Cultural harmony and social justice are the goals

In the year 2017, Southerners gather with nooses and torches to protest the removal of Confederate statues. In New Mexico, those who cling to an ugly colonial past are likewise hard at work, sanitizing history by terming the return of the Spanish in 1692 (after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680) as a “resettlement” instead of a “reconquest.”

Elmer Maestas’ My View (“‘Veiled Lightning’ and the full story of New Mexico,” June 15) is a desperate attempt to drag New Mexico back to a mythical origin story that might work on the tourists, but not on the locals who know and care about the truth. Maestas chooses to lecture Natives about their own history — as if only Anglo or Spanish people could possibly know about or be experts about collective memory.

While he concedes the point that further dialogue may be advisable, he restricts participants to “New Mexico Native Indians and New Mexico Native Hispanos.” This way of thinking is narrow-minded and absurd, not to mention racist. Under Maestas’ guidelines, a Native in Arizona who goes to school and works in Gallup could be excluded from the conversation — barred by an arbitrary state line drawn by non-Natives on property previously owned by Natives.

Maestas ignores the fact that many Natives are deeply offended by the Santa Fe Fiesta Entrada, and while he laments Spanish “settlers’ children dying in the freezing cold,” he shows little compassion for Native losses or suffering. He is clueless about how the after-effects of genocide and oppression still reverberate today in our schools and civic arenas.

For example, our Veiled Lightning film documents the issues surrounding the fact that 300 Native children in Santa Fe public schools are being pulled out of class to honor the military figure who contributed to the misery of their people. The Fiesta Council script requires the Native cacique to wear rosary beads, which he must display to Don Diego de Vargas. Even grade school students can detect the fabrication of stage directions that present lies as truth. After all, one reason that Po’Pay led the Pueblo Revolt was because he had been arrested for practicing his religion, then tied to a stake and publicly flogged on the Plaza, accused of sorcery and witchcraft.

Maestas’ facts about the Veiled Lightning screening also are woefully wrong. The event was advertised as a condensed short version (“the Entrada Chapter”) and he was personally told by me the same thing when he arrived at the screening with his wife. Maestas blames the protesters for being “loud, obtrusive and potentially dangerous” when, in fact, they were kept behind barricades. Furthermore, all video footage from our nine cameras clearly show that the use of sirens by the city of Santa Fe was the sole factor that startled the horses, creating a dangerous situation — not the protesters.

The centuries of oppression, slavery (yes, Maestas skipped right over that fact as well) and social injustice have only recently infiltrated school curriculum and public discourse. It is only within this generation that men of conscience such as Dr. Alfonso Ortiz, Dr. Herman Agoyo and Dr. Joe Sando have brought the balanced story to light.

Presenting only the dominant culture’s narrative is a sad vestige of a past that never was. Veiled Lightning seeks to serve the overarching interest of cultural harmony and social justice, and to honor not only those who fought to bring the First American Revolution to light, but the young fighters of today who have electrified a Pan-Indian hemispheric consciousness from which we will all benefit.