This blog is a reaction to the film, “Salt of the Earth.” As I viewed this film, I thought that it was done very well with respect to the time period in which it was made. Although the “Red Scare” was out there, and the filmmakers, actors and actresses were all black-listed, the film was quite representative of the struggles of people of Mexican descent. Esperanza, which means ‘hope,’ is at first, a typical wife of a miner. She stays at home to watch the children and handle the household chores. And, they were not easy chores. With no plumbing to heat the water and the fact that she had to chop wood to heat the water and carry it up to the house, which was owned by the mining town, was a strenuous daily job. When her husband, Ramon, goes to wash up and finds no hot water, an argument ensues. Ramon tells Esperanza that the miners are striking for their safety issues, while Esperanza says: “What is more important than sanitation?” (Biberman, [director]. 1954). This is the first time that Esperanza speaks against her husband. The men have a union representative, the women have each other. The men are striking for one reason only-for the safety of the miners and for equality with other miners, while the women want to add sanitation to the strikes requirements, but the men say no. There is a lot of male ‘machismo’ going on with the men. They look to their peers for strength, while the women, who are fighting for equality as well as for sanitation, have a subtle strength. They begin to be seen while the men are striking. At a men’s union meeting, the women offer to take over the picket lines when the men are threatened with jail time. Most of the men say no. Esperanza says to the union spokesperson to take a vote on whether or not they can strike in their husband’s places. After 103 yes’s and 85 no’s, the women are strikebound. These are feisty women who form a circular picket line. When they are arrested, they go out singing “solidarity forever.” When released from jail, they are back on the picket line.
There are many changes in the movie, beginning with Esperanza and finally, with Ramon. Esperanza learns that she, too, has a place to assert herself among the striking miners, and among her sisters in solidarity. She is seeking equality with the men. She says to Ramon, as he raises his hand to strike her: “Never strike me again—that was the old way. Sleep where you please but not with me.” (Biberman, [director]. 1954). She has developed into a liberated woman. This was an amazing feat for Esperanza. Although of Hispanic origin, the actress who played Esperanza, as well as the men from the mines, were all portrayed as Mexicans, not Mexican-Americans. In one scene, in fact, the supervisor of the mine says, in answer to Ramon’s question about who would work the mine if they didn’t, and the supervisor answers, “the Americans,” meaning the white men who worked in the other mines. (Biberman, [director], 1954). As if they were not part of the American country, but illegal immigrants. But, as the film showed us, they had been on the land owned by the Delaware Mining Co., for many years before the mining company bought the land. This film was really quite interesting in that this film was produced and directed by one of the 50 motion picture executives “black-listed” from the American film industry by the House Committee on Un-American Activities~or Joe McCarthy’s fear mongering. It pre-dated the ‘60’s decade of liberation and equality. It had taken place in a time and place that was way ahead of its time. It actually discussed women’s liberation from the household chores that women were bequeathed with. It is full of consciousness and hope.

The articles written by Michael Yellow Bird were very stimulating and thought-provoking. In his first piece, “What is the Highest Form of Patriotism? I Say Acknowledging Our Addiction to Patriotism,” (n.d.) is a piece about the war in Iraq. He is addressing the Peace Vigil and Rally in Kansas City, Mo., and wants to understand the Indigenous People’s part in the war. He had previously written an “Open Letter to All Indigenous Peoples,” subtitled “Why Are Indigenous Soldiers Serving in Iraq” (Yellow Bird, 2006. p. 1)? In hopes of obtaining answers to this question, which does not fit with the First Peoples “beliefs about life, truth, and justice” (Yellow Bird, 2006. p. 1). Michael Yellow Bird waited in vain for the political tribal leaders to respond to his writing. He received many positive emails back from the First Peoples’ members. He wondered why it was that so many of his people were serving in the military. As he says: “on the gentler side, my approach corresponds to that of Buddhist writer, practitioner, and teacher, Noah Levine (2007). Levine, who says… “In America, we like to talk about equality and human rights, but this country was founded on violence and oppression” (Levine, 2007). America has not been a very compassionate country~the way that they stole “the lands and resources; extinguishing our languages; ignoring our histories; trivializing our heroes and heroines; and forcibly removing our children from their homes and putting them into off-reservation government boarding schools” (Yellow Bird, n.d.). In fact, it can be said that America is a nation of power and wealth, obtained by a greedy leadership which has hurt and abused countless
peoples and nations for the sake of its own power and might. Once we recognize and work to change our current view of the world, and our minute role within it, we will see that it is only by working with others for peace and compassion~towards the down- trodden and oppressed peoples of other cultures, nations, tribes and diversifications other than the white, patriarchal, nationalistic, and selfish leadership, which we all had to bear.
My grandparents immigrated from Ireland with only the clothes on their backs. They were thankful that another nation would take them in and give them a chance to possess “the American dream.” But, their dream did not last very long. I have fought it since college days when I realized that we were killing innocent people~in Viet Nam, in our ghettos, in our barrios, among Native Peoples; and now, in Iraq and Palestine, in Darfur and Nicaragua, and recently, in Honduras and Iran. But settling these differences with wars and bombs and bullets, is not the answer. We must all work together to create a more peaceful, compassionate world.

