• OREGON TRAIL END: The making of solidarities among the co-dependent labor and land of Black and indigenous peoples

  JOHN TAYLOR + KITTY CLOUD : AFRO-INDIGENOUS SOLIDARITIES

          INTENTION: 

  • Form the basis of interrelation, and co-identity formation among Black and indigenous communities

KC :  My love, would you like some tea before we begin?

JT : Nothing would better soothe me, my Kitty Flower. 

The sun was entering the John and Kitty’s modest home outside Durango.

For once, the couple had come to a stop. Both were known for their nomadic livelihoods. Love had brought them enough ease to rest. They had long sought the comfort of such sedentary station.

Kitty tends to pot over the wooden stove. Euterpe, their oldest daughter, opens the door from the sided bedroom, and appears sleepily.

JT : Terpe, my sunshine is here. The day can begin. You know how dark it was in here before you came through that door? Terribly dark. Darker than me and you, ha! Darker than your grandmother, but so rich and blue. Then comes my Terpe! Shining, shining. Now the day can begin: the birds can sing, the lizards can scurry, and most of all, my baby can give me some sugar! 

KC : How you spoil that girl! 

JT : Don’t pay her no mind. Speaking to Euterpe. She just jealous of you girl! Shouldn’t let her know you my favorite, now come here girl! 

Terpe runs full speed across the square room, housing their living, dining, and washing rooms: all in one. 

KC : My desert rose. A peaceful sunrise to you my love. 

EUTERPE: Hi momma! 

JT : Now Terpe, you gotta be a good girl and be quiet, cause yah momma and daddy is about to talk real serious to these folks here, and we gotta concentrate to do that. Can you help us by staying quiet, and helping yah little sister out if she wakes up? 

Terpe knods her head, she smiles and looks at her dad. Sticking her teeth in between her missing front teeth, she gestures to her index and middle fingers to her lips and makes a quiet, whisper: “SHHHHH.” 

KC : This is our first. What a marvel she is. You know it was nothing thinking about having her. John had come to know my dad from his Buffalo days. And my dad always regarded him well. Those kind words that spoke like molassess over us all. ‘The Dark Solider,’ ‘fluent in all the languages,’ ‘moving bout like the Indian himself.’

JT : Chief Cloud was a dear man. Stern, but wise and always so mischievous. I think we saw that in eachother. Two men who had learned how to play a game with no rules, and certainly with no playing characters we could fit in with. 

KC : A game we will never know how to play. No rules. Just rulemakers, watching and plotting, adjusting the end and changing the goal. No way to be sure of it all. 

JT : It had bothered me how they made us wander out here chasing the “red man.” The “savage.” I knew anyone the white man called that, must be the kind men I should be around. 

KC : And woman! 

JT : Laughing. Men meant you too baby! 

KC : Now, I will not even entertain you. Whisking through the simmering porridge next to the boiling water for tea, Kitty moves her body from facing the stove, to take a swift look at John before turning her head back downwards. We had heard of the Buffalos. To us they were a mixed bag. Some good, some bad. But it was clear they weren’t acting themselves. No. They were being made to. How we all are. One way or another on this land, the White Man finds his way into you. Onto you. Above you. Only thing you can have is what is in you, and what is right below you.

JT : Kitty’s right. The Buffalo’s was just a bunch of lost Negroes trying to find a way. A lot is better than chains. Could have asked us to do just about anything to get away from there. But, what I did find was a shared language. We were all scourges to them. Annoyances. They needed us to build it. And they needed y’all to be gone and the land you were on to keep it. Simple.

KC : True. They do not want to see us. Cannot have us on the land for it to be theres, and surely can have no free labor on it for it to be theres. These new white folks are hungry. Snarling and looking for something to take. 

JT : And that is why we moved. I joined the Chiricahua down in Texas, and made my way further West, until I found some people I could see. 

