At last, the colonial mess that is the fourth is over. Almost.
Normally, today it wold be time to get down to the business of summer, but colonialism will always extract its price, and this year, that means an official closure of everything to give the already most privileged yet another paid holiday.
We were thankfully granted a small reprieve last night, with mostly only the ton’s official fireworks display putting the land at risk. This is, after all, now a 1,200-year drought, and the small amounts of precipitation we’ve had thus far don’t even put the shallowest dent in it. More, last night’s temperatures remained high even as the wind kicked up a fierce demonstration of trickster power, perhaps inducing those who would otherwise have engaged in risky firebug behaviors to keep their powder dry just this once.
Earth and sky weighed in last night as well, an hour or so after the town wrapped up the last of its dangerous folly: A powerful lightning storm unrolled across the peaks to the east, delivering thunder, more wind, and a good half-hour or pouring rain, fading to a soft drizzle thereafter. The lightning, however, continued for another two hours or more, and it felt like a warning.
Spirit knows the colonial world needs to heed it now.
This is, in this place, what should be fully midsummer, the early heart of the monsoon season. The rivers should be running hard and high and fast, whitecaps overflowing their boulders and banks as they race southward in gravity’s vise-like grip. The Río Pueblo that bisects the old village plaza should look as it did in the image above, one Wings captured a decade or so ago, and it should be flowing abundantly with its fellow tributaries into the wide powerful waters of the Río Grande.
The Big River is abysmally low now.
It’s not just the downstream areas that will suffer. Up here, our habitat is already grossly endangered, and still they come, invaders seeking to strain this most precious of resources far beyond capacity.
It’s a capacity several times lower than it should be, but even were it at full mass and volume, it could not sustain this level of deliberate harm.
These ands are suffering, and the people of it, too, and it’s going to get far worse. We are watching the medicine disappear: watching the flow dry up in real time, the smallest pools evaporate, the trees expire and the grasses burn up in the fields; watching, too, the animals and birds and insects seek shelter and mostly find none, indigenous species driven out to be supplanted by invaders of their own.
There is work to do.
That work lies not in colonial/outsider-led efforts that seek to undermine a third of a century of work by the Indigenous people who belong to this place. It lies in protecting them and their lands, always with them doing the leading. It lies in colonial interests surrendering to Indigenous ones, in their giving up of their privilege and ill-gotten gains to support the people from whom those gains, like the water now, are still being stolen.
But yesterday reminds us how unready they are to do so, and even more unwilling.
Now the water flows high only in memory, as before our eyes we are watching the medicine disappear. It’s time for reclamation.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
