“See,” he said, tapping a document with a gnarled finger, “here’s one of the flies in the ointment to preserving Blue Lake for the Taos Indians. Acting Secretary of Agriculture Harry Brown contends this document signed by both Taos Pueblo and the local Forest Service does not prohibit the Department of Agriculture from taking surpluses of forage or timber.”
She tried to follow all the ramifications of the act, but the paper trail laid by the various departments of the government wound through a superbly designed maze, a smoke screen created by the world’s most skilled illusionists, politicians.
“. . . striking the paragraph giving the Forest Service the right to dispose of forest resources not needed by the Indians . . . eliminating the provision that places the area under state game laws . . . giving the Tribe the right to make improvements to the forest without requiring that such improvements be mandatory . . . .”
By afternoon’s end, Stella and Dr. Frear felt like they were making some headway. Alessandra knew she needed more time to sort out and study the voluminous letters and documents and acts, some going back a hundred years, all containing influential fragments bearing on the Taos Tribe’s effort to keep its land.
That night in Stella’s guest room, she pored over the obfuscating papers until the light of daybreak flooded her room. Still dressed, she fell asleep across her bed and awoke three hours later as the maid brought in a breakfast tray.
When Stella and Alessandra met again with Dr. Frear that afternoon, Alessandra felt better prepared. Arbitrarily, she shoved the stacks of paper on Dr. Frear’s immense oak desk to one side and placed a single document before him and Stella.
Dr. Frear peered up at her blankly. “What is it?”
“A rider. Appended to some inconsequential act passed by both houses several years ago. But look at what it provides.” Her finger stabbed at a paragraph toward its end. “Outsiders are to be permitted in the area held sacred by the Taos Tribe through the joint assent of the Forest Service and the Pueblo.”
Stella looked at her without comprehension.
“Don’t you see? You can wade for years through this paper swamp. Whatever legal paperwork you present, the government will generate more paperwork to counter it. What I propose is to withhold the paperwork.”
“What?” Stella and Dr. Frear asked in puzzled unison.
“For outsiders to be permitted into the sacred Blue Lake area, to hunt or fish or camp or herd sheep or whatever . . . both the Forest Service and the governor of Taos have to sign a visitor permit. For each and every person. All Governor Romero has to do is refuse to sign these Forest Service permits. From my peripheral experience with our United States government, I can assure you that if enough hunters and fishermen and Mexican sheep herders are riled, the government will sit up and listen.”
Stella and Dr. Frear looked at each other and grinned widely.
* * * * *
Two things happened in Alessandra’s absence. The small Indian pueblo of Tesuque eight miles north of Santa Fe barricaded itself behind its dirt walls, vowing to starve in protest to the Bursum Bill pending in Congress.
And Man married.
Married Mud Woman. She, who was a master potter, skilled in fashioning the famed Polished Black Ware of her Santa Clara ancestors. She, who offered up white corn meal as a prayer to Mother Earth and Clay Woman before creating a vessel that it might be beautiful and make happy its future owners.
Did she also offer up a prayer of gratitude each morning that her husband enfolded her in his arms? When he caressed her passion-hot skin? When his strong, sensitive hands found ever-new ways to give her joyous pleasure without limits?
In her singular moments of pain, Alessandra had never felt so alone. Yet she had the diversion of many new faces in her increasingly hectic days of organizing the drive to awaken the nation to the crisis of the Indian condition. She stayed so busy her thoughts didn’t stray too often to the mystic village only miles distant.
Only when its flutes called to her at dawn, its drums at high noon, its song of life in the deep of sleep. Only when evening came, when Man’s voice sang out from the highest house-top, deep, clear, a summons as mournful as the dove’s. Only when the sound of the strong, masculine drum pierced her lungs, her diaphragm, her heart, vibrating atrophied muscles, stimulating dormant cells. At those times, a great tristesse pulled her down like a netted lioness. At those times, she was tempted to remove the beautiful bracelet of silver Man had fashioned, but she could never quite bring herself to do so.
