The Odd Thanksgiving

We've never been much for the myths of Thanksgiving and the mutual feasting by the Indians and Pilgrims giving thanks for making it through the early famine period of English settlement in Massachusetts.

Over the years of course the truth -- at least partially  -- wills out. We find the myth is a sad and damnable lie, that the relations between the English settlers and most of the native peoples of the land was anything but happy and cooperative, and that massacres were perpetrated with some regularity and glee. The settler were not peaceful, they were religiously intolerant, and their response to resistance by the original peoples was increasingly brutal slaughter.

Since I'm of both English and Irish descent (the German component apparently doesn't  register in my DNA) I've had some interest in the issue of English/Irish relations, including the many times the English and Irish went to battle with one another. In the 17th Century, there was a mass slaughter of Irish by the English under Cromwell, really quite terrible. This took place about 20 or 30 years after the Pilgrim settlements in New England, but Cromwell's practice in Ireland was not particularly different from the mass murder and destruction of Native peoples in Massachusetts and the rest of New England. Patterns were set, and they were maintained throughout the period of Anglo settlement of what became the USA. Mass murder, displacement, and seizure of lands and goods was policy. To an extent it still is.

But I wasn't particularly thinking about that over this year's Thanksgiving holiday. We live in Indian Country, and many of our friends and colleagues are Indians. Ms. Ché is an Indian after all and she's getting her creative writing degree at an Indian art school. We've wrassled with the history for a long time, and in the end we let the past be the past. Indians have their own reasons to mark the harvest season with thanks as they have done in their own way for many thousands of years, but the meaning of the American holiday is quite different for most Indians than many Anglos presume.

No, this year, I was thinking more of the fact that I've survived another year, and this year, at least since May, has been largely pain free. Believe me, I'm grateful for that. Ms. Ché is too. She's been through so much anguish over my condition. There were periods I could barely walk, other times I was in such intense pain and there was nothing she could do about it. This situation actually goes back quite a bit longer than the two or so years I've been diagnosed with RA. It's been tougher for her in some ways than for me.

At any rate, I had the last of four Rituxan infusion treatments this year on the 22 of November; went to the hospital in Albuquerque in the morning, got infused and was released in the early afternoon. I felt OK except I was tired, more tired than I'd been after previous infusions. At least there was no pain.

I had some things I wanted to do while I was in town, but found I was too tired to do it, so I went home. I discussed with Ms Ché that I wasn't really up for a home-prepared feast on Thanksgiving, and asked if she'd like to go out instead. She said, "Why don't we go out this evening? I know just the place." She mentioned a barbecue joint in the Sandia foothills we haven't been to in a couple of years. I said "sure!" and took a nap.

There was an odd chemical smell in the restaurant. I couldn't identify it, but it was noticeable -- except when we were eating, when I didn't notice it at all. When we got home, I felt fine and went to bed at my normal time.

I woke up about 2am. I was nauseous and very dizzy. The room was spinning around me, and I could barely stand up let alone locomote to the bathroom in case I had to expel my stomach contents. By holding on to walls and furniture, I managed to make it, and in the end, nothing came up from my craw.

I sat in the living room for the next couple of hours, head spinning, gorge rising and falling. Went back to bed, slept till about 1pm, and when I got up, I was still dizzy and nauseous, but not as bad.

I told Ms Ché what was going on. She said it might be due to that chemical smell whatever it was, though she said she felt no ill affects. Later, when I could I looked up side effects of Rituxan, and sure enough, dizziness and nausea were among them.

I had not experienced those symptoms after previous infusions. In this case, they seemed to be fading slowly, so I told Ms Ché I would let doctors know I had apparent side effects if they didn't fade by the weekend. I'm scheduled to see the eye doctor and rheumatologist on December 1 anyway.

So Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, was spent in a kind of WTF haze. We did enjoy some home made mac and cheese for Thanksgiving dinner, and we both reflected on what we're grateful for. The list is long and growing.

Of course we're grateful for each other. Every day together is amazing.

This morning, there's a movie on the TeeBee, "Silverado." It was filmed in the Santa Fe/Cochiti/Galisteo area. Galisteo is a few miles north of our place, and the primary location for "Silverado" was on what was then called the Cook Ranch. A western town set was built for the movie, and though it burned down in 1999 when some fireworks used in another movie started a range fire, the movie-town was rebuilt and is still frequently used for filming.

