Songs of the Dead (20 page)

And now I'm back, almost walking into a coed who's wearing too-tight blue jeans and a too-tight white t-shirt. I step around her and stumble again, this time seeing myself in a different row, reading different books, these on the European conquest of North America.

Today I'm hoping to read an account of the systematic genocide perpetrated against the indigenous of Europe by the civilized between, say, the beginning of the current era and 1500, sort of an earlier European version of
American Holocaust
or B
ury My Heart at Wounded Knee
. Maybe something called
Bury My Heart in Saxony
. Of course it's the same story I mentioned earlier, the modus operandi of the dominant culture. It was true two hundred years ago, it was true two thousand years ago, and it's true today. Just yesterday I read, “Deep in the Amazon rainforest a small tribe of uncontacted Indians is on the run, fleeing chainsaws and bulldozers as logging companies penetrate their forest home. They shun all contact with outsiders. They are fighting for their very survival. If urgent measures are not taken to protect them and their land from this invasion, they will disappear forever. That this is genocide is indisputable. Very little is known about the tribe, commonly referred to as the Rio Pardo Indians, who live on the border of Mato Grosso and Amazonas states. They may be the last survivors of their people, or they could be related to one of several neighbouring tribes who nickname them ‘Baixinhos' (the tiny people) or ‘Cabeças vermelhas' (the red heads). Since the 1980s, sightings and rumours have abounded. Arara Indians, who live in the area, report hearing them at night near their villages, mimicking the sounds of animals. Settlers and miners in the area have come across their abandoned houses. The government's Indian Affairs Department FUNAI has disturbing evidence that the heavily armed loggers are hunting down the Indians. One field worker told Survival, ‘The loggers are going to clean out the Indians. They will just shoot them to kill them.'” The day before, I read an article about the destruction of different Indians that had the pull quote: “‘They killed my mother, my brothers and my sisters, and my wife.' Karapiru Awá, survivor of a massacre.” The article: “Unless the Brazilian government, the World Bank and the mining company CVRD take urgent action, uncontacted Awá Indians in Brazil could soon be wiped out.” A couple hundred years ago the Shawnee Chiksika pretty much summed up this pattern when he said, “The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”

I want to find a book that will help me understand how the Europeans became subsumed into the cannibal culture. Walking down a row I see one that looks slightly promising:
The
Barbarian Conversion From Paganism to Christianity
, by Richard Fletcher. At least it's the right subject. I know I'm in trouble, however, as soon as I open it: the author dedicates the book to his late mother, thanking her, for among other things, encouraging him to be a regular church-goer. At least he doesn't try to hide his prejudices.

I spend the afternoon there in the stacks reading the book. I'm simultaneously disappointed and blown away.

My disappointment is the same one I used to feel when I'd watch cowboy and Indian movies, the same one I feel today when I read newspaper accounts of U.S. invasions: the authors' heroes are so often my villains, and their villains are my heroes.

In this book, the Catholics—the civilized—are the heroes, not the committers of genocide. One of the results of this is that the role of the sword in the “barbarian” “conversion” gets de-emphasized, and the g-word—genocide—doesn't get mentioned at all. The author can't, of course, avoid all mention of the sword, but he allows his language only to hint at the impact, as when he calls without much elucidation the Christian conquest of Saxony a “precedent” for “ugly episodes” in sixteenth-century Mexico.

I stand, return to the row where I once sat reading about the conquest of the Americas, and see myself again through the years. I look closely at myself, sitting in corduroys and flannel shirt, clean but disheveled hair down to my collar, face unshaven. The me on the floor glances up, looks right through me, and I wonder how many of us ever get to see ourselves unselfconsciously. I hold that moment, treasure it, look at myself as I would look at anyone else I love. And then the vision fades. I step to where I was sitting, and pick up one of the books I read before.

I shake my head to clear it, to return fully to the present, and think again about that author's language. I think about ugly episodes; an argument with Allison where she and I both fought unfair; yelling at the cat because she peed on my handwritten notes for the next section I was writing; snapping at my mom over an entirely imagined slight. Those are the real ugly episodes.

