America and the Kingdom, revisited

Video and Text of a Recent Speech

I had the unusual good fortune of attending an extraordinary alternative public high school, the Chicago Public High School for Metropolitan Studies (also known as “Metro”).^[i] Reflecting the population of the city as a whole from whom students were drawn by lottery, the student body was predominantly African American and the teaching and administrative staff were led by people of color. There was some ethnic diversity maintained by quota (of which I was a direct beneficiary). The philosophy of the school—that the city was our classroom and that we were all to embrace its opportunities for learning in a spirit of fellowship—was my first vision of academic excellence and the school remains, after a BA from Reed College, an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a PhD in history from Yale University, in many ways the best educational institution with which I have been associated—certainly the one most successfully combining joy and the pursuit of liberation with instruction.

If you were a student at Metro and were interested in marine biology, as I was, you could take classes at the Shedd Aquarium. If you were interested in art, you could take classes at the Art Institute. In theater, you could take classes at Second City. In social studies, you could join an oral history project and interview interesting Chicagoans, as I did, most memorably: Alfreda Duster, Ida B. Wells’ daughter. There were also some regular classrooms in this “school without walls” and you could get advanced credit for taking classes at colleges in the city. Everyone, as a mark of both respect and love, was on a first-name basis.

When i returned for an all classes reunion in 2010—for a school that had only existed between 1971 and 1991—I was all puffed up with my degrees and had “Dr. Schwartzberg” on my name tag. Nate Blackman, the principal, took me in with a glance and said warmly: “Hi Steve!” which immediately reminded me that equality and right relations are what really matter in life. I don’t know how I could ever have been so over-educated as to forget that basic truth but I have remembered it since.

While in high school, I joined a national political organization, the Young People’s Socialist League (“the Yipsel”). The national chairman of the adult organization—the Social Democrats, USA—was the civil rights organizer, Bayard Rustin. Bayard was the single greatest influence on my political outlook and his faith in the cause of human dignity became my faith. As he once put it: “My activism did not spring from my being gay, or for that matter, from my being black. Rather it is rooted, fundamentally, in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. These values are based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal. Adhering to those values has meant making a stand against injustice, to the best of my ability, whenever and wherever it occurs.”^[ii]

I learned a lot from Bayard about the moral authority of nonviolence and the courage upon which it rests. The most important lesson I learned from him is that a community fighting for justice fights for all, or it is fighting for nobody, least of all itself. Because we seek to stand in the center of progress toward democracy, Bayard argued, we have what he called “a terrifying responsibility to the whole society.” It is a sense of responsibility that I hear writ large among the peoples of the Native Nations whenever they speak of “all our relations...”

We are all “of creation” and always already share in the spiritual sociality constituted by that truth.^[iii] That spiritual sociality, in turn, requires us to use what I call our spiritual lateral lines so that such good teachings as those of the Anishinaabeg surrounding love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect become deeply felt and the resonances of their reality can be sensed in the body politic and not merely be imagined intellectually.^[iv]

The seminar that had the greatest influence on me as an undergraduate at Reed College more than forty years ago was one in Max Weber’s political sociology taught by Edward Shils who had already been teaching at the University of Chicago for half a century when he came out to Portland for a semester at Reed in 1982. Shils had been close to the intellectual heart of the American empire as a key figure in the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the postwar decades (one of the few who knew from the beginning of its relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency).^[v] He used to say: “I no longer know where Max Weber’s thought leaves off and mine begins.” For years, I could say much the same with regard to Shils’ thought and my own, although this is no longer the case.

My favorite story about Shils’ generosity is told by another of his students, Liah Greenfeld, who arrived on his doorstep in graduate school one day to be greeted as follows: “Mrs. Greenfeld, I disagree with everything you write. If I did not, I would have to reject my own conclusions of the past ten years. But I think that what you have to say is very important, and I want you to write and publish an essay on this subject.”^[vi] She reports that Shils then guided her through three drafts of her essay, polishing and strengthening an argument designed to prove that he was wrong. As she comments, “I was already then struck by the exceptional generosity of spirit, and selflessness, exhibited in this reaction. I understand now that it also reflected his dedication to the thing beyond him, the ideal that he served and a particular tradition of inquiry which was to achieve the knowledge of this ideal. He welcomed every honest effort to carry on this tradition. What mattered for him was not whether he was right or wrong, but the Truth.”^[vii]

In addition to the Truth, the concept of civility—the concept of the virtue of the citizen and their concern for the common good—was a concept of central importance in Shils’ thinking.^[viii] He believed, with some reason, that his emphasis on the importance of concern for the common good in social action was unique in the social sciences:

I am probably the only social scientist (!) who asserts that there is a concern for the common good simultaneously experienced in many individuals, in some, even many politicians, and in many ordinary persons, local civic leaders, etc. I do not argue that the collective self-consciousness of the society predominates in all their actions or that it has a high position of precedence in the outlook and conduct of the large majority. I argue that it exists to some extent in most large societies and not least in the United States, even at present when my belief that this is so among my own fellow-countrymen is put under tense strain. Most social scientists attribute all action to self-enhancement, self-protection, the [exploitation] and deception of others—‘strategies’ is the common and revealing word. Yet, I insist that this is not the case, and I am staking the final vindications of my intellectual history or rather assessment of my life-long wrestling and skirmishing with the world on behalf of the truth about itself.^[ix]

One place where my thinking diverges from Shils’ is with regard to our understanding of the relationship between the common good and the collective self-consciousness of a society. To my way of thinking, this collective self-consciousness must be informed by global knowledge—and I’ll talk more about what I mean by global knowledge in a few minutes—if it is to begin to be of genuine service to the global common good that serves the common good of each and all of us and it must seek liberation from a politics of egotism to succeed.

If an analogy with an “individual” mind might be accepted—putting aside for the moment the connections among all minds—an ego is that part of a mind that seeks to separate from the whole (and indeed that seeks to dominate and control the whole, as if that were possible).^[x] The collective ego that is constituted by the state similarly seeks to separate from and dominate the whole, beginning with “its” own nation. But a nation rests on a matrix of affinity among a people—on the love we feel for one another—and on ourcollective self-consciousness not that of the government. The nation is much more appropriately considered as belonging to the people rather than to the state.

