Photography by JD
To read about the Geronimo Commemoration, see AJA’s report here.
For background on the event read Repressed National Memories and Old San Carlos and a Blessing.
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They came from the Jicarilla Apache Tribe. They came from the Tonto Apache. The White Mountain Apache were there, and the Yavapai-Apache, and the Camp Verde Apache. They came from the San Carlos Apache Tribe. Under a grey, marbled dome of sky and the cross-hatched rays of light that sometimes broke through them, amid a chill wind and drizzle on a promontory overlooking San Carlos Lake, the Apache Nations assembled within a mountain-ringed horizon to honor the victims of atrocious conquest and to seek a new beginning.
By the time Coolidge Dam was completed in 1928, it had covered over not only the land beneath the lake it created from the waters of the Gila River, but an abject and awful past as well. It buried beneath the lake’s luminous beauty a history of subjugation and suffering. It washed that history from the memory not only of the conquerors, who barely considered what they had done, but from the full recollection, too, of the descendents of those who suffered.
It was below the site of the commemoration, beneath the waters of the lake, that the original settlement of the San Carlos Apache Reservation was made – Old San Carlos. It was there that the members of varied Apache tribes had been compelled to march from their more native grounds – their own “Trail of Tears,” with their own losses along the way – and to settle under
the rule of the U.S. Army. It is there during droughts, when waters recede, that the foundations of the old buildings are once more revealed, as well as the graves of those who died. History provides the accounts of the conditions under which they lived, the final humiliation after the land and the freedom taken.
The legacy of cultural disconnection and loss has been long. Some of the tribal leaders who spoke to those assembled, on February 17, 2009, took note of their own rise from personal depths, their rescue from hopelessness and alcoholism.
When San Carlos Tribal Chairman Wendlser Nosie and the San Carlos Tribal Council chose the hundredth anniversary of Geronimo’s death, after twenty-three years in captivity, as the date on which to mark this history, it was not without controversy. Geronimo is controversial. San Carlos historian Dale Miles examined some of the controversy in an article in the local Apache Moccasin newspaper. Geronimo, Miles reasoned, needs to be considered in the context of the times in which he lived: a violent era of raids and counter-raids that came with two hundred years of Spanish and Mexican encroachment on Apache land, twenty-five years more of the same from the U.S., and the murder of Geronimo’s wife and children by the Mexican Army. In the end, with defeat and captivity for the Apache assured, Geronimo remained as the last actor and symbol of defiance and relentless resistance.
San Carlos Apache Tribal Chairman Wendsler Nosie
When Nosie spoke, he acknowledged the controversy, and the fact that division and dispute among the Apache had been one of the sorry legacies of their conquest. He reminded the audience that the day was about much more than Geronimo. It was, he said, about honoring the past and the ancestors who had fought and suffered. It was about acknowledging, but then moving passed, this history – about healing and seeking a new path, in unity, into the future. The monument created and unveiled for the occasion revealed an Apache family, and in the middle of it, a headstone representing those who died.
The Reverend Dr. John Mendez, Emmanuel Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, NC
One of the final speakers was Dr. John Mendez, Pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mendez spoke of an advantage Native Americans have over African-Americans, who were brought to the continent involuntarily, and who, in most cases, do not know their origins – their tribes. Native Americans, he said, are not another ethnic minority; they are the original inhabitants of the land. Apaches know their land, their culture, their history and tribe. These, Mendez suggested, are gifts of circumstance to be utilized. Then he offered a fable – the story of an eagle caged so long among chickens that it had forgotten its eagle nature. Repeated efforts to lead the eagle from its cage and to remind the bird of its true character had failed. In one final attempt, it was taken to a mountain top , its natural home, and released from the cage, when at last it spread its wings and flew, like an eagle.
AJA; Photography by JD
To see more photos of the Geronimo Commemoration, see JD’s photo essay here.
For background on the event read Repressed National Memories and Old San Carlos and a Blessing.
SUBSCRIBE to the sad red earth.
