Quanah Parker - Empire of the Summer Moon

"Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History" was quite the historical read. Writer S. C. Gwynne gives background to why the Comanches were so little known -- basically, they were in the wild west further than other tribes, and they didn't trade, mingle or interact with the invading Whites. They kept to themselves, rarely took captives, were quick to strike, elusive to catch, and commanded thousands of miles so were almost impossible to pin down anywhere. They were the true "cowboys" of the west. 

Source

The Comanches measured wealth in horses and in the years after the Civil War, managed a herd of some fifteen thousand. They also owned "Texan cattle without number" and they roamed freely and fought passionately over the land that contained the country's largest buffalo herds. The Spanish knew a lot about them and were their marked enemy, as were many of the other tribes in the area:  Apaches, Utes, Osages, Pawnees, Tonkawa, Navajos, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes. They were a nation of military supremacy with a keen eye for horse flesh and adept with controlling their cattle and following the buffalo herds. One sign of their domination in their huge region was that their language, the Shoshone dialect, became the lingua franca of the southern plains. 

The Whites continued to pour into the West and the Comanches, unlike some Indians, refused to make treaties. Comanches fought, raided, burned, killed and disappeared back into their wild prairies and soldiers could not safely follow them and exact revenge despite their superior musket power. It was proven that a Comanche could loose 20 arrows in the time it took a soldier to load and fire one round, and this was even more deadly because the Indians knew about using the terrain in their warfare and didn't make themselves easily visible. 

Times were changing and firearms would quickly overpower the Indians skill: the Colt revolver with quicker loading action and power for up-close shots suitable for killing Indians on horseback appeared in 1835,  in 1860 the Spencer repeating carbine revolutionized how a few soldiers could hold off a mass of attacking Indians, and in 1873 the powerful Winchester created a complete imbalance in the "fairness" of warfare. Whites could kill at a great distance while Indians became powerless with their second-hand flintlocks, castoff muskets and short-range arrows. [In 1876, however, Custer was defeated by the combined forces of Lakotas, Northern Arapahoes and Cheyenne at the Little Big Horn despite his weapon advantage. Comanches as southern tribes didn't participate in the battle but the battle's effect caused a very hardline against ALL Indians, and White brutality against almost all Indians escalated with the clear message: the Indians must go because the Whites have come.]

Amongst all the raids of Comanches which usually resulted in taking captives, a band of Comanches swooped down on a northern Texan new settlement and killed the majority and took a few young prisoners. Cynthia Ann Parker (1827-1871), age 9 or 10 at the time, was one, along with a young aunt, younger brother and two cousins. Cynthia Ann disappeared for the next 24 years into the land of the Comanches. The others who were captured at the same time either were killed soon afterwards or in the case of her cousin Rachel Plummer Parker were brutalized and escaped many months later to tell, and document, the story. 

The story of Cynthia Ann Parker is unclear. What is clear is she became full Indian, and whenever Whites came to the camp she was in, she would disappear ... by choice. In her 24 years with the Comanches she completely lost her first language, married Peta Nocona and it was a love match, bore three children, and then with the invasions into Indian land increasing, her husband was killed in front of her and the "blue-eyed Indian" was recaptured and repatriated to her "own  people" ... which she could not understand and she rejected White life, which Whites could not understand. 

Many times she tried to escape, but always was returned to yet another distant relatives' who watched over her, often imprisoning her in a house. Cynthia had seen her two sons fleeing and would never meet them again. One soon died of injury or sickness, and the other Quanah Parker (1845-1911) grew to become the last of the Comanche chiefs. Cynthia Ann's daughter Prairie Flower died of influenza after a few months, and finally after 10 years in White captivity and not adjusting or understanding why she couldn't return to "her people", Cynthia Ann lost all interest in life and starved herself, dying herself of influenza. Years later Quanah Parker would hear the full story of his mother and sister's capture, and their deaths. He somehow obtained the single photograph made of them together and, though he built a great wooden mansion and entertained lavishly both politicians and his fellow Indians, that picture was his single-most treasured possession.

