So They Call Themselves Conservatives? (Through the Eyes of a Yaqui Elder)

As someone who  grew up in the 60′s and worked for Robert Kennedy, I see things now that I remember seeing before. Things seem the same, but they are different!  I have seen these times before: a war we were in  that was unpopular, a man who was trying to make  America a better place for all people of color.  I was even there when I saw him weep when he saw how Indian people lived in poverty on the reservations in Arizona. Robert Kennedy  was a good man and when he was assassinated, I was devastated. I decided to leave politics.

In those days, racism was part of everyday life. Not just against blacks, but Native Americans as well. In those days, mexicans were seen as half-breed Indians.  See the movie Giant ( Charleston Heston, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor). In the movie,  they call the mexican girl in the family, “that skin or half breed or squaw.” Blacks were fighting for the right to vote and trying to be seen as human beings, but native people were not even recognized as citizens in the southwest. We were savages and conquered  people. Half of us were on the reservation and the other half were off the reservation, trying to better our lives in anyway possible.  We couldn’t even practice our religion or be citizens of our own country. ( I plan to tell you the story of a man who was drafted and refused to go to the war and the supreme court agreed with him, because we were not considered citizens. This will be in another blog post).

We couldn’t be a citizen  of our own tribe or vote as a citizen of the United States. There was no value in being part of a conquered people.  Many Indian people were born at home and their birth certificates said “dark” under the description for race.  It wasn’t good to be Indian.

My mother’s tribe is Yaqui. There were times in the 1920′s and 30′s that the mexican government had bounties for Yaqui people . Yes, you could shoot a Yaqui where he stood and cut off his or her ears and the mexican government would give you 100 pesos for a male and 50 for a female and 25 for a  child. I know it’s hard to believe, but it is true. That’s how people saw us.

Many Texas Rangers and others formed groups to make money for themselves. The government had to issue a warning that it was against the law to engage in such behavior. Why am I bringing this up? I want you to have some understanding of history and what generations of people had to do to live and struggle to survive . Many of this is not known.

A few years ago , the Housing Authority issued a report that the most discriminated people in housing in the southwest were Native Americans. There are many  so called “conservatives” who feel that God has ordained them as our master. They feel entitled to the land and to do with us what they please. The book,  Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875-1928 by David Wallace Adams, outlines the philosophy of what was done to  these brown people. The whites even had the right to pick up our children and take them to one of the Indian Schools like Stewart in Nevada or Sherman Institute  in California.

In Indian school, we would be kept and taught how to be Christians. They would cut our hair and take us from our families and culture. Punish us when we spoke our language and if necessary not let us eat or put us in dangerous situations to scare us to death. (Examples abound. They would lock us in closets, refuse to feed us, etc.) Some parents even thought that by sending their kids to boarding school, they were giving them a better life!  I have a video of one Navajo girl who grew up in a Mormon family because her family thought that she would have a better life. She suffers from “Marginal Man Syndrome.” Of course, this is another story.

I was invited to a showing of a film made to share the oral history of Indian families in Nevada. There was a part where a women spoke of not knowing where her son was and she sent her older son to walk 20 miles to see if her youngest son had been taken to Stewart Indian school in Carson City, Nevada. When he arrived there,  they had his brother but they kept him too. The majority of the people in the audience were non-Indians and they started to laugh at this. I stood up and said, ” You think that’s funny!  You think taking someone’s children and keeping them when the parents don’t even know if they are alive or not is funny?  You think it was a summer camp and they roasted hot dogs and ate  melon and sang songs of peace and love.  We were captive people.”  The small amount of Native people that were there applauded and yelled at this.  I haven’t been invited by that group to any other events.

These forms of  ethnocide have been forgotten and not talked about.  Some religious groups did the same as part of their means of getting into heaven. It is by converting brown people (in their eyes, heathens) to their religion that they get mansions in the after life.  The Mormons even have this in their bible in which they refer to us as the lamanites. If we take up the way of the Latter Day Saints, the melonin in our skin will turn white and we will return to being “white-some and delight some.” Mormons have recently changed their ways, but for years, they would take children from uneducated Indian parents under the auspices of helping to educate them and give them a better life. Then the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978 and this practice was prevented.

The code word for many of these people was “conservative.” Those were the people who believed that God  had chosen them (Christians). They believed that God had given them this land and they could do whatever they felt was in their interest. This was true for all the conquistadors of the southwest.

If you want to know who conquered us, just look at our names or tribal names. The Spanish were the people of conquest in the west and southwest and the English and dutch in the east and the French in the south. People have asked me, “Why is your last name Spanish?” The answer: because of conquest. Those of us who who grew up knowing who we are, know it was not fun growing up Indian in Arizona, Nevada, California or New Mexico. We were the conquered people with weird food and habits and brown skin. Once, I heard a womean talking to her daughter, “Honey, they are different than us. They like to be with their own kind.”

