Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read. A few days ago Jeanne decided to give me a shot of rare pleasure. She took me to my favorite place in the Kansas City area: A giant Asian grocery store.
As we entered the large vestibule at the entrance I noticed large ceramic pots for sale and the one below caught my eye.
I walked over for a closer look and called to Jeanne. “Look at this!” Pointing with my cane, “These are petroglyphs from the US!”
Meanwhile an Oriental man noticed me from inside and rushed out. “One hunnerd dollars! One hunnerd dollars!” I dragged my attention away from the pot and stared at him. He pointed to another pot. “Fifty dollars! Fifty dollars!”
Then he pointed inside the pot and shouted, “Look!”
So the burning question is, are Asian petroglyphs so similar to Native American petroglyphs as to be indistinguishable from them? These pots seem to be decorated with some symbols definitely not Native American, mixed promiscuously with reproductions of petroglyphs I’ve seen countless times in New Mexico and Arizona, Colorado and Utah.
It’s clear no matter what the answer might be that Asians have gotten the jump, however, on the ceramic petroglyph trade.
If I had someplace to put one of those pots and something I wanted to put in it and $100 lying around with nothing to do I think I’d just buy one of those pots. And maybe haul it over to Zuni or Acoma to give them a looksee. The tribes have been losing business to Asians copying their fetishes, their kachinas, their other crafts for a longish while. Maybe a bit of reversed engineering of petroglyph covered pots would provide a shot in the arm for them.
Aside from the fact nobody’s likely to buy some damned pot covered with petroglyphs.
Imagine it readers. Someone saying aloud, no hint of humor, “I respect white people!” Imagine that bullshit.
Now, turn that around and imagine you’re hearing what you’ve heard a thousand times from the lips of a white person speaking about this or that minority group. Or women. [Parenthetically, I think males, especially white males, are the minority in the US gender-wise. I haven’t checked the statistics, but I recall somewhere women live longer than men because they don’t have the stresses, wars to fight, and don’t have to do the hard, dangerous work all us men do just for the fun of it.]
Anyway, think of it. Suppose you were a self-respecting US citizen of color, and some white person said to you, “Hey man, I respect blacks.” Do you suppose he’ll just figuratively roll his eyes back into his head and grunt? Or will he say, “Just what the hell are you talking about you freaking lying hypocrite? You believing your own bullshit again?” Because it ain’t like he’s been living on the moon. He’s living in the world where the prisons are full of black males, where black males are gang banging, selling black women off to prostitution, and strutting around being proud of it.
How the hell could anyone except some stupid white person insult, dehumanize decent black people who aren’t doing those things by saying he/she ‘respects’ generic, stereotyped, cardboard cutout blacks?
Same with Hispanics. The only Hispanics a person could claim to respect and mean it across the board are the ones illegally crossing the US/Mexico Border to work their asses off for peanuts doing anything lazy assed US citizens don’t want to do. But just saying, “I respect Hispanics,” is to stereotype them in a way any fool knows is a blasted lie because it simply isn’t possible in the real Universe.
It’s a similar with Native Americans. That’s because the insult is compounded, squared and cubed. Probably 90% of people guilty of even thinking such assinine thoughts have never even spoken to anything remotely akin to whatever the hell they think a Native American is.
There ain’t any such thing, is what I’m saying. No such thing. No such thing. There are Lakota, Zuni, Navajo, Mojave, Mescalero. As different from one another as a NYC black trumpet-player living in Greenwich Village is from a bayou Coonass in Louisiana.
About the only thing descendants of aboriginal tribesmen in North America have in common is white people and Mexicans and blacks. Every Rez is full of people who know how stupid white people, Mexicans and blacks are. The Rez is full of stupid people too, but mostly they don’t know it. But they could be a lot stupider than they are and still recognize how stupid white people, Mexicans and black people are.
And they’re damned well sick of being dehumanized by being respected by them.
Hell they just want to be like us. You can’t blame them. Who in the world doesn’t want a piece of the best sociology, culture, society, music, attitude, behavior, the US has to offer. The centerpiece for the cultural best has to be exported for the advancement of humanity.
But there’s not room for two.
People in conquered lands always want to imitate the conquerers. That’s why British all try so hard to behave as though they’re Normans. And [East] Indians try so hard to be good Christians.
