[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Domination Chronicles Podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your co-host, Peter Doreco.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm your co-host, Steven Nukum.
[SPEAKER_00]: Together Peter and I have 90 years of experience researching, discussing, and writing about indigenous people's issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our conversations, examine themes such as the original free existence of our native nations and peoples, invasion and colonization.
[SPEAKER_01]: as a claim of a right of domination and civilization as a process and system of domination.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, good morning, Steve.
[SPEAKER_01]: Good morning, how are you doing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Doing very well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Today's conversation is going to be about our conversations.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that may seem a little bit looking at our navels, but I've gotten some sense of feedback from people like they like listening to our conversations, but what motivates them?
[SPEAKER_01]: What guides them?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we have any path that we're following?
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of urges and implementations.
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it that we're focused on domination?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did that happen?
[SPEAKER_01]: And how is it that we're able to stand outside domination?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started thinking about your domination translators.
[SPEAKER_01]: You call it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe you could say something about the history but like when did you start actually focusing on domination as a phenomenon, a concept, a history, all of that, and then integrate that into your presentation of texts where you use your brackets and put the word in every time you come across a word that implies or incorporates or mean domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's a fascinating subject for me because it
[SPEAKER_00]: It requires me to go back to pretty much the beginning of my efforts to make sense of Johnson versus McIntosh, federal Indian law, going back to the history, reading, bearing my heart at Wounded Knee by D-Brown when I was about 16 years old and then getting into reading
[SPEAKER_00]: accounts of what was going on with not just with the law, but with history.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I say the lie, I always want to add two letters to the word the I are there law.
[SPEAKER_00]: And but as I began to get deeper into all of that and began to want to make sense of the Johnson and Versus McNus
[SPEAKER_00]: and I would look up key terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if I see a word such as ascendancy, I don't really know what that means.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the sense that it's upward somehow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, when Marshall says the character and religion of it's inhabitants, meaning the continents and habits afforded in apology,
[SPEAKER_00]: meaning created an excuse of rationale for considering them as a people over home, the superior genius of Europe, my claim and ascendancy, what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a convoluted sentence to begin with, but then when I looked it up at some point, maybe not initially, maybe I never looked it up for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I did finally do so, I saw controlling influence governing power
[SPEAKER_00]: look at that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the one of the key points was of my research was when I came across the book by William Brandon, New World's for Old.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's 1987, but I wouldn't swear to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he does a very excellent accounting of the etymology of the word Dominion.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he takes it through Latin dictionary and looks at these, all these little details of it and how it relates back to dominium, the Latin word dominium, and then he has a sentence at the end of his extended paragraph, political power grown from property dominium,
[SPEAKER_00]: was in effect domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, oh, that's interesting, ascendancy and then domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: So then I started to associate every time I see the word dominion, I would associate that with what Brandon was saying about domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was kind of at that point that I really began to zero in on that theme
[SPEAKER_00]: And I used to do a lot of reading in other areas as well, and without getting into a lot of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was one author in particular, from India, Arabindo, Srirabindo.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had these massive, I mean, you have to be a mental massacist to read Arabindo.
[SPEAKER_00]: His least is philosophy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really something else, but he had some really amazing, he was an extraordinary intellect, and he had some amazing essays on the future, but also on the past, and one of the themes that he kept hammering was domination, and particularly the domination of women, and this sort of thing, so that they're again.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just kept seeing this theme every so often I would crop up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, when you kindly assisted us to have our Indigenous Law Institute website up on the internet through native web and all that, if you go back and look at that website, you'll see that I have the Empire Domination Model.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that's mid-1990s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1993, I had already published my Law Review article kindly published by New York University School of Law, the evidence of Christian nationalism and federal Indian law.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a doctrine of discovery, John Severs' Macintosh, and Plenary Power.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was already putting all those pieces together, noticing these various strands of meaning, and how that theme of domination just kept coming up, but also it's related to Empire.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I didn't have the comfort zone within myself, the psychological,
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, it sounded so extreme.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I started saying domination, people would think that there was something wrong with the way I'm presenting the information.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not weird how there's some kind of timidity that you become timid and, well, can I really say this?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it took me years and years to get over that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so finally, when I got to the comfort zone of, which is maybe in the last 15 years or so, of being able to use that term and use it very openly and regularly and so forth, I eventually developed a list.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would sit with this stuff for a long time and I began.
