2011 interview.

INTRODUCING RUSSELL MEANS

Hello my relatives. What I have to say about myself is that I have been in prison, I have been a thief, and I have been a dope dealer. I have also gone to College, I am an accountant and a computer programmer, as well as getting my doctorate in philosophy. I have been everywhere in the strata of white society. I’ve even hung around with multi-millionaires when there where no billionaires.

I am an Indian, an American Indian. I am an Oglala-Lakota from the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation (South Dakota), which is still designated in the Defense Department as prisoner of war camp #44. You see, Indian people don’t have any rights or any Constitutional protections on the reservation whatsoever. No freedom of speech, no privacy… Well, you Americans are in the same boat.

As far as being an American Indian and a Lakota, I also belong to the Republic of Lakota because a significant portion of my people withdrew from the treaties we made with the federal government in 1851 and 1868, Sioux treaties and American treaties signed at Fort Laramie which is now Wyoming.
(Note: The Republic of Lakota is a movement that has declared its independence from the United States and refused to recognize the authority of presidents or governments, withdrawing from treaties it made with the federal government and defining its borders which cover thousands of square miles in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana).
So when we withdrew from the treaties because of gross violations according to the laws that the United States of America is signatory to, we had a strategy for attaining our complete independence and the return of our land.

I also wrote a biography, WHERE WHITE MEN FEAR TO TREAD, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RUSSELL MEANS is the title. It is a very thick book, 550 pages, but I'm very proud, it has had 17 printings in 16 years. So people are interested in who we are. And it’s actually a comprehensive history based on my family of our existence in the 20th century and the deprivations we went through and the trials and tribulations. So if you really want to find out about us, you can read my book and then you can go do more research.
But you see, the sad thing in America is that we don’t exist in the 20th century. You have to specialize in Indian education of some sort, anthropology, history, and then go and dig in the archives or wherever, in order to find out anything about us in the 20th century. So there you have it.

AMERICAN APATHY

The American people for too long have been an irresponsible, free people. And even from generation to generation it has become less free. And they don’t recognize it. They have lost the ability of critical thought. In order to regain critical thought all you have to do is read your Constitution and then look at the laws that govern you, especially from the federal perspective. It is unconscionable to allow your freedoms to be taken away decade, after decade, after decade, year after year.
And I am very proud of this, by the way, my Nation, the Lakota, were the first Nation to militarily defeat the United States of America on the field of battle and that resulted in the Laramie Treaty of 1868.
Be that as it may, after they economically forced us into these prisoner of war camps by destroying our food supply and our right of passage in our own land, they then began practicing and perfecting their colonial tactics.

They found gold in Montana. The shortcut was across our land. We did not mind. People were passing through. But then the American Army at the insistence of themselves started building forts, through three states, along what was called the Bozeman trail. That was the trail to the gold fields.
Now that was going too far. That was contrary to what the United States of America had already promised. It disturbed our land. They did not have ownership.
So we went to war. And we won. The result was the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The United States agreed to all our demands. All of them. They left. They got as far as Chicago. And then they changed some of the treaty. They took about one-third of our land, all of what is now the State of Nebraska. Then they went on to Washington D.C. and the treaty was ratified by the Senate and the president.

Then they embarked on a war on our food source. Here is a staggering statistic. At the coming of the white man to our Plains there were sixty million buffalos, a Southern herd and a Northern herd. The Plains States into Canada were the Serengeti of the Americas. That whole area was a vast migration of natural animals. Sixty years later there were two-hundred buffalos left. That’s a million killed per year! That kind of devastation has not been known anywhere else in the world. And that is one of the legacies of the United States of America. And that is what got the Plains Indians to acquiesce. They did not just destroy the food source. They destroyed, shelter, hides, real medicine, farms, gardens, …
We were literally starved into the reservations. Yet we preserved our dignity. They took away our weapons. Then they started assassinating the leadership, first Sitting Bull, then Crazy Horse. Then they claimed that shots were fired by the Indians. We had no guns, we were with our women and children, no one had fired a shot. This was merely an excuse. They raped the women. They slaughtered us. They stacked us up in piles.
This was before the Nazis and inspired Hitler. They stacked us up by this mass grave and took pictures. Then came the blizzard. The bodies froze.