"Silverado" though was the first Big Picture filmed there --other filming location included the Eaves Movie Ranch south of Santa Fe on Highway 14, and at Tent Rocks on the Cochiti Pueblo even farther south of Santa Fe off I-25.

Most of the outdoor scenes feature the views of the mountains and rolling plains toward the west (Jemez Mountains), northeast (Sangre de Cristo Mountains) and south (Ortiz and Sandia Mountains). Practically every outdoor scene features an image we have in our mind's eye, as we pass through the Galisteo Basin, seeing the same views, every time we go to Santa Fe.

This is our home country, and we are extremely grateful to live here. For both of us, it evokes memories -- good memories -- of our more-or-less rural California childhoods. Ranches and farms were all around. Ranch and farm people were and are our family friends. Salt of the earth.

We spent many a year traveling all over the country for work and for pleasure, and we had an extraordinary time of it, but one place and one place only captivated us -- New Mexico. I think we first passed through -- it wasn't even really a visit -- on the way to someplace else (probably St. Louis) in 1983, and we said then, "Someday this will be our home."

And so it is. We can't think of anyplace we'd rather be.

It's full of Indians, and Hispanos and Anglos, sunsets that only happen in other people's imaginations, sunrises that penetrate the soul, challenges and tribulations that you never imagined you'd encounter, let alone get through, and endless spirit-lifting visions, people and experiences. There's no other place like it.

And if you want to see some of what we see practically every day, watch "Silverado" and pay particular attention to the outdoor scenes. Sometimes those sights are dotted with pronghorn antelope, and when they are, we take it as a sign. The antelope, which few people ever see in the West, are more common than deer or coyotes for us. They are our friends, and they, among others, our our spirit animals.

Make no mistake. "Silverado" is a rough story with a lot of violent and unhappy people living violent and unhappy lives -- if they survive. New Mexico is not for everyone, not at all.

The Cook Ranch, Galisteo Basin locations for "Silverado" filming, is no longer the Cook Ranch; it's now called Cerro Pelon ("Bald Hill") after a hill known locally as "The Wave" that's on the 22,000 acre Cerro Pelon Ranch now owned by fashion designer Tom Ford. He's got it listed for sale, if you're interested. Asking price $75 million, including the movie set. the Wave, a contemporary mansion, various outbuildings, a couple of pueblo ruins, and who knows what else. Cowboys negotiable.

The Wave

While all this strikes us as kind of silly, it too is part of our home place.

We're grateful to have a tiny portion of it as our own.

There's much else we are thankful for. Much, much else.

This year's Thanksgiving was a little odd and challenging. But we know where we are. Every day.

Thankful for....

This is a rough time for a lot of folks. It could be worse, and I'm thankful that it's not, at least not so far.

Of course this is a Day of Mourning for Native Peoples, who apart from sheer and bare survival, have too little to be thankful for. Nevertheless, not only are they still here, but they continue the struggle against the forces lined up to take from them what's left. Their bodies and their spirits are strong and millions of allies around the world stand with them. How can we not be thankful for that?

"Thanksgiving Day" is for the White Folk. It's a folk holiday for the Invaders, Colonists and Settlers, who see no reason for everyone else not to celebrate with them... after all, it could be worse! Ha ha.

Yea and verily, it could be worse.

From a personal point of view, I'm thankful that I'm still here, and that despite my increasingly frail physical state, I don't feel like my end is nigh. It may be, but the doctor I saw yesterday disputes it, and my treatments took a step up, both palliative and corrective. Because I have a "complicated" condition that can affect all kinds of organs besides my joints -- and is currently doing so -- it's going to be a challenge from here on in. Well, I've certainly faced those before and somehow got past the worst of them. How this one will go I can't know in advance, but I'm up for the challenge.

That has a lot to do with the Light of My Life, Ms Ché, with whom I just celebrated our 47th year of marriage, our 49th together. What a wonder. You think I'm not thankful for that? Oh, but I am. Nothing in my life prior to becoming Mr. Ché to the Missus came close to the feeling of love and devotion and mutual regard we have for one another, nothing over such a long stretch of time has given me so much education (let's say!), extraordinary commitment, and so much serenity. She continues on, despite her own conditions -- diabetes being the main one, the chronic settler-disease of so many Natives -- setting a pace and an example for the young ones at IAIA that is nothing short of amazing. She may be an Elder, but she out performs many of the young pups there, many of whom have become part of her "Posse."

