by Paul Cudenec, who reads the article here

John Trudell (1946–2015) was a poet of the resistance against spirit-denying and culture-destroying industrial imperialism.

Machine money progress
Is the cause of our common abuse [1]

His initial focus was on defending the rights and autonomies of Native American peoples who had been so brutally crushed by the invading and occupying empire.

Indians are Jesus
Hanging from the cross
Hanging from the cross
In the name of their savior
Forcing on us
The trinity of the chain
Guilt sin and blame [2]

He wondered: “How did my land become somebody else’s country?” [3] and how other Americans could expect Indians to share in the national grief over 9/11.

Now you want us
To cry your tears for you
Already we’ve bled for you
Already been dead to you
Now you want us
To cry your tears for you

Chapters of a democracy story
Descendants of genocide
Twelve score and more years ago
We went from being the majority
To being the smallest minority
Now you want us
To cry your tears for you [4]

The modern tyranny demands that we forget who we are and where we came from so that we can be turned into disempowered, malleable and exploitable human resources for its global mega-racket. [5]

But Trudell, like so many of us, felt the soul of his ancestors stirring inside him and guiding his thoughts and actions.

In the 2005 documentary film Trudell, he explains: “I felt as if somebody knocked me unconscious when I entered the world. It’s been a lifetime trying to come to.

“I used to get this idea that I was in the wrong time in the wrong place. I thought that I came here a hundred years too late. The hundred years too late was because I used to see this camp on the plain amongst the trees by a river. It was a tribal camp and I felt I was part of it. It’s like these thoughts were memories. Every part was familiar and I was a part of the whole thing”. [6]

Too confused to care
Is no way to live
Young ones listen
Remember who you are
Remember where you are
Remember why you are [7]

In 1969, his sense of indigenous roots and connections was galvanized by the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island.

He was the spokesman for this 19-month long action, which brought the plight of Native Americans into mainstream American consciousness, and he went on to be national chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM) from 1973 to 1979. [8]

All of this drew the attention of the corporate empire’s enforcement squads and between 1969 and 1979 the FBI amassed a 17,000-page dossier on him, one of the longest in the agency’s history. [9]

An internal FBI memo stated: “He is extremely eloquent… therefore extremely dangerous”. Trudell commented: “All I did was talk and they cracked down hard just for that”. [10]

“The majority of the American citizens agreed with us… The way the government operates, any time any group of people start to get popular support, this becomes a threat to the government. AIM got labelled by this Eastland Subcommittee on Unamerican Affairs as a terrorist organization.

“Between ’73 and ’75, the government with the FBI, they were literally waging a Contra war against now all the AIM people and the traditionalists”. [11]

On February 11, 1979 Trudell burned an American flag during a demonstration in front of the FBI HQ in Washington, DC, explaining: “In the military, they said if the flag has been desecrated, the only way to properly dispose of it is to burn it”. [12]

Some 12 hours later, a fire “of suspicious origin” burned down Trudell’s home on a reservation in Nevada, killing his pregnant wife, Tina, their three children and Tina’s mother.

Unsurprisingly, the FBI declined to investigate, and the blaze was officially ruled an “accident”. But Trudell insisted: “It was murder; they were murdered as an act of war”. [13]

Devastated by the tragedy, Trudell withdrew from the world for a time and found something within him, from beyond him.

“Putting my love into the ground like this, putting my love in boxes, putting them into the ground and covering them up reconnected me to the earth”. [14]

It was during this period of grief and rebirth that he discovered his poetic gift.

Sometimes me and my mind
Don’t get along very well and
Sometimes I need someone to talk to
And someone to cling to
A little bit of forever for a little while
Doing the rest of the life I can’t hide
I fell through some of the wounds
And pulled the scars inside [15]

In his poems, later spoken to musical accompaniment as songs, his personal sadness merges with his sadness at the Indian peoples’ condition and indeed a sadness at the endless assault on the living being waged by the global industrial empire.

