Coca leaves for sale in a Bolivian market (Wikimedia Commons)

       Today’s basic drug prohibition laws were all put into American law between 1906 and 1918 by the ruling White supremacist culture. These legal lies, put into modern language, are simply a repeat of the slaver lies found in the Malleus Maleficarum. The Drug War is the Inquisition. 
       America’s drug prohibition laws are built on these legally institutionalized slaver lies:

      1. human herbalism is abnormal; 

      2. human herbalism causes crime;

      3. whole herbs are the same as refined concentrates; 

      4. pharmacological evidence is irrelevant in drug cases; 

      5. the pure physics of supply and demand can be overcome with legislation. 
     The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, the current federal law, is Nixon’s politicized update of these lies. This book is the history of those lies, embedded in American law and politics. America’s great saving grace, of course, is its ethos of free speech. I don’t fear that the secret police will come knocking on my door because of my critique of the drug war.  I feel an absolute, an ecstatic, freedom of expression.  But American history is schizophrenic.  I feel free to speak, but the lilies of the field, my birthright, have been denied me. We Americans have the ecstacy of centuries of spectacular creativity and innovation, and the agony of human enslavement, prohibitionism and mass imprisonment built on Prohibition. American prohibitionism is the primary engine driving the fascism threatening America today.       How is it that normal human herbalism is demonized to the point of imprisonment? When did I become a slave forbidden to partake of humanity’s traditional sacramental herbs? How is it that America imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other nation on earth?  The U.S. imprisons 700 people per 100,000. The Dutch imprison 70.  That is a working definition of industrial fascism, and it is built on the slaver propaganda of the Drug War. All recognized terrorist groups are drug gangs, financed by the artificial value created by our Prohibition. There is no established, self-sustaining terrorist group that is not a drug gang, and there is no drug gang that is not also a terrorist group. Al Qaeda doesn’t exist without the artificial value our Prohibition gives its heroin.  How do we stop al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Sinaloa cartel? Bankrupt them with controlled global legalization or decriminalization. Pull the financial rug out from under them. 
       It is no coincidence that those countries that have legalized or medicalized drugs, like Holland and Portugal, have 15% - 35% of our per capita opioid use rate. Holland has less than 20% of our opioid use rate. Obviously, if opioids really did cause an ‘epidemic,’ that would not be possible, since opioids are the same in Holland.  If opioids really did cause an epidemic, Holland would have to have the same per capita opioid use rate that we have. The real public policy question isn’t “what do we do about the opioid epidemic?,” but “why doesn’t Holland have an opioid epidemic?”        ‘Epidemic’ is an archetypal inquisitorial word used repeatedly in the Malleus Maleficarum, which talks constantly of the “epidemic of witchcraft,” by which the medievals meant herbal shamanism, contemporary midwifery. Prohibition, which achieved the blanket criminalization of the safe traditional whole herbs by equating them with the newly-invented refined concentrates, is a stimulus to hard drug use, just as the artificial value provided by Prohibition is the most powerful stimulus to production that can be devised – it is a structural price support.  Legally, coca leaf became cocaine.
       This is the history of the mass-imprisonment and global imperialism, the endless war, built by those in the warfare and imprisonment business using the Drug Propaganda. The Drug War is a Reichstag Fire designed to justify sucking as much of the public purse as possible into the military-police-prison-treatment complex.  How do we afford medicare for all, a green new deal, universal pre-K, debt-free college? Stop creating drug crime out of whole cloth, stop demonizing normal human herbalism and stop spending most of the culture’s wealth on mass imprisonment and weapons systems to fight unnecessary colonialist wars.
