Albert was his name, this time. He preached up a storm too! This is his hand, as he explains it. White is the dominant, the middle finger, the largest, and, after Black (ring finger), Brown (pointer finger) and Yellow (pinky finger), Red is the smallest, the most oppressed. But red, the thumb, is the hardest to live without.
Christianity, he says, that’s bullshit! Whose father would kill his children? Send them to hell? We’re living in hell now, he says, but it’s a hell we have sent ourselves to. Drugs, disease, war and god knows what, this is hell, now, here.
The revolution will come from the Red Tribe, he says, and I believe him. Albert was a three-time state wrestling champ and came in sixth, I think he said, in the 1998 Olympics. He joined the armed forces as well. He’s just 20 now. He had a girlfriend in Salt Lake City who was 50 years old and used to hide him in the bedroom when the missionaries came over – that’s bullshit too, he says.
He busted out his eagle feathers – the U.S. constitution and the eagle as the national bird came from the influence of the Iroquois Confederation, he says. Ol’ George Washington, he says, asked the Indians how to run a free state, and their ideas were incorporated into our laws. He explained everything to those missionaries, but they left him and his girlfriend, and his girlfriend was shunned by the church for having a live-in boyfriend – bullshit, he says. But hard drugs ruined all that eventually. A typical addicts’ story, he says – lost everything.
The Native American way, he says, is to respect everything because everything comes from Mother Earth. Before, when he was proud and hanging with his White friends, they passed his alcoholic bum of a brother on the street, and he denied him his brotherhood. The guilt got to him though, and later he went back, told his White friends to fuck off, bought his brother some wine and took him out to eat.
What’s Columbus Day?, he asked. What was Columbo? A Spaniard? An Italian? It was the English, he says, that conquered his people, the English and Christianity. Oh yeah, by the way, Albert is Navajo, not a Mexican, even though he looks it, he says. We’re all human beings, he says, all our own tribe. The Indians, he says, are a humble people who accept their circumstances of being a conquered people.
But Albert, in his own way, having travelled all around the country doing Pow Wows, considers himself as an individual to have conquered all the United States with his dancing. Even after all the destruction and decimation, he says, his people are still here, they still have their language, they still have their culture. They are a conquered people, he says, but individually they are still human beings. He doesn’t believe in evolution, that’s the White man’s belief. We all come from Mother Earth, we’re all equal – everything that comes from Mother Earth.
