The last day of the month the dominant culture allots to the “history” and “heritage” of our peoples, and the snow is only miles off now. As a practical matter, no one even remembers at this point, save us; the rest of the world has long since turned its attention to the frenzy of the winter holidays. Locally, tonight will see the tree lighting in the Plaza, although the accompanying festivities were moved indoors a few days ago.
This is not our grandfathers’ world, nor our fathers’ either.
We both come from lands of real winter. Neither of us has ever been afraid of a little snow, nor of a little cold; we’ve experienced far too much of the real thing for that. But we both were also born in a time when modern conveniences had become generally accessible to most people, if not always finding their way into traditional lifeways.
We were also born into a world in which the possibility of, and opportunity for, more traditional forms of self-defense were already past — a world already so thoroughly, forcibly colonized that, save for a few skirmishes here and there, resistance perforce could only take more subtle forms than the armed variety. The occupying government has never ceased waging the Indian Wars against our peoples; the only difference is that they more often wield bills and laws and votes, lobbyist dollars and corporate balance sheets and authoritarian jurisprudence, supplemented as needed by the odd collection of tear gas and water hoses and sound weapons, by cages and attack dogs and pepper spray.
And so the ways and means of our resistance have shifted with it.
Even so, it’s been a rude awakening for many people, especially the young. They have never lived through such irregular wars firsthand, and the so-called history they are force-fed in colonial schools “teaches” only the most watered-down depiction of the Civil Rights Movement. The young can be forgiven for having thought the country was better than this; all their lives, they have been assured that it was.
We, of course, should have known better. Some of us did know better.
For us, history is not some distant haze in a textbook; even at its most attenuated, it’s the lived experience of near ancestors. In this part of Indian Country, it’s also the fodder for a thousand myths of the colonial mind, ahistorical worldviews that have translated the peoples’ existence into pop-culture renditions of white v. red, of the marshal’s star and the Cavalry’s flag triumphing against savagery and emptiness.
But the land was not empty, and the savageries were colonial.
It’s interesting to me that, in writing the previous passage, my mind should immediately have reached, unthinking, for the word translated. Perhaps it’s simply a function of knowing the history so well that conscious thought is no longer required for the building blocks of exposition — just as one accustomed to driving a car no longer thinks consciously about where the gas or brake is, or when and how to stop and go. Because today’s featured work is centered around an old warrior, one of the greats, who, like so many, had a “name” that was not his own, one imposed from without by colonial powers: a name that was bestowed out of raw fear and yet one that represented the invaders’ own patron saint of translators. From its description in the Other Artists: Wall Art gallery here on the site:
Goyathlay (“One Who Yawns”) is perhaps the archetypal Indian warrior, a man of both great military acumen and great spiritual power and wholly devoted to his people. The rest of the world knows him as “Geronimo,” and his name has become cross-cultural shorthand for courage and heart. Here, he looks out quizzically from the frame, perhaps ready to yawn once more at yet another in the long string of deceptions and lies for which he ultimately gave his life, far from his people’s sacred lands.The texture and depth are astounding; each line in his aging, weathered face tells a story and evokes this famed warrior’s bravery and leadership. By Pemwah (Isleta Pueblo). The visible image is 14.5″ high by 22.25″ wide; the entire piece, including frame, is 22.25″ high by 30.25″ wide (dimensions approximate).
Pastel on Japanese kaba paper; rugged barn-wood frame
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
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I’ve written about Goyathlay before, and in detail. He was among the last generation of this land’s old warriors, the dog soldiers of indigenous defense and resistance. The Dog Soldiers, so named, were from the peoples of the Northern Plains, but their strong heart and brave spirits could be found among the warriors and ordinary people all across Turtle Island. Being outnumbered by those hell-bent on genocide is no indication of strength of spirit; it’s proof only of the evils of the colonizing mindset, and of the essential character of those who fought to save their people.