Even our elder friends are astonished at her strength and endurance, but that's who she is, that's who she's always been. God Bless Her.

It's hard for me to express how thankful I am that we live in New Mexico rather than California. Every now and then I have a hankering to return, to see friends -- before they pass on -- and to sort through the things we left in storage there, selecting what few items we need to bring back to New Mexico with us and disposing of the rest. But each time I get to the point of scheduling a trip to CA, something comes up, and whoopsy, I can't go. And  here we go again. Something has come up -- RA lung disease in this case -- and it's not looking much like I'll be able to go back to California anytime soon.  if ever. C'est la vie.

I prefer New Mexico, out here in the country, in the middle of nowhere when it comes down to it, where there are more prairie dogs, cattle, and antelope than people, living in an old and beat up pioneer (settler!) adobe, with friends we can count on, salt of the earth neighbors -- who largely voted for Trump, and I'll try to get to that  -- but with whom we have little or no animosity, despite our Outlander/Outlandish California ways. This is our home place, and it really feels like it, and like we've always been here.

California had its merits to be sure, but for us it became almost unlivable.

The California we knew, Ms Ché and I, when we were young (she born into it, I being brought from Iowa when I was 9 months old) had a population barely 20% of the current number, actually closer to 15%. There were big cities, yes, but there was a lot of wide-open country too, and the seashores and mountain retreats were not the exclusive playgrounds of the rich. In those days, too, the rich -- or at least some of them -- had a social conscience which appears to have gone absent in the contemporary conception of California, despite occasional efforts at pretense.

Population density kept increasing. Ms Ché was born out in the country, but her family's place became surrounded by suburban development starting in the 1950s and was finally absorbed by the suburbs they'd held at bay.

I first lived in a little town north of Santa Barbara, a kind of idyllic place, full of flowers and surrounded by strawberry and broccoli and sugar beet fields, where everyone knew everyone else, and... well, things happened that I won't go into now. I'll only say that it wasn't easy for a single mother like my mother to cope with both making a living and looking after a squalling brat like I was, heh. Even though this was her home place from the time she was five years old. It wasn't easy, and she did what she had to to get by and get along.

That meant moving to Los Angeles, albeit suburban Los Angeles, out in the San Gabriel Valley, which was at that time, mid 1950s, still out in the country, and it was filled with orange groves. For a little while more, anyway.

Sam Shepard wrote about the transformation of the San Gabriel Valley in his trilogy of Family Plays, "True West," "Buried Child," and "Curse of the Starving Class." It was the strangest thing. I didn't know what his background was, that he'd been raised on a country place in San Dimas, a few miles from my home(s) in Baldwin Park and then La Puente. And he lived through the traumatizing transformation of these little towns and outposts in the Valley into tracts and tracts of post-war suburban housing. And that's a big part of what he was writing about in those plays. I didn't know about that when I first encountered "Curse of the Starving Class" -- I just knew that I immediately related to the characters and the story. Oh yes, I knew these people. They were neighbors, friends, people down the street and across from my school. I knew them well. And when I later worked on a production of "True West," it was as if I were being transported back to where I once lived, hard against the San Jose Hills (I think they have a different name now, "South Hills" or something) which was still very wild country when I was a lad. He lived hard against the San Gabriel Mountains -- which formed the stunning view (on clear days) out my living room window eight miles to the north. Oh my yes. I could feel the connection but at the time, I didn't know what it was, and when I mentioned it during the production, no one could understand what I meant because they hadn't been there and didn't know. Those who lived through it, as I did and Sam Shepard did, knew. But for others, it was like peering into a telescope at an alien land populated by strange and incomprehensible entities.

I'm thankful that I eventually came to understand Shepard's understanding of what we in our separate little child-worlds knew for a fact was true.