[SPEAKER_00]: I looked up the word civilization at one point and no, I had looked it up before, but it depends on the dictionary as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some dictionaries will have this particular definition, the forcing of a cultural pattern on a population of which it is foreign.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're the forcing of a cultural pattern on another nation or people is obviously domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then I begin to realize, wow, all these different terms, the word state, you know, Max Weber saying the state is a relation of men dominating men.
[SPEAKER_00]: for the state to exist, the dominated must submit themselves to the authority claimed by the powers that be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's also dependent on the translators of vapor, because maybe not every translation looks exactly like that, but that's the one that I have that's handy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then I realized, well, let me put these key terms into a list.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I came up with seven main terms, I've added the word government to the list since then, but the seven key terms are civilization, state, sovereignty, because Jonathan Havercroft defines that as an unjust form of political domination that limits human freedom, a tendency,
[SPEAKER_00]: to the United States, sovereign, sovereign to the dominion empire.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, in any case, there's seven key terms and they repeat over and over, and you see them all the time, but nobody's going to look at the word state and think, oh yeah, domination, maybe some people of their experts in the field, but not typically in every day use of language, even civilization.
[SPEAKER_00]: any of those terms really.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sovereignty, people are using that term as an effort to fight the good fight, but then they'll put tribal at the front of it, which really means, as you point out the other day, diminished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody looks at tribal sovereignty and says, yeah, we have diminished sovereignty.
[SPEAKER_00]: but that's what it means.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the way in which English is so ambiguous, the extent to which it is so ambiguous, makes it necessary to have a lot of these types of
[SPEAKER_00]: detailed understandings and connect the dots in a very creative fashion.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I ultimately came up with this idea, hey, why don't I do something where I take, I'll call the Domination Translator.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I come upon the word sovereignty or if I'm writing the word sovereignty,
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll just put domination in brackets after it if I civilization, domination, and so but then I, uh, the state of domination, the claim, what's it all based on?
[SPEAKER_00]: Them coming and asserting or assuming or claiming a right of domination, I don't want to say they have the right, but because they don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to say it's a claim that they're making.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a bogus claim as far as I'm concerned, but they're making it nonetheless.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they don't realize they're making that claim.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just using language without any real conscious awareness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe at the highest level of the state department, legal affairs office or something, but they may have some sense of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure they do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the most part, the average everyday person does not.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's just a real quick rundown of how I came upon all that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's terrific, Steve.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so insightful, you know, a few things that are occurring to me, you're list, the list are seven things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we could add,
[SPEAKER_01]: If we get into normal language, like people, normal, just daily language, people talk about property, as you pointed out, there's Domination within the concept of property.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you back up a half step, you maybe begin to see that because when you have a landlord,
[SPEAKER_01]: You have lordship built into the person that supposedly quote owns that property.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so domination immediately becomes apparent where just with the word property by itself, it doesn't become apparent unless you've done the current analysis that you've done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as soon as land lord becomes a kind of common term, and certainly as a common term in US English, used over and over again,
[SPEAKER_01]: Then if you back up another half step, you just take off the land and you say, well, what a lordship?
[SPEAKER_01]: You mean, so lordship is built into ordinary thinking in daily life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, those other terms that you're using are also built in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Government is built in to ordinary daily like state is built into ordinary daily language.
[SPEAKER_01]: And these concepts of domination become normalized.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that they become normalized.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've already been normalized.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're born into a society in which domination is somehow normal.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not thought of domination because, as you pointed out, there were domination sounds bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's other words are used, which have the same effect in terms of what is happening institutionally, but the dressing has been changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The closing has been changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like when you talk about the emperor's new clothes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you talk about the
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't do it today, but you've used the phrase of view from the ships versus the view from the shores of the ships.