As I wrote here more than four years ago about the warrior the invaders misnamed Geronimo:
He was regarded by his people — and by not a few of other area Indian nations, as well as colonial invaders – as having great supernatural power: It was said that he could walk without leaving footprints, and that he was invulnerable to bullets, claims no doubt encouraged, and no doubt believed by the soldiers and settlers against whom he led so many successful raids. It was said that he could see the future, and like prophets of many cultures, stories abound that he foresaw the possibility of what would be done to his people and to him personally, which would only have encouraged his resolve to fight in their defense. It was also said that he could hold back the dawn: that he could protect his people under cover of darkness by preventing the sun from rising. While I have yet to find any actual reports of night standing still, it was undoubtedly useful as a tool of wartime propaganda.
During Goyathlay’s years as a young man, he, like Indians of tribal nations all over the Southwest, traveled well-established trade routes far and wide, including those south into what is now called Mexico. When he was 29, he returned from one such trade mission in Mexico to find his wife, his three young children, and his mother slaughtered by Spanish troops. It was a pivotal moment that split young Goyathlay’s path permanently into two: No longer solely a medicine man, it was the catalyst that sparked the warrior’s fire in his soul, and burned white-hot. His new-found and wholly understandable hatred for the invaders knew no bounds, and he resolved to defend the rest of his people while destroying as much of the colonialist and occupying forces as possible.
They were, of course, made to pay, and pay dearly, for having the temerity to defend their sacred and ancestral lands, their people, and their way of life. Both the Spanish in Mexico and the U.S. government did their best to exterminate all of the Chiricahua. By 1876, execution of the country’s Indian Policy had extended to the far reaches of New Mexico, and the Chiricahua were forcibly removed to the neighboring Arizona Territory, on lands inhabited by the San Carlos Apache (now confined to a delimited reservation). Unwilling to be forced into internment, Goyathlay and a small band of his people evaded the U.S. Army and went to Mexico. They were captured and interned at San Carlos anyway, and there they stayed, in a manner of speaking, until 1881, when an Apache prophet there was assassinated. Goyathlay escaped on three separate occasions, and not once was he captured by soldiers: He simply surrendered for his people. At that point, Goyathlay and his fellow warriors stole out of the reservation to an encampment in the mountains where they plotted strategy and continued harrying raids within and without Mexico.
Oh, and about that name: It was during this period that he became known by his modern appellation. But how did Goyathlay get transformed into “Geronimo?”
Goyathlay and his warriors were famous among both Spanish (Mexican) and U.S. soldiers for their courage, daring, and strategic aggression. Word of his exploits traveled fast and far, as did word of his purported supernatural powers. As an enemy, he was respected, but also feared outright. During clashes in Mexico, where he and his warriors raided and harried the Mexican forces mercilessly, word of his arrival — or even of the possibility that he might be in the area — instilled such fear into the soldiers’ hearts that they invoked the name of their patron saint, Jerome — in Spanish, Geronimo (pronounced Hay-ROE-nee-moe, but with short, sharp vowels, unlike those found in English). It became a cry of terror, so the story goes, and it stuck: The Spanish evermore thought of him as Geronimo; the U.S. soldiers picked up the name, but, as was their wont, predictably mispronounced it Jer-AH-nih-moe; and Goyathlay himself no doubt both laughed and yawned at the thought that he was capable of striking such terror into the hearts of the invaders that they would accidentally reward him with the name of their patron saint. Today, it’s appropriated for everything from military actions to charging cries in children’s games.
