Savanna Greywind
First day of autumn, 2020.
We reached the 200,000 watermark that day.
Two hundred thousand Americans dead from Covid-19.
That was more American casualties than World War I and the Viet Nam War combined.
For only the second time in recorded history, the National Hurricane Center moved into the Greek alphabet for storm names. Hurricanes spouted all across the Atlantic and the Gulf throughout the summer of Covid-19, slamming into Texas and Louisiana, forcing an already taxed populace weary from a half year of pandemic stresses to endure more hardship.
In Southern California, the Bobcat Fire in the Angeles National Forest continued to blaze into its 17th day. At that time, it torched 20 structures and 109,000 acres, making it one of the largest fires in LA County history. The smoke hanging over the east LA basin added to its usual smog levels, making air quality one of the most toxic mixes ever recorded.
In Big Sur, the Dolan Fire was 46% contained, but the damage was done…200 square miles of burn scar, a total of 129,000 acres. It was hard to fathom. The Pacific Coast Highway finally reopened. I considered taking an isolated quarantine drive up there that week to bear witness. I felt compelled to tread on sacred ground, blackened though it would be. Perhaps I needed to breathe in that Big Sur air, spoiled with ash and smoke as it was. Sometimes we have to see the story to the end, though we know reaching the finale will hurt.
That may have been a figurative part of self-fulfilling prophecy playing out across the country. Humans have an errant tendency to stand fast when witnessing things coming to a type of end. We have an overt fascination with the voyeurism of failure, disaster, and endings. We observe from what we think is afar, be it a celebrity’s career or a car wreck. I didn’t want to see an ashen and torched Big Sur, nihilist as its draw in that era may have been, but perhaps I felt I must. Sanctity beckoned, whither or not my talismanic Mecca had been burned to a crisp.
Experts clamored about American disaster fatigue. One thing after another, 2020 just wouldn’t chill. The pandemic, the racial unrest, the economic depression, the partisan divides and polarization, extreme weather, endlessly negative news cycles and proliferation of doom across social media, celebrity deaths, numbers and statistics blurring together in an overwhelming assault on our senses. Our ability to ground ourselves and take a few moments to decompress was taken away from us.
On a better front, Congress passed a bill called Savanna’s Act, named after Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman who was kidnapped and murdered in North Dakota in 2017, eight months pregnant, her baby cut from her womb. The bill put attention on the longstanding crisis of missing or murdered Indigenous women in the United States.
Over 500 Native American women and girls have been killed or gone missing in the last two decades, 330 of which have occurred since 2010, according to a 2018 analysis by the Urban Indian Health Institute. The bill provided parameters to support coordination and data collection between tribal, local, state, and federal law enforcement in cases involving Native American women, and required federal agencies to incorporate recommendations from tribes on methods and protocols that enhanced safety for at-risk women.
The stats reported were low estimates, considering the lack of media coverage for Native American rights. Most tribal advocates attributed the preponderance of Native women disappearances and murders to domestic violence, sexual assaults, and sex trafficking. Native women’s looks were considered exotic (more Asian) to sex traffickers. There was, and still is, a bustling black market in sex slavery trade for every creed and color and age. The number one reigning champ of international sex trade remains women of Pan-Asian descent, including Indigenous women of the Americas.
The law was a good step in the right direction, but as always, it wasn’t nearly enough. The plight of Native Americans is as sordid, if not more so, as any other marginalized populations. They are a real time testament to the legacy of white supremacy. Acknowledgment of our barbaric transgressions toward the peoples who first inhabited this continent is a key component in our ability to move forward with renewed socially conscious morality, ideally followed soon thereafter by reparation motions of inclusiveness at legislative levels and vastly increased funding to rebuild their communities and nations. Our continued disregard of the ownership due to Indigenous peoples is among our most abhorrent calamities of our entire history. We will never be a truly unified people until we directly address those permanent bloodstains on our hands, in full totality.
I still often think of that unhoused wanderer at the KOA campground in New Mexico.
He changed my life.
Once seen, never unseen.
I’ll never know of which tribe he originated from, or whatever happened to him, not unless I look it up in the next world’s Library of Earth archives, presuming such a facility exists. If so, I plan on making a trip to that vaunted place. There’s a number of truths I’d like to corroborate unlikely to resolve themselves in this lifetime with current levels of access, including but not limited to: the existences, or lack thereof, of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Atlantis, the final destinies of several of my disappeared cats over the years, and how many times I pulled a ‘ships-passing-in-the-night’ maneuver while walking by strangers I would eventually know much better, later on in life. Discovery of shits and giggles like that butters my bread, I admit.
Yes…whatever happened to the wayfaring Native homeless man who inspired much of my worldview?
Someday, I would like to know the answer to that.
I think of that legendary Jim Morrison tale, where he developed so much morbid curiosity of death because of a childhood experience when, much as my parents hauled me through the heart of New Mexico, his parents supposedly were doing the same, and came upon a car accident involving a number of bloodied Native Americans, several of whom were deceased. According to Jim, one of their souls jumped into him as he passed by, becoming a part of his own soul until his untimely death at 27 years of age.
The Doors were one of my go-to bands as a kid. Morrison was a big Kerouac and Nietzsche fan, as am I. He often tested interpersonal boundaries. I do that as well. I’m no stranger to some of his other proclivities, including dark romanticism, difficulties in relating to fellow human beings, and resistance to most American conformity. Apparently yet one more similarity we share is, we’re both guilty of waxing poetic about Native American spirituality from an outsider whiteboy perspective.
Native American women have had ample reason to fear living under a white over-class for some 500 years now. To think there are Native girls living in cages forced to service scumbag customers at some illicit black market brothel in Thailand’s underworld or Tijuana’s back alleys is beyond imagination, and yet it’s happening, right now, as we go on with our bake sales and our insistence of celebrating whitewashed holidays and our endless partisan bickering over wearing masks and whether certain lives do matter as much as everybody else’s.
The relativity stick, that one tool we whiteboys shove in the very back of the box and rarely pull out to use, it’s a rusty crowbar at this point. On the seldom occasions we do pull it out, we usually wield it in slapdash form. If only our prowess with the hammer translated to all of our instruments.
A poor carpenter, are we.
Brown Lives Matter.
*Compiled from September 22, 2020