Rovics Have Guitar, Will Travel

Protest Travel Writing
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62675-118-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 212 Seiten

'The great troubadour David Rovics put down his guitar long enough to compose this gripping and vivid book, filled with illuminating stories about the courageous people he met over the last few years who are fighting for justice in the United States and around the world. Impassioned yet conversational, he brings loving portraits -- and damning indictments. Rovics's humanity shines through, as does his unquenchable thirst for a better, fairer world.' Matt Rothschild Editor, Progressive Magazine

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rovics, David

Leseproben

500-Year Siege – December, 2006 I was in San Francisco, California a couple months ago, and I saw Klee Benally there. It had been a long time since I’d seen him. I tend to go where the gigs take me, which often means going in and out of certain orbits in unpredictable ways. There at the American Indian Center of San Francisco, Klee was the master of ceremonies for an event that was attended by 200 or so people, mostly indigenous. The event was one of many of its kind to draw attention to plans by the Arizona Snowbowl Corporation to build a 14-mile pipeline from the city of Flagstaff to the nearby San Francisco Peaks. They want to expand a ski resort there, and make snow out of the wastewater. These mountains are sacred to 13 different local tribes, but as usual, this is not a problem for the corporation. The message here is not lost on anyone. Once again, it is a case of the USA saying to Native America: we shit on you. Your land, your religion, your people. The 500-year siege continues. Klee is a member of a 3-piece band called Blackfire, along with his sister and his brother. Their music is hard, dark, loud, punk-metal kind of stuff, with lots of growling and power chords. Together with their father, a Navajo medicine man named Jones, the four of them also perform traditional song, dance and drumming together. Sometimes the Benally Family opens for Blackfire, which is always a fascinating exercise in contrasts. But usually Jones is in Flagstaff, employed as a medicine man at a local hospital. I was on one of Blackfire’s European tours, opening for them at a bunch of shows in Germany and Prague. We were a day late getting into Prague. We were traveling in an old but functional VW van. We had a gig in a squat in Prague during the week of the World Bank/IMF meetings there. The Czech border police didn’t know what to make of us. They were on the lookout for black-clad anarchist youth from Spain and Italy. We definitely didn’t fit that description, but they knew there was something about us. I’m sure they had never seen a Navajo family before, and they must have realized that Jones was far too old to be throwing rocks at anybody. After a while they decided we had to stay in Germany because there was a small but fairly jagged dent near the back of the van. The said they thought this could be dangerous, someone could cut themselves on it. We spent the night at a friend’s place in Nuremberg and succeeded in getting into Prague the next day by train. Around that time, in 1999-2000 and thereabouts, I was spending a lot of time in Germany, in a relationship with a woman from Hamburg, hanging out with the radical farmers in the Wendlandt region, singing at anti-nuclear protests and such. Germany has a very active leftwing, especially when it comes to US imperialism and nuclear power. For many German leftists, though, as with their counterparts in the rest of Europe and the US, Native America is a non-issue. When approached about getting involved with Native struggles for self-determination in the US, some will tell you that the issue is “esoteric.” In other words, basically, Native Americans are a thing of history, irrelevant except for certain hippies who like to make sweat lodges, live in tipis, and imagine what it might have been like way back when. Others in Germany know better, and there are probably more functional groups working in solidarity with indigenous struggles there than anywhere else in the industrialized world. They know that Native America exists and it is under a constant state of siege. And they know that resistance is widespread, and needs to be supported. I spent Y2K in a trailer on a farm in the Wendlandt, figuring it might be good to be near a source of food for when industrial society collapsed. After the world failed to end I went back to Hamburg, and along with a dozen other people from around Germany, I made my way to Arizona. February 1st, 2000, was to be an important marker in the struggle for Big Mountain, and this date would see the largest number of outsiders coming to show solidarity with the people there for quite some years. Since long before Europeans began their savage conquest of the Americas, Navajo and Hopi people have lived side by side in what we now call the Southwest. Traditionally, Hopis are farmers and Navajos herders, so there have at times been tensions between the two peoples, as is the case anywhere in the world where these