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AFTER BUFFALO
We’re another generation after buffalo - will you tell me what we’ve learned?
We destroy everything sacred – all our bridges have been burned
One great nation after buffalo – no place left for them to roam
The land’s been raped by our greed and our arrogance – how can we find our way home?
How can we find our way home after buffalo?
Future’s departed and people discarded like bottles on the roadside
Mongrel’s confusion at highway’s intrusion the reservations dust-blown dreams have been denied
Where’s the wisdom of this mighty nation whose pillars crumble on a shameful foundation
Another generation takes mindless dictation from two and a half centuries’ soul-less federal administration
We are not innocent in irresponsible ignorance to empower leaders of unaccountable indifference
Using artful rhetorical circumlocution and wild allegorical verbal ablution
To qualify, falsify, quantify, modify, deny and justify lie upon lie upon lie
Three hundred treaties broken – beware the spirits you’ve woken
With the cerebral contusion, rapist intrusion, cultural, racial, spiritual pollution
Defended by an exclusionary constitution to wage genocide known as the “Indian solution”
Captain Pratt still revered for his benevolent contribution of the military boarding school institution
An educational illusion of hate and persecution exchanging family and language with fear and confusion
Degradation without restitution, demoralization with no retribution
The scars of humiliation of forced assimilation with no repatriation but white-washed devastation
Rivers run crimson and we bear the cross, gasping beneath history’s albatross
And the mountains once purple now blackened with loss of the Great American Holocaust
Where the winds and the rains howl with no consolation, a deluge of disenfranchised desolation
For the millions of buffalo whose systematic extermination
Cuts straight through the heart of every reservation
Are we savages, or are we man – to drain this lifeblood from the land
Run, run, run, run as fast as you can from this thunder in my hand
May the sun bear witness to mound upon mound of carcasses rotting, the blood on the ground
Imagine the sound of round after round, quelling revolt with jolt after jolt from Winchester, Henry, Spencer and Colt
Breaking, stampeding, turning, retreating, the bullet-flesh meeting, thunderous repeating,
Hearts and drums beating, calves staggering bleating,
Crying eyes-wide by their dead mother’s side with her tongue cut away and her three-dollar hide
Do you know what was taken, destroyed and defiled?
Do you know what is sacred in all that is wild?
HARMONY…man and beast…mother and child
For the hearts and the lives and the spirits still breaking
For the buffalo and the earth never yours for the taking
Beware of these spirits you’re waking!
Beware of these spirits you’re waking!
Oh say, can you see from sea to not so shining sea, salty and bitter with the bile of hypocrisy
Over the bones of the braves and those last to life free laying shallow in graves of monumental infamy
With Washington’s backing of hatred and fear, sent the Cherokee packing, the long Trail of Tears
Now those faces of Rushmore, the Four Musketeers, put in office by land thieves and war profiteers
In self-righteous vanity, in the name of Christianity, watch over the legacy of the Massacre of Wounded Knee
While George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry are made martyrs for their crimes against humanity
Are we savages, or are we man – to drain this lifeblood from the land
Run, run, run, run as fast as you can from this thunder in my hand
This is the way the world ends with this blood upon the plains
This is the way the world ends – Wavoka’s dream has been in vain
This is the way the world – all our so-called leaders are insane
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a whimper, but a bang…
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