Kill the Indian, Save the Man

Thomas Flowers died on an acre of land, a retired banker in Pecos, New Mexico and given a Christian wake delivered by a Priest at the New Desert Cemetery and was buried in make-up on his cheek, short and neatly combed hair, cotton shirt, tie and coat, khaki slackers and penny loafers. There were proverbs and psalms recited, his grandchildren sang hymns from the New Testament Gospel. There were no rattlers, whistling, drums of war, bullroarers, dancing or chanting. It was not a celebration of life, it was a Christian burial. The desert that day fumed with orange dust scattered from winds, lightning scorched the sky and touched down upon the earth, illuminating the symbol and spear of some ancient warrior god, and thunder roared with the thud of a thousand bulls like a cursed vision come in the span of a few seconds.

The civilized man Thomas Flowers was born seventy seven years earlier to a Navajo Tribe, given the name for Juniper Tree in present day Genado, Arizona, and inherited the blood of a natural born warrior, graceful on the horse and with bow and arrow, performer and singer in sacred ceremonies to heal the sick, and artist in tending to and then butchering sheep.

His homeland was a roaming earth across the Southwest, migrating between the four sacred mountains each season like a flock of great birds, cooler air in the summer and southern lands in the winter.

He and his family never took much with them wherever they moved. They kept a herd of sheep, the wool they used for blankets and trading—one blanket they could have sold for $2000. The meat and organs of one sheep kept them without hunger for a full year.

When he married, he did so at sunset, riding forty miles to the mother’s home of his wife, horseback, with his family behind him on unbroken horses. The horses bucked along the way but they were fixed back to route. The family wore great sheepskin cloth. Snowflakes dabbed down from a purple sky and melted in the desert.

The two families met in an eight-sided hogan with a fireplace in the center, and earthen dust for a floor. They sat with their legs crossed while a medicine man lit fire from wax and blessed the ceremony, speaking in Navajo, a poetry and traditional spiritualism untouched by the violent nostrils of Christianity.

The hogan was given to him and his new wife. He raised the children on hunting big horn sheep and buffalo, how to ride wild horses, how to fish, how to trek forty miles on foot a day, how to sleep without shelter, how to recieve visions from the creator and what the visions meant, how to count the stars, how to sleep in freezing weather without shelter, and how to laugh each day. They bathed in the Colorado River.

One morning on an eclipse while the light upon the earth descended into darkness, there were scoring waves of wicked horse beat and the wind whispered in sacred tongue to him, and he spat out his blood cake and gathered up his band.

It was the coming of the Americans.

He’d fight them in the desert for twenty years, clad in red war paint streaking down his face as though it were blood come down from his scalp, racing his unbroken horse across the desert with a bullroarer whipping in one hand sounding like some motorized and alien vehicle storming the earth, and a bow and arrow in the other, in such a lightning procession that it became the stuff of myth and legend, coming with his band of warriors scoring the sound of wind and storms.

When all the other Chiefs signed a treaty of peace with the United States in 1868 and surrendered, Juniper Tree refused, defending the land of his birthplace he considered sacred.

He was finally captured by General Adam Herod Adams, the Civil War legend from Kentucky who would become somewhat of a wicked and remarkable warrior god of the southern plains, somewhere in the Painted Desert, slung off his horse by rope tied to his neck and the General’s saddle, and made to walk behind the General’s horse, 333 miles with his fellow Navajo who surrendered, and as a prisoner of war, forced to transform his entire identity into that required by American civilization.

His children were taken from him and they never saw each other again, and their children not allowed to learn their own language or own ways, and when he died they had no ways of knowing how to honor his life upon the earth proper.

When he died, his soul became the stuff of a long ago era, legend and myth.