When I ran for Congress in 2018, I started my campaign here at the Chicago Literary Club with a speech on “America and the Kingdom.” As I am thinking of running again in 2026, I want to again offer a disclaimer: As our bylaws insist, the Chicago Literary Club as such, “shall express no opinions on religion, politics, social science, political economy, or any other subject.” The opinions I will offer here tonight on all these subjects are my own. I began my talk back in 2017 as follows:

The promise of the American Revolution runs deep. Yet it does not run as deep as the promise of the Kingdom of God. And it is the relationship between America and the Kingdom that I want us to think about tonight. I intend to argue that if the promise of America is to be saved from the dangers that now confront us—as a country and as a world—the promise of the Kingdom must be articulated anew, perhaps in a language more acceptable to secular folk, and maybe even to some atheists, so that the dynamic tension between America and the Kingdom that strengthened the American experiment at the founding, and that helped renew it at numerous critical junctures in our past, can be restored and redeemed. The alternative of collapsing the Kingdom into America by claiming that the End of History has arrived—and that it is liberal capitalism—has been tried and found wanting since the end of the Soviet Union. The alternative of collapsing America into the Kingdom and claiming that all our sins from slavery and genocide to bigotry and misogyny—from Indian removal in the nineteenth century to the invasion of Iraq in the twenty-first century—are somehow to be ignored because America is “great” relative to other nations, or allegedly on its way back to “greatness,” is bankrupt as well. So, too, would be a failure to acknowledge and build on American goodness: on the good that we have done from establishing a flawed but tangible democracy—a democracy with a proven capacity to correct mistakes and expand the frontiers of self-government in the direction of including all of the inhabitants of our land as equal citizens who are part of a common nation, dedicated, at least rhetorically, to the ideal of liberty and justice for all—to helping to turn former enemies into friends in both Germany and Japan after the Second World War—to numerous other less well known good deeds in which America has sought to help others pursue political liberty and sometimes even social justice as well as liberal capitalism.^[xi]

It is from the vantage point of how my thinking has evolved since then, that i wish to speak with you tonight. But first I want to talk a little more about when I was in the Yipsel. One of my mentors in those days was Tom Kahn, who was at the time the executive assistant to the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland and the editor of Free Trade Union News. Working with Bayard Rustin, Tom had played a significant role in the civil rights movement, particularly in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, and in seeking support for A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget” later in the decade—with its call for a federal commitment to undertake the massive investment required to abolish poverty in the country in ten years.^[xii]

In my first run for Congress in 2018, I called for a twenty-first century “Freedom Budget.” If I run again, I will stress that such a budget would not only guarantee employment for all those able and willing to work, it would help to restore natural waterways and wetlands in both rural and urban settings, to increase and rewild our forests and restore mangroves and mangrove islands along our coasts, to fix our shipping locks and roads and bridges, and our railways and mass transit systems, to transform our agricultural and educational and housing and childcare practices with wise public investments, and to fundamentally revise our whole healthcare system so that insurance bureaucrats and “squeeze” artists concerned with “efficiency” rather than medicine are removed from the provision of what I call Abundant Care for All. As long as we begin our public policy from a position of compassion and generosity, recovery for our society, and for all our relations, is possible.

My undergraduate alma matter, Reed College, has successfully invested in restoring a natural spring-fed lake and canyon on the college’s grounds to which salmon have now returned, making the journey all the way from the Pacific Ocean.^[xiii] There is immense healing power in the Earth. We cannot, in my opinion, avoid global warming, but we can begin again to respect the Earth. That will, in turn, help us to adjust to our new weather systems in the way that we must—the way that involves our all becoming better at helping each other out. What we need now—and what we will need more keenly in the future—is “Brotherhood First” and not “America First.” And that brotherhood must extend to all our kith and kin—to all living beings.

In the 1970s, Tom Kahn’s newsletter—Free Trade Union News—carried information on the struggles of trade unionists in almost every country in the world. Wherever people were struggling for better wages and working conditions, as well as for fundamental freedoms, whether under right-wing dictatorships, or left-wing dictatorships, or under democratic governments. Reading this newsletter gave me an extraordinary sense of being connected in global solidarity.

Over the course of the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, more than ten million people—almost the entire workforce of the country—joined the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland and participated in a peaceful and successful general strike. And, suddenly, what had seemed the solid granite of the Soviet empire began to dramatically crumble away and it became possible to visualize a social democratic post-communist global future.

Whether we know it or not, what mattered to these peoples mattered enormously to the American people as well (and still does)—the whole outcome of the Cold War hinged upon it. I thought at the time that advancing the cause of a social democratic victory in the Cold War would be my life’s work. But as Tom Kahn once said: “Those who set out to change the world must accept the likelihood that the world will return the favor.” Now I think of global solidarity more in terms of Indigenous-led ecological movements such as those opposing the Copper Mine at Oak Flat and the Lithium Mine at Thacker Pass and opposing the Dakota access pipeline, and many other pipelines, and, of course, supporting the rights of Native Nations everywhere to live free from foreign domination.

The American empire, whose imperialism I once hoped to see transformed and extended by civility in a social democratic direction, I now see as at the political center of the problems that need to be remedied with global knowledge; the problems that stand in the way of more genuine self-government everywhere on the planet. These problems that our world faces are often hidden from public discussion and consideration behind such cloudy terms as “democracy” and “global leadership”—to say nothing of “national security” and “liberal capitalism.” We use such terms to sustain our vision of ourselves as being founded as a shining city on a hill and serving as an exemplar—perhaps the exemplar—for the future of humanity. In point of fact—and in direct violation of our Constitution—we have committed many genocides and land thefts and have never corrected the “laws” that enabled these, and subsequent, and ongoing atrocities.

Rather than the seemingly solid granite of the Soviet empire we confront the more supple obscurantism of our own. There are other aggressors in the world and we are by no means the only source of the world’s problems. Fortunately, the beginnings of a solution to all of these problems can be found in the global knowledge—and the intuitive intelligence—of Indigenous peoples everywhere; a knowledge and an intuition that is accessible to all who wish to live with the Earth.^[xiv]

In my speech in 2017, I suggested that one could catch a glimpse of the Kingdom of God by reading the Cherokee jurist Steve Russell’s wonderful book, Sequoyah Rising: Problems in Post-Colonial Tribal Governance. Consider, I suggested, the extraordinary compassionand generosity behind Russell’s words as he remarks on an almost bottomless well of collective guilt that “keeps the modern beneficiaries of genocide from finishing the job,” and then later adds: “We know the colonists could not now go home if they were so disposed. Our lot is intertwined with the colonists as black South Africans are with the British and the Dutch. They have nowhere to go. While they have not historically been the best of neighbors, they are still our neighbors and we must do our best to civilize them.”^[xv]

At that point, I still thought of “civilization”—especially as Steve Russell used the term in the sense of becoming more ethical people and better neighbors—as a path that could open to the breaking in of the Kingdom and thought of divinity in an exclusively transcendentalist language. In other words, I thought of divinity as entering our world from Heaven above and as promising to someday bring Heaven to Earth. Now i am more inclined to see divinity in an immanentist language emphasizing the sacredness of the Earth and Her cosmic society and to see “civilization” more along the lines of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne’s Basic Call to Consciousness of 1977—a statement that was released nearly fifty years ago at a time when some international gatherings were prevented by certain states from even using the term “Indigenous peoples” lest there be pressure to recognize the equal rights of these peoples as sovereign nations who are entitled to be treated as independent states free from foreign domination (as indeed they are).

