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Esto’k Gna Somi Se’k [The Human Beings of Texas] - Ep 77
871 Plays1 year ago
On today’s episode, Jessica hosts Chairman Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas (in their language the Esto’k Gna Somi Se’k[The Human Beings of Texas]). During the interview Juan discusses the tribal erasure in Texas, Spanish and American colonization, and the Border Wall. He also discusses their efforts to protect Garcia Pasture along with other culturally important places from development along the US/Mexico Border by SpaceX and LNG. Garcia Pasture was on the World Monuments Fund’s World Monuments Watch List for 2022.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/77
Links
- Heritage Voices on the APN
- Garcia Pasture on World Monuments Fund’s World Monuments Watch List for 2022: https://www.wmf.org/project/garcia-pasture
- Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas Donation Page to purchase land and fight oil and gas development on sacred lands: http://www.carrizocomecrudonation.com/donate.html
- Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria Jr. and His Influence on American Society by Steve Pavlik and Daniel R. Wildcat: https://www.abebooks.com/9781555915193/Destroying-Dogma-Vine-Deloria-Influence-1555915191/plp
*more links at https://www.archpodnet.com/hevo/77
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Heritage Voices, Episode 77. I'm Jessica Uquinto, and I'm your host. And today we are talking about Eshtok, Guna, Somisike, the human beings of Texas. Before we begin, I'd like to honor and acknowledge that the lands I'm recording on today are part of the Nooch, or Ute People's Treaty Lands, the Deneta, and the Ancestral Pueblo and Homeland.
00:00:26
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Chairman Juan Mancillas: Background and Education
00:00:31
Speaker
And today we have Chairman Juan Mancillas on the show, and Chairman, if you'd like to introduce yourself.
00:00:38
Speaker
My name is Juan Mancias, Juan Benito Mancias. I'm named after both my grandfathers. Just because my name is Spanish doesn't necessarily make me Mexican national. I was born in Texas and so were like seven other generations before me from New Mexico to Texas. And so that's, you can just call me Juan. So I graduated from one of the,
00:01:08
Speaker
were schools that I think for the fossil fuels at Texas Tech University and a degree in political science and also certification from incarnate word University in San Antonio.
Research and Understanding of Native History
00:01:23
Speaker
And a lot of what I've done and mostly in behavioral studies and all worked a lot with archeologists and anthropologists and
00:01:34
Speaker
looking at sociology from 12 hours from getting my master's, which I think sometimes in my own way, I think it's futile because unless you got the paper, nobody wants to listen to you. But what I have to say is it comes from all.
00:01:51
Speaker
a lot from oral histories and my own research of almost like 38 years of research for trying to validate my grandfather's words, my grandmother's words, and trying to relocate the lands that were ours along the Rio Grande and all the way up into the canyons of the Panhandle.
00:02:22
Speaker
There's even a place up in Colorado called Carrizo Canyon. So I mean, that says a lot. And some of the research that I've done, other people's have done, which a lot of times has been done by non-natives and been done by people who are not really
00:02:46
Speaker
aware of the presence of the native people in Texas. Because for the longest time, I would tell them that I was a native from a native original person of Texas, they would tell me I, they didn't know that there were any Indians in Texas. And it's funny that we hear that all the time. So I'm at a point where I need to just
00:03:14
Speaker
make sure that the history is being told correctly because it's been romanticized a lot by those who have discovered that they do have some indigeneity in their bloodline. So I work on trying to make sure that everybody understands the sacred sites and the history. There's just not one sacred site and it's not just in one place. A lot of those sacred sites were destroyed and misnamed.
00:03:41
Speaker
like Devil's River and the Devil's Watering Hole and they named them because they were sacred to us and of course they consider us to be the wild Indians of Texas because we didn't stay in the missions. They displaced a lot of tribes out of Mexico and brought them in here and
00:04:03
Speaker
we're not quoted Tekken speakers. This is part of my disclaimer to doing a bio about myself that we're not quoted Tekken speakers. So I just want to let you know that I have done extensive research on a lot of this thing. We do have the information in the documents, romanticizing a lot of the stuff that it's been romanticized in the past. As far as I know,
00:04:32
Speaker
You know, we've always been for the human beings, and we stood our ground for almost a year and a half. We occupied some land down in South Texas, protect a gravesite, and it literally took a while to make people realize that there had been 28 laws that had been abolished by
00:04:58
Speaker
the Homeland Security to build the
Challenges of Native Erasure and Cultural Heritage
00:05:00
Speaker
wall. Those laws are still waived. They haven't been rescinded. And I think that they're taking advantage of them in some of the counties for some of the so-called science that's going on there and some of the gentrification that's been going on.
00:05:19
Speaker
But there are stories about those areas and I think it's just a matter of trying to get the history together for what's going on. But when they waived 28 of the environmental law, well, 26 of the environmental laws and then they waived the Native American Grace Protection Repatriation Act.