        The Drug War, the fascist militarization of American culture, is the Vietnam War in slow motion – completely unnecessary, self-inflicted, global strategic suicide, engineered by the same forces that engineered the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was profitable to no one but the weapons manufacturers and the CIA-connected drug dealers, whom we called a government, trading their heroin profits for our weapons. Just as the Viet Minh, our WWII ally, was not attacking us, so too ‘drugs’ are not attacking us - any more than ‘Jews’ were attacking Germany in the 1930s. There is no such thing as ‘drug-caused crime’ – it’s all Prohibition caused crime, hoodlum fights over possession or dealing territory caused by the artificial value Prohibition gives these demanded commodities. It is that artificial value alone that creates the drug gangs – without Prohibition they don’t exist.  We are pummeled with cliché-spouting news stories that pound ‘drug crime’ into the public consciousness, when in fact what we are dealing with is Prohibition crime, money-motivated crime. There is no drug threat.  There is a Prohibition threat. 
        Virtually the entire public argument for Prohibition, before it became law in 1918, was rabid, aggressive, scapegoating anti-Black racism. Prohibitionism was the number one political platform of the KKK in 1920, as it was that of Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Kresge et al. The same racist killers who put ‘separate but equal’ into law in 1896 with Pleassy v. Ferguson, wrote most of the standing legal precedents of today’s Drug War, for the same fascist purposes. You couldn’t arrest people for organizing a union, but, after 1918, you could arrest unionists for having a beer. In the end, the beer scam failed, but it institutionalized organized crime in America, and the related pot, coca and opium scam succeeded. It was Prohibition and the related Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906 and the Harrison Act of 1914 that gave us what we now call the DEA (The Narcotics Division of the Prohibition Unit). Prohibition was necessary to reinstitute slavery as sharecropping, and Black folks, and Native Americans, were ideal scapegoats to justify legally defining us all as slaves. The enforcement structures created by Prohibition remain as politically and racially selective, and as connected to organized crime, as ever. The Bush and Saudi BCCI bank was a drug money laundry covertly trading arms for Contra Cocaine and Afghan Heroin. 
        The central sacrament of Incan culture, coca leaf, a medicinal chew and tea leaf, was determined to be un delusio del demonio by Pizarro’s slaver priests, who proceeded to save Incan souls by working them to death as beasts of burden under the lash. Farm animals are rendered docile by control of their eating and reproduction, which is why slaver religion and slaver law are full of personal strictures regarding eating and reproducing. Original Sin is a slaver domination trick. There is nothing sinful about eating and reproducing.
       Coca leaves are considered a sacred food in their culture of origin. There is nothing dangerous about whole coca leaves, which are as harmless as orange pekoe tea. Coca leaf tea is traditional Incan baby medicine. Cocaine, which wasn’t isolated until 1860, comprises less than 1% of the weight of a coca leaf. Highland coca, erythroxylum coca, is about 1% cocaine by weight. Lowland coca, Colombian coca, erythroxylum ipadu, is about ½ of 1%.  It takes 2000 pounds of coca leaves to make 10-20 pounds of cocaine. There are far more dangerous compounds in potatoes, tomatoes, celery, pizza mushrooms and fava beans, all of which are perfectly safe to eat. But Incan tribal identity centers around rituals involving Mama Coca, who is contacted through the communal ritual use of her leaf, so control of coca was essential for Incan enslavement. This happened centuries before the invention of cocaine. That is, the Drug War was born in the industrial enslavement process of the ancient world, and has nothing to do with conquistador concern for anybody’s health.          F
        This book is largely the political history of the intentional confusion between whole herbs and refined concentrates, a confusion rooted in the unconscious contents of our political culture.  That is, in the planted axiom that ‘the drug problem’ can be discussed in terms of modern politics. The Drug War can’t be separated from the cultural compulsion of our conquistador history.  Nor can it be separated from the evolutionary function of inebriative behavior, known to anthropologists as shamanism. The classic anthropological definition of ‘shamanism’ is ‘archaic techniques of ecstacy,’ to which I would add, ‘designed to foster communal identity, healing and automatic creativity.’ These techniques includes herbalism, music, walkabout and ordeal.
     Industrial political evolution has been as successful in burying conscious knowledge of the archaic techniques of ecstasy as it has been in burying the wolf, and those that understood it.  Unconscious knowledge, on the other hand, is a tad more difficult to manipulate, as the neurotic lurching of so many of our public figures demonstrates; ‘just say no,’ after all, was invented by an ad agency recommended to Nancy Reagan by an alcoholic, one of her chief aides, Michael Deaver.