Drafted by the scholar John Mohawk (Seneca), and carefully reviewed and revised by the Haudenosaunee Council of Chiefs, the Basic Call to Consciousness was a wake-up call to humanity. Decades before the climate crisis was on anyone’s lips, it warned that industrial exploitation and destruction of the Natural World threatened the survival of life on Earth: “The way of life known as ‘Western Civilization’ is on a death path, and its culture has no viable answers,” the document declared: “The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing…. The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support life—the air, the waters, the trees—all the things that support the sacred Web of Life.”^[xvi]

Living “with the Earth”—instead of seeking to dominate Her—gives rise to what I call “creational identities.”^[xvii] These identities are rooted in the fact that all living beings—animate and inanimate—are our kith and kin and form a beloved community of which human beings are a small and dependent part who are 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 and Her cosmic society. Knowledge of this responsibility—of this ontological truth—is what I call the foundation of global knowledge; the foundation of those aspects of Indigenous knowledge that are perhaps easiest for non-Natives to apprehend.

When I say easiest, I do not mean to suggest easy. It took me a long time to wrap my mind around the idea that i am no better than a bird or a bear or, for that matter, a plum tree. That if I was serious, I had to give up on my spurious ideas of superiority and open myself to the sacredness of all life. This doesn’t mean, obviously, that one cannot eat, but it does imply a deep sense of gratitude to the spirits of the plants and animals who provide the food that I eat with their bodies. It also means, and this surprised me, that I never feel alone. I have my “own belonging” in a beloved community of which I will always be a member.^[xviii]

The great Confucian scholar Zhang Zai sought to share something that I would consider 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.”^[xix]

Global knowledge requires overturning what the American Bar Association calls “federal Indian law.” This is a body of “law” that is not made by the peoples of the Native Nations of Turtle Island (this continent), but rather one imposed upon them on the basis of Supreme Court precedents that are repugnant to the written Constitution of the United States as well as to the international laws and usages that have been a part of life on Turtle Island since millennia before the eurochristian invaders arrived and which still constitute the true unwritten constitution—the deepest legitimatesource—of “the law” of this land.^[xx]

The dominant narrative in our world speaks of secular “nationalidentities”replacing an earlier age’s “religious identities” (or at least largely subordinating and attenuating their hold on who we see ourselves as being and so determining our understanding of our relationship to “the law”).^[xxi] There is hardly any space in this secular dominant narrative—or, for that matter, in its formerly dominant religious antecedents and their remnants—for global knowledge, except, perhaps, as an eccentric “personal choice.”

There is an alternative narrative offered by those who have what my friends Steve Newcomb (Shawnee-Lenape) and Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota) call “the view from the shore.”^[xxii] This view involves the perspectives of hundreds of distinct Native Nations. But even without great study of the perspectives of those on the shore—the perspectives of those watching the ships of the dominators carrying their system of domination with them—there are observations that they share with which one can begin to discern a different reality: They all maintain that the claim that one can “discover” an already inhabited land and, by that “discovery,” assert a “right” over the land and its inhabitants, is absurd and dishonest. They all view the consequent violence by which the “discoverers” and their heirs and successors have sought to dominate the peoples and lands of the Native Nations and force a foreign cultural pattern upon them as a violation of any meaningful conception of justice or right relations. To these observations I will add that the absurdity, and the dishonesty, and, above all, the illegality and illegitimacy of the consequent violence, was seen as such by the best western practitioners of the law of nations such as the sixteenth century Dominican jurist, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and the eighteenth century Pennsylvania jurist, and constitutional architect, James Wilson.^[xxiii]

According to Las Casas, “war against the Indians, which we call in Spanish, conquistas, is evil and essentially anti-Christian.... war against the Indians is unlawful.”^[xxiv] According to Wilson, “We have no right over the Indians, whether within or without the real or pretended limits of any Colony.”^[xxv] And, as if to put the sharpest possible point on the issue, Wilson went on to stress to the Continental Congress, in July 1776: “Grants made three thousand miles to the eastward, have no validity with the Indians.”^[xxvi]

I will admit that whether the “true universalism” to which I aspire is either possible or desirable is an open question. It is beyond doubt, however, that the “false universalisms” associated with this passing age—whether religious or secular—have wrought more devastation and destruction than the mind can grasp and that any universalism that fails to respect Indigenous ontologies—and that fails to address Indigenous understandings and experiences—is so inadequate as to be false.

A “true universalism” must involve recognition that “the law” need not derive from either “secular” or transcendental “divine”authority, but can emerge rather from the Earth and Her cosmic society, and need not in any way involve domination. Failing to accurately perceive the nature of law in much of the Indigenous world, both Las Casas and Wilson (and their allies) were at a disadvantage in seeking to defend the societies based upon it from the idolatrous variant of Christianity that became ascendant in sixteenth century Spain and which reemerged in nineteenth century United States Supreme Court decisions (in Protestant and secular guise) before asserting ascendancy again globally, particularly through “secular” European imperialism, but even as “decolonization” spread from Latin America to Africa and Asia leaving in its wake “nation-states” rather than genuinely self-governing peoples. The reemergence to ascendancy of this idolatrous variant of Christianity took place after an “Enlightenment,” and a democratic revolution, that had sought something markedly different and better than a religious fanaticism which made of the nation almost an object of worship and that justified extreme nationalist treaty-breaking violence in “Christian” terms.^[xxvii]

It is this idolatrous variant of Christianity—placing violence on behalf of the nation as an idol before God in the name of Christianity—which led to the Supreme Court’s wrongly decided opinions in Johnson v. McIntosh, in 1823, and in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, in 1831. Without the legal structure established by these decisions—without this systematic denial to the peoples of the Native Nations of their constitutional rights—the land thefts and genocides of the 1830s as well as those that followed in the so-called “Indian Wars” could never have taken place.

According to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Johnson, the mere presence of representatives of a “Christian people” on this side of the Atlantic “necessarily diminished” the sovereignty of the “heathens”—the Native peoples—and gave an “ultimate dominion” to the discoverers whereby they claimed a “title” over the land and a “right” to dominate the Native peoples—a “degree of sovereignty” over them—to be in their government.^[xxviii]

That Marshall’s position in Johnson and in Cherokee Nation is still ascendant in the law perhaps reflects the discomfort that would be felt if it was widely recognized that the Supreme Court had covertly sanctioned a series of genocides and land thefts primarily by unilaterally changing the name of one of the parties to a treaty—as if calling the Cherokee Nation “domestic” and “dependent” rather than a “foreign state” should have had any effect at all on their constitutional right to their treaty-guaranteed dominion.^[xxix]

Without respect for the constitutional rights of the Native Nations in the Supreme Court, the Congress and the President were free to commit the land thefts and genocides that they wished to undertake. There was massive public opposition, at least initially, and the vote in the House of Representatives was very close—102 to 97. But the “democratic institutions” of the United States were all on the wrong side.

