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Introduction. Rebuilding Nations and the Indian Problem: Why Does It Matter?
- University of Arizona Press
- Chapter
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3 For people unfamiliar with the West, traveling there is an experience, and you will always remember your first time. If you live there, you have learned to adjust to it like indigenous people. The West is a vast region of seventeen states, including Alaska and Hawaii, with barren desert areas in the Southwest. The barrenness is disassociated from the eastern deepgreen Black Hills, for example, making the West a contradiction of this and that. In its own way, the desert colors resonate with their own beauty. As George Lee, a Navajo, described his homeland of the Four Corners area, “My spiritual eyes are taught while gazing upon the vastness of the endless desert vision. So unending is the vista that the supple curve of Mother Earth’s horizon heals the hungering heart. Always, as far as memory goes, this land has been one of everlasting enchantment.”1 Native love for the earth runs deep, permeating the souls of the indigenous. Indians are of the natural world. Four main deserts exist in the United States, and all of them are in the West—Sonoran, Mohave, Chihuahuan, and Great Basin, including 20 smaller ones within the four larger ones. Attached to the Southwest is the Basin area, the West Coast, Pacific Northwest, and Columbia Plateau. The Northern, Central, and Southern Plains span like a mighty northsouth corridor bordered by prairie lands that touch the great Mississippi River. This broad area of nearly 502,000 square miles has been called the “Big Empty” by Douglas Hurt.2 This is the vast West, home to many— humans, flora, and fauna—and demanding of all. The seemingly near emptiness becomes endless space, and perceptions of distance are lost in Introduction Rebuilding Nations and the Indian Problem Why Does It Matter? 4 · Introduction the vast West. Distortion occurs, and one has to understand nature’s way in order to obtain the water that is necessary for living.3 The human body consists of 65–75 percent water, requiring eight eight-ounce glasses, or four liters, every twenty-four hours. Green is alien in the desert, except for knots of pine forests climbing and resting on mountainsides, like in the Black Hills, and other tree types in various parts of the Southwest, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Noted Laguna writer Leslie Silko described the Southwest through the eyes of one of her characters in her renowned novel Ceremony: “‘This is where we come from. This sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. This earth keeps us going.’ He took off his hat and wiped his forehead on his shirt. ‘These dry years you hear some people complaining, you know, about the dust and the wind, and how dry it is. But the wind and the dust, they are part of life too, like the sun and the sky. You don’t swear at them. It’s people, see. They’re the ones. The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave.’”4 The earth becomes a teacher, a harsh one that instructs human beings and other life in lessons of survival. One might call this a difficult love, a love for such a land. In this earth’s bosom, the elements allow no escape. One only learns to cope with periodic rains that risk the danger of flash floods, winter’s plunging cold temperatures at night, and the almost unbearable heat of the warmest summer days. In the West, the plains spiral up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer and the air is dry, waiting for a cool rainstorm on the horizon. In the Desert Southwest, summer temperatures can soar up to 115 degrees or more of pure heat. The ovenlike sun is ubiquitously tormenting and intensely penetrating. Other parts of the West are equally demanding in their own way, and people learn how to adapt, which is a main reason for this book. In 1881 the legendary Lakota leader Sitting Bull sat on the ground with fur trader Gus Hedderich. The great war leader squinted his eyes while meticulously studying the trader’s weathered face and the steady rhythmic movement of his leathered-skinned hand. Then, Sitting Bull drew his name, a picture of a buffalo sitting. The trader drew a sitting buffalo and then wrote “Sitting Bull” under the picture. In the next several minutes, the trader patiently taught Sitting Bull how to write his name in English. In that pivotal moment, Sitting Bull...