Whence the name, "Bionic Buffalo"?

The "Bionic" part is simple. A bionic being is an organic lifeform, portions of which have been enhanced or replaced by electronic or mechanical devices. The word commonly is used with reference to implants, prosthetics, or other manufactured things directly connected to the body. Instead of a clear boundary, we see a continuum between the organism and the mechanical world. We are becoming bionic, ourselves, as computers and machinery enter more and more into our lives. (It is not so clear, however, that the intrusion might always be an "enhancement".)

Thus, we are Bionic because we strive to enhance humanity using the enhancement afforded by computer-related technology.

But why "Buffalo"?

Long ago, an great animal roamed Turtle Island from the great waters of the rising sun to the great waters of the setting sun. The Lakhota people called it tatanka. The Chahta called it yąnąsh. To the Bodéwadmimwen, it was known as pkocshuke'. (Note 2)

Tatanka is a large animal, taller than a human, and much heavier than ten or more together. The people worked together to hunt it, but it provided many things: meat, clothing, medicine, tools, glue, sinews for threads and bows, shelter from the hides, and many other useful and necessary items. No part was wasted: even the dung was burned for fuel. Surplus could be bartered in trade for other goods.

For centuries, the people followed herds of tatanka, which provided much of what was needed for living. Tatanka taught the people many lessons, not only how to eat and make clothing, but also how to live side by side with beings that were not exactly the same as the people themselves.

Then the white conquerors came, the Europeans who stole and plundered and killed their way across Turtle Island, which they called "America".

Their name for tatanka was "buffalo", and those, too, were destroyed. The white people reduced the buffalo from almost 100 million to perhaps less than a thousand, destroying 99.999 percent. Worse, unlike the Lakhota and Chahta and Bodéwadmimwen and other native peoples, the white people discarded and wasted most of the kill. Millions of buffalo were killed only for their hides, leaving the meat and other parts to rot in the grass. Millions were killed only for sport, but even the lessons taught by the buffalo were never gathered, and abandoned in the fields. (Note 3)

This is the way of the white people (Note 6): discard what is not valued the most and hoard what is, leaving the rest to rot. The white people discard their children, born and unborn, leaving the surviving ones to be raised by machines because white people have discarded most of their own humanity and do not know the difference. The old people are discarded, left to live miserable lives in old age homes they pretend are welcome places to assuage what has not been discarded of their consciences. The sick and infirm are warehoused in "hospitals", safely out of sight to most of the white people. Those who do not go along with the rules are left to rot in prisons and jails. They are all discarded, thrown away. (Note 4) Even in their religion, they ignore the parts of their "holy books" which are unwanted, and focus on the ones they find convenient. What is not wanted is discarded.

Even the slaughterhouses that kill the millions of animals every day used to feed the white people, while they may sell all of the parts of the animal for feed, fertilizer, or other profitable products, continue to discard chemical and biological waste, that kills the animals and people who live downstream. But that is acceptable in the owners' minds, because those animals and people are discarded anyway. When the toxic waste dumps are no longer needed, they are discarded. When the slaughterhouse workers are no longer needed, they also are discarded.

Businesses operate in the same fashion. Once an employee is no longer needed, he is discarded. Even when he or she still is working, the employee is expected to discard most of his life at work, where family (especially children) and individuality and dreams and aspirations have no place and are unwelcome, unless they produce the one thing which is not discarded: money. Profit is hoarded, but all else is discarded when its usefulness is outlived. The only stories and imagination and dreams which have value, are the ones that contribute to the bottom line.

If discarded wage-slave (Note 5) workers could be sold the same as chattel slaves, they would be, but for the former employer in any case they are no longer profitable to keep around and maintain. In the throw-away culture, discarded people are only so much rubbish. It is convenient not to consign them directly to the rubbish bin, because the illusion that they still have value is part of the façade, the political theatre, that keeps them from realizing their positions as the collective chattel of the owning classes.