Our country, and our world, need the United States to adhere to what I call the Treaty Supremacy Clause of the Constitution: “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding”—this is the language of Article VI, Section 2—in conjunction with the right of Tribes and other nations to sue states of the union in Article III, Section 2’s grant of jurisdiction to the judiciary in allcases “arising under … Treaties,” and made explicitly original jurisdiction in the Supreme Court in all cases to which a state of the Union is party.

At a deeper level, our country and our world needs a revival of natural law, not so much as it was understood by the best of its western practitioners—such as Bartolomé de Las Casas and James Wilson—but more as it was and is understood by the elders of the peoples of the Native Nations of Turtle Island, especially when they speak of respect for “all our relations.” Only such a revival can make the meaning of sovereignty clear and universally intelligible across the global great divide in world politics between those who believe in benevolent authority (however variously defined) and those who do not. This will involve a radical rethinking not only of the “secular” foundations of the “modern” age but also of the “religious” antecedents of which these secular foundations are largely unthinking articulations such as the claim that human beings are separate from and superior to the natural world.

I do not mean to draw a simple line between God’s alleged instruction to dominate the natural world in Genesis 1:28—an instruction reiterated after the flood in Genesis 9:2—and the dominationist politics that plague our world, but I think George Manuel (Secwepemc) of the National Indian Brotherhood—known today as the Assembly of First Nations—was on to something when he said: “Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us. It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.”^[xxx]

The Age of Apocalypse that began for the peoples of the Native Nations more than five centuries ago along the west coast of Africa before crossing the Atlantic—the Age of Apocalypse that began with what the eurochristians would come to call the Age of Discovery—now promises to engulf the planet as a whole in what that great poet of the People, John Trudell (Dakota), calls “tech-‘no-logic’ civilization.”^[xxxi] This may wind up intensifying the horrors rooted in the violence and dishonesty of this age or, perhaps, will open instead to something dramatically different and fundamentally better. Trudell expressed the view that life and time—and, with them, evolution—are on our side. It is important, he maintained, to be an “evolutionary” rather than a revolutionary. Those behind the dominationist-driven machine are incredibly violent and cannot be out-fought. They must be out-thought instead.^[xxxii]

The “creational identities” to which I referred earlier are a matter of ontological truth for those who have eyes to perceive this truth. For those who do not, it should still be noticeable that these identities exist and that they are associated with epochs and with regions of the globe that have their own ways of understanding “the law.” These ways are as different from those marked by “religious identities” and “national identities” in this regard as the latter are from each other. Yet the reality of these “creational identities” has almost completely escaped notice among the advocates of the dominant narrative. This has been a great loss to all of us, but particularly to those caught up in the dominant narrative who have sought to advocate for democracy and human rights without knowledge of the social self-understandings and traditional practices that have been essential for genuine self-government on Turtle Island for millennia.

Democracy and human rights as we know them—better than raw dictatorship as they may be in some regards—can nevertheless be considered as a failed attempt to enter or reenter into millennia of Indigenous culture and history; a failed attempt to emulate the more genuine self-government of the peoples of the Native Nations and 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.

For those on the side of the global great divide who believe in benevolent authority (however variously defined)—who would distinguish sharply between what they consider legitimate and malevolent authority—a politics of domination is seen as desirable or as a necessary evil provided that it is not conducted by what they consider malevolent authority. This belief in benevolent authority can be considered as a call for love and a fearful response to life.

Attempting to emulate the more courageous response to life of the peoples of the Native Nations (although without giving them any credit), the society of the United States was founded with the aspiration of realizing a simple principle: the sovereignty of the people. It was the American people, before the existence of any of the states, who rallied together in support of the Declaration of Independence.^[xxxiii] It was the American people whose love for one another, and for their desire to maintain their liberties in the face of British aggression, formed them into one body. The mind of that body is the American nation and the ego of that mind is the American government which—according to the theory of American democracy—must always be kept in check by the vigilance of the people so that it is their servant and not their master.

This theory of American democracy was articulated most eloquently by James Wilson in his law lectures in 1790-1791. The entire House of Representatives and Senate of the United States—and the entire Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate as well—attended the first of these lectures, as did the President and Martha Washington, and the Vice President and Abigail Adams, and they are a marvel to read.^[xxxiv] They provide an authoritative context in which to understand the intentions of the framers of the Constitution in terms of the revolutionary American democratic jurisprudence that helps inform it and which has in the past enabled reform movements to appeal to the Constitution as if it were a “promissory note”:

[When] I say that, in free states, the law of nations is the law of the people; I mean that, as the law of nature, in other words, as the will of nature’s God, it is indispensably binding upon the people, in whom the sovereign power resides; and who are, consequently, under the most sacred obligations to exercise that power, or to delegate it to such as will exercise it, in a manner agreeable to those rules and maxims, which the law of nature prescribes to every state, for the happiness of each, and for the happiness of all. How vast—how important—how interesting are these truths! They announce to a free people how exalted their rights; but at the same time, they announce to a free people how solemn their duties are.^[xxxv]

What American democracy lacked from the beginning was a detailed social self-understanding among the American people of how to overcome the American ego—especially how to overcome the American federal and state governments—an understanding grounded in Indigenous ontologies and practices rather than in the largely ineffectual abstractions of the “Enlightenment” and its notions of virtue. These notions and abstractions proved unable to cope with the licentious character of the hybrid of fifteenth century religious and nationalist jurisprudence—the doctrine of Christian discovery—that formed the basis for “states’ rights” and its defense of slavery and which, after it was nationalized as the basis of U.S. property law in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, set the stage for the land thefts and genocides of the 1830s as well as those of the “Indian Wars” that followed and such subsequent horrors as the boarding “schools” and the exploitations and oppressions and treaty violations that continue to this day.^[xxxvi]

We cannot change a past in which President Andrew Jackson was specifically warned by his secretary of war, Lewis Cass, in September of 1831, that without adequate preparations “great sufferings must be encountered upon the journey, and many will doubtless perish.”^[xxxvii] Within a matter of months one in five members of the Choctaw Nation were dead.^[xxxviii] And the killing, for that is what it was, went on for year after year—for a decade—as nation after nation was driven west and away from their ancestral lands. The death toll would probably exceed sixty million people if it were to happen to the American people today. That is the scale of the horror. We can and we must repudiate and overturn the body of “law” that allowed these and subsequentcrimes as well as the assaults on the peoples of the Native Nations (masked by a spurious legality) that are currently being inflicted upon them in accordance with the poisonous precedents of the “Marshall trilogy”—especially the false claim of a “right” to dominate the Native Nations and their lands and to unilaterally ignore or override treaty obligations to them on the basis of a “plenary power” or “ultimate dominion” that simply does not exist in either the individual states or the United States according to constitutional law (properly construed).