Naively, she thought she only had to contend with the Bursum Bill, and then she could get back to painting. After her visit with Stella and Dr. Frear, she stumbled onto other bills and administrative undertakings of shattering character. One of them proposed to take from the Mescalero Apache most of their tribal lands. Another denied the Navajo ownership of their Executive Order reservation and ultimately denied every tribe ownership of every Executive Order reservation.
The public’s lack of information and resultant indifference proved completely widespread with the Indians hardly better informed. Incredibly, these menacing bills and policies were promoted by the Department of Interior itself, the very governmental branch appointed to protect the Indians through its Bureau of Indian Affairs. Neither the voting public nor the Indians could comprehend this absurdity.
With Peg’s help, the artists and writers of Taos, and those who had spilled over into Santa Fe, rallied in legions. United under the slogan of “Let’s save the Pueblos,” they issued a stinging manifesto, a challenge entitled “Proclamation to the American Public.”
Working alongside each other gave Alessandra and Peg plenty of opportunity to discuss the three months Alessandra and Man had lived together, yet Peg referenced that time only once, while they were collating signatures from the communities across America.
“After you returned to live in your adobe again, well, I never brought it up when you came to visit . . . I felt it was none of my business,” she reached out and touched Alessandra’s arm, “but I knew you did what you had to do. I understand all too well the power of passion. You would never have known if you hadn’t gone to him. . . I’m just sorry it didn’t work out. I felt he truly loved you. Hell, maybe I’m just too blinded by my feelings for Tony . . . even after all these years. Pay me no attention, Alessandra.”
She managed a smile. “You may be just about the only one I do pay attention to. At least, according my brother Paul, who claims I don’t listen to anyone.”
How badly she wanted to ask Peg what she knew about Man these days. Believing not only was it unfair to draw Peg into the mess she had made of her life, she also found it intolerably painful to hear his name mentioned. Merely passing an Indian on the road sent shards of pain through her heart.
Will I ever cease thinking about him during the day and dreaming about him at night? Will the longing never end? Or will that come only with the blessing of death?
No, I did the right thing, setting him free.
That following month, she, Peg, and the local Indian Defense Association unleashed a blitz of paper and words, inundating newspapers and magazines across the country with protests, resolutions, letters, and articles. Mary demonstrated her genius with publicity. “The trick is to be informative without being sentimental and still provide an emotional appeal that inspires our readers into action.”
Alessandra wrote notes to friends in her eastern intellectual community, appealing to them to join the struggle though they had never seen New Mexico or a Pueblo Indian.
Stella’s fellow club members, at her prompting, showered their congressmen with telegrams and letters.
Just as they had 242 years before at the time of the great Pueblo Revolt, tribal messages summoned the Indians to unite. Alessandra arranged for delegations from each village to meet at the Santo Domingo Pueblo, north of Albuquerque.
Here, more than three hundred years before, Nuevo Mexico’s first governor cut off the left foot of eighty resisting Ac
oma Pueblo males. Their hideous cries still echoed in the voices of the Pueblo people Alessandra had gathered to meet that night. Defiantly the Puebloan representatives formed the All-Pueblo Council and pledged to use every resource available to defeat the Bursum Bill.
In all its mighty arrogance, Washington ignored the letters, petitions, protests. The White House where the Great White Father controlled the Pentagon, the bastion of supreme male destruction, stood impregnable to mere mortals.
When the paper-flood tactic didn’t work, Alessandra mobilized the battle plan she had laid out to Dr. Frear and Stella. “Tony’s got to get Governor Romero’s ear. If not in the kiva council chambers, then in a sweat lodge. Get Governor Romero to cease counter-signing the Forest Service’s visitor permits.”
* * * * *
Barely out of high school, a reporter in oxford shoes stood at the door of her adobe, asking for a scoop. Ned McCafferty of the Albuquerque Herald wasn’t that much older than Jeremy. “Come on, Mrs. O’Quinn,” he begged, popping his gum, “give me a break. I need something to take back to my editor.”
