Custer Died for Your Sins in Vain

Vine Deloria Jr. reports on an idea reputed among most American Indians that Col. Custer's blood sacrifice was simply the price the United States paid for its radical eradication of millions of people, once we up and decided to be a country.  In a sense, however, Custer may merely have died in vain.  He fell pray to the same death-dealing system to which fell Vine Deloria Jr. and every single of his American Indian Ancestors from the past few centuries.  The only difference between Deloria and Custer is that the earlier realized it and the latter did not.    Deloria writes: 

"Consider also the fascination of America's military leaders with the body count.  It is not enough to kill people, bodies must be counted and statistics compiled to show how the harvest is going.  Several years ago every effort was made to keep the ratio of enemy killed to American fatalities at a certain portion [referring to the Vietnam War].  Yes, violence is American's sweetheart...  But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won.  Victory, yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict.  Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies."  (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 256) 

The reason why the United States resolves almost all of its conflicts violently, simply, is that it can't help it.  We make purpose out of violence using a production of meaning that emerges out of warfare (and the metaphors resulting from it).  Our culture is premised on victory, on winning, through commitment to ends that involve life-sacrifice.  This is true going back to Rome.  

I do not mean to imply that Native American culture is somehow purer.  American Indians certainly fought each other--this we all recognized.  But the Western discourse of rationality stems directly from the violent conceptions upon which we justify our entire existence.  In rational discourse, per Richard Rorty, we love intersubjective agreement, we love gaining mastery over a recalcitrant set of data, we love winning arguments, and we love synthesizing little theories into big theories (Rorty 2007: 35).  The love of Truth, he claims, is really a love for these things.  Thus Rorty's operationalization of Truth reveals an important point--rationality necessitates that we all think the same thing, and that the process of reaching sameness is born out in a fight.  Somebody wins, and once he has won (for it is usually a man or a woman acting like a man) he has to find some other new fight, some new struggle, or his meaning and purpose is lost.  Deloria continues:  "The United States operates on incredibly stupid premises.  It always fails to understand the nature of the world and so does not develop policies that can hold the allegiance of people.  It then alienates everyone who does not automatically love it," (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 256).  Yet, the United States is simply acting in the way that its discourse necessitates.  We must get everyone on our side, to fit in with our ideologies, lest our stance lose out and we all become Chinese.  Somehow, we forgot that it's possible for the Chinese to be Chinese whilst the United States remains "Uhmurrica."

Vine Deloria Jr. presents an alternative to our violent-rational-egalitarianism in his concept of tribalism. Tribalism is a form of anarchy in that it rejects clearly-drawn, economically based laws, instead opting to rely on structured personal-emotional relationships.  Although I would ostensibly depart from some Native American customs, Vine Deloria Jr.'s particular indictment of Western culture pays clear homage to a liberal critique of hyper-individualism emergent via capitalism and contemporary corporatocracy.

Capitalism is a beautiful theory, in theory, and in practice, it is death dealing.  However, capitalism has facilitated the emergence of corporations, which, argues Deloria, are a contemporary Western version of tribes--those which do all the same things that tribes did for American Indians before Columbus hit a rock in the Caribbean and anointed it with Catholicism and disease.  Deloria writes:  "...corporate life since the last world war has structured itself along the lines taken a couple of centuries earlier by Indian existence.  Totems have been replaced by trade marks, powwows replaced by advertising slogans.  As in the tribe, so in the corporation the "chief" reigns supreme," (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 228).  It is difficult to find evidence for the emergence of these pseudo-tribes in corporate structure.  However, the suggestion that the United States might, in some areas of its cultural persistence, posses tribal tendencies, likely carries seeds for further (more cogent) imagination.  

Deloria also suggests that tribes present interesting alternatives in their distinctive ability to define a bounded community unrelated to Western rationality.  Here, in the tribe, the organization of community manages human interaction utilizing emotional-interpersonal elements on a small scale.  There are customs based on cultural conceptions of environment and of social relations, which for American Indians involve certain sorts of rituals, traditional-hierarchical power structures, and prestige formation based on wisdom and generosity rather than on money and capital (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 231-234).  It is feasible to envision a kind of different tribe based on Western equity, consensus-based decision making, and differentiated work structures.  Power structures could easily form in the altered tribe around the liberal Quaker model of service leadership where decisions are not reached via win/lose debate, but via collaboration and story-telling.  

So this is where I begin. 

Bibliography

Deloria, Jr. Vine. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Univ of Oklahoma Pr (Trd).

Hedges, Chris. 2003. War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Anchor.

Rorty, Richard. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol.4. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press.