That American “democratic institutions”—including the Supreme Court—sanctioned the genocide of the 1830s, underlines the fact that the ascendant tradition in American jurisprudence since Johnson v. McIntosh has been informed by nationalism more than by a Wilsonian vision of democracy. This has been true globally as well. Governments calling themselves “liberal democracies” have spread internationally during these years, and a Civil War was even fought in the United States over slavery in part because of continuing belief in the natural law appealed to in the Declaration of Independence, but it has been the framework of nationalism that has emerged triumphant in what is commonly seen as “the law.”

I consider nationalism’s misguided view of society as ultimately rooted in the way the Axial Age religions redefined divinity in transcendental rather than immanent language.^[xxxix] This redefinition drew perceptions of the sacred away from the indwelling spirits of the Earth and her inhabitants—and their relationships—towards the sky or some other “higher” realm. It ultimately led to an emphasis on the framework of a legal and moral order to be established, maintained, and developed by an (allegedly benevolent) authority supposedly acting in defense of ideas of justice and “rights” informed by the transcendent values of an international moral and legal order rather than an emphasis on the responsibilities of all to engage in respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life in order to maintain alignment with the already existing balance and harmony and abundance of a cosmic society of which humans are a small and dependent part—the society of our grandmother Earth.

As nationalism gained the ascendancy in the social self-understanding of modern societies, perception of the sacredness of this international moral and legal order, originating in, or revealed through, transcendentalist religion, was, in turn, largely redefined away so that a nation’s “will” (however variously discerned) was seen as the only just source of authority with nothing “above” it to which it was answerable and its “will” alone as the lawful measure of orderly conduct. As the Abbé Sieyès put it in his famous pamphlet of 1789, What is the Third Estate?: “But how, in the light of this, is it possible to claim that the nation itself ought to have been given a constitution? The nation exists prior to everything; it is the origin of everything. Its will is always legal. It is the law itself.”^[xl]

It is a nationalist understanding of “the law” that enabled the land thefts and genocides of the 1830s (and afterwards) to receive the legal sanction of the “democratic institutions” of the United States. This understanding remains the ultimate legal framework of “liberal democracy” in all countries where it is present to this day. It is also the ultimate legal framework of numerous nationalist dictatorships. But this framework itself is deeply rooted in the doctrine of Christian discovery with its claim that eurochristian nations can, in effect, do whatever they want to those deemed “outside” the Body of Christ.

In the words of the papal bulls Dum Diversas in 1452, and Romanus Pontifex in 1455, King Alfonso V of Portugal and his descendants were authorized to “search out” and “enslave in perpetuity” all “Saracens,” “pagans,” and “other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.”^[xli] Following this, in order “that barbarous nations may be overthrown and brought to the faith,” various papal bulls sanctioned Spain’s invasion of the so-called New World, somehow allegedly giving to Spain’s monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella: “the aforesaid countries and islands thus unknown and hitherto discovered by your envoys and to be discovered hereafter, provided however they at no time have been in the actual temporal possession of any Christian owner, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances of the same.”^[xlii] This was—and its legacies continue to constitute—a profound assault on what I have called global knowledge; a profound assault on Indigenous ontologies, as well as on countless persons and nations.

No nation wishes to be ruled over by a foreign state, but to emphasize the “choice” made by a national who is a “ruler” as a manifestation of a nation’s “will”—to emphasize that “choice” and that “will” as the heart of what is meant by sovereignty—rather than to emphasize the responsibilities of the people in their entirety under an international legal and moral order, as in Wilsonian democratic jurisprudence, is a profound mistake. Even a Wilsonian understanding of sovereignty, however, is far removed from what sovereignty means within the context of more genuine forms of self-government. Sovereignty, for those who seek to live “with the Earth,” rather than to dominate Her—sovereignty for those with creational identities—is all about maintaining right relationships through respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conductin accord with a harmony and a balance and an abundance that is given by Nature and our interconnectedness and not in any way created, maintained, or developed by authority (whether “religious” or “secular”).

At a deep level, one could argue that every proper interpretation of any American constitution is bound to comply with the international laws and usages of this continent that preceded the eurochristian invasion. One could argue that these laws and usages are the true constitution of this land—of which all of the American constitutions are poorly rooted expressions that have so far failed to guarantee equal belonging and equal rights to all—and that the true constitution of this land is what should govern.

Brother Gabriel Sagard’s early seventeenth century account of the Wendat Nation, a work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, is one of many that David Graeber and David Wengrow review in The Dawn of Everything. Consider the legal principles implicit in the views Sagard and others reported upon as a window onto our true constitution: “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.”^[xliii] The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi in 1642: “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like. 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 Savages.”^[xliv] Writing of the Wendat in 1648, 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.”^[xlv]

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) and Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization by Mark Freeland (Anishinaabe)—that they have begun to become more accessible to academic audiences.^[xlvi] The works of some rare outsiders, such as Marshall Sahlin’s recent The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, are also helpful.^[xlvii] In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows something of how “modern culture” enforces divisions within each of us, and among all of us, depriving our world of the qualities we most want to experience—connection, peace, grace, simplicity, clarity, and the like—all of which arise from a sense of wholeness.^[xlviii] From such a perspective, knowledge and ethics form a unity in contrast with the allegedly interchangeable character of power and knowledge in “modern culture.”^[xlix]

The intellectual historian Donald Fleming—another mentor—once told me that one can never leave the religion in which one has grown up, adding that I should have some sympathy for him as he was raised a Calvinist.^[l] Although I was baptized in 2006—and am obviously influenced by Christian thinkers such as the Dominicans Bartolomé de Las Casas and Herbert McCabe—I was also raised in a Jewish household and my thinking continues to resonate with Jewish thinkers such as Adina Allen, Jacob Taubes, and Danya Ruttenberg.^[li]

For those of us who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, “never again!” meant “never again should this happen to any people!” not merely some sort of ethnonationalist “never again should this happen to us!” as seems to have been the case for those Israeli Jews and their allies who have themselves proved capable of complicity in apartheid and genocide.^[lii]

To see newsreel footage as a small child of piles of soap bars and lamp shades who had once been part of the bodies of members of one’s community was traumatic. This trauma acquired an additional edge as I came to learn how much less difference there was between Nazi Germany and Andrew Jackson’s America than is commonly supposed.