In 1969 we were demonstrating at Mount Rushmore. The whites who ran the concessions were selling colored-in postcards of these pictures, these grotesk pictures of frozen, dead Indian people. We tore up the shops and took over Mount Rushmore.
We stayed there for a year.

What has happened now America, because of the irresponsibility of your forebears and the irresponsibility of yourselves, you are now on one huge Indian reservation. All policies where bred and born on an Indian reservation and then exported to the world and now come back on the backs of the American people.

You have a near perfect document. In 1744 Benjamin Franklin said to a collection of colonist discussing freedom: “If a Nation to the North can form a near perfect Union that has endured for centuries, why cannot we form a more perfect Union.” They were talking about the Iroquois Confederacy and that is where the Constitution comes from. The American Constitution is patterned after the code of the Iroquois Confederacy.
(Note from Russell’s book: The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation endured for eight centuries in their own League of Nations. In the 1920s the Six Nations sent a delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva to ask for international recognition of their sovereignty, p 379).
In 1988 on the eve of the two-hundred year anniversary of the Constitution, Congress sent a letter to the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, unanimously thanking them for their input in the Constitution and the formation of the United States of America.
So you see, the Constitution is Indian Law and that’s why I love it.

EUGENICS

The dominant society is fearful of matriarchal Indigenous groups, it always has been. The original people of Japan were driven to the Northern islands. The Sámi people of Scandinavia, commonly called Laplanders, have been persecuted. The Indigenous people of Africa suffered slavery and sterilization. Indian peoples of South America are systematically violated. It’s a continuous attack on the Indigenous people the world over.
All the so-called bio food and pharmaceutical corporations have set up a system that adheres to maximum profit for the industry. The American people are the lab rats in their laboratories. What is the best way to profit? Well, we gotta have sick people.
They go to the scientific community, in league with the government, to O.K. all these drugs that can kill you. What is unbelievable is that they advertise medication on television as lethal and people still want them. What happened to their brains? .
Everybody knows that a McDonald burger is a killer. Everybody knows that many foods are bad voor you. It’s on the label! Besides education I am convinced all these foods and medicines have gotten to people’s brains.
We used to have laws for food and drugs. All washed away by politics, by Congress. And you don’t even have a court system to back you up anymore.

VACCINES

When I was growing up in America we had one forced inoculation, a smallpox inoculation. Not only did it hurt, it also got infected, pussy and sore. In my little mind that was wrong. Making you all pussy and sore to make you better, I could not wrap my head around it. I am now 72 years old. I have children age 50 down to 19 years old. I did not want them to be inoculated. I did not have the wherewithal to home-school them and my wife and in-laws insisted on inoculation. So I lost out.
I think this inoculation does something to the brain. If you look at America it has lost its self worth and become one huge sick society and I mean physically and mentally.

LOSS OF FREEDOM

Beginning in the 1840s they started stripping away American freedoms by developing the corporation, a piece of paper. A piece of paper! And then in the 1870s, during Lincoln, when they declared martial law and martial law was extended another three or four years after the Civil War when there was no need to, Congress starts giving the banks the right to rule.
Then, of course, you go on to 1913 and the beginning of the 20th century and that is when they officially gave away the power of the United States’ economy to the banks. They can print the money for us. Yet according to the Constitution the people should never allow their money to be printed by someone else. What were the people thinking? You don’t have control over your own money!
The history of the Indian and the history of the American have now come full circle and are intertwined in the dictatorial policies of those that control the monetary system of America. And they have done such a bad job of it that they are destroying themselves. It is ludicrous at best.

