Category: American Indians

Entering the World of Willa Cather’s Archbishop

A writer for The New York Times visits Isleta, Laguna and Ácoma pueblos — Entering the World of Willa Cather’s Archbishop.

Today, these three pueblos are connected by freeways. Isleta and Ácoma have their own casinos. But each community still preserves its ancient identity. Eighty years after Cather’s novel was published and more than 150 since the events she recounted, it is possible to use her narration as a visitor’s guide. One warm March day, paperback in hand, I found my way to all three pueblos, grateful for Cather’s sensitivity to the great beauty and mystery of the Southwest and for her ability to bring to life the characters who had encountered one another in the same landscape so long ago.

I wonder why the writer failed to note that Laguna has two casinos.

Link via dangerousmeta!.

Most politically incorrect headline of the day, so far

The Day Santa Fe Emptied Out

That Albuquerque Journal online headline refers to August 21, 1680, when the Spanish were forced to abandon Santa Fe.

Emptied out? Well, only if you ignore the several thousand Pueblo Indians that remained in the area and the leader of the revolt, Popé, who personally occupied the Palace of the Governors.

The Santa Fe Indian Martket

… is this weekend.

Each year the Santa Fe Indian Market includes 1,200 artists from about 100 tribes who show their work in over 600 booths. The event attracts an estimated 100,000 visitors to Santa Fe from all over the world. Buyers, collectors and gallery owners come to Indian Market to take advantage of the opportunity to buy directly from the artists. For many visitors, this is a rare opportunity to meet the artists and learn about contemporary Indian arts and cultures. Quality is the hallmark of the Santa Fe Indian Market.

Southwestern Association for Indian Arts

As for NewMexiKen, it’s Taos this weekend. High temp 88º, low 55º. Or maybe Red River, high 83º, low 49º. Fall!

Feast at Jemez Pueblo

Today the Pueblo of Jemez (Walatowa) is celebrating “Nuestra Senora de Los Angelas Feast Day de Los Persingula” with a feast and corn dances. The Pueblo, which is normally closed, is open to the public.

Jemez is pronounced “Hay-mess” or traditionally as “He-mish”.

The events today originated with the pueblo at Pecos, which was abandoned in 1836 when its remaining residents moved to Jemez.

Jemez Pueblo publishes this guide about feast day etiquette:

* Enter a Pueblo home as you would any other – by invitation only. It is courteous to accept an invitation to eat, but do not linger at the table, as your host will probably want to serve many guests throughout the day, thank your host, but a payment or tip is not appropriate.

* Pueblo dances are religious ceremonies, not performances. Please observe them as you would a church service, with respect and quiet attention. Please do not interrupt non-dance participants by asking questions or visiting with friends.

* During a dance is not the time to conduct business or loudly socialize. Many Pueblo members only have a chance to see certain dances once a year and may have traveled many miles to participate.

* Please refrain from talking to the dancers. Do not approach dancers as they are entering, leaving or resting near the kiva.

* Applause after dances is not appropriate.

History of the Pueblo of Jemez

Geronimo

Several sources give June 16, 1829, as Geronimo’s date of birth. It’s not clear to NewMexiKen that the Apaches were using the Gregorian calendar at that time. And, indeed, one of those sources, The New York Times, stated in its obituary of Geronimo in February 1909 that he was nearly 90 — not 79 as this birth date would indicate. But, he had to be born some time. So why not June 16?

In her excellent 1976 biography of Geronimo, Angie Debo concludes:

Geronimo was born in the early 1820’s near the upper Gila in the mountains crossed by the present state boundary [Arizona-New Mexico], probably on the Arizona side near the present Clifton. …

He was given the name Goyahkla, with the generally accepted meaning “One Who Yawns,’ why or under what circumstances is not known.

As an adult in battle he was called Geronimo by Mexican soldiers, perhaps because they could not pronounce Goyahkla, or perhaps to invoke Saint Jerome (Geronimo is Spanish for Jerome). The name was adopted for him by his own people.

