"Pagans In Our Midst" is a book published by the Mohawk that is made up of Newspaper articles from the last hundred years around Akwasasne reservation in upstate New York. As this New York Post editorial makes clear, even though we are no longer considered minors under the law and can now practice our religion legally, we are still subject to terrible mis-representation in the press. This article is in the tradition of L. Frank Baum's (author of Wizard of Oz) editorials after the massacre at Wounded Knee as well as articles in the last year in the NYTimes and the Wall Street Journal. I would suggest that these articles be given the widest possible airing amongst our groups. Only sunlight will kill fungus. (REH)

This article is forwarded from the NYPost, a reply is found at the end of the article. The reply is authored by Ray Evans Harrell, a Cherokee who grew up on the Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma. Harrell is an opera conductor/stage director who lives and works in New York City.

Tuesday May 28, 1996 Editorial
THE NEW YORK POST
AN INCA GIRLS DEATH LONG AGO

Although Hollywood and much of the Politically Correct professoriat still labor to persuade young people that, prior to the arrival of Columbus, the Americas were an earthly paradise ruled by gentle, socially sensitive ecologists, grim reminders of some of the more salient features of Native American culture continue to impede this enterprise.

In December, for example, scientists discovered the eerily well-preserved mummy of a 12-year-old girl embedded in the ice of Peru's Mt. Ampato; last week, the still-frozen mummy was put on display at the National Geographic Society in Washington.

Prior to exhibiting the mummy, researchers examined it carefully: The girl, it seems, had been kneeling when she received a blow to the head that killed her. In short, she was a victim of Incan ritual sacrifice.

Her clothes, preserved almost perfectly, were made of fine wool. |At the time of her death, she was surrounded by pottery, coca leaves and golden figurines; moreover, she was healthy and well-nourished.

It is difficult in this day and age to imagine life in the Inca empire or among the Aztecs, the Mayans or the warring tribes that wandered over the Great Plains in what is now the American farm belt. but sight of this Inca girl--so tantalizingly close to life--cannot but give pause.

Did her parents protest when this healthy child was taken from them to be beaten to death and abandoned in the mountains? Did she have younger brothers and sisters who wept for her after she was gone? Or was the ritual of taking children and killing them so internalized--so much a part of the Incan order--that no one gave it a second thought?

According to historians, the Native American empires that existed before Columbus tended to have elaborate social-organization regimes, some rudimentary knowledge of astronomy and fully developed agricultural systems. Still, when confronted with relatively small bands of Spanish conquistadors, these seemingly formidable "states" collapsed as if made of paper.

Perhaps the same culture that demanded the regular sacrifice of young children also rendered the pre-Columbian Indians incapable of confronting a completely new phenomenon--Spanish soldiers on horseback.

In any event, it's now the rage among American academicians to assert that the Founding Fathers took ideas for the U.S. Constitution from sources so =93diverse=94 as to include various Native American tribes. Such claims, of course, amount to pseudohistorical nonsense.

In fact, in contemplating the fate of the young Inca girl clubbed to death on a lonely mountainside, we find our- selves feeling grateful that contemporary America borrowed virtually nothing from the moral system that obtained in this hemisphere before the arrival of Columbus.

Attributed by the Post Editorial staff to Scott McConnell

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**REPLY: Ray Evans Harrell

First let me simply say that blarney does not equal truth. This man's blarney does not explain why this child is now on exhibit anymore than it explains the murder of millions in Europe that continued when their relatives arrived here.

The irony lies in what the writer wore to work the morning that he wrote this article. His cotton shirt was made possible by the science of the people he demeans. The instructions with the Potatoes that his probable ancestors, in their ignorance or arrogance, forgot to follow (from the heathen agricultural scientists of Peru) caused the death of millions in Ireland and the rush to leave to come to America where he now writes from the ignorance of his own past not to mention ours.

Seventy per cent of the finest foods he eats was developed here by mostly female agricultural scientists. In Peru, home of the frozen maiden, they developed over 200 varieties of potatoes which would have saved that million people in Ireland if the wealthy land owners had cared enough for their tenants to follow the instructions.

That is agricultural science, now as for the Math, we know that before the Moslems taught his ancestors the concept of zero the Mayans had set the time of the birth of the universe around the time of modern science's "big bang". You get all of this from the sixteen extant Aztec Codexs and the couple of Mayan Books left from the thousands burned by the Roman Catholic priests. Neither Adolf or the KGB could have done a better job at erasing a people's accomplishments. Who knows they may have told them a lot more if the European had been willing to listen instead of spreading smallpox, pillaging and burning.

Even Gengis understood that the artisans were worth more than the gold, he took them home with him. The European version of this was to kill the artisans and melt down most of the art into gold and silver bars for easy portage. They murdered Natives for sport or worked them to death in situations like Potosi the silver mine where six million men, women and children died in Bolivia. Two out of every twenty-five survived and this NYPost Editorial Writer has the nerve to blame them.