[SPEAKER_01]: The view from the ships is people who are traveling with a domination framework in mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, partly, they're very explicit about this because they have a piece of paper from a king, which is a dominator.
[SPEAKER_01]: And probably they're all aware that the king is some kind of dominating force, you're not even allowed to talk about the mortality of the king.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a crime.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was treason actually under their lezae majesty rules.
[SPEAKER_01]: So domination was inherent in that English society.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we just stick with England for a minute, but we know that we can expand this to France and Spain and Portugal and back to the Catholic Church, et cetera, the Roman Church,
[SPEAKER_01]: these concepts of domination were actually valorized.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are supposed to be good things.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you pointed out, one of the papal bulls talks about he from whom empires and dominations and all good things proceed.
[SPEAKER_01]: So back up to what I was saying, the people on the ship, their view is a world in which domination is normal.
[SPEAKER_01]: it is expected.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is God ordained and whether they considered it sometimes objectionable or not, nevertheless it was simply there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was part of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the mental framework that they brought when they came across the ocean on their ships.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started to say, partly they had a very clear sharp idea that they were they
[SPEAKER_01]: were out to dominate whatever they found, and they had their weapons to bring with them, and they had their markers of dominion to bring with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had all of that as an explicit project.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I'm curious about that is spurred by your domination translator, is the extent of which, in addition to their, or is a companion to their explicit intent to dominate, where domination did not exist, at least Christian domination did not exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: In addition to that, they carried with them their own normalized.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, there's nomination, how else could we live?
[SPEAKER_01]: Viewpoint.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, okay, but let me jump in there and add what I think is kind of a key point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Domination is perhaps the most negative term in the English language.
[SPEAKER_00]: If not the most, it's certainly one of the most negative terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll see, among Christian writers, them talking about Islamic domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you won't see them any reference to Christian domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wouldn't happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you'd never see those two paired together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, when we went to interview Dr. Luis Rivera Pagan and Puerto Rico, I happen to have
[SPEAKER_00]: the priest had the window seat, there was an empty seat between us, and I had the aisle, and I eventually had the opportunity to discuss some of this with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I gave him that sentence, not just the one that you mentioned already, a him from whom empires and domination and all good things proceed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the one about the K. Su back to Ali, Dominio Temparali, Ali Koram, Dominoram, Christianorum, Constitutino and Ascent, so that Dominoram, Christianorum, I translated that to him as Christian dominators.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or I might have even said Christian domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: I might have said that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he said, well, that's not possible because there's, it domination does not go with Christianity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he rejected it, the point of making is that they had a sense of whatever the heck they had a sense of on the deck of the ship, they had the sense of those documents and the authorization, but I don't think any of them thought in terms of their own effort to go and dominate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the amazing thing in terms of the skill and the subtlety of how very negative things in the hands of a very skilled writer can the euphemisms that are used to cloak what's actually going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's an extraordinary skill, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's a way, so what I'm getting at is from the viewpoint of the shoreline looking at the ship, its domination, from the viewpoint of the people on that ship, it's all the other synonyms for domination, it's all the other terminologies that are not understood by them as domination at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that's really you said it what I was trying to say you just said is that what they were carrying in their minds was domination, but it was not a consciousness of domination.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when they thought about their king, they thought about obedience, let's say, or they thought about the divine protection that they were getting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And certainly when you can quote from a
[SPEAKER_01]: and you have a priest who says, oh no, that's impossible, then what has transpired there means that that that Latin is being read by the priest without actually making it's even though the Latin word dominium is in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not translated that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's translated into something like
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, what are the, what are the rules?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're rule, sway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, type of terms, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Diction even though jurisdiction, there's, that's another word by the way that people use all the time when what does it mean jurisdiction means they power of the law to speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: They, they, they don't, they don't mean if I can use that word.
[SPEAKER_01]: The, in which a given rule can be applied.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the jurisdiction of the, uh, federal district court for the Southern District of New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a defined geographic boundary around the power of that court to speak the law.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, who is thinking of that as domination?