Industrial slave
Capitalist and Communist
Imperialist
Smiling with false faces
Beckoning us
With their lies about progress
Wanting us to enjoy
The rape of earth
And our minds

Industrial slave
Fork-tongued
Legalistic contract chains
Turning our visions
To technologic nightmares
National security warmakers
Desecrating the natural world
And gods still trying to get over
What you done to his boy

Industrial slave
Material bound
Law and order
Religious salvation
Industrially alone

Industrial slave [16]

Trudell pointed out: “The governments that are created are created to serve the needs of this industrial ruling class”. [17]

Building to the new world order
We’re expected to carry the stone
Emperors and the feeding class
Human being, being used up fast

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
A civilized behavorial notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society [18]

He argued: “There is no clear thought being exercised right now in the American public. They are allowing the insanity of the leaders to make decisions that really are not in the best interest of the public, they’re not in the best interest of the children of the public, they’re not in the best interest of the grandchildren of the public. They’re not in the best interest of the earth, they’re not in the best interest of anyone”. [19]

Waking up in industrial society
Surrounded by angry days
Going through motions of not being
Wanting the best but not expecting it [20]

Bitter fruit emerges where bitter seed is sown
Economic chains all dressed out as reward [21]

Trudell did not shrink from addressing the depth and scale of the threat posed by industrial imperialists who pillage nature to feed their infernal machineries of greed.

He judged that “they’re industrially insane – no sensitivities to life or what anything is about” [22] as they carried out their grim

Sacrifice ritual for the
Prophet technology [23]

He said: “I think we really need to put serious thought into understanding that we’re dealing with a disease. You know, it’s like there’s this predator energy on this planet and this predator energy feeds upon the essence of the spirit, feeds upon the essence of the human being, the spirit…

“They have to mine our minds… The mining of the essence, the mining of the spirit, mining our minds, the pollution from that is all of the neurotic, distorted, insecure behaviour patterns that we develop. That’s pollution.

“Because in order for this predatory system, this disease, to work, we must not be able to use our minds in a clear, coherent manner. Because if we use our minds in a clear coherent manner, we will not accept the unacceptable…

“The great lie is that it is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has been literally the most bloodthirsty, brutalizing, system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That’s the great lie… or if it does represent civilization and that’s truly what civilization is, then the great lie is that civilization is good for us”. [24]

The sheer mendacity of the system was a constant theme for Trudell and he stressed how those he termed “corporate terrorists” [25] were always

Lying to enslave with an illusion
About freedom [26]

We know the predator
We see them feed on us
We are aware
To starve the beast
Is our destiny

The times they were kind
They were polite
But never honest [27]

Everyone pretending to live
Calling exploitation progress
Calling submission freedom
Calling madness profit
Calling earth a plan et
Plaguing her with civilization [28]

Damnation or salvation
Among the
Terrorisms of freedom
A civilizing process
Where the rule of law
Is the law of rule
The law is a lie the law is a lie [29]

In the homeland security
Pretending corporate corruption
Isn’t economic terrorism
Money talks while the government listens
Compiling files on ones who think different
Conditioning an acceptance of debt
And not to expect the truth
So get used to hearing the lie [30]

The relationship between people and land is central to Trudell’s understanding, as it is to that of the organic radical tradition as a whole.

He told a protest rally in 1979: “We understand that the issue is the land, the issue is the earth. We cannot change the political system, we cannot change the economic system, we cannot change the social system until the people control the land and then we take it out of the hands of that sick minority that chooses to pervert the meaning and intention of humanity”. [31]

And he later remarked: “Lying dormant in us we have a genetic memory and in that genetic memory there’s knowledge, there’s knowledge in that genetic memory, all right, that goes back to the ancient, to the beginning for us… every human being lived within a tribe, every human being recognized this reality that the earth was the mother and the sky was the father”. [32]

It was from this deep and mystical connection to both land and ancestors, the thing I call withness, [33] that Trudell sourced his strength and inspiration.

We are all children of earth
The earth is our mother [34]

Crazy Horse
We hear what you say
One Earth one Mother
One does not sell the Earth
The people walk upon
We are the land
How do we sell our Mother
How do we sell the stars
How do we sell the air [35]

See the woman beauty
Lightning streaking dark summer nights
Forest of pines mating with new winter snow [36]

Life is a form of the energy of being
All forms of the earth have being
Our power in being is in spirit energy essence
We manifest our power through our human [37]

Join the time of tomorrow and the past
Be like us serve the creation we will endure
Listen as the trees sing their songs
Listen listen [38]

This belonging and connection allow us to mount a life-rooted [39] resistance against the death-cult empire.