If you haven’t yet heard about it, a remarkable five-part series will air on PBS’s The American Experience beginning in April. Entitled We Shall Remain, the co-production by Native Public Media (an Unusual Suspect, blog right) and WBGH of Boston offers a new perspective on American history – a Native perspective, from the Mayflower through the 1970s. That it might seem appropriate to end the series thirty years ago is a major reason that Julia and I are working on the project we blog about on these pages. Fittingly, part four of the series, “Geronimo,” tells the story of the Chiricahua Apache, whose story is so intimately connected to the history of the San Carlos Apache Reservation, from which Julia and I have been blogging these past nearly two months. We hope to post about the February 17 Geronimo commemoration any day.
You can access the We Shall Remain library guide, with much background information, here.
AJA
Sam Hinton, of Peridot, the San Carlos Apache Reservation
JD
In Far Rockaway
Shortly before my tenth birthday, we moved from Bell Park Manor-Terrace and that childhood bedroom to an apartment building on Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway, also in Queens. Far Rockaway was a tougher and more heterogeneous neighborhood than the predominately white and Jewish Queens Village, and I was confronted with some physical and psychological adjustments. Our apartment was on the building’s first floor, very near the apartment of the building superintendant. His son, Kenny Larson, was a tall, lean, Scandinavian with white-blond hair, a couple of years older than I, and he soon became a friend. Kenny had spent time in a 600 school, a system of reform schools for juvenile delinquents that had earlier been developed in New York City. He was also the first of a series of older and wilder boys to whom, from that point through my teens, I attached myself in an unconscious desire to overcome my fear of the world. He was the first person I knew, particularly white, who walked with a “bop,” that dip and snap of a knee, followed by a forward toss of the opposite shoulder, that was a mark of street cool and toughness. He tossed his long, straight hair back upon his head with a flip, and he taught the boys of the building how to rap out African-styled rhythms with their knuckles.
Kenny showed me his switchblade. He showed me how it worked and explained the difference, as then
understood on the streets of the U.S., between a switchblade and a stiletto. One day the two of us walked into the small town of Far Rockaway (a long main street – Central Avenue – intersected by a series of side streets) a couple of miles from our home, and which for me, at ten, might have been a Humphrey Bogart waterfront. We made our way to the roof of what seemed an old office building, at the corner of Central and Mott Avenues. We were, perhaps, three stories up, maybe only two, but looking down from the roof edge on the activity of the streets below, the world seemed wondrously wider and more vital than I had yet imagined. We could see the cap of the beat cop standing against the wall of the building, just beneath us. Kenny proposed something with a laugh. He withdrew his switchblade and flicked it open. Then he suspended it, blade down, over the edge of the roof, above the head of the cop. I would never have done such a thing myself. I could never have imagined it. The impulse was not in me. Yet I stayed with Kenny as he dropped the knife.
We didn’t look to see what happened. I have no recollection of our path leaving the building, or of how far it was, finally, we traveled before we stopped. But we ran. We ran. Danger could come to you directly from the world itself – like a thunderstorm. It could come, I had now seen, to others through you. And it could come to you as a consequence of your actions. The world was a dangerous place.
On a couple of occasions, easy to anger, Kenny punched me in the face and bloodied my lip. I never hit him back. I’d been taught to box – well – at summer camp in the Catskills, but I had no experience at real, street fighting, and it was clear that fighting back would have been pointless and left me worse than where I began. On each occasion I was forbidden by my parents, who had always disapproved of the friendship, from spending time with Kenny again. I would always, ultimately, disobey. Something about Kenny, in his fearless engagement with the world, drew me to him. Or I was an idiot. The jury is out.
"Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy…"
Another friend from that Far Rockaway apartment building was Robert Rosenberg, a short, wiry boy born to rule through his mouth and the manipulations of the might of others. Imagine Rahm Emanuel, or maybe his brother Ari, in a ten-year-old’s body. “Precocious” would sentimentalize him undeservedly. He was psychologically mature and clever beyond his years, and was certainly the only ten-year-old for whom Catch 22’s Yosarian became a personal mentor in recognizing and turning upon themselves life’s absurdities. That the other fourth graders and the lunch room servers with whom Robert shared and savored Yosarian’s delicious ironies had not read Catch 22 and could only stand in ignorant awe of Robert’s instructive references was of no consequence. Robert expected to be ahead of the game.
