A Language Older Than Words (5 page)

Finally it occurred to me that if simply asking had worked for the coyotes, perhaps it would work as well for the dogs. I sat down with them, and as they jumped all over me I said, "I give you guys plenty of treats. When I pull food from the dumpster for the chickens you get the first shot at it. I think that's a pretty good deal. Please don't eat the eggs."

The next day, the dogs stopped eating eggs.

That's when I started to think I was crazy.

I have read accounts of scientists who administered electric shocks to cats at intervals of five minutes, each shock sending the animals into convulsions. The cats who survived were removed from their restraints, then brought back another day for further shocks, until they had been given as many as ninety-five shocks within a three-week period, or until they died. I have seen accounts of scientists who attached electrodes to seven-day-old kittens, then shocked them up to seven hundred times per day for the next thirty-five days, always during the nursing period. The scientists noted that "the behavior of the mother cat merits attention. When she eventually discovered that the experimental kittens were being given electric shocks during the feeding process or whenever it was close to her body, she would do everything possible to thwart the experimenter with her claws, then trying to bite the electric wire, and finally actually leaving the experimental kitten and running away as far as possible when the electrodes were on the kittens' legs. Her attitude toward the experimental kitten when the electrodes were removed was one of deep mother love. She would run over to the kitten, try to feed it or else comfort it as much as possible." After the thirty-five days, the kittens were allowed to rest, and then the experiment was repeated on the same beleaguered felines.

I have read accounts of scientists who irradiated dogs; the dogs who survived were fed a diet that was abnormally high in fat and cholesterol, and then given drugs to suppress thyroid action. Those who survived were given injections of pitressin, which raises pressure in the arteries. Those who survived were given electric shocks. Those who had made it this far were immobilized with their heads held rigidly in stocks, and leather thongs fastened around their bodies, given further electric shocks. Most didn't survive this. One was able to strangle himself in the harness. Another was not so lucky. After appearing "to be in temporary respiratory distress, presumably as a consequence of active struggling against the stock," the creature was given artificial respiration so the experiment could continue. The dogs were shocked for weeks on end. One of the dogs survived the shocks for seventy-seven weeks, which encouraged the scientists to begin shocking him ninety times per minute. The dog died one hour and fifteen minutes later.

How about this? Scientists raised dogs in complete isolation for their first eight months, then reported that the dogs were frightened of nearly everything. Shocking, but there's more. The dentists stated that when the dogs were placed on electrified grids, they froze and made no attempt to escape. The scientists held flaming matches under the dogs' noses, and "jabbed them with dissecting needles." Still the dogs froze. The scientists pursued the dogs with electrically charged toy cars, which delivered 1,500 volts to the animals on contact. The scientists reported that the dogs, raised in isolation, did not seem to understand the source of their pain.

What does a person do with this kind of information? How do you grapple with the knowledge that, in the pursuit of data— and ultimately in an attempt to make ourselves "lords and possessors of nature"—members of our culture will give electric shocks to kittens and will mercilessly torture dogs? It seems impossible to form an adequate response.

Six nights ago, I dreamt of fishing. In this dream I began to reel in a huge fish. I pulled and pulled, and when it came close enough to see from shore it sped toward me and leapt onto the beach. Its bulk scared me—it was as long as my outstretched arms, and nearly half that distance from dorsal fin to belly. Its cold eye seemed to follow my every movement. Its jaw worked for breath. I wanted to throw it back; I couldn't stand having it next to me. Nor could I bear the thought of killing it. It had swallowed the hook. I had no choice: placing one foot on the fish's head, I pulled on the line. At last the hook came loose with the familiar crunch of cartilage. I still wanted to throw the fish back. Dying now, it was even more hideous. As I searched for a
\
hatchet to finally kill this creature of the deep, a man approached, and said two words: "It's cod." I awoke perplexed, and then realized he meant for me to eat it, take it in. That is what we all must do.

I called my friend, Jeannette Armstrong. A traditional Okanagan Indian, she is an author, teacher, and philosopher. She travels extensively working on indigenous sovereignty and land rights issues, and helps to rebuild native communities damaged by the dominant culture. I told her about my interactions with the coyotes and said, "I don't know what to make of this."

She laughed, then said, "Yes, you do."

A few weeks later we took a walk, and sat on the steep bank of a river. I leaned against the reddish dirt and played with the tendril of a trees root that trailed from the soil. In front of us an eddy whirled in circles large enough to carry whole watersoaked trees in lazy circuits. Each round, the logs almost broke free only to fall back toward the bank and slide again upstream. Beyond the eddy the river moved slow and smooth, and beyond the river we could see cottonwoods and haystacks dotting broad meadows, interspersed with fields of alfalfa hemmed by barbed-wire fences. In the distance, the plains gave way to mountains, low and blue.

Jeannette said, "Attitudes about interspecies communication are the
primary
difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor." She paused, then continued, emphatically, "It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is."

I looked at the river. It would be easy to observe the eddy and make up a half-dozen lessons I could learn from it, for example, the obvious metaphor of the logs traveling in circles, like people trapped in a confining mindset that doesn't allow them to reenter the free flow of life. There's certainly nothing wrong with fabricating metaphors from the things we find around us, or from the experience of others—human or otherwise—but in both of those situations the
other
remains a case study onto which we project whatever we need to learn. That's an entirely different circumstance than listening to the other as it has its say, reveals its
intents, expresses its experience, and does all this
on its own terms.

