I also think about working for National Indian Youth Council.
They had the [? seeder ?] program out of there.
So every Native in Albuquerque worked there
at one point or the other.
[LAUGHTER]
And I was working with their newspaper "Americans Before
Columbus," and I remember having to go over to Church Rock
to report a uranium spill and a lot of talk
about how that shifted things.
And also, which your presentation reminded
me was that we--
I remember the people sitting in with some of the linguists
trying to figure out how do you come up with a word for uranium
that will tell the people that you cannot see it but it is
destructive.
And the children had always played in the water
and the animals were always taken there to drink.
And how do you--
how do you change a language?
Period.
How do you change any language to deal
with those kinds of atrocities?
Which now we would have never believed
how they've multiplied.
But yet at the same time, like many of us I sat in those
circles in the '60s--
late '60s and the '70s with people
who were telling about how if we did not
change our relationship, if we did not remember
our relationship to this place that these
are the kinds of things we would see.
"Once the world was perfect and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once doubt ruptured the web all manner of demon thoughts
jumped through.
We destroyed the world we had been
given for inspiration for life.
Each stone of jealousy.
Each stone of fear, greed, envy, and hatred put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other in the dark
and now we had no place to live because we didn't know
how to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
and shared a blanket, a spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A wind clan person climbed out into the next world.
And then the other clans, and the children of those clans,
and their children, and their children, and their children,
and their children, all the way through time to now,
to right now, to you."