00:05:37
Speaker
And also the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, it put us in a very strange position of trying to protect the lands. And I believe in protecting the lands is how we're going to abolish the whole mentality of tribal erasure of this country through blood quantum and through all of that. And the only way we can do it is maintaining
00:06:03
Speaker
are teachings, and if you don't know those sacred sites, you may not know the teachings, and if you don't know your language, you may not know the sacred sites. So, that's who I am. It's a little too long too still, but there's a lot more to go. There's just so much more.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah, you got us started on lots of topics. I also just want to throw in here a thank you to and cuss of the world monuments fund who connected us. Yes. World monuments fund added Garcia pasture, which we'll be talking about to the 2022 world monuments watch. So yeah, so very excited to have you on the show. You know, and has been talking about having you on for quite a while now. So I'm glad that we're, we're finally connected.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yes, thank you. I've had to jump a lot of hurdles just to be able to bring some of these stories to light and
00:07:00
Speaker
and not feel like I'm romanticizing the culture in any way because I feel like even people of their own tribal descent have a tendency to appropriate their own culture. And there's always some sort of a traditional manner of dealing with our decision making. And a lot of times people have a hard time with traditional councils, you know, and that's been the fact all along.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah. So I guess to get us started, since there's, there's so many different directions we could go, so many interesting things to talk about, but let's start with how you got into this type of work and these efforts. I'm sure it's a longer journey, you know, since you're tribal chairman, but yeah, we'll, we'll start there and you can, you can go with that where you think is best. I started it now. I don't know. Maybe when I was just like really.
00:07:59
Speaker
At six months, I mean, they say that they were singing songs to me. My grandma would bring some of the elders to sing songs to me when I was six months old. I think a lot of that kind of hung on to me and stayed with me. But I think the biggest part of it is watching how
00:08:18
Speaker
how distant the civil rights movement was for me when growing up, watching it on TV, that it seemed like it was a totally different other land because we were so, we were economically despaired from what was going on and traveling and I was just the son of a mom who had come from a large family who were migrants and from a father who was
00:08:48
Speaker
a cowboy working in the ranches in South Texas. And my dad was deaf and he lost his hearing from an accident he had when I was a year and a half. So knowing that and knowing that my dad was such a ambitious person and my mom was there for him just about all the time, it helped a little bit. Not saying that they were the, you know,
00:09:18
Speaker
the perfect people, but they were good people. And they helped a lot of people and gave them homes and stuff. And I recognized that there was a trend that was going on and I started asking questions of them and my grandfather and my grandmother.
00:09:37
Speaker
So a lot of that, a lot of that I started recording. And I think this, once I got into, got out of high school, got into college, I decided I was gonna try and discredit a lot of those stories to see if they were true. And finding out that they were all true, it just took a lot of time.
Cultural Survival and Resistance
00:09:57
Speaker
Like the whole story about my grandfather telling us to go and get our lands back done in, around the, in Penitas, which is in Hidalgo County,
00:10:07
Speaker
and then finding out that that land ran on both sides of the river. They didn't understand that process of visas and all that, green cards. But he was born on this side of the river and so was my grandma because Brownsville used to not be called Brownsville until after it became state.
00:10:32
Speaker
And that's the same thing with a lot of the cities that are on the United States side now. They used to have the same names like Reynosa was called Reynosa and Matamoros was called Matamoros on both sides. Just like Laredo is called Laredo and then Nuevo Laredo on the other side. And of course, I started looking into this because in 1920, I believe, they changed the whole
00:11:01
Speaker
the city of what used to be called Carrizo down there and changed it to Zapata, Texas, after Antonio Zapata, who was the first, well, he was the Zapatista that we have, you know, down up in the river. He fought under the flag of the Republic of the Rio Grande, which later was deemed treasonous by the Texas government and their lands taken away because of that. But there were
00:11:30
Speaker
300 of our warriors that fought in that, that we know of, that is documented. And of course, Antonio Zapata being one of the guys that was, was also Carrizo. They called him Greasy Hat. So, because he wore the same hat and he had a lot of, from sweating on it.
00:11:53
Speaker
those kind of things that started making me realize that there was something there. And then I started realizing that they were changing names to accommodate the settler mentality, the colonizer mentality. And our own people were also losing a lot of their culture because of the oppression of the language of Spanish, which was the first oppressive language to us.
00:12:24
Speaker
and there was a lot of history. There's evidence up around Lake Ellen Henry, which is also a place where the picture of the Mothman is at, which connects us to some of the prophecies that are even ongoing today. There's a picture of one of the missions where they were cutting off the feet and the hands of my ancestors to
00:12:51
Speaker
convert them or to get rid of them so they get out of the way so they could get it at the environment. And that's exactly what they continue to do today with their sacrifice zones that they're setting up. It's not a document. That's our documents. Those are our files. That is our Bible. And of course, because of people looking at us as not knowing anything, they have a lot to learn about our science and how we survived.
