Kill the Indian, Save the Man (Voices From the Plains 1)

Thomas Flowers died on an acre of land, a retired banker in Pecos, New Mexico and given a Christian wake delivered by a Priest at the New Desert Cemetery and was buried in make-up on his cheek, short and neatly combed hair, cotton shirt, tie and coat, khaki slackers and penny loafers. There were proverbs and psalms recited, his offspring sang hymns from the New Testament Gospel. There were no rattlers, whistling, drums of war, bullroarers, dancing or chanting. It was not a celebration of life, it was a proper Christian burial. The desert that day fumed with orange dust scattered from winds, lightning scorched the sky and touched down upon the earth, illuminating the symbol and spear of some ancient warrior god, and thunder roared with the thud of a thousand bulls like a cursed vision come in the span of a few seconds.

The civilized man Thomas Flowers was born seventy seven years earlier to a Navajo Tribe, given the name Juniper Tree in present day Genado, Arizona, and inherited the blood of a natural born warrior, natural on the horse and with bow and arrow, performer and singer in sacred ceremonies to heal the sick, and artist in tending to and then butchering sheep.

One morning on an eclipse while the light upon the earth descended into darkness, there were scoring waves of wicked horse beat and the wind whispered in sacred tongue to him, and he spat out his blood cake and gathered up his band.

It was the coming of the Americans.

He’d fight them in the desert for twenty years, clad in red war paint streaking down his face as though it were blood come down from his scalp, racing his unbroken horse across the desert with a bullroarer whipping in one hand sounding like some motorized and alien vehicle storming the earth, and a bow and arrow in the other, in such a lightning procession that it became the stuff of myth and legend, coming with his band of warriors scoring the sound of wind and storms.

When all the other Chiefs signed a treaty of peace with the United States in 1868 and surrendered, Juniper Tree refused, defending the land of his birthplace he considered sacred.

He was finally captured by General Adam Herod Adams somewhere in the Painted Desert, slung off his horse by rope tied to his neck and the General’s saddle, and made to walk behind the General’s horse, 333 miles with his fellow Navajo who surrendered, and as a prisoner of war, forced to transform his entire identity into that required by American civilization.

His children were not allowed to learn their own language or own ways, and when he died they had no ways of knowing how to honor his life upon the earth proper.