two ways of living intersect. By most accounts, though, the Navajo-Hopi “land dispute” is basically a creation of the US government, the state of Arizona, and Peabody Western, a giant multinational energy corporation. The Navajo and Hopi people, like most indigenous peoples in North America, suffer from the very same affliction that keeps most people in countries like Nigeria or Angola in grinding poverty – that is, great wealth, in the form of tremendous deposits of coal and uranium. There was a brief “renaissance” for many indigenous peoples in the west. This was in the early part of the twentieth century – in the brief span of time in between. In between the time when native people were slaughtered en masse, forced onto reservations, and starved, and the time when coal, uranium and oil were discovered on their lands. Since then, things have continued to go from bad to worse. Those of us coming from Germany to Arizona to support the struggle on Big Mountain arrived by mid-January. Driving onto the Navajo reservation, it became quickly apparent why some rental car companies in the Southwest make you sign a contract saying you will not take their cars to Mexico or to any Indian reservations. The area of Black Mesa/Big Mountain is just the sort of place Hertz is afraid of. The roads, if such a term can be used to describe what we were driving on, were beyond anything I’d seen anywhere in the world. It was beyond the general neglect of the federal government and the corrupt tribal councils. The area around Black Mesa was subject to a US government-imposed freeze on all construction, including road maintenance, which had been going on for several decades. The roads, such as they were, consisted of two humps, like little mountain ridges, with valleys in between them that were often several feet deep. If you fell off the humps at the wrong spot, whether you were in a pickup truck or an SUV, you could seriously damage your vehicle. We managed to stay on the humps in my old pickup truck. We had long since passed the nearest town. After many more miles of driving down a dirt road that had been maintained, we passed a little school and a water tower. Soon after that, the road turned to humps and we drove many more miles, slowly, constantly vigilant to avoid falling into the ditches on either side of us. We passed many ancient driveways that led to hogans that were no longer there. Finally, we came upon one of the very few driveways left that led to a hogan that was inhabited, by Louise Benally and her family. We had brought a couple of big Army tents with us that we bought in Flagstaff, and there on Louise’s land we set them up. Her homestead there would come to be known as Camp Anna Mae, named after Anna Mae Aquash, the Micmac woman who came from Canada to Pine Ridge, South Dakota to support the struggle of the Lakota people there against the mining of uranium on their land. Her death was one of several dozen unsolved murders in South Dakota in the mid-70’s. The FBI is widely suspected. I quickly realized one of the many things that made Louise Benally special. Along with the tenacity of her spirit, her willingness to stay on the land so long after the vast majority had been driven off, was something else – she spoke English. There we were, sitting around a fire outside Louise’s hogan, with several elderly women in colorful skirts, slowly cooking a hunk of a lamb they had recently slaughtered, which was wrapped in foil and lay beneath hot coals. Louise was several decades younger than the rest of the women, and the only one who spoke a language in addition to Navajo. These elderly women were the backbone of the struggle. Collectively they were known by all as the grandmothers. Their bravery, their dark, weathered faces, their short stature and their colorful skirts all reminded me of the Mothers of the Disappeared I had seen standing between us and the riot police in Buenos Aires. But they were several thousand miles north of those Madres, and speaking Navajo instead of Spanish. At its peak, during a pipe ceremony on February 1st, there were 250 people who had come from outside to show their support. There were people from all over Indian Country, including from as far away as the Dakotas. There were the Germans. There was a French chef. There was a sizeable delegation Japanese, many of them Buddhist monks. And most of the rest were young white people from across the US and Canada. But for some time before and after that date, at any given moment there were several dozen people, mostly young people from across the US, living with the grandmothers, working with them, herding their sheep, cutting firewood, and otherwise just being a presence, organized then as now with the name Black Mesa Indigenous Support. In contrast to the clean, colorful elders they were living with, these youth were often dressed in anarchist chic – dirty rags they had gotten from dumpsters and stitched together themselves, covered in patches, facial piercings, and dreadlocks. The grandmothers called them “goat heads” because of their dreads. Peabody Western runs North America’s biggest coal mine there in Navajo country. For decades they had been using...