K'é: Alcoholics and Child Molesters

for all friends of Bill

I was at a party and a friend was telling her sister's story. She had just adopted a family of three Yup'ik kids from Alaska. It's a story she tells often, about the kids, their history of FAS, the complete selflessness it took to adopt the lot of them, in order to keep them together.

Most people don't know much about the ICWA of 1978. She does. She had to deplete her savings in order to legally adopt them.

At this point in the story most people's sympathies are with the storyteller and her sister, especially considering the expense she went to raise another woman's children. We're the lone hold outs. Mostly I stand there silent. This is not a teachable moment. But this time the storyteller refused to end the session.

The mother, of the children, is, of course, a demon. All three kids have FAS. You'd think she would learn. To stop drinking or not to get pregnant, I'm not sure which, but you'd think she would've learned by now.

We stand there silent, and an unusual thing happens. The party host notices. Silence and tension build among the listeners but the storyteller is not affected. She keeps on talking. The kids require an unbelievable amount of work and many financial and social resources. Her sister is dauntless. She refuses to let them sink into the squalor. Their village, there's nothing there. "I mean they're all alcoholics and child molesters."

I am a child of alcoholics and child molesters.

It's common knowledge. Childhood shapes every aspect of adulthood. If I make it, March 29, marks my 20th birthday. 20 years sober. 20 years is half my life, nearly to date. If I continue on this road I will soon have more days sober than I had drinking.

Of the many things that have gotten me here, white knuckles included, nothing has helped more than my home schooling. I exist because my mother bore me and I am who I am because they, my family, raised me.

The Indian Child Welfare Act was first established in 1978 (25 U.S.C. § 1902) in response to the historical removal of Indian children into non Indian families . The imposition of western models of the family on Indian families has been devastating. The intent of ICWA is to "protect the best interest of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian Tribes and Families," by giving jurisdiction to the tribe in matters concerning all of their members, especially their children.

Removing children from the family removes the future. Their removal is a final blow in the systematic destruction to our clan, kinship and traditional educational systems. Removing children says, there is nothing here, in this house, in this culture, in this village to learn from. You are nothing, of no value.

Traditional knowledge enables us to see our place and our responsibility within the movement that is history, as the community experiences it. When children are born they have a responsibility—that responsibility is to become an elder.

Vine Deloria's chapter, "Knowing and Understanding," in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, offers the following insight:

"Even the most severely eroded Indian community today still has a substantial fragment of the old ways left, and these ways are to be found in the Indian family.

Even badly shattered families preserve enough elements of kinship so that whatever the experiences of the young, there is a sense that life has some unifying principles that can be discerned through experience and that guide behavior."

Mine is one of those "badly shattered families." I have never wished my experiences on another, nor have I ever wanted to be removed from my relations.

"The old ways of educating affirmed the basic principle that human personality was derived from accepting the responsibility to be a contributing member of a society. Kinship and clan were built upon the idea that if each individual performed his or her task properly, society as a whole would function. Because everyone was related to everyone else in some specific manner, by giving to others within that society, a person was enabled to receive what was necessary to survive and prosper.

The family was a multigenerational complex of people, and clan and kinship responsibilities extended beyond the grave and far into the future.

The elder exemplifies both the good and the bad experiences of life, and in witnessing their failures as much as their successes we are cushioned in our despair of disappointment and bolstered in our exuberance of success."

It has taken me over half my life to sift through the good and bad examples from my home. Where I have wounds I also have salve.

Kinship in its most expansive sense helps us account for our movements and experiences across the land, up through the previous worlds and into the Navajo Nation now. Our memories of migration, colonization, slavery, alcoholism, drug abuse and urbanization are revealed in the strains and breaks to our families, and in our responsibility to address those strains and breaks today.

When we turn our backs on any member of our community, and fail to recognize them as such, be they father, ant or rock we turn our backs on ourselves.

Healing a community requires more of us than removal. Individual families are targeted as the illness in most therapeutic models, but the removal of specific children, by itself, does nothing to address the roots or context of family violence. Taking children from their villages and giving up on whole communities to locate and develop the necessary resources to survive is part of the overall agenda to annihilate Indigenous people and Indigenous culture.

My Grandfather's and my Uncle's response to their own spiritual suffering was one of violence. Their choices form a legacy we pass down. Like clothes, they affect future wearers for generations. The world told them they were nothing and no one and they acted like that was a truth they would never escape from. I witnessed their failure, and bore the weight of some of it in particular. These experiences of observation and abuse taught me the consequence of believing their lies and hate, and of accepting their realities and visions as my own.

In the worst of moments my Grandfather took his fight against his own degradation out directly on his children’s' bodies and souls and my Grandmother attributed the blame to our culture: "Don't be a damn fool like your father. Crazy Indian."