00:13:19
Speaker
they found they would always find ways of demeaning us in Texas. And that's why when the compression of pushing a lot of the tribes toward the plains
00:13:33
Speaker
And even through the trellids here is the long walk while trying to relocate the tribes just like they had done before with some of our young people. When they came in and separated the families by stealing the children and taking them to Mexico and teaching them Spanish and Nahuatl, which is the language of the people in Mexico City, they would bring them back as interpreters and of course
00:13:59
Speaker
We found it really hard to accept them back in. They would take them when they were five or six years old. At the age of 15, they'd bring them back. So you're looking at a 10-year difference there. And a lot of the people had already moved on and moved away from the area. But they could speak the language. So that was one of those things that we had to
00:14:28
Speaker
understand that was happening to our people on this side of the river. But now, you know, with the colonization of the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934, even a lot of our people distinguish Mexican Indian or American Indian. So we buy into the colonization and the settler mentality.
00:14:52
Speaker
and kind of discredit that ideals like those guys down there, they have no ceremonies, you know. But we were like the buffer zone of what was happening further south and further north. If you look up history, you'll find that the Carrizo and Coma Cruz, which is us, the Eshtokna, were the people of the land.
Cultural Teachings and Historical Understanding
00:15:14
Speaker
And we were the people that
00:15:17
Speaker
lived on the peyote grounds, which is another big factor in our probably survival is trying to protect those lands and knowing that the land is sacred because of medicine grows there.
00:15:34
Speaker
That's how I got into all of this, realizing the research that I had done myself just to make sure that our future generations understood that there's a history here and that history is important. It can't be erased in any way and they're trying very hard to erase it so they can continue taking the resources of this land because 530 years ago, that's
00:16:02
Speaker
how long it's been now since this genocide's been going on in the Americas. And they came here to take all the resources, so they took all the gold and took the silver, took whatever riches they could and took them overseas, they exported them to Europe. And the kings and queens and the barons and lords, they all got their...
00:16:26
Speaker
You know, they got the riches. And here we are 530 years later, and the same thing is still happening. We're still exporting the resources, the rich resources of this land overseas. And now with these resources, it's really hampering human life and the environment.
00:16:49
Speaker
And it's not a question of us protesting. It's not a question of us lobbying. It's a question of us protecting what we have. And it's not because we own the land. We don't own the land. It's that the land owns us. And we have to learn to respect that land that way. And this is why I do what I do. And it gets rather exhausting.
00:17:17
Speaker
It's a question of truly decolonizing ourselves from being puppet governments to a larger government that doesn't really recognize or want to recognize, even if you are federally recognized, those tribes. Because we have no say. We have no representation in this government. And we're not the ones writing the laws. We didn't write the Constitution. So there's always those things that
00:17:48
Speaker
People don't recognize the fact that we were never represented, that we were the people that were being sacrificed for the riches of a few, of a plantation mentality that exists even today. There's still a plantation mentality with the whole thing with, oh, we don't want to pay minimum wage, we don't want to be
00:18:13
Speaker
There's no economic disparity. We want to be equitable. We want to be equal. Now they're using the word equitable. Equitable means to be fair. And they define what's fair. And that's one of the reasons that I'm still in here. That's why I want to change the narrative. I have a hashtag that I use a lot that says, change the narrative. Hashtag change the narrative.
00:18:42
Speaker
When they passed the no protest law here in Texas, I was there when they were voting on it and disrupted the vote. And basically because I don't believe that their idea of critical infrastructure is their derricks, their oil wells, and their terminals, their LNG terminals, or their oil terminals, or their Petrochem
00:19:10
Speaker
plants, or the pipelines. I don't think that's critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure is that the water, the air, and the land, and the thing that they're doing is, you know, they're charging for all of that. Some people are talking about water security because, I mean, now they want to desalinate the ocean, take more water, and why so they can continue to, you know,
00:19:39
Speaker
damage the planet that we live on. And then you got their scientists going around saying, well, we can always go to Mars and invade it. I don't care what life forms there are. That's what Elon Musk said. They'd better watch out because we're coming. And that's exactly what they did here. 530 years ago, they came in here with a doctrine of discovery and they threw it in our faces and said, you guys don't believe like we do. You don't look like I do.
00:20:09
Speaker
So we're going to get rid of you. And that mentality is still there. You can see it in all the...
00:20:16
Speaker
the racism that still occurs in the South and especially right now along the wall. And with the LNGs that you're trying to put up in Cameron County, you can see it with the people that favor their Spaniard blood more than they do their native blood of these lands because they've been led to believe that being native is, you know,
00:20:42
Speaker
It's not human, it's not God-like, whatever God they believe in. And that makes it really difficult for who we are. And trying to maintain our own traditions, maintain our own way of life, because even though there's an American Indian Religious Freedom Act, they had us buying into the whole thing that our way was a religion, but it was a way of life. We lived that way.