I open the book in front of me, flip through it, find examples of what this apologist for genocide calls “ugly episodes” from sixteenth-century Mexico. Ugly episodes. Cortés sent a “peace” delegation to the Aztecs, who welcomed them with songs. In the midst of the celebration, according to the sixteenth-century historian Bernardino de Sahagún, “The first Spaniards to start fighting suddenly attacked those who were playing the music for the singers and dancers. They chopped off their hands and their heads so that they fell down dead. Then all the other Spaniards began to cut off heads, arms, and legs and to disembowel the Indians. Some had their heads cut off, others were cut in half, and others had their bellies slit open, immediately to fall dead. Others dragged their entrails along until they collapsed. Those who reached the exits were slain by the Spaniards guarding them; and others jumped over the walls of the courtyard; while yet others climbed up the temple; and still others, seeing no escape, threw themselves down among the slaughtered and escaped by feigning death. So great was the bloodshed that rivulets ran through the courtyard like water in a heavy rain. So great was the slime of blood and entrails in the courtyard and so great was the stench that it was both terrifying and heartrending. Now that nearly all were fallen and dead, the Spaniards went searching for those who had climbed up the temple, and those who had hidden among the dead, killing all those they found alive.”

Ugly episodes. Cortés: “I resolved to enter the next morning shortly before dawn and do all the harm we could . . . and we fell upon a huge number of people. As these were some of the most wretched people and had come in search of food, they were nearly all unarmed, and women and children in the main. We did them so much harm through all the streets in the city that we could reach. . . .”

Ugly episodes. Cortés and other Spaniards enslaved Indians and sent them to work on plantations and in mines. They killed them faster than they could be replaced, even at a cost of seven pesos each.

Ugly episodes. In about a century the Spaniards reduced the population of the Tepehuán people by 90 percent, the Irritilla by 93 percent, the Acaxee by 95 percent, the Mayo peoples by 94 percent.

Ugly episodes. I see Indians chained together at the neck, being led to mines. I see Spaniards decapitating them if they slow. I see Spaniards cutting off women's breasts. I see Indian babies being killed and used as roadside markers. I see Spaniards cutting off Indians' hands and noses, then stringing these dismembered parts around their necks and sending them home. I see Spaniards throwing “pregnant and confined women, children, old men, as many as they could capture,” into pits packed with spikes, so that the Indians are “left stuck on the stakes, until the pits were filled.” I see that, in the words of one contemporary, “The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. . . . Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.” I see Spaniards testing the sharpness of their swords on the bodies of Indian children, and I see them tearing infants from their mothers' arms to feed to their dogs.

I think, for that matter, about the “ugly episode” that gave Hangman Valley its name. Before Colonel Wright arrived in Spokane, Hangman Valley and the creek that runs through it were known as Latah, which means in the native tongue stream where little fish are caught. Soon after the battle near the Spokane River, soon after Colonel Wright and his men hanged a chief who had come under a flag of truce, soon after Colonel Wright and his men slaughtered the horses, Colonel Wright sent a note to the Yakima warrior Qualchan, saying once again he wanted to talk about peace. Qualchan's father Owhi responded. He was, of course, put in chains. Qualchan came in after his father. Still believing that a flag of truce might mean something, he brought along his wife. Qualchan was immediately put in chains and taken to a tent. His wife describes what happened next: “We were waiting for developments when in a moment, two soldiers entered the tent from behind where we were sitting, grasped my husband about the head and shoulders, threw him on his back and bound him with cords. I tried to cut one soldier with my knife, but another one kicked the knife out of my hand and then a great number of soldiers crowded in, overpowered us, and we were at their mercy. I thought then that the worst that could happen would be a few months' imprisonment, and you may imagine my consternation when I saw that they were making preparations to hang my husband. I first thought it was a huge joke, but when I saw the deliberateness of their preparations, the fullness of their treachery and cowardice became apparent.” Qualchan first tried to go for a revolver he had hidden under a blanket, but did not succeed. Then he tried to bite the hand of the man who put a noose around his neck. In that, too, he did not succeed. After that Qualchan called upon the spirits of the mist, and twice the rope by which he was to be hanged broke. The third time he was killed. Qualchan's brother Lo-kout was also there. He was also tied. He was also to be hanged. He heard a voice say in his native language: “Jump on your horse and flee or you are a dead man.” Another Indian cut the ropes that bound him, and he jumped on Qualchan's horse and rode for the mountains.