Same as the whatchallem, Native Americans who aren’t whites, Mexicans, Blacks, Asians, and such. Aboriginals, they’ll likely want to be called sometime. Tribal Americans, some other time.
The Rooskies have always been good at gangsta, but they always felt something was missing over there in the KGB, GRU, and up in the Gulag.
We haven’t gotten around to conquering Pakistan yet, but maybe dropping a few cruise missiles and drones down their smokestacks was enough. Bound to be an explanation and drones might be it.
Africans adapt surprisingly well to modern US culture.
New York Jewish gangsta rap would be difficult to top by Israeli gangsta rap I’m betting.
Australian aboriginals get into the swing about as well as a person can wish. Hard to find fault with that.
All in all I’d say this fits the 21st Century better than Christianity fit the earlier ones.
A few old guys of the same species sitting around Kerrville, Texas wondering where the world went. Each too different from the others to guess which parts they missed. Old guy the others knew walked up and sat down.
Silver gray hair in a ponytail, 70ish, shorts and sandals with athletic stockings, heavyset. We shook hands and I studied his features. In Texas he looked definitely out-of-place, though he could have been Hispanic throwback gene pool. But something in the features and skin pigment had me suspecting he was a Navajo or Apache. A curiosity because Native Americans aren’t much drawn to Texas as a home.
Finally my puzzlement got the best of me. “Where are you from?”
He grinned at the others, then at me. “I’m Swedish.”
“Yeah, but what TRIBE Swedish?”
Minneconjou Lakota, it turned out. Born in a US Public Health hospital on the Rez in Minnesota. Mama a party woman, no idea who his pappa was. Reared by his grandma, then sent off to Indian School. Learned to be a welder and pipe-fitter.
By 1970-or-so he was up in Alaska on the North Slope a few years building the first Alaskan pipeline across the permafrost. Had a few stories to tell about that, then all of us began picking his mind for all manner of details. “How deep did they have to go setting the pilings holding up those pipe joints?” “How were you housed?” And so on.
Turned out all the oil from that field was shipped directly to Japan. US refineries weren’t tuned to that sort of crude. But the fields are still producing.
Guy has a tribal census number, but never went back to live on the Rez, but visited his grandma there until she died. Brought tears to his eyes thinking about her. Never used the free health-care/dental-care for life benefit available to him because of the tribal census number US Public Health Service offers.
“I worked hard all my life and settled here. Paid my own way every step along. Making a lifetime job of being an Indian didn’t appeal to me much. When they quit shooting us they tried to offer that as the next best thing.
“They’re still trying, got all those liberal white people to worship blanket Indians. Better than getting shot, but not as good as kicking the whole damned mess.” He shook his head. “Damned white people and their congratulations for being victims will finish off all the ones left.”
Nice meeting him. I hope I see him again before I head for the tall timber. Being born into a trap doesn’t mean there’s no escaping it, I reckons.
I wrote this after a weekend spent with a once-lady-friend who spent her career as a high school librarian on the Navajo and Zuni Reservations.
Cataclysmic Doggerel
A schoolmarmish lady in Zuni
Had canines subversive and loony;
Her Communist felines
Made neighborhood beelines
With doctrines both outworn and puny.
The KGB cat was a lean
And speckled-nosed beauty serene
In appearance alone
For her countenance shown
Multi-faceted plots as she preened.
Her Weathercat history was tops:
She sprayed on dozens of cops
With a Commie aroma
But joined Sertoma
Cavorting with phonies and fops.
The ringleader hound was a red
And curly haired rascal it’s said
Whose Trotskyish leanings
And Maoish gleanings
Were pondered curled up on the bed.
Princess Redfeather, they tells
Of this curly red bitch of the cells,
Forsook her fine lineage
To sip of the vintage
of Lenin, and Gulags and hells.
The worst of the felines, Bearboy:
Striped and cross-eyed and coy;
Politically weak,
Had claws that could tweak
Bourgeois carpet, and bedspread, with joy.
The Uncle-Tom dog of the hut
Was Ernie, the gray-bearded mutt;
Dog-tired, and dogmatic,
He thought,”Problematic:
dog-eared dialectic and glut.”
The Uncle-Tom dog she called Ernie
Began as a dog-pound attorney
Commuted from gassing
He pondered in passing
Discretion’s demand for a journey.