Last year I had the clarity of mind to recognize, in part, why I drank. It was that feeling I didn't want to have, I sent the drink in search of. The particulars of feeling like a nothing may be a family pain, especially for our position in the world and the deep irreparable fissures in our family caused by our experience of racism and religious persecution. I stopped for a moment and said out loud, "this is why I drank. Not to feel this." And then I kept on walking. The spiritual strength and emotional maturity required to make a different response is a gift also given by my relations: the unfathomable belief that we can be "more beautiful than broken."

For Future Reference: I am I cried

part two

President Obama's words to as-Aribiya refuse to leave my ear hole:

"[I]f you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task."

When Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) Bishop Richard Williamson there was a swift and strident outcry. Williamson's denial of the Holocaust is unpardonable. Few could tolerate his statement: "I believe there were no gas chambers."

In the midst of the uproar his SSPX colleague Father Floriano Abrahamowicz, another of the four "traditionalist" bishops excummunicated by Pope John Paul II, told the Italian newspaper, the Tribuna, "I know the gas chambers existed—at least, for disinfecting—but not whether they caused deaths or not."

In response to Obama's recent words, there has only been shrill silence.

Even when I repeat his words to others the response has been, "Yeah. Right. What's the problem."

This is hardly the same.
No it isn't.

Recognize: 2., to know by some detail

The United States of America is a settler colony. The settlers moved in and continue to occupy our homelands. In response the Nations within (Indigenous Nations) have continued to assert three things: we exist, it happened here, and it is happening now. The details of America's history as a colonial power go beyond this writing.

Historically we, Indigenous People of the America, have failed to register as a people. Our history does not seem to bare weight. Our elders lack authority. We've spent the last 517 years simply asserting our existence.

Invisibility is a power many of our ancestors used to great strategic affect. This is different.

Recognize: 4., to acknowledge the existence, validity, authority or genuineness

The day after the oral arguments for the California case against Proposition 8 opened and closed, the San Francisco Chronicle was already reporting that the court seems to favor the validity of Proposition 8.

During the arguments proponents for Proposition 8 said that the weddings performed during the 5 months when same sex marriages were legal, would not be invalidated, but they would not be recognized.

Where is Duane Big Eagle when you need him?

Obama's election has been hailed as a turning point in the U. S. national consciousness, a day after of sorts, a moment in linear time reflecting an evolution of thought, a wholescale shift in character, a now to oppose a then.

We are flooded every day with words and images that deny our humanity and experience. On June 6 of 2008, in McLean VA, the USPS issued the new priority mail stamp. On Janaury first of 2009, additional postage was already required. Regardless it was my only option. I refuse to send an elder a SASE with the defaced Black Hills as postage. I asked for other stamps. The Postmaster said there were none. I can do math. So I asked for other stamps that would add up to the new rate. It took nearly 15 minutes and her constant sighing, but I left with a SASE that looked not unlike the image on the official USPS poster for suspect mail.

California AAA's western wonder page sports the "Mountain Men" this month. Sculpting of Gutzon Borglum's giant homage to four U.S. presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln—began in 1927. Fourteen years later, Mount Rushmore National Memorial stood head and shoulders above South Dakota's Black Hills. The magazine arrived shortly after my frustration at the post office.

These are trifles. Yes. But these trifles wear us down in a relentless assault on our souls, as we face our occupied homelands today, as we face an academic and popular insistence that we don't exist, we did not know who we were, or where we came from, and our conquest is complete and definitive.

Recognize: 9., to acknowledge as having the right to speak.

The most painful memory I have, in relation to homophobia, is the trip my wife and I took to Minneapolis to bless our nephew. His maternal grandmother introduced me to her mother as "This is Reid. We met her at the wedding."

I stood there, dumb. What do you say to that? How do you maintain your dignity in silence?

I was not even a friend, or a roommate. I was someone met at the wedding.

I am the oldest of the generation of "children" and my wife and I have been together the longest. We flew at great cost, to my health and our one income household. In a sentence I was reduced to no one of no consequence. And I stood there and swallowed.

Some say the Navajo philosophy is to walk around the rock.

My soul is tired and my feet not rested.

No matter how many times my wife and I marry there are many who will refuse to recognize our vows. My own Nation included. I understand that we are asking precisely for what they refuse to give: an acknowledgement of our humanity.

In the 3 years since my nephew's baptism I've developed a fetish for Nebraska, somehow convincing myself that if I could understand their minds I could somehow make a space within it.

There's the rock. Walk around it.

When I was little I used to run the house singing Neil Diamond.

"I am," I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
"I am," I cried
"I am," said I
And I am lost, and I can't even say why
Leavin' me lonely still
1971 Prophet Music, Inc. (ASCAP)

Some things are old. We feel them even when we are young. We do not know how. We do not always know why. But we know we do.

painting: Sitting Bear by Niki Lee

For Future Reference: I am I cried

This month, For Future Reference will take the form of a series, unfolding.