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, what else is it, but a kind of form of rule, which is, in a sense, unchangeable except by going to a higher court.
[SPEAKER_01]: for a district like it's okay now we're going to talk about it for the second circuit and then above that is the Supreme Court so we have layers of jurisdiction and at any point that somebody says well this is all a system of domination people generally returning say what are you talking about i mean you know don't get in the way here don't mess up the uh... the thing with the irrelevant comments and i can imagine that maybe when you first
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, realizing what you were on to with this word domination, when you say you were hesitant, is because you sense that people are not ready initially to hear this, but it has to be said, because otherwise there's no clarity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess I want to ask you another question.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you've studied cognitive theory.
[SPEAKER_01]: And is there any way in which you were relating
[SPEAKER_01]: your understanding of the use of language to give metaphors for domination, let's call them, or, you know, well, is there, what's the cognitive, did you have you dive into that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well certainly, the NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
[SPEAKER_00]: I, well, I wanted to give credit to Stephen Winter in his book, law, a clearing in the forest, law, life and mind, I think it came out in 2001, but what, what, what, I, particularly through his book, I realized that there's a background
[SPEAKER_00]: a background framework of meaning that's not evident in the words.
[SPEAKER_00]: We speak these words, there are all kinds of implications.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll give in a really key example.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Christophe O'Kalone went to that first island, landed on that first island.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he had his ceremony of possession as they call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he decided to name the island, San Salvador, Holy Savior.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody's going to think of that as a term of domination, even that act is not understood as domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're as younger people just reading all kinds of stuff and we're going very fast and reading these and taking the terms that face value and so forth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, but in that term, that's an example of metaphors.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the application of a name for one thing and applying it to something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're thinking of that island in terms of this other thing called Holy Savior, which is the entirety of Christianity and that little piece that little part is called a
[SPEAKER_00]: or metonomy, the part that stands for the whole for the entirety of the Christian theology and all that, the Bible and so forth, but nobody's saying that, they just see San Salvador.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so how many people are conscious of the fact that that background is operating just through those two words in Spanish?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, so that's one example, but going back to the idea of land lord,
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where it gets fascinating because the extent to which a person is able to go into all the minutiae has the patience to go into the etymology of these various terms, and realize, oh, Dominion is also related to Domayati in Sanskrit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a term called Dominoos and Dominoos.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dominoos is he who has subdued past tense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Dominoos is he who subdues.
[SPEAKER_00]: President, I mean, as a kind of the nature of that being, that person to subdue, which is the word subduos is in an information.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he who has dominated is a translation of the word
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, and Domino's the same thing, the Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are two terms for Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, how many people would know that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you go to a particular type of religious service and you hear a domony, domony, domony, domony, domony, domony for the whole entire service throughout the entire service you hear this term, what does that term mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: But notice how it's connected to the theme of domination, dominion, dominion, dominion, dominion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dominion is the same root, the same operating framework that's being used in a plate.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one, and I mean no one, within the flock or the congregation, is going to think, oh, yes, the dominator.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not going to think, the Lord's prayer, the dominators prayer, they're not going to think that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So from another perspective or vantage point, it's possible to put those pieces together, but then you run the risk of, oh, you're going to really offend people because how dare you point out that these things are, that, well, I'm sorry, but that those connections are there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can't really avoid it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm on a little bit of a side path or some work I'm doing about Constantine and we alluded to once in a while when the Roman church became weaponized and I'm thinking that in a certain way I'm thinking of this as being helpful is to salvage Jesus from this picture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's my understanding, as I said, I'm still working on this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think there's anything that is quoted and not that there is any way reliable source to say, oh, yes, he said this was on such and such a day and such and replace.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the words that have been carried down is like this is what Jesus said.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that there's anything that said that he was called, he says,
[SPEAKER_01]: When did the prayer becomes the Lord's prayer?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know the answer to these questions, but I just think there's a way in which as we travel back through Western civilization, we're going to begin to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: The beginnings, we're going to begin to see the beginnings of certain ways of articulating this hierarchical structure of domination and basing it on what?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I'm wondering right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: What were these prelets and popes and all the rest of them relying on to say, oh, now I can tell you, this is what it is, it's the Lord, and you have to bow down.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to shift a little bit to another set of names because
[SPEAKER_01]: What you're talking about is the way it's like that priest on the plane or the person in the church.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the translation process going on in their head and to the extent that they're aware of it then they're going to be somewhat puzzled.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're going to resist calling it by this other name.
