Steve Schwartzberg is a scholar, teacher, and activist whose politics are rooted in the conviction that genuine self-government flows from love, belonging, and deep knowledge of the sacredness of all life.  This is a deep knowledge that we, the American people, still have the opportunity to learn from the peoples of the Native Nations of Turtle Island (this continent), and from listening together to the Earth.  If we are to free ourselves from a corrupt billionaire class, its fascist allies in the Republican Party, and its neoliberal enablers in the Democratic Party, we must do so.  There is no other way for us to live as a free people: to live peacefully “with the Earth,” as Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota) puts it—in genuine self-government—rather than abusively “on the Earth” in what remains of an increasingly broken democracy.  There is no going back to a lost “normality.”  There is a new and uncertain future which holds the potential of right relations with all.

Most of the social democratic measures that we can advocate in response to our present situation—even to the extent that they strengthen and improve our civilization—will soon become part of the problem.  We need to find a way out from under civilization itself—in other words we need to find a way to free ourselves from the politics of domination—a way into a new social self-understanding of who we are.  This is a need that no “authority”—no matter how “benevolent”—can meet.

This present campaign, however, can help provide access to relevant ideas such as those offered by the Native scholars and activists and their allies gathered around https://www.redthought.org, and by John Trudell (Dakota) here1 and here2 and by Tiokasin Ghosthorse here3 and here4 and by Steve Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) here5 and here6.  It can facilitate an international conversation on Turtle Island in which there can be a meeting of hearts and minds from which alone can come all the good we aim at.

“I joined the Young People’s Socialist League in the late 1970s,” Steve writes, “when the great civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin was the National Chairman of the adult organization, the Social Democrats, USA, and became directly active in politics again in 2016 knocking on doors for Bernie Sanders in Iowa and Wisconsin.  I am a former director of undergraduate studies for international studies at Yale University and the author of Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal. I first ran for Congress in the Democratic primary in 2018 and received 4% of the vote!”

For more about Steve’s views and background, see the text and video of his recent speech on “America and the Kingdom, revisited,” his campaign manifesto, and the “About” section of this website.

“We should not seek to build the beloved community as if it were something absent, something that human hands must somehow construct from nothing,” Steve declares: “The beloved community—the sacred web of all beings—always already exists. It is woven into the very fabric of creation. Our task is not to invent it, but to re-member it: to restore our awareness, heal our relations, and align our lives with the balance, harmony, and abundance of the Earth and Her cosmic society. Politics, rightly understood, is antithetical to domination and rests on the practices of belonging and respect. It is the humble and joyous work of restoring what was never truly lost—only forgotten in the midst of illusions that have been terribly destructive in their consequences, but which remain illusions that can be dispelled with what John Trudell calls ‘clear and coherent thought.’”

The deep knowledge that we need is in the original instructions of our spiritual DNA.  It can still be intuited and developed.  The problem is that it is easy to forget what we know in the midst of what Trudell has called “tech-‘no-logic’ civilization.”

Before what was known in the eighteenth century as “the Enlightenment,” Europeans and Americans were greatly influenced by the peoples of the Native Nations of the so-called New World.  They were influenced by the moral depravity of their governments in seeking to rule over these peoples and their lands, influenced by opposition to this moral depravity, especially among some of their intellectuals, and they were influenced by the alternative way of life that they could perceive among these peoples.  A recent book, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, conveys much evidence along these lines.  An earlier work by William Brandon, New Worlds for Old, does so as well.

Writing of the Wendat Nation, in 1648, the missionary Father Lallemant noted that “They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.” Writing of the Montagnais-Naskapi, six years earlier, another missionary reported: “They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases.” The missionary Gabriel Sagard, in an even earlier work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, observed: “They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.”

The Native views that can be seen through the filter of these seventeenth century missionary accounts are part of the self-understanding of more genuinely self-governing societies; a self-understanding—if we will adopt it—that is capable of bringing down a corrupt billionaire class and an authoritarian administration threatening to move from trade wars of aggression to more conventional ones by invading traditional friends like Greenland, or Panama, or Canada, or Mexico, while supporting Netanyahu’s grotesque and genocidal attacks in Gaza and while ignoring Putin’s grotesque and genocidal attacks in Ukraine.  First, the American people were told that greater brutality might have to be tolerated in the interests of economic prosperity.  Now, we are being told to accept economic misery in the interests of pursuing brutality.

The “civility” of traditional American politics, a “civility” that has always excluded some—such as, for centuries, the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent—is now threatened with destruction.  This “civility” has been deteriorating for decades, but now—instead of a corrupt oligarchy more or less covertly seeking to buy elections and politicians—we face the prospect of a fascist president almost openly seeking to serve the billionaire class by treating the American people—and, especially, the working class—in a closer approximation to the way the peoples of the Native Nations have been treated (in other words in violation of “the rule of law”).

