Kill and scalp all, nits make lice.

A lot of people who are I think at least a little bit ignorant of history wonder why Native american groups take issue with sports mascots. In the town where I grew up, South Deerfield this was a big issue when I was in seventh grade at Frontier. A Native American group had taken issue with the name and gotten the school to change it and there was a referendum on what the new name should be. I always thought it should be changed to the 'Frontier Rednecks' because of my experience at the school. But there were several choices and the student body ended up choosing 'red hawks' which remains the name to this day. But still alot of people wondered what all the fuss was about. I mean besides reducing a population of millions to a population of 400,000 at the turn of the century. Perhaps its the long history of broken treaties and broken promises, of forced marches and massacres. And the language of this period is unmistakable in terms of the intentions of those who coveted Indian lands. Words like 'extermination' and 'extinction' are used frequently when reading about the history of Native American's in the west. And the abuse continues to this day with Native Americans on reservations typically living below the poverty line. Colonel John Chivington of the U.S. army before the massacre at Sand Creek in which 105 Indians women and children were killed and 28 men 'kill and scalp all, nits make lice.' After the Sand Creek Massacre George and Charlie Bent who were sons of a white trader and a Cheyenne woman, were so disgusted by the events they witnessed there that they chose to take up with the Cheyennes instead and forsake their father. And who could blame them, after seeing the soldiers mutilating the bodies of the Indian's as one Soldier put it 'in going over the battleground the next day I did not see the body of man, woman, or child but was scalped, and in many horrible instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner-men, women, and children's privates cut out & I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick.' Makes your stomach turn reading the kinds of things people are capable of. And I still see people around town waving the 'redskins' banner like they are some kind of patriots. Fucking rednecks.

A good day to fight a good day to die.

She always hated the whiskey trader. He was a heavyset man with a large beard, who seemed to constantly reek of something a strange unpleasant odor she could never quite define. But mostly she hated the dark liquid that he pushed upon her people, that had turned half of her village into wife beaters, and thieves who would sell their firstborn for a taste of that vile liquid. It had turned her father in the space of a few years into a proud warrior and provider, loving father, and husband into something else. A vacant, decaying, husk of a human being. She saw him now passed out in the small room of they're small cabin the bottle half-full on the table beside the bed. She wanted to pour it out, to grab the rifle that hung on the wall and walk out into the village and shoot the whiskey trader dead. She knew this was a sentiment shared by more then a few in the village. She had poured it out before but her father had beaten her mercilessly for it. She had to constantly remind herself that this was not the same man who had reared her. Who had taught her how to live and be a good person in the world, who had comforted her when she was scared, when she felt helpless and in despair. She watched the whiskey trader from outside her window now, he was bargaining with an old man who was attempting to barter a belt or something for a bottle. He would demure at first, but eventually he would give the old man what he wanted. The whiskey trader seemed bound and determined to ensure death and ruin to her people, to sow the seeds of destruction for all of them. A few of the old men of the village had attempted to warn against this vice but their pleas had gone unheeded, unheard, except for a few. It would consume them all, there was no hope.

Love is coming to us all.

So I was thinking about doing some writing for a while now and finally i have managed to actually get down to it. Feeling low the past few days. Real low. Darkness, despair, drinking hoping that somehow that fleeing feeling of exuberance will cure what ails me. That ingesting something and feeling like shit and then doing it over the next day thinking it will be the cure. To fight fire with fire. So here I am at 5am just pondering what to do. What exactly is wrong. Can't seem to see through the haze. Got on this dating site and the hardest part of explaining who I am and what I'm doing. What am I doing? I really don't know. It saddens me this feeling. This utter detachment I have from myself. A feeling that I don't really care what happens. It reminds me somewhat of something Shelby foote said about Lincoln 'that he could remove himself from himself as if he were looking at himself.' I think in some ways thats how I feel. A lack of ego, of self-esteem, of pride. Something went wrong somewhere down the line and the shit just seems to come piling in. Sitting, stagnating, getting fat, old, useless. Eroding all my sense of dignity and self-worth, drowning myself in rivers of whiskey and malt liquor to dull everything. The pain, of what? Its not even fun anymore and the taste is fleeting. Feel disgusting and bloated every day and its just getting worse. Seems like everyone around me has confidence and know what they want but I just fall behind. Watching everything pass me by day by day not really knowing why. Why I live like this, why I don't want to move to do something with myself, to get out to live. Letting everything go to where I make an absolute fool of myself for no damn reason. Drinking just takes from you, at first it seems to give you things but then it takes. Until you don't know why your'e doing it but you still can't stop. Every day you wake up and you just don't want to. And people who know you ask you 'why are you still drinking?' and you can't think of damn good answer because you just don't know. And you just want to stop and just be like everyone else and just lead a relatively normal existence but you can't. And you can't just sip, or have a few beers like other people can. You have to swig, chug, and guzzle the stuff down as fast as you can. And the more you put in the more you want, but it never seems to fill the vast chasm you have inside you. Something missing. Something askew, but what is hard to say.