[SPEAKER_01]: They want to just keep the first name that they were happy with.
[SPEAKER_01]: And or at least weren't questioning.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that
[SPEAKER_01]: We can use there's this familiar debate about what is the name for these original inhabitants that John Marshall referred to as the inhabitants, its inhabitants, well they were calling them Indians and I think pretty much everybody knows the reason they were called Indians because Columbus didn't know where he was.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he arrived at this place that he thought was Indian, he called it San Salvador.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was actually not only applying a name that he was just pulling out of his own head, but he was thinking that he was somewhere else.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he was actually in his own head in more ways than one.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't where he actually was.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that name is problematic in at least those two ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's been a sense over the decades that, oh, that's a misnomer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we shouldn't use the word Indian.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the I word.
[SPEAKER_01]: We shouldn't use it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course it's so embedded.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's part of the law.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's part of federal Indian law.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's going to hard to get around that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So then the next thing was well, they're American Indians.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they say, well, American indies, well, let's see, America didn't exist when Columbus landed here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So how could they be American Indians?
[SPEAKER_01]: When did the Indians become American Indians?
[SPEAKER_01]: How could that be?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so then that was a little problematic.
[SPEAKER_01]: So then, well, let's say, call them Native Americans.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's just as problematic because, as I said, America didn't exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the search for,
[SPEAKER_01]: What's an acceptable way to hide this gross mistake of geography and this imposition of a dominion of a domination over the so-called original inhabitants?
[SPEAKER_01]: And recently there's been a kind of, well, in the last decade or so, the movie is toward the word indigeneous.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, no, now there's no problem with that indigenous just means that they're here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, there's a level of meaning of the word indigenous.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means yes, it's just here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So like this plant is indigenous to this mountain range.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as you worked with the UN documents that we talked about, well, we haven't talked about on these conversations, but
[SPEAKER_01]: we work together on that some years ago, the United Nations puts forward the idea of indigenous peoples' rights, but when it comes to who are the indigenous peoples, it falls back into domination, do you want to do
[SPEAKER_01]: You want to tell me your memory about the phrasing in that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the thing is that Columbus didn't speak English.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he doesn't have to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But so in Dios was most likely the term used.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I read long ago, but I don't recall the source.
[SPEAKER_00]: that anything toward in the direction of the Indies was the people were called Indios.
[SPEAKER_00]: because there were the people of the Indies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the indicator.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were toward India, but any distant lands in a direction across an ocean was toward the Indies.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why you see in the somewhere in the Caribbean region is the area called the West Indies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I believe that's connected, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: Then when you take the word Indio,
[SPEAKER_00]: And you translate or you create an English word based on indios or indio, then you end up with Indian.
[SPEAKER_00]: Indianer is a more of a Germanic or Dutch type of pronunciation of the term.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's various iterations of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, I received this, I forget how I received many, many, many years ago, back in the 1990s, I ended up with a pamphlet fact sheet number nine from the Human Rights Center and in New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe it is in New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could be the Geneva Human Rights Center, but nonetheless,
[SPEAKER_00]: This particular document was referring to indigenous peoples as the descendants of the peoples that were existing in a given place when a second population came in and through conquest settlement and other means established dominance.
