War World X: Takeover (42 page)
From the closed hearing by the Interior Subcommittee of the United States Senate, 1 September 2073.
Mr. Bendicks:
Why, exactly, does the Administration want to cancel the treaties with the various Indian tribes and transfer the reservations to the public domain?
Sec. Pendleton:
Seventeen years of free movement between national entities, ending in 2065, resulted in thirty-seven million foreigners, uh, extra-nationals, holding permanent residency permits within the United States. Fewer than six million of those persons have applied for citizenship, and according to figures of the INS, fewer than one in eleven is competent in the use of the English language. There are twenty-eight different newsfax publishing one or more times a day in the United States, in eleven different languages. Throughout the states, there are innumerable enclaves in which the principal languages spoken are other than English, notably Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic.
Mr. Bendicks:
Mr. Secretary, one of us has obviously misunderstood the other. Let me repeat my question. Why, exactly, does the Administration want to cancel the treaties with the various Indian tribes and transfer the reservations to the public domain?
Sec. Pendleton:
If the Senator will be patient, I’m coming to that.
Mr. Bendicks:
Please do.
Sec. Pendleton:
Not only the United States of America, but almost every other developed, industrialized nation on Earth, has such enclaves of unrepentant extra-nationals making their social and economic demands but unwilling to naturalize. This administration has gone to considerable effort and expense to absorb these non-American populations that make up more than eight percent of our total population.
Yet we have other un-Americanized enclaves of much longer standing. I refer to a number of the Indian tribes. In the first seventy years of the twentieth century, major progress was made in Americanizing these people. Some tribes lost their languages entirely. In most of the others, many of the younger people had limited or no ability to speak their tribal language. Then, in the last one hundred years, and particularly in the last seventy years, this healthy trend has been reversed. The children are taught the tribal language from infancy. Most tribes have modernized their languages for twenty-first century use by developing words from old roots, “adapting” American words by adding native prefixes or suffixes.
If we are to exert legal pressures on these recent immigrants to adopt the American language and culture, we must first eradicate these cultural regressions by the Indian tribes, who, after all, have been recalcitrant for a much longer time.
Mr. Bendicks:
It’s reassuring to know, Mr. Secretary, that we have you in there fighting to Americanize the American Indian. Now, let me ask one more time: Why, exactly, does the Administration want to cancel the treaties with the Indian tribes and transfer the reservations to the, public domain? I’d like you to state it explicitly, if possible, for the record.
Sec. Pendleton:
Senator, the unfortunate cultural recalcitrance of these Indian tribes is rooted in the reservations. The administration has no argument with Indians as a whole. The number who live away from the reservations is five times the number who live on the reservations. Twelve times if we include those who identify themselves as Indian or part Indian and as having more than one-eighth Indian blood, so to speak. The majority of these are from mixed tribal stocks—Cherokee and Kiowa for example, or Jemez and Acoma. They speak only English, and essentially have been assimilated into the mainstream of American culture. To remove the Indian populations from the reservations would result in the completion of Indian assimilation.
Mr. Bendicks:
Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I presume you’re aware of the proposals by the Bureau of Reclamation for the large scale pumping of desalinized water to a number of the western reservations, and the establishment of urbanization projects on them. No doubt reservation land would become very valuable then. Who do you suppose would profit from this, if the land was first taken from the tribes and then made available for purchase from the public domain by developers?
2074 A.D., Earth
T
he army landed at Lukachukai on February 6, 2074. Also at fifteen or twenty other places on the Navajo Reservation. It was a Wednesday. Not that February or Wednesday mean anything now; the calendar is more complicated here. But I remember those things because I am an old man. I forget yesterday, but I remember well what happened long ago.
My wife and I lived at Mescalero, New Mexico, then, but sometimes we did consulting, mostly on Apache reservations. Strictly speaking, the Navajo are Apaches. Were Apaches. The Spaniards got the name Apache from the Zunis, who used it for all the Athapaskan speaking-tribes that raided them. The Spaniards called the biggest of those tribes “Apache de Navajo,” Apaches of the Fields, because they cultivated corn squash. The Spaniards never did conquer them.
