Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [68]
In 1838, armed soldiers rounded up 17,000 Native Americans for a forced march west. The old were prodded with bayonets, the sick stacked in wagons, and the dead buried by the side of the trail. Almost 2,000 people died on the way. Another 2,000 were put in stockades in Oklahoma. A Georgia volunteer, later a colonel in the Confederate Army, said, “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”*
I never learned any of this history in school, where Indians were always spoken of in the past tense. Like most children, I was fascinated by the pictures of painted tepees and half-naked braves on spotted ponies in my social studies books. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I cut feathers out of colored construction paper to make an Indian headdress I wore to the lunchroom. Other children made black pilgrim hats, and we all went out of our way to be nice to each other while we ate pressed turkey and bread stuffing off of our pastel plastic trays. I knew the story of Pocahontas and had even heard of Sitting Bull, but I never imagined that any of their relatives had survived. My teachers spoke of Indians the same way they spoke of dinosaurs, as a thrilling but dangerous species whose inability to adapt had made them extinct.
All these years later, I recognize this as the way that winners often speak of those they have harmed beyond repair. Trying to find some way to live with what we have done, we find solace in the idea that their doom was their own doing. They were savages, after all. It was them or us. In the case of Native Americans, we have romanticized those our forebears dispossessed. We wax rhapsodic about their reverence for the earth, their care for the land—without ever offering to give any of it back. One way we do this is by pretending that they no longer exist, at least not in the way that we remember them. The people we might give the land back to wore feather headdresses and rode spotted ponies. They made baskets from river reeds and ground corn between two flat stones. They did not tend gift shops or empty slot machines at the casino up in Cherokee, which effectively lets us off the hook. If we cannot see the Native Americans of our fantasies, then we do not owe them anything because they are not there.
Ed and I had seen the old graves on our place the first day we walked the property, but at the time we did not translate them into deeds, evictions, and removal. It was not until a Cherokee friend came to visit and said he remembered hearing stories about our place from his grandparents that the land began to speak to me. His name was Anacleto. Ed had met him years earlier when they both showed up to protest the excavation of an old burial ground by a land developer. Cleto was a massive man with a noble brow and a ponytail that reached to the middle of his back, who belonged to the Longhair Clan of the Eastern Band Cherokee. When I shook his hand for the first time, Cleto looked at the ground instead of me, which I accepted as a personal favor. His direct gaze was a little more than I could bear at that point.
Soon after they met, Cleto took Ed to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where a Lakota Sun Dance chief