With her best smile, she invited him in. “All right. Tell your editor that beginning next week, the Taos Pueblo governor, Governor Jesus de Romero, will refuse to counter-sign the Forest Service’s visitor permits. That will affect hunters, campers, fisherman, hikers . . . you name it.”
His lopsided grin grabbed her heart. “Gosh, thanks, Mrs. O’Quinn.”
“You owe me one, kiddo.”
* * * * *
To her great disappointment, even though Governor Romero agreed not to counter-sign the Forest Service’s visitor permits, the refusal resulted only in local rumbling, but nothing that would rattle the halls of the nation’s capitol. At least, not yet.
Meanwhile, she joined the association members in their continuous barrage of public letters, newspaper editorials, and, when invited, speeches to organizations. Unfortunately, most of the presentations were within the state borders, an area under the influence of both Senator Bursum and Secretary of the Interior Fall.
Alessandra knew that of the two, Fall was the more dangerous. Many believed he had hired out a gunslinger twenty-five years earlier to murder his rival, the powerful New Mexico land owner, Albert Fountain, and his eight-year-old son.
* * * * *
Taking stock of their fruitless efforts, Alessandra, Peg, Bert, Blumy, and Mary met in the Rainbow Room in late February. Though weeks after January’s Three Kings Day festivities, candles and strings of popcorn still adorned the large fir tree Peg and Tony had placed in the corner opposite the fireplace.
After much reviewing, haranguing, and brainstorming, the group admitted they were back where they started, hopeless. Peg looked at Alessandra. “You’re our general. You know the enemy. What’s our best strategy?”
Alessandra couldn’t face the other four. Old feelings assaulted her. She felt inept, helpless, insignificant, even incidental in the face of unshakable authority. Old feelings that were as new as her next breath.
She so wanted to trust her own strength, her inner knowing. To trust the process of life itself. On the verge of weeping, she rose and, arms crossed, paced the room. The others sat in silence. The creak of the planks beneath her Russian boots made the only sound.
Perhaps my inadequacy comes from my utter loneliness, my worthlessness without Jeremy. Or perhaps it is . . . no, she would not let her thoughts turn to Man. The pain was invariably a grand mal seizure.
She turned and faced her colleagues questioning gazes. A new self-awareness announced to her soul she had at last come to that blurred edge of reality. She had to trust in the not knowing. To trust herself . . . or trust in nothing.
“I will find a way. And when I do I will let you know.”
* * * * *
Her solution did not come as an exalted moment of enlightenment.
Two weeks after her meeting with Peg and the others, she attended Taos’s Deer Dance and its accompanying installation of the new governor and officers. Along with a handful of Anglos from Taos, she stood in the Pueblo’s translucent blue air. Snow feathered like goose down on the plaza.
Man’s amorphous form could be seen on the highest roof. His calm, compelling voice called out the Spirit’s blessing upon the new leaders.
Yes, I did the right thing . . . for him. And that makes it right for me. Probably the one unselfish act I have ever performed.
Clad from head to foot in freshly tanned buckskin, the headman received his cane of authority from Man. Then the dancing began. Alessandra tore her gaze from Man’s mystical figure, shrouded in his white blanket like some desert sheik. What good did it do her to open her heart’s scarred wound to reminders of her great forfeiture? With futile concentration, she watched the dancing in which the spirit of the Tribe communicated with the Great Spirit.
Old men stood at a distance, chanting, singing to their drums’ unrelenting beat as two long lines of Indians, a couple of hundred or more young men, shuffled forth from the kiva. Their thudding feet stirred the plaza dust. Little bells tied to their legs echoed around the plaza. Naked, but for the hides they wore, the young men concealed their identities under antlered deer heads. Snarling, howling, the men hunched over sticks that became extended deer legs. Slinking among them, boys wore the skins of fox and wolf and mountain lion.
As if mesmerized, these beasts of the forest padded behind two imperious young women in the age-old dress of their female ancestors. One of the two proud women was Mud Woman. Long hair loose, eyes lowered, she nonetheless wore the look of a woman deeply fulfilled.
