Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places,
Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ.
“I’m gonna git those injuns!”
I regret to say that I spoke those words as a 2 ½ year-old back in 1961 when my family took our first trip west from Ohio to spend a week at Ghost Ranch. I wore my white cowboy hat, my black cowboy boots, and was ever on the lookout to “git those Injuns.” I was a product, as most kids were in that era, of a culture of playing cowboys and Indians, shooting toy guns at “bad guys,” and learning about life through the lens of TV Westerns and movies.
An aside: According to the book Beating Guns by Shane Claiborne and Mike Martin (Mike is the Mennonite pastor in Colorado who was instrumental in helping us start the Guns to Gardens movement) there were at least 1,400 Western films that came out from 1935 to 1960. Eight of the ten top television shows in 1959 (the year I was born) were Westerns. Thirty-five million paperback Westerns were sold per year in the 1950s. Westerns had taken the country by storm. Bad guys and Indians beware.
It was only later that mom and dad told me, with a chuckle, that on our trip a little Indian boy walked right past me, and I didn’t know it. He wasn’t dressed as I imagined he should be, as seen on TV. Apparently, back then, modern Indians were safe from little boys with toy guns.
But not so yesterday in Española when a young man wearing a MAGA hat shot into a peaceful crowd protesting the planned re-installation of a statue of Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate, a controversial figure in New Mexico history for generations for his oppressive and often brutal treatment of Native Americans. One person was shot and was air-lifted to a hospital, condition yet unknown at the time of this writing.
Oh, what harm we have done! All those movies and TV shows I grew up with were not benign entertainment. While they purported to be morality plays it was all about a good guy with a gun shooting a bad guy with a gun. Sound familiar? But it was all a myth. Always has been. The Wild West wasn’t that way. In fact, they had stricter gun regulations than we do today. I urge you to click on the link below where noted author Malcolm Gladwell speaks to this. He even suggests that the simplest explanation for the Supreme Court’s puzzling run of gun rights decisions may be that the justices watched too much Gunsmoke when they were growing up. Oh my.
So, listen, 2 ½ year old self, the alleged shooter in Espanola, and all those who still hold on to such thoughts, we are out to “git” no one, but rather to get to know one another and to get along. Retribution never works so leave it alone. Don’t demonize anyone, or “other” them, or denigrate someone in anyway. Never. Get rid of your hat which you think symbolizes a better time in the past. There wasn’t one. It is all a myth. Don’t watch those shows or any others that glorify violence. We have bloodied our communities enough.
Instead, let us grow the Beloved Community by celebrating Indigenous cultures as we are doing this Sunday. How fortuitous, we might be tempted to think, that we are doing so after this week’s shooting. But we’re wrong. We should have been doing this since 1961 and all the days before. Imagine, if we had, all the lives saved, injustices that never happened, and the racism that was never given a chance to prosper.
Grace and peace,
Harry
*Malcolm Gladwell, on his podcast Pushkin, https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/guns-part-2-getting-out-of-dodge