        Our public laws are no longer overtly racist, but we are still brutally anti-tribal, in many ways institutionally unloving, structurally violent, to millions of our children, our tribal primitives, and to our shamanic adults.  This is a psychological inheritance from our conquistador past, as well as a legal one, and is directly responsible for the persistence of racism in our culture.  Racism is the otherizing, the tribalizing, the scapegoating of people for a political purpose.
        This inquisitorial neurosis, this slaver hostility to tribal culture, inculcated by patriarchal religion, the mandatory slaver replacement of matriarchal tribal religion, this proscription, causes drug problems, in the same way that violent sexual puritanism causes sexual problems. The ancient tribal wisdom prevents them. There are many cultures, both tribal and industrial, the Vicosinos of Peru and the Dutch, for instance, that don’t have anything like our current disaster, and they all apply prescription rather than proscription. 
       James Adair, a trader among the Indians in the southern U.S. in the 1760s, expressed a typically American attitude when he wrote, “For my own part I would prefer an old Indian before any chirurgeon whatsoever, in curing green wounds by bullets, arrows, &c. both for the certainty, ease, and speediness of cure.”  Europeans were amazed at the superiority of Native American trauma treatment. Indians from Peru to Canada understood the use of arboreal oleoresins, antiseptic and healing herb juices, honey and egg whites.    William Wood, in 1639, wrote, “Some of them have been shot in at the mouth, and out of the ear, some shot in the breast; some run through the flank with darts, and other desperate wounds, which either by their rare skill in the use of vegetatives, or diabolical charms, they cure in a short time.” 21 22 
        Bossu, in the 1750s, reported the progressive use by Choctaw shamans of an antiseptic powder on a wound, a regular antiseptic wash, and drying and healing agents. Dr. Pitcher, in the mid-nineteenth century, reported that the Michigan Indians began the treatment of a gunshot wound using a powdered puffball as an effective hemostat. A bladder and quill syringe was then used to inject a mild antiseptic wash into the wound, guarding against premature closure with a drainage straw of slippery elm bark - firm enough to sink in, soft enough not to damage the wound.  In 1929, Dr. Harlow Brooks in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine declared: “In frontier medicine much, one may even say most, of the settlers’ knowledge in regard to the treatment of traumata has been bodily copied from the Indians.”  23 24    
        The Indians “developed a splint for legs, which, in their time, was superior to those used by whites.”  The Ojibwas would put liniment on and warm a broken limb until it was relaxed, then jerk the dislocated bone back into place, setting it with wet clay or rawhide in conjunction with herbal poultices and elastic splints made of cedar or cactus ribs. The techniques of the Ojibwas, Pimas and Mescaleros for resetting and immobilizing broken bones with form-fitting splints are now the standard techniques of modern medicine. 