So this is the reason for the "Buffalo" in Bionic Buffalo: to remind us that there is another way to run a business, different from the usual way taught in business schools and other wage-slave factories. We try to remember that there is more to employees and customers and vendors than the mere opportunity to make a profit. We believe that there is more to people than the opportunity to make money. People have families and dreams and feelings and problems and whole lives. We will not hire salesmen or customer service representatives or human resources managers to be cheery and happy and care about our customers and employees and vendors, and lead everyone to believe we are a concerned, empathetic enterprise. We will do the caring and feeling ourselves, for we are whole people, too.

This is our lesson from the buffalo, and why we took the buffalo's name. (Note 1)

Notes:

1. One of Bionic Buffalo's founders learned about the then-new science of "bionics" from a 1960s article in Popular Electronics magazine, and about the Indian's use of the entire buffalo from a sixth-grade school history class. He never forgot either of these things.

2. The Lakhota are a branch of what Europeans most commonly call the Sioux people. The name of the Chahta people is spelled and pronounced "Choctaw" by whites. The whites call the Bodéwadmimwen, the Potawatomi. (Most truthfully, whites usually just call them all "Indians", and can't tell them apart.)

   Turtle Island is what many Indians called the North American continent, before the European invasion.

3. There were many reasons the conquerors killed the buffalo. One of main ones was to starve the Indians by destroying their food supply, to weaken and kill them, to more easily take the land.

   The policies of genocide were enormously successful from the conquerors' point of view: millions of Indians were wiped from the face of the earth, and the white people were able to take almost all of Turtle Island's land, water, and other resources.

   Today the white American people use a yellow ribbon as a sign of support for the "troops" in the Mideast and elsewhere. The symbol originated in the yellow kerchiefs worn by the U.S. Army troops assigned to carry out the slaughter and subjugation of Indians in earlier times.

   Thus the genocide of Iraqis by the United States in the present day is descended from the genocide of the Indians over the centuries. Many of the same techniques are used: in the 1990s, between the first and second Gulf Wars, the embargo on Iraq resulted in the death of large numbers of Iraqis, largely by starvation and lack of medical supplies, "softening" up that country for the second U.S. invasion. Starve the Indians to take their land, starve the Iraqis to take their oil: it's the same basic idea.

   The attitude among American "leaders" also has not changed. On the "60 Minutes" television show May 12, 1996, interviewer Lesley Stahl asked U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright about the death of half a million Iraqi children caused by the embargo. Ms Albright responded, "we think the price is worth it."

   The United States is not alone in the use of such tactics. For example, Israel uses the same tools to drive the Palestinians out of their land, so that it can be taken over by Israelis. As Moshe Dayan, former Israeli "Defense" Minister said, "you [Palestinians] shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."

4. In Dante's Inferno, "hoarders" and "wasters" are two sides of the same coin. In the fourth circle of Hell, those who hoard are punished by being required to push heavy weights toward those who waste; those who waste must push the weights back. This goes on for eternity. Hoarding and wasting are two hallmarks of white American society.

5. When a capitalist minority owns or controls most of the essential non-human factors of production, as in most present-day industrial economies, then the proletariat majority is forced to work for the minority, a condition known as wage-slavery.

   Wage slavery is distinguished from chattel slavery, in that the latter assigns ownership of each slave to a specific master, instead of the workers being owned as a group by the capitalist class. (The word "chattel", derived from the Latin "capitale", meaning "property", is a legal term referring to a slave or to moveable property. Chattel is distinguished from "real property", which is property tied to the land.)

   The brilliance of wage slavery as a capitalist tool is that the slaves have the illusion that they have more freedom than they in fact do, and individual owners are no longer responsible for the care of the slaves they own. (For example, a wage-slave employer does not have to pay for sick or injured slaves, nor is he expected to care for them after they are discarded by retirement, layoff, or firing.) However, since the essential resources are owned by the capitalist class, the wage slaves are slaves nonetheless, because they must work for the capitalist class to live.

   Wage slavery is like a co-op for capitalist masters. At least in this respect, capitalists have embraced a form of socialism when it comes to certain expendable assets.

6. The controlling white culture has been adopted, willfully or otherwise, by a great number of subject cultures and races. What is true of whites now often is true of browns, blacks, reds, and yellows.

   Moreover, the white conquerors are not the only people with an inherent rejection of the whole. However, the great majority of waste and hoarding that has taken place on the planet for centuries has been at the behest of, and under the control of, the dominant white peoples.