As Wright noted in his report to headquarters: “Qualchew came to me at 9 o'clock this morning, and at 9 1/4 a.m. he was hung.” The next day Wright similarly hanged six Palouse Indians. He was a hero.

A few years ago the city of Spokane decided to put a golf course in Hangman Valley. The golf course is named Qualchan.

I know why the author of
The Barbarian Conversion
didn't provide examples of such “ugly episodes”: to do so would undercut his thesis of the “conversion” of the indigenous of Europe, just as today similar presentations of “ugly episodes” (perhaps those including cluster bombs, napalm, nerve gas, machine guns, imprisonment, sensory deprivation, torture, dispossession with consequent mass starvation, and so on) would undercut the thesis of the “conversion” of people everywhere to capitalism, the most recent name of the God of civilization, the cannibal God.

That's why I'm disappointed.

At this point—given our near-total inability to face who we are and what we have become—my disappointment more likely stems from stupidity than optimism. Come to think of it, at this point—given that this culture is killing the planet—any sort of eternal optimism is probably inseparable from stupidity.

I return to the other book, read more, and despite the author's prejudices, I start to get more and more excited. I start to get blown away. Why? Miracles. The book is full of descriptions of miracles. And I understand: just as Hitler and through him the Nazi government experienced numerous miraculous escapes from death and dissolution, and just as the conquest of the Americas (and the consequent founding of the United States) required such good fortune that even George Washington noted in his first inaugural address, “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency,” so, too, the conquest of Europe— the conversion of the barbarians—required countless miracles.

What if these miracles were real?

They're everywhere. Martin, bishop of Tours, had demolished a pagan temple and was getting ready to cut down a sacred tree. The people to whom the tree was sacred challenged him to stand directly where the tree would fall. He did. The tree screamed the scream of dying trees—you can hear it if you listen, and sometimes even if you don't—and began its arc toward him. He made the sign of the cross, and the tree fell to one side. The hagiographer Sulpicius related what happened next: “Then indeed a shout went up to heaven as the pagans gasped at the miracle, and all with one accord acclaimed the name of Christ; you may be sure that on that day salvation came to that region. Indeed, there was hardly anyone in that vast multitude of pagans who did not ask for the imposition of hands, abandoning his heathenish ways and making profession of faith in the Lord Jesus.” That was from only one miracle. Another: A young man named Aquilinus was hunting with his father when he suffered a seizure and fell into a coma. His relatives recognized immediately that he had been put under a spell by some enemy. They called a local healer, who was able to do nothing. The boy's griefstricken parents brought him to the shrine of St. Martin, where he recovered. There was the hermit Caluppa, who, cornered by a brace of dragons, put them to flight by making the sign of the cross (although one dragon did fart defiantly before leaving). Amandus raised a hanged man from the dead, and “when this miracle was diffused far and wide, the inhabitants of the region rushed to Amandus and humbly begged that he would make them Christians.” Emilian cured the blindness of the slave-girl of a senator, exorcised demons from the slave of a count, cured the paralysis of a woman who had traveled great distances to see him, and through the sign of the cross cured the swollen belly of the monk Armentarius. Miracles were almost as important as the sword in “converting” the indigenous of Europe. As Fletcher put it, “Like it or not, this is what our sources tell us over and over again. Demonstrations of the power of the Christian God meant conversion. Miracles, wonders, exorcisms, temple-torching and shrine-smashing were in themselves acts of evangelization.”