Salt River Seniors.

We have 19 Indian Tribes in Arizona and 22 reservations. Twenty-seven percent of the land in AZ is Indian Reservation. Only Alaska has more acres of Indian Reservation than does Arizona.

Saturday, I'm glad I met new friends from the Salt River Pima Reservation, just East of Scotsdale.
http://www.srpmic-nsn.gov/

I took 13 of their Senior Citizens to Sedona:

By the way, here's a roadrunner who stood still long enough for his picture. They really don't look anything like the cartoon version of roadrunner --- come to think of it, neither does the coyote.




One lady said it had been 15 years since she had been off the reservation -

They turned out to be darlings. They were tourists! They bought T-shirts and caps that said SEDONA They got lunch at an outdoor cafe' and shopped till they dropped.
















Once they "warmed up" to me came the good part. It's always the "good part" when you can get seniors to begin to tell their stories.One of my new friends is a Hopi. I don't know her name because it's rude to ask indians their name. I've known indians for years, whose names I still don't know. Here she is with her Salt River husband. He speaks English and Spanish, but no Pima. Why? Because his parents spoke NO Pima. Her parents taught her Hopi.

Destroying the language was part of destroying the culture. I never knew that about boarding school. I never knew that siblings and clan members were deliberately sent to different schools in order to isolate children from their "uncivilized" family. I'm reminded of what worked so effectively with Africans.

Hopi indians were "runners" . There were several Southwestern tribes who taught their children to run great distances to escape enemies.

When her father was taken away to Indian School in Phoenix, he twice escaped and made it the 200 miles back to HopiLand in 3 days -- where he was promptly re-captured. (Check out TheRabbitFence - a story about an Australian Aborigine who did the same.)

Everyone knows that talking to seniors IS talking to history if one knows how to be quiet and listen.

Here's my new friend who is a repository of Tribal knowledge and who doesn't mind sharing:

i.e.: A Pima woman who wears XXXXL is "Pima Petite"

i.e. The Pimas are "UTO" Aztecs. I don't know what it means, but he hinted that the Pima are the inheritors of the lost Treasure of Montezuma.
i.e This was the first reservation in the nation to fight for and get the first indian Casino.

They promised to invite me to the next Pow Wow on the reservation in November. I hope they do; but, I reminded them that we continually have to love one another and be patient to teach those who don't understand. One of my friends asked, "For how long? How long will it take them to understand?" Forever. Every generation and each of us has to continually choose love over hate. When we fail to love, hate wins.

I hope we meet again my new Indian Friends!