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This afternoon I am watching the documentary Broken Rainbow, the story of the government-imposed forcible relocation, in the '70's, of half of the Navajo tribe, from Hopi lands where they had lived since antiquity.
"There is no word for relocation in the Navajo language," the narrator says. "To relocate is to disappear and never be seen again."
The ties to the land, of the Navajo and the Hopi tribes, are an intricate part of their culture. The land is sacred to them. Unlike the white man, accustomed to seeing land as an apparently limitless resource.
Why the forced relocation? The usual reasons: white man's greed for the minerals and oil under the land. The radioactive waste left behind will remain on the reservation for 80,000 years. Meanwhile many of the people who worked in the mines are now dying of radiation poisoning. People who built their dwellings from the irradiated rocks are dying of cancer. Children are born with deformities at twice the national average.
Between 1 and 3% in royalties were "awarded" for rights to extract from the land, but whoever receives them, the majority of the people on reserve live lives of abject poverty. Those relocated off the reservation fare even worse.
Beautiful people of the rainbow,
you hold sacred
the red lands
under your feet.
Your prayers rise up
in sacred fire
to the god of the mountains,
high, where the white bird flies.
Land of star-gazers,
you have attuned your heartbeat
to the rhythm of Mother Earth,
who sings to you.
To see through your eyes,
a people of peace,
is to see a world
in balance.
Your early chiefs drew
a blueprint of life
based on ancient ways.
You lived as caretakers
of Mother Earth
for a thousand years.
How you must weep
at the corporate blueprint,
which lays waste your homeland,
and then moves on,
unsated.
Your hogan, you tell us,
itself confers a blessing.
"It wraps its arms around us
and says "you are home'."
"Washington says 'Move' "
the old woman weeps,
"and we must move,
away from our sheep,
who are better than money,
to a land of bills and costs,
when we have no way
to make a living.
I cry for my sheep.
I ache for my homeland."
As a child of the '50's,
I watched the Hollywood movies,
bugles blowing, flags waving,
clapped as "the good guys"
arrived on horseback.
For that, though I knew no better,
I am now
so ashamed.
Once I sat through a western
in an old theatre packed with
First Nations,
and listened to them guffawing
at Hollywood's version of history.
I was still young, then,
but recognized enough
skewed storyline
to be embarrassed
inside my white skin.
Today we saved
a baby starling,
fallen from its nest,
cheeping shrilly
with terror,
not yet able to fly.
We climbed up and
returned him to his nest.
Just one small
next-right-thing,
against all the injustice,
all the suffering and tears,
all the wrongdoing,
all the people displaced
from their homelands
by those in power,
and by war,
and by corporate greed.
Today,
aside from caring,
it is all I can do,
and it is so far
from being
anywhere
near enough.
For you are all
-all-
red rocks, white bird,
followers of the Red Road,
the dispossessed of Syria,
refugee camp dwellers of Palestine,
winter-hungry wolves and bears
and cougar
flushed from your vanishing habitat
into our neighborhoods
and our waiting
bylaw enforcement guns,
you are all
-all-
All My Relations.