       Captain John Gregory Bourke went up against Crazy Horse’s Sioux and the Northern Cheyennes and was Crook’s aide-de-camp when he penetrated the Sierra Madres to force the surrender of Geronimo.  Although he spent the early part of his life killing Indians, he got to know not only his scouts but his adversaries personally, and became fascinated by their humanity and their shamanism, becoming their political defender in later life.  In his 1887 report on “The Medicine-Men of the Apache,” Captain Bourke described an Apache curandero administering an enema with an animal bladder and a hollow leg bone; that’s how ‘modern’ medicine was invented. 25 26 27
    Two nineteenth century historians wrote that “For a century, French voyageurs and coureurs du bois had preferred the Indian treatment of wounds and chronic sores with poultices and herbs to that of whites.  Native medicine men also doctored many other ills with concoctions of herbs, drinks, sweatings, and rubbings, usually accompanied with ceremonials, incantations, ghost shooting in the night, and similar aids.  They even sucked out manitous, or evil spirits.  In some western communities in the earlier years there were Indian doctors who were held in quite as high repute as regular white doctors.” 28  
       When William Bent, the legendary trader of Bent’s Fort in Colorado, was being choked to death by a throat infection, “the medicine man strung a sinew with sandburs and dipped it in hot buffalo tallow.  This he forced down Bent’s throat with a peeled stick.  When the tallow melted, he jerked the string out, pulling the infected membrane with it.  Bent survived.” An old Sioux shaman, Baptiste, was so treasured at the Winnebago agency, that when his tribe was moved west the government built Baptiste a clinic and kept him on at the agency, where he treated Red and White alike, “finally dying respected by both races.” 29 30
       Bossu described the “steam cabinets” of the Choctaws “in which are boiled all sorts of medicinal and sweet-smelling herbs. The vapor filled with the essence and salts of these herbs enters the patient’s body through his pores and his nose and restores his strength.”  Spruce noted in the 1850s that “the domestic medicine of the South American Indian is chiefly hygienic, as such medicine ought to be, it being of greater daily importance to preserve health than to cure disease.” 31 32      
        Herbal knowledge, like knowledge of animal ways, is instinctive,  emotional knowledge, knowledge that connects us to our identity, our roots in the Earth. There is no distinction between plant biochemistry and human biochemistry. The plant world is literally the mother of the animal world.  This is our food.  Many human neurotransmitters are chemically identical to herbal isolates. Most sacramental herbs actually work by triggering or repressing our own neurotransmitters. Since we share our evolution with these sacred foods, their identity is dream-knowledge, accessible in cultures that foster such knowledge. The shamanic state, the state of spirit-possession, often induced by sacred herbs, is often encyclopedic - superconscious, not subconscious. That’s why many shamans demonstrate uncanny memory.  We know that The Odyssey and The Iliad were preserved, for hundreds of years before they were written down, by mnemonic power that very few moderns could match. The oral preservation of the Vedas, which weren’t set into print until the 19th century, is even more spectacular.  Imagine the power of the intellect that could sing The Iliad from memory.  Mnemosyne, according to Hesiod, is the Mother of the Nine Muses.  She could look forward as well as backward, that is, she ‘remembered’ how the world worked, so that she could prophesy as well as recall. 64
       When Jacques Cartier’s crew, icebound in the St. Lawrence River near Quebec in 1536, were dying of scurvy, it was Domagaia, the local chief, who saved them.  Cartier had already suffered twenty-five dead when the chief asked his women to gather “the juice and sapple of a certain Tree....boiling the bark and leaves for a decoction, and placing the dregs upon the legs....No sooner had they drunk than they improved in a manner truly and obviously miraculous....in six days a whole tree as large and tall as any oak in France was used up. And in those six days it worked more wonders than all the physicians of Louvain and Montpelier using all the drugs in Alexandria could have done in a year.” 65 
        The scurvy was stopped by Domagaia’s white cedar, which Cartier called “the tree of life,” and the explorer survived to write his name in the history books.  It was Cartier’s account of his rescue, two hundred years later, that caused Dr. James Lind of the Royal Navy to launch the experiments which ‘discovered’ the dietary basis of scurvy.  When Captain Cook went around the world in 1776-80, he carried a large supply of beer spiked with spruce, another traditional Indian remedy for scurvy. Eskimos have known for millennia that the adrenal glands of moose, rich in vitamin C, were a scurvy preventative, and made a ritual of sharing the glands among the family.   
       ‘Modern medicine’ is as much a discovery of ‘modern science’ as Hudson’s Bay is a discovery of Henry Hudson. Galileo and Newton may have described acceleration mathematically, but they didn’t invent the spear-thrower, the toggling harpoon, the bow or gun powder.  Dr. Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin, credited tribal shamans with the “pharmaceutical spadework” that made his discovery possible.  Fleming said the same thing about penicillin, and the same is true of digitalis, scopolamine, reserpine, ephedrine, atropine, quinine, curare and salicylic acid (aspirin), as well as of most basic medical techniques. 
