Thanks, Steve. There's a friend, NOT on the list, I would like to forward this to. May I? N
-----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Monday, December 17, 2012 11:30 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How to avoid shootings 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 > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