But I'm also thankful that I've been able to find a whole lot of documentation about my family and ancestors that I knew little or nothing about when I was young, partly because either my parents didn't know much either, or if they did know, they didn't want me to know. My father told a grand fib about our ancestors which I believed -- why not? -- until I found out the truth (only a few years ago) which was quite different. In the process of research, I was contacted by a cousin I didn't know I had who corrected some of my information and shared some of her experiences, including the bogus story my father told me about our ancestors. Her mother, my father's younger sister, had told her essentially the same story of prominent Irish-American ancestors who were pivotal in the Revolutionary War, blah, blah, blah, and how we were their direct descendants.

Only the fact is, we aren't. We couldn't be. They emigrated from Ireland in the 1600s. Our direct ancestors arrived in or about 1850 according to the records. The best I could come up with -- and the information is spotty -- is that we and they have common ancestors back in the 1600s and before in Ireland, but who they were and how we are (or aren't) related is a mystery we may never solve. When I told her that, she seemed momentarily nonplussed, but when I explained that the story we'd been told could not possibly be true, but the actual story (so far as I could piece it together) was if anything even more interesting, she seemed to be mollified. Somewhat.

Then it got more interesting for me. I thought my mother was of Irish ancestry -- she wasn't sure but she had red hair like me -- and that therefore I was probably 3/4 Irish and 1/4 German (through my father's German American mother). Turns out no. My mother was actually of British ancestry all the way down. Her father, her biological father, may have had some Scottish heritage, but that's uncertain. At any rate, on his mother's side, she was every bit the English dame. On my mother's mother's side, all of her ancestors were of British origin, going back to the deepest mists of time, and most of the early ones arrived in America if not on the Mayflower (apparently some might have), then shortly afterwards. Oh.

There is also an Indian Princess connection on my mother's side. Yes, she's really called "Princess" *Snowflower* but whether she was actually an Indian or not is subject to some dispute. The story that she was an Indian Princess is told in great detail in lore and legend, but those who dispute it say the tale was made up in the 19th century years after her death, and is not backed up by fact. It was just a romantic something or other to pass the time away.

People did that in those days. As was demonstrated by my father's family's tale of colonial ancestors.

And so, while I probably know far more "truth" about our ancestors than my parents did, there's a whole lot I don't know and may never know. That's quite all right!

Trump voters, yes. Let's consider that a bit. One of the established myths of the (s)election was that "rural, white male voters" were the deciding factor, and it was the failure of Hillary to appeal to that constituency on economic or other terms that lost her the presidency.

It's a convenient myth, but I think it's wrong. First of all, there aren't enough rural voters, period. The United States has long been 80% urban and 20% rural -- just about the same split as in New Mexico, btw.

[Note: I got my county's demographics wrong, thanks to misremembering an outdated City Data chart. According to the Census Bureau, my county reports  a decline in population from 2010 -- from 16,383 to 15,485 in 2015. The bureau also reports that 90% of the remaining population state that they are white, while 42% state that they are Hispanic. 53% say that they are non-Hispanic white. There are 4.2% Native, 2.2% black and .05% Asian. 2.8% claim two or more races. Median household income is $34,720, poverty rate, 27.6% in 2015.

My rural county, like many in New Mexico, is 70% Hispanic *mostly citizens*, not Anglo at all, and many of the other rural counties in the United States are nowhere near as white/Anglo male as the current mythos of the (s)election makes them out to be.

My rural county in New Mexico is relatively poor -- as it has always been. People get by however they can, and that can take some clearly or potentially illegal routes. Oh well. If there are no other viable economic activities available, then that's what people will do. Too bad, so sad. The primary economy here is based on ranching and farming, and there are a few very wealthy and prominent "ricos" in the population. They are mostly Democrats. Some of them are High Party functionaries, former electeds and so forth.

On the other hand, most of the party registration in the county is Republican or Libertarian. Gary Johnson, for example, got 11% of the county vote. Trump got 60%, and Hillary just under 30%. That's pretty much what I expected.

So why would a largely poor 70% Hispanic rural county, vote 60% Trump and 11% Johnson (I was one of 66 voters who voted for Stein in the General, whoo-hoo!)

Isn't it obvious?

This is what the myth-makers of the Rural White Rural voter revolt typically ignore: what the majority of the people in my rural county want and wanted was to be left alone, first, and not to have to pay for other people's well being -- or incarceration -- when they can barely get by on their own. Hello? Isn't this obvious, for criminy sake?

