A report today: native red squirrels face extinction at the hands of grey ones, introduced from America in 1876. No-one can quite work out why they cannot live together but scientists say that it may have something to do with the grey ones being more competitive....
The greys are sweeping the south; only in a few places do the reds survive and that too in special reservations...


Wisdom is grey. On the other hand, life and religion are full of colour.

----Wittgenstein


For the Red Indian seems to me much older than Greeks or Hindus or any European or even Egyptian. The Red Indian as a civilised and religious man, civilised beyond taboo and totem, is religious perhaps in the oldest sense, and deepest of the word. That is to say, he is a remnant of the most deeply religious race still living....Never shall I forget the utter absorption of the dance, so quiet, so steadily, timelessly rhythmic, and silent, with the ceaseless down-tread, always to the earth's centre, the very reverse of the upflow of the Dionysiac or Christian ecstasy.

There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were still alive but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock...For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, earth-life, sun-life...This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion ...

Again, something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitter dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses..this old, bronze-resonant man, with his eyes as if glazed in old memory, and his voice issuing in endless plangent monotony from the wide, unfurled mouth...

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms, and shut up fast in her own 'productive' machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

--D.H. Lawrence, Selected Essays.



'The North American Indian, says Frithjof Schuon, had no intention of 'fixing' himself on this earth, where things crystallise or petrify in time if they do not evaporate: this explains his aversion to houses, especially stone ones, and also the absence of writing which, from his perspective, would "fix" and "kill" the sacred flow of the spirit ..The red man's sanctuary is everywhere,; and this is also why the earth should remain intact, virgin , and sacred as when it left the Divine Hands'.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.


'First, in the Sioux country , the Army crushed the Sun Dance with armed force. Then the missionaries influenced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to impose regulations not only against the Sun Dance but against all "pagan" ceremonies which, they believed, impeded the progress of the Indians towards Christian civilisation. The Interior Department framed a criminal code forbidding Indian religious practices.'

---Indians of the Americas, John Collier.'...


The white man descended on them. It was a horde in which rapacity and the sterile superstitions of 'progress' had already destroyed the spiritual heritage which had been its won birthright...and there was only a sadness deeper than imagination can hold-sadness of men completely conscious, watching the universe being destroyed by a numberless and scorning foe'

---J. Collier , cited in Gai Eaton's King of the Castle.


At the frontier, the death of an Indian...(from Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden)

On the outskirts of a small town an Indian, Jimmy, is attacked by three crazed white youths and his body dumped at the riverside...

"In the spring when the snow melted and the rivers flooded, Jimmy would no doubt be swept away to the river , on currents that carried the logs and rocks and earth of the interior to the Great Slave Lake and beyond towards the arctic ocean...Think of those four minds. The one moving in a country that was his , of which he knew every corner, that he could explain and explore and use and delight in. The other three looking at a "wilderness", with a tough indifference or resolve, somewhere and somehow, to get get some hold of some part of this place and transform it from nothing into something, from mere land into money, from frontier into a ranch or an oil well or something, just something. Think of one mind filled with knowledge of place and the others empty of such knowledge, filled instead with determination and craziness and anger of youth, reinforced by restlessness and nomadism and technologies from elsewhere....this meeting of minds, this murder, could have taken place-has taken place-on all frontiers between settlers and hunter-gatherers.This time, in 1998, in this place, it was Jimmy Field, Dunne-za. He was man who travelled time in dreams and moved on his lands with awe-inspiring skills...the pain of his death contained all deaths, in all places and all times. The bodies of hunter-gatherers continue to be swept under the ice, frozen , dead, towards the oceans."