Continue reading Geronimo

Perspective

NewMexiKen means absolutely no disrespect to the victims at Virginia Tech and their families — I think I have made quite clear my strong sense of loss over this tragedy at a place I know.

But if journalists, essayists and bloggers are going to continue to call this the worst shooting in American history, then I am going to have to suggest that they read a little about Wounded Knee, 1890, when as many as 350 Lakota men, women and children were killed.

American Horse: There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in these three directions, and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.

Lakota accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee (1891)

Send me a postcard

Shortly after noon on Wednesday, the last few feet of a steel and glass skywalk was rolled out over the southwest rim of the Grand Canyon, a 2-million-pound engineering marvel that the Hualapai Indians hope will boost tourism to their remote ancestral land and provide the impoverished tribe with a desperately needed economic boost.

With sage burning and tribal members playing gourds, spiritual leader Emmett Bender blessed the cantilevered horseshoe-shaped skywalk, which will jut out 70 feet from the canyon rim and dangle 4,000 feet above the canyon floor. He called the structure “the white man’s idea.”
. . .

Three years in the making and topping $30 million in cost, the 30,000-square-foot skywalk, which will open March 28, will allow 120 visitors at a time to walk out over the canyon rim to look at the gorge through glass walls and through a glass floor at the bottom of the canyon, nearly four-fifths of a mile below.

The Washington Post

NewMexiKen gets nervous looking over the railing from Jill’s landing into her family room.

An Unjust Expulsion

The Cherokee Nation’s decision to revoke the tribal citizenship of about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by the tribe is a moral low point in modern Cherokee history and places the tribe in violation of a 140-year-old federal treaty and several court decisions. The federal government must now step in to protect the rights of the freedmen, who could lose their tribal identities as well as access to medical, housing and other tribal benefits.
. . .

Advocates for the expulsion say it is about self-determination. But the tribal history makes clear that it is about discrimination — and that it is illegal. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has been curiously silent, should bring the Cherokee government into compliance with the law and require it to restore the tribal rights of the expelled members.

The New York Times

Indian Trackers vs. Smugglers

Somewhat interesting article from The New York Times. It begins:

TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — A fresh footprint in the dirt, fibers in the mesquite. Harold Thompson reads the signs like a map.

They point to drug smugglers, 10 or 11, crossing from Mexico. The deep impressions and spacing are a giveaway to the heavy loads on their backs. With no insect tracks or paw prints of nocturnal creatures marking the steps, Mr. Thompson determines the smugglers probably crossed a few hours ago.

“These guys are not far ahead; we’ll get them,” said Mr. Thompson, 50, a strapping Navajo who follows the trail like a bloodhound.

At a time when all manner of high technology is arriving to help beef up security at the Mexican border — infrared cameras, sensors, unmanned drones — there is a growing appreciation among the federal authorities for the American Indian art of tracking, honed over generations by ancestors hunting animals.

And you think gasoline is expensive

In the Navajo community of Pueblo Pintado, some 30 families scattered around the community have to haul their drinking and washing water long distances.

The water comes out of pipes 30 miles away in Lybrook or 43 miles away in Crownpoint, said Rena Murphy, coordinator at the Pueblo Pintado senior center.

Sometimes, when the drive is too much or no vehicle is available, Murphy lets residents fill up small containers at the center. “My elderlies,” she said, “when they run out of water, will bring 5 gallons and 10 gallons to the senior center.”

The Pueblo Pintado water haulers are among an estimated 63,500 people on the Navajo Nation who lack running water. Some drive as far as 100 miles in their trucks to fill water tanks, Navajo Nation statistics show.

As gasoline prices rise, hauling water is increasingly expensive. Taking into account the gas and time required to haul water, Navajo Nation water planners estimate that in 2003 it cost tribal members at least

$16,000 per acre-foot, or almost $5 per gallon.