Cynthia Ann Parker with daughter Prairie Flower

That last sentence was a big jump in time. Quanah held out as a free-roaming Indian chief as long as he could. However, his dwindling nation, which was now taking in former enemy tribe members who equally rebelled against the Whites, was weak in number, lacked food in the harsh winter, particularly since the buffalo were gone, and Quanah the strategist realized that fighting the Whites was a losing battle. When he saw the north Texan range where the buffalo had roamed by the millions, wave upon distance wave moving against the yellow distance, when he saw the plain devoid of life, only yellow with no spot of dark fur, he knew he and all the Indians were defeated. At that time, his single remaining option was to cooperate with the Whites. With the killing of the buffalo, they had won. 

Quanah Parker, only survive child of Cynthia Ann Parker, last chief of the Comanches

So being a highly intelligent strategist, he taught himself the White laws, eventually went to Washington DC, became a passionate spokesperson and was the representative powerful and charismatic voice for all the Indian nations. He made some difference, but the Whites were determined to take everything. The lands that were first awarded his Indian tribe were soon stripped from the Indians with White cunning. Quanah spoke out for the Indians who came to him, counseled them, and though they lost almost everything, without his voice, his Indian nation would not have fared even as well or for as long as they did.

Despite wearing White man's clothes, particularly on his visits to Washington, Quanah never cut his hair.
That was the one aspect of "being Indian" he retained, and he retained it with pride.
Source

In any regard, Quanah as a spokesperson and of very charismatic personality, became wealthy. He entertained lavishly with a massive table, china, cutlery and tablecloths. His home was equally open to all Indians who passed through for advice, talk, food. He fed everyone indiscriminately and teepees surrounded his wooden mansion. Over the years his 10 wives either died or divorced him, and  he died in near bankruptcy at the age of 66. But Quanah Parker, despite what Whites said about the lack of morals in Indians, was a man who lived with principle. Life might have attacked him, but he stood up and made a difference for both "his people" and was respected by Whites for his uprightness.  

A Fictionalized Monograph of an Aztec

The dust cover of Azteca by Gary Jennings reads:

"Once in a great while appears a book that combines the drama and immediacy of fiction with a deep knowledge and understanding of an exotic place and time — a book that excites and expands the imagination. In the last three decades, readers have been enthralled by Mika Waltari's splendid The Egyptian, Mary Renault's The King Must Die and James Clavell's Shogun. Now comes Azteca!" 

I've read Clavell's Shogun trilogy and now Jennings' Azteca, both of which were phenomenally researched and crafted with creative ethnology, so now I must go for Waltari's The Egyptian and Renault's The King Must Die, neither of which I'd ever heard of until picking up this book. When great literature is compared with other literary pieces and called similarly brilliant, the reader must listen to the erudite muse of print and ... read on!

The monograph 

And so begins the narrative of a quarrier's son, Mixtli, who was granted an ironic education, became a courier, a renowned warrior, a nobleman, an outcast, a wanderer, and a tradesman, but who ultimately died ignominiously at the hands of the "Christian" invaders who denied Mixtli his own Aztec spirituality and his own authenticity as the last keeper of ancient Aztec records. The narrative begins with him as an old gnarled and twisted man captured by the Conquistadores who want to hear and record a history of the Aztec people they have conquered and are decimating ... and who deny that Mixtli could possibly be telling the truth as Aztecs have no honor, no morals, and are on a ethnic hierarchy far below they themselves who are bringing Christianity to this uncivilized nation ... albeit in a violent bloodbath of deceit, treachery, and mercenary zeal that allows for no spiritual clemency or humanitarian act.

Mixtli, born with the Mexicatl dark spot like a bruise in the small of his back, begins his narrative by relating his abrupt entrance into the world in the Conquistadore year 1466, whereupon he was immediately plunged into a welcoming cold jar of water after which his severed navel string was wrapped around a little wooden war shield and given to the first Mexicatl warrior passing and who

was commissioned to plant the object somewhere on the next battlefield to better the boy's fate, destiny, fortune.