". . . with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human real. That is not a mechanical problem, but an essential one. . .I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate, or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and in his language, to rescue the sufferings from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity, and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him." Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair


Things to be Desired
for Ershod

“You’re an Indian, huh?”

“Navajo.”

“What are you doing here?”

“My Dad worked these docks. They called him Beaver.”

“He the Indian?”

She nods.

“I come down here too.”

He steps up close. Shaved iced. He’s a barely holding together. Twilight is a blanket. For the moment they step inside.

“See. You’re lucky.”

Two hundred pounds of fat, she doesn’t feel. What is it he’s saying.

“You know your people.”

She heard it all; but she never heard this.

“Black people. We don’t know our people.”

They stand, shoulder to shoulder, in the silence of recognition. The water coming up to the edge. Sometimes pouring over. He to the left. She to the right. One man, five foot seven. One woman, five foot one. Thin. Fat. Black. Beige. Close cut. Thick waist length braid. Before them the island. Behind them the buildings. Overhead the new sky of the Embarcadero. The Central Freeway just torn down. Earthquakes expose the mud beneath the surface. Structures fall. Pancakes with no syrup.

She doesn’t know what to say. This was her moment to find the quiet and he keeps on talking. Her head packed tight with wishful thinking.

“My Sister gave me this. Have you seen it?”

He hands her a folded paper, the Desiderata. She looks at it. Reads. Still not looking at him. The intimacy between. Her father’s people always find her. Head nods and hat tips, an index finger raised to the eye; she walks the city streets and they stake a claim. Daughters lost. Fathers found. Uncles and nieces.

“He an alcoholic too?”

She turns and looks at his ear. Small ears. Hers are huge, no one disputes the size of ancestry in the earlobe. Strings of ears on museum shelves, hers still attached. They frame the face. Eye to eye, you never see it.

“You got that look.”

“What is that?”

“Edgy.”

She hands him back his paper.

“You know they found that in a deserted place.”

“My mom likes sayings.”

“Yeah. So does my sister.”

He’s the left foot. She the right. A wave of water rushes over.

“Oh shit.”

The blue horses of morning.

He jumps. From left to right, making his way over to the knee deep concrete hedge, he sits. The bay immersing her calf deep inside it. Offerings she has none. Olokun. Yemaya. Even Oshun gathers here at this seven point juncture. One minute piles upon another and she follows him over to the seat and sits like she’s expected.

The cold gets colder, wet pants, shoes, socks. His jack rabbit jumping has him dry. She’s wet. A slow soggy slopping over.

“How long you been sober?”

“Four years.”

“You guys have a real problem with that.”

“With what?” She’s ready to leave, but doesn’t.

“Alcohol.”

She’s a lump of floured water. Poorly figured. No breasts, just flaps of skin, nipples like birthmarks. No suckling children or jealous lovers. Just an empty gnawing ache. Emptiness, fill it.

“I smoke crack, but I don’t do heroin.”

His speed picks up, or hers slows down. It’s difficult to judge the shifting perspectives. Cold water, darkening sky. The soles of her shoes sponges she can’t wring dry. Her back beneath the jacket, growing wide, loosing shape or absorbing it.

“See. That’s why I came down here. I told this woman to get me some and she brought me this.”
He holds his fingers out, palm up, in between them a swatch of air. He shakes his hand up and down.

“A balloon. And you know what’s in that shit.”

He drops his hand.

“I threw it away.”

Cars rush by. The night is on, not announcing it’s arrival.

“Fuck that shit. Excuse me, but no way. Not me.”

She breathes. Words. She has none. Wet feet, she had two.

“So I came down here. ‘Cause I know where it is and you know I might just go back and get it. So I come down here. Get me some air. That’s when I seen you saying your prayers.”

She keeps breathing air into the wordless mass. Two or more gathered together, this is a meeting. They are inside it.

He pours out of himself, “I wish you could see me another day. This shit makes me all paranoid. I’m not like this. Mean and paranoid. I’m a nice guy. If you could see me another day you would see. I’m not like this.”

His hands long strands of black thread. He wraps them around his words. They keep spilling forth, but like the girl they don’t hold water.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do they do it?”

She waits for him to finish.

“What I want to know is how can they? I understand people like you and me. Why we use. We need it. I gotta have it. We’re hooked. But these people that sell it. How can they do it? Make their money off of other people’s misery. I don’t understand.”

Thoughts can smother even the strongest fire.

“I don’t know.”

She’s tired. Narcotics are high heeled shoes. She don’t use them.

“Ershod.”

He says, extending his hand. She takes it, puts her inside. Names, she don’t give one.

“If you see me on the street, and I look like this, don’t come up to me. I’m mean.”