The New Mexican

‘Who Is Cherokee?’

The Cherokees, so proud that they survived the racism and greed that forced them to leave the East and settle in Oklahoma, are embroiled in a debate that is dredging up some of the most painful chapters of their history. The fundamental question they are asking is: Who is Cherokee? And it is raising ugly accusations of racism, from both inside and outside the tribe.

At issue is a group barely known outside of Indian country, the Freedmen. These are the descendants of black slaves owned by Cherokees, free blacks who were married to Cherokees and the children of mixed-race families known as black Cherokees, all of whom joined the Cherokee migration to Oklahoma in 1838.

The Freedmen became full citizens of the Cherokee Nation after emancipation, as part of the Treaty of 1866 with the United States. But in 1983, by tribal decree, the Freedmen were denied the right to vote in tribal elections on the ground they were not “Cherokee by blood.”

They sued, and in December won their challenge. But that has prompted a bigger fight. On Saturday, the Cherokee Nation is holding a special election — believed to be the first of its kind — to decide, in essence, whether to kick the Freedmen out of the tribe.
. . .

“There are Freedmen who can prove they have a full-blooded Cherokee grandfather who won’t be members,” said Ms. Vann, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. “And there are blond people who are 1/1000th Cherokee who are members.”

The New York Times

I say vote to kick ’em out of the Tribe and then make them wear a yellow Star of David.

Wounded Knee

The following is from The Library of Congress, posted on the Today in History page for this date in 2004, but not posted this year:

On December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, some 500 soldiers of the United States Seventh Cavalry opened fire on approximately 350 Lakota (Sioux) Indians of Chief Big Foot’s Miniconjou band. At the end of the confrontation, between 150 and 300 Sioux men, women, and children, including Chief Big Foot, were dead. This event marked the end of Lakota resistance until the 1970s. Apart from the few minor skirmishes that followed, the Wounded Knee massacre ended the Indian Wars.

In many ways, the massacre resulted from the Ghost Dance movement. The movement was led by a Paiute named Wovoka who claimed to have had a vision that the “Old Earth” would be destroyed and a new one created in which Native Americans could live as they had before the coming of the European. He preached that the only way to survive the impending apocalypse would be to faithfully perform the Ghost Dance and the ceremonies associated with it.

Continue reading Wounded Knee

Tatanka-Iyotanka

… was killed on this date in 1890. Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man. He was born around 1831 on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota. He became a warrior in a battle with the Crow at age 14, subsequently becoming renowned for his courage in fights with the U.S. Army.

In 1874, an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer confirmed the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, an area that had been declared off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. When efforts by the government to purchase the Black Hills failed, the Fort Laramie Treaty was abrogated. All Lakota not settled on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull led his people in holding their ground.

Continue reading Tatanka-Iyotanka

Dance out of time

As the dancers move in the chill winter air, spectators remain hushed. They don’t clap.

That’s because this dance is not a performance; it’s a prayer. And visitors seem to know that instinctively.

All winter, visitors and friends of New Mexico’s Pueblo people have the opportunity to share the prayer by attending any one of a number of dances at the various Pueblos.

Whether celebrating at Christmas, marking a saint’s day or gathering to honor a tribe’s new government, Pueblo members have many “doings” throughout the winter.

To watch the Deer dancers come over the rise at Taos Pueblo, or to hear the drums at Ohkay Owingeh, or to see a plaza fill with dancers at Santa Clara is a holiday gift to yourself. Those memories of movement and music and feelings of stillness and peace will return to you throughout your life as bits of grace in a busy world.

The New Mexican

The article continues, including a calendar of events.

Blighted Homeland

From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were dug and blasted from Navajo soil, nearly all of it for America’s atomic arsenal. Navajos inhaled radioactive dust, drank contaminated water and built homes using rock from the mines and mills. Many of the dangers persist to this day. This four-part series examines the legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation.

