"UNIVERSAL SOLDIER"

 “UNIVERSAL SOLDIER”

We’ve made an oval walking path in our woodsy backyard – twenty times around will give you a mile walk.  In these beautiful fall days, amidst our towering pines and the oaks and maples and poplars, I am thinking of all the people who have walked in these areas, especially the Muscogee Creek people who were driven from the land on the Trail of Tears.  

As I was walking on Saturday and thinking about the Creeks, I thought of Buffy Sainte-Marie, who is a Cree Canadian-American singer and songwriter, pacifist and activist.  Creek and Cree are not the same tribe – the Creek were of the southeast, and the Cree were in Canada – but to my Anglo mind, the sounds are similar and brought her to mind.  She was born on the Piapot Reserve in Canada in 1941, and raised by an adopted Indigenous family in the States.  She taught herself guitar and piano and has written very powerful songs, including a lament for all that Indigenous peoples have lost to Anglo imperialism, called “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone.”  

I first encountered her in the 1960’s when she wrote an amazing song about the impulse for war and death that seems to reside in the human heart, but most especially in the European drive to conquer and dominate.  As Sweet Honey in the Rock later put it: “your hunger for war is nothing new, cowboy.”  The song  is called “The Universal Soldier,” and it is a poem/song that seems to apply to any age and to all people, as she writes.  Here it is:

He's five feet two and he's six feet four

He fights with missiles and with spears

He's all of 31 and he's only 17

He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an athiest, a Jain,

a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew

and he knows he shouldn't kill

and he knows he always will

kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,

he's fighting for France,

he's fighting for the USA,

and he's fighting for the Russians

and he's fighting for Japan,

and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy

and fighting for the Reds

He says it's for the peace of all

He's the one who must decide

who's to live and who's to die

and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have

condemned him at Dachau

Without him Caesar would have stood alone

He's the one who gives his body

as a weapon to a war

and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he

really is to blame

His orders come from far away no more

They come from him, and you, and me

and brothers can't you see

this is not the way we put an end to war

if you want to hear her singing it, here is the link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6imjvgJFvM

    As we think about Native American Heritage Month, let us remember the power and strength of Native Americans who have endured and who have persevered and survived, all the while holding on to a vision of creation that we so desperately need in our time:  the earth and all beings on it and in it are inter-related, including us human beings.  Let us align our lives to reflect this interdependence, or we’ll all perish as fools, as MLK so aptly put it.