00:21:10
Speaker
We had to learn to live with nature. So Chairman Mencius was really on a roll during this conversation talking about so many important different things and I didn't want to cut him off. So these breaks, this is going to be the first break and you'll notice that the conversation just flows right back in right after the break because he was still talking. All right. And jumping right back into where Chairman Mencius left off.
00:21:38
Speaker
There's a YouTube channel, the documentary that was directed by Carolina Callecedo and David De La Rosas from Colombia. And it's called Teaching of the Hands and I narrated it. And it's one of our teachings about what the hand means and what you can see in your hand.
00:22:02
Speaker
because it's a science and it's a mathematical sequence of things that can happen.
00:22:11
Speaker
the misinterpretations of a lot of our paintings, the New Age Indians that have tried to reclaim their own blood without any teachings because DNA doesn't carry the teachings, it only carries that concentration of DNA but doesn't give you the teachings if you don't know who you are, if you don't know what nation you come from. And that's one of the problems that we're running into with
00:22:40
Speaker
the more conservative mentality of people wanting to be indigenous. And I struggle with the word indigenous, but again, it's a catch-all term. That's why we prefer to call ourselves a Shtokna, because we are the human beings of Somisake. And that means that we are from this land.
00:23:06
Speaker
The evidence is there. The paintings are there. And you can only interpret them if you know our language. Like where we have the unification of the arrows dance, it's on some of the medicine wheels you find denote our harvest dance. And all of that is painted on the walls. The solstice site, the equinox site,
00:23:31
Speaker
a paint rock, you know, everybody's trying to clean out before nobody claimed it. And I've been going out there for years. My grandfather would stop by there and drop tobacco. And then I know, because I would ask the questions, why are we doing this? They knew all the plants. I remember getting waterlogged while we were out there holding cotton.
00:23:54
Speaker
and him handing me, you know, say the Artesimia, which is the white sage from this area, and letting me smell it, and I was fine afterwards. But see, these things are all dying, and it's because of the contamination of the pollutants in the air. So that's why I'm here. I mean, that's why I continue to do what I'm doing. I believe in
00:24:24
Speaker
In a better world, I believe in our lifeways. I have faith in them. I've seen them happen. I've seen the rain come when we asked for it. Those things were left behind for us to see. And if you didn't know the language, you didn't know what you were looking at. If you didn't know the ways, you didn't know what you had. We had 16 of our deer songs that were recorded and left behind. Our language was recorded in 1886.
00:24:53
Speaker
There's a lot of research that I've done over the last 40 years and just on the tribe itself.
Family Heritage and Land Rights Struggle
00:25:01
Speaker
And at this point, a lot of the elders don't feel like we need to get the recognition from this government to be who we are. Some of them say, we don't need a white man to tell us who we are. And that's exactly what they've been doing for a long time when they had all the mascot issues.
00:25:20
Speaker
So when you know the teachings and you know your ways, you know that you have a value system and it's not based on ideals of a country of generic makeup. And many of us still call the United States, the United States of generica.
00:25:41
Speaker
because everybody's a little confused. And you know, the bad thing about it is they absolve themselves from that confusion. They absolve themselves from any wrongdoing in the future.
00:25:53
Speaker
the insurance companies insure them only if it's not an act of God. I don't know. That's what drives me out. Well, they talk about a God, but then they use God to absolve themselves from any wrongdoing, like what's happening with what happened with BBP and the ongoing
00:26:13
Speaker
fire that's out in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a hurricane that tore it down. So they said, and now they got a fire going on for 14 years out there. And what did they say? Well, it was an act of God. We're not responsible to clean it up. So who's going to clean up the mess? And now they're proposing to do the same thing to Mars, you know, in the universe, you know, get out there. The space around us already has enough garbage
00:26:42
Speaker
that they created. It wasn't enough to pollute our beaches with their plastics. Now they're polluting the space with debris up there. And I think it's high time and we start recognizing what is sacred in our lives. If money is what they trust in, then let everybody know that money is their God.
00:27:07
Speaker
For us, we hold the land sacred and because our people are buried there, our people come from there. Our creation story starts at Boca Chica, the mouth of the river.
00:27:19
Speaker
And we talk about how the Creator, when they came, they went up the river and started creating all these things, the plants, the animals. And then coming back down, the Rio Grande from the mountains started gathering all the nice things of each one of the animals.
