Hey guys. I saw Dances With Wolves yesterday (hadn't seen it before).
What a beautiful movie. Couldn't keep my tears in, and believe me, it takes something for me to cry at a movie.
Anyway, this piece is what came of that mood. I have a second piece in my mind, but it is in contrast to this one, so I'm not sure I should write it. It's strange; it's a contrast, but yet similar.
Yeah. Don't mind me babbling. Just read this, and please, please tell me what you think.
I fingered the words I had just written down. I love Stands With A Fist. Dances With Wolves.
Dances with Wolves. I no longer felt like John J. Dunbar, lieutenant in the United States Army. The atrocities people had committed in name of that Army disgusted me. To see what had happened, to see what could happen to these wonderful people filled me with fear.
We were impostors. We had invaded this vast country so many years ago, and we had continued to destroy it even to this day. We had slaughtered the people living on it, the people native to this country. This land belonged to them, not to us. This was where they had lived, where their ancestors had bloomed. This land was sacred to them.
What was it to us? Just another place to conquer, another piece of land, though larger than ever before, to destroy with our so-called masculinity. Another way to fulfill our need for blood and gore, to see the power we had.
How wrong we were. Maybe we were strong. Maybe we had power – but these people, these people who had survived three hundred years of invasion and still continued to stand strong, they were the ones with the real power. They battled their own fights, they lived through death and disease.
We were weak. I could so easily see it now; my earlier dreams of controlling this entire country had vanished.
We were weak, because we had no mental strength. We cowered in front of power; we pretended to be strong, pretended not to care, but we did, and it created a life of fear and hiding for us.
I did no longer want to belong to these people. I felt estranged. It had been too long since I had been in the company of those I actually liked; I had not seen my family in years, and as a result I did not miss them. I do not feel I am betraying them by visiting the Sioux. In many ways, they are better humans than those others will ever be.
I looked across the land expanding in front of me. How I loved them, even when they were not my home land. The beautiful vastness of this place, the silence; I loved all those things more than I had ever loved my hometown. Nature flourished here.
The Sioux I now shared my life with were nothing like I had ever heard; all the stories I had been told did not apply to these people. Yes, they murdered, but did we not do the same? Their manners were not beastly and hostile; indeed, they had welcomed me and I felt I was part of this peaceful community. Their lives were balanced, even if the Army had disrupted it; the endless cycle of life remained untouched here.
I felt at home.