The Nomadic Alternative – Page 109

The Vision of Isaiah promises a Saviour to supervise the operation. "His name shall be Emmanuel" and he shall be a nomad.

"Butter and honey shall be his food that he may know how to refuse the evil and choose the good." (7.15) He will eat dairy produce and thank nature for her gift of wild honey. In those days every man shall "nourish a young cow and two sheep" (7.21) , and even the hunters will re-emerge from obscurity. "With arrows and with bows shall men come thither because the land shall become briars and thorns."

Many unsettled peoples have voiced this horror of agriculture. Smohalla, an Indian prophet of the Wanapum Tribe of the Great Plains, believed he would commit murder if he cut the ground. "You ask me to plough the ground? Shall I take a knife and tear at my mother's bosom? Then when I die, she will not take me to rest. You ask me to dig for stone? Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot be born again. You ask me to cut the grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men? But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?"*

Manual work in the fields is degrading and unmanly. It is also ritual murder. Sacrifices of human blood alone can appease the hateful crime of murder. Sacrifices of human blood alone can appease the hateful crime of murdering the ground. The detestable abominations of the Temple were the works of settlers. And with the single-mindedness of faith, the nomadic revivalists would lead the people back to the old days of insurgency. Israel must consciously return to that state described in the early books of her history.

She must remember the heroic days of her youth - raids in the green dawn, feints and ambushes, cattle-rustling, gold and silver looted for the treasury of the Lord, flame and black smoke rising over the walls of a mud-brick city, pictures smashed, high altars brought low, molten images melted, and the carcasses of fat kings suspended from the trees. The urban rabble is a sub-human plague and loyalty to the species runs out where tribal loyalty ends.

*James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, in Ann. Rep. of the Bureau of American Ethnology, XIV, 2, 1896, pp. 721, 724.