Taos Park Controversy Update
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, July 8, the Town of Taos rescinded the name change from Kit Carson Memorial Park to Red Willow and decided to leave Kit Carson Memorial Cemetery as is while appointing a committee to come up with a suitable name for the rest of the park. According to reports, the Tribal Council of Taos Pueblo objected to the Town’s usurpation of the Pueblo’s “Red Willow.”
The controversy surrounding the name change has been good for students and academics with an interest in Southwest Studies (American Studies, Anthropology, Archeology, History, Literature). Hence the book list below is posted. Fritction will continue to update the book list as readers write in and advise us.
Meanwhile, we don’t expect politicians to read the recommendations anymore than they generally read their packets prepared by staff. Frequently, however, activists in the community come to meetings prepared, not that facts can prevail over emotional responses that offer different world views. Regardless, this subject seen as “A History of Southwestern Ideas (El Norte style)” is fascinating.
Apparently, some folks have confused the middle-aged white man, Hampton Sides, with the historic character presented as the symbol of Manifest Destiny, Kit Carson. No doubt Sides’ success has aroused a certain envidia among academics and others. Sides’ presentation of Kit Carson as a dime-novel hero juxtaposed to and the symbol of historical forces presents difficulties of interpretation to those who read headlines but avoid the fine print. Even as one becomes fond of Kit Carson through familiarity during the journey of exploration and investigation, Sides foreshadows Carson’s blood lust with particular examples early on in the tale that culminate in the sickening “Long Walk” of the Dineh to the Bosque Redondo. He’s a hero with clay feet but a “good soldier.”
Ironically, Sides shows that General William Tecumseh Sherman, the famed Civil War general, seen as the butcher of Atlanta for the infamous scorched earth, march to the sea, is the U.S. military officer, who decides the fate of the Dineh and sends them home to what we call Navajo Country today— where they have grown as a nation.
The real villain in “Blood and Thunder,” to me is neither Sides nor Carson, neither General John Charles Fremont nor even the right-wing imperialist Senator Thomas Hart Benton (great uncle of the painter) nor the tribes and their historic enemies, whether other American Indians or the settlers spawned by the Spanish Conquest. No, the great lesson of “Blood and Thunder” is how the American policy of “Manifest Destiny” led to the occupation and genocide in what is known today as the western United States.
The same policy of so-called “American Exceptionalism” continues today in what we call the Mid East (in comparison to whose West?) where the Obama administration, supported by the U.S. Congress expands the American empire worldwide. Carson and Fremont were the pawns of destiny. The Euro settlers of the Hispanic conquest, who resided in the west among the Native Americans, joined the latter as victims or losers in the initial battles with los Americanos but, as we know today, history has not been written by white middle-aged men so much as by the descendants of the Native Americans and Native Hispanics, who have thrived, in terms of population and other ways, in northern New Mexico and, ironically, in Arizona, where the Navaho/Dineh constitute a political and social force.
Sometimes the survivors write history by example. Willow Weep for Me. Here are a few books for students of El Norte and the Southwest.
Whaley’s List (Listed alphabetically by author)
Burke, Flannery: From Greenwich Village to Taos (University Press of Kansas)
*Forrest, Suzanne: The Preservation of the Village (UNM Press)
*Gordon-McCutchan, R.C. Taos Indians and the Battle for Blue Lake (UNM Press)
*Hassrick and Cunningham’s “In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein” (University of Oklahoma Press)
Nichols, John: *The Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey, The Nirvana Blues, (Ballantine).
Parsons, Elsie Clews: “Taos Tales” (Dover);
*Rodriguez, Sylvia, Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity, and Place (School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM).
Rodriguez, Sylvia: “Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos: Toward a Sociology of the art Colony (Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 45, No.1. Spring 1988, pp. 77-99)
*Rudnick, Lois: Utopian Vision. (UNM Press).
*Sanchez, George I. Forgotten People
*Sides, Hampton: Blood and Thunder (Doubleday)
*Stuart, David: Anasazi America (UNM Press)
Waters, Frank: To Possess the Land (Ohio University press)
Waters, Frank: The Man Who Killed the Deer (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press)
Judge Peggy Nelson suggests the following books.
“Manifest Destinies: The making of the Mexican American Race” -Laura E. Gomez
“When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away” – Ramon A. Gutierrez
“Captives and Cousins” – James F. Brooks
Dr. Sylvia Rodriguez forwarded this supplemental list:
The Tewa World, Alfonso Ortiz
When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away, Ramon Gutierrez
Captives and Cousins, James Brooks
Manifest Destinies, Laura Gomez
Land, Water, and Culture, eds. Briggs and Van Ness
The Myth of Santa Fe, Chris Wilson
Understories, the Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico, Jake Kosek
Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco
The Pastoral Clinic, Angela Garcia
Land of Disenchantment, Michael Trujillo
Properties of Violence, David Correia
Recognizing Heritage, Thomas Guthrie
Extra Credit
Culture in the Marketplace, Molly Mullin
No Separate Refuge, Sarah Deutsch
Preservation of the Village, Suzanne Forrest
Language of Blood, John Nieto-Phillips
The Daring Flight of My Pen, Genaro Padilla
Our Lady of Controversy, eds. Gaspar de Alba and Lopez
Reader Erich Kuerschner recommends:
Teju Cole’s “The White-Savior Industrial Complex” or “How Manifest Destiny is alive and well with the USA progressives.”
From Dr. Steven Fox:
James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,. 2002.
Lamadrid, Enrique, Hermanitos Comanchitos—Indo-Hispano Rituals of Captivity and Redemption, UNM Press 2003
Rael-Galvez, Estevan (Questa native, former State Historian and director National Hispanic Culture Center: Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity: Narratives of American Indian Slavery, Colorado and New Mexico, 1776-1934. Dissertation, U. Michigan. [There’s only once copy at Zimmerman, noncirculating).
Judge Jeff Shannon
The first critique written of the European treatment of Native American peoples.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de (1999). Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-044562-6.