Aurora borealis, the icy sky at night
Paddles cut the water in a long and hurried flight
From the white man to the fields of green
And the homeland that we've never seen
They killed us in our tepee and they cut our women down
They might have left some babies crying on the ground
But the fire sticks and the wagons come
And the night falls on the setting sun
I wish I was a trapper; I would give a thousand pelts
To sleep with Pocahontas and find out how she felt
In the morning on the fields of green
In the homeland that we've never seen
~ Neil Young
My dear friend Matthew is due to arrive here soon, visiting me from up north, so I've been thinking about our friendship. Matthew was a student of mine back in the late 70s, and we shared a love of Neil Young. We bonded over our separate experiences of seeing Neil Young and Crazy Horse in NYC for the Rust Never Sleeps tour in 1979, and I've lost count of how many times we've seen him in concert since, either together or separately. Our most recent concert was last September at some obscure venue in Pennsylvania. But we were in the fifth row, so no complaints.
Anyway, I was taking a look at the Rust Never Sleeps song list and clicked on "Pocahontas," due in part to the recent use of that name to denigrate one of our finest politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren was forced to deal with the infantile name-calling of a man campaigning for the Republican Presidential nomination last summer and who, still in campaign mode, has taken up the "insult" once again. All because Warren claimed Native American heritage based on family folklore, something that she was unable to "prove." We all have our family stories; how many of us can prove them? For instance, there was a marble paperweight shaped like a book on my mother's desk when I was a kid. The story was that it had been President Woodrow Wilson's. Can I prove that? No way. But it's my story and I'm sticking to it.
But again, I digress. Neil Young has been singing protest songs for sixty years. His most recent effort is Peace Trail, the December 2016 release that includes "Indian Givers," a song that highlights the conflict at Standing Rock, a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which treads on Native American sacred land. (And guess who overturned the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' stop-work order on construction as soon as he took office?) One of Young's most known protest songs was "Cortez the Killer," about the Spanish conqueror of the peaceful Aztec Empire in 1511. The Aztecs viewed him as a god, but he killed many of them nonetheless. Oh, history!
In "Pocahontas," Young imagines an encounter with the Native American princess who reportedly saved Captain John Smith's life in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. She was later captured by the English in 1613, held for ransom, and then converted to Christianity and married an English settler, John Rolfe. When the Rolfes later traveled to London, Rebecca (as she was then known) was presented as a "civilized savage." Neil Young's song is about the massacre of a Native American tribe by European settlers, and as Rolling Stone commented, the song is "simply amazing, and nobody but Neil Young could have written it."
And Neil's still writing. About the things that matter. Neil Young, despite being a Canadian citizen, is an American treasure. And as we all know, it's better to burn out than to fade away. Keep burning, Neil.
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