Agua
This story was inspired by events that took place on several American Indian reservations during the 1970's.
According to Walter... Ray is "Thunderheart", a Native American hero slain at Wounded Knee, who is now reincarnated to deliver them from their current troubles.
I've just rewatched the movie and that wasn't really what I understood. I understood Sam Reaches to be saying Thunderheart was Ray's ancestor.
Wikipedia is full of ridiculous errors.
Anyway, the central plot of the movie is that corrupt people, both White and Native, are making a lucrative uranium mining deal on Native lands at the source -- the start point -- of local water resources. Natives are getting sick from the water being contaminated and people are being murdered to prevent them from interfering with this deal and there is an active cover up and a lot of lies being told about who did the killing and why.
If you've heard of Leonard Peltier and, like me, have no idea why he was in prison for so many years and why some people claim he was unjustly imprisoned, his story is part of what inspired this movie and some of its plot points.
I'm an environmental studies major. According to oral family tradition, my late father was part Cherokee.
No, sorry, I'm NOT in ANY position to check the Dawes Rolls. I'm currently homeless. However "easy" Natives may think it is to CHECK if I'm really part Cherokee, well coolios for YOU if your life is easier than mine in spite of being a dirty injun and member of a conquered people.
I grew up in Georgia and because of my father, I knew how to identify dogwood trees and magnolias and other species even though he wasn't from around there. He was born and raised in Indiana.
He grew up on a farm and while in the military he routinely talked trash about "city boys" being ignorant of nature as his explanation for why he knew so much about plants, animals, etc.
I have read that the knowledge of nature my father had is typical of tribal peoples, not farmers, and their children typically know more than the other kids about nature even though they were raised in the big city. I suspect ragging on city boys got other farm boys on his side while deflecting attention away from his mixed heritage.
If he had said he knew it because he was a farm boy, other farm boys might have called bullshit and said "I don't know the stuff you know. You don't learn that planting crops." But they were probably happy to side with him in mocking people who looked down on them in some kind of class divide.
His tales of military life suggest he stood out from the crowd for tracking type skills and for navigating the wilderness under circumstances where the entire unit should have died but didn't because of him.
My mother was originally from the freistadt -- city-state -- Danzig, currently Gdansk, Poland. It was a large, cosmopolitan city.
When I was three, dad retired from the Army and bought a house in the 'burbs on the edge of one the biggest cities in Georgia which is more cosmopolitan than most locals seem to understand or appreciate. Behind my house was a patch of woods that after I was an adult and no longer living there became more endless tracts of housing.
My dream career was that I wanted to be an urban planner with a background in environmental studies.
I once saw a meme online suggesting that Natives say the deer isn't crossing the road. The road is cutting through the deer's habitat.
I see cities as growing out of the land. Civilization starts with people finding a place worth settling and water for hygiene, for growing food and providing transportation is critical to human settlements.
Major cities frequently occur where you have a natural harbour on a waterway or coast. This is true of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago which are the three most populous cities in the US.
Natives were typically driven off rich lands that provided a comfortable life for their people and dumped in badlands or similar that no one really wanted to live in. Their reservations typically come with inherent water quality issues before you get into illegal strip mining deals and other NIMBY projects forced upon them.
Water is life. Bad water creates a bad life.
When I posted the link to Hacker News, it was apparently called Navajo Water Project. The name is apparently currently Water Equity Alliance. I left one comment in the discussion suggesting off grid solutions might be the way to go.
That comment is quoted in piece I wrote about Metal Poisoning in the US on a pointless, currently abandoned alternative health site of mine. That same site has a related follow up post called The Anti-Drama Queen intended to help people, especially Native Americans, do something about it if they care to do so.
I thought I had linked those two pieces somewhere on Eclogiselle but I'm not readily finding them on pieces marked Tribal.Lands or others I've checked.
Perhaps I left it off because that health site is abandoned. Perhaps I left it off because that health site an alternative medicine site easily dismissed as whackadoodle nonsense.
Perhaps I left it off because I do a LOT of downplaying certain things and handling things discreetly. My writings about Native Americans and related issues are spread out across multiple sites and I go out of my way to deflect hateful attention from both Natives and racist anti-Native assholes.
In my mind, my Native heritage -- in other words my father's culture -- is a golden thread holding together the tattered tapestry of my unfortunate life filled with too many challenges and not enough opportunities or support.
To Natives, I'm a Pretendian who is somehow harming Native rights by explaining that I'm interested in the topic because "according to oral family tradition, my father was part Cherokee."
Cool. Feel free to revel in your abandon and actively hate in potential allies because I guess you don't have enough enemies.
I've left "your" discussion spaces. This is MY blog and you are welcome to get off my lawn if you want to hate me for being too White passing, though White culture absolutely doesn't accept me either which is what informs my opinions of the MMIW issue.
Or maybe you can get over your baggage long enough to worry about your health and welfare and that of your children and never mind my Irish maiden name and that in my youth, like a lot of Irish people, I had three skin colors: Pasty white, off white and lobster red.