"WHO BELONGS?"

“WHO BELONGS?”

            Our daughter Susan lived in Albuquerque from 2005-2008, working in an Americorps program and then working for the Albuquerque public library.  We visited her while she was there and saw many wondrous and strange sights – the Sandia mountains (10,000 feet), Los Alamos, Truth or Consequences, Santa Fe, Taos, and Ghost Ranch, among others.  As I think about Native American Heritage Month, I am reminded of visiting the Acoma Pueblo, about 60 miles west of Albuquerque.  It is one of about 20 tribes or pueblos in New Mexico.  “Pueblo” is a Spanish word for village or town, and in this area, it refers to housing built on the flattop mountains called “mesas.”  One of the many striking things about the landscape of New Mexico was its lack of trees, so you could see these flat mesas from hundreds of miles away.

            Acoma Pueblo is built atop a sheer-walled, 367-foot sandstone bluff in a valley studded with sacred, towering monoliths. Since 1150 A.D., Acoma Pueblo has earned the reputation as the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America.  Throughout the land, from the waters of the Atlantic to the shores of Puget Sound, others have come and gone, but the Acoma have stayed in the Southwest.

            The area only averages seven inches of rain per year, and one of the docents on our tour told us that they pray sincerely for rain every day.  Though they would not put it this way, I was struck by their Calvinist leanings.  We asked them about sharing political power, and they replied that the men were the ones who held political office in the tribe.  (I don’t know if women are ineligible to run, or if it is just traditional).  When we frowned at learning that only men held the political power, our docent indicated that they had their way of controlling that imbalance – they are matrilineal.  The women own the property!  To paraphrase the old Loretta Lynn song, “don’t come home oppressing with loving on your mind.”  When we asked what happened when the men made a bad political decision, she indicated that they would have to sleep outside.  They aren’t kidding either – the property passes from mother to daughter or to nearest female relative.  They had a great distrust of centralized power, and in their culture, there was a balance of power, with checks and balances.

            We then learned of their horrible interactions with European powers – in 1599, a Spanish army killed over 500 males and some 300 women and children, in a massacre to subdue them.  This massacre destroyed over 13% of their population, but the Acoma people did not let it crush their spirit.  Though it did limit their autonomy, the Acoma remained strong and vibrant and refused to yield their culture to the Spanish or to anyone else, although the Spanish and later the Anglos oppressed them and tried to acculturate them.  As we sadly know, this history is the same across the United States – the scourge of white supremacy took so many destructive and deadly forms.  And, as we see in today’s world, it still does.

            We visited the Acoma Cultural Center at Sky City, and we learned some of this history and of the Acoma (and other peoples) attempts to reclaim and to live out of their culture.  Because of their history with those classified as “white,” they are loathe to interact with white people, except (and this is a BIG exception) to give us tours and to take our money.  They have a hotel and a casino for Anglo (and other) money, and its main purpose is to recover, to preserve, and to deepen Acoma culture.  They have annual sacred rites, in which they join with the other pueblos in the Southwest.  Our docent emphasized that Anglos were not welcome to attend those because they did not want to be tainted any more than possible by the destructive powers of Anglo culture.   She also emphasized that they would not allow other Native American cultures which had interacted too much with Anglo culture.  When I asked her about tribes like Cherokee and Creek (the tribes familiar to me in Georgia), she said definitely not. 

            So, on a hot dusty summer day on that mesa in that Native American territory, I was called on to recognize my own history as a person classified as “white.”  Though we have provided many benefits to humankind, especially the idea of equality (which of course, we acted like we did not believe), I was struck by the many similarities of our destructive hand in slavery and in the massacre of indigenous people.  It called to mind Nahum’s prophetic words to end his prophecy in the Bible about the Babylonians:  “For who has not known your endless cruelty?”