The international community has refused to invest any more in the financial instruments of America because they know they are worthless. They know the United States is too far in debt and cannot cover it. Consequent they refuse to buy the bonds and the treasury notes, etc. What the Federal Reserve is doing is buying those federal bonds and treasury notes and then printing more money. It’s absolute suicide. And it’s been proven from empire to empire. When you allow your human right, your individual rights to be usurped that’s when empire grows and could care less.

Around the 1950s the labor unions had become so powerful that they were about to form their own political party. They had shown during World War II how powerful they were in the vote for the presidency and Congress. But the leaders of the unions sat down with the bankers and the government and they made a deal. They sold out the unions. When the people began to organize and gather and really have some power it was negated and it has been negated ever since. You have no privacy. None. You have no protections anymore.

I can be an American, take my social security card, leave the reservation, and be like the rest of you. They welcome that. They had forced relocation for Indian people back in the 1950s. It was fostered under Truman and the man appointed to run it headed up the Japanese internment program of World War II. So he headed up the Indian relocation program too. I know. I was part of it. Twice!

That is what they wanted, diaspora. Guess who’s land they are after. In our meager holdings on trust land over forty percent of the natural resource wealth of America is still under and on our lands. Over forty percent! It is curious to me that wherever they put us was full of energy from our Grandmother Earth. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have been found to lie under reservation land. Now that’s a thought you should think about.
So consequently, if we had the rights that you had, if we had the rights to join in with capitalist society, we would be richer than the Saudis. And we damn sure would not have allowed Wall Street to use our money for derivatives, etc., etc.

It is never enough. And they started creating financial mythology. And you allow it. That’s the crime. You have no-one to blame but yourself. Look in the mirror. If you can’t move to protect yourself guess what happens. Look around you. Look at Detroit, etc., etc. It’s unconscionable what is happening to America. Because of the Federal Reserve this economy in the United States is going to continue to deflate. You have nothing to back it up. You exported everything that makes the country run. You allowed that to happen. For greed. For your Walmarts and for your Nieman Marcuses. For this idiocy of just buy, buy, buy and debt, debt, debt.

You allowed your republic to be commandeered by two political parties who’s only differences are their spending goals. Some want to spend over here. Some want to spend over there. But they still want to spend. There has literally been no difference in those two parties since, I would say, the Civil War. All one has to do is look at the results of history. The proof is in the pudding. And it’s very blatant. And you don’t realize it. I fault the American people for not being alert to their own freedoms and to value those freedoms. Instead it has been replaced by politics which guide you into this insane economics of a single party with two names. And you don’t even realize it.

CULTURE OF THIRD PARTIES

There are many efforts at a third party in this country. I know because I have testified before the state legislatures on behalf of third party politics. The idiocy of Americans to tell me that if you vote for a third party you are wasting your vote. What?!
Look at all the parliamentary governments in the world. They have pretty much kept industries and everything in their country rather than shipping it out. And the unions are alive and well there. It is a society that is not as materially minded as America. The reason for this is: Americans don't have a culture. They left their cultures behind. Culture is about values. Culture, I find, is the necessary backbone for value. If you have value you have culture.

I visited most of the countries in Europe. It was refreshing. It seems to me that Europeans are a lot more responsible than Americans. They still had iron works. They still had clothing industry and made their own shoes. If we had local industries families would not be broken up.

Here’s what it comes down to in America: mob rule. Fifty percent plus one and the rest left that disagree have to follow the fifty percent plus one. It’s idiotic. That is not freedom or an expression there-off.
Look at the parliamentary system. The smallest party, if it organizes right, can be heard. They go to the capitals of Europe. They built coalitions and all of that kind of stuff. They know how to live in cities. They are not letting the Federal Reserve print their money. (Note: Dutch farmers who were threatened with annihilation by their own government organized themselves, fiercely demonstrated, and ultimately managed to get 15 seats in parliament in 2023).
All these lies of the corporate media, they say Greece is worse off, but in reality England is far worse off than Greece and America is the third or fourth worse off country in the world, economically. Your leaders have forgotten all about you.
Welcome to the reservation.