She don’t answer. It’s a gift and doesn’t require a response. Recognition takes many forms, in the intimacy of what to do and when to do it. Whodini rings in her ears, “One love, one love, you’re lucky just to have, one love.” She likes the slow decay of fermentation. One drink is too many, one hundred not enough.

At the corner she throws her shoes and socks into the trash. He melts into the unlit night. Her father. Her brother. The beaver who likes living down at the piles, his head on the pavement, a bottle at his hip.

K'é: Heathens and Homosexuals

"We have yet to register with him as a people who matter."
-George-Kanentiio

AP Press writers Ben Feller and Christopher Wills begin their report on President Obama's recent ceremony to commemorate Lincoln's 200th birth date with the following: "President Barak Obama called on Americans Thursday to follow Abraham Lincoln's example of showing generosity to political opponents and valuing national unity—above all else."

Lincoln's "generosity to political opponents" clearly did not apply to the 38 men of the Dakota Nation publicly hung in the state that takes its name from their language, Minnesota. Their execution stands as the largest mass hanging from a single gallows to date.

The men were hung at Mankato on December 28, 1862, by the direct order of President Lincoln, who took the time and effort to phonetically spell out each of the warriors names so there would be no mistaken identities. Lincoln further went on to clarify the Dakota's position in respect to U.S. presence on their lands, degrading their position of being at war with the U.S. to his stand that there was no war; they were common criminals.

The U.S. has always criminalized Indian resistance to colonization, but Lincoln's order to mass execute the 38 Dakota reveals the power of language to manipulate reality, transforming 38 warriors into rats to be exterminated.

Lincoln's desire for national unity, at all costs, resonates strongly with President Obama, though he refuses to honestly appraise the divisions the U.S. faces today. After Congress agreed to pass his stimulus plan he spoke these words: "We are far less divided than in Lincoln's day [but] we are once again debating the critical issues of our time."

Black American Slavery was the Civil Rights issue of Lincoln's day.

Gay Marriage is the Civil Rights issue of President Obama's.

Many are reluctant to parallel racism and homophobia, afraid the specifics of their histories will be eclipsed by the large swaths of experiences that overlap. When community organizers use the language of Civil Rights to speak to the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California they are legally correct in doing so. Proposition 8 removes rights that existed for California citizens by a popular vote. My dear friend, the late, Deborah Dixon used to always tell me, "People would vote back slavery if it went to the polls."

The voting booth offers the protection of anonymity, and hate is easily expressed when people are spared accountability. When community organizers apply the language of Civil Rights to homosexuals they are treading tender ground, picking the scabs of wounds that have yet to heal and revealing one face hate wears today: homophobia.

Proposition 8 passed in the state of California in 2008, in the same election that earned President Obama his office. Indians and gays overwhelmingly supported Obama, many saying he "has our backs," he understands us and the unique nature of our lives. In full disclosure I never believed "he had our backs," he has made that clear in various speeches, but I did vote for him and against Proposition 8, simultaneously.

I refused to witness his inauguration when he chose Saddleback's pastor the Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural prayer.

National Center for Lesbian Rights Executive Director, Kate Kendell, said choosing Warren showed "how culturally competent Obama is on Gay and Lesbian issues. . .I think it's a reminder of how much work we have to do."

I have not been so understanding.

Warren, in print and at the pulpit, has equated gay marriage with incest, polygamy and pedophilia and while President Obama has framed his selection of Warren in the light of Lincoln's desire to bring north and south together after "freeing the slaves." I am not persuaded.

Maybe, like Lincoln, President Obama "wants us all to go back home and return to work on their farms and in their shops. . .That was the only way, Lincoln knew, to repair the rifts that had torn this country apart. It was the only way to begin the healing that our nation so desperately needed."

For First Nations and for homosexuals the very nature of our home life has been and continues to be attacked. Going home and getting to work, is often, for us, criminal behavior.

Indian country has taken issue with President Obama's inaugural address itself, specifically the lines: "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus-and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace."

The primary issue has been with the language "the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve."

In our memory and experience these words are words of warning and consequently the tribes of the nations within the U.S. have taken note.

President Obama's official statement was " President Obama was not referring to Native American tribes in this line of his inaugural address."

His response itself is indicative of the problem, as the co-founder of the Native American Journalists Association Doug George-Kanentiio pointed out, "we have yet to register with him as a people who matter."

President Obama's beatification of Lincoln as the freer of slaves, laying the foundation for his ability to become the first U.S. Black president ignores the fact that women and children of the Navajo Nation, which officially endorsed Obama prior to the election, were still being bought and sold into slavery by New Mexicans as late as 1868.

In his first interview given to the Arab press he makes the unbelievable claim that "as you say, America was not born as a colonial power."

