Friday , March 29 2024
Dares you to look at our society through the eyes of those whose backs it's been built on.

Book Review: Lines From A Mined Mind – The Words Of John Trudell by John Trudell

What do you see when you look out your door? Do you see a street in a neighbourhood with cars, roads, houses, shops, apartments, and people going about their business? Or do you see occupied territory full of things that don’t belong, cluttering up the landscape and despoiling the environment? Two people can look at the same thing and see two completely different things, it all depends on your perspective. One person’s normalcy is another person’s hell.

Look at what we accept as normal: famine, war, pestilence, and death. The four horsemen of the apocalypse have been among us for centuries but we’ve been too blind to see them. What would happen if the apocalypse came and nobody noticed? Guess what – it’s happening everyday and you haven’t noticed yet. What? You don’t believe me do you – you think I’m full of shit and crazy don’t you? According to our society the viewpoint I’ve just expressed is crazy and full of shit because it doesn’t accept the agreed upon version, or vision, or normalcy.

If you’re going to read John Trudell’s book of poetry and song lyrics, Lines From A Mined Mind – The Words Of John Trudell, published by Fulcrum Books, you better be prepared to have your preconceived notions of how the world works challenged. First of all, he has spent the past forty years as a resistance fighter on behalf of his people, the Santee Sioux, and the authority you accept as a government are in his eyes an occupying power. It was from his great-grandparents that we stole the land on which we have built our neighbourhoods, and against whom our governments conducted a campaign of genocide in order to deal with the “Indian Problem”. A history like that is enough to give anybody a jaundiced eye when it comes to looking at the world around you, but Trudell has also suffered horrible personal tragedy.

He was a spokesperson for the all tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island by Native Americans that lasted from 1969 to 1971 and subsequently joined the American Indian Movement (AIM). He was chairman of AIM from 1973-79, but following a mysterious house fire that killed his wife, children and mother in law he resigned. To this day the cause of the fire has never been discovered, but considering his position, and the animosity that surrounded AIM in those days (and that continues to this day) there will always remain the distinct possibility that the fire was set deliberately. After that, Trudell began writing, and since 1983 he has released eleven recordings of his music, and toured around North America performing and giving readings of his work.

Lines From A Mined Mind is the first time an exhaustive collection of his writing has been gathered into one publication. For those of you not familiar with Trudell’s work, he primarily wrote blues and blues based rock and roll, but more importantly his lyrics dealt with issues that barely anybody was – or is – singing about. It’s not only that he wrote about issues affecting Native Americans, but he also wrote about the effect the world we live in has on a human being’s spirit; how we have allowed ourselves to be shaped and moulded to such an extent that we no longer notice that we are being manipulated.

In his introduction, titled “From Somewhere Inside My Head,” Trudell outlines the precept behind “Mined Mind”:

Industrial tech no logic civilization is the mining process

The intelligence of each arriving human generation

Is programmed to perceive the reality that meets the needs

Of the industrial society each human generation arrives in

The human beings are individually and collectively mined

Society conditions so that we can be of most use to it, but of course as with every industrial operation there is waste product. In our case that ends up being “the fears doubts and insecurity/That affects the human beings perceptional reality in such a way/The human being becomes separated from the being at the expense of being/Resulting in human beings viewing life through their fears and inabilities.”

Now, although Trudell has made it cleat that this is how he views the way the world works, he doesn’t lay any claims to being superior to the rest of us because of this belief. This is just the backdrop against which all of our struggles to be true to ourselves are played out against. In his poems and song lyrics throughout the book he talks about his struggles to overcome those obstacles. Of course, his path is made even more complicated by the fact that he is also a member of a group of people considered to be a conquered race by the majority of our society. For most of his life the government that supposedly is there to protect and serve him, has done its best to deny him his rights as a human being.

What’s really wonderful about his poems/lyrics is that they don’t just complain about something, or sound like the usual victim’s lament. He demands that his readers think about things and poses questions that are designed to try and make you see how his world view came about. In the poem “To God” he asks a few questions about some things that he’s found confusing: “About these Christians/they claim to be from your nation/but man you should see the things they do/all the while blaming it on you”. The poem then lists a litany of offences that have been carried out in God’s name and then continues “We do not mean to be disrespectful…our people have their own ways/we never even heard of you until not long ago/Your representatives spoke magnificent things of you which we were willing to believe/But from the way they acted/We know you and we were being deceived.”

Naturally, as you would expect from a man who has fought for the rights of his people for forty years there are quite a few political poems and songs. However he is more than a one issue person, and writes about everything: from the joy children can bring, our responsibilities to each other as human beings, spirituality, and the relationship between men and women. In fact, some of the poems he’s written about men and women are the most honest I’ve read by a man about that subject.

In “Shadow Over Sisterland” he has written probably the strongest denunciation of men’s mistreatment of women since John Lennon’s “Woman Is The Nigger Of The World”:

There’s a shadow over sisterland

With a Smith & Thomas

Pointed at her head…

Money and authority

Have their own way of talking

…Tethers of chains

Tethers of jewels

Economic bondage

Runs by those rules.

Everything about our society; religion, laws, and even the way the economy runs are geared towards keeping men dominant over women. When you start to consider some of the more regressive laws that have been passed in recent years, ones that have resulted in women going to jail for refusing to have caesarian sections during childbirth, you realize that you might not like the picture he’s painting, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.

John Trudell is an articulate and intelligent poet and lyricist whose words might confound you because they challenge your vision of the world. You might not like his perspective, and there’s a good chance you won’t agree with it, yet it you won’t be able to deny his sincerity. Because it dares you to look at our society through the eyes of those whose backs its been built on, it’s not a pretty picture, but it’s a lot more realistic than anything you’ll read or see for years to come. For as he makes clear, whether we know it or not, we’re all victims of the same machinations.

About Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of three books commissioned by Ulysses Press, "What Will Happen In Eragon IV?" (2009) and "The Unofficial Heroes Of Olympus Companion" and "Introduction to Greek Mythology For Kids". Aside from Blogcritics he contributes to Qantara.de and his work has appeared in the German edition of Rolling Stone Magazine and has been translated into numerous languages in multiple publications.

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