WITH COLUMBUS’ PENETRATION, MANY THINGS HAVE CHANGED

WITH COLUMBUS’ PENETRATION, MANY THINGS HAVE CHANGED

It was the season of Apnui (flowered Summer), 516 years after Columbus’ crude penetration into this hemisphere. Sun seemed happy talking with a pleasant and endless powder-blue sky. Soft breaths of wind stirred small ripples across the mirror-surface of the vast and powerful ocean, seeming to slumber in the warmth of the day. It was a pot-luck early dinner encouraged into being by members of the Santa Cruz Indian Council.

It is true. We had clam chowder when we should have had fresh abalone and mussels.
It is true we had contemporary salad when we should have had
seaweed, dandelions and the stomach contents from a freshly taken deer.
It is true we had mashed potatoes when we should have had crushed, boiled seeds from a thousand different abundant plants from the thousand hills.
It is true we had fried chicken when we should have had roasted turtle.
It is true that we had bottled water from the nearby grocery store instead of a basket of water from the nearby fresh-water spring.
It is true that we had cookies and pie instead of a basket of honey we dipped with two fingers, moving it quickly to our mouths like thin, delicious poi.

It seems that our entire diets have been drastically changed because of the great wisdoms found in “civilization.” And in the civilization of the water and the landscape. The vast ocean has been polluted with much waste and today a cautious mother will not allow her children to bathe there, or even wade. The fresh-water springs from earth are damaged and dried up. The ocean is stripped of abalone and the ocean floor is raked clean of clams, shrimp and other creatures out of ecological balance. Turtles no longer lay eggs for their generations to continue. The seaweed is more polluted than the ocean. The variety of seeds upon the many hills atrophy because the air is polluted and often the rain, too. It is difficult to locate real honey nowadays, but every grocery store has an endless variety of “cultured” honey that is not created from flower nectars but from bees in captivity with only sugar-water to knead their honey from.

So many things have changed since the European violation of the western hemisphere, too many to list or remember.

But there was something at that little dinner on the beach that is neither rare nor
atrophying, love. The love between a variety of earth’s people, and the love of our breaths to freely partake of and share the sweetness of our existence and to share our sweeter, sometimes concealed, emotions of fellowship and affection; the love that has deep, untouchable, delicious roots I our hearts, tingly roots that are mysteriously connected to the universe.

Love and dreams made the beans so tender and delicious beyond memory. Love and dreams made the mashed potatoes a fork full of sweet emotions that fed our famished spirits. Love and dreams made the carefully selected ingredients of the salad seem as carefully fashioned as an expression of joy from a lovely child.

That delicate yet eternal love spilled over into my three-hour lecture on the mountain top, which spilled over into the additional hour of sweet chaos after the talk ended, while we gathered under a full moon, fire-red sunset long embers

In 1850, just two hundred years ago, the California legislature passed a series of laws making it an honorable duty to kill indigenous and the bounty for that noble service was the same as for a coyote scalp, $5.00. Today, standing under the sun watching a happiness welding many thoughts into one emotion, this indigenous person flipped through our history seeing many changes to our lives. Standing on the sands, under a vast and silken sky, before a relaxed and endless ocean, laughter exploding all around, I looked far past the powder blue sky to the universe that begins in infinity and touches the infinity within each of our hearts. I thanked Aponiha for the precious moments we had the pleasure to experience, for joining us, and for the love that is in abundance, holding us each just near enough to sun that life is mostly beautiful, but I thanked the Great Powers especially for issuing us each the wisdom to cultivate that sweet emotion I our deeper selves that neither can be altered nor polluted.

Yes, many things have changed since the adventures of Columbus, but love has not. Watching the children run and hearing them scream with delight, wrapped in a protective mantle of open sky, my heart cried.

Thank you Santa Cruz Indian Council, special friends, students of Stan Rushworth’s valued class at Cabrillo college, Santa Cruz, and the Santa Cruz community at large that participated with us on that tender day in October, 2008.

Sul’ma’ejote
Aka, Darryl Babe Wilson