Existential themes
Extinction Revisited: Cultural Annihilation
It is as if I am startled awake, unable to equilibrate, in the fuzzy state when you weigh what you know to be real in the conscious world against the vivid and intense events of your dreams. In the past few months, what I thought I knew about late 19th and early 20th century California history has been abruptly jostled and rearranged. The well-known horror story of cultural subjugation has become magnified and illuminated. The images flit before me like an old film reel that plays over and over again.
I was staying in Santa Monica several weeks ago on a meandering road of older elegant homes and carefully manicured gardens. It was quiet, almost museum-like. A resident showed me the thick trunked olive tree in his garden, grey, wrinkled, and massive, like the leg of an elephant. An immense branch was lopped off to make room for an addition to the house. The tree must have been beautiful once, now a faint echo of the vast Spanish land grant, the Rancho Boca, where it grew in bountiful orchards stretching along the hills and canyons to the Pacific Ocean. An elderly lemon tree nearby had been so heavily trimmed it looked more like a modern sculpture. The nearby creek, once wild, ran through a concrete culvert.
It was early in the morning and trucks of all kinds were arriving up and down the streets. Spanish-speaking drivers and passengers alighted to service the gardens and homes. Several pick-up trucks parked near the site of a new home under construction. The workers milled about on the sidewalk, relaxed, calling to one another, laughing and chatting before the start of their day. As I approached, a workman stepped off the sidewalk, motioning his coworkers to follow suit, slightly anxious and deferential, almost bowing. I felt a pang of intense discomfort; there was plenty of room for all of us. I greeted the men in Spanish, said something about it being unnecessary to move, and walked on.
This was part of Alta California before Mexico ceded the land to the U.S. Why should I, a white woman who can lay no historic claim to this land, be accorded such respect? These men should be living here and everyone should be speaking Spanish. Then again, the Native Americans should still hunt in the canyons and fish in the ocean. Who are we to own this abundance and beauty and remake it into our private reserve, employing descendants of the former residents as servants?
In Monterey I visited the Cooper-Molera Adobe, a stately and unadorned home from the 1800’s, with a view of the bay and a series of courtyards where espaliered fruit-trees and blooming wisteria vied for space. The Coopers held a land grant in what was then Alta California. Their property stretched over 6,000 acres from Big Sur to Sonoma. In the dining room opposite the heavily polished table I was haunted by the photo of a 16-year old indentured Ohlone servant, Lazaria, who looks out at us with startling matter-of-factness and a hint of questioning. She is buttoned into a high-necked fitted white blouse and sports a long polka dot skirt, poised mid-scrub by a wooden washtub and metal washboard. She looks transported from a vastly different world and appears weary, weary in a way that no one that age should know. The plaque next to her photo tells the visitor that Ohlones, mostly children, were often kidnapped and sold into servitude over the course of nearly a century, and that Ohlone Indian servants were common in households such as the Coopers.
In 1863, when Lazaria was 17, the Emancipation Proclamation led to her freedom. Did she still have a family to return to? Did they remember her and she them? Was she able to speak to the Ohlone in her native tongue any longer? Had she forgotten her Ohlone name? Did she know the stories and the songs? Having been inculcated with her masters’ manners, culture, and rules, what remained?
Lazaria reminds me of the before and after photos of Carlisle Indian School students in a biography written for youth about Jim Thorpe, the Native American athletic superstar who attended Carlisle in the early 1900’s. * Jim Thorpe went on to become a football phenom, an Olympic gold medalist in the pentathlon and decathlon, competing in sports he barely trained in, as well as a basketball and baseball player. He was one of the few students to thrive at Carlisle. Over 39 years around 12,000 children from 141 tribes attended Carlisle; only eight percent ever graduated, twenty percent ran away, and 181 children died while at the school.
The photos rattle me profoundly. In one, three Sioux boys stare unflinchingly at the camera, two with a tall eagle feather in their long hair, all wearing moccasins, an animal hide over the shoulders of the boy who is standing and an ornately worked blanket over his arm. The photographer, John Choate, may have used Indian props and costumes, but there is no denying that the boys are beautiful and self-possessed. The photo of the boys three years later is in such extreme contrast, I have to study the facial features to convince myself they are the same children. Now clothed in drab, snug, uncomfortable looking uniforms and sturdy military-like shoes, the boys sport short hair and no outward sign of their culture. Ironically, the painted background behind one boy depicts what looks to be a vase of pheasant feathers that sprout up behind his head, a sad relic of some dignified past.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/photos-before-and-after-carlisle
At the Carlisle boarding school, military autocrat Colonel Richard Henry Pratt would purge the children of all that was Indian and remake them into his own image, literally beating the Indian out of them. He lured and forever damaged a generation that was destined to live in a nightmarish limbo, unable to return to their families, often incapable of speaking their own tongues, unfamiliar with their heritage, sporting new names, and never white enough. It was a deal with the devil that continues to this day.
