John Trudell

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John Trudell
what it means to be a human being

[B]ecause ... we come from where we come from, every one of us is the descendant of a tribe. Every person in this room is a descendant of a tribe at some point in our ancestral evolution. Common, collective, genetic memory that’s in there, you know, that’s encoded, like I say, in the DNA.

And for every individual, encoded in our individual DNA, alright?, is the experience of our lineage from the very beginning. Whose whole perceptional reality was what I was just saying: all things have being, we’re made up of the Earth – all my relations, pray to spirits. See, and they didn’t pray to man or human form. The closest they came to it was they prayed to spirits that were called ancestors.

Alright? And because they were praying to those ancestors for help and guidance, they understood that we were borrowing today from the past and the future. We’re borrowing it from both places.

So they had this understanding of reality. So they knew that to keep the balance was the purpose. That was the purpose. The reason for being was to keep the balance.

So this was like, you know, what I will call a spiritual perception of reality. And so because of the spiritual perception of reality they understood that life was about responsibility. It wasn’t about the abstraction of freedom – it was about responsibility. That life was about responsibility.

—John Trudell, 15 March 2001

Imagine running out of imagine
Mistaking authority for power
Weaving lifes free spirit
Into patterns of control

—John Trudell, “Iktomi,”

Lines from a Mined Mind, p.259

What It Means To Be A Human Being, 15 March 2001
Recommended Sources for Lines from a Minded Mind
John Trudell Discography, 1983-2014
Progress has produced ‘mining of the spirit,’ Trudell says,
by Joel Seguine, 1998
Interview by Tamra Spivey, 2011
Trudell shines in “Lines from a Mined Mind”,
by Honey Dawn Karima, Pettigrew, 2010
Interview with Christopher Luna, 2009
rat haus reality: celebrating 20 years wide
Keep the Balance, by David Ratcliffe, Full Moon, Feb 2015
John Trudell as the ‘Voice’ of Native Peoples
– ‘Who Fights an Uncivil War with the American Oppressors’,
by Michael Walker, 2013
Dissenting Troubadour, by Brooke Shelby Biggs, 2002

“I think the best way the younger generation is going to have to deal with things is with the clear use of their intelligence. When you have a problem it needs a solution. The energy that we take and put into the solution is the energy that’s going to be in that solution. If fear/anger are used in the solution then the solution is going to have fear/anger in it, and therefore we didn’t change anything.”

—John Trudell, 15 Dec 2014

“Freedom... We’re born into a reality where you have to pay to be born, you have pay to die, and you gotta have money to live. Now where is the free?”

—John Trudell, 14 Dec 2014

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