Steven Newcomb. Photo from Finding the Missing Link
Steven Newcomb of the Indigenous Law Institute explains how the use of metaphors by the U.S. and the U.S. Supreme Court are used against the original Native nations:
The United States government has justified its rapacious, deadly, and kleptomaniacal behavior toward our nations on the basis of dominating and dehumanizing metaphors that it lives by. The United States is an empire established on the basis of a founding metaphor of paternity (think “founding fathers”), a Great White Fatherhood that gave birth to its offspring of empire and domination. George Washington called it “our infant empire.” E Pluribus Unum—From Many One: One empire and domination under a concept of “God.” The U.S. Supreme Court has been an extremely small but powerful group of humans engaged in an effort to build and maintain for our nations a metaphorical world of captivity. Our nations have been held within that semantic world for more than two hundred years now. Consequently, what Chief Justice John Marshall called “this, our wide-spreading empire” has used its carefully constructed idea-system to help itself to many trillions of dollars derived from our lands, territories, and resources. It has thereby made itself the wealthiest and most powerful empire on the planet, though it now seems to be showing signs of succumbing to the law of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. As a result of the United States’ cognitive use of metaphor and its rapacious idea-system, the world in which our nations and peoples now exist has epidemic levels of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, jail and prison incarceration rates, poverty, diabetes and other deadly diseases, as well as the lasting effects of genocidal efforts to eliminate our nations by destroying our languages, culture, ceremonies, and traditional child rearing practices, and by stealing our children and socializing them to the “American” norms of the dominating society. Those and other indicators—such as the destruction of our sacred sites and significant and ceremonial places—are a direct result of the U.S. Supreme Court and other sectors of the U.S. government using destructive metaphors against on our nations, on an intergenerational basis. The result has been a world-destroying process for our nations, and a world-building and enriching process for the United States. Clearly, metaphors matter.Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: Metaphors Matter: Toward the Liberation of Our Nations (Indian Country Today 7/6)
Join the Conversation
