"You told me that that man we visited today, the one with the hollow eyes, put an end to slavery, huh? But I'm afraid that our people are still being bought and sold, even though they are dead—and have been for hundreds of years! Even worse, some of the people are not whole. They remain in bits and pieces, and yet these people are also being traded, bought and sold, like so many sheep! When does it stop?"
Anna Lee Walters, Ghost Singer
While the nation has been celebrating Juneteenth—"the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States"— few know that the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, was not applied to Indian slaves. Our slavery was not regarded involuntary. When Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19th,1865, with news that the civil war had ended and slaves were freed Indian slaves, Navajos among them, were still being held in bondage. Joint Resolution No. 65 was passed five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, on July 27, 1868. The resolution gave "General William T. Sherman power/authority to use the most efficient means at his disposal to reclaim from bondage the women and children of Navajo and other tribes then held in bondage and return them to their respective reservations."
New Mexicans resisted and fought. They were successful and maintained their hold, culturally and legally, upon their slaves. Revealing that "[l]aw . . .is merely that complex of rules which has the coercive power of the state behind it." (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study)
"For the most part, Indians carried to Rio Grande settlements and sold into slavery were lost forever to both tribe and kinsmen—as no treaty clause could induce New Mexicans to release property they had paid as high as $200 per head for." (Lynn Baily, Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest)
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter began as a novel.
I'm not suggesting you read it.
Briefly, (from the film adaptation):
"History remembers the battle but forgets the blood."
"However history remembers me before I was president, it shall only remember a fraction of the truth."
"I shall always think of myself first and foremost, as a hunter."
"I shall kill them all."
I've written about Lincoln and his historical record before: http://reidgomez.blogspot.com/2009/02/ke-heathens-and-homosexuals.html
Vampires want a nation of their own.
"Eye Killer awakened beneath a shroud of soil. Sand and dead wood pressed upon his body. He worked the muscles of his arms and flexed each cord in his hands, relishing the pull of reknitted tendons. Taut as bowstrings, he thought. And at the tip of each finger, arrowheads of iron." A. A. Carr, Eye Killers
Vile necromancers—we have warriors too: Johnnie Navajo (Ghost Singer), Anna and Wilbur Snake (Ghost Singer), Nasbah Navajo (Ghost Singer), Michael Roanhorse (Eye Killers), and Diana Logan (Eye Killers)
"Truth is facing ourselves, and seeing what we is, and swallowing the taste of it. We have to know this to live and to keep on living."
Anna Lee Walters, Ghost Singer
For the truth about slavery read: Ghost Singer
For the truth about vampires read: Eye Killers
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