The Indian Dream: Surviving the American Holocaust

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© 2013 by Samuelin MarTinez. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 06/14/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6194-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6193-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910711

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CONTENTS

About the Book

Introduction

Traditional Healing Praxis

To find our way home, we are given Traditional Healing Praxis

Traditional Healing Praxis and the ugly history of a mental health system

Two examples of my Traditional Healing Praxis, Espejo and Dicho Therapy

Inherent in Corporate Culture is a disrespect for our own Cultural Healing

Lo Siento—I Feel you, Traditional Healing—Best Practice Research

Survivors of the American Holocaust

Exaggerated—Truth?

We are DisLOCAdoS—Uprooted Survivors

Liberating Raza from Post Traumatic Oppression Dislocados—

It takes a Healthy Pueblo to raise a Healthy Child, What happens when the Pueblo is sick?

Can machpa tiuitze? Where have we come from?

A… MEN’s Council

Coming Full Circle

To Find Our Way Home

The Seven Traditions, Is Our Home-Ing

Huarache Ways—Zarape Dreams Seven Directions Poems & a Prayer

Padres Con Palabra

To find MeChicano Solutions To MeChicano problems Look too MeChicano Ways

Trying to pray in Nahuatl, our first tongue

The Melting Pot

Cultural Digression

La Cultura Cura, Traditional Healing Praxis

Serving a Raza population wherever you are

To Heal the Broken Spirits of the Dislocados, just Re-Member

ABOUT THE BOOK

How does a mother and son heal from the most horrid human experience, an American Holocaust that everyone is convinced never existed. My mother faced the greatest fears of having to surrender her son to an American campaign to

Kill the Indian save the child under the threat of America taking me from her if she did not send me to school. This is the story of how difficult it was for America to kill the Indian in me and how my mother maintained our traditional relations to healing our broken spirits.

This is a story of how I recovered from the traumas inflicted in me since I was five years old and how I joined a national effort to share our healing with others. Working for thirty