Things to Ponder Ernie Bulow

Things to ponder...

By Ernie Bulow

6/16/ 2020—First thing today, Good Morning America led off with a piece about a man being shot in Albuquerque. There had been a big fight over the removal of the statue of Juan de Onate. They covered it like it was just part of the general unrest over George Floyd.

There was never a mention of Native Americans. There was never a mention of what Onate did to get his statue defiled, as they said. The similar, but more successful attack last week in Santa Fe was not mentioned either. Apparently they want to keep us focused on the Black protests.

Likely, they just didn’t know anything. They have no idea who Juan de Onate was or what he did. In my opinion this statue was far more deserving of it’s fate than, say, the one of Columbus.

The Guardian, an international newspaper out of England had the only coverage explaining the meaning of the statue and that meaning appeared well down in the body of the text..

Onate, governor of New Mexico at the time, was mad at the Acoma Pueblo because they had killed his nephew, who had been killing them. Onate came over with a large army, killed more than one thousand Pueblos, took all the small children as slaves, and chopped off the right foot of the remaining men. That had to be worth a few statues.

The real issue for me is the almost total lack of mention, not to say feeling, for the Acomas. Perhaps they know nothing, and certainly not the fact that Acomas are Native Americans. So the Black people are almost the only minority ever mentioned, with slight notice of Hispanics—brown— or orientals—yellow. The history of Chinese on the West coast is truly disgusting. In Nevada, not so many years ago, there was still a law that Chinese were not allowed to marry.

The phrase “Vanishing Red Man” has been used for centuries. In talking about the failings of Indians, White Americans are only talking to themselves about themselves. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a novella called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wherein the good Dr. Jekyll has a theory that if he could just separate his personality into the good and evil parts, the good could destroy the evil.

Unfortunately the opposite was the case. It would seem that Anglos have long wanted to put humans into the same two categories, with much the same result.

If Anglo Americans see the various ethnic groups as inherently stupid, cruel, and all the other negative things, it is not only correct, but preordained that they remove them. We think we have rid ourselves of this horrible belief, but there are strange little reminders.

What I am parsing today is why, of all minorities, Native Americans are invisible. Perhaps it is by design. The quieter you are, the more invisible, and the more invisible, the safer. The problem with that conclusion is that to major news outlets , like the television channels and big newspapers, nothing is ever truly hidden. So my next conclusion is that they simply have no interest.

Just for the sake of my ramblings, how many Native Americans have been removed? Linguists say that half of the world’s languages were once spoken in North America. That includes Mexico which today is the country with the largest number of native speakers. Half of those were spoken on the West Coast— California. I know that seems impossible, but the Spanish were far more successful at killing Natives that we ever were.

Even today there are 18 language families (Europe has four) with seventy- four languages. [Yeah, I had to look that up]. I would think it was hard to hide that many folk.

Even today (after all that exterminating) North America has 296 Native languages grouped into 29 families, with language isolates like Zuni. I wish they would use all those languages to better effectiveness.

Photo by Lola Johnson