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

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We were once factious, fierce and wild,

In peaceful arts unreconciled

Our blankets smeared with grease and stains

From buffalo meat and settlers veins.

Through summer’s dust and heat content

From moon to moon unwashed we went,

But IVORY SOAP came like a ray

Of light across our darkened way …

And now I take, where’er we go

This cake of IVORY SOAP to show

What civilized my squaw and me

And made us clean and fair to see.³³

Because Indian bodies are dirty and impure, they are considered “rapable,” since the rape of polluted bodies does not count. Or, as scholar Andrea Smith goes further to note, “For instance, prostitutes are almost never believed when they say that they have been raped because the dominant society considers the bodies of sex workers undeserving of integrity and violable at all time. Similarly, the history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear that Indian people are not entitled to bodily integrity.”³⁴

One example can be used to illustrate the aforesaid. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century a small number of trappers known as the La Bonté group were hunting and trapping southwest on the outskirts of the Great Salt Lake. The expedition of five men led by a Colorado trapper named Rube Herring soon left the safety of the lake and headed across the desert. Although Rube supposedly knew the country and was an experienced guide, his ignorance was soon apparent as the group lost their way across the waterless desert of the Great Basin desert. Late one evening several Paiutes crawled into their camp and stole two of their horses. The next day La Bonté and his men followed their tracks to the Indian village. The following morning the trappers, discharging their rifles at close quarters, killed nine Indians and captured three young girls. They also retrieved their stolen horses and acquired two more. After proceeding to scalp the dead bodies, the trappers moved on with their young “squaws” in hand. But they were still lost, and food and water was in short demand.³⁵