       The Incas understood that kelp was a preventative for goiter, and used clay rich in kaolin for stomach upset and bacterial infections of the gut, just as modern kaopectate does.  The birth control pill, in herbal form, is likewise a shamanic discovery. Hundreds of years before Withering discovered the cardiac stimulant digitalis in England in 1784, American Indian shamans were correctly using the American variety of foxglove, the source of digitalis, for the same purpose. 66
       A 1967 analysis of one billion prescriptions showed 50% containing active ingredients, vegetal, mineral, animal and microorganic, known and used by shamans, and it is fair to say that at least another 25% contained synthetic copies of the same.  A 1976 analysis came up with the same percentages. 67 68   
        Pater dazzles us with the techno-trees so as to obscure the forest.  There are only three historical epochs: Prehistory, which is the reptilian-mammalian spine and medulla oblongata; Ancient History, which is the advent of Homo sapiens, the Upper Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago; and Modern History, which began with the invention of agriculture in the Neolithic, about 25,000 years ago, or with the military organization of Neolithic villages into the first great industrial slave states, the ‘first great civilizations,’ about 7,000 years ago.
       If you think the Neolithic experiment in mammalian cybernetics isn’t present and ongoing, just contemplate the industrial destruction of the ecosphere. The bacterial plagues seem to have been replaced by viral plagues, the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels seems to be warming the ocean and the atmosphere at an evolutionarily suicidal rate, the destruction of the Earth’s lungs, the rainforests, continues unabated, there is a massive die-off of species, an apparent change in the ratio of key atmospheric and oceanic gases - the list goes on and on. 
        There is no guarantee, as the oceanographers and atmospheric scientists are warning, that a combination of these disasters won’t careen out of control.   If the poles heat up just a few more degrees, their cold water will cease to sink. It is this massive underocean river, which rises, heated, at the equator, that drives the oceanic food chain. Imagine what a stagnant ocean will do to the atmosphere, and the life that depends on it.  The thawing of the Arctic tundra is continuing apace, the massive release of the trapped methane causing a geometric increase in the rate of global warming.
        Here is the evolutionary necessity to control industrial fascism  - it won’t control itself.  Black Elk, or me, or you, smoking an inner peace pipe, communing with the vegetal source, refusing to make the assembly line a religion, ain’t the problem.  What killed Black Elk’s people, and criminalized their shamanism, is.  As Albert Szent-Gyorgi, the chemist who isolated vitamin C, puts it, we are still “the crazy ape.”     
         As the renowned linguist David Crystal puts it, “Anthropologically speaking, the human race can be said to have evolved from primitive to civilized states, but there is no sign of language having gone through the same kind of evolution.  There are no ‘bronze age’ or ‘stone age’ languages, nor have any language types been discovered which correlate with recognized anthropological groups (pastoral, nomadic, etc.).  All languages have a complex grammar...” 69 
       That grammar is the spontaneous geometry of mammalian perception and emotion. A co-worker of Bourke’s in Powell’s Bureau of Ethnology, the seminal anthropologist and linguist Franz Boas, in his 1911 Handbook of American Indian Languages, and Boas’ student Edward Sapir, in his 1921 book Language, demonstrated that Amer-Indian languages have complex declensions, verbal tenses and concepts as abstract, and as difficult for a non-speaker to comprehend, as anything found in Latin, Greek or English. 
        ‘Snow’ may be adequate for an industrial urbanite, but a hunting Eskimo, who has dozens of functional descriptions of snow, can use snow, and communicate its uses, in ways that would make most modern urbanites seem like amnesiac fools.  Tribal languages, regarding the ‘biological technology,’ are more sophisticated than industrial languages, not less.
       No serious ethnologist missed the point that at least half the shamans were women with equal status in the medicine societies. I find myself pluralizing my sentences so as to find a pronoun, absent in English, or Spanish, that personalizes without specifying gender. The inanimate ‘it’ is hardly a substitute for ‘he’ or ‘she,’ although ‘they’ or ‘them’ does successfully personalize without specifying gender. 
