PS from Mesa Verde

There are a few more things I wanted to mention about Mesa Verde. First of all, it's the first park we've been to that celebrates the human history of a place in such a thorough and respectful way, and where you get to see so many examples of the Pueblo/Hopi peoples' skills as builders, basket weavers, pottery makers, botanists/agriculturists. There are hundreds of indigenous plants on the Mesa, and every indication that the ancient Pueblos had discovered medicinal and practical uses for many of them. The Yucca plant was especially important, for its fibers (which were fashioned into rugs, sandals, and ropes with up to 250 pounds tensile strength--very useful when you live hundreds of feet up a sheer cliff), and for its soapy roots, not to mention its edible fruit. The ancient Pueblo people cultivated corn--which is not a naturally occurring plant species, but the result of hybridization of two grasses. And the cross pollination does not occurr in nature, it has to be done by human hands. How did they figure THAT out!?!?! We came away with a great respect and admiration for their accomplishments, all the more astonishing given the systematic, violent and ruthless efforts of white Anglo-Americans to exterminate them entirely over almost 200 years. Frank Waters, in his 1962 Book of the Hopi writes (and be forewarned, this is difficult to read):

"The deeply rooted racial prejudice of the Anglo-white Americans against the Red Indians, virtually a national psychosis, is one of the strangest and most terrifying phenomena in all history.  It has no parallel throughout the Western Hemisphere.....Cold blooded, deeply inhibited, and bound by their Puritan traditions, [the Anglo-Protestants] began a program of complete extermination of all Indians almost from the day they landed on Plymouth Rock....As early as 1641, New Netherlands began offering bounties for Indian scalps...Pennsylvania..in 1764 [offered] rewards for scalps of Indian bucks, squaws, and boys under ten years of age....By 1876...Indians were trailed with hounds, their springs poisoned.  Women were clubbed to death and children had their brains knocked out against trees to save the expense of lead and powder. " (pp 278-79)

Throughout our history we have characterized the Indians as savages, and have killed them, moved them and contained them so as to have unfettered access to the best grazing land, the richest farmland (historic Deerfield is a case in point), the most productive veins of gold.  We have broken treaty after treaty and separated them from their ancestral homelands.  We turned them into awful savages so successfully that we felt entirely justified in "defending ourselves" against them.   But at the root of  it all, our intention was, apparently, to get rid of them entirely....fortunately for the United States government, ethnic cleansing was not considered a war crime until around the mid-20th century, I'm guessing.