Firing Squad

Saddam Hussein is a bad man
So let’s line up the children of Iraq
And shoot them.

Saddam is a very bad man
So let’s line up the mothers of Iraq
And shoot them.

We know that Saddam is a bad man
So let’s line up all the old people of Iraq
And shoot them.

Saddam is a very bad man
And firing squads are old fashioned
So let’s just bomb Baghdad.

After we bomb the Iraqis
With our “shock and awe” two-day plan
Surely they will welcome us as liberators.

Surely the Iraqis will thank Allah
That they have been so fortunate
To have been bombed with such precision.

Surely they will recognize
That Saddam is a very bad man
And their oil is better in our hands.

Saddam Hussein is a very bad man.
So let’s line up the children of Iraq
And shoot them.

--David Krieger, 2003.


In Michael Yellow Bird’s work “Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism” (2004), he proposes the fact that the cowboys and Indians visible in a child’s play set, have come to mean for him-“America’s past and present infatuation with colonialism and genocide” (Yellow Bird. 2004. p. 34). He bought the play set to help his students understand the “oppression of Indigenous Peoples by paralleling our situation with that of other more well-known groups of color” (Yellow Bird. 2004. p. 35). He uses the analogy of Nazi prison guards and Jewish prisoners, as well as African American slaves and their slave masters, and the illegal aliens from South America or Mexico and their INS border guards (Yellow Bird, 2004, p. 35). Such analogies are crucial if one is to have an idea of what Indigenous Peoples have gone through with the colonialists of the United States, both past and present. He then launches into the Chinese women who make these plasticized toys under horrendous working conditions, with little pay, and with toxic chemicals that cause poisoning of the lungs-all for the sake of American toy companies, which do not make the toys in our own country. Going to pay for these little figurines, he comments on the pictures on the bills that he pulls out. He pulls out a five dollar bill, and comments on the picture of Abe Lincoln, saying that Abe ordered the hanging of 38 Dakotas-the “record holder for the largest hanging of people from one gallows” (Yellow Bird. 2004. p. 37). Yellow Bird then points out that the Indians seen on television are attacked brutally by the white men, and mercilessly killed. Further on in this paper, Yellow Bird says that: “the cowboys and Indians phenomenon has been directly implicated as contributing to the killing of other dark-skinned people in other parts of the world who have been regarded as impediments to American colonialism” (Yellow Bird. 2004. p. 43). In Viet Nam, a war which existed in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, and involved the killing of Vietnamese and Viet Cong by Americans, who looked at these women, children and men, as though they were killing Indians. They even referred to the enemy territory as “Indian Country.” And what were we fighting for??

A Little Girl Begged Us Not to Kill Her Family’s Farm

She begged us,
With her child like screams
Not to kill or harm
The earth
With all our bombs
And hate.

But it was too late
The sky was filled
With so much rage.
Darkness
Had replaced the blue skies
Her eyes
Had already seen
This transformation
And I was helpless
To defend her
From this assault
On her heart.
I could see the captain,
His battle hardened face,
Glistened with wet cheeks.
I had to close
My own eyes,
So as to shelter me,
From her look
That tore holes
In my soul.

--Unidentified, July 15, 1967

In the invasion of Iraq, many years later, it looks like Osama bin Laden was equated with Tecumseh and Geronimo-all as terrorists. In the game of cowboys and Indians, the Indians are still the enemy, and they “have developed a certain sense of internalized denigration and personal contempt within our consciousness resulting in self-effacing and destructive patterns”
(Yellow Bird. 2004. p. 45). These are the modern Indigenous Peoples, who suffer from not only alienation, but alcoholism (which the white man introduced), drug abuse, violence, and suicide. Because of the white man’s treatment of First Nation’s lands and homes, cultures, languages, and religions, and the demeaning and oppressive way they treated, and continue to treat, First Nations Peoples-in a deplorable way. Yellow Bird takes issue with the white man’s “colonial policies and arrogance…” (Yellow Bird. 2004. pp. 33-48), and the issues that he takes make sense to me. My peoples, the Irish, were in a similar situation with the British. The British starved and used the fields of the Irish to fatten cattle on, whereas the Irish could have been growing potatoes on them. There is a song about Co. Mayo, where my people come from, about a children’s cemetery there, and the great number of children who all died in the potato famine. The British restricted the use of Gaelic (the language of Ireland) and made them give up all cultural events-like dancing and singing. The Irish are a very musical, lyrical people. They devised a way of dancing that the British could not detect-they danced with their arms plastered to their sides, and the British could not see their feet moving swiftly when they passed by them and looked in the windows. To this day, Irish dancing is done with arms against their sides, in remembrance of their determined ways.