        Edward Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf called this linguistic inadequacy SAE, Standard Average European. That is, Whorf pointed out that conscious thinking is often relative to the language learned. He demonstrated that the Hopi can express time in more than twenty-five subjective ways, whereas in SAE English, well worked-over by the inquisitorial process, I have only a few impersonal tenses available to me, resulting in a far poorer ability to express or even conceptualize subjective states. It follows that the attitude of the two cultures toward manipulating those states is equally different. 70
      Very few mechanistic moderns can match the mnemonic power of a Hopi shaman (‘spirit-person,’ no gender intended). Jane Ellen Harrison stressed the Greek origins of many SAE English words precisely to illustrate the buried shamanic roots of our culture.  Mnemosyne may be the root of our word ‘memory,’ but its use in ancient Greek literature implies powers of vision, perception and automatic creativity that extend far beyond the recollection of past events.    
       Many things are unconscious for us simply by virtue of cultural inculcation.  Fantasies and even political dialogue that would be acceptable in one culture can be unacceptable in another.  That is, language often subliminally teaches self-censorship, the instant suppression of unacceptable content. 
        ‘Drug’ is a medieval French word, drogue, meaning ‘commodity no longer in demand and therefore valueless,’ as in our phrase ‘a drug in the market.’  It was put into the language by inquisitors and is a subtle piece of implicit propaganda, replacing the ancient ‘medicine’ words, like the Greek pharmakon (cognate with pharmakos, sacrificial king) with a put-down the speaker assumes to be subjective. 
       In France, in 1635, Cardinal Richelieu, a legendary inquisitor and slaver, established the Academie francaise, composed exclusively of priests, nobles and generals.  He chartered them “to render it [the language] pure.” The Church founded the Accademia della Crusca in Italy in 1582 with the same object.  The Congregatio de propaganda fide, “Congregation for propagating the faith,” founded by Pope Gregory XV in 1622, gave us the word propaganda. 71    
        Put ‘em all together and whaddya got? Drug Propaganda. Industrial fascists distort the meaning of history so as to destroy mnemosyne, because, as Plato said, “all learning is remembering.”  Slavers operate by co-opting the symbolism, and demonizing the sacraments, of the enslaved. Demeter is turned into Zeus.  It would have seemed very odd to Jesus, executed by Romans for resisting their military enslavement of Israel, to be told that Constantine, a Roman slaver, represented Jesus. That’s sort of like naming the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ‘The Geronimo.’ Constantine no more partook of the war shaman Joshua’s actual sacraments than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs partakes of Geronimo’s - however many airplanes he jumps out of. 
        Industrialization, as Native American war shamans well understood, is largely the process of domestication and infantilization, submission to Augustine’s industrial paterfamilias.  Creativity and power are not its necessary results. 
        The Catholic Bourke thought it was the height of good sense for an Indian to walk away from his or her culture forever and “adopt the sacraments,” as if they had none of their own. 
       Native American tribal geniuses were devalued right along with their means of creativity and communication.  When a literate sensitive like John Neihardt bothered to record the words of a great Sioux shaman like Black Elk, Crazy Horse’s cousin, what is revealed is a powerful healer with uncanny intellectual and spiritual powers.  As the ecosphere itself proves, we are in the process of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The herbs in the elk hide valises, Chiron’s gift to Asklepios, were a gift from the Mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne.  We reject gifts from the Earth at our peril. 