00:27:40
Speaker
and they put them in their hand and when they came at the end they took sand and they took some of the ocean and they clapped it together and they created first woman and that's because you know they were feeling you know lonely by themselves here and so they created first woman and then creator left to finish the universe and still working on finishing the universe and
00:28:10
Speaker
So it'll be a while before the creator, they come back over here. These are things that are important to us to understand how we are connected to each of the things that have been created through that first woman. And then what was left over, creator took all of that and made first man. So that's the way we, that was told the story. I thought it was funny.
00:28:39
Speaker
But it gave us a better understanding of where we come from, that we honor our mothers, we honor the women, and we follow the mother's clans. And that was important. That makes a big part of what my prime directives are that I live by. My grandmother always telling me, know who your people are. You don't want to marry your cousin.
00:29:06
Speaker
My grandfather said, go find our lands, get our lands back. But he never told me that there was this huge land base that existed. I found the deeds to some of the land that was given to the Mancias family. And a lot of credit goes to my own family members and relatives like Arturo Mancias and a lot of Mancias that still live in South Texas.
00:29:35
Speaker
I was a first generation born away from the Rio Grande, but I was not left without an understanding and a connection to the land that was there. I mean, because the land ran all the way up into the canyons, Palo Duro, and all the way up into Carrizo Canyon. My grandfather was, he
00:29:57
Speaker
made what came from the line of cowboys working the Longhorns. My dad did too. And my mom was, she was actually the middle child of 13 kids. And they were good people. They were always giving. I'm not saying that they were great, but they were good. None of us are that great. But they were good people.
00:30:23
Speaker
And that's part of the land that exists now. It's really bad that we had to criminalize anything that happens because we don't see or accept the invading religions that came in here.
00:30:44
Speaker
And they call themselves missionaries, but they don't know exactly what those missionaries do to us when they come in. And I think for a long time that was a lot of the problems that we have had have been side effects or byproducts of a society that doesn't care what really happens to us. And they absolved themselves from that. That's the whole thing. There's a self-absolution.
00:31:14
Speaker
they forgive themselves for any wrongdoing that they've done. You know, that's one of the things that I write about. I've got two small books that I've published, and one of them is called, So Your Grandma is an Indian and You Don't Like Controversy. And the other one is called, Just the Sounds of Oppression. And I think that
00:31:38
Speaker
If you listen very carefully to the laws that are being made, like no protest law that was passed in Texas, you can hear the sounds of oppression. You can hear where it's all about their God, the money, and how everything is now. You have to pay for air, you have to pay for water, you have to pay for land.
00:32:03
Speaker
the way here. You shared the land. You shared the water. You kept the water clean. You knew where the clean water, the spring waters were at. And you shared them. And of course, the air was always clean. One of the things I tell people is that they have to recognize the fact that they are 70% water, all of us are.
00:32:31
Speaker
When we cross over, you know, go back to the stars, we say that that water becomes part of this environment. And our bodies, they wither and they decay and become part of the land. So the last breath you take, you know, is put out into the atmosphere.
00:32:57
Speaker
So when we breathe and we breathe, we're breathing our ancestors. When we drink the water or bathe in that water, we're bathing in our ancestors. And when we partake from food that is growing in the land, we're being nourished by our ancestors.
00:33:18
Speaker
And that's the connection that we have, is understanding that connectedness and the relationship that we have with, not just with each of these animals, with each of these plants, but also with, you know, the land itself, the Earth itself. And that's why we all call him Mother Earth, you know, or Grandmother Earth.
00:33:39
Speaker
to a distinct connection that we never lose it from because we accept the fact that we're part of it.
Environmental Challenges and Cultural History
00:33:48
Speaker
And that's why we always say it's not that we own the land, it's the land owns us. It's that the water that we're polluting and using to pollute the land
00:34:03
Speaker
with the fracking that goes on. I mean, that was predicted 4,000 years ago. There's a picture of it at the paintings down in Seminole Canyon. But again, they've romanticized that whole concept because they don't think any further than their nose. They don't see any further than that. They see that there is a dollar sign and that's all that exists. Because even time now,
00:34:30
Speaker
is being sold. Have you ever used the term time is money? Time is money. That's another one. It's a very serious situation that we're in. When people want to say that things like plastics, when a country says like Saudi Arabia says plastics is
00:35:00
Speaker
is necessary, we need it to survive. But 530 years ago, when they landed on these lands, there was no plastic. So I don't know. I mean, we've learned to survive. And they, the creator, give us a science that was very simple to balance out who we were. But we've taken that science and created a monstrosity.
00:35:30
Speaker
in these industries. And Texas LNG and Rio Grande LNG is exactly what they're doing right now by even digging up our graves. That's the other prime directive. I have three prime directives that I live by. The other one was from an interview that was done with one of my great, great, great relatives, great grandfather. His name was Manuel Calasos.