She and the other woman danced backwards with small cedar boughs held aloft, shaken in rhythm to the chanting of the old men. The Indians danced with every muscle in their body but did not touch each other. The two women symbolized the powerful female magic, leading the spellbound beasts of the forests back and forth in the plaza . . . and ultimately to their doom.
So this was what Man was trying to explain to me. The feminine, the oriental yin, was the strongest in nature. The wild animal must be sacrificed to sustain that mystical strength, that strength necessary to procreation and continuation of all things spiritual and physical. Did he see me that way, strong?
After the two women led the lines of subjugated animals back to the kivas, the singing and the drum beats faded away. But not the images.
Finally Alessandra comprehended the vital roles Man and Mud Woman played in the continuity of their people. Finally she accepted she would always be an outsider to the Pueblo people. Yet she had her own role to play in their continuity of life. She had to take her crusade for these people to the enemy’s gates to complete that role.
She planned to leave northern New Mexico without fanfare, mainly because she had never liked good-byes. Far too many of those had been said, so she told only Peg she was returning to Washington and made her pledge her silence to the others about the move. Peg agreed to dispose of furniture in the little adobe for her and arranged for the touring car to be waiting for her at the plaza to take her first to Santa Fe and then onto Lamy.
And so, at that last moment, with the morning’s faint notes of Pueblo flutes whispering in her ear, she turned and kissed the turquoise door of her beloved little adobe home good-bye. Her palms and lips lingered on its scuffed wooden planks. Then, tears in her eyes, she turned to face the uncertain future with its foreboding glimpse of authoritarian power.
* * * * *
All of Bear Heart’s forty-three years he had known who he was and his purpose in this lifetime. Never had there existed the miasma of doubt, that whisper of confusion, the fleeting image questioning otherwise. The heart of Taos society, the clan, was founded on group cohesiveness and loyalty. The individual sacrificed for the whole.
Bear Heart ascribed to this.
But he had ceased to be an individual. The night Alessandra had entered Peg’s house and lifted her traveling veil to reveal her large eyes and there her ineffable soul, its defiant yet skittish innocence, its bar
baric strength, its essential goodness . . . that night the boundaries of his flesh were stormed.
How conceited of him to think he had surrendered his individuality to the clan, when that part of him claiming earth space as a medicine man sat him apart from his clan. He had accepted his duty and responsibility, the boundaries of being apart yet obligated to the clan. But Alessandra had invaded his safe boundaries, revealed to him his weakness that his inner being did not entertain, the possibility of being wrong in its principles.
And now his boundaries had expanded to incorporate Alessandra’s. They were two streams, running side by side through eternity, through many lifetimes. And though they paralleled, interflowed, separated, always they were comprised of the same element.
Mud Woman, good wife that she was, did not voice her worry about where his thoughts wandered, thus betraying a lack of faith in him. His lack of faith in himself proved much worse, for it made clear he had lost touch with the heart. His wife’s puzzled glances when she thought he was unaware revealed more than any accusations. They revealed the truth to him. His thoughts followed his heart. He hated himself, hated the task to which his hereditary position had committed him. Only the darkness of his days made life endurable. Light he could no longer stand.
And when the darkness became unendurable, an unbearable torture . . . despite the scoffing of the white man’s science, his heart called to his Power Spirit, knowing that it would guide his soul into that other dimension, where he could reach the one he wanted.
What matter he broke cosmic rules. He had to know she was safe, well, alive in this world.
That night in restless sleep, he called his Power Spirit to take him to the white people’s shrine land in search of his beloved.
She was still awake.
* * * * *
For three weeks Alessandra had marched around Washington. Omnivorously she had read Indian Commissioners’ reports and Federal Statutes. Ignoring her overwhelming fear of her impending personal battle, she had strategized the battle for Indian rights. The threat at home refused to be ignored.
Indian Affairs (historical romance) Page 26