Their racial/ethnic origin (ie: the much derided "identity politics") doesn't make nearly as much difference as is widely believed under the economic circumstances for rural voters in general, which for too many, for too long has been a form of imposed poverty and extraction of any surplus to pay for the well being of others (not just welfare recipients, oh no) and the incarceration of their friends and family. Hello?

That's not to say that racism has nothing to do with it, because for some it does. Of course it does. This is America, racist at its foundation, racist to its core. But that's not the sole or the chief reason people voted for Trump or Johnson over Clinton or Stein in my county. I would extrapolate that to many other counties as well.

It wasn't primarily racism at all. It was much more that Democratic political and economic policies, whatever their intention, simply made life harder for people on the margins and in rural areas with little or no mitigating effort or even mitigating thought for that matter. Trump and Johnson at least said they wanted to lighten that burden. Ok, then. Easy to understand, no?

But even if every rural voter voted for Trump or Johnson, there wouldn't be enough of them to cancel out an urban vote for Clinton.

Not only are not all rural voters white and male, not nearly all the rural voters voted for Trump or Johnson, not even close. Except, interestingly, in those counties in Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest where -- at least initially -- more votes were recorded than were cast, and other peculiarities and anomalies, such as 90% or greater turnouts and so forth were reported. There "whiteness" -- even if only phantoms -- may have been a determining factor.

The myth of what happened is false, through and through, but it's the Narrative that's being sold to Americans in order to explain how Trump "won" when in fact he may not have.

Jill Stein is raising money to challenge the outcome in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, simply because there are too many questionable anomalies to accept without question. Good on her. Somebody has to do it, and according to what I read last night, she's already raised enough money to begin the challenge process in those three states. Whether it will change the results is highly doubtful, largely because there is no way to be sure the counts or recounts are accurate. In many cases there simply aren't any reliable audit or checking mechanisms -- and that is by design. Our voting and tabulating systems are too often grossly and deliberately opaque. There's no way to know for sure whether the outcomes reflect the will of the voters or not.

But if Jill does challenge the outcomes in those states, and the issue is aired thoroughly, regardless of the ultimate result, then I will be thankful that it has been brought to public attention once again that too many voting systems in this country cannot be veritfied and because of it, Americans cannot be assured the outcome is actually what they voted for.

This has been true for a very long time, and it's long past time for it to change. But given the way the outcome seems destined to go, the situation is likely to get worse, not better.

So. We'll see. It's going to be an interesting few months, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, I'm thankful for the Water Protectors in North Dakota who will not give up the fight. I'm thankful for the people in the streets who refuse to accept the results of the (s)election without question or resistance. I'm thankful in fact to be living in such interesting times, even if there isn't a lot I can do any more to change things.

Genocide, Massacres, Police Violence, and The Cult

We've made it to Thanksgiving Day, 2014.

Thanksgiving celebrates genocide. I don't know when I first came to the realization that that's what this holiday represents, but it was most likely during the Civil Rights era when so much of the American mythos was put to the test.

We had been lied to all our lives in other words, lies and damned lies about the past that made it out to have been a struggle won by the righteous. Well, no. Not so. The righteous continued to struggle, nothing had been won but a sham, it was all false -- and how many millions had been slaughtered and enslaved in the process?

How many millions? The mythos didn't know. The mythos didn't care.

We were to believe that's done is done, and we can't go back and we can't fix it. White folks are good and true and righteous, everyone else is a savage or suspect or unworthy.

That's the story we were told, but I didn't believe it from a very early age because I spent a good portion of my early childhood among people of color. They weren't called this at the time, however. They were called Greasers, Beaners and Niggers, but when you're a kid, those words don't necessarily carry the sting they do when you get older. They're just words, and they don't really have anything to do with people. It takes a while to learn that words like that can hurt badly.

I lived the first ten years of my life among people of color and I didn't become socialized to the fear of the Other that seems to influence so much of world view of white folks to this day.

It didn't occur to me that there anything at all to fear from brown folk and black folk, but I knew from a very early age that there was plenty to fear from white folk. The ones in charge, you know? Some of them were purely evil in so many ways that you had to be on the alert all the time -- or you might not survive.

We, the children, black, brown, and white, all seemed to be aware of who we had to watch out for and be afraid of, and it was always white kids and white adults in positions of power. Always. They could hurt you, and they did.

