"For some, it's a time of mourning"
 
by:   Wendy Rose
 
in:   "The New World"  (Spring 1990, No. 1)
 
      As I walk upon my Mother earth, I listen for the voices. 
All of my relations whisper to me:  the pines and buckeyes, the
finches and hawks, the delicate down of spring mountain grass,
the tiny spiders and red ants, the enormous vermillion evening
sun, Hopi and Me-wuk ancestors whose songs are not finished.  My
flesh is in contact with the granite bones of my Mother and Her
strong pulse moves softly beneath my feet.  These are not the
only voices.  There, too, is Joseph who joined the colonial army
in Canada after losing the Irish estate that his ancestors had
stolen five hundred years earlier, and Henrietta, his wife,
descended from the native Picts and mystic Celts of the Scottish
Highlands, great-great-grandmother who followed her husband to
the California goldfields.  But there is a difference.
      Is it the pitch of the voices? the volume? the clarity?  In
all of the voices, I find my life.  This is especially true on
mornings like this one, cool and deeply dramatic with impending
rain and swirling wind.  My morning commute takes me through the
Mother Lode's southern foot, from my home in Coarsegold (not far
from the place where Joseph and Henrietta settled) to the foggy
floor of the Great Central Valley where the native people of the
Sierra Nevada were imprisoned when miners wanted their land and
treaties were signed in disappearing ink.
      I am a modern consumer, a new voice with little substance. 
I wonder if the generations to come will hear mine among the
many, will hear any human voice within the increasing wail of the
injured earth.  Every blow to the flesh of my Mother drives the
colonial knife in deeper; this indigenous world, the real world,
is crying.
      I must remember that all of this death was for money.  The
very beginning of this episode, five hundred years ago, was the
legacy of losing the Crusades to a stronger market, a sharper
sword.  Within one generation, the "discoverer's" son had
destroyed all native human life on the island his father had
claimed for the "new" world piled high with Spanish reales.  I do
not believe that the physical shape of my Mother was ever the
question; even then it must have been obvious that, like me, She
was round, asymmetrical, large.
      I must remember that exploration and genocide have always
just been business as usual.  Neither scientific nor strictly
political, those brave trekkers whose names frost the pages of
every American child's schoolbooks carried their banners not for
kings, but for companies, for traders, for miners, for every kind
of coinage, for the freedom not to worship or walk or speak or
elect, but to profit beyond the reach of the king.  Was there
even a single explorer whose concern was the fresh-fallen snow of
new knowledge or friendly contact with the citizens of
previously-unknown (to him) nations?  Did any traveler experience
awe at the Creator's diverse and supremely logical creations? 
Was exploration merely endured for the sake of economic expansion
or was there, perhaps, one who might have gloried in the dif-
ference between what was familiar and what was remarkably new, in
the equally ancient places of his travels?
      When the United States inherited the status of "discovering
nation" from England, it quickly forgot the promises of the
Northwest Ordinance to seek peace with the native people and to
protect the sanctity of their borders; in utmost bad faith,
George Washington did not merely father a new country but sur-
veyed and coveted western Indian lands becoming, more accurately,
a rapist.  When the colonists revolted against the king, I must
remember that the king had wanted to protect Indian land from men
like Washington.  Every American schoolchild learns of George's
hatchet and cherry tree as if it were true, but when are they
told the truth of his punitive raids into Iroquois country to
burn crops and houses, slaughter innocent people?  When are the
children told the story of these starving and murdered Indians,
the very people from whom Benjamin Franklin gained the knowledge
of governmental balances of power, centralized federal admini-
stration over autonomous states, and the revolutionary idea that
power flows up from people rather than down from the ruler?  It
did not take long for America to forget--so that "manifest
destiny" could be invented in order to justify the continuing
theft of land.  America is accountable today; there is no choice,
for that same "manifest destiny" has turned on them with sterile
burning eyes and radioactive teeth.
      The voices remind me that there are other things I must
remember.  The natural people of the earth have survived with
their aboriginal wisdom intact.  Even if they have lost in-
dividuals to the lure of Wasi'chu/Pahana from time to time, the
Center has survived.  much more so than the vast destruction, I
am in awe of my Elders' strength.  I have learned that the
traditional people are not protected from the continuing coloni-
zation of their nations by a cadre of college-educated Indians;
rather, the reverse is true.  I derive my strength and my sur-
vival from them.  As long as they live, there is a place for me
and if they do not live, all of us will go with them.  Though
some of us may pretend that we are not still tied to the Elders,
I am certain that those ties remain strong.
      The voices live in my very bones and shiver along the
structure of me with rage and with prayer.  I cannot acknowledge
defeat even though my people and my land have been obstacles to
the maximization of profit for five hundred years.  I will not
give up my ancestors' dust, nor their songs, for the complacent
and deadly half-life offered by Wasi'chu/Pahana to those Indian
people who begin to believe they have been defeated.  I hear many
voices but of them all, the most enduring ones with the strongest
and sweetest songs, are native.  More than that I am irrevocably
linked to the two-legged, four-legged, flying and swimming of
earth, to the vanished Taino who first felt the heavy hand of
colonization, to the frozen huddled walkers on the Trail of
Tears, to the buffalo skull mountains piled high near prairie
railroad tracks, to Bikini Islanders left with invisible brooms
for cleaning their devastated sacred land, to the napalmed and
betrayed people of Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia, to the misled boys who
carried corporate rifles into clouds of Agent Orange, to the
shadows of evaporated men on sidewalks of Nagasaki, to the
weeping Elders who pray on Big Mountain and keep safe the graves
of their grandparents, to the brave new poet-diplomats of
Nicaragua, to all who wait for Purification and stand ready
within our Mother's heart, to all who remember their origin and
have traveled the great circle to return home, to the choice that
we made and the promise that we gave to be thankful for each new
sun rise, each drop of rain.  You know, nothing of the past five
hundred years was inevitable.  Every raised fist and brandished
weapon was a choice someone made.  The decision to become a
nation of thieves and liars was a choice.  The decision to censor
the native truth was a choice.  The decision to manipulate the
knowledge of American history was a choice.  My immediate choice
is to celebrate or to mourn.  With my relations around me, I go
into mourning--but I go angry, alive, listening, learning,
remembering.  I do not go quietly.  I do not vanish.  I do not
forget.  I will not let you forget.
 
 
                                                            ROSE-01.ART