Indigenous people from Australia, from Sub-Sahara Africa, from the Pacific Islands, from North and South America did not come to Europe to invade our lands, to impose their cultures and religions upon us, and to judge us to be inferior and only worthy of slavery or hard labor, or death.

While calling ourselves Christian and civilized, we have done these things and more to the native people of the lands and continents we have taken, and to this day attempt to force our perceptions of progress on the world, and of cultural superiority. We are still conquering, we still strive to be the

masters of the world, to have control of the earth and of space, and to establish our western civilization to be the cultural norm, the only valid cultural model.

And we seem perplexed by the resistance of some indigenous groups, who appear hostile to us for merely resisting our aggression, resisting the ideas of assimilation and acculturation, the idea of being made minorities on their own lands, the assumption that their cultures, religions, technologies, languages and traditions are irrelevant or obsolete in the face of our economic, military, political, technological might.

We must understand that the moment we attempt to get on top of another people to force our civilization upon them, or to otherwise coerce them through manipulation, intimidation, or any other means to make it seemingly impossible for them to resist what we call progress, we invalidate all we

stand for, all we believe, all we have and all we are. We indeed become transgressors and tyrants, and the traditional indigenous people of the world become at once a refuge and a symbol of resistance against such tyranny, as were the German tribes while Europe was overcome by the Roman Empire.

Our Indo-European civilization has always been tyrannical by definition, because it has waged a war against nature and natural people from the beginning, and has yet to acknowledge that there are places where it is not welcome and never will be, places that do not accept conquest or our fantasies of superiority, a few of these places being the very hearts and minds of some of the native people we assume to have subjugated within our national borders.

Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.

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