Na ūspami pīl wana ak tal kēâmî ūpāt bûdâmâ wal awa ūtchî: Things Have Happened, It’s Our Response That Matters

ALEX PEREZ / STRONG WIND

Nayi emnata Wo’ol Ba’h. Na Englič emnata Alexander Joseph. Na ūspami pīl wana ak tal kēâmî ūpāt bûdâmâ wal awa ūtchî. My name is Alexander Joseph. My Karankawa name, Wo’ol Ba’h, means Strong Wind. My ancestors lived here on this land long before any of the people of the world came here, your ancestors.

I’m from Galveston Island. My grandmother’s people are from the coast of Texas all the way down to Corpus Christi and even further south. There was a time where we were chased out of this land. First the Spanish, and they for the most part didn’t have the resources to really extinguish us the way that the Americans and the Anglos did.

So after the war between the Americans and Spain—or Mexico—the Americans started acquiring land here, first through Spanish land grants and such. When America acquired California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, then it was open season. These were our ancestral lands where we migrated seasonally for different harvesting of foods and whatnot. Those lands became ranches and we could no longer go there. We didn’t understand what private property was, or land ownership. We thought: how ludicrous that is, to think that you can actually own the land that was created by the Creator?

Of course, things have happened in the past of every culture. It’s our responses that’s important. We’re given two ears and one mouth. So there’s a reason for that, so that we listen more than we speak. We’re talking about people’s experiences, cultural experiences, the effects of our living condition, and what I mean by that, from a wider perspective, is the effects of our environment, of our world.

My main concern is the oil rigs off the coasts of the world—we’re talking about a giant, okay, this industry is a giant—and cycles of time. There have been multiple time periods where the earth itself does change. We call her Changing Woman because she’s always in a state of change. My concern about the oil rigs off the coasts is that it could be tomorrow, it could be 500 years, it could be 2,000 years, eventually the earth is going to roll. And I don’t mean spin on its axis, I mean it’s going to shift its axis. There’s nothing anybody can do about it, I’m sorry to say, except adapt, just like nature does. My concern is that with industry, oil in particular, that when this eventually occurs and all of these straws—pipelines—are in the ocean with no foresight, and those things rupture, and that oil is dispersed all over, it’s going to make the BP spill look like spilled milk.

Alexander Joseph Perez / Wo’ol Ba’h (Strong Wind) is a council member and cultural and spiritual advisor for the Karankawa Kadla tribe. He wrote the book “Karankawa Kadla/Mixed Tongue.”

We acknowledge that Southeast Texas is the traditional territory of the Atakapa-Ishak, Akokisa, Bidai, Karankawa, AlabamaCoushatta, and other nations. We affirm and respect tribal sovereignty in this land and in all territories.

Below: A man believed to be Atakapa, in winter. Painted in 1735 by Alexandre de Batz. Image courtesy of Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.