Our attitudes are climbing
We don’t have time for more mind-wasting lies
Whatever it is you’re doing we’re not going to buy it
It’s time to say something not a time to be quiet [40]

I was listening
To the voices of life
Chanting in unison
Carry on the struggle
The generations
Surge together
In resistance
To meet
The reality of power

Mother Earth
Embraces her children
In natural beauty
To last beyond
Oppressors brutality
As the butterfly floats into life
We are the spirit of natural life
Which is forever

The power of understanding
Real connections to spirit
Is meaning our resistance
Our struggle
Is not sacrifice lost
It is
Natural energy properly used [41]

The generations
Remembering the past
To rebuild the future
For weeping is
Another way of laughing
And resisting and
Outlasting the enemy [42]

Continue to struggle. Resist…
The people, the rain, the earth, the wind, struggle together for a common liberty [43]

This profile has been added to the A-Z of thinkers library on our sister organic radicals website.

[1] John Trudell, ‘Grandmother Moon’, Tribal Voice (1983), in Lines from a Mined Mind: The Words of John Trudell (Lakewood, Colorado: Fulcrum, 2008), p. 11. All subsequent page references are to this work. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NmEot5IIUg
[2] John Trudell, ‘Hanging from the Cross’, Bone Days (2001), p. 218.
[3] Trudell (2005), directed by Heather Rae, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlcmTeCcbME
[4] John Trudell, ‘Cry Your Tears’, The Moremes (2007), p. 255.
[5] Paul Cudenec, ‘An A-Z of the modern mega-racket’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/09/07/an-a-z-of-the-modern-mega-racket/
[6] Trudell.
[7] John Trudell, ‘Young Ones Listen’, Tribal Voice, p. 35.
[8] https://www.johntrudell.com/biography
[9] Trudell.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] https://www.johntrudell.com/biography
[13] Ibid.
[14] Trudell.
[15] John Trudell, ‘All Nite Café’, Blue Indians (1999), p. 185.
[16] John Trudell, ‘Industrial slave’, Tribal Voice, pp. 26-27.
[17] ‘John Trudell on Becoming Human’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=180vRsMmqNI
[18] John Trudell, ‘Carry the Stone’, Bone Days, p. 207.
[19] Trudell.
[20] ‘Thing Is’, AKA Graffiti Man (1986), p. 55.
[21] John Trudell, ‘Blue Indians’, Blue Indians, p. 183.
[22] Trudell.
[23] ‘Machines for ancestors’, AKA Graffiti Man, p. 53.
[24] Trudell.
[25] Ibid.
[26] John Trudell, ‘Without Earth’, Tribal Voice, p. 27.
[27] John Trudell, ‘Never Too Loudly’, Tribal Voice, p. 43.
[28] John Trudell, ‘Arms Race’, Tribal Voice, p. 15.
[29] John Trudell, ‘Hanging from the Cross, Bone Days, pp. 218-19.
[30] John Trudell, ‘ Cry Your Tears’, The Moremes, p. 256.
[31] Trudell.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Paul Cudenec, The Withway: Calling us home (2022), https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/the-withway-paul-cudenec.pdf
[34] John Trudell, ‘Children of Earth’, Children of Earth (1992), p. 142.
[35] John Trudell, ‘Crazy Horse’, Bone Days (2001), p. 202.
[36] John Trudell, ‘See the Woman’, Children of Earth, p. 145.
[37] John Trudell, ‘Introduction: From Somewhere inside my Head*, p. 1.
[38] John Trudell, ‘Song of the Trees’, But This Isn’t El Salvador (1987), p. 117.
[39] Paul Cudenec, ‘Life-rooted thinking’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/06/26/life-rooted-thinking/
[40] John Trudell, ‘Rant ‘n’ Roll’, Johnny Damas and Me (1994), p. 158.
[41] John Trudell, ‘Listening’, Tribal Voice, p. 9.
[42] John Trudell, ‘Endure’, Tribal Voice, p. 21.
[43] Trudell.