His ability to over look America's colonial history paired with his unpardonable selection of Warren to deliver the inaugural prayer, and the consequent missed opportunity to stand for the Civil Rights issue of his day, does not tell me he doesn't get it. It tells me, many don't get him and what he accepts and consequently endorses.

His consistent framing of the U.S. as "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus-and non-believers" is what troubles me most.

Clearly the U.S. faces serious political and economic problems, but the religious divide has come to determine limits and possibilities for us all.

My life has been dogged by the word heathen since I was nine at Corpus Christi, where we bought "pagan babies" with the "Mission money" that was collected every morning. President Obama's constant use of the term non-believer is degrading and closely resembles sanctioned persecution, if only for it's refusal to recognize our beliefs as such.

The Navajo are not non-believers. In our laws people, plants and animals have their own rules, rules to be respected. Our indigenous knowledge is ancient, specific, and shaped by a people's experience of a particular place. Our knowledge defines our relationships and gives us direction, illuminating what we are and what we can become, by providing a moral code, an ethic, based on accountability, responsibility and honor for all life. This core has come down to us in part through our kinship system of K'é. Which details our clans as well as our relationship to our environment—people, plants, animals, earth, sky, water, wind and his companion darkness. The inter connectedness and appropriate behavior in light of those connections are explained by our philosophy of K'é. When we have violated those codes, as we have in previous worlds, the result has been chaos and destruction. For those reasons we must live according to K'é today.

When Johnny Navajo went to Washingdoon in October of 1969 he said, "it seems to me that not many people in Washingdoon even knew of the slavery in our part of the country. The truth is that we may not be too well known here. But it doesn't matter, Grandson, because we know who we are."

This is why and how we live in proper relation. We know who we are.

The mass execution of the 38 Dakota warriors, the passage of Proposition 8, the Diné Marriage Act of 2004, the selection of Warren, President Obama's words regarding the dissolution of tribes, and his indignant response that he was not referring to tribes (I didn't mean you) and President Obama's consistent use of the term non-believer all reflect a denial of our existence and our experience, as Indigenous people of the hemisphere and humans who love.

President Obama 's selection of Warren and his use of the term non-believer reveals his tolerance for hate is higher than mine.

Any language or action that denies a person's humanity, as heathens and homosexuals, that persecutes us for who we are and who we love, diminishes and negates our relationships, our beliefs, our warriors, our wives, our husbands, our families and supports hate.

In his interview on AI-ARIBIYA President Obama said any conversation in "the Palestinian-Israeli theater" needed to be founded on mutual respect and mutual interest. He said, "anybody who has studied the region. . ." I ask do these considerations apply to us, heathens and homosexuals.

During his campaign he went to great lengths to convince the public that "words matter." To AI-ARIBIYA he said he wanted to be "someone who listens and is respectful. . .People will judge me not by my words, but by my actions."

Standing to speak is an action he will be judged by.

To the Muslim world he has said, "you will be judged on what you built not on what you destroyed." Here in Indian country, among the nations of this hemisphere, he wants to build a monument to Lincoln. We of all nations (people, plants, animals, earth, sky, water, wind and his companion darkness) want good relations.

Photo Credit: Jesus Saves Liquor and More, 3rd and Townsend, San Francisco by Reid Gómez

For Future Reference: Our Trade Networks Once Ruled This Land

"The White Man makes us forget our holy places. He makes us small."
-D'Arcy McNickle, Wind From An Enemy Sky

Mexico and the United States of America signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo on February 2, 1848, ending the Mexican American War. Mexico exchanged over 1.2 million square territorial miles (land that is now claimed by the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California) for 15 million dollars and additional considerations, namely citizenship, Spanish language and land rights for Mexican citizens and their Spanish speaking descendants. The United States acted decisively and quickly in respect to their new found land wealth, the only obstacle being the Indians.

Indians have always been a problem for the United States and Mexico. The problem being, unequivocally, who we are as a People, our concepts of the world and our understandings of our place within it.

In Nations Within, Vine Deloria Jr., clarifies this concept: "In almost every treaty. . .the concern of the Indians was the preservation of the people. . .The idea of the people is primarily a religious conception, and with most American Indian tribes it begins somewhere in the primordial mists. . . because the tribes understood their place in the universe as one given specifically to them. . .a council to remind the People of their sacred obligations to the cosmos and to themselves, was sufficient for most purposes. The tribes needed no other form of government except the gentle reminder by elders of the tribe when the people were assembled to maintain their institutions."

The solution to the problem of us has also remained the same: extinguish our spiritual title, traditional knowledge, and physical occupation of our homelands through war.