00:35:57
Speaker
They're trying to build a railroad back in 1871, and they went looking for the Carisos, because they found this massive gravesite in Devil's River in Valverde County. And there it says, he asked the, I guess it's the Corps of Engineers, the captain, and his name was Hawkins, he asks, and he says,
00:36:23
Speaker
So what are you going to do with my people? And the guy said, well, we're going to have to move on because we've got to build a railroad through here. And he very seriously looks at him and says, now my people will die by another. So every time you're digging up one of our people again, you're killing us again. That's the genocide that is ongoing. And that's what exactly is happening at places like with the Texas LNG and the Rio Grande LNG, where they both have
00:36:51
Speaker
bought into the Garcia Pasture, which is the monument that we put
00:36:57
Speaker
the World Monument Foundation is watching and trying to stop this madness of this exporting all these resources out. Because Total out of France also wants to get part of this LNG for France, and France has a strict no fracking and
00:37:25
Speaker
no fossil fuels policy. You'll see it during the Olympics because it's going to be, they're working at it trying to make it plastic free, the first Olympics to be plastic free. And I think that because of some of our efforts and the World Monument Fund and some of the other groups that have been involved with us in trying to fight this, it's making a big, big, big
00:37:53
Speaker
you know, did and what goes on over there. So if the United States can go there representing itself plastic free, that would be great. You know, but, uh, I doubt it. That's gonna happen. So like I mentioned before, here's the second break and then chairman Mencius will be continuing on with what he was saying. All right. And jumping right back into, uh, where chairman Mencius left off.
00:38:17
Speaker
The Garcia Pastor's 32 village site that was surveyed back in the 1920s by some guy named Anderson, T.S. Anderson, and he was looting the place and selling a lot of the artifacts to museums. So a lot of the museums have some of our artifacts. We'd like them back.
00:38:40
Speaker
the Whitney Museum at one time had like 120 of our infant remains and their babies, they were wrapped in rabbit fur blankets and they were selling them on eBay at one time, which to me was the other reason that I just
00:39:09
Speaker
I saw that there was no humanity in this science and there was no humanity about giving life to the people and they were still practicing the whole doctrine of discovery. So it hurts me to know that these things happen.
00:39:29
Speaker
I was taught that the battlegrounds have changed. There's no longer the bullets and the guns and the bows and arrows. But the battlegrounds have changed to be the courtrooms, not just in this country, but worldwide. And to take these invading countries that came into our lands and hold them accountable for what they've done,
00:39:55
Speaker
And hopefully those countries will hold this country accountable for what it continues to do. The genocide that is doing, the tribal erasure, the cultural erasure. I saw some guy the other day had a t-shirt that said that the cancel culture stole this country and going like, oh my God, I can't believe these people. But the thing is that it goes further than that.
00:40:26
Speaker
They, in their mind, think they own stuff and they don't own it. We're only part of it, part of this creation, and we have to learn to be a part of it. The Creator, they made sure that we understood that. At least that teaching was given to us. I don't know where their teaching went, that they don't recall that anymore, but it's all about, you know, divide and conquer kind of mentality they have.
00:40:53
Speaker
There's power in killing people. And I don't see that. And especially the way that they do things and the way they want to continue seeing these things. But there's a lot of history involved here. And the peyote grounds are a big part of where we lived on both sides of that river. And there's been a constant of take, take, take, take, take, and not putting anything back.
00:41:23
Speaker
But the Creator put that medicine in that place, and that's where the Creator put it, and that's why that medicine has the strength that it has for a lot of us, especially our people. And I think that a lot of our own people don't understand just the basic sciences of the creation and how it happened.
00:41:52
Speaker
There's a book called Destroying Dogma that was a lot of excerpts. After Brian Deloya passed away, a lot of his excerpts were put into that book. But it's called Destroying Dogma. And one of the biggest things that he would talk about was that he would talk about why wasn't our creation story important, only the one that was written in the Bible. And basically, again, it's that we were not considered to be human beings.
00:42:22
Speaker
even though we told them over and over. I mean, even the word humanos down here means humans in Spanish. That didn't even dawn on them. They just called them humanos. And it just became a name of a group of natives that were there, but it was us. We're the estocna. That's what estocna means. It means the human being.
00:42:50
Speaker
And if you put so many seconds onto it, the human beings of this area, this land of Texas, that's what we call Texas now. But we didn't have words for prayer. We had to put several words together to say prayer. So, you know, we say, cha pe polem, which means that I'm throwing my voice out, because that's part of singing.
00:43:18
Speaker
And it's also, you know, we say, Shabbat Malayo. I'm singing the voice and Yeneh Pes, which means, you know, look into my wishes, into my desires, what I'm looking at. So it was a connection to that inner person of understanding our presence on this earth.