I'm a liar, i'm a thief, i'm a cheat.

Brooklyn 1927

Vito walked out of the dark alley unto the street feeling the cold breeze against his skin. It was early December and he wasn't really dressed for the cold but that didn't matter. His father was a stonemason who worked hard but he had six other mouths to feed so Vito didn't really blame him. Still he felt an exhilaration as only a 13 year old could feel. He had made it out, played hookie, gotten out of that damn place that he hated more then anything in the world. He had told the teacher he was going to the bathroom and had slipped past the janitor and the teachers. He was a big kid but he could by stealthy if he needed to. He had done it before with his friends from the neighborhood, broken into rich peoples houses and taking food and sometimes they had taken a few swigs off the bottle in the liquor cabinets. Vito had never much taken to the taste of the booze but after a few swigs it warmed him up nice and they all felt good. Vito reached into his coat and pulled out the folded piece of paper he had obtained at school. He pulled it out slowly and at first he wondered if it was real. He had stolen from Jimmy William's backpack after recess, five dollars. Five fucking dollars Vito thought as he unfolded the crumpled note. It was more money then he had ever held in his hands. He had seen his father with wads of the bills at payday but they were always gone almost as soon as they came in. But now he had one, to spend in any which manner he pleased. He felt powerful like the gangsters he saw who ran the speakeasy on the corner in the neighborhood. They always had plenty of the green bills and they never seemed to run out. 'Crime doesn't pay son.' His father had told him. 'Those are very bad men.' he had said. Still the words went in one ear and out the other. He thought of all the candy he would buy, the soda, maybe even a sirloin steak, he felt like the luckiest kid on earth. Vito had wanted to be like the men on the corner, the ones who never seemed to have a work but always had money, who life seemed to come easy to. He had seen his father bust his ass every day working on projects with little to show for it and he had always vowed that that wouldn't be him. That he would never have to want for anything like that. Vito turned the corner as he noticed the policemen coming down the street. Fuck, he thought avoiding the mans gaze. If they caught him on the street like this he would likely give him a good beating and then send him back to school. The beating he could handle, going back to that damn school he could not. Vito quickly crossed the street narrowly avoiding the model A tearing down the street. Vito was still somewhat unnerved by the massive metal bohemoth's coming down the street. The policemen hadn't noticed him distracted by something else. Vito pondered the rest of his day. Most of the beat cops in the neighborhood knew him so there was only one thing to do, take a trolley downtown.

Now witness, now witness love

I was thinking recently why I would never like to serve in the military. Not the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines or the National guard. Beyond the aspect of getting blown away and showering with other men I can't help but think what a horrible past our nation has. About the trail of tears where thousands of Cherokee and Seminole and creek Indians where forcibly removed from their homelands in the American Southeast and marched to Oklahoma. Of the use of slave labor to build our nation up from the start. And to think that I would be representing a nation capable of such acts, an instrument of its foreign policy is terrifying.

Yup

The story of America is the story of conquest. Of new lands and peoples. Sometimes when reading about this discovery and subsequent conquest of the New World the Native people that lived there are often overlooked. Not ignored entirely but brushed aside. As obstacles to progress. They're fate is acknowledged haphazardly but rarely told for what it was, a genocide. Granted using a modern term for something that happened in the past to sometimes frowned upon anyone who examined the practices and policies the Spanish, the British, and later the Americans would certainly come to the same conclusion. Right now I am reading about the end of the era of resistance among the Indians tribes with the massacre at Wounded knee. The years of the late 1880s had brought despair among the Sioux at Pine ridge agency. A drought had wiped out they're crops and the government had cut they're beef rations. They had once been a self-sufficient people now forced to live on government handouts. The feeling of despair spread across all of the Western Indians on the reservation and a prophet started to emerge. A Paiute Wavoka, had told his followers that if they would dance a dance he had shown them called the 'ghost dance,' that the great spirit would wipe out all the whites and the plains would once again be abundant with buffalo. That family and friends who had died would come back. A compelling message, especially in light of the dire circumstances they faced. But from what I have read about it I think the Indian agents and government officials wanted to provoke an incident. It was Custer's old 7th cavalry that participated in the massacre, and it does not seem to be a stretch to think they wanted revenge for the loss at Little bighorn.

This is real.

Fuck this. Fuck everyone. I really don't know what to do anymore. I want to scream to cry out. But I do not know what to say. To articulate what exactly is the problem with me. What is my major malfunction. Why do the pieces not fit? Exactly what is going on? And I don't know and I damn sure do not want to tell anyone.