       Bourke’s teacher, Lewis Henry Morgan, insisted that “the institutions of mankind have sprung up in a progressive connected series, each of which represents the result of unconscious reformatory movements to extricate society from existing evils.”  As the influential theologist John Fiske, in his 1902 Studies in Religion, put it: “From the general analogies furnished in the process of evolution, we are entitled to hope that, as it approaches its goal and man comes nearer to God, the fact of evil will lapse into a mere memory.”  Herbert Spencer’s “Social Darwinism” (Principles of Sociology,1876) left the White man with a hell of a burden. 72 
       This theocratic interpretation of evolution was as Protestant as it was Catholic, and was held by America’s leading progressive lights.  We can, I suppose, call it ‘scientific creationism,’ which, I am distressed to admit, is a force in contemporary Euroamerica.  Bellowed Albert Beveridge, one of the Senate’s leading Republicans in 1898: “It is God’s great purpose made manifest in the instincts of the race whose present phase is our personal profit, but whose far-off end is the redemption of the world and the Christianization of mankind!”  Sounds contemporary, don’t it? 73
       Condescending as he was in victory, Bourke was completely honest, and sickened to the depths of his soul by the rapacity of the culture he fought to defend.  “I am a strong Republican in my sentiments and sympathies but candidly concede that years of power had made it corrupt, avaricious and unscrupulous, and it should now be made to stand aside for some new party representing live issues and new principles.” 74
       Noticing the health and sharpness of Indian children, Bourke complained, “We have too many stump-tailed monuments to George Washington and other corpses and not enough money spent in providing means of healthy recreation and amusement for our children in the big cities.” 75  
       In 1877 the Indian Bureau forced the Poncas, 710 people, to move to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma because their Nebraska reservation “unluckily for them, was arable and consequently coveted by the white invader.”(Bourke) Two years later, thanks to exhaustion, malnutrition, malaria and other diseases, the Poncas numbered 430. 76
       When Crook was ordered to arrest Poncas peaceably walking back to Nebraska, he arranged lawyers for them and had his own orders challenged in court.  The result was a legal landmark: the American Indian “is a person within the meaning of the habeas corpus act” and therefore had full legal rights. 77 
       Between 1875 and 1880 Crook was preoccupied with the Sioux and Cheyenne in the Dakotas.  The Indian Bureau, manipulated by “A ‘ring’ of Federal officials, contractors, and others...formed in Tucson, which exerted great influence in the national capital,” took the opportunity to confiscate all the profitable Apache farmsteads Crook had set up. All the Western Apache groups, many of whom didn’t get along with one another, were then “concentrated” on the San Carlos reservation. 
       Bourke: “The ‘Tucson ring’ was determined that no Apache should be put to the embarrassment of working for his own living; once let the Apaches become self-supporting, and what would become of ‘the boys’? Therefore, they must all be herded down on the malaria-reeking flats of the San Carlos, where the water is salt and the air poison, and one breathes a mixture of sand-blizzards and more flies than were ever supposed to be under the care of the great fly-god Beelzebub.” The original Apache farmsteads on prime Arizona land were then sold by the Indian Bureau to “the boys.” 78   
       Lied to, starved and cheated, the Apaches heeded Noch-ay-del-klinne, a White Mountain shaman, who announced the coming resurrection of all Apacheria and the imminent supernatural destruction of the Europeans.  Even Apache army scouts were excitedly dancing to call up the Messiah, so his prophet was assassinated by the army in 1881.  That, combined with the endemic corruption at San Carlos, was simply more than the Chiricahuas could take. 
       During the 1883 campaign, despite the help of 200 Apache scouts, Crook was unable to contact Geronimo after a month and a half in the Sierra Madres, although he was able to capture some of his women and children.  Several of Geronimo’s warriors later swore that on the day of their capture, Geronimo, 120 miles away, with no physical means of knowing, announced to the whole group that the army had captured their people and that they must go to the rescue. When Geronimo’s party arrived on the scene, the disposition of the small army force was exactly as Geronimo had outlined. 79 
       Unable to corner him, and uninterested in further warfare, both Crook and Bourke allowed themselves to be taken by Geronimo so as to talk him down without bloodshed.  That speaks volumes about the stature of both men.  Through the decades quite a few army officers risked their lives or careers to avoid going up against these extraordinary warriors, whom they deeply admired.  Below, Crook is seated on the right right, in the pith hat.  Bourke is immediately to Crook’s right, looking at Camillus S. Fly’s camera.  Geronimo is seated left.  His pistoleros ring the 3/26/1886 parlay.
       Once on the Turkey Creek reservation near Fort Apache, the Chiricahuas expected the contract made in the Sierras with Crook to be honored: they were to be allowed to develop their sheep herds and to pursue their own entrepreneurial ideas, for which they were famous.  