00:43:43
Speaker
and our responsibility to it. And we only took what we had. We were very, we were migratory people. We went up and down the river, so you'll find villages all along the river. And that's becoming very evident now because of our relationship with the Customs and Border Patrol people. And what they're trying to do and trying to build this
00:44:08
Speaker
nuisance that they call a border wall. It's not even at the border because the border is right in the middle of the river. And of course, here's how smart their science is that that river meanders and it moves and it leaves Oxbow lakes. That boundary changes all the time. And I think that that's why we
00:44:32
Speaker
want to make sure that people understand that there was a simple science here involved in what was going on because we understood and we had that relationship with the environment and the first thing it was to get rid of us then they could get into they could get to the environment. The first one of the first explorations into Texas was by one of the explorers called Chamoscado. He came in and
00:45:00
Speaker
run into Juan Savieta and to Huizbenive. Huizbenive comes from our language, which means red elk. The clans that he had were at Pecos Pueblo, which is on this side of the Sangre Cristo Mountains. That's why, you know, we have a word for elk, a word for all this, but cuiz means red in our language.
00:45:30
Speaker
And beneath it means elk. And that tells you that where we were at, where we lived. And they let this guy, Chamos Cado, through a wild goose chase through the mountains of the Davis and in Delaware. Because they didn't want to show him where all the easy pass was and where all the water was.
00:45:56
Speaker
took him almost a year to get back to Mexico. But by then he had taken over, he had already killed like over 3,400 buffalo and taken as much of the freshwater pearls that he could find. I mean, they even say in the research that the pearls were freshwater pearls and the
00:46:24
Speaker
Quality was not the best, but it was still a pearl. And you're going like, wow, these guys are something else. And they'll find any way to degrade the population, to degrade the teachings of the land. And I think that that still continues today by these guys going around digging up paint rock and having so-called native people going in there and pretending that they know what they're talking about.
00:46:53
Speaker
And they don't. And the thing is that if they had any connection to those relatives, they'd leave them alone. But again, you know, and it's not a superstitious thing. It's just a question of, are people need to rest in peace as well?
Protecting Sacred Lands and Legal Battles
00:47:12
Speaker
Just like Davey Crockett does and Panchoia does and all those guys. But they don't care about, they just dig us on up.
00:47:23
Speaker
build a pipeline right through it. Any, have I let anything out yet? That was it a quite a bit there. Yeah. I was going to say, I think we just recorded pretty much the whole episode. Yeah. Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure we get to like anything maybe specific about Garcia pasture? Like if there's any like background.
00:47:51
Speaker
that you wanna give so our listeners will understand all of that situation better? Well, I think that what we need to do is, and I've been saying this for a couple of years now.
00:48:03
Speaker
We have to really go after some of the local governments and for their lack of business knowledge and of course scientific data that's been offered to them. I think one time they were talking about, the FERC was talking about how much pollutants and particulates were gonna go into the air from just one project. They weren't looking at, at that time there were three projects.
00:48:32
Speaker
And so, but they're still not, I think they're only looking at one project at a time and they're saying, well, they qualify under the EPA, but when you take both of those projects together, it's out of whack. And I mean, they're putting a lot of pollutants into the air. There's a high threat of them exploding because of SpaceX being there and what happened with this last rocket.
00:48:58
Speaker
And of course, you know, to get their monies, they weren't honest with their proposal and said that the blast zone would only be like three miles and it ended up being like six or seven, eight miles. And it was a lot of damage too. And right after that, there was a tornado on top of that and a couple of children died and one gentleman
00:49:25
Speaker
And then there were kids that were lost for a while. They didn't know where they were because a tornado took them off. Or they couldn't find them in the rubbish.
00:49:34
Speaker
But nobody talks about these things, and that tornado was only about two to three miles away from Asia pasture. So the ancestors themselves are really speaking out and showing that they're not happy with what's going on down there. But of course, their God is more important than human life. So they're ready to continue sacrificing human people.
00:50:00
Speaker
to get whatever they need to gentrify the human being. They call it gentrification or urbanization, whatever you're gonna call it, but it's actually gentrifying the humans in those areas because the mom and pops restaurants that are so important in that area because it's a tourist area are gonna lose a lot of funding. I think that the people that are making these decisions economically are market wise,
00:50:29
Speaker
They're being handed a dangling carrot and everybody's trying to take a bite out of the carrot and they're going to find out that the carrot's made out of plastic because it's nothing but lies anyway coming from SpaceX and from the next decade and the group of investors for Texas LNG. These guys, they're using marketing like it's important.
00:50:59
Speaker
when even some of the so-called environmentalist groups in the state are saying that they support carbon capturing sequestration. And in the long run, they don't even know if it's proven. They only
00:51:19
Speaker
Every time they've had a carbon segmentation plant, it's blowing up, some has happened to it. And they want to set another one up that's going to be huge, one of the biggest ones in the world, done with the Rio Grande LNG. And that's how they sold this whole project to the administration, because they thought that this was going to cut down on pollutants. But they're taking, I don't know,
00:51:48
Speaker
like 16 tons of gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the air, putting it into the ground. But the ratio is not consistent with what is being put out of CO2 by the rest of the population and also by the fracking that's going on right now, because we have so many fracking flowers in Permian Basin. And now the Eagle Ford Shell has started back up fracking again.