In 1864 Christopher "Kit" Carson was recruited to finally and definitively subdue every Navajo who stood in the way of United States and New Mexican settlement and occupation. In a letter dated, Jan 24, 1864 he wrote:

"They [Navajos] declare that owning to the operations of my command they are in a complete state of starvation, and that many of their women and children have already died from this cause. . .I sent the party to return through the Cañon [Tséyi'] from west to east, that all the Peach Orchards, of which there were many, might be destroyed, as well as the dwellings of the Indians. . .but it is to the ulterior effects of the 'Expedition' that I look for the greatest results. We have shown the Indians that in no place, however formidable or inaccessible, in their opinion, are they safe from the pursuit of the troops of this command; and have convinced a large portion of them that the struggle on their part is a hopeless one."

The United States desires our absorption into America— by means of violent and absolute dissolution. Full assimilation as citizens (English speaking mass consumers) in exchange for the territory of our souls as well as our homelands is the only option afforded us. Even when we are granted nominal or ceremonial management of our souls and lands (via such acts as the IRA of 1934) the terms are clear and unforgiving.

We, across all first nations, have been and continue to be punished for who we are, what we believe and how we propose to live on our own homelands. Those punishments have historically taken place in military, religious and educational arenas (Wounded Knee 1 and 2, The Long Walk, The California Mission System, the persecution of Carrie and Mary Dann, Western Shoshone sisters, and the boarding and vocational school system). Regardless of the terrain the enemy has remained the same: landed cultures and landed peoples whose world and life practice are most usually defined as traditional.

When the United States burned our peach orchards and cornfields, and slaughtered our sheep (during the livestock reduction period) their message to us as Navajo and to all first nations was simple: you cannot remain alive if you continue to be who you are. You can join the regular citizenry or you can die. America can afford her Indians but she cannot abide the Diné Nation.

The United States makes some believe they are weak and they have no choice, it promotes a relentless force that acknowledges nothing and no one outside its terms or agenda, claiming that your best defense is to find a way to make the best of a bad situation, and live with what it claims are a series of inevitabilities.

Never has it been practical or realistic to be Indian, and certainly it is not today. Punishment of traditional peoples who live traditional life ways are largely economic. There are many areas we do not have legal access to (The Black Hills, The San Francisco Peaks, LA City and County) but my concern today, on the eve of the anniversary of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, is our use of money.

Tribal language speakers know that traditional culture requires tribal language. The best way to create and maintain language immersion is to live in traditional culture. Living traditional culture often feels economically impossible—every one will tell you that, over and over. During the best of times it is a fiscal challenge on the books of our nations and in our individual pockets.

Our trade networks once ruled this land. People and goods moved in the four directions, forming alliances, families and enriching individual cultures without jeopardizing our identities. These networks were shaped and built on honor and responsibility. Goods were expected to be well made, raw materials were expected to be of high quality and craftmanship was rewarded fiscally.

Some say those days are over.

I don't believe it. But, I know our only hope, as humans, is to place our faith in land based philosophies and ethics. Traditional cultures that express and nourish humanity are still viable today. With our little money we can start supporting traditional ethics by supporting artists, educators, scientists, and engineers (farmers, herders, horsemen and builders) financially. Everyone needs to make a living, everyone.

All of America's economic stimulus plans seek the same thing: the rescue and fortification of American ideals and standards of living. We can stimulate our own economies, even and especially those of us who live in cities, simply by only supporting, with currency, people and institutions that contribute to our health as humans on Earth.

Objects have power. The power to foster the health of the planet and our health as humans. The politics of poverty are clear to everyone. Yet we often resign ourselves to our own dehumanization, simply because it seems cheaper, faster, more convenient, or somehow inevitable. These are advertisers' and politicians' lies. They are paid to manipulate our commerce.

Food, dolls, stories, baskets, beadwork, silverwork, weavings, hand drums, flutes, songs and dances tell us who we are and teach us how to care for ourselves and our relations. Farmers, artists, wise men and women, weavers, dancers and singers invest their time and money living tradition, making a place for us in the here and now. They invest their resources in us and our future, creating and forging relationships that support us as individuals and as people. When we support them we support ourselves. When we purchase objects or services based in hate and exploitation we are funding hate and exploitation.

Trina Secody of Runway Beauty and Secody Records, Navajo, wife, mother, and independent business woman reminds us all, "Walk in Beauty. . .they are more than words. . .it is a lifestyle"

Photo Credit: Beauty Unlimited by Reid Gómez

K'é: Light Green Bananas

Last week I heard about a new environmental movement: Light Green.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, former Survivor, host of The View and author of the forthcoming The G-Free Diet (living gluten free), hosted a consumer advocacy segment on the daytime show detailing the ways you can go green without much trouble or expense. Her guest, who I neglected to record the name of, but she might have been sponsored by (an employee of) Disney, took us from stage left to right, listing what products you should spend your béeso on and those you shouldn't.

Before beginning though, she said. Going green doesn't have to be hard. I like to think of it in shades, or grades, from dark green to light green. Some people would have you driving Hybrids and making your own baby food. Those are the dark greens. We're here to show you how to go green without changing your lifestyle or wasting your hard earned money. I added the part about hard earned.