In Hispanola where there was enough agriculture to feed eight million, (De Los Casas said there were eight million,) within a hundred years there were 100 living native people left on Hispanola. Of course the official historians, demeaned De Los Casas and said there couldn't be that many (they claimed less than a million), until the satellite photos revealed the ancient agriculture.

About the abused, walking wounded who arrived in the the "New World" to find their lives. I've often wondered what those who couldn't afford fine linen, wore instead of our normal cotton shirts? Wool? Leather? Velvet? What did people who had to tear holes in the floors of their apartments to make a privy, do for everyday clothing, before America? What was it like to come from a place where the rivers that you washed in and drank from ran brown from sewage in the summers? Those who survived had to have very good immune systems and must have had amazing intestinal flora and fauna. Just think of the drugs that we have to take to go to those countries where their ancestors live today.

Cortes said Tenochtitlan was the most beautiful and the cleanest city in the world, before he destroyed it. Historian Hugh Thomas called Tenochtitlan a masterpiece of urban planning destroyed, carefully and methodically with all of the forcefulness of European war, however; in spite of this he states that although Cortes and company was initially perceived as deities... "But in the end, to be honest, it had been the Mexica who had fought like Gods". Not much like a house of paper. Cortes wanted them to surrender and he to have a new world Venice to present to his mentor. The Mexica would not be under anyone's boot and fought to the end.

Where did you get your morality? If Rome was a civilization to be admired, with the hundreds of thousands dead for entertainment in the coliseum even two hundred years after the founding of the "Holy Roman Empire" then we must consider the remarks of Albrecht D'Crer when he observed the art from Tenochtitlan: "I have seen the things which they have brought to the King out of the new land of gold....In all the days of my life, I have seen nothing which touches my heart so much as these for, among them, I have seen wonderfully artistic things, and have admired the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands. Indeed, I do not know how to express my feelings about what I found there".

When you demean the inability of the dead to defend themselves against biological warfare, you must remember that AIDs is here, shistomyosis is on Santa Lucia and eboli is on everyone's mind.

As for morality and human sacrifice, why don't you try out some of your excuses for slavery. I'm reminded of the Christian Ship Captain who wrote that hymn, "When I survey the Wondrous Cross on which the Prince of Glory died. My richest gain I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride". He wrote this while the souls were drowning in their own waste in the bowels of his ship.

Or explain de facto segregation or the highway lottery where you remove the speed limit for the God of Transportation to gobble up another twenty thousand sacrifices a year. Or explain ten thousand pounds of TNT for every man, woman and child on the earth just to make the world safe in an argument by two middle eastern philosophers.

We have made our share of mistakes and we have had our fundamentalist literalists and often they have been the most citified but at it's heart the concept of sacrifice or to give back for what you have been given is not an unusual concept and most people share it. Like a warrior who believes that it is correct to sacrifice his most valuable possession to the God who will give him victory or who has given him victory. It is an old story told world wide. To point this out examine the relationship in your own language between Sacred and Sacre-fice.

As for sacrifices of daughters you can take your pick. You can listen to Handel sing of it in his oratorio or you can read the story in the bible. If we were to draw the same conclusions about morality from the hundreds of thousands slaughtered for entertainment in the Eternal City or the slaughter of the Catharians for their "natural" religious heresy, we would now condemn everything that is Roman and Catholic . I would also be surprised if the Post Editor liked or accepted the Calvinist doctrines of that old political opportunist John Locke and what he would have to say about the writer's personal morals. I'm sure that as a modern American he would be more comfortable with Blake than Locke and Blake most certainly was effected by us.

As for our effect on the Editor's dream, I would suggest a little read amongst the American Indian Scholar Historians who could share the passages from the Founding Fathers own quills about their debt to the "savages". The only problem with scratching a native historian is that they also have a great memory about "As long as the grass grows and the water flows" and every consonant, vowel and articulation that the American people have made with Native Americans over the years and never kept. Even today the hypocrites are alive and well, just read Safire and his "fake-Indian" articles or a letter in today's other NY newspaper. One should also examine the linguistic connection between "hype" and hyp-o-crite. The roots of "Sacrifice" and "hypocrite" in Indo-European languages might make good Sunday articles for that "fake-etymologist" William Safire.

I must warn you (pleasantly) that we have very long memories. We were rememberers long before the Nazis stimulated the European memory and conscience. For example we remember the Canary Island genocide and the Gypsy and Jew hunting parties in Poland where they gave extra points for killing a pregnant woman's child. What I don't understand is how the people who demand that other groups repudiate racism amongst themselves have been so quiet over this little piece of anachronistic trash that you have placed in the Newspaper begun by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton being one of the early sacrifices in the new republic to the God of Testosterone.

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