The Power of the Spoken Word: Ota K'Te
The spoken word, even more
than the “white man's” written word, was powerful and sacred for
Ota
K'Te, also named Luther Standing Bear (1868-1939).
He was Chief of the Oglala
Lakota, the very people who are besieged today by the construction of
a pipeline at the Pine
Ridge reservation, one of the poorest places in the Western
Hemisphere. In 1933, forty-three years after the
U.S. Army had massacred Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded
Knee, and effectively defeated the Sioux, he wrote in Land of
the Spotted Eagle:
[The white man's] law was a written law; his divine
decalogue reposed in a book. And what better proof that his advent
into this country and his subsequent acts were the result of the
divine will! He brought the Word! [John 1:1] There ensued a blind
worship of written history, of books, of the written word, that has
denuded the spoken word of its power and sacredness. The written word
became established as a criterion of the superior man – a symbol of
emotional firmness. The man who could write his name on a piece of
paper, whether or not he possessed the spiritual firmness to honor
those words in speech, was by some miraculous formula a more highly
developed and sensitized person than the one who had never had a pen
in hand, but whose spoken word was inviolable and whose sense of
honor and truth was paramount.
Ota K'Te knew. The U.S.
had violated its treaties with Native American nations repeatedly.
European Americans cheated them without shame. He knew what he was
saying.
His words strike me as
particularly poignant at a moment when someone has been elected
President after having spewed vitriolic words against Mexicans,
Muslims, women and others in the U.S. His words have had and will
continue to have effects. Superficial retractions, were they
forthcoming, and specious clarifications about who will be targeted
for persecution will not take these effects back. They would only
show what we already know: this person's word is dishonorable,
untrustworthy, and ethically and politically harmful.
I rather
prefer the soothing words of Ota K'Te, who asks us: “Is not kindness more
powerful than arrogance; and truth more powerful than the sword?”
It is up to each one of us to respond, in word and deed.
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