If you know much about Indians, you might guess from my name, Carl Boulet, that I didn’t start out as Dinneh, as Apache or Navajo. I’m a Chippewa-Sioux mixed blood. My great grandmother told me that the French last name came from one of Louis Riel’s métis refugees from the Manitoba Insurrection in the 1860s.
But that’s not what you want to hear about. You want to know what it was like to come in exile to this world, and what it was like here in the old days. I will tell you the best I can. I did not talk English for many Earth-years till you came here. Once it was my best language; I had three university degrees, and talked it like you do, better than Chippewa. Better than Mescalero. Now it comes forth differently, even though my words are English. That’s because I have come to think differently, living as we do here.
The September before the army came to Lukachukai, my wife and I—her name was Marilyn—established a program in applied domestic ecology in several Navajo schools, on a trial basis. It is strange to remember things like that. I was a different person in those days. At the end of January, we went back to see how it was going. On February 6, she was at Window Rock while I’d driven up to Lukachukai the day before.
It was noon. I’d eaten lunch, and was in the gym shooting baskets with a couple of teachers. I have not remembered shooting baskets for a very long time. Then the principal hurried in. The army, he said, had just landed at Window Rock, and federal marshals had arrested the tribal government. Troops had landed at Tuba City and Dinnehotso, too; they’d probably landed at every town on the reservation that day.
Just then it was snowing hard at Lukachukai, which may have been why they hadn’t landed there yet. The men I’d been shooting baskets with didn’t even look at each other. They started for the door. Lemmi Yazd paused long enough to call back to me, “Maybe you better come too.”
I hesitated for maybe a second, then grabbed my parka where it hung in the teachers’ lounge and followed them outdoors. They scattered; I stayed with Lemmi and we trotted to his pickup; we got in, he lifted it on its air cushion, and we left the parking lot in a hurry.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“A place we’ve set up in the Chuskas,” he said. “One of the places.”
Instead of going northeast into the Chuska Mountains on the maintained road, he drove west a little way, then turned north on a small dirt road, not made by engineers but cleared through junipers and pinyons for their trucks. You couldn’t see very far through the snow, which was fine with us. The snowfall thinned and thickened but never stopped. As we got farther north, the land grew higher, and the pinyon and juniper began to be displaced by ponderosa pine. And there the snow wasn’t just today’s new fall. There was snow left from before.
I worried about Marilyn. It sounded as if, at Window Rock, there’d been no warning. I wondered if I was doing the right thing to go with Lemmi Yazzi. But if she was interned at Window Rock and I was interned fifty miles away at Lukachukai… I turned the radio on in the pickup and got the tribal station out of Window Rock. It was playing
America the Beautiful
. In English. That made it real to me; the government had taken over.
We’d been warned, kind of. The summer before, a rumor swept the reservations all over the United States, that the government was going to start taking over and selling Indian lands and relocating reservation Indians.
Ten years earlier, hardly anyone would have taken a rumor like that seriously. But in 2172, the Soviets had begun rounding up some of the Turkic and Mongol peoples in Asia and relocating them by force to a world called Haven. It was scary to read about.
The CoDominium Bureau of Relocation had been sending immigrants to Haven for years, and once, out of curiosity, I’d read up on the planet. Not in the newsfax, but in technical journals. Haven sounded like a bad place.
Some tribes, the Mesaderos and Navajos among others, had set up unofficial committees of resistance. Not that we thought it would really happen, but just in case. Hideouts were built or dug in, in hidden places in canyons and forests, and supplies were hidden in them. It was to one of those that Lemmi was driving us.
We were the first ones to reach it. It was two hogans topped with a foot of dirt and twenty inches of snow, on one side of a shallow draw, shaded by pines and firs. The hogans would be hard to see from the air, with the naked eyes. Maybe an instrument search would show them.
