N -
Your point is well taken...
It is out of the culture that murdered and displaced our native
population that our gun culture emerged and now thrives. It is still
glorified by many, some trying to live it past it's time and some
watching from the sidelines. You don't have to read McCarthy's Blood
Meridian or McMurtry's Comanche Moon to have a hint of how brutal and
thoughtless the dispossessed or displaced Confederate (and in some cases
Union) soldiers were in the last half of the 19th, coming west and
trying to recover from that mess. If we think PTSD was invented in our
middle east or even Vietnam wars, imagine the horrors of the Civil War,
especially where cousins or even brothers found themselves on opposite
sides, crossing bayonets.
I have lived among, and counted as friends, many of the *survivors* of
the native genocide, throughout of my life. It has always been an
incredibly delicate topic, the genocide, the displacement, the many
broken treaties and promises. None of my friends ever wanted to talk
much about it, even though they knew I was as sympathetic as anyone not
the victim could be. An overt apology to them felt quite empty and
hollow, and specious in too many ways. Being a friend was the most
(least?) I could do.
I had a Navajo friend in college who was married to a Hopi woman during
the worst of the Navajo-Hopi resentments. They couldn't go home, at
least not with their spouses, so they became somewhat unusually
available for friendships with us, their white-eyed neighbors. Our
daughters played in the dirt together outside our adjoining apartments.
We shared meals. He was simultaneously studying the hydrology (MS
Geology, NAU) of the Kayenta basin and working as an activist to get the
outrageous coal mining practices there at least looked at if not
stopped. I was helping find the dirt on their tribal chairman Peter
McDonald that eventually brought him down.
One of my good friends in middle school was one of two adopted brothers,
also Navajo, living with their adoptive do-gooder white christian
parents. The parents tried, they cared, but they were oh so clueless.
They were "good boys" until the testosterone kicked in, and then they
became warriors without a cause. I remained friends as best I could as
they spun out in place, exploring alcohol and it's it's dangers to their
metabolisms and resorting to fairly random violence with others to try
to wrestle their own daemons. I lost track after high school.
My first crush was a Zuni girl in my first grade class who was as tall
as I. To get the yayas out of us, the teacher made us run around the
building twice each morning. To avoid the crowd of other running kids,
I tried running the opposite way. I met her at the far corner, she
leading the pack and me going full tilt on my own. We collided
cheekbone to cheekbone (this is when I realized we were the same
height)... and I got teased mercilessly by my father that I had gotten
my black eye from a girl on the playground. LIttle did he know that I
cherished that bruise and missed her as much as a 7 year old can when
her family moved away that year.
A good friend of mine today is Lakota Sioux and is becoming a successful
(or at least surviving) artist in his own right after 40 years of
careening through wives, children, grandchildren, alcohol, drugs,
homelessness. He won't hear white man's apologies, there is just too
much water under that bridge to pretend to put it back at the headwaters.
And what we couldn't do with smallpox and cholera, with swords, bowie
knives and repeating rifles, we did with boarding schools, then alcohol,
with white sugar, with white flour unto diabetes and organ/system failure.
I feel mildly lucky to have lived places where the genocide and/or
displacement was not as devastatingly complete as it was in the
heartland, the South and much of the East and West coasts. I live
within the boundaries of a Tewa-speaking Pueblo and visited their
Christmas sale on Saturday and was surprised, shocked, offended and
relieved all at once to see no other white faces. The vendors were not
just San Ildefonso, but from all over pueblo country from Laguna to
Taos. I was welcome, even though most of the folks there do not know
me personally... I feel lucky to have known and called friend
individuals from many indigenous groups from the Dacotahs to northern
Mexico. Few, if any, are not *still* touched by the legacy of the
abuses by my own ancestors, the invaders, the murderers, the
displacers. And again or still, I don't know how to apologize to them.
I am just now reading an oral history of the father of a childhood
friend. Now 98, he was the son of early homesteaders from England who
were coming in on the trailing edge of the US's suppression,
enslavement, and destruction of the Apaches in the area of Western NM
(near where the fires were last year). It is clear that they hardly
knew anything at that time (his youth, during the first half of the 19th
century) of what had come just before... there was a myopia that came
with limited education and transportation and something like
desperation. I honestly don't think he knew what had happened except
for the last of the fierce geurilla battles waged by the few survivors
(Victorio, Geronimo, Ju, etc.) raiding and hiding in those mountains.
He spent his entire life in the back country raising sheep, cattle, etc.
His was a hard but innocent life. Perhaps not unlike those who were
displaced from the lands his family occupied. His son (my friend) came
to school in 3rd grade with his brother in 6th, neither having ever had
formal schooling. Their mother had decided to give them a life that
was more promising than theirs had been. They still spent summers on
the ranch and on the fire watchtower where their mother spent her
summers. My friend went on to become the county drug interceptor
(stealing drug drops from airplanes out of Mexico and selling them in
Arizona) while his cousin (another good friend) became the county sheriff.
I at least try not to celebrate or romanticize the "consquistadors" or
the "indian fighters" that were the sharp-edge of that horror. But the
remaining abusers, the blunter edge, I think they were quite a bit more
innocent. And I think *we* are them still. The best I can tell, better
than an apology would be a change of heart. For us to learn from those
mistakes and pull back our colonial/empire which now lives almost
entirely in the corporate extractive exploitation of the third world.
My Lakota friend has an art project called "Not Afraid to Look" that
begins to address this.
Apologies are important for the apologizers... but don't be surprised if
they can't be heard until we change our ways... ( said the man filling
his tank with gasoline from the middle east, typing on a computer
manufactured in China, eating grapes from South America, watching movies
laced with violence and exploitation...)
- S
Thanks, Russ. At least somebody had the grace to apologize. I don't think
the word apologize is in our national lexicon. Can you IMAGINE what would
happen if Obama were to apologize on behalf of the nation for our infection,
slaughter, displacement, and confinement of indigenous Americans.
[shudder] N
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Russell Standish
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2012 11:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How to avoid shootings
On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 10:56:44PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
And you forgot our genocide? For some reason I imagine that the
Australian genocide was less vicious. I hope the Australians on the
list will weigh in on that. N
Sadly, our treatment of the Aborigines was pretty appalling, right up to
1968, when they were finally given the vote and recognised as citizens of
our country. And that included mass genocide, in places like Tasmania, and
kidnapping of children by the state.
It looks like our generation has finally made some effort to apologise, and
fix up the mess created by previous generations, but there is still a long
way to go before there is true equality between aboriginal and
non-aboriginal people.
Cheers
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