Stage left. Fruit and vegetables. I have these in categories. Things you shouldn't even waste your money on and things you should absolutely purchase organic. In the first category: oranges, pineapples, bananas. Wait, bananas are the sacred food of my nation. I begin to listen more closely. All these things come with their own skin, which you peel off. Precisely, that's what makes bananas the perfect food, aside from corn and mutton. You just peel it off and there goes the pesticides.

What?

She's on to the absolutely organic. Whoopi is chomping on a hard green apple. Apples, peaches, grapes, these you should cough up the money for. Or, Miss Elisabeth adds, you can just peel them. On to the next display. Miss Shades of Green sort of stammers, about the skin, peeling it off, some is absorbed by the fruit. Time is ticking, and so is common knowledge. The View Master has a stopwatch and Miss Shades of Green has to move on.

Peel them?

Last weekend I also saw the toxic comedy, Blue Vinyl, a film by Judith Helfand (http://www.judithhelfand.com/) and Daniel B. Gold. The film follows Helfand as she tries to convince her parents that their decision to side their home with blue vinyl, embossed to look like wood, was a big mistake. Her father assures her the vinyl siding only poses a threat in the unlikely event of a house fire.

He must not be afraid of the End of Days, and he must not live in California.

The film documents her efforts to prove to him the vinyl is not so harmless, to the environment, the factory workers and the neighboring communities.

He's in Long Island and in Long Island Louisiana can seem, not so close, the people, not so real, certainly not related, the danger not so tangible. Besides it's cheap and the vinyl is good for the resale value.

They're selling the house? They just put the vinyl on.

You gotta see it. The film that is.

The point, in the end, Helfand and Gold are trying to make is: My house is your house. (http://www.myhouseisyourhouse.org/)

When I was little and I got some cool new toy, like crystal knocker balls that hung from a silver ring, real silver not that fake nickel plated stuff, my Grandma's first words would always be: Where did you get that?

Mostly because she had to navigate my travels and treasure hunting. The daily trips I took with my Grandpa, on our way to Dog Patch, en route to the liquor store we'd always stop and sift through the dump, back when there were "local dumps," and he'd locate the jewels among the garbage. I had a very extensive collection of marbles and bottle tops. Knocker balls were contraband.

I'm not supposed to have used things. You never know what they carry. Not cooties, we had cooties of our own, so we weren't afraid of them, but life. You never know what experiences things hold the residue of and we were supposed to be careful. We were sensitive to that: residue.

We didn't have a lot of money, but my Grandparents turned our poverty into endless hours of magic. Food, we grew it. Clothes, we sewed them. Toys, we built them. Music, we played it. From this and that, our feet, our hands and our minds we were never without something good.

Any idiot knows you can't peel the pesticides offa apple, offa skin, off the earth.

My Grandpa being the coyote he was would often urinate in the most creative places. But he would never urinate in his soil. The neighbors yard, yeah. I mean what did she do, but plant Mrs. Butterworth bottles and Christmas Poinsettias from Safeway. He ate his dirt, not for food, but for information. He tasted what it had and from that he knew what it needed. He watered his dirt. He went back in his shed and mixed up plants and potions to make it good, for us and for our bellies and spirits.

Food was a politics they could both agree on, not like Jesus or the Catholics. Food made us different. The tongue hanging out of the pot was only one example.

Back to the sacred food of the Diné.

Bananas are the number one selling fruit in the United States; they out-sell apples and oranges combined. Over 170 million 40 pound boxes of bananas were sold in the United States alone, in 1997. In 2007 the Hawaiian Islands alone produced 9.7 millions pounds.

Anyone who loves bananas as much as we do knows they're good green, they're good yellow and if they go black you can mash them into a bushel of muffins. Anyone also knows bananas bruise, easily.

The point, though, is not in the peel. Though the peel does allow you to carry one in your purse, or fold a half one up for later. The point is in the people and the dirt, not to mention the Banana Republics.

Bananas are grown in dirt and they are grown by people. In the course of a growth cycle both the people and the dirt are treated with an insane amount of toxic chemicals (pesticides). Chorpyrifos (declared toxic by the World Health Organization), DBCP (resulting in sterility among workers), nematocides/Aldicarb (lethal at .9 mg per pound of human weight). Soil is often flood irrigated. Songbirds and hawks are dying as a result of the poisons. Latin America has increased pesticides use five fold since the eighties, all to meet the United States consumer desire for summer fruit in winter.

The question of today is not my Grandmother's. The question of today is how much does it cost? And can I get it cheaper?

I was raised with the twin phrases: we don't do that and we don't say that. These words gave me strength at four and continue to give me strength today.