In addition to learning from the Native peoples, we should also be learning from the Polish labor movement, Solidarity, whose success in organizing trade unions and conducting a general strike, in the spring and summer of 1980, began the peaceful revolution that led to the overthrow of the Soviet empire.

Traditionally, and unfortunately, American politics have been shaped by a vision of human beings as separate from each other and separate from the Earth that sustains us. There is another way: a way of belonging, a way of reverence, a way of remembering that before we are citizens of any state, before we belong to any human tradition, we belong to the Earth and Her cosmic society; that we all begin with what might be called “creational identities.”  Knowledge of these creational identities does not erase any other identities, but rather invites us into a deeper understanding of who we are.

These creational identities are rooted in the fact that all beings—animate and inanimate, seen and unseen—are our kith and kin and always already form a beloved community of which human beings are a small and dependent part. We are, all of us, responsible to act with respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life in pursuit of alignment with the balance and harmony and abundance of the Earth. This is part of global knowledge, part of those aspects of Indigenous knowledge that are perhaps easiest for non-Natives to apprehend.

The great Confucian scholar Zhang Zai sought to offer something that may be considered resonant with such global knowledge a thousand years ago:

“Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”

This is the heart of our vision: a society rooted not in domination, but in sisterhood and brotherhood. A politics not of division, but of equal belonging. A democracy that does not merely—and, for that matter, only ideally—seek to govern on behalf of the people, but a more genuine self-government in which we remember who we are and who we can be—together.

The deepest problems we confront as a nation are rooted in our failures to see the world through the framework of global knowledge; our failures to treat all as we would wish to be treated, and in our inflicting on others conduct we would not want inflicted upon us.  We have mistakenly placed our faith in “benevolent authority” (however variously defined) rather than in a collective self-consciousness committed to a healthy social self-understanding of spiritual natural law grounded in love for the Earth.

Democracy and human rights as we have known them—better than monarchy or raw dictatorship as they certainly are—can nevertheless be considered as a failed attempt to emulate the more genuine self-government of the peoples of the Native Nations and to belong to the land, and to fellowship with Her inhabitants, rather than to see the land and “its” inhabitants as the property of any ruler or group of rulers.  A democratization of despotism is still despotism.  The Earth is our grandmother and she is not to be parceled out and owned, either by the state or by anyone else.

The American people are barely 250 years old. If we are to survive and flourish for anything like the length of time that the Native peoples flourished before the eurochristian invasion, we will have to do a better job of learning from them and to cease exploiting and oppressing them.

It is only as Native scholars have addressed the spiritual and ontological foundations of their own societies—as, for example, in God is Red by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Dakota), Pagans in the Promised Land by Steve Newcomb, The Gantowisas: Iroquoian Women by Barbara Alice Mann (Seneca), and Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization by Mark Freeland (Anishinaabe)—that these foundations have begun to become more accessible to academic audiences. Now the American people are beginning to glimpse how much we have to learn from the peoples of the Native Nations.

The Native peoples are our elder brothers and elder sisters in the cause of genuine self-government—far more advanced than we are in the history of their accomplishments—and entitled to the respect in the world that we claim for ourselves with our democracy, or were proud to do before Trump began to sully our international reputation—even in our own eyes—in striking new ways. We must remember that where these Native peoples frequently now suffer with extreme poverty, and often inadequate Tribal governments, this situation is one that we have imposed upon them by committing genocides and land thefts against them and by forcing upon them governments under our domination.

“As an independent candidate for Congress in the Illinois 5th District, I will caucus with the Democrats, if elected,” Steve has announced: “It is my position, however, that both parties must learn to grasp the complex political truth of America: That our country was founded not only on slavery and genocide, but on deep dreams (some of them worthy) of building both a better country and a better world, and that both of these aspects of our reality are central to who we have been as a society.  The genuine civility that at least some of us have enjoyed has depended on the worthy dreams among those deep dreams which, at the same time, have often served as cover to hide the ongoing abuses that those outside the circle of American belonging have suffered behind the facade of a false civility.  This has been true both domestically and in American foreign relations as well.

If we are to do markedly better in the future—and to live in genuine self-government rather than simply dream it—we must choose the way of reverence as a people and as human beings: We must change our collective self-consciousness and adopt a new social self-understanding grounded in the wisdom of this land and our maintenance of right relations with each other and with our grandmother Earth.

19 May 2025

© Steven J. Schwartzberg 2025

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