What Kenny Larson was to me physically, Robert was verbally and personally – notice of how people and life could be engaged through language and force of personality. When Robert broke the middle finger of his right – his writing – hand, he quite naturally exempted himself from the next day’s composition assignment. He had not, however, yet informed our teacher of the accident, and when asked, in the midst of class, why he was not writing along with the other students, only then provided the excuse. Challenged on the truth of his explanation (it was Robert, after all, and the teacher knew him) Robert held his cast out toward our teacher for all to see, with a smile.
It should be not very surprising, then, that Robert and Kenny and I sometimes hung out together, and we didn’t always need to range as far as the town of Far Rockaway. With expansive youthful imaginations, the immediate neighborhood was large enough. So there was the “haunted” three-story Victorian right next to our modern red brick apartment house, with which the act of bravery was to run up onto the porch and knock on the door. And there was the huge, vacant double lot, up an inclined approach from street level, right across Beach Channel Drive. The long-standing story was that older boys – probably 15-17 years old – had constructed a secret underground clubhouse somewhere on the lot. Previous efforts by the younger children to uncover it had failed. But on this one afternoon, Robert and Kenny and I were successful. As with most myths, the reality disappointed – it was only one room, and there was no Batmobile -but it was underground, where one could stand upright, and it had long escaped discovery.
We explored for a short while – there not being much there there – enjoyed the glow of success, and then decided to leave. Kenny climbed the ladder, made of tree limbs, to the surface, followed by Robert, after whom I took my first steps. But Kenny stepped in front of Robert at the entrance and pushed me back. I fell to the clubhouse floor. Kenny and Robert then – with Kenny in the lead, but Robert helping – took the foliage and branches that had served as cover for the hideaway and began to stuff them down the narrow opening. They then tossed matches in, to light the kindling on fire, followed by fire crackers, to intensify the assault – and the sense of my alarm. Each time I tried to ascend the ladder again they would push me back with branches or by dropping matches and firecrackers on me. I cannot even recall the fear I must have felt as the fire sprung up or the smoke spread. I was so bewildered by such an unexpected turn on me. Robert, too, apparently was soon struck by the quickly unfolding situation, as it became clear to him that they might actually kill me. The entrance now blocked by flaming branches, he began to scratch desperately at the earth around the roof of the clubhouse, until at last he opened a hole large enough to pull me through. Kenny stood back. I marched quickly away, stunned and reeking of flame and smoke. Robert trailed urgently at my shoulder, explaining himself in my ear. I left him behind.
AJA
Sam and Frieda Hinton in their Peridot, San Carlos Apache Reservation home, where mulitple members of several generations reside.
JD
Thelma Hinton in her kitchen with her grandson, Joshua Kinney, on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona.
JD
Today’s statement from Elouise Cobell, via the IndianTrust mailing list:
BROWNING, Mont., Feb. 13 — Elousie Cobell, the lead plaintiff in the 13-year-old class action lawsuit over the federal government’s mismanagement of Individual Indian Trust accounts, said today she was pleased that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has stated the Obama administration will try to settle the litigation.
In testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee Thursday, Salazar said he “will try to bring” the case “to conclusion.”
The secretary also said he was aware that two previous Interior secretaries had been held in civil contempt in the case.
Ms. Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, said that the more than 500,000 Indians covered by the lawsuit want to see the case resolved properly.
“We are happy that the Obama administration appears to be taking a positive view toward resolving our case,” Ms. Cobell said.
“The Secretary must understand that the Cobell litigation cannot be settled unless such settlement is fair, equitable, and in accordance with trust law.”
For background on the Individual Indian Money Trust Fund litigation, see The Trust Fund Litigations on the menu above.
AJA
If you haven’t yet noticed the widget (that’s what those boxes on the left and right margins are called) over on the left – the one that provides an RSS feed of headlines from Indian Country Today, probably the premier paper providing comprehensive news of, well – Indian country – today – check it out. There are, right now, three articles highlighted of real significance. On the negative side, we’ve go a piece about a, perhaps-now-to-change, sad lack of diversity in the presidential press pool. On the up side, there is an article about Jodi Archambault Gillette, the Standing Rock Sioux who has just been named by President Obama “one of three deputy associate directors of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. It is a historic appointment, as no other American Indian has ever held the position.” A third article is about Larry Ecohawk, a Pawnee, brother of John Ecohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, who has been named head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These are signs of hope.
AJA
Thelma Hinton works in her kitchen with her grandson, Joshua Kinney, on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona.
JD
The Atlantic Wire
