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.