Some of that is true, but her intent was obvious . She wanted to make sure her daughter didn’t mingle with kids of color. She didn’t say, “They are just like us; we are more alike than different.” This was a very well-to-do family and they were actually very nice people. In fact, if you knew them, you would think they were  liberal and open-minded.  Are they racist? Like Sarah Palin whose father said that she transfered from the University of Hawaii  because there were too many Asians and Natives and she didn’t feel comfortable with them. Or what about Rush Limbaugh’s listeners? I recently heard one listener say, “Why isn’t the media focusing on the fact that Tiger Woods has been having sex with non-African American women?”  Apparently, this listener  thinks that Mr.Woods is solely an African American and doesn’t know that he is a true mixed race person: white, Native American, black and Thai. Hello!

The real  racism is this: when you won’t see a person of color as an authority figure—someone in a position of power—then you’re a racist.” People need to get it.  Respect is everything. I remember when these same types of people didn’t want Martin Luther King to be honored. Same story. “He’s a far out commie!” I can remember people saying things like that. “You want your daughter f—king  a n–g-r? That’s what’s next if you let those people live side by side with you!”

Seeing people of color as authority figures, well, that’s the same problem that some people have with our president. I only bring this up because I hear self-righteous people telling me that it’s not a problem that Obama is black. It’s his ideas that they have a problem with because they see him as a far-out,  left-wing pinko.

This reminds me of a female student I once had. She was very nice and proper with a lot of class. She was quite astute. I knew that she was going to be a leader.  When the semester ended, I had a day where the students could openly express their feelings about the class.  This woman said with great sincerity,  “Dr. Ramirez, I want to tell you something that may sound funny, but I feel safe enough to tell you and the class.” (I thought, hm, this is going to be interesting.)  \ “Go ahead,” I said. “Well, ” she said, “It’s just that I have never known someone like you who is so smart. I know it sounds funny, but it’s true. You are one of the smartest professors I have ever known. You just don’t see many people of your race who are!”

I was blown away by this! I started laughing and some of the other students did too. I said , “Thank you,  I think? It’s too bad … you should have met my father who was very smart and never even got past  8th grade. And then there was my grandfather who couldn’t speak english, but taught me so much about the world.” She just smiled! And I thought to myself that somewhere the spirits were laughing. And no doubt my grandfather and mother were smiling too.

What I’m saying here is that I have lived long enough to have seen this ideology played out before. It is our sense of humanity that is going to make us a great country. Young people haven’t experienced the inhumanity of racism before. They see black people all over in sports and entertainment, but don’t understand why the Redskins are disturbing to First Nation people.  Yet, if anyone called a sports team “the darkies” or “spear chuckers” there would be an outrage.

Instead, there is attitude toward mexican people who have been here for generations yet are totally disrespected. Well, here it is again. So when you hear someone say, “I’m a Christian conservative,” know that for those of us who have lived long enough, we hear the echos of another time. Is it here again?

The white robes and burning crosses are back. The conservatives are not wearing them on the outside, but they carry them close inside their heads. The burning crosses with crowds of white-robed people are now called “tea parties.”  It’s indicative of what  governors of southern states used to claim back in the day: “The Bible tells us there’s no race mixing!” These are the signs of hate, the struggle for power: not power over someone, but power to change the status quo.

We need to change back to a democracy, which is not the same as an America that is run by corporations.

There is a disregard for people of color who are now in positions of power, but it won’t be long before people of color in the southwest are the majority. Most of these people have had unbelievably hard lives and know deeply what the angst of living is all about. These people want health care for everyone. They want more sharing of the pie in America.

I think of myself as a person who is very spiritual and even conservative in a way. I want all of my family to have a sense of history and family history in particular. I believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. I don’t believe that God is a man, but rather a name for something beyond my comprehension. That’s why native people have ceremonies. Sweat lodge brings us closer to being “clean and honest.”.I believe that there are universal principles that govern all mankind and the universe as a whole. I believe that we as human beings are the humblest of all creatures, for we search for meaning our whole lives. Animals know who they are and they just are. Man searches for who he is or struggles with who he is and this is our biggest angst in life.

I believe that what goes around. comes around. I believe in prayer as a form of physics. Will we be able to practice our ways without disrespect? Don’t conservatives believe in prayer or just Christian prayer?

As we evolve, we discover more. We start with what we know and discover what the Creator has laid out for us. Is that a conservative idea or a native way? The Creator gave me a brain, not a book!  We honor what is alive and know that all life comes from other life (plants and animals). We honor that. Honoring life is the native way!  Man makes books, but my brain was given to me by the Creator and it is what gives books meaning.

My nature is in me and like a piece of turquoise, it needs to be polished  so that the matrix will be revealed and show through.  Is that a conservative way? Following my nature is the Creator’s way. Following a man-made book from the Middle East is not our way. Does that make me a commie?  Does that make me a target for disrespect or conversion? Does my worldview make me a savage? Does that make me a threat to those people who call themselves conservatives?