00:52:18
Speaker
with all that pollution going into the air, 16 megatons compared to 600, I don't think that's a conducive ratio to make a decision to let them have that. I think what they need to do is just stop
00:52:36
Speaker
the stop from having human beings be collateral damage and let's let the industry be the collateral damage. They need to shut down. They need to stop them. And that's why in Texas, they're just doing away with any kind of history that holds them accountable for their stupidity and for their ignorance and for their genocide.
00:53:01
Speaker
And they just want to maintain a very ignorant society in Texas that has no responsibility, has no accountability to their actions. And as long as the history is told by them who write the laws, again, we don't have any representation. Because Texas that I know of has no natives in their Congress.
00:53:32
Speaker
So if somebody is interested in supporting, you know, all of the efforts that you mentioned, is there a place for them to go in order to do that? You can go to our website. It's carrizocomecrudonation.com because it looks like, we'll say like, don't, when you look at it, you think it's saying donation, but it's carrizocomecrudonation.com and there's a, where you can,
00:54:02
Speaker
put money there if you want to help us out. What we're doing is I just bought another, I just closed out on a deal for the tribe on some 5.5 acres.
00:54:15
Speaker
in Cameron County. Now we have 11 acres there. And what I'm doing is I'm trying to block them from bringing in the Rio Bravo pipeline, which is Enbridge sponsored. So we can get enough land along that site. It's a sacred site. Loma Alta is there. There was an archeological site there. They had found some burials in that area. And they've been maintained and protected.
00:54:44
Speaker
one of them became a, he's a private wildlife refuge. And we're just down the street from it. We acquired the land and that land's gonna be either become a spiritual center or an information center of some kind where we were able to maintain some kind of agricultural, and we're trying to buy more of the land down there so that we can continue to stop this block, to block this pipeline from coming through.
00:55:13
Speaker
It'll take a while for them to deal with us, even though they do believe in horizontal fracking, but we ain't moving. Because it'll be actually, quote unquote, our land's the colonized way, because we'll own them.
00:55:33
Speaker
I think 13 acres being offered right now for like $47,000. And I sure would love to get that land because those lands are right on the path of the...
00:55:45
Speaker
of the pipeline. There's another pipeline that came through there that we were the only ones fighting at the time. Nobody was listening to us. Nobody listens to what's going on in Texas because according to everybody, well, you're not federally recognized kind of attitude, which is a very colonized settler mentality. And I guess we're going to be the wild Indians. We might as well be the wild Indians and maintain our sovereignty by holding on to
00:56:15
Speaker
and fighting them on their courts and whatever it takes to keep them from destroying our sacred sites. And we're going to protect our ancestors as well. And that's what we're doing right now. But it'd be nice to be able to buy as much of that land there as possible and turn it into the first Native American or first Native original peoples
00:56:44
Speaker
university in Texas.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:56:46
Speaker
That would freak out at every Texan. Wow. Okay. So we will put a link to that donate page in the show notes. So anyone that's interested in donating and supporting that effort to purchase land and fight oil and gas development on sacred lands, you can go there and make your donation and we'll have some other links in there as well. But yeah, I just want to say thank you so much for taking so much time out to talk to me about these
00:57:13
Speaker
important topics and all of the important efforts that you guys are working on to protect this land. So thank you. Well, I just want to give a shout out to the World Monument Foundation and also to ANCCUS and the Magnum Foundation for helping us out in every way that you possibly can. Because I mean, it's important. It's made a big statement.
00:57:41
Speaker
about how we care for our lands and our ancestors here. So I do appreciate that. Now we can just sell it to the non-business people that are not politicians of the area, we'll be fine. So I think that's my other way is just to kind of make them realize how bad of a bad venture this is to build those places there. All right. Well, thank you. Well, thank you.
00:58:11
Speaker
Appreciate you. Thanks for listening to the Heritage Voices podcast. You can find show notes at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash Heritage Voices. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Google Play Music Store. Also, please share with your friends or write us a review. Sharing and reviewing helps more people find the show and gets the perspectives of Heritage Voices amazing guests out there into the world.
00:58:38
Speaker
No, we just need more of that in anthropology and land management. If you have any more questions, comments, or show suggestions, please reach out to me at Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. If you'd like to volunteer to be on the show as a guest or even a co-host, reach out to me as well, Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org.
00:58:56
Speaker
You can also follow more of what I'm doing on Facebook at Living Heritage Anthropology and the nonprofit Living Heritage Research Council, or on Twitter at LivingHeritageA. As always, huge thank you to Liable Enqua and Jason Nez for their collaboration on our incredible logo.
00:59:21
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.