As a babe, his mother daily bathed his face in scalding hot lime water, as was the custom, to discourage the emergence of a beard throughout his adult life.

Mixtli tells of growing up and that lying, "speaking spittle and phlegm," was a grievous sin and punished by lower lip piercing of a thorn to curb such untoward behavior. He told of flags and tapestries made of fine feathers minus their quills — egrets for white, macaws and cardinals and parakeets for various reds, jays and herons for blue, toucans and tanagers for yellows. The colors and iridescence fluttered lively even in the softest breezes. But Mixtli intoned that the know-how for weaving these glorious flags died in the tumultuous years following the arrival of the Conquistadores and the passing of their virulent diseases (which he later related was ultimately what massacred the nation and not really the Conquistadores themselves).

He recalls wars and the need for wars even in peace time to feed the gods and keep them content. In times of peace when pestilence or a drought struck, the gods were thought to be angry and a war between alliances was arranged — not to kill on the battlefield but to take prisoners for sacrifice on temple altars. Warriors who died on the battlefield or as a temple sacrifice had a Flowery Death, that is, a death honorable to one's self and satisfying to the gods. To most effectively please the gods, alliances during the peace-time "wars" would sacrifice their captives on the same day and same hour. The god-nourishing blood of thousands of captives being sacrifices on the same day was thought to gorge the gods and make them replete so they would release their starvation caused by many (perhaps even as many as 20 or 30) warless years.

Using the term "flowers" to describe highly evocative situations was a literary motif of the Aztec. For instance, to give someone a "flower garland" was to kill them in sacrifice to the gods, "to destroy with flowers" was to seek retribution which almost certainly involved death, to have a "war of flowers" was to have a war among alliances for the purpose of taking prisoner-sacrifices to offer to the gods, and more benignly from a male's perspective, "to caress someone with flowers" was to seduce a woman.

Mixtli related that virginity of unmarried girls was required, and girls who went "astraddle the road" (prostituting) were deplored. However, some Aztec girls knew ways of proving their "virginity" on their wedding night. Pigeons fed with dark red seed of some flowers lay red-yolked eggs, so young virgins-to-be would secret an egg inside of them and would "prove" their virginity by the undetectable egg. The egg was used in conjunction with an astringent of buckthorn that would pucker the orifice to adolescent tightness. The Christian Conquistadore scribes were repulsed, insulted yet fascinated by the telling of Mixtli's tales of sexuality and war. The stories were duly documented but, though a baptized Christian of many years and his tales were of his culture or before his days as a Christian, Mixtli was thought to be repulsive to even speak such tales of blood, war and sexual appetites of himself, his people or his culture.

He told of the 5, not 4, directions of the compass — east, north, west and south, represented by the colors red, black, white and blue respectively. But green was the color to mark the center of where a person was at as well as all the space above as far as the sky and all the space below as far as the Mictlan underworld. Green, therefore, was a very important color for the Aztec, as for instance, only a child of a noble lineage could have a name reflecting a name with green in it, e.g. Jadestone Doll.

Mixtli spoke of Aztec medicine taken to the battlefield — salted honey or a healing salve of beeswax mixed with egg yolks, the juice of both adder bark and barbasco root as infection fighters. Soldiers, allies and enemies, too seriously injured in battle were knifed to death and all soldiers, friend or foe, were burned communally but each with a chip of jadestone in hand or mouth to honor their blood shed in battle and as symbols for their acceptance in the afterworld.

Just a cultural aside, the Conquistadores were culturally confused by the crosses found in the Aztec empire. To them, the crosses referenced a Christian burial, but to the Aztec the cross was a wayfarer symbol not for "reverence" but for "gladness" as it marked the presence of clear fresh water nearby.