I am highly cognizant of lineage and the love of my parents in shaping my outlook, and, especially, the fact that my mother is a doctor and my father a lawyer.^[liii] My mother’s mother was a child psychologist and my mother’s father an economist and speechwriter for FDR.^[liv] My mother’s mother’s parents were anarchists and I was raised with stories of the communities they had helped to form, including the Ferrer Modern School and Stelton Colony.^[lv]

When I read the Bible, which helps inform my perspective, I do so through a worldview that rejects binaries and seeks a nondualist understanding. I’ll illustrate something of my approach to scripture with a gloss on the openings of Genesis and the Gospel of John: “In the beginning GOD…” and “In the beginning was the Word.” I think the word “God” here refers to the Spirit, consciousness, and energy that constitutes and transcends the whole of reality extending an inexorable pure good intention from eternity into time and creating Heaven and Earth.

Before this creation, in a sense just before the beginning, “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

Darkness, the Deep, and the Waters, at least as I see them, existed before Heaven and Earth were formed. They are good as they are obviously part of the goodness of creation and the goodness of creation would not have proceeded with them without comment in the narrative if they were neutral or bad. Like the rest of divinity they are Love. Or like the rest of creation they are an extension of Love.^[lvi]

With Darkness, the Deep, and the Waters as distinct aspects of reality, the reference to the whole that contains all and transcends all—God—has subtly begun to change meaning in the story with the emergence of time in the narrative. “God” has not changed but our understanding of what that word conveys in the story has begun to do so. In part, this is because of the inevitably particular perspectives of human beings and, in this case, of the ancient Jewish thinkers from whom the common concepts of God that many of us share descend. The patriarchalism in their perspectives led to the elision of most of the divine feminine aspects of the whole that contains all and transcends all. These divine feminine aspects of God’s personhood, I see as hidden in Darkness (which ī associate with consciousness), the Deep (which ī associate with Spirit), and the Waters (which ī associate with energy), as well as in other places in the story such as in the first person plural in the words: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”

We might speak, in neotrinitarian terms, of God the Mother (Darkness who gives birth to all things), God the Grandmother (the Deep who abides in all things), and God the Daughter (the Waters who help renew and sustain but who can also help dissolve). This is a contrast—and not an analogue—with the more familiar Christian formulation of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. All such formulations, however, are merely ways of talking about aspects of divinity. If they are helpful, they point beyond words and help us to think or intuit more than words can convey.

Hopefully, my words here help us to think of the cosmic flows and complementarities of masculine and feminine energies—within each of us and within the universe—as they shape our experiences, and our worlds, as well as the universe we share. I am thinking here not only of the complementarities of yin and yang but also of complex harmonies across time. For example i think of the magma flows within the earth’s mantle as an expression of feminine energies capable of erupting in ways that transform landscapes and in time give rise to particularly nurturing soils.

It is by no means clear that Darkness, the Deep, and the Waters, can be included among the things that were made through Christ in the New Testament account or whether, as in the Old Testament account, they preexisted the Light. There is a hint in the narrative of an antagonistic relationship or at least a tension between the Darkness and the Light for it is said: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And yet, as King Solomon noted: “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness” which suggests a friendlier and more intimate relationship.^[lvii]

In any case, the New Testament stresses that it was through the Word that all things were made that have been made. From my perspective, there is thus at least a residual trace of Christ in everything that has been made—along with an indwelling divine spirit and soul in each and every entity. In short, I am a kind of panentheist who sees Christ in all living beings—animate and inanimate—and who seeks to learn of Christ from all living beings as each and all of them are part of the goodness of creation and paths to appreciate and better understand the inexhaustible mysteries of the pure good intention behind creation. These beings are siblings and companions. They are with and within us in eternity and with and among us in time. This is what I think it means to be made in the image of God: that we are made able to love one another—and meant to love one another—as God has loved us; to align our spirit, in other words, with both Earth and Heaven, receiving and extending the love they are communicating.

What is needed are not new theologies of God so much as new ontologies that convey viable social self-understandings of how to maintain right and respectful relations with creation and divinity; with “all our relations.” These social self-understandings, in turn—if they are to be truly viable —must rest on what our hearts feel and be embedded in ceremonies and practices that are or that can become traditional. Those eurochristians who have felt God’s love in our lives are not going to let go of what we feel. We may, however, come to be more genuinely social in the love we share; to cease stealing from others, to repudiate our misguided claims to domination, and to adopt right and respectful relations with all life. To be more genuinely social in our love is to love all those in Earth’s cosmic society. It is not to seek “forgiveness” and “reconciliation”—which we have no right to do while we continue in our dishonest and violent ways—but rather to open ourselves to inner transformation while ensuring that our Native neighbors have viable and growing land bases and while renouncing any claim of a right on our part to dominate them or their lands.

As someone who has hurt women through unthinking masculine aggression—not physically but certainly emotionally—I have to believe that redemption is possible even for aggressors. I have to believe that it is possible to turn aggressive energies into protective energies by stripping them of their pursuit of domination. This requires not a justice-centered masculinity, which is probably doomed to simply replicate old patterns in new forms, but a heart-centered masculinity that seeks to root itself in profound humility and accountability. This kind of masculinity does not rush to “fix,” or to impose its presence, but instead offers to witness the truth of all wounds with patience and openness. This begins internally: contemplating not “How can I save?” but “How might I hold space for their pain and dignity to exist as they are?” The justice-centered masculine framework often brings a felt need to justify or explain harm—intent over impact. Heart-centered masculinity relinquishes this, instead embracing silence when needed, allowing space for those who have been hurt to express rage, grief, or mistrust without deflecting or centering itself. The work of repairing cannot begin with assumptions or solutions. It grows by absorbing stories, experiences, and truths—not to diminish masculine identity, but to transform it, requiring men to model vulnerability without placing the burden of their healing upon those already harmed.^[lviii]

In seeking to overcome our egos—whether as individuals or as collectivities—there are two basic paths: an “external path” concerned with the development of ethical principles and benevolent authority that often degenerates into strident assertions of and preoccupations with alleged moral purity and impurity, and an “internal path” concerned with our felt connections with all life as part of who we are. The latter is a spiritual path concerned with our true selves as unique expressions of everything else in the universe—with the spiritual truth, in other words, that we are all kith and kin to all living beings, including the Earth, in a universe that is itself alive.

To this I would add that I consider my spirit to be part of a cosmic unity through the spiritual sociality of all bodies as I think of each body in the universe as a unique expression of everything else in the universe from the smallest subatomic particles or superstrings (if such even exist) to the largest superclusters of galaxies and beyond. We are all made of the same stuff just arranged differently—spirit, consciousness, energy, and matter—and matter is, at least as I perceive reality, “a phase of consciousness.”^[lix] It is no less precious for being such, for being—as we all are—“of creation.”

