tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post4470100847442797711..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: A Door in the WallUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-78091051365073247742014-05-20T16:21:15.343-07:002014-05-20T16:21:15.343-07:00Jenny Dorn reminds us of Ed's visit to Nixon, ...Jenny Dorn reminds us of Ed's visit to Nixon, in The Shoshoneans, cited in <a href="http://warscapes.com/reviews/long-view-north-american-history" rel="nofollow">Claudia Moreno Parsons: The Long View of North American History</a>:<br /><br />"In Nixon, Nevada, Dorn finds a white-owned and -occupied bar on First Nation land (known then as a reservation). Knowing this can’t be right, he talks to an Indigenous man, asking about the situation, who indicates that the bar folks are simply squatters and there wasn’t anything to be done about the situation. Dorn recounts their conversation, reporting his sense about what’s going on: <br /><br />"'All life was a series of compromising effects for him, and that probably accounts for the innate hesitation of his reply. Although he didn’t say it, I could read it on his face: Whatever goes down, I won’t have any control over it and I (and my people) will have to get through it the best we can. For “get through” you might as well read “stay out of the way of it.” And I was thinking too, good God, how hopeless, it really doesn’t concern this man, he just lives his life along with it. Manifest Destiny, whether he’s heard of that or not, turns back in on him anyway, as much a domestic force as it is foreign, and the more it becomes frustrated and resisted abroad the more it turns back in, turns back into America.'"TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-87600671989707800372014-05-16T14:53:53.870-07:002014-05-16T14:53:53.870-07:00By the by, considering that Jonas Dovydenas was ab...By the by, considering that Jonas Dovydenas was able to pick out and represent with some measure of objectivity the basic issues and oppositions in this particular slice of regional history (in particular the history of water management in the Truckee River watershed), and that he was being paid to do so by the US government (during the Nixon administration, yet), one is almost tempted to inch toward the surprising conclusion that just maybe, can this be possible, we had then, somehow, a more enlightened government than we do today, when the government maintenance of private citizens' information is so thorough and far-reaching, whereas the officially-disclosed "public" information is so often scant, tilted and otherwise deficient.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-14526439130995339392014-05-16T14:18:40.751-07:002014-05-16T14:18:40.751-07:00Thanks Red. Nothing like the local knowledge.
The...Thanks Red. Nothing like the local knowledge.<br /><br />The long struggle of the Paiute tribe to save their lake is perhaps best told in Knack and Stewart's As Long as the River Shall Run.<br /><br />I'm going to present a bit of that text here, hopefully as a teaser for those who'd wish to follow up:<br /><br />___<br /><br />The injustices with Anglo-European history has heaped on the Paiutes are not safely relegated to the past. Their history, as with the history of all Indian tribes, did not stop with the shooting. The damage done to Indian peoples did not end with white settlement of the frontier. Instead it began. As Anglos increased in numbers, so increased the pressure against remnant Indian resources. The open violence of frontier times was transformed into the more subtle, and more invidious, methods of the twentieth century -- lobbying, corporate power plays, manipulation of legislative processes, government development projects, with the intricacies of legal title and contracts.<br /><br />Attacks on the Pyramid lake resource base were made farther and farther from the lake itself, unseen by but not unknown to the residents there.<br /><br />The Paiutes were vulnerable to this form of attack. Like Indian tribes everywhere, they were themselves politically powerless. A people few in number and despised, they had no direct access to the political system which ruled their lives. In addition, they suffered the institutionalized disadvantages which Indians alone of all ethnic groups endure. The most obvious of these was administration by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the federal trust status of reservation land. This was an ambiguous relationship which was both a source of endless frustration and the only bulwark between the tribe and Anglo greed.<br /><br />-- from As Long as the River Shall Run: An Ethnohistory of Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation: Martha C. Knack, Omer Call Stewart, 1999TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-82735611746510509392014-05-16T13:07:54.264-07:002014-05-16T13:07:54.264-07:00Thank you, Tom, for the good poem and instructive ...Thank you, Tom, for the good poem and instructive photographs. Just northwest of Fallon, Nixon... on a patch of hard-hard-hard luck. Used to drive through a couple times a year. Bleak town, Nixon, on a largely neglected rez. I used to stop at that Nixon convenience store for a bottle of Coke. Yeah... a great poet, Adrian C. Louis, represents that world.Poet Red Shuttleworthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06053848100740944133noreply@blogger.com