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Wednesday
On Monday Sewanee observed Indigenous People’s Day with a walk along that section of the Trail of Tears—the Bell Route—that goes through our area. In 1838 John Bell led a detachment of 650-700 Cherokees on the 1000 mile trek to present day Oklahoma. They arrived in January, 1839, suffering from hunger, sickness, and cold along the way. The Sewanee walk honoring their memory was interspersed with readings of recorded accounts of those who were relocated and their descendants.
While this was going on, the Trump White House was issuing a proclamation praising Christopher Columbus. As Heather Cox Richardson reports
The proclamation says that the day is one on which “our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus—the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”
The proclamation goes on to announce that, upon Columbus’s arrival, “he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith.” And that, “guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas—paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”
In response, and at the risk of sounding like a left-wing arsonist, I share this Lucille Clifton poem, written after she watched a neighbor bulldoze down all the trees in his yard so he wouldn’t have to worry about raking leaves. Watching the trees go down, Clifton thought of the famous Wounded Knee photo of Chief Big Foot. “Pahuska” means long hair and is the Lakota name for General Custer:
the killing of the trees
By Lucille Clifton
the third went down
with a sound almost like flaking,
a soft swish as the left leaves
fluttered themselves and died.
three of them, four, then five
stiffening in the snow
as if this hill were Wounded Knee
as if the slim feathered branches
were bonnets of war
as if the pale man seated
high in the bulldozer nest
his blonde mustache ice-matted
was Pahushka come again but stronger now,
his long hair wild and unrelenting.remember the photograph
the old warrior, his stiffened arm
raised as if in blessing,
his frozen eyes open,
his bark skin brown and not so much
wrinkled as circled with age,
and the snow everywhere still falling,
covering his one good leg.
remember his name was Spotted Tail
or Hump or Red Cloud or Geronimo
or none of these or all of these.
he was a chief. he was a tree
falling the way a chief falls,
straight, eyes open, arms reaching
for his mother ground.so i have come to live
among the men who kill the trees
a subdivision, new,
in southern Maryland.
I have brought my witness eye with me
and my two wild hands,
the left one sister to the fists
pushing the bulldozer against the old oak,
the angry right, brown and hard and spotted
as bark. we come in peace,
but this morning
ponies circle what is left of life
and whales and continents and children and ozone
and trees huddle in a camp weeping
outside my window and i can see it all
with that one good eye.
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” the German thinker Walter Benjamin once wrote, and Heather Cox Richardson follows this up by observing, “Rejecting an honest account of the past makes it impossible to see accurate patterns.” She adds, “What is arson, though, is the attempt to skew history to serve a modern-day political narrative.” Trump’s whitewashing to Columbus is matched by his whitewashing of Andrew Jackson, one of his favorite presidents and the individual most responsible for the Trail of Tears.
Trump, of course, is not only going after history. Since he came to power, the cavalry has only stepped up its assault on “what is left of life,” whether it’s clear water, clean air, clean energy, the national forests, children, civil rights, or American democracy generally.
Clifton doesn’t altogether absolve herself. After all, she has moved into a subdivision that required the felling of trees. One of her hands, she says, is “sister to the fists” that pushes the bulldozer against the oak. Her angry right hand, however, is as “brown and hard and spotted” as a felled tree or a felled warrior.
Her eyes are similarly split. While her left eye prefers not to see things, her witness eye insists on testifying.
Which, by Trump standards, makes her a left-wing arsonist.