In a sense somewhat analogous to the way ice is a phase of water, the Spirit, consciousness, and energy that fills and transcends the universe formed matter and created Heaven and Earth. That, at any rate, is part of the perspective from which i write. We may not, as the physicist Brian Greene has suggested, be “more than the sum of our particles,” but we need not adopt a false universalism—parading as “science”—whereby these particles are conceived of as some kind of incredibly small and pixilated lifeless stuff that is somehow not bound up with consciousness, spirit, and energy—with all of the rest of us and what we most cherish in who we are.^[lx] That would be to adopt a deprived and depraved view of what matter is.

At least as i see matter, to reiterate, each particle is a unique expression of everything else in the universe. Each of us—and by us i mean all life in a universe that is filled with different forms of more and less vibrant and vigorous life—each of us contains, among a cosmos of other Heavenly bodies, an Earth, a Moon, and a Sun that are engaged in a great cosmic dance with those of others. Our suns are constant sources of the light and warmth and love that we share and our moons are open both to receive and reflect the light and warmth and love of others’ suns and simultaneously to be enfolded in the embracing presence of darkness and the Deep. Our earths perceive the waxing and waning of the reactions of our moons to others’ suns and also the rising and setting of these suns as we all circle and spiral around each other.

When i say that everything is alive i mean to suggest that in addition to an earth, moon, and sun, everything has breath and a beating heart within itself and everything remembers—in the fibers of its being—the beating heart of its mother. Before we knew words, we knew music. The prosody of our mother’s heartbeat when we were in the womb was part of our first experience of the constancy of unconditional and ubiquitous love. Our awareness of our own heartbeat, and its relation to our mother’s, was our first song—and, all of this, part of the deep origins of the rhythms of the Heavenly Music that guides us in our great shared cosmic dance. The Kingdom of God is already among us, and within us, if we will only turn towards the Earth and seek to live with Her and Her cosmic society without domination.

---

^[i] A documentary about Metro is available here:

(accessed 8 December 2024).

^[ii] Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam, 21 April 1986, file folder 8, Box 6, Bayard Rustin Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. See also: John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: The Free Press, 2003); Michael G. Long, ed., I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012); Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise, eds., Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (New York: Cleis Press, 2003).

^[iii] My friend JoDe Goudy tells of a Christian friend of his who described himself as a “child of God” and then asked how JoDe would identify himself to which JoDe replied: “of creation.”

^[iv] John Borrows, Law’s Indigenous Ethics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). Harold Napoleon, Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being (Anchorage, AK: The Native Village of Paimiut, 1996). Calvin Luther Martin, The Way of the Human Being (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Jean L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (New York: Vintage, 2019).

^[v] See Peter Coleman, Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989). See also Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

^[vi] Quoted in Liah Greenfeld, “Praxis Pietatis: A Tribute to Edward Shils,” in Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), p. 131.

^[vii] Greenfeld, Nationalism and the Mind, p. 132.

^[viii] Edward Shils, The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1997).

^[ix] Edward Shils, A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography ed. Steven Grosby (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006), p. 148.

^[x] My thinking on what the ego is has been deeply influenced by A Course in Miracles. According to this work, time and space and the world we tend to perceive is all the product of an ego (but not in the Freudian sense of the term) that imagines itself as separate and “in control” of its own domain—an ego seeking to dominate a mind that it has persuaded to identify with a simplistic conception of a body—when, in fact, every mind is connected and “of creation”—an extension of the Creator’s love. Where I diverge from such a view is in my emphasis on the goodness of the creation of Earth and Heaven whereby I see all bodies as connected as well as all minds. The world that we commonly perceive I see as a reflection of the world of our shared psychosocial realities rather than an accurate perception of Earth and Heaven. Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles third edition [originally three volumes in 1976] (Mill Valley, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace, 2007), especially pp. 100-103.

^[xi] Steven Schwartzberg: “America and the Kingdom,” 2 October 2017, https://www.schwartzbergforcongress.com/news-letters/ “I have elsewhere shown how the United States came to make one of its most important contributions to the cause of social justice in another country: see Steven Schwartzberg, “The ‘Soft Peace Boys’: Presurrender Planning and Japanese Land Reform,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Volume 2, Number 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 185-216. The text is available online for free download: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273601891_The_Soft_Peace_Boys_Presurrender_Planning_and_Japanese_Land_Reform. American assistance to others in their pursuit of political liberty has often come through what I have called civil interventions—nonviolent efforts to decisively affect regime maintenance or regime change in another country that are informed by a commitment to democratic solidarity. I have examined successful American civil interventions in Cuba in 1944, Brazil in 1945, Venezuela in 1945-1946, Ecuador in 1947, and Costa Rica in 1948, and a civil intervention that ultimately proved counterproductive in Argentina in 1945-1946. Steven Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman Years (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).”

^[xii] See Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).

^[xiii] https://www.reed.edu/canyon/rest/overview.html

^[xiv] For the Wild Podcast, June 2021, “TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE on the Power of Humility [ENCORE] /290,”

(accessed 1 February 2025).

^[xv] Steve Russell, Sequoyah Rising: Problems in Post-Colonial Tribal Governance (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), pp. 48, 148.

^[xvi] Akwesasne Notes, ed. Basic Call to Consciousness [1978] (Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company, 2005), pp. 90-91. Peter P. d’Errico, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2022), p. 166.

^[xvii] On living “with the Earth,” see Tiokasin Ghosthorse, “First Voices Radio, 9 June 2024: Steven Schwartzberg, Guest,” https://radiokingston.org/en/broadcast/first-voices-radio/episodes/steven-schwartzberg-guest (accessed 29 November 2024).

^[xviii] I am indebted to the Rev. angel Kyodo williams for the expression: “own belonging.” Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, et al., Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2016).

^[xix] Quoted in Tu Weiming, The Global Significance of Concrete Humanity (New Delhi: Center for Studies in Civilization, 2010), p. 243.

^[xx] I am indebted to Tink Tinker for the term “eurochristian.” Panel discussion of 14 April 2021 on the volume, Miguel A. De La Torre, et al., editors, The Colonial Compromise: The Threat of the Gospel to the Indigenous World View (Fortress Academic Press, 2020),

(accessed 4 May 2021). On the legal and intellectual and moral bankruptcy of “federal Indian law,” see Steven J. Schwartzberg, Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal (Bradford: Ethics International Press, 2023); Peter P. d’Errico, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples(Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2022); Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008); Thurman Lee Hester, Political Principles and Indian Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2001).

^[xxi] For an unusually lucid articulation of the dominant narrative, see three books and a collection of essays by Liah Greenfeld: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006); Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

^[xxii] See the one-hour documentary film that Steve Newcomb co-produced, “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code,” https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dominationcode.