Until that day there’d only been a rumor, and the Navajo Reservation hadn’t seemed like the place where the government would start. The Navajos were the strongest and most populous tribe and most of their land was poor. The White Mountain and Mescalero reservations had much better land. And the Nez Perce; even the Pine Ridge. I suppose the government decided that if they took the strongest first, and relocated its people, the other tribes would lose heart and do what they were told. I used to wonder if that’s how it worked out.
Within forty minutes there were ten of us in the two hogans. Everyone but me had clothes stored there, and boots, and a rifle. I was lucky to have worn boots that morning instead of oxfords; the weather forecast had given me that. And two of the pickups had rifles racked in them, so there was one for me. I didn’t know who I would worry with an old .30 caliber Winchester hunting rifle. Two infantry riflemen had more firepower than the ten of us.
Of course, the idea wasn’t to get in fights anyway. It was to make little armed demonstrations, get on the television and in the newsfax, and get the American people on our side. That had been the strategy of the Indian rights movement for more than a century. But the government was paying less and less attention to the people.
It stopped snowing that night. Meanwhile the government had shut down all the tribal radio stations and Navajo language programs on other stations, and banned any mention of what was happening. We tuned in Gallup, Flagstaff, Farmington, and Holbrook, and they never mentioned that anything was going on.
The guys I was with talked it over. They decided to sit tight and take it a day at a time. If we didn’t hear anything tonight, maybe we’d send out pickups in the morning to visit the nearest groups. Maybe we could work something out.
No one asked my opinion; I wasn’t Navajo. I wasn’t any kind of Apache—any of the Dinneh, or Tindeh…the
people
in the Apache languages. I was originally from the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, where the country was soggy muskeg instead of timbered mountains or rough, stony desert. I’d married a Mescalero, learned the language, and done my Ph.D. research on them. Also I spoke pretty good Navajo. But I wasn’t really one of them. Not then. I even had enough European genes to give me hazel eyes. But if they had asked my opinion, I’d have gone along with what they thought best. I had nothing myself to suggest. I was no chief then. I was an educator.
As it turned out, the army came to us, at about 3:30 in the morning. I suppose their instruments picked up the heat from our stovepipes, even though we kept very small fires. They’d have taken us entirely by surprise, except that I had awakened and had to urinate, so I pulled on my boots and went out of the hogan. And heard the soft, rumbling hum of landing craft settling into a meadow in the woods—what the Spanish and Anglos in the southwest call a
cienega
—a hundred or so meters down slope. I went into both hogans and woke everyone up.
We fooled them; we fought. It seemed unreal then that we’d do that. It seemed unreal to the army, too; that’s why we did as well as we did. Some of us didn’t even take time to lace our boots, just wrapped the laces around our ankles. The others strapped on snowshoes and went down the draw toward the
cienega
. I didn’t have snowshoes; I just waded along the best I could in other people’s tracks.
The troops were in no hurry. They were still in the
cienega
. They’d unloaded from the two light landers, I guess a platoon of them, and were forming up to move on us.
None of us had a night scope, of course, but the soldiers weren’t wearing camouflage whites, and there was moonlight. With the snow cover, it was easy to see them. But it was too dark to use the sights on our rifles. We just aimed down the tops of our barrels and started to shoot from behind trees. We had time to shoot two or three rounds each before they started shooting back, but when they did, it was the most frightening thing in my life, before or since. It sounded like four hundred rifles instead of forty. I could hear bullets hitting tree trunks and rocks, and branches falling off the trees above and behind us. They fired for about half a minute, I guess.
Then they stopped, and started moving forward. Someone said later that they’d gotten orders through headphones in their helmets. They were to take us prisoner if they could and they thought they’d intimidated us; thought we were ready to quit, and I was. One or two of our people started shooting again though, so the soldiers did too, and then the rest of us did. I shot two or three times more before Lemmi yelled to cease fire and surrender. After a few seconds, the soldiers stopped shooting again, too. They came up and arrested all of us. A few started to beat us with their rifle butts, but their sergeants swore at them and made them quit. We’d shot a few of them—I heard we killed three and the rest were pretty mad. Five of us had been shot, and two were dead.