THE PATRIARCHAL PYRAMID

Since patriarchy reared its ugly head a little over six-thousand years ago, everything that is structured in the patriarchal world is a pyramid. Religion, corporations, governments. Everything!
In order to get some sanity back into the world you have to very simply go local. I am looking at my ancestors who are responsible, in part, for the Constitution of the United States of America. Why not go to the source.
I look at my people and there is such a thing as a clan system within the Nation. It’s made on blood, related bloodlines. And then there is such a thing as sister clans or you might call in-laws. What those two groups prevent is incest at every level of life. It also ensures unanimity. A decision can not be made unless it is unanimous. In the republic of Lakota what we want to do in going local is to form a neighborhood. Neighborhoods can be two houses, two families, it can be forty houses, it can be four-hundred houses. But if that community makes a decision it has to be unanimous. Remember mob rule has not worked in America, it’s very evident.
There are people in America today that go by that rule. The Quakers, they are alive and well and very prosperous. And the Six Nations of the Iroquois Federation. At least a good portion of the Six Nations people. There’s others that joined you Americans. It does not mean uniformity. It does not mean socialism. What it means is you agree to the end result and you build the ladder needed for that end result. And you do it with patience. Patience is golden. If you have a neighborhood with just two houses that get along that is fine. Twenty houses is fine. It does not matter the size. Bigger is not better. As long as your neighborhood is unanimous.
Now think about this. Research that in your mind for a moment. What a concept huh, to agree with everyone that is important to you, that are important to you.

Patriarchal societies are after control. They want to control everything. When you are at the top of a pyramid whether you are a CEO, a president, a king, or whatever, it is precarious, because people are climbing that pyramid and they want to take your place, and you know that. The man at the top is fearful. That’s why they have armies and that’s why they have police. They are fearful.

CENTRALIZED AMERICA

Centralized America is like a human body. You have veins going out all over to your extremities. Your extremities function very well. Then disease sets in. All of a sudden the blood is not being fed to all these extremities and the proper nourishment to keep your body free is co-opted. You don’t have a feeling of well-being, because the psychological is very important. So your body begins to die prematurely.
It is the same with life. Life is organic. And in order for it to be organic everything has to flow freely. You look at everything and anything around you and you will see that anything that is centralized is wrong.

What really blows my mind is, you go to school and you learn history but it means nothing to you because you don’t do anything to change it. Another empire rears its ugly head and does the same thing that every other empire has done. They overreach, they become greedy, they become too large for themselves and they can’t maintain. On and on through history, over and over again, the same mistakes. Because what happens when you become an empire, you have to maintain an army. That’s the only industry left in America. That is proof positive. Look at the budget of the Defense Department. How do you allow it?
(Note: A National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been passed every year by Congress for more than half a century. There has always been bipartisan support by huge margins for the military machine that carries out America's predatory policy. Every president signed off on the budget, including Donald J. Trump. The budget increases every year and was $858 billion dollars for 2023, close to double the amount of the defense budgets of China, Russia, India and Germany combined).

THE LIBERTARIAN SOCIETY

I was born in 1939 and when I was growing up it was a more libertarian society, on its way to extinction, but still libertarian (the Means family resettled in Vallejo, California in 1942 to get away from the poverty and problems on the reservation and Russell went to San Leandro High School in California). Children were safe. We could go to the playground without adult supervision because we were safe as children. We did not have to get permission from the school board and get a playdate with adult supervision. Now children cannot grow up without adult supervision. I have a friend in California and his and my son wanted to go ride the ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Wharf. It was about a half a mile away. I said “go ahead son” and my friend almost had a fit because his son was going alone with my son. That’s fear. A society of fear. That is an upside-down society. Banning smoking in public places in the city, yet they allow the cars to drive back and forth. What kind of logic is that.

