We're an American Band...

I've been deep in thought these last few days since the passing of Graham Greene and the impact his films made on my life - seeing true Indigenous representation on screen in Dances With Wolves after a childhood of Westerns with white actors in face paint was truly special

I graduated high school in 1992 and yet had never heard of Thunderheart at that time - it's not surprising, to be honest. After running away from home at 16 (I wrote about that here - https://feathers-in-the-snow.ghost.io/angel-of-the-city-2/), quitting high school, returning to graduate with my class, and entering the United States Army, to say I was a bit distracted is an understatement. The years would pass, as would many of the cast of Thunderheart, including Sam Shepard and Val Kilmer, and with that, this film came into view where I was ready to SEE it.

If you're unfamiliar with the plot (no spoilers here), Val Kilmer plays Ray Levoi, a young punk of an FBI agent handpicked by William Dawes (played by Fred Thompson) to work a murder case with FBI legend Frank Coutelle (played by Sam Shepard) on the Sioux reservation in the Badlands. Levoi's father is of Sioux descent, so the DC suits are sending him in as the "Good Indian." On the reservation, Levoi meets Walter Crow Horse (played by Graham Greene), part of the Tribal police force. Levoi is unimpressed with Crow Horse's crime scene investigation techniques of track reading, wind listening, and owl messengers - all this shifts when he meets Grandpa Sam Reaches (played by Chief Ted Thin Elk). Levoi begins to connect with memories he's suppressed regarding his father and then the land to speak to him. He begins to remember.

Today, walking in Balboa Park instead of running, I thought about all this. The clouds hung low, and I didn’t need to rush. As I passed the California Western School of Law, Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band” came on my playlist, and suddenly Thunderheart’s story was alive in me again. I thought about how many had given up so much for the sake of “whiteness”—a lie invented to uphold colonialism and slavery, a lie that even robs those it claims to elevate.

Because here’s the truth I can’t shake: whiteness isn’t real. It was never real. It was constructed as a weapon—first to divide, then to conquer, then to keep everyone in their place. The tragedy is that the very people who cling to it most tightly are often the most colonized of all. So many traded in their languages, their songs, their stories, even their ways of praying, just to be called “white.” They forgot who they were, and in that forgetting, they became easy tools for the Empire. Colonization stripped so much from everyone.

And yet, just like Ray Levoi in Thunderheart, we can remember - in fact, we must. Decolonization isn’t only political—it’s spiritual. It begins when we tell new stories, or better yet, when we remember the old ones that the Empire tried to erase. We must see ourselves within our neighbors, regardless of color or circumstance - that's just the beginning. Harold Johnson wrote, "We become the stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves." What stories have we been told and thus shaped our own inner narratives that are completely false?

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about "whiteness" in an essay. In fact, he called it, the "religion of whiteness." As a child, I always wondered why my church had only white people and black people went to their own - well, that goes back to slavery, and as Du Bois rightly coined. The deconstruction of this notion must happen if the United States is to even survive what is currently happening - in fact, it is the 7th fire prophecy from the Anishinaabe. The Seventh Fire Prophecy is a foretelling of a time of crisis and choice when the people must retrace their steps to find lost traditions and choose a path toward unity and a peaceful, eternal "Eighth Fire". 

Will we? Will we finally choose what we've lost and forgotten? What looms ahead is bleak. Water wars, decimation from climate change, techno-feudalism with nothing but robots and slaves (sold to you under the guise of a technology town). Don't think it can happen? Dear reader, it's already here. That technology town? That was the old mill towns back where I am from. You owned NOTHING - the company did, and you could only buy from the company store. People have forgotten this - again, will we remember? You must read voraciously, be curious, and question. You must remember and retrace your lineage - why and how are you here on Turtle Island in the first place (this is for white folks).

As we see the escalation of removing anything that isn't white, we must resist outwardly whilst decolonizing inwardly. We must join our larger community of countrymen and women, and in order to do that, much work must be done. We aren't going to make it otherwise.

Grand Funk Railroad sang, “We’re an American Band.” To me, that’s the invitation of this moment. Will we keep playing the Empire’s same old tune — whiteness, extraction, division — until the stage goes dark? Or will we pick up the instruments our ancestors left us, the songs Empire tried to erase, and learn to play together again?

The Eighth Fire awaits. The choice is ours.

I leave you Gary Snyder's Piute Creek

One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.

For Graham, for Val, For Sam, For Ted, For Harold, For All of Us

Thanks for reading