But the mythos says no, white folks were kindly and generous and righteous, and I knew that some of them were, but when they were kindly and generous and righteous, so often they wound up almost as persecuted and disparaged as black and brown folk were.

This was, after all, the era of Red Baiting and worse. Oh, much worse.

Thanksgiving celebrates the genocide of the Indians by these righteous, kind and generous white folks. They did their duty. They cleansed first the eastern seaboard, then the rest of the country of the taint of the Savages. They brought their slaves over from Africa to serve their needs and demands. They fought one another and they killed whatever they designated as the Other with impunity.

The Other scares the holy shit out of them. Murderous rampages are the result. It has ever been thus, but if you're not socialized to fear the Other, as I wasn't, you run the risk of being designated the Other and being rampaged against yourself.

How well I know. How well so many Americans know.

Police violence is a direct descendant of the genocidal, massacring, murderous rampages that made this land what it is, that we celebrate at Thanksgiving.

I've been studying police violence for decades and have written extensively about it. It has become the central social issue of the American people this year thanks to an appalling spate of police killings, so many of them driven by nothing but stark terror of the Other, that has led to the deaths of hundreds, nay more than a thousand, many of them innocent of wrongdoing, this year and every year. People are killed by police because the police in so many cases are terrified of their own shadows, specters they've created in their own minds.

It's insane -- just as the genocidal, massacring, murderous rampages that created this country were.

Recently I came across a video at the Police One site that actually explains how policing has become such a perverted killer culture, and why so many get killed by police year in and year out, and nothing is done about it.

I posted the video here as an example of how police are trained and brainwashed to regard certain designated Others as existential threats fit for nothing but killing. And how the police are trained and brainwashed to believe that killing the Other is their highest accomplishment.

This is psychological abuse of the highest order and this is what leads to scenes like the killing of Tamir Rice in a park, the killing of Michael Brown in the street, the killing of James Boyd on a hillside, and the killing of so many others, at least 1001 since January 1, 2014, according to the tracking site, "Killed by Police."

An analysis of this insane training video is, I believe, long overdue, for this trainer, (Lt Col) Dave Grossman, had been spreading his theories and philosophy of "Killology" among police and military recruits unchallenged for a very long time.

From his perspective, a perspective shared by police and military alike, the highest accomplishment of a police officer is to kill -- to kill the designated Other, with neither remorse nor regret. According to Grossman, police are sheepdogs, the Other is the Wolf -- a veritable demon -- whose death at the hands of police is the purpose of the sheepdog's life.

When Brave Officer Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown on Canfield Drive that hot August noon, he was fulfilling the purpose of his life, just as Brave Officer Lowman Loehmann fulfilled the purpose of his life when he shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park a few days ago.

That is what they are trained to believe their purpose in life is: to kill, without conscience or remorse, whatever is deemed a threat to the lives of the Good People, the Sheep as it were, that sheepdogs -- the Police and the military -- are assigned to "protect."

But what happens to these theories when the sheepdogs become the threat?

Who do the sheepdogs work for, anyway? It's not the sheep, that's for sure. Who or what are they protecting?

I resisted the cult and the theories that this insane freak (Lt Col) Dave Grossman propounds, but when I realized that his theories are largely responsible for the huge number of killings and other abuse by police in this country, and they probably form the psychological basis of so much of the killing by Our Valiant Forces abroad, and that it all amounts to a secular cult of killing, I realized I'd better take a closer look.

But the fact is, I don't want to look closer. It's vile. What Grossman propounds is clearly an effective means to warp and perverting the minds of police and military, too.

How to corral and overcome it becomes a fundamental question for the survival of the people who face this deadly police culture every day.

That's what the protests against police violence and murder all over the country and spreading around the  world are all about.

Overcoming the madness.

I give thanks that so many people are waking up to the necessity to overcome this madness, to end the slaughter, to curb the police.

But the struggle isn't done, but more and more police seem to be waking up, too.

Let's hope so.

Thanksgiving

Norman Rockwell's famous "Freedom From Want" illustration from 1943. Part of the "Four Freedoms" series. Needless to say, for many-- or most -- Americans in 1943, Thanksgiving wasn't quite like that...

There's one of those posts over at Alternet that lambastes the Europeans -- specifically the English settlers in North America -- for genocide of the Indians, a genocide that was the impetus for the First Thanksgiving that is still (apparently) given much play in elementary schools across this broad and fertile land.