[SPEAKER_00]: over them or in that area.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I saw that, I thought, well, hey, here's that same pattern, the domination pattern.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like I said, by the mid 90s, I was on to this, but this was maybe even a little before that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I noticed that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so as I got into more definitions, they're always called working definitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a single definition of indigenous people are very emphatic about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But nonetheless, this particular point, key point, is something that people just gloss right, they just don't even notice it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we had an occasion gathering of us that we're working on in the international arena and I brought this up and a particular person so we'll know it doesn't mean that and they ended up going through the definition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And consider themselves distinct from other sectors of society now prevailing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So right there, that tells you something, but what they were focused on, or is they consider themselves distinct, they have their own identity, but they also have a continuity in terms of their connection to their ancestors and that sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they were focused on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They weren't focused on this other aspect that I'm talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you become aware of that, it's pretty difficult to ignore it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what you'll see is terms such as pre-invasion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's pre-domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or they have a pre-existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what kind of pre-existence?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, are free and independent.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't say that, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't focus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have to understand that the people operating within the UN system are very skilled with their use of language.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they know how to create these little details,
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just scared around that so we don't make it explicit that they were free and independent, but what's this other invading force came in, now it's no longer pre-invasion, it's post-invasion, well that's post-domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the beauty of the domination translator because every single time that you see an example of the domination system you're going to call it out and
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so to jump back to the beginning of this conversation, you're, it's obvious that the way that this works, the domination translator and the way we arrived at it was by parsing words, parsing sentences, looking closely at language, looking at etymologies, look at the history of the meaning of a given word.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's intertwining,
[SPEAKER_01]: with other words that are seem to be different words, but they're actually related words.
[SPEAKER_01]: And sifting through all of that and bringing it back into the presence so that we have a lens with which to read the words that are written to see through them to what the meanings of those words are, the deep meanings of those words are.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I get the sense often that
[SPEAKER_01]: There are people, even people who, you know, send praise to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yes, you guys really made so much sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking that very often people who think they are somehow pronative pro-indigenous, they're not
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not actually, they're not rooted in this, in the work that you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're dealing with the end product, so that they say, oh, yes, the indigenous peoples, they want to use that word, they don't want to use the word Indian.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't want to use the word Native American, the indigenous peoples, and they have a quite grassroots indigenous peoples language, the rhetoric, and international U.N. documents perpetuates the same thing that all the other labels did.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if we bring that out as you've done today, I'm thinking they're gonna become perplexed.
[SPEAKER_01]: At some point they're gonna say wait a minute, you mean it doesn't really matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're word that we're using if that word can be translated into domination.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we talk about federal Indian law specifically, over and over again, we hear about the trust doctrine, the trust relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, as we know by analyzing the Cherokee Nation of the Georgia case and related cases, that's a phrase that says domination.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a phrase.
[SPEAKER_01]: It says, oh, this is wonderful, loving, caring, delightful.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a phrase that says, we're in charge and we'll tell you what to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: best interest as determined by us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's been pretty well stated.
[SPEAKER_01]: explicitly, in recent Supreme Court cases, so that anybody who's looking at the rhetoric today saying, oh yes, the trust of federal government has a trust relationship, and if we expose just by simple analysis of the text of those documents and related documents, if we expose that what you're saying is, oh yes, the domination in relationship is really good.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to say, wait a minute, I didn't say that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look at what the word means in the context of so-called federal Indian law, and then you go through, connect all the dots, and they say, so what am I supposed to say about that?
[SPEAKER_01]: What about that relationship?
[SPEAKER_01]: What about the responsibilities, say, well, the government has not declared that it has any such responsibility.
[SPEAKER_01]: The trust is not a trust, and then a common understanding of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in a sense, our analysis is throwing a lot of people for a loop, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're losing confidence in their ability to express what they're thinking and feeling because they realize that the language is available to them, the cognitive structures are available to them, are problematic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: To my way of thinking, that's actually good that they come to that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember during my teaching years, sometimes a student would come up after I had taken a part Cherokee Nation, let's say.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they say, oh, I'm so disillusioned.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would say, that's great.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got rid of the illusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's wonderful.
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe it reflects like, well, wait a minute, disillusionment feels bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say, that's a real forward step.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the first step to begin to get anywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: and illusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a ways back to the notion of the Emperor's new clothes because the clothes are as surface.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you say, well, what's behind that surface rhetoric of trust and response, et cetera?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's the same old domination.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, well, wait a minute.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the way to men it is where we should just say, yes, that's the beginning point.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way to men it is a beginning point.
