Here is something that gave me pause and made me think.

Yesterday I went down to the Newberry Library for their book sale, got some decent books. I love those kinds of sales. More on that later, but today I’m thinking of something I just read in one of them. It was a book I had read some years ago, but thought it worth revisiting. Here is something that gave me pause and made me think.

“Tucked in among them was a copy of a speech made at the Medicine Lodge council of 1867 by Ten Bears, a Comanche Chief. Phaedrus had copied it from a book on (1^st American) oratory to use an example of Plains speech by someone who could never have learned it from the whites. Now he read it again.

Ten Bears spoke to the assembled tribes and specifically to the representatives of Washington, saying:

There are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They were not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You have said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and to make us Medicine lodges. I do not want them.

I was born on the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over in that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them lived happily.

When I was at Washington, the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours, and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep. The young men have heard talk of this, and it has made them sad and angry. Do not speak of it any more. I love to carry out the talk I get from the Great Father. When I get goods and presents, I and my people feel glad since it shows that he holds us in his eye. If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is to small.

The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done this thing you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die. Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Spirit. I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and pure, and I wish it so, that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in, and leave it when they go out.

As Phaedrus read it again this time he saw it wasn’t quite as close to cowboy speech as he’d remembered—it was a damn sight better than cowboy speech—but it was still closer to the white Plains dialect than it was the Language of the European. Here was the straight, head-on, declarative sentences without stylistic ornamentation of any kind, but with a poetic force that must have put the sophisticated bureaucratic speech of Ten Bears’ antagonists to shame.”

Just something that made me think. From Robert M. Pirsig, in “Lila”.