LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 13 - Ixachitlatlan: "The red giants of Atlantis"

The horse reared back on his hind legs when the rattlesnake snapped faster than a gun
in our faces, and my saddle started slipping off sideways because I was only a half-assed
horseman and didn't know how to cinch it up tight enough.
"Yeow! Whoa Boy, whoa!"
It was like a cartoon we had on the wall back at the bunkhouse of a cowboy on a horse
and they were falling off a huge cliff, like Wiley Coyote in another of his hapless free-
falls down the abyss of his own bad luck, screaming "whoa, you sonuvabitch, WHOA!"
The saddle slid inexorably over to one side of the roan's big belly, driven centrifugally
by my own heavy boot in the stirrup, until I went flying, just as the horse went flying in
another direction like a bucking bronco back on all-fours, and before I knew it a hoof hit
me in the mouth and stars went flying and I was knocked two ways to tuesday sliding on
my face in the dirt. Not quite unconscious, I crawled in panic, muttering through the tooth
stuck clean through my bottom lip, "where's that SNAKE?!" Cockeyed, I thought I saw
that goddamn horse running at a dead gallop back to the barn miles away with the loose
saddle flip-flopping directly under his belly, but I couldn't see anything too clearly.
Jumping to my feet in a rush of unnatural adrenaline I tried to see that rattler who'd
spooked the four-legged, but I guess he was gone, probably more scared than we were by
the sudden godawful commotion we'd brought upon his serene crawl in the prairie
looking for mice or a mate or on the lookout for eagles or hawks of his own. I stumbled
around in a few circles for a few minutes trying to see through my concussion and blood
all over my mouth. "I musta got kicked in the head."
In my delirium, it made me think of how the armchair radicals like Ward Churchill
were kicking the shit out of us local yokels down on the farm.
"And now you're about half-coldcocked miles from anywhere on foot with a rattle
snake somewhere just waiting."
There was more than an element of paranoia in it too, all right. It had gotten so we
were all expecting lone gunmen to appear out of nowhere in our backyards, or outside our
bedroom windows in the middle of the night, ready to shoot us and our children on sight.
"And it's getting cloudy and a thunderstorm is rolling in. With no shelter anywhere."
Not that there hadn't been just such sneak attacks a-plenty all over the reservations
forever, with over 300 unsolved and uninvestigated murders on Pine Ridge alone, since
1972.
"Why don't you learn how to ride a horse and hitch up a saddle? Now you're gonna die
out here."
I tried to tell myself my pardner Randy LeBeau back at the bunkhouse would see the
goddamn gelding when he came into the barn, with the saddle all lopsided and haywire,
and immediately come looking for me in the pickup. "He'll get up a posse, pronto." We
were on the eastern edge of the Cheyenne River Rezz of the Minneconjou and Itazipco
Lakotaki, and I'd been following a few stray herefords on a faint horse trail, in the good
ol' summertime of my adventures. Randy was a short-haired cowboy indian who'd given
me a job cowboying, out of pity probably, on his grandmother's leased/alloted ranch of a
few thousand semi-arid acres that was so tangled up in ownership clauses of the usual
anti-treaty laws that only a few shysters I'd met in washington a.c. like Marvin Sonofsky,
in a luxurious suite of offices in the exclusive neighborhoods dominated by huge squat
government complexes of concrete abstractions called the "Interior Department" and the
"Internal Revenue Service", could untangle. It seems they'd made a science of solving the
problems they'd created in the first place, thereby profiting like their fellow war-
profiteers in the nearby "Pentagon" and "Department of State" coming and going - that is,
bombing the shit our of an Enemy and then rebuilding everything they'd bombed. It was
the same on Randy's Grandma's ranch. Billions in "Indian Trust Funds" had been socked
away by sympathetic law firms to hold for the pore damn treaty-skins who didn't know a
dollar from a donut, in cahoots with conscientious bankers sitting back, watching the
interest-rates roll in. Randy had told me he and Marvin were pardners of a sort too, in the
unofficial land business of government subsidies to agriculturalists and other lovers of
free enterprise. His ranch, therefore, like almost all the reservations, was a patch-quilt of
allotments for haying to local white ranchers, a square of ground here for a farmer and