The genocide was real, and it's still not really taught or even talked about much in schools, I'm told. The preferred way to deal with it is still to claim that the Indians "died out" due to lack of resistance to European diseases. That's true too as far as it goes. Many tribes perished en masse from disease. Many others still struggle with the twin scourges of Native Peoples, alcoholism and diabetes, both of which were introduced by and have been idly perpetuated by the dominant Euro-culture.

However, something keeps astonishing me about the Anglo/Euro-American view of American Indians, and that is the strange belief that the Indians have been all but wiped out entirely, that they are "gone, though not forgotten." The internalized belief is that the genocide -- however it was accomplished -- was essentially complete, and now there are almost no Indians left.

What nonsense. I know too many people who sincerely believe this though, who assure themselves  that they don't have to concern themselves with Indians any more because there aren't any left -- or at least that there aren't enough of them left to bother with.

But scholars suggest that there are more American Indians alive now than there ever were, and for the most part, native tribes are holding their own if not flourishing. Tribal living has been severely -- and probably irreparably -- disrupted for many Natives, but there is no lack of Natives in this country. Many are wise, some are militant, all of the American Indians I know are creative. The stereotypes from the past are still abroad in the land, of course, but the reality mocks the stereotypes.

It's a reality worth celebrating, and yes giving thanks for. Without a Native presence, America would be much worse off than it is.

Moving from California to New Mexico, we knew we were moving from a society in which the very concept of "Native" is for all intents and purposes alien (though there be no lack of Indians in California, don't get me wrong, they are very numerous) to one in which Native Peoples, society and culture are the foundation of everything else. Indians are not "gone" from New Mexico by any means. They are everywhere. The 19 current Pueblos are only part of the picture of Native Living in New Mexico. The ruins which dot the state, some of them not far from our own home here, demonstrate that the Indians of New Mexico and round about were "civilized" (in terms that Spanish and Anglos can understand) from a very early date, and modern day Pueblos continue that society in an unbroken line from those early days. Scholars are said to be still mystified by the "Anasazi" > Pueblo connection ("if there is one") but the Pueblo Peoples aren't. They understand it fully, and they are happy to let the scholars know if they are interested, but often they are not because they are more interested in fostering their own pet theories.
 
The Navajo and Apache Peoples who have lived among the Pueblo Peoples for many generations -- and have had more than a little conflict with them over the centuries, let's not fool ourselves -- have a distinct life-style and culture and language that is not that of the Pueblos, and most people in New Mexico understand that, while many outside the state don't. Navajo may have the dominant numbers and may hold far more land than other tribes, but they do not rule Indian society, nor is their culture the dominant Indian culture. It is one of several. (Navajo and Apache are considered "new-comers" -- and invaders -- by the Pueblos, because they only started arriving from the north in the 1400's, not that long before the Spanish incursions from the south.)

The Kiowa and Comanche Peoples who once raided and preyed on the Pueblos of New Mexico from the north and east are now pretty much integrated into Indian life in the region and many have become part of Pueblo communities. There still might be a sense of rivalry or even animosity from time to time, but for the most part, no. In fact, it appears that Indians of All Nations are welcome among the established tribes, and together they form a huge part of the artistic and cultural richness of New Mexico. It's impossible to imagine New Mexico without an enormous cultural, social, and artistic influence by Native Peoples.

Of course what I know about these things is limited. My ignorance is profound, as it will no doubt be for the rest of my life. I may have lived among Indians for most of my existence, but I still feel like I "know" next to nothing -- and in many respects, that's as it should be. I'm still finding out about my own people, after all,  and the lies they've told over the generations.

We'll have a modest Thanksgiving this afternoon -- partly to acknowledge the many blessings we've had over the years, and to give thanks to the Spirits for all of it, good and bad, as we have stumbled along our complicated path of life. Myself, I once was convinced I wouldn't -- couldn't -- live past 30, and here I am well into my 60's, puttering along, amazed at every day. Astonished. And often delighted.

The United States has many sins to atone for, as each of us as individuals have our own catalog of sins  to expiate. At the same time, we have so many blessings to be grateful for.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving! Then gird thy loins, there is so much more to do...;-)