A calico hound lying dormant,
Most likely a police informant:
A capitalist clown
Took his food lying down
Resisting the commie allurement.
The Stalinish kittenish spies
Spread foment and torment and lies
To Indian curs
And mutts that were hers
And War-Gods high up on the rise.
Princess and Ernie and, Spot,
And Chester, the narc-dog; the lot:
For half a piaster
Would bring a disaster
To Zuni, once called Camelot
Bringing civilization to Native Americans was never easy. Almost every step of the way the tribes selfishly hoarded the lands they depended upon, frequently resorting to violence when whites who needed the land for farming, ranching and mining tried to run them off.
One example was the Modocs in northern California, 1852. The US suddenly owned the land, having disproved the false claims by Mexico of ownership by invading them and killing as many as they could catch. But the Modocs were spoiled by being owned by Mexico, being mostly left alone. When whites came into the Tule Lake area the Modoc slaughtered 38 innocent people.
Ben Wright and a group of miners from Yreka, California attempted to peacefully resolve the situation by having a feast for the tribe, but almost to a person the Modoc unreasonably refused to eat the poisoned food.
Wright and the miners were forced to fire into the mass of tribal members, which allowed a third of them to escape. That failure led to decades more of Modoc attempts to halt the march of civilization and disputing rightful white claims to the land.
Not until 1873, after seven months of hard fighting and the loss of many innocent white lives were the Modoc finally subdued permanently and the leaders hanged.
A microcosm of the history of the western US where flawed and improper leadership and planning resulted in the needless loss of innocent white lives.
No one remembers anyone
Who remembers anyone
Who remembers
Why she died
But there she is
Wealthy woman young
Good teeth,
No slave.
Those killers
Didn’t kill the slaves
Took them away squat beneath
The loot the weight of
What they carried off
As they did before for her,
Before emancipation
To slave for someone else.
Arroyo cut through ruin
Showed her to the wind and sky
And me a thousand years
After noise and smoke
And screams
Stone hatchet broke the head
Flames brought down the roof
Around her,
Her and her kin
Charred corn
Still on cob
Beside her skull.
She died and partly burned
A long forgotten civil war
Between someone
And someone else
No one remembers
Over something
Neither wind nor sun
Nor these charred bones
Remember.
The mountain I used to prospect for several years is covered with ruins wherever there is water. Big ruins. I used to sit on one near my camp and try to imagine what it must have been like.
One summer solstice afternoon I was sitting on the cliff boundary of the ruin watching the sunset. In the basin below there’s a volcanic knob out toward the center of the plains. I’d discovered a single kiva on top of it years before and puzzled over it vaguely. What was that kiva doing there, miles away from the big houses?
But because that day happened to be solstice, I suddenly noticed when the sun went down, it vanished directly behind the point of that Kiva knob! Yon damned Mogollons used it to mark summer solstice!
A place like that fires the imagination, and I spent a lot of time thinking of those people who lived in that ruin. Some of these groups had evidently been in the same locations for 300-400 years, and suddenly their government leaders decided they had to leave. Politicians, or priests, or both, deciding what was best for them.
One day they just left. I’ve always thought it was because of that grim civil war nobody knows anything about that happened among them around the time these ruins were abandoned. Bashing in the heads of anyone who didn’t agree to migrating.
They probably watched and even hosted strings of these travellers along the trail until their own turn came.
What a thing it must have been to be one of them on that last day, saying good bye to the place your great-grand-dad, your granddad, your dad, and everyone else as far back as anyone could remember, including you were all born, lived, and mostly died.
Everyone voluntarily packed a few belongings, a medicine bag and blanket or two, a stone hatchet and a few scrapers, and left, leaving corn in the bin for those coming behind. Abandoned pots lying around all over the place measured the things they couldn’t carry.
Sometimes sitting on that mountain early in the morning it sort of overwhelmed me, the pain and sorrow in those villagers. Probably they all left in the morning one day, after a while of maybe being notified it was their turn. A few weeks of planning. What to take? What to leave behind.
Finally they probably finished the last minute packing the night before. At dawn they made a line down the basin heading south, looking back over their shoulders as long as they could, feeling so sad. Knowing they’d never go home again, wondering about the place they were going.
