Monthly Archives: October 2020

Jack wrote this in February of 2006:

Hi again, blogsters:

This blogging experience might turn out to be too much for my psyche.  I don’t watch television, deliberately don’t read newspapers.  The reason is that I discovered a decade, or so, ago, that knowing about matters I can’t influence doesn’t lend itself to inner-peace.

However,  I’m finding something just as good as television and newspapers to stir up inner-confusion, dissatisfaction, anger.  About issues that aren’t my business as I define it, because nothing I can do might influence those issues.

The Native American feeds are a microcosm of the phenomenon:

My general feeling about the Native Americans I meet in my daily life is one of respect, of acknowledgement, of consideration.

Yet, on blog sites, I find a daily flow of feeds on Native American issues to inspire the antithesis of respect.

I see whines by Native Americans concerning inadequate health care for the tribes.

All over the US non-natives of all groups, and Native Americans who don’t happen to have tribal census numbers are faced with the daily challenge concerning health care.  Only Native Americans with census numbers are provided total free health care by the US Public Health Service.  Yet they complain and ask for Non-Native support to try to make what they have more comprehensive.

I see complaints about the limitations on tribal sovereignty.

There is no tribal sovereignty.  The tribes, with a few exceptions, are entirely dependent on US Government funding to maintain survival.  US taxpayers have been the mainstay for continued aboriginal survival, for Rez roads, Rez housing, Rez incomes, Rez education and Rez ‘independence’ for more than a century.

• I see nothing wrong with some US citizens getting an easier deal in life than others, if they can manage it.  Inherited wealth and ethnic preference have a strong basis in precedent in the US.
• I see nothing wrong with the tribes continuing to burden the remainder of society with dependence, with holding to life on the Rez without having to hold regular jobs and concern themselves with the daily issues of survival,  as do other Americans, should they choose to make that their goal.  The lure of a free ride through the Welfare State is seductive for individuals of all ethnic groups.
• What bothers me is the litany of complaint that it ain’t enough.  That somehow the ‘rest of society’ muddling along without such benefits, with no safety net, ought to feel more is ‘owed’, based on something that dead men did to other dead men more than a century ago.
• Something in me protests that we’re all born naked.  That we can each make our own choices every day.
• Something in me protests that begging is a lousy choice.  That whining and blaming others for our choices and our lot is not a behavior devised to command respect, so much as guilt.

Which is none of my business.

Jack

Old Jules, given ‘the raptures’ imminent arrival, how many cans of beans and wienies should I stockpile?

Don’t buy any and figure on taking it out of the homes of them who were raptured out after they’re gone.

Old Jules, what’s the biggest social injustice in today’s society?

The treatment of prostitutes by the criminal justice system.

Old Jules, what do you think forgiveness really is?  How do you break the mental link to the person you resent and set the process of forgiveness in action?

Seems to me forgiveness is a recognition of our own boundaries as they apply to our ability to influence the behavior of others, and the release [for our own benefit] of that which didn’t conform to our expectations.

The burden of carrying around whatever the alternative is to forgiveness is ours as individuals and, quite frankly, carries a lot higher cost to ourselves than it does for the unforgiven.

In my view it’s self-therapy, entirely a means of releasing ourselves from all manner of lousy baggage of no consequence to anyone but ourselves.

But the other side of it involves a more subtle piece of reality and self-definition.  A matter of recognizing the real question:  “Just who the hell am I to impose my expectation-slavery on another human being?” 

We’re all of us just flawed creatures stumbling along trying to find our way in life, most of us not making a particularly good, nor admirable job of it.  The judgement-arrogance involved in needing to forgive someone else for doing something to not live up to the slavery of behavior capsule we placed around them is a statement of what dishonest creatures we are.

So dishonest we’d lock our minds into the belief we occupy the moral high ground as though the ground around it was also high.

Jack posted this in February of 2006:

Last Friday Night

“It’s just too deep in the Rez

For a white-man style killing,” he says.

“A bullet each to the back of the head,

At Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead;

Two Navajo brothers are dead.”

“It isn’t a skin-walker killing;

No feud, not a woman too willing.

A knife, a club, a thirty-ought-six

Is common enough and at least doesn’t mix

White man logic with Navajo tricks,

“No bullet each to the back of the head!

But at Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead!

Two Navajo brothers are dead.”

From Bread Springs to Shiprock you’ll hear people say,

“No place is safe now!  You can’t get away!”

Nageezi to Yah Ta Hay

You’ll hear the Din’e people say,

.

“The killer’s from Pie Town or Santa Fe!

Some white, somehow, somewhere must pay

For a bullet each to the back of the head!

At Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead!

Two Navajo brothers are dead.”

From Poems of the New Old West 

Copyright©2002, Jack Purcell

Note:

I wrote this a week or two after the killing.  At that time it wasn’t yet known who the killer was, nor why.  A while later that changed.  The killer was a neighbor, just down the road.  He fled the Rez to California, but was soon apprehended.

All of which changes little for the poem.  The two-week certainty that an execution-style killing in the center of Navajo country would never be perpetrated by Navajo had the accusations and demands flying fever-pitch.