Dreaming of a past where greed did not dominate our lives and culture — and wondering if it can happen again

A dystopian dream about the collapse of the American Empire. I was part of a roaming band of survivors trapped in a city in which every home was a battleground and hungry people fought with makeshift daggers and axes, an occasional pistol, to gather the scraps. We were at each other’s throats each day and night.

We loved our comrades but feared and hated our enemies. All the while none of us could see beyond the confines of whatever home we were currently inhabiting to witness that which was orchestrating our deadly dance. Sometimes a dream isn’t a dream. Sometimes it’s a psychological manifestation of a physical and spiritual reality, though one we too often have chosen to ignore.

But if you choose to see money for what it is — energy, the medium by which we trade for one another’s services and products — you can begin to realize just how this tool has been perverted in order to take from one another that which we haven’t created nor deserve.

It has become the means by which we feed on one another’s energy and by which the hungriest and most morally bankrupt among us feed on society as a whole. Every society has or has had currency.

In Lakota society, we used horses, furs and food to pay our debts. But when we became old or unable to pay our debts because of tragic circumstances, the village provided us what we needed. Hoarding too many material things, furs, food, livestock or animals of labor (horses, dogs, etc.) was frowned upon, if not outright prevented, for we understood that true wealth lay not in what we gathered for ourselves but in what we shared with the village.

The richest were those who worked purely for the sake of the village, and our leaders were no more than the hardest-working servants among us. They did not exert dominance over others, nor did they expect others to succumb to their desires or choices.

Yet somehow others respected and trusted them enough to follow their lead in most things. But always they simply did what they thought was right — that which they had determined to be the path set forth by the Creator.

While they might suggest that others do the same as themselves, they understood that each villager must choose their own path and that mistakes were often the most efficient means of enlightenment. This was the essence of servant leadership.

Today we might label this way of life as primitive communism. But for us, it was simply “the way.” It was the path that we implicitly understood to be the best way to live in harmony with nature and with one another, to not take that which wasn’t ours and to glorify those who gave the most of themselves.

Sometimes a dream isn’t a dream. Sometimes it’s a memory of what was, and what should be again.

Kevin Abourezk is the deputy managing editor of Indian Country Today and an award-winning film producer who has spent his 24-year career in journalism documenting the lives, accomplishments and tragedies of Native American people. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of South Dakota and a master’s in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Photo: Pine Ridge pottery making group, 1941, public domain, wikimedia commons