Remembering how it was playing on the mountain with their grandads when they were kids, remembering the special, secret places kids always have. Just looking and yearning to stay, and already missing that long home where their ancestors had roamed for 2000 years.
They’d have tried to keep it in sight as long as they could, each one stopping to wipe the trail dust off his face, pretending to catch his breaths. But yearning back at the old home place, piercing the heat waves with their eyes, straining to see it one last time, maybe crying, certainly crying inside. The kids probably screeching enough to cover everyone elses grief.
As they trekked south they were joined by other groups from the neighboring villages. The dust rose on the trail making a plume, a cloud around them. They examined these strangers who were now trail mates and wondered who they were.
Some, they probably soon discovered had a mother-in-law, or uncle who came from their village. They got to know one another better there on that hot, sad, lonesome trail away from all they they’d ever known, and they shared the hardships of the journey together for a long time.
Today, it’s just piles of rock, potsherds, holes left by scholars and other diggers for spoils. The land still falls off across Johnson Basin, sun going down over that volcanic nub that once measured the time to plant. Cow men ride their motorized hosses across the old trails, cows stomp around looking for grass, making the pottery fragments even smaller.
But sometimes late at night when the wind howls down the mountain a man might hear, or think he hears an echo of the chants, the drums, the night mumbles and whispers of lovers, the ghosts of lovers. Pulls the bag tighter around his ears and wonders.
Seems the advantages of being out of sight and out of mind for most of the population aren’t necessarily advantages when the out-of-sight geography includes something a multi-national corporation wants. All those city folks needing to keep the air conditioners turned down to 70 and to be able to light up the hair dryers every morning probably never ask themselves where the electricity popped out of the ground and hopped into the wires they plug things into.
One more bug on the windshield of civilization. Old Jules
[The following letter was written by former Hopi Tribe chairman Benjamin H. Nuvamsa from Shungopavi. He presented the letter to the Hopi Tribal Council on Friday January 13, 2012]
January 13, 2012
Hopi Tribal Council
Hopi – Tewa Senom
It is time we have a serious discussion about coal mining on our reservation, our water rights and our environment. For far too long, we have pushed these issues aside, not willing to talk about how these issues impact our lives. We must talk about how the Peabody Western Coal Company and Navajo Generating Station are affecting our lives. Since the mid 1960’s, Peabody Coal has been mining our coal, pumping our precious Navajo Aquifer water and paying us pennies on the dollar in return. Navajo Generating Station is emitting dangerous and harmful particulates into the air we breathe. Our coal resources are being depleted. Our Navajo Aquifer has been damaged…
It’s about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.
There’s a ghost town you can barely see in the pic…. used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the mid-1800s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds. Most of the buildings are still intact, though they’re going away rapidly.
Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it’s not in the national trust as part of the Rez. Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired ‘tribal’, but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes.
Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn’t bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it. The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.
Salt Lake’s a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother. If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ….. it’s a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside … that’s where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held… but all over that section you’ll pass over various religious items from recent times you’d be well advised to leave untouched.
Salt Lake used to be the place all the warring tribes got their salt throughout history. A place where a constant truce between enemy tribes existed.
It’s also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine. The great percentage of the desert surrounding it, from north of Springerville, and Saint Johns, Arizona is government land with shallow coal deposits comparatively inexpensive to ‘recover’. They’ve already converted the desert on the Arizona side to a wasteland. Still desert, but more in the moonscape vein than the usual, regular arid country mode.
The people in El Paso and Phoenix need electricity so they can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated. Those places have climates uncomfortable to the human skin most of the time and they’d rather savage a few million acres of country they’ve never visited and never will than suffer a few degrees of discomfort and use a towel to dry their hair.
Which the Zuni believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.
They might be right.
The Zuni and a few commie-pinko-obstructionist greenie environmentalists are the only people who give a damn, and the other desert-dwellers in the area would welcome the jobs helping ravage the country around them would bring to the area. The last time I looked the Zuni tribe was burning up a lot of tribal money trying to stop the mine expansion into New Mexico. The prospects didn’t appear promising because the New Mexico government, the feds, and the mining interests were stacked up singing songs of human progress and greater good.
Heck, it’s been a few years now. Maybe they’re already mining it. Probably easier to ask someone in Phoenix or El Paso whether the hair dryer worked this morning and if it did, assume that desert has gone to the moon.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 