The Native-American Peace Pipe (or Pipe of Peace). Two Terms Often Used as Symbol, Idiom, and Metaphor: Difference between revisions

“…in Kubrick’s telling it is not the ghosts of ‘Indians’ who haunt the Overlook but those of the European perpetrators.) All that is left of Native Americans are the artifacts littered throughout the hotel in the form of the decorations in the Colorado (Spanish for ‘red’) Lounge, the ‘Indian chief’ logo on the cans of Calumet (meaning ‘peace pipe’) baking powder conspicuously displayed in the kitchen storeroom…” (Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door. Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust, 2004).

Seeking shelter from mounting liability suits, the headline in The Wall Street Journal on April 16, 1997, was: “Peace Pipe: Philip Morris, RJR Talk Settlement With Plaintiffs.” In the same year, France and the Netherlands held a mini-summit on drug policy, and the politico.eu headline read: “Peace pipe on offer in drugs policy conflict.” Another 1997 headline appeared in the Los Angeles Times on December 3: “The Peace Pipe Eludes Modern ‘Pilgrims’ and Indians,” about a confrontation with police and the arrests of more than two dozen members of the United American Indians of New England’s day of mourning march. James M. Wall, “No Peace Pipe: The Stated Goal of Bush Appointee Daniel Pipes—an Israeli Victory and a Palestinian Defeat” (Christian Century, September 20, 2003).  

“In fact, marijuana was one of the few common-ground experiences left in Vietnam, with dope sometimes being shared and passed between white and black soldiers like a peace pipe” (Martin Torgoff, Can’t Find My Way Home. America in the Great Stoned Age, 2004). In 2005, the UN Refugee Agency announced: “Rival ethnic groups smoke peace pipe in Liberia’s Lofa County.” The reconciliation was not the ritualistic sharing of a smoke by the Lorma and Mandingo tribes, but the slaughter of a cow.

 

“The smoke in the peace pipe means many things. It may be the smoke given off by the fires of passion or the intoxicating scent of love itself. Most importantly it is the breath of words, spoken from the heart, seeking true understanding and union” (Teresa Moorey, The Fairy Bible, 2008). The Deseret News, August 2, 2009: “Obama’s modern peace pipe” was about his invitation to Henry Louis Gates and Police Sergeant James Crowley to share a beer at the White House. “Netflix Smokes a $50 Million Peace Pipe With the Satanic Temple” (nasdaq.com) was about the Satanic Temple’s lawsuit against the Netflix show, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Best-selling author, Ta-Nehisi Coates used this metaphor: “I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move to an actual fight” (The Beautiful Struggle, 2009). “It is David’s Heavenly Pastoral; a surpassing ode, which none of the daughters of music can excel. The clarion of war here gives place to the pipe of peace, and he who so lately bewailed the woes of the Shepherd tunefully rehearses the joys of the flock” (Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Treasury of David,” romans45.org).).