Certainly it would be a step in the right direction if our culture as a whole could accept the notion of listening to the natural world—or listening at all, for that matter—even if they thought that "listening" was merely a metaphor. I once heard a Diné man say that uranium gives people radiation poisoning because the uranium does not like to be above ground. It wants to remain far beneath the surface of the earth. Whether we view this statement as literal truth or metaphor, the lesson is the same: digging up uranium makes you sick.

But to view this metaphorically is to still to perceive the world anthropocentrically. In this case the metaphorical view expresses concern for the people poisoned by uranium. The Diné man's observation, on the other hand, is a comment on the importance of maintaining the order of things.

I told Jeannette about this, then sat silent while I considered a pair of conversations I'd previously engaged in, one a couple of years before, and one much more recently. In the former conversation I'd been sitting on the floor of my living room, speaking with a scientist friend of mine who insisted that the scientific method—whereby an observer develops a hypothesis, then gathers data to rigorously test its feasibility—is in fact the only way we learn. One of my cats walked into the room, and my friend said, "Hypothesis: Cats purr when you pet them." She scratched her finger on the carpet, and the cat trotted over to her. She ran her hand along the cat's back. The cat purred. "Hypothesis supported," she said. "Sample size, one. Where's another cat?"

I knew I disagreed, but it took me a while to articulate my reason. Finally I said that whether we are electrifying a kitten or petting a cat, if the purpose is specifically to collect data we're still objectifying the cat. "What if," I said, "I pet her because I like to, and because I know she likes it? I can still pay attention, and I can still
learn
from the relationship. That's what happens with my other friends. Why not with the cat, too? But
t
he
point
is pursuing a relationship, not gathering information."

She hesitated, looping strands of hair around her index finger, as she often does when she contemplates something, and then she said, "I guess that would change the whole notion of what knowledge is, and how we get it."

I nodded. The cat, for her part, reached up on her hind legs to push her head against my friends arm. Absentmindedly, my friend stroked the cats back.

The other conversation was shorter, but then trees can be rather taciturn. I was walking the dirt road that leads to my mailbox, which intersects with a paved road. I noticed an old pine tree just on the corner, as I had noticed it many times previous, and I thought, "That tree is doing very well."

Immediately I heard a response that did not pass through my ear but went directly to the part of my brain that receives sounds. I heard a completion of my sentence that changed its meaning altogether: "For not being in a community." I looked around, and though there were other trees nearby, this was not a full tree community. The tree's nearest neighbors included the mailboxes and a telephone pole coated with faded creosote. I began to think about this lack of community, and from there began to think of all the times I had moved, from Nebraska to Maine and back to Nebraska, then Montana, to Colorado for college, Nevada, California, months spent living in my truck, back to Nevada, Idaho, Washington. I thought about the people I had left behind, my grandmother, my brothers, one sister and then another, friends. The irrigation ditch behind my old house. The aspen trees outside the front window, the Russian olives, the immense anthills in the pasture. These were my associations, not what I heard the tree "say." That's the crucial difference. The tree merely expressed one phrase. Everything else came afterward. Try it yourself. Listen to someone, and pay attention to where your thoughts take you. It actually
feels
different to hear than to think.

I told Jeannette about these two conversations. We talked some more, about the river, about her activism and my own, about what it will take for humans to survive. As we talked, a mosquito buzzed around her lace, then stopped to perch on her arm. She waved it away.

I told her about the dogs, and how they had stopped eating eggs as soon as I asked. "I can’tvue believe how easy this is."

"Yeah. That's what we've been
trying
to
tell
you now for five
hundred years."

On November 29, 1864, approximately seven hundred soldiers, under the command of Colonel John Chivington, approached a Cheyenne encampment near Sand Creek, in Colorado. The dawn's early light revealed to the soldiers about a hundred lodges scattered below.

Chivington knew that in an attempt to demonstrate that they were no threat, the Indians of this village had voluntarily turned in all but their hunting weapons to the Federal government. He knew that the Indians were considered by the military to be prisoners of war. He knew further that nearly all of the Cheyenne men were away hunting buffalo. His response to all of this: "I long to be wading in gore."

As was true of Descartes centuries before him, Chivington was no lone lunatic, but had an entire culture for company. This highly respected man—a former Methodist minister, still an elder in good standing at his church, recently a candidate for Congress—had already stated in a speech that his policy toward Indians was that we should "kill and scalp them all, little and big." It would be comforting to think that such a murderous impulse would stamp the man an outcast. We would be wrong.
The Rocky Mountain News,
the paper of record for the region, had ten times during the previous year used editorials to urge "extermination against the red devils," stating that the Indians "are a dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race, and ought to be wiped from the face of the earth." The paper worked closely with the governor, who proclaimed it was the right and obligation of the citizens and the military of the region to "pursue, kill, and destroy" all Indians. Chivington and his troops did not act alone.

Two white men who happened to be visiting the camp spied the soldiers, and tied a tanned buffalo hide to a pole, then waved it above their heads as a signal that this was a friendly village. Black Kettle, the Cheyenne's principle leader, raised first a white flag and, fearing the worst, a United States flag (given to him by Abraham Lincoln) in a desperate attempt to convince the soldiers not to attack.

There is an awful inevitability about what happened next. Soldiers opened fire. Indians fled. Chivington ordered his artillery to shoot into the panicked mass of women and children. Troops charged, cutting down every nonwhite in their path. Women scratched at the creek's sandy bank, trying to scoop out shelters for themselves and their children. As one soldier later reported, "There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side."