Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

34 страница из 156

Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest¹

At first there were few white people, and they were all going west; then, as wise old Nana knew, the lure of gold, discovered far to our west, brought them in hordes. Though most of them went on, some stayed to burrow into Mother Earth for the ore sacred to Ussen. Nana was right in thinking that gold was to bring about our extermination.

Ace Dalugie, patriarch of the Mescalero Reservation Son of Juh, Leader of the Nednhi Apache²

This is a study of relocation and removal of Indian groups in the Greater American Southwest centering on the events of the nineteenth century. Relocation, of course, is not only a nineteenth century phenomenon in American history. During World War II there were ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority, of which the largest was the Poston War Relocation Center in Yuma County (now La Paz County) in southwestern Arizona. Most of the Japanese Americans living in California, 110,000 of them, were moved to Poston and other centers, including the Gila River War Relocation Center 30 miles southeast of Phoenix. Del Webb built Poston on the Colorado River Indian Reservation over the objections of the tribal council (just as the Gila River Center, located on the Gila River Indian Reservation near Sacaton, Arizona, was built over the strong objections of that reservation’s American Indian government). It is a sad irony of western history that Indians, who themselves had been rounded up 80 or so years ago to be relocated and imprisoned on unfamiliar and hostile terrain, would now be forcibly hosting a new generation of Japanese American prisoners.³