[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot assume that the rhetoric that you've the narrative you've been given, no matter how much it's been propped up with all kinds of wonderful rainbow flags and you know, gatherings and beaded moccasins and all the rest are you can't assume that that narrative is anything but a lie.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, anything but a decoy away from the truth, not only a lie, but an intentional decoy away from the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when you think about just jump back to Cherokee Nation again, you say, so I mean, if the trust relationship, if we just use it in its own words now,
[SPEAKER_01]: is because the inhabitants are words, and you say, well, now wait a minute, how long ago is that that was about 200 years ago?
[SPEAKER_01]: So are the native people today still words?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they still incompetent?
[SPEAKER_01]: They still can't manage themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that true?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that's what the doctrine implies.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that would open up another whole, from some point of view, can't have worms, but for us, you know, a can of enlightenment.
[SPEAKER_01]: take a step back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me just in my book, I say, pick your misnomer.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all misnomers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the sense of a misnaming.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then a lot of people jump to a conclusion, they say, oh, I know you don't like that word, such whatever the word is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know you don't want us to use it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying that you shouldn't use, I mean, maybe in a certain sense, that you have choices.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want people to be aware of the choices they're making, that when they make those choices, they're also, there's this background information that they might not be aware of, or narrowly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so occasionally I use Indigenous, but that's, I also want to move away from that to an extent, so I began to use original.
[SPEAKER_00]: nations, original peoples.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Marshall, of course, we've talked about that before, has that sentence where he's talking about the original fundamental principle that Discovery gave title to those who made it, made the discovery.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what the heck?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not original and they're not fundamental, so as he grabbing those words for them, we need to pull those back for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where the use of the word, the loose use of the word rhetoric is interesting, because I studied a majored in rhetoric and communication, and rhetoric is the art of persuasion.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the faculty for finding all the available means of persuasion and a given situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's Aristotle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, I have a pretty deep grounding in all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, with those terms, the use of various terms, they are problematic, but we just have to kind of work through that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And anyway, that was a key point I wanted to make.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a way, I'm thinking this is a leap back to our conversation about quantum physics and quantum fields is that, and we're going to come back to another conversation after you found that 1941 physics book.
[SPEAKER_00]: No 53.
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad, my dad's textbook, college textbook, physics textbook, and
[SPEAKER_00]: That was really a treat to see that and we'll get into that later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but the reason I'm referring to it is that there's a certain language of classical physics that's related to the idea that nature is dead.
[SPEAKER_01]: Things are dead.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only thing it matters is physical objects and the measurement number in relations among physical objects.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that was part of the whole world of mechanics, physical, mechanical understanding of what the world was all about, or they claim it is all about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So then that's all been blown away.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wind has been taken out of the sails of that by quantum understanding of physics.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, this is the only thing I want to say.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to go deeper into it, but in yet,
[SPEAKER_01]: In ordinary daily life, people are walking around in a classical physical universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what is happening now, I think, in the world, is there so much turmoil about what is a legitimate government and what is a legitimate authority?
[SPEAKER_01]: Words where people are using words that if they transfer, is there any such thing as a legitimate domination, et cetera?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a difference between domination and authority?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there difference between domination and leadership?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean a lot of things can begin to be opened up in a time of what is really a kind of time of turmoil But it's a time when a lot of light can come in
[SPEAKER_01]: through the cracks in the old system.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as the world turns out to be different from what people think, the same words actually might be used, but in a very different way, as well as they're having to be discarded words and new words are put in, or old words in which new meanings are found, or, you know, et cetera, all of this working with words.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we, that's what we do.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's work with words, and everything else is pouring out
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and I remember the idea I wanted to convey, which was the idea of trust.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you want to talk about a trust relationship,
[SPEAKER_00]: it's fascinating that if it's a domination relationship and you've been conditioned from a young age to always refer to it as a trust relationship, think about that sentence again and apply it to the United States.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's not a single hymn, if it's a system such as the US, we trust in the US from whom from which empires and domination and all good things proceed.