Los Angeles Times

There’s a terrific slideshow accompanying each of the articles.

Best line of the day, so far

He’s good-looking, though, like he just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public-service advertisement. He’s got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little moons orbiting them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put Junior and me next to each other, he’s the Before Columbus Arrived Indian and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian.

Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” The New Yorker, 2003, an absolutely first-rate short story.

The Made Up Americans

This is Mack’s first Thanksgiving in school, so of course he’s hearing the public school version of the First Thanksgiving story. Schools Some teachers don’t use the correct name for the indigenous people near Plymouth — Wampanoags — or even the preferred generic term — American Indians. No, they use the presumed politically correct name — Native Americans.

That’s what the teacher says, but what do the children hear?

Mack’s mother Jill reports:

“At school, Mack is learning about the first Thanksgiving. He came home today with a short story about it, which I asked him to read to me. It went well until he got to the first reference to what he called the ‘Made Up’ Americans.”

Blood and Thunder

Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday has written a review of Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. Momaday’s summary paragraph:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

NewMexiKen began reading the book the other day and, so far, it’s been very good — excellent reading. For whatever reasons, Sides jumps around in the chronology but, while unusual for a narrative history, it seems to work. It has the effect of seeming to move the story along more rapidly.

I’d noted three passages I found particularly amusing, informative, or resonant:

[S]tories like the one about the mountain valley in Wyoming that was so big it took an echo eight hours to return, so that a man bedding down for the night could confidently shout “Git up!” and know that he would rise in the morning to his own wake-up call.

As a baby in his cradleboard, Narbona [a Navajo leader] probably was not called anything at all, for Navajos, who tended to view early infanthood as an extension of gestation, did not usually give names to their children until specific personal characteristics began to show themselves—Hairy Face, Slim Girl, No Neck, Little Man Won’t Do As He’s Told. Although Navajo parents followed few hard rules about how to name their children, it was generally agreed that the watershed moment when a baby could definitively be said to have passed from infanthood into something more fully human was the child’s “first spontaneous laugh.” First laughter was an occasion for much celebration, and it was the time when many Navajos held naming ceremonies for their young; it is likely that this is when Narbona received his original “war name,” whatever it might have been.

Perhaps to dignify the nakedness of Polk’s land lust, the American citizenry had got itself whipped into an idealistic frenzy, believing with an almost religious assurance that its republican form of government and its constitutional freedoms should extend to the benighted reaches of the continent held by Mexico, which, with its feudal customs and Popish superstitions, stood squarely in the way of progress. To conquer Mexico, in other words, would be to do it a favor.

Give Me Land, Lots of Land, Under Starry Skies Above

If the fence is built, however, it could have a long gap — about 75 miles — at one of the border’s most vulnerable points because of opposition from the Indian tribe here.

More illegal immigrants are caught — and die trying to cross into the United States — in and around the Tohono O’odham Indian territory, which straddles the Arizona border, than any other spot in the state.

Tribal leaders have cooperated with Border Patrol enforcement, but they promised to fight the building of a fence out of environmental and cultural concerns.

For the Tohono O’odham, which means “desert people,” the reason is fairly simple. For generations, their people and the wildlife they revere have freely crossed the border. For years, an existing four-foot-high cattle fence has had several openings — essentially cattle gates — that tribal members use to visit relatives and friends, take children to school and perform rites on the other side.

Read more about how Border Fence Must Skirt Objections From Arizona Tribe from The New York Times.

Ko’oe Esther

“Her American Indian name is P’oe Tswa, or Blue Water, but many knew her as Ko’oe Esther, or Aunt Esther.

“She spent much of her childhood living with her grandparents and traveling back and forth in a covered wagon to visit her parents.

Esther Martinez“She was a major conservator of the Tewa language, teaching her native language from 1974 to 1989 at schools in Ohkay Owingeh, formerly known as San Juan Pueblo.