In another of Michael Yellow Bird’s papers, “On the Justice of Charging Buffalo: “Who stole American Indians Studies” Redux (2007), I find in him a person who lives up to his word and actively supports the truth, as he perceives it. One of his colleagues, Professor Ward Churchill, was being asked to leave the University of Colorado for his remarks about the genocidal nature of the U.S.’s Middle East policies. Prof. Churchill’s remarks were said to be “at odds with simple decency, and antagonistic to the beliefs and conduct of civilized people around the world” (Owens, 2005). Professor Yellow Bird refutes this comment by saying that: “they, meaning the State of Colorado, Governor Owens and the United States, are in no moral position to lecture him, or any Indigenous Peoples, about decency, appropriate conduct, and understanding the facts of history” (Yellow Bird. 2007. pp. 91-99). Also, the assault of online
“listservs, Web sites, blogs, and emails,” (Yellow Bird. 2007. pp. 91-99). has created a web of “hate mail” that cowards can view their opinion on, by such anonymous means. They feel safe to speak their opinion on such media. The University of Colorado was trying Churchill for other, non-related scholarship, having to do with the Arikara and Hidatsa and Mandan tribes that were almost wiped out due to a smallpox epidemic. In 2006, Professor Yellow Bird stood up for Churchill and testified that the epidemic had been a “deliberate act done by the military and/or civilian populations” (Yellow Bird. 2007. pp. 91-99). The results were to fire Churchill. This is just another example of the white man’s ways of getting underserved, revolutionary scholarship out of the mainstream’s public eye. Dismiss Churchill, who speaks a truth, and our nations academic institutions will, once again, be safe places for “anti-intellectual and anti-Indigenous” (Yellow Bird. 2007. pp. 91-99) discourse. The following poem, I think, reflects the Native/white problem. It is called “Dear World.”

Mother has lupus.
She says it’s a disease
of self-attack.
It’s like a mugger broke into your home
and you called the police
and when they came they beat up on you
instead of on your attackers,
she says.

I say that makes sense.
it’s in the blood,
in the dynamic.
A half-breed woman
can hardly do anything else
but attack herself,
her blood attacks itself.
There are historical reasons
for this.

I know you can’t make peace
being Indian and white.
They cancel each other out.
Leaving no one in the place.
And somebody’s gotta be there,
to take care of the house
to provide the food.
And that’s gotta be the mother.
But if she’s gone to war.
If she’s beaten and robbed.
If she’s attacked by everyone.
Conquered, occupied, destroyed
by her own blood’s diverse strains,
it’s conflicting stains?

Well, world. What’s to be done?
We just wait and see
what will happen next.
The old ways go,
tormented in the fires of disease.
My mother’s eyes burn,
they tear themselves apart.
Her skin darkens in her fire’s heat,
her joints swell to the point
of explosion, eruption.
And oh, the ache: her lungs
don’t want to take in more air,
refuse further oxygenation:
in such circumstances,
when volatile substances are intertwined,
when irreconcilable opposites meet,
the crucible and its contents vaporize.

—Paula Gunn Allen

References
Allen, P.G. (1986). In Niatum, D. (Ed.) (1988). Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. pp. 121-122. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Anonymous. (1967). A Little Girl Begged Us Not To Kill Her Family’s Farm.
Retrieved from: http://wwwvietnamexp.com/poems/page2.htm

Independent Productions/International Union of Mining, Mill and Smelter Workers (Producer), & Herbert Biberman (Director). (1954). Salt of the Earth [Motion Picture]. Retrieved from:
http://www.archive.org/details/salt_of_the_earth.

Krieger, D. (2003). Poets Against War. Retrieved from: http://poetsagainstthewar.org/displaypoem.asp?AuthorID=2491

Levine, N. (2007). Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Owens, George. (2005). In Yellow Bird, M. (2007). On the Justice of Charging Buffalo: “Who stole American Indian Studies?” Redux pp. 91-99. Retrieved from:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wicazo_sa_review/v022/22.1yellow_bird.pdf

Yellow Bird, M. (2006). “An Open Letter to All Indigenous Peoples: Why are Indigenous (American Indian) Soldiers Serving in Iraq?” Indian Country Today. 4 Aug. 2006
Retrieved from: http://arikaraconsciousness.blogspot.com/

Yellow Bird, M. (2004). Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism. WICAZO SA Review. pp. 33-48. Retrieved from: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wicazo_sa_review/v019/19.2bird.pdf

Yellow Bird, M. (2007). On the Justice of Charging Buffalo: “Who stole American Indian Studies?” Redux pp. 91-99. Retrieved from: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wicazo_sa_review/v022/22.1yellow_bird.pdf

Yellow Bird, M. (in press). “What Is the Highest Form Of Patriotism? I Say Acknowledging Our Addiction to Patriotism.” Unpublished manuscript submitted for publication. University of Kansas.