So I had occasion last summer.
I was invited by Sandra Cisneros down to San--
good old San Antonio to her Macondo workshop--
writing workshop.
And there I met Deborah Miranda.
And actually Deborah reminded me that I'd
met her a few years before at Evergreen
at one of Gail Tremblay's summer sessions.
And Deborah Miranda is from one of the California mission
tribes.
And of course you know in 1700 there were a million--
at least a million California Indians
and by 1900 there were 25,000 left.
And part of that had to do with the mission system.
So Deborah Miranda is a wonderful poet.
She teaches back in Virginia somewhere.
And we got to talking about the book that she's working on.
It's called Bad Indians.
And it's a wonderful mixture of sort of a family memoir.
And one of the peculiarities--
or not peculiarities, but one of the interesting things
was that in the 1920s I believe it was,
there was an anthropologist and I'm
going to say his name is Stevenson.
I should have written it down.
But anyway there was an anthropologist who focused
on Deborah's--
the band of Mission Indians that Deborah's from.
And this guy worked with members of her family.
And so Deborah started doing research
and got a hold of this anthropologist's notes.
And at the time this anthropologist was
doing this fieldwork with the Mission Indians,
all the other anthropologists were like oh,
why are you bothering with those Mission Indians?
They're just about extinct.
And who's interested in them?
And so actually for years and years all
of the stories and narratives that he had collected
were sort of just--
no one had really cared much about them.
At least not in the anthropology world.
And so Deborah started going into them
because she knew that her--
she had like a great grandpa and different relatives that
actually talked to this guy.
So she was really interested to see what
her relatives had said to him.
And so once she got started, she started looking
for other kinds of things.
She decided well, maybe I'll take a look
because after all, the mission system meant
that the priests who were in charge of the mission
and the Indians who belonged, like possessions,
to these missions-- they kept all these records.
And of course, as I referred earlier with the story
in New Mexico, all of this horrendous slave trading
activity is meticulously documented
in Baptismal records.
And so, of course, again when Deborah Miranda
started looking at the records of the mission
where her ancestors and family had lived,
she just found a wonderful--
it was so complete and it went all the way back
to the beginning.
And she happened to tell me this.
And I bring it up now because it relates directly
to this whipping-- this whipping that seemed to go on here
in the Southwest and that was noted, as I said earlier,
by that one Navajo captive who complained about it.
Deborah Miranda discovered this--
that once a year the priests had to send a report.
I think it was once a year they had
to send a report to the bishop, who I guess was in Mexico
City or something like that.
And you know this is way long ago.
And there were six questions that the priests
had to answer-- had to report on to the bishop.
And among those questions was this question--
"Do your Indians discipline their children?"
And the attitude was that one of the worst
things about these Indians was that they were just
so kind to their children and they just treated them--
one of the quotes was "like little idols"--
that they just worshipped their children.
And so Deborah started reading and in the first years when
the priests report comes to that question
it says, oh these Indians, they won't lay a hand
on their children.
They spoil them.
It's terrible.
We have to whip their children for them.
And so Deborah said you read along and for about the first
10 or 15, maybe first 20 years, that's
a complaint-- that the priests have
to go and whip the children.
But then after you get about 30 years
into these reports Deborah said, well these Indians
are improving.
They still can't bring themselves
to whip their children, but they bring their children to us
so we can whip them.
And then some years go by Deborah says,
and then finally you get to the part
where it says our Indians are doing very well.
They whip their own children now.
And she was interested because she
was interested in looking at some of the origins of abuse
to children and in thinking about it in her family
and so forth.
But she shared with me the results
of this research, where it was very much the Catholic
Church and the priests that demanded
this-- that wanted this.
And I then was able to bridge or understand
what all of these accounts of all this
whipping in the accounts of how the Mexican families in the New
Mexico territory treated their Indian slaves
and then of course, this story that I just
read to you about Juana.
I had written a longer piece that goes more into the Bailey
book and sort of been hoping that maybe the University
of Arizona press can republish the Indian Slave
Trade in the Southwest.
It's a very scholarly book and you
can see why it was published in 1964
and then it's been allowed to go out of print, which
is a pattern in this country.
This country that has this sort of amnesia when it comes
to certain kinds of things.
And I think it's a terribly--
a terribly important book to really understanding
the history of the Southwest.
Abiquiu, Taos, Tucson, El Paso--
these little towns like Cubero and Abiquiu's
a small town now--
they were the scenes of these terrible, terrible slave
markets.
And there's a creepiness I think that sometimes-- you
can sometimes feel it here.
I certainly feel it in Taos.
Well why not Santa Fe and Albuquerque, you can imagine.
But this carried on for such a long time.
And even after 1865 when the 13th Amendment was
passed outlawing slavery, Indian slavery was not outlawed.
It was sort of winked at.
And one of the horrors of the 1871--
where the good citizens of Tucson went over to Fort Grant
and massacred the defenseless, unarmed Apache women
and children--
30 children were taken by the good citizens of Tucson
and sold into slavery in Mexico.
This was in 1871.
And when they held--
there wouldn't have even been a trial here in Tucson,
but word got back to the Northeast.
And there was outrage in the Northeastern part of the United
States.
And so they brought the perpetrators
to trial and of course, they were acquitted.
And the children that were sold into slavery into Mexico--
the Apache children-- were never were never recovered.
And part of the sickness of it all
is that Wasson Peak by my house is named for John Wasson
and he was one of the organizers of the Fort Grant--
Camp Grant Massacre.
And the person that the Carrillo school is named after
was also on that terrible raid.
So we live in a very, very strange country.
And I think this country has always been like this.
And I'm sad to say that it hasn't--
it seems to me in this regard it hasn't changed at all.
So anyway because this kind of politics is just all around us
all the time and that we're reminded
that nothing has changed.
Nothing has changed in 200 or 300 years.
Not really.
When I set out to write The Turquoise Ledge,
I wanted to be sure not to have very much of what I was just
talking about in there.
And I realized that no wonder I've always felt
happiest with animals and birds and snakes,
because look at how human beings treat one another.
And so most of The Turquoise Ledge then I decided
would be devoted to the beings and the things that
give me the most happiness.
And those are the wild things.
And so now I want to give you some relief from that unhappy--
that unhappy thought.
But one should always be aware.
One should always be aware that there's a great deal--
that there's a great deal yet still
to be answered for in this part of the country.
So that's kind of the background of my finding
out that yes, I have slave dealers--
slave keepers-- in my family.
I dare say I'm not the only one here tonight.