K'é is the way we work together—with and through our relations. K'é recognizes that the earth is our mother, we emerged from her. We have the responsibility to care for her and she cares for us. Our fundamental philosophy relies on this responsibility, on respect and the nurturing of good relations. It is our belief and our practice that these relations guide each of our daily activities, including the purchase of bananas.

Given their ubiquity and value, they are a perfect product for us to exercise our good sense and stewardship.

As long as they have a resale value commercial bananas will be grown. People, animals and the earth itself will pay one price while the consumer is charged a lower one.

In Blue Vinyl, Judith Helfand tells us "Consumers have the power to transform a market and make a hazardous product obsolete."

It doesn't take a genius. If you want to save some béeso don't buy Elisabeth's book, buy organic bananas.

For Future Reference: At the Crossroads, Knowledge Is What You Know

This is the month of the melting snow. The first, today, the feast day of the Ifa God of the Crossroads. Rain. Dark mornings and early nights. Winter Solstice reminding us that we are close, together, to spring. Work requires hands. We have them. Hands working. The men take this time to plan how they will plant, while children sit and listen to narratives that tell us who we are.

For many January first marks the time when Christmas bills start arriving. Credit and debt shapes many lives more intimately than the ancestors, what they taught, what they know.

For a long time I've said, with pride, "we don't have a casino." Now we do.

Fire Rock Casino opened on November 26, 2008. The doors opened at 4 pm. The people standing in line since 8 am. Once open the casino hit capacity in 45 minutes. While more waited outside over 400 got in. The first day totals were $1.2 million.

Navajos are noted for a great and many things, the least of which is not our pride. We have numbers. We have land. We have many living speakers.

As recently as the Unites States Great Depression many Diné were living well, grazing their sheep and teaching their children. Sheep is life. K'é the fundamental law of the nation. The seasons providing the time and space necessary for our teachings. The U.S.'s general economy and culture was on the periphery of our daily lives. In practical terms we stood firmly in the center of the world.

This is no longer the case.

Our world is touched and our daily lives shaped by the world wide web, employment/unemployment, formal education, Christianity, drug and alcohol abuse and the consumer-entertainment industry.

The same day the Times reported the Fire Rock opening, Jason Begay wrote a significant article about the effect of gas prices (rising and falling) on the nation.

Some facts from his article (Officials Study Impact of Falling Oil Prices," Window Rock, Nov. 26, 2008): People are happy about the fall in pump prices. The U.S. federal government served notice they were cutting $10 million from federal grants for the nation's operating costs. Oil costs have gone down approximately 66% in the last 4 months. In the 2008 fiscal year the Navajo Nation Oil and Gas company was earning $47.2 million. The 2009 fiscal year projections for the nation were $172 million, providing oil prices remained the same. The Budget and Finance Committee will have to address and account for the difference in projections and actual returns.

For all the details please read Begay's article in full: http://www.navajotimes.com/news/2008/1108/112608oilprices.php

A week before, former Chief Justice Robert Yazzie and Lorraine Ruffing and James Singer of the Diné Policy Institute of the Diné College published an opinion piece in the Times: Wall Street, Navajo Way meet at Crossroads.

Some facts from the article: 70% of Navajo income is spent outside of the nation (off reservation), after the recent fall of the U. S. economy the Nation's trust portfolio fell over $240 million.

I recommend everyone read their article in full: http://www.navajotimes.com/opinions/index.php

Yazzie, Ruffing and Singer conclude with the following: "With the current economic crises we as a people have the freedom and responsibility to examine where we are and where we are heading. A choice, then, is laid on the road before us: whether to continue down Wall Street, or hang a U-Turn on Navajo Way."

In 1934 Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas arrived from Paris for Gertrude's American lecture tour. The first line of one of her lectures was: "Knowledge is what you know."

Fire Rock Casino. The Navajo Nation Oil and Gas Company. The Nation's Trust Portfolio. Money. Do we know how to live without it? The U. S. Economy. Do we know how to live outside it?

In previous writings Judge Yazzie has remarked that our strength as a people came, in part, from our homogenous culture and our isolation from the U.S..

No one doubts our ability, as a people, to take what we see as the best in other worlds and refashion them into something uniquely and passionately our own. Perhaps our defining characteristic is our ability to adapt to the changing world while retaining our indescribable core: K'é, Diné Bizaad, these our winter stories and the time to tell them.

Our challenge today is no different than the challenges faced by our ancestors. They too had "the freedom and responsibility to examine where we are and where we are heading."

In practical terms we must untangle our minds and our national and personal economies from the U.S. economy and culture.

The U. S. economic crises is a direct consequence of certain beliefs about the world and the people who inhabit it. Our grandparents know this. We know this too. The problem is that many no longer believe it is possible to live whole, in the center of the world, or they lack the practical steps to return our daily activities to those practices which maintain balance (ecologically, socially and spiritually) and identity.