Azteca as narrated my Mixtli tells of a nation at the height of its culture but in the depths of sacrificial depravity. He tells of the comings of the Conquistadores in the middle of his life, the deaths of all his family and friends, even his second wife who is dying of the disease "Being Eaten by the Gods" (leprosy). Finally, he tells of the overthrow of the Reverend Speaker (king) Montecuzoma and how Cortes, Alvarado and Narvaez lost the entire treasure of the dead king when they fled an uprising of the angry Mexicatl. And thus was lost the treasure now referenced as "the lost treasure of the Aztecs".

So Mixtli "kisses the earth" (swears or pledges honor) that he, as the last Rememberer of the Aztecs, has told his life tale with care and honor so that his history may be known to the conquerors, and yet he knows that before they strike him the last Rememberer down in cold-blood that the great Aztec history will similarly be chopped apart ... as the history of the Mexicatl / Aztecs is now in the hands of those who have no memories but are the usurpers of the nation.

AR (Accelerated Reading) score:   74 points, a very high score

Coyote Medicine

Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, Phd, is a half-breed Native American who took years becoming a medical doctor. In his early attempts at residency he voiced his idealistic views about how medicine is institutionalized but has little to do with the patients' mental or emotional sufferings while their physical symptoms are measured by numbers on medical tests and treatments correspond to the test-documented area of illness, not considering the human under treatment at all. Lewis as an intern was startled into the awareness of the human when four formerly healthy men were suddenly dying of kidney failure because doctors felt the men, because of slightly high counts of proteinura, were given biopsies ... and all four healthy men from the biopsies had kidney failure. And thus Lewis began to question allopathic medicine. For several years Lewis postponed his internship and explored various aspects of  Native American cultural health heritage in his search for complimentary holistic medicine that considers the whole person — the physical, mental and spiritual.

Below are some of his astute comments on the allopathic-complimentary medicine spectrum that he made in his book Coyote Medicine (1997):

"The academic world had met my thirst for knowledge but it had proven to be as spiritually barren as it was as intellectually bracing." (p. 33) 

"Native American religion was illegal at that time [1970s, until 1975], having been outlawed by an act of Congress in 1895. Although school children learn that the Constitution protects freedom of religion, Native Americans were long denied the right to practice theirs." (p. 36) 

"Eddie continued to explain the [Kiowa] sweat lodge to me, how it was built, what would happen. 'It's supposed to symbolize the whole world,' he said. 'Also the womb of Mother Earth. Even though it's a half sphere above ground, you're supposed to think of it as a whole sphere going doing into the earth as far as it stand above the earth. The pit in the middle of the lodge is where you put the stones. Think of those as your placenta. You're returning to the womb of Mother Earth. The placenta is then to doctor you and to take away the wastes and the toxins that you no longer need. You're going to sweat them out. The stones get filled up with the energy of the sun when the wood is burned. Then they give that energy back to you. That is the medicine.'" (p. 40) 

"The song 'Amazing Grace' is the national anthem of the Cherokee people. It was made famous from being sung on the Trail of Tears, from Tennessee to Oklahoma." (p. 67) 

"Medicine for the most part is generated numbers and statistics, t-tests and chi-squares, distributors and product moments — objective results that can be disputed and defended ... quantitative studies. Qualitative studies by recording stasis such as the method Lewis Mehl-Madrona used had its own merits, and the use of the deconstructionists view of reality, which has become mainstream thinking in behavioral medicine." (p. 145-6)

On psychiatric medicine:

"'We prescribe Thorazine of Haldol or lithium for bizarre behavior as casually as we prescribe antibiotics for bacterial infections,' Luke, chief of the psychiatric ward, would say. "Isn't chaining yourself to City Hall and reciting passages of Howl a more complicated problem than strep throat?" (p. 151) 

"The psychiatrists' tool kit includes four major categories of drugs — anti-anxiety drugs called benezodiazepines, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers," e.g. Klonopin, Valium, Xanax, Librium, Antivan, Loxapine, Haldol, Mellaril, Pamelor, Lithium, valproic acid, Tegretol, Elavil, Zoloft, Parnate, and Nardil. (p. 163).

Other books similar to Coyote Medicine are located at Native American Healing.