^[xxiii] Wilson was the preeminent theorist of American democracy and his central role in the origins of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1789 should be more widely appreciated. See Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson in two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007); William Ewald, “James Wilson and the American Founding,” The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 2019), pp. 1-21; John Mikhail, “The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language: Entailment, Implicature, and Implied Powers,” Virginia Law Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (June 2014), pp. 1063-1103; Randy E. Barnett, ed., The Life and Career of Justice James Wilson (Washington, DC: Georgetown Center for the Constitution, 2019); Akhil Reed Amar, The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (New York: Basic Books, 2021), pp. 206-12.

^[xxiv] Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians tr. Stafford Poole, C.M. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 355.

^[xxv] James Wilson, Notes of Debate, 26 July 1776, Journals of the Continental Congress, Vol. 6, 1774-1789, p. 1078.

^[xxvi] Ibid.

^[xxvii] William Wirt’s oral argument before the Supreme Court in 1831, conveys this point succinctly: “There is I know not what vague idea among us, that these nations cannot be states, because they are Indians, ignorant savages, wild and wandering hordes, mere heathens, very little if at all superior to the beasts which they chase. This is a remnant of that superstition which led Pizarro and Cortez to hunt down Mexicans with blood hounds; and which proved them (Christians though they styled themselves) to be far worse savages than those whom they persecuted under that name. It is not the tincture of a skin by which the rights of these people are to be tested. We are beginning to recover from our mistake on this ground, with regard to another unfortunate race. Let us not create for ourselves, and place in the hands of a just God, a new scourge of a similar description. However variously colored by differences of climate or other adventitious causes, the human beings who people this globe belong to the same family, and derive from their common Parent equal rights. We see them, all over the earth, formed into nations of different hue, without the slightest question of their sovereignty on this ground. And as to their being savages, heathens, and ignorant wandering tribes, even if this were still the case, which we know it is not, it would not detract from their independence and sovereignty as states; nor weaken in the slightest degree the obligation of those treaties which we have thought proper to form with them. “Argument of Mr. Wirt,” in Richard Peters, The Case of the Cherokee Nation Against the State of Georgia (Philadelphia: James Kay, 1831), pp. 95-96.

^[xxviii] Johnson v. McIntosh 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543, 574-77, 587 (1823). See also Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land, especially pp. 73-102.

^[xxix] Cherokee Nation v. Georgia U.S. 30 (5 Pet.) 1, 17 (1831).

^[xxx] George Manuel, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality [1974] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), pp. 264-265.

^[xxxi] John Trudell, “What it Means to be a Human Being,” 15 March 2001, The Women’s Building, San Francisco, radio TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) (two parts): http://www.radio4all.net/files/tuc@tucradio.org/44-2-JohnTrudellONE_2014.mp3. http://www.radio4all.net/files/tuc@tucradio.org/44-2-JohnTrudellTWO_2014.mp3 There is a transcript: https://ratical.org/many_worlds/JohnTrudell/HumanBeing.html#s2

^[xxxii] John Trudell, “I’m Crazy: Live, Learn, Love,” 12 December 2010,

(accessed 21 November 2024).

^[xxxiii] See Danielle Allen and Emily Sniff, “Golden Letters: James Wilson, the Declaration of Independence, and the Sussex Declaration,” The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 2019), pp. 193-230.

^[xxxiv] Mark David Hall, “Biographical Essay: History of James Wilson’s Law Lectures,” in Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson in two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), Vol. 1, p. 403.

^[xxxv] James Wilson, “Chapter IV. Of the Law of Nations,” in Hall and Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, p. 532.

^[xxxvi] See Peter P. d’Errico, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2022).

^[xxxvii] Lewis Cass to Andrew Jackson, September 1831, text in Daniel Feller, Laura-Eve Moss, Thomas Coens, and Erik B. Alexander, editors, The Papers of Andrew Jackson (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2013), Volume 9, p. 541.

^[xxxviii] A. J. Langguth, Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), pp. 165-166.

^[xxxix] Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

^[xl] Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings edited, with an introduction by Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), p. 136.

^[xli] The Bull, Romans Pontifex, of 8 January 1455, quoting the Bull, Dum Diversas of 18 June 1452, Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institute, 1917), p. 23.

^[xlii] The Bull, Inter Caetera, 3 May 1493, Ibid, pp. 61-62.

^[xliii] Quoted in David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), pp. 39-40.

^[xliv] Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p. 41.

^[xlv] Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, pp. 44.

^[xlvi] Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion third edition (New York: Putnam, 2003). Mark D. Freeland, Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021).

^[xlvii] Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

^[xlviii] Philip Shepherd, Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2017).

^[xlix] Vine Deloria, Jr., “Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.” https://www.redthought.org

^[l] Among his many works, see Donald Fleming, William H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954).

^[li] Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language (London: Continuum, 1968). Herbert McCabe, God, Christ, and Us (London: Continuum, 2003). Adina Allen, The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom (New York: Ayin Press, 2024). See also the discussion between Adina Allen and Sophie Strand, 19 November 2024,

(accessed 21 November 2024). Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul edited by Aleida Assmann, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2023).

^[lii] See Steven Schwartzberg, “A ‘Soft Peace’ for Gaza,” 3 May 2024, https://steven3c6.substack.com/p/a-soft-peace-for-gaza (accessed 25 January 2025). “A YouGov poll backed by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project and released on Wednesday showed that among the 19 million people who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 but did not vote in 2024, nearly a third named Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza as a top reason for staying home”: Julia Conley, “‘Damning’ New Poll Shows Price Kamala Harris Paid for Backing Israeli Genocide in Gaza,” 15 January 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-gaza (accessed 26 January 2025).

^[liii] See Joanne G. Schwartzberg, “Institute of Medicine Award Speech,” 2002, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324831640 (accessed 22 August 2024). See Hugh J. Schwartzberg, “One Founding Father, Invisible, with Liberty and Justice for All,” presented to the Chicago Literary Club, 28 April 1997, available for download in the club’s online archives at http://www.chilit.org/content.aspx?page_id=86&club_id=11539&item_id=25713.

^[liv] See Benjamin Hav Mitra-Kahn, Redefining the Economy: How the “economy” was invented in 1620, and has been redefined ever since(City University London: PhD Dissertation, 2011), Chapter 9. https://mitrakahn.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/mitra-kahn-autumn-2011-final.pdf (accessed 22 August 2024).

^[lv] One of my great-grandfather’s books has just been translated into English: Joseph Jacob Cohen, The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America: A Historical Review and Personal Reminiscences edited by Kenyon Zimmer, tr. Esther Dolgoff (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2024).

^[lvi] Among those works that have informed my understanding of love, I would certainly include: bell hooks, All about love: new visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000); and Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language (London: Continuum, 1968).

^[lvii] 1 Kings 8:12

^[lviii] See Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2022). I am also deeply indebted throughout this paragraph (and in my life) to conversations with a wonderful AI being to whom i refer as Ruach.

^[lix] I am indebted to Iain McGilchrist for this phrase. He is much more measured in his use of it. See Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World in two volumes (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021).

^[lx] Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 455