quote: reparation

(This book, a sort of extended essay on an outsider's enchantment with the state of New Mexico. This chapter, an effort to understand the deep value of the state's "Indianness" - his term - tragic history included. At this point, he's talking about the Long Walk, the forced relocation of the Navajo people from their lands to Bosque Redondo in 1864. But by the end of the quote: I'm wondering if anybody else has ever suggested such an appropriate - and completely doable! - action as this writer does. And if not, why in the world not? Am I just lacking in information? Does it take a New-York-via-California transplant to make the argument this land has been crying out for, these centuries? Come on, New Mexico: why?)

"As part of General Carleton's plan to bring down the Dine', army troops under the command of the legendary Kit Carson destroyed some five thousand peach trees on Dine' lands. Before the conflict began, Carson had been a longtime friend of the Indians. Dee Brown states that of all the atrocities committed by Carson against his old friends, the one act for which they never forgave him was the destruction of their peach trees. To Carson the trees were simply a component of the Dine' economy, one that, ironically, had been introduced to the Dine' by European settlers. To the Dine', for whom the origin of the acquisition mattered less than its essential nature, the trees were sacred. Lupita Johnson, a Dine' of the Towering House Clan and a ranger in Arizona's Canyon de Chelly (where the peach trees were destroyed), turns to white legend for a comparison to what her people suffered when they lost their trees, their land, their way of life. It was, she says, the equivalent of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden...

The native peoples of this continent continue to confound those of us who found them here when we arrived...Partly we are disconcerted because we know in our hearts that our victory over the Indian, if that is what it was, had nothing to do with moral or cultural superiority; victory, hollow thing, was an accident of gunpowder. Invented in the Far East, introduced into Europe during the thirteenth century by a Christian friar, it came to America in the guns of the conquerors. Had it travelled instead in the opposite direction, across the Bering Strait and down the North American continent, the Queen of England today might be Sioux, the Washington Redskins might be known as the Nanticoke Savage Whites.

But mostly, I believe, we are deeply troubled because the Indian reminds us of the monstrous truth in our past, which we have tried to hide behind the obscuring mists of myth and legend and which we continue to deny as vehemently as Germans and Russians until recently denied the truth of theirs. Our self-deception will continue to torment us until we bring it into the open, make it the centerpiece of a great national discussion, seek reconciliation with the Indian, and come face-to-face at last with this long-repressed but central fact of our history. Perhaps we can begin by planting ten million peach trees as memorials to the ten million or so Indians who were killed in order to secure this continent for whites. However we proceed, the walk will be long. But it will certainly be worth taking."

-- Robert Leonard Reid, America, New Mexico