In the opening pages of To You We Shall Return, Lakota storyteller Joseph Marshall describes a giant with an insatiable hunger. He consumed the earth and all its living creatures. A single fist clutched a giant buffalo; a single gulp swallowed a whole person. His early destruction was physical and sprawling—rampaging across the land and driving fleeing people onto ever-shrinking island refuges on the prairie. The helpless people watched as the giant stripped the earth of all trees. Then, a torrential rain soaked the valleys. The soil, no longer held by tree roots, collapsed into violent mudslides, trapping the giant. In devouring the earth, he devoured himself, bringing an end to his plunder.
The late Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn once told me a version of this story. In her telling, Unktehi, a serpent-like monster, ate so many people and buffalo that his belly dragged on the ground, eventually wearing him to a halt. Look at the barren black gumbo hills, Cook-Lynn instructed—they were the evidence of this time of terrible danger. Their dark domes cradle the river valley bottomlands of Mnisose, physical reminders of ohunkakan stories reaching deep into the mythic past to expose timeless and universal human problems.
These stories are not mere superstition. Western culture often turns to its own mythic origins, drawing upon Ancient Greek mythology. The gods, characters, and lessons of those tales populate European languages, corporate brands, and popular culture, thus retaining a certain significance and totemic power for a culture that claims secularism as its god. The ohunkakan stories carry a distinct prescience, because they originate from this land and provide original instructions for living upon it.
Two false extremes cloud our understanding of deep Indigenous history. On one end lies Hobbesian contempt—the belief that life in the state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this view, Western civilization elevated select human cultures above nature, bringing them closer to the image of a divine creator. Any culture that saw itself as part of, equal to, or subservient to the natural world was dismissed as inferior—godless, primitive savages fit only to be harnessed like draft animals, forcibly converted, or annihilated for standing in the way of progress. This species-centric view placed nature outside human enlightenment, leaving everything beyond humankind with only two fates: subjugation or extermination.
On the other end lies romantic idealism. Here, Indigenous people are flattened into Avatar-like Na’vi characters, inhabiting a fantasy conjured by colonizing minds rather than Indigenous reality. Though intended as praise, the notion that Indigenous peoples lived as one-with-nature stewards is equally dehumanizing. They did not, and do not, exist outside of history; they remain bound by the same biological and natural laws that govern all life.
The ohunkakan stories embody that humility and acknowledge the inherent flaws of humankind. They recall a terrible era of monsters and chaos—a world thrown violently out of balance. Only when the destroyers brought about their own ruin does the lesson emerge: insatiable desire and overconsumption will kill the devourer, regardless of its strength. Natural law and death remain the ultimate equalizers.
The giant and the serpent find their modern avatars in systems like capitalism. The monsters of the past were physical in their rampage, but their hunger never died. Today, that same insatiable greed drives the ruthless pursuit of profit and power over others. The biosphere makes the ultimate sacrifice as soil, air, and water are polluted. Rendering the earth uninhabitable may prove to be the final grave digger of capitalism—exposing the limits of a system that treats consumption as boundless, even as its modern prophets project their hostility toward nature and elevate their belligerence to the level of the cosmos through dreams of space colonization and post-human artificial intelligence.
In the past, humans were too weak to defeat these supernatural monsters, leaving nature to enforce its own limits upon them. But capitalism is a social system, created and kept in motion by human beings, even as it devours us whole. Yet like the monsters of old, today’s monsters—despite their awesomeness and perceived invincibleness—have vulnerabilities and remain bound by the same natural laws that govern us all. Reclaiming our world is a matter of collective resolve—the shared will to destroy the monsters in our minds and free our spirits from their grip. And to reclaim the earth, our only home.
This first appeared on Nick’s Substack.