In 1882, the Army caught up with him, and he agreed to return to the reservation with his warriors. It didn’t last long; the government arrested another Apache leader and imprisoned him, and Goyathlay gathered his warriors and escaped once more. Another three years of battles and raids ensued, until he finally agreed to a conditional surrender in September of 1886 , subject to certain conditions about where he and his people would be placed. This was considered the last real “Indian action” of the U.S. Indian Wars, and Goyathlay and his warriors are credited with being the last and longest holdouts against an encroaching colonialist government executing a genocidal policy. On September 4th of that year, General Nelson Miles took him and his people into custody. The government promptly breached the agreement, as always, and Goyathlay and the 16 warriors, dozen women, and half-dozen children were rounded up with the remaining Chiricahua. The 450 or so of his people who had survived the recent military onslaught were shipped to Florida, to Fort Marion and Marion Pickens, where they were interned in concentration camps in a harsh and unfamiliar climate, given unhealthy food, forced to live in unsanitary conditions, and exposed to disease. They were transferred to Alabama’s Mount Vernon military installation, and fully a quarter of them did not survive internment there, dying of tuberculosis and other disease to which they had had no previous exposure, and therefore, no immunity. Those who did manage to survive the Southern sojourn, including Goyathlay himself, were eventually forcibly transferred to Oklahoma’s Fort Sill, where they lived out their remaining years. Goyathlay spent nearly three decades — twenty-seven years — as a prisoner of war. When he walked on, it was on the soil of Fort Sill, far from his own lands; he remains interred there, still separated from the soil where his spirit no doubt longs to rest.
Goyathlay is credited with a number of famous quotes, but for me, one stands out, both for its accuracy and for its poignancy:
I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures.
As I also said here of the name:
Funny, that. An Apache medicine man turned fierce warrior, the last holdout, the one who harried colonizers from the lowliest settler all the way up to the American president himself and not a few from the imposed border to the south, a man whose real name referred to yawning, would eventually acquire the name of a bibliophilic monk from the other side of the world and, in a subversion of the entire colonial process, convert a bookish name based on words into a fearsome war cry, a symbol of military power and strategy and courage in battle, a prayer for salvation and relief from the self-defense of the oppressed.
It’s natural that Goyathlay, in his Geronimo persona, should become a an intertribal symbol of Native power and resistance.
It’s a name that links the old Apache warrior with Wings’s own people, as well. As I’ve written here before:
It’s an interesting choice [of the invading Spanish to name Geronimo as the Pueblo’s patron saint], one I’ve written about here before . . . and one that I am convinced was entirely purposeful. As I wrote here more than two years ago:
Most people probably don’t really grasp the particular significance of Saint Jerome, nor of the underlying reason that Spanish priests would have chosen him as the patron saint for this village. Jerome, or, as the Spanish called him, San Geronimo, was the patron saint of librarians, encyclopedists, and, perhaps most significantly, translators.
It didn’t help the Spanish much. Like another Native icon upon whom the same name was bestowed by colonizers, the language here has remained steadfastly impervious to all real attempts at compilation and translation. More than a half-millennium later, it is still defiantly unwritten, even in the face of new attempts at linguistic incursion by new[er] evangelists bent on conversion of multiple kinds, including those who wish to impose their own religious and cultural practices from without, and those who wish to steal those of the people for themselves.
Words hold power; our peoples all across this continent have always known this. Here, those words are not for anyone but the people themselves.
Authoritarians have always known that to control the people, one must first control the words. It’s a dynamic on sobering display today. And for colonizing forces, one of the most effective ways to control the people they seek to dominate and exterminate and replace is to coopt their language and alter its essential nature, the fundamental meanings of words.
But first, the invading force must be able to translate it.
And this is where the people of this place so effectively and thoroughly defied and denied their would-be oppressors.
At Red Willow, the indigenous language remains unwritten. It’s hard to translate a language dependent so much on intonation and inflection for meaning when one cannot even envision its form and shape. Oh, there are words from Latinate roots that have been adopted and put into use, often with alteration and variation. But the local tongue itself is still sacrosanct, with all that that word implies — and both culture and language survive and thrive. They are existence, untranslated, and they are the more powerful for it.
And this is where the heart of indigenous resistance beats today: in preservation, yes, but in a refusal to permit cooptation or appropriation, in an insistence on adhering to the old ways even as we navigate this occupied world that we have inherited. It assumes a different form and shape than that of the old warriors like Goyathlay; but while its outlines might seem unfamiliar to those ancient spirits, and its movements, too, it all centers around the same strong courageous heart and sovereignty of spirit.
Because that, perhaps, is the truest expression of sovereignty: the ability to define oneself, to set the bounds of one’s people and culture and traditions — a spirit untranslated.
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