From When White People Go Bad:
can't resist...
about mixing the medicines
a New Age Yin and Yang Cherokee Tale ... decolonized
An old Christian evangelist is teaching his grandson about life by way of misrepresenting and homogenizing American Indian spiritual lore.
“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is dark and therefore evil (because I believe and perpetuate long-debunked race theories as biological truth, and therefore equate dark skin with sin) – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. These things are bad in my simplistic Western view that categorizes all things into binary opposites, and these emotions are never, ever, ever natural or useful or necessary. They are just plain bad.”
He continued, “The other is white and good (because as a privileged white man, I am at the top of the Great Chain of Being and so whiteness is holy and right and true) – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too, because my Eurocentric value-laden paradigm is of course representative of everybody else’s.”
The boy asked, “Why are they wolves?”
The Christian evangelist replied, “Well, they are wolves because even though we have driven wolves to near-extinction with our anthropocentric and ecocidal ways, for some hypocritical reason we still romantizise wolves as noble creatures. Despite not honoring their place in life in practise, their symbolism theoretically elevates an otherwise clichéd story into a good yarn. And so I talk of wolves although I have no knowledge of their true habits, but I enjoy anthropomorphizing them into childish constructs of good and evil, to veil my otherwise too-obvious-to-be-authentic American Indian parable. So I suppose the real reason is that they give more spiritual credence to this story than a dog or a cat or a horse ever could.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Well, which wolf will win?”
The old Christian evangelist simply replied, “The one you feed.”
The grandson called bullshit. “Wolves are wild, you senile dickhead. Only domesticated creatures rely on humans for food.”