America is emptying out. I have friends and I have friends of friends, who are upper middle class people, who are moving away. Some have moved to Australia and New Zealand. Most of them have gone down to Costa Rica and Panama. They see the hand- writing on the wall.

To wrest control of the monetary system from the Federal Reserve would take, I am sorry to say, a revolution. America has been through it before, three times actually if you count the labor unions because they revolutionized the people. Whether you like unions or not, there was a time in America when the people through the unions made their political mark on the ways of America. For instance the unions were responsible for the G.I. Bill, the greatest affirmative action program for white people in the history of America.

It’s information deprivation that’s what they are giving us with the federal school system “no child left behind.” The dumbing down of America and all of that, that’s Indian policy. That was born on the reservation in the boarding schools, how you dumb down a people in your mode of education.

I give you an example of America as I was growing up. With local control you have more honesty. That’s just a rule. Local control engenders honesty. I went to a public school system in Northern California that was considered the finest education in America. This is in the 1940s and early 1950s. America was considered to have the number one education in the world. So I have the benefit of the best public education system in the world. That’s pretty good.

Now the United States of America is ranking 23rd in the world. It’s worse than it has ever been. And California is ranking 43rd in the nation in public eduction. Wow. What happened? They are dumbing you down. There is no value in education anymore. It’s Indian education. That’s why I call America the largest reservation in the world.

Twenty-four percent of Americans who are able to work are unemployed. And that’s being kind with that statistic. I grew up when there was no homeless. There were hobo’s. I know. I used to be a bum on skid row. But there was no homelessness. And it’s mostly white people. That was your first wake up call.
Everything was local. There were still values. The grocers went to the farmers. You ate seasonal food. You bought fresh bread every day. Even the corporations took back their day-old bread. Day-old bread! Now there are so much preservatives in the bread that it stays on the shelves of Walmart until it rots.

The point is, local control of economics is the only way the human being can live adequately. It engenders communication. It engenders communication that brings about honesty. And that is the America I grew up in. It was not completely fair, but it was a hell of a lot more happier.

It just saddens me to see America being despoiled by the ruling elite. Understand the patriarchal model of the pyramid and you understand that as long as that pyramid exists you are going to end up in the America that you have now and it is only going to get worse.

You, along with your parents, your grandparents, and their parents sold our rights down the river. We have a duty. You better get real.
My duty is to my own people, my local area. That’s why I have the Republic of Lakota. I tried to force the United States of America to live up to its own laws. And I could not do it. The American Indian Movement could not do it. And we were constitutionalists!
(Note: The American Indian Movement adopted their credo from Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé: “Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself – and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty”)

It is not a hopeful time, unless you grab ahold of the Constitution. It’s not too late. It’s not too late.

*This is a near verbatim transcript of most of a 2011 Russell Means’ interview with Infowars/PrisonPlanet put on YouTube by Paul Joseph Watson. Thank you Paul.

*You will find the quotes of the PRELUDE in the Epilogue of WHERE WHITE MEN FEAR TO TREAD, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RUSSELL MEANS (page 536 & 537, 1995).

*I will address the repetition-compulsion of history, the denial of observed reality, the delusions of science, and the cons of the environmentalists in my next article, UNRIVALED REDRESSERS: IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY, VINE DELORIA JR., AND WARD CHURCHILL.

*I stayed for two consecutive years in the homes of American Indian friends on Pine Ridge Reservation during the time of the big yearly PowWow. I stood at the graves of those who were massacred in 1890 at Wounded Knee (remember, weapons were confiscated). Thank you Lillian and Pedro, as well as Audrey, for your warm welcome and many Indian stories.

March 2023, Sophia Wien, M.A., Drs.