Date:   8/4/2010 12:30:00 AM ( 15 y ago)
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URL:   https://www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=1664220

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The same with Native Americans?

In my own personal experience, the many cultures have been so fractured that is it almost impossible to see what's true and what's hype. Part of the destruction of Native American cultures has been the creation of the welfare state and the dependencies that go with it. This is a very real thing.

I've spent up close and very personal time with people from Navajo, Hopi, Kiowa, Ute, Lakota Sioux, Blackfeet, Ojibwa. For reals. Part of this access came when I created some of the first network communications for IHS (Indian Health Services) in the states of N and S Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and took these technologies onto reservations. This in no way makes me qualified to speak as if I am some authority. I do know what it is like to for instance, drive into the Pine Ridge Reservation, enter into the hospital at Pine Ridge, and face Native Americans and see the treatment they received.

I detail this because it presented my eyes with significant metaphors for what I believe has been wrought for centuries. In one part, the Lakota Sioux of Pine Ridge turn to the US government for health care, and all the trappings that go with it. At the same moment, there remains deep seated hatred (I wonder why) of whites. One time I met with a white doctor who was counting the minutes until end-of-biz Friday so he could drive his sports car off the Rez and make it back to the city. There was a line of people waiting to be seen. It was one of the saddest moment of my life. He hated his job, and you could see the contempt he had for the 'redman'. He told me as much in confidence when we were alone, because I was white, even tho I had given him no reason to think I was in agreement. I wanted to beat him into dirt when I heard that.

Anyway, there is also the tradeoff of people who approach Native Americans who think they hold some kind of mystical powers of the earth which is almost always b*llsh!t because most Native Americans have been ameliorated into the modern cultures, and they have no more mysticism than a jet fighter pilot. And they know it. And they trade off of it. I've been with some friends who will turn on a dime and feign the "of the earth redman" demeanor, and people swallow it whole. That is how to sell jewelry, lilting flute music CDs, rugs, and so on. I was shooting a moonrise of Mitten Buttes in Monument Valley (made famous by the great John Ford westerns) when an acquaintence told some other tourists who happens by that his names was Michael Jackson, and that they were not allowed to take any photographs because it stole his soul. They were so nonplussed, they completely missed the first joke about being 'Michael Jackson', which made the soul stealing thing a total wash. The idea of the noble savage is from the movies. And native americans trade off of it. They know it.

Am not saying anything that probably doesn't hold true for other indigenous people of the world. But things are so fractured here in The States, and I've also interfaced with Native AMericans in Canada where treatments have been somewhat similar, that things are not what we want them to be. Overwhelmingly so, at least here, and this is based on my own experience. Which is not insignificant.

The mythologies that are maintained are also of course watered down stories of convenience.

One of the craziest things is... I have some acquaintenances down in Arizona who are some of the founders of a huge Navajo agricultural consortium. It is a completely modernized mega farm group where they are turning prairie into cultivated fields for miles. Modern water delivery systems. Their own trucking firm. An amazing enterprise. And many of the crop yields are no more indigenous to the Navajo than the space program. What makes it boggling is that these food sources are not native to their diet, and hence there are massive issues with diabetes, heart conditions, and so on. The Natives are no more native to the land than most of us anymore.

About the only thing that is real, and when I have a chance I beg parents, or schools, to maintain... their languages. My wife was a victim of her parents not teaching her Spanish because of the persecution they experienced in school as brown skinned people. Exactly the same for the many people I have made acquaintances with and their culture and language. Close friends like full blooded Navajo, a dancer singer, and he and his full blooded Navajo wife are raising three kiddos, and I implore with them to teach the language (and teach me too). Because that is about the only real thing that keeps them tied to their past. I want them to maintain these things, starting with their language, because as I have exhorted for a long, long time, so they go, so will we go too.

A rambling expose Spuds, but it is one way to answer your question about the relationship of Native Americans and the land. The spiritualism, the being tied to the land, the original cultures.... all of these have been so fractured, hardly any of this is what it was. This from my personal experience. I mentioned Pine Ridge because not only have I had some remarkable experiences there as elsewhere, it also has historical significance in relatively recent histories like Wounded Knee (1890), Leonard Peltier (1975), the blizzards of 2009-2010 that revealed the terrible conditions that exist for peoples of this land to this day.

Oh, and the further irony of all this is the natives to these lands are not even that as of the last 300-400 years. Encroachment from the Spanish and French from the southern parts, and the other N. Europeans from the east, pushed Native Americans off their lands. So the Cheyennes for instance were shoved into the lands of the Kiowas, Utes, and other plains Indians, and these cultures were shoved into the Rocky Mountains and became mountain Indians, and so on. So the natives to the land are not even that because their ancestors were living on different land than where cultures are now identified with.

Anyway.

You asked a question Spuds that hits a bit home with me, hence the elongated response. What is real is the language anymore. I so badly want that to remain. Language, like the whales and the toads and the birds, so it goes, so we go too. One way to attach spiritualism to these lands is to drive to them, get out of the car and then walk, and maybe one day by accident you will stumble across someone cooking a dinner or something, and have them tell you in their language, anything. What they ate for breakfast. Their dog's name. Anything. And then we would begin to get a glimmer of what's under our feet, and mebbe we would begin to feel something again about this place.

Something like that...

I know that Australia has made significant reparations towards Aboriginals in recent years. Our version of that is to create permits for gambling to occur on the Rez's, as if this is somehow going to mend some pasts. Casinos all over the place now. These are some of the saddest, most destructive gestures that could possibly be tendered by the US Government. And of course, there is a money trail in there.

Off soapbox.

Or, Hágoónee'.

 

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