another square next to it for another farmer or rancher, who paid literally one or two
dollars a month to the technical owner of the land, in this case his Grandma slowly
starving to death in a shack in the agency headquarters of Eagle Butte. And that was the
basic source from which most Americans fallaciously thought "Indians get a check from
the government every month. Charity moochers on our tax dollars." The only real check
Grandma got was a fixed income of Social Security and food stamps.
So we were all bleeding slowly to death in the drought and impossible economics of
cattle ranching on the arid buffalo plains, just like my lip gushing profusely all over my
cheap K-Mart vest.
"But the thunderbolts are starting to crack all around me out here, anyway, and I'm
lost."
So naturally I started to run in near panic as the rain started ripping the shit out of my
face and the gumbo trail, a wild and terrible danger on the lone prairee. I tried to get mad
at the huge corporate ranchers who wanted free grazing on "Public Lands" owned by the
"Bureau of Land Management" and "Agriculture Department" all over the West -
sometimes the Feds owned as much as 70% and 80% of entire States like Wyoming and
South Dakota - but I couldn't concentrate. Like a lot of antelope and meadowlarks I was
getting murdered by the sheer force of Nature. When lightning is crackling the hair on the
back of your neck in an open electrical calamity it's hard to think assholes like Churchill
are worth a thought.
Instead, I tried to calm my nerves, jogging carefully, with visions of former romantic
lifetimes flashing before my eyes and I started thinking about what the Toltecs told me
about Quetzalcoatl up in those gathering gray heavens and havens about to kill me. One
bomb exploded so loudly it literally threw me off my feet. "O Sweet JAYZUSS!"
Limping as well, smeared in muck from somewhere, I managed to get back on my feet
somehow and figured out the mysteries of the universe right then and there, and it went
way, way beyond metaphors and puns, similes and syllogisms, of genocidal secret police
and Holy Saviors.
"Quetzalcoatl, you see," an old wizard from Tollan told me, down Chiapas way, "and
his twin brother Tezcatlipoca entered the body of the Earth Monster Tlaltecihtli and
resided in there. That's it. That's the whole story." He stopped talking and grinned, and
chewed some coca leaves the Bros had brought up from Bolivia.
 "Huh?" I waited.
"The gods brought beauty and justice out of the earth's whole terrible upheaval. She
was all the Earth and the Heavens."
"She couldn't help it if she was violent," I realized.
"No. She needed the help of the gods, her twins. Spirits bring what is good in the
world."
"Wow," I replied, "that really does clear it up a lot."
"Si Senor."
"It explains Egypt, and death, and everything," I marveled, as I resumed an easy trot
as a heavier rain a-started to fall. "Tlaltecihtli is Apep, the World Monster, in the
Egyptian cosmogony, and Osiris and his brother Set are neither good nor bad, like
Quetzal and Tezcatl, since they bring ethical, immortal life to the burning ball of gas that
had not life before, like Earth's brother and sister planets, as meteors. We know water
came on earth in the form of meteors, sacred seeds from Outer Space, and when they hit
the boiling rivers of volcanic lava they steamed; and the steam condensed and evaporated
into clouds, and it rained. It rained!" I shouted madly in the cataclysm, running and
laughing like a bloody madman soaked down to his dirty shorts. "Rain! O God!" I could
feel the earth struggling to improve herself, and god as the creative principle struggling to
help her and himself, and men struggling to do better too. It all made sense. "We have to
wreck everything! Tear it all down and build up a new civilization, an ethical civilization
as Osiris and Quetzalcoatl did, out of nothing!" Death and all the random misery and
atrocities of life derived from that first awkward Monster who made children to make her
world a nobler and more dignified place, a planet of peace and goodness her progeny
were produced to harvest and cultivate; and to overcome the awful laws of physics and
chemistry that constantly attend the monster's struggle. It explained how mankind could
so easily go to war and hate just as easily as it lived in quiet happiness. "The Spirits, O!" I
felt my own twin running and laughing beside me in me in my fear of the gathering
darkness, in my body outside of my body, and it almost lifted me in flight, shivering and
injured and frightened.

