I guess if I am talking about how different things
read relate to each other, I should mention that my family has been reading the
Old Testament together. Seeing how ancient rulers would carry off a conquered
people, and send other people to take their place, shows me that destroying
national identity, morale, and ties to home has been around for a while.
Chester Nez mentions two great Navajo tragedies in Code
Talker. The first was The Long Walk, a 350-mile forced march from Fort Defiance to Fort Sumner. Going to Fort Defiance in the first place
was preceded by the slaughter of livestock, crop destruction, and uprooting of
trees. Along the way hundreds died, not just because the journey was hard but
because if there were any issues (like childbirth) the soldiers shot them.
There's still a lot I don't know, but I have yet to
find a tribal history without a similar incident. Sometimes you hear about the
"Trail of Tears", but it was more than one trail.
It may also be worth mentioning here that from both A
Century of Dishonor and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, what you see
over and over again is that tribes built schools and grew crops and raised
herds, and then would lose it all in forced relocation. Sometimes they would
have rebuilt two or three times and be sent on again. You could argue that it
was simply due to their land being wanted, and not a conscious attempt to
destroy the people, but there were enough conscious attempts at destruction,
and enough assumption that the Indians were going to die out, that it makes you
wonder.
Nonetheless, the people kept going. 8000 survived
The Long Walk and started over. A treaty a few years later granted each family
two sheep, one male and one female. They did well enough that seventy years
later that there were concerns about the area being overgrazed. That led to the
second tragedy, the Navajo Livestock Reduction.
The government came and dug trenches. Any family
with more than 100 sheep or goats was subject to reduction. They herded they
amount they deemed necessary into the trenches, then sprayed those extra
animals with flammable material and set them on fire.
My first reaction is to be sick because I love
animals, and that was the first reaction of the owners. They loved the animals,
and the animals knew them. Nez remembers hearing the stifled sobs of his
grandparents at night after that. Some families received some money at far
below market value, but many received nothing. Some meat was preserved, but
only a small amount.
I still feel the pain for the animals, and their owners,
but I see another side, because again there is that destruction of efforts and
labor, the attempts to destroy the people.
Other reading come in again, because I thought there
was something familiar about it, and realized it had come from The Worst
Hard Time, by Timothy Egan.
The government did kill cattle owned by white
farmers in the Dust Bowl, but this was different. The animals were being choked
to death and blinded by dust, there wasn't good grazing for them, and the
government paid the farmers between $1 and $16 per head and salvaging what meat
they could for hungry people, which was not much. Mainly, the farmers had a
choice.
There is another section in Code Talker where
Chester talks about his first hunting trip, and things that they did to show
respect to the deer, and that its death was not wasted.
These were healthy sheep and goats belonging to
people who believed in living in balance and it was the Depression. Even if you
accept that the reduction was necessary, it should have been possible to give
those animals humane deaths where their meat and wool and skin became a great
benefit to people suffering from hunger and cold, but that would have involved
treating the Navajo with respect. It could have involved caring about animals;
just that could be enough to make things go better. Even an aversion to waste
might have helped. None of those factors mattered.
Now I want to quote Chester Nez:
"The effect on
the Navajo sense of community was devastating. In the time before the massacre,
friends and neighbors helped one another. When someone fell sick, neighbors
pitched in to care for their animals. Medicine men and women were summoned to
cure both people and animals. Neighbors and family assisted by gathering together
at night and praying for the sick to recover.
The livestock
reduction challenged this sense of community by pitting Navajo against Navajo.
Those who kept livestock resented the Navajo exterminators who worked for the
Bureau of Indian Affairs. Neighbors put up fences to enclose their pastures,
saving them for the sheep they had left. The year-round migration from one
community grazing area to another that had always been the norm as I grew up
became impossible. As a result, ties between neighbors weakened.
The toll in
self-respect was also huge. Families, unable to protect their own livestock,
felt powerless. And nothing could have done more to erode the local work ethic.
What was the point of working hard to build up wealth, a sizable herd, when the
government just stepped in and destroyed it?
The massacre killed
more than livestock. It changed the dynamic between neighbors. It changed the
meaning of hard work; it changed everything."
(Code Talker, pp. 79-80)
Currently I am reading about tribes that were
forcibly removed from land for the building of a dam, even though it was
completely illegal according to their treaties. That happened in 1951
I don't know that I have a lot to add to that, but I
think maybe for anyone who is upset about tribal "handouts", maybe if
we could go without uprooting and destroying for long enough that there is no
one alive who personally remembers it, maybe then it could be a good time to
reexamine the issue.
Posts