“She also helped translate the New Testament of the Bible into Tewa and compiled Tewa dictionaries for pueblos that have distinct dialects of the language…”

Last week she “was honored along with 11 other folk and traditional artists for being named a 2006 National Heritage Fellow, the nation’s highest honor for such artists, the NEA said in a news release. The fellowship includes a one-time award of $20,000.”

Saturday night, as Esther Martinez was nearing home on the return from the awards ceremony in Washington, an apparently intoxicated driver crossed the center line and collided with the Dodge Dakota in which she was riding with her daughters.

She died at the scene. She was 94.

Above quotations and information from story in The New Mexican.

Caught in the Crossfire

The beginning of an article in The Washington Post:

ALIR JEGK, Ariz. — Elsie Salsido was breast-feeding her baby when Border Patrol agents walked into her house unannounced this summer. “Are you Mexicans?” they demanded.

Salsido’s four other children cowered on the bed of her eldest, a girl in second grade. Night had fallen on this village on Arizona’s border with Mexico, nestled in a scrubland valley of stickman cactuses hemmed in by mountains that look like busted teeth. The agents explained their warrantless entry into Salsido’s house as “hot pursuit.” They said they were chasing footprints, she recalled, of illegal immigrants sneaking in from Mexico, just 1,000 feet away. But the footprints belonged to Salsido’s children — all Americans.

As the United States ramps up its law enforcement presence on the border with Mexico, places like Alir Jegk, a village of 50 families in south-central Arizona, are enduring heightened danger, as they are squeezed between increasingly aggressive bands of immigrant and drug smugglers and increasingly numerous federal agents who, critics say, often ignore regulations as they seek to enforce the law.

Alir Jegk’s experience is complicated by the fact that it is on the second-biggest Indian reservation in the United States, belonging to the Tohono O’odham, or Desert People, who hunted deer and boar and harvested wild spinach and prickly pear in this region before an international border was etched through their land in 1853. Now, the Tohono O’odham Nation occupies the front line of the fight against drug and immigrant smuggling — costing the poverty-stricken tribe millions of dollars a year and threatening what remains of its traditions.

Continue reading from The Washington Post.

The Pueblo Revolt

On this date in 1680, the surviving Spanish settlers under siege decided to abandon Santa Fe and began the trek to Chihuahua. The Spanish did not return to New Mexico for 12 years.

Colonists from Mexico first settled in New Mexico, north of present-day Santa Fe, in 1598. By the 1620s there were 2,000 colonists taking land and forcing labor from the Puebloans, occasionally executing dozens of Indians for the murder of one settler. In the 1660s a drought further stressed conditions for all, especially as Apaches and others raided the Pueblos. Many Puebloans began to feel that deserting their own religion to accept Christianity had brought on these disasters. There were occasional uprisings, but nothing sustainable until Popé, a San Juan medicine man, began unifying resistance among the various independent Pueblos in 1675.

On August 10, 1680, the Indians launched a unified all-out attack on Spanish settlers. Colonists were killed, churches burned, horses and cattle seized. Priests were singled out and killed in all the Pueblos, including Acoma, Zuni and Hopi (in modern Arizona). About 1,000 survivors escaped to Santa Fe and the town was put under siege on August 12. By the 16th the Indians occupied all of the town except the plaza and its surrounding buildings. According to reports, as they burnt the town the Indians sang Latin liturgy to taunt the Spanish.

Three-hundred-and-twenty-six years ago today the settlers were allowed to withdraw from Santa Fe. When they reached El Paseo del Norte in October, there were 1,946 from of a population that had been about 2,500. About 400 had been killed, another 150 escaped to Mexico independently.

The Puebloans removed all signs of the Spanish — the churches, the religion itself, the crops, even the animals (the horses let loose on the plains, eventually transforming the culture of the Plains Indians). One vestige remained: one man rule. Popé declared himself that man and moved to the Palace in Santa Fe.

Spanish attempts at reconquest failed until 1692.