Indians on the Horizon

Indians on the Horizon

Yesterday evening, just before it got too dark to see, three horses with hunched riders on them came plodding down the mountain trail from the west. Although the riders were wearing ball caps and sports jackets, I saw at a glance they were Indians, and in my mind's eye I saw them in buckskins with feathers in their long black hair and lances in their hands.

Maybe I am impressed too much by the paintings and sculptures of Remington and Russell, or too many western stories I have read, but to me there is something so very right and natural about an Indian on horseback. They, like their Mongolian forebears who migrated across the Bering straits thousands of years ago, look as if they and their horses were made for each other. I have seen lots of white riders, usually cowboy types, who look entirely competent and comfortable on their horses, but not to the degree of the Indian riders I saw yesterday

I'm afraid I'm being a reverse bigot, and have a very unreal and romanticized view of Indians. If I had been a pioneer intent on settling Indian land, and I saw three Indian warriors with lances appear on the horizon, I would have been running for my cabin and arming myself for battle, knowing I was just another white person they intended to scourge from their land.

But times have changed in the last 150 years, and Indian survivors have come to the reluctant realization they had to change too, or they would no longer exist as a people. They are still in a state of change, but with the help of shared casino revenue, many tribes are making huge strides in changing the hopeless attitudes of their people who were trying to drown the bad memories of history in alcohol and drugs.

The Indians I saw yesterday are not typical of American Indians. They are visiting Kumeyaay cousins whose ancestors were left on the Mexican side of the artificial borderline agreed to by white men in the Treaty of Guadalupe after the Mexican War in 1846. The Kumeyaay and other tribes, who had lived on this land for thousands of years, were given no chance to speak up in favor of keeping their heritage. Now they, like everyone else who wants to enter the United States from Tecate, Mexico, have to wait in line to be passed through byU.S. Customs and the Border Patrol if they want to visit their relatives on this reservation where I live at a horse camp.

 Perhaps because Spanish settlers in Mexico assimilated the Indians rather than trying to annihilate them, the Mexican Kumeyaay seem to retain more of their unique identity than their cousins on the US side of the border do. Although they speak Spanish, Kumeyaay is their main language. Until recent efforts to save it, the Kumeyaay language north of the border has been almost abandoned. So if the northern cousins don't speak Spanish, they have to rely on interpreters or sign language to communicate with their relatives.

Please forgive me for wandering so far from yesterday's scene of Indian riders coming over the horizon. I wanted to put it in a poem, but I didn't feel up to the task.