     “See,” here is used as reflection, or mirror. John accounts of a       shared recognition. A fundamental solidarity of two groups in          reflection of a shared treatment, a similar disposition and rank        an assemblage of shared realities coming to meet, to be one           thing. 

KC : It sure helped that the man can speak just about every language in these Four Corners. 

JT : It helped most in getting your hand and having these beautiful, grizzly kids. 

KC : Now do not call my babies that! 

JT : I mean what else can we call em: a Negro and an Indian, all mixed up. All these white folks see is a threat, a grizzly ready to come back for everything they done stole from us both! 

EUTERPE: Grrrr! And we coming to take it! 

JT : Now there’s my grizzly princess! 

KC : We are proud Ute people. And when this lovely man came to our village one day, I was so taken. I almost froze. He just smiled, and kept speaking to me in Ute, and when he thought I could not understand, switched to Hopi! What a show off! I was pleased to be so attracted. 

JT : And the rest was easy carrying on! Did not have not a problem. The fellow Ute’s welcomed me, even let me sell them some of their land back. Let me own even more. I mean I got Buffalo buddies still trying to get their money owed to them for serving decades ago! Let alone buy, sell, and repeat! I mean the folks here have been good to me, to Ms. Kitty, to our grizzly babies, and just bring the kind of love you want from a family. 

KC :… From a community. We had known other tribes that had owned people, and we never thought it was right. But the stories we heard were awful. When we actually met folks, and especially, when I met John, it was all so clear. It is too hard to be fighting one another. Making separations, and laying out distinctions. We one people to them: something not to be. But we both keep being ourselves. We wake up everyday surrounded by people who want to be who they are. We got these kids being raised up to be exactly who they are. 

JT : Long as the Southern Ute Reservation is here, the little town of Ignacio is coming together, and we keep those miners in check, we can have a little peace here. I love to move. To wander. But, I did not trying to find something. Really, trying to get away from something. Much deeper. But what I got here is much wider. It has taken it all up, and swallowed up, and gave me a better taste in my mouth. 

KC : And just like that it is time to eat. My little desert grizzly, can you get the other cubs and we can have something to start the day? 

EUTERPE: Yes! Grrr! Euterpe, runs off to the room she emerged from and little feet hit the hollow baseboards of the Taylor’s modest home. 

JT : I mean we do not want to worry, but with every bit of peace comes the greater threat of more loss. Of more wandering. Of feeling like you can’t escape it all. Like they always find a way to win.

KC : Such a note leave on, John. But it is true. Ever since the Brunot Agreement, the white folks have began popping up left and right, building new little towns and making it harder to feel free of them. To not have to look or be worried. But, what hurts most is to see the land cracked open like that. 

JT : A big slice too!

KC : Being dug deeper into land. Undoing its lovely, lovely face. We had been good. So good.

JT : So far. 

KC : And we will continue. We won’t be leaving our home. And we wont be leaving this land. We saved this here for the Grizzlies! 

EUTERPE and siblings: Grrr! Grrr! It’s time to eat. 

As the Taylor’s sat to eat, the local representative from the         Southern Ute Agency continued writing down their notes. Just        watching as the black man and the red woman, with their black and      red kids, ate joyfully without a care in the world. Outside the window, bringing light to the world, there were clouds, and plumes of bedrock riffling up into the sky. A dust thickened around the façade of the loving, grizzly cabin. 

The treaty had brought thousands of new white colonists to the         Colorado Plateau. A new body of leech like subjects marched        themselves into crumbling caves for the unsold promise of dust.       Dust just like all the dust that had made it’s way West. The broken pieces of landscape being unmade, and produced into an         edifice. The endless bottom that promised dreams and   opportunities, covered itself with the exponential recharge of        sacrificial bones, roots, soil, rain, memories, pain, flesh,          talent, territory, timber, and tears. 

But there still was that house. Just a square, with a few rooms, and a wall. A Red woman and a Black man, and generations with  less dust than the other.