In that same book, a photo depicts what occurred all around Jim Thorpe’s family farm, the melee that ensued when a cannon was fired on April 22, 1889 in Oklahoma marking the free for all for any white settler wishing to stake out a homestead on what had been Indian territory. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/native-history-land-rush-for-oklahoma-indian-territory-begins-zyaP2-UBRE2EQitF83mnrw/
Already displaced once from their ancestral lands, countless tribes had settled in Oklahoma, only to have the rug pulled out from under them yet again. In the photo, as far as the eye can see, white men on horseback stampede forward amidst clouds of dust. The picture makes me downright queasy.
Last spring we visited Old Town in San Diego. I have always been entranced by carefully preserved historic settings; it is the closest I can come to time travel. I followed the rhythmic clanging of metal on metal to the open barn where the blacksmiths hammered super-heated orange metal into submission, bellows pumping and coals glowing. Next door, I wandered into the weathered wooden gracious Cosmopolitan Hotel where a grandfather clock and flowered wallpaper graced the lobby and I yearned to check in. I admired the imposing dark bar in the hotel saloon and could almost hear the clinking of glasses and laughter. Outside again, I strolled down a path to a small adobe building, tucked in like an afterthought, an Indian market. Inside it was quiet, dark, and cool, lined with rugs, jewelry, sculptures, and baskets. A bear of a young man was wrapping gemstones in silver wire, spinning whimsical jewelry webs. He continued wrapping as we chatted and paused to show me his creations. He crafted much of the silver jewelry in the store. He told me about the willow leaf baskets woven by his people, the Kumeyaay, on the reservation where he lives, not far away. He never charges for the stones in his wrapped jewelry because, he says, they come from the earth and the earth gives them to us for free. Now nothing is free. All of Old Town, indeed all of San Diego County, was the land of the Kumeyaay for 12,000 years. The Spanish robbed the Kumeyaay of their land in 1776, the Mexicans in 1810, and the Americans in 1846. http://www.kumeyaay.info/history/
In a recurring dream, I have lost all sense of proportion and am looking from the edge of a mesa into a deep golden red canyon somewhere in the Southwest. A monolithic thin rock spire rises from the canyon floor to an impossible height, almost to the top of the cliff. I am terrified and awed. It is familiar and fantastical. All these years later I discover it is Spider Rock at Canyon de Chelly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyon_de_Chelly_National_Monument#/media/File:A095,_Canyon_de_Chelly_National_Monument,_Arizona,_USA,_Spider_Rock,_2004.jpg)
What had I really digested over all the years I’d studied anthropology and Native American history? My parents revered Native American culture, art, and handicrafts. They set aside small amounts of money until they could purchase a bowl, a basket, a Kachina. We treated these items with the greatest respect, placing them carefully around our home. My mother adored Native American jewelry and studied how it was made, marveling over the techniques and attempting to replicate them in some of her own gold and silver smithing. My brother and I had multi-colored god’s eyes prominently displayed in our rooms. When I was 14, I accompanied my father on a trip to learn from a Navajo medicine man. My travels to the southwest left an indelible impression on me of what seemed to be another country, a world that was not mine and one I could not fathom. The bleakness and poverty on the reservations was overwhelming; all the fry bread in the world could not alter the oppressive miasma.
As an undergraduate, I was simultaneously fascinated and anguished by the account of Ishi who emerged stunned and emaciated from the California forest around Mt. Lassen once all his Yahi tribe had, after 44 years in hiding, finally perished. Somewhere in the historic atrocities I had missed the Indian bounties set by the settlers pouring in with the California gold rush: 50 cents per scalp and 5 dollars per head. Ishi lived at the Museum of Anthropology on the U.C. San Francisco campus under the care of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. I visited the Ishi exhibit regularly in the Kroeber Anthropology Museum at U.C. Berkeley and tried to make sense of the last chapter of Ishi’s life. In graduate school I learned about the dire health of Native Americans who suffer disproportionately from lower life expectancy, alcoholism, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and homicide. The patterns continue year after year, over decades, over centuries. Will they ever fully heal, recover, and ascend?
Something has changed. It is as if I put on glasses and can see clearly for the first time, took off gloves and can feel. I am profoundly shaken. There is no return.
*Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team by Steve Sheinkin 2017 NY: Roaring Brook Press