"I'm going to utter perhaps the greatest piece of knowledge

anyone can voice," he [Don Juan Matus] said. "Let me see
what you can do with it.
"Do you know that at this very moment, you are surrounded
by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity,
if you so desire?
"Do you know that you can extend yourself forever in any
of the directions I have pointed to?" he went on. "Do you
know that one moment can be eternity? This is not a riddle;
it's a fact, but only if you mount that moment and use it to
take the totality of yourself forever in any direction. We are
a feeling, an awareness encased here."
- 'Journey to Ixtlan', by
Carlos Castaneda
 *

"Aimsters are a bunch of gangsters," Barry LeBeau snarled over 37 beers in the
Longbranch Saloon of the capitol city Pierre (pronounced Peer), next to his brother
Randy at the table in his omnipresent white cowboy hat, rolling a cigarette.
"I agree," I said, "I was a gangster myself."
Loretta Lynn or Boz Skaggs were wailing on the electric guitars from the loud
jukebox in the Honky-tonk, on another rainy afternoon (after I'd been rescued) when no
agricultural wages could be paid because of the impassable gumbo that halted all
commercial traffic in cows, horses, sheep, pigs, sorghum, millet, alfalfa, and wheat. Barry
was a good round Sioux actor I'd know for years, ever since he'd played Crazy Horse's
second father Tuga (Hump) in my old play 'Two-Men' that was produced back in 1981 in
Steamboat Springs Colorado.
"Huh? Are you an Aimster or not?"
"Well hell," I replied philosophically, "it depends. If I want anything to do with
hustlers like Means and womanizers like Banks, no. There are some truly evil charlatans
like Ward Churchill out in Boulder who are really doing damage, like with the Hopis
down in Arizona. Jesus. Victor Masayesva, a great Hopi filmmaker friend of mine, says
that Boulder mafia is using oldtimers like Tommy Banyacya down there to screw over
everybody."
"Yeah, I've heard about that."
"It's insidious. He's called me a Fed all over the place too. What's the point of that?
Because I was helping Leonard Peltier, and we've built that Defense Committe up into a
worldwide network of support groups, so Churchill has to come in and take it over? He's
even run off Steve Robideau now, Leonard's cousin, calling him a FBI too."
"I know Steve," Randy added quietly, surely. "He's a good man."
"Damn right."
"Everybody knows Steve," Barry nodded, molified for the moment. "So what's Peltier
got to say about that?"
I sighed deeply, truly disappointed and almost depressed. "He's sided with Churchill.
Steve is out. He's gone. He calls me up broke as hell, trying to take care of his four kids
and keep it together. Leonard doesn't know what the hell is going on, fer chrissake. He's
in Leavenworth now."
"That's just my point," Barry fired up again. "Whatever, whoever, good guys come
along, the fuckers run 'em out."
"It's a war," Randy said.
"It's Peltier," Barry snarled bitterly, expressing the disappointment of a lot of Indians.
"What's his problem? Everybody has tried to support him, in the beginning, but he just
goes off on this power trip as the Big Chief of everybody now, while the rest of us twist
in the wind."
"Whadda ya mean?"
"If he didn't kill those Feds, who did? That's what I mean. It's bullshit, all this 'I don't
rat on my friends' bullshit. And Aimsters now, Man, they beat up their grandmothers for
a pair of boots or a bottle, or each other for nothing."
"That's the rodeo-and-basketball crowd talking," Randy disagreed.
 "You know what they did to George Amiotte's house."
"Yeah," I nodded. "I went out there, down by Kyle, with him. George said AIM did it,
I don't know who. A good sundancer and medicine guy, they tore his home to hell,
ransacking it for loot or furniture or whatever, windows broken, everything torn up and
thrown all over the fields. It looked like a tornado hit it."
"Fuckers."
"They burned down Fools Crow's house," I sighed. "Goons."
"I heard about that," Randy nodded.
"I don't know why. That's the other AIM I'm talking about, the good people, whether
they're traditional fullbloods or breeds like us or white or black or green people,
whatever, whoever, whoever doesn't go along with the same old program."
"Goons are anti-AIMers," Randy said.
"Yeah, on the federal payroll."
"Those Skins down in South America, though," Randy said easily, handsome and
boyish-faced, "they're all right. They got their shit together."
"Mexicans," Barry smirked, his better humor returning with a fresh round of Miller
Lite.
"South America."
"Mexicans. They're all fucking MEXICANS! Frijoles and pinatas."
"I like those people," Randy insisted. "They got their shit together."
"Poor as dirt," I suggested.
"MEXICANS! Now they want to come up here and move in."
"Shut up Barry," big brother commanded pleasantly, smoking his handrolled fag.
"Peru," I said, "Man, now you're talking, Macchu Piccu."
"Yeah," Randy smiled dreamily, "I never been down there, but I want to. I always
wanted to see Ecuador, where they say there's a Cumas confederacy or something of a lot
of tribes across into Colombia, just like our Bear Butte Council here, of the Treaty
Confederacy."

And so the war began. For the Shining Path, the action
was the first spark of destiny's fire. This was the genesis
of the blaze on the symbolic plains of the bourgeoisie and
all betrayed revolutions. Over the following years, as the
embers flamed throughout the country, the search for an
explanation returned repeatedly to this primordial spark.
Why Chuschi? What symbolic detail separated this distant
village from all others to mark the war's beginning? Did
Chuschi unite the basic characteristics of semi-feudal
oppression in the countryside, the delay of progress in
Andean towns, or was it the cradle of Shining Path activity
in the countryside?
Few town in the Peruvian Andes had been more studied
than Chuschi in the years before the war. Unfortunately,
as happens frequently in academic research, almost all of
the in-depth studies had been published in English in the
United States and remained relatively unknown in Peru.
 Chuschi was a relatively prosperous and stable community.
It had never been subjected to the dependence, exploitation,
or patronage of hacienda rule. To the contrary, its inhabitants
had once invaded a small hacienda bordering community
lands. It was essentially an independent community. Although
linked by highway to Ayacucho only since 1966, Chuschi
had been "an important market, administrative, and ceremonial
center for at least 400 years." People from neighboring
communities traveled by foot from one to two days simply
to buy and sell goods in Chuschi's Friday market. A good
number of Ayacucho's residents had ancestors who were
mitimae, including the Chuschans. Shaped by the demographic
commotion that followed the Inca conquest, the area is
populated by the descendants of the indigenous populations
of Canas, Cusco; Canaris, Ecuador; Aymaraes and Angaraes
in Apurimac and Huancavelica; coastal Moches; and the
original Taquiguas from the area. Chuschi and Cancha-cancha
share an origin in Aymaraes while neighboring Quispillacta
has its origins on the Canas mitimaes.
- Sendero Luminoso

[end of page 1 of Chapter 13]