        Crook circumvented the cannibalistic military contractors by contracting directly with the Apaches for all the hay, wood, meat, corn, barley, produce, commodities and tools his troops could use, paying them directly in cash.  This was a matter of honor with Crook, who did not give his word lightly, but it infuriated the contractors and their allies in the Army and Indian Bureau. Crook’s ultimate objective was full citizenship for the Apaches, complete self-sufficiency and self-government, including the right to vote in general elections.  This was an objective the land-grabbing Arizona governor did not share. 80
        The corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs, attached to the Department of the Interior, not the War Department, ignored Crook’s word, insisting that the Apaches give up herding altogether in favor of full-time farming.  As Crook repeatedly pointed out, this was an impossibility on the grazing land at Turkey Creek. 
        Then the straightlaced Crook himself insisted that the Apaches give up tizwin, their favorite brew.  This was universally regarded as an outrageous, and uncontractual, personal invasion.  Apache paranoia was already at fever pitch due to constant genocidal threats from the Arizona authorities. The arrest of one young man for drinking tizwin only increased it, since he disappeared and wasn’t seen again for months. 
        Tizwin-making was a trade of shamans, one of whom was the influential Pretty Mouth, a skilled midwife known to have powers from the lion and the lightning, Bourke’s Apache interpreter. She convinced her husband Mangus to join Geronimo in yet another outbreak, thus ruining the whole peaceful arrangement. 81           In 1885 Crook once again found himself in the field against Geronimo, whose few troops were succeeding in completely destroying Crook’s political credibility in Arizona.  With less than a dozen warriors, Ulzana covered 1200 miles through New Mexico and Arizona, killing 38 people, stealing and using up 250 horses, riding circles around thousands of troops, engaging in scores of close firefights, and returning to Mexico with the loss of only one man. 
       An Apache scout told Crook that they “could never catch the Chiricahuas because they could hide like coyotes and could smell danger a long way off like wild animals.”  They could also travel forty to eighty miles a day through the desert and broken precipices of the Sierra Madres under the blazing sun with little or no water: “No civilized army can do that,” noted Bourke. 82 83
        Ulzana, of course, left the field free for the advocates of wholesale deportation. Crook, pictured in Fly’s famous photo above, desperately tried to talk Geronimo into another peaceful surrender - before the Apaches were left to the tender mercies of Brig. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, a politically ambitious racist murderer.    The meeting failed for both Crook and Geronimo. 
        Gen. Miles replaced the politically defeated Crook in the field. Miles was utterly stymied and outfought by Geronimo, and eventually sent in an officer Geronimo knew with a generous deal.  Miles thought nothing of breaking his word, and as soon as Geronimo came in, he packed him and all the Chiricahuas, including his own and Crook’s scouts, off to twenty years imprisonment in Florida. For the first few years the men were separated from their women and children. Both Bourke and Crook worked hard until their deaths, in the 1890s, to free the Chiricahuas. Bourke called Army Apache policy “the quintessence of idiocy; poppycock sublimed into madness.” 84 
       By the mid-1880s the Bureau of Indian Affairs had grown into a bureaucracy employing more than 2500 people, managing, with the help of the army, 250,000 Indians on 187 reservations.  The tribes had been stripped of the right to negotiate further treaties, and the chiefs were deprived of all legal power in favor of BIA courts.  Rations were distributed to individual families rather than to the tribal organization, and Indians were legally subjected to White mores, the criminalization of polygamy, for instance. 85
        The young were separated from their tribe and forced to attend trade schools, usually for nine months of the year. Most of those 200 boarding schools were run by churches or missionaries under government contract. The militaristic discipline, when not actually inhuman, was often quite harsh and unloving.  Five and six year-olds, forced to separate from their families for most of the year, were marched around in uniform as if they were prisoners of war.  They weren’t even allowed to speak their own language among themselves.  The objective, obviously, was cultural genocide.  Even on the reservations, at the trading posts, if the adults didn’t order in English, they didn’t order.  White dress and hairstyles were mandated. All shamanic rites, including sweat lodge and Sun Dance ceremonies, were prohibited by law and interrupted by the rudest personal intervention. 86.