[SPEAKER_00]: is not amazing to apply that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what has happened, I believe, is that we as Native people have been conditioned to apply a very favorable sounding term trust confidence to a horrific system of domination and not realizing that that's even going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and you made a similar point if you minutes ago about so-called tribal sovereignty, which according to the actual official definition, is diminished sovereignty, or even non-s sovereignty, all right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the use of these words has been, well, it was actually the whole point of the boarding schools.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll have to get in there, getting near the end of today's session, but the idea
[SPEAKER_01]: Colonel Henry Prats idea was you actually changed the cognitive structure of these children's minds.
[SPEAKER_01]: You take them away from a community in which there were leaders, but not dominators.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a, there are what we could use in English, we'd say authority patterns, but in non-English, other languages, they would have some completely different way of being talked about.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the relationship between this person and that person?
[SPEAKER_01]: They're the most common thing in my understanding of native language certainly what I learned in Navajo is constant awareness of relationships and so take a child out of that and put a child into another setting in which relationships are also key, but the relationships have been stratified.
[SPEAKER_01]: and made into a structure cognitive structure, which obscures it's felt by the children.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure because there were beatings in all the rest of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's felt physically, but eventually, over the course of the boarding school operation, the minds of the children have been taught to, let's use these word, these are good words.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are good words.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are the words we can count on from the great white father who has our, quote, best interest in mind as he sees it, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's so much that involves language, words, the teaching of a new language, the obliteration of an old language, all circulating around words, language, meaning,
[SPEAKER_01]: etc.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what guides, you know, come back to the beginning when I said what guides the work and how did you come up with this?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a constant search.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, why we do that?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Between the two of us, something more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know why I do it because every time I would ask my father, what does a word mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd say, look it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would never give me an answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would always make me go and look it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got into that habit of always looking up terms and I was very curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: So curiosity is a key factor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to end on this note, which is that the difference between talking about sovereignty and having that be our focus and talking about our original free existence that pre-invasion free existence before they ever showed up with their system of domination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's the critical part.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think when we just as we use a term such as trust in an inappropriate way to refer to a domination system, it's also unfortunate to place our attention on a term of domination called sovereignty, or even diminished sovereignty, instead of our original free existence as a sacred birthright.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and if I can have one last closing work that you're your notion that we talked once before about what do we mean, that's how we got into quantum thinking what is free existence and that when we talk about it, I think this is a key difference really general conversations of people that well let's talk about native peoples, however they refer to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: is that there's a kind of museum quality to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, they used to be this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can go to a museum, or see the beaded moccasins that they used to wear.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, I mean, oh, they still wear them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've seen them at the power.
[SPEAKER_01]: You say, well, we're not really talking at that level.
[SPEAKER_01]: You and I, we're not talking at the level of sort of surface cultural practices.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about ways of life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a question for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: As we look around it in a so-called native government's tribal councils, to what extent that a free existence has actually been lost or abdicated or suppressed, just like the old ceremonies used to be suppressed, and what extent it's still available.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have my sense of what you and I touch is that we're standing in that ground as a present understanding of the world, of the cosmos.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a past for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of like that notion, where's it who co-talking about history as the history of the present.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're in the present, and every time we refer to history, we're not talking about some musty archive that has kind of archaic interest.
[SPEAKER_01]: antiquated interest, but we're talking about, oh, we have discovered another little tendril of the still living root of a system of domination, and we are separating ourselves from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: We do not have to stand within that and try to figure out how to get out of it, but we're staying outside of it and seeing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think that the past and present are funny and English, you know, past present future because we are a product of all of our past experiences at this moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have a past present combined the two words together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those are all tied into the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can envision and work toward a positive future, but it'll be based upon what we've experienced up to this moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, that's probably a good place to leave.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, let's end it there, Steve.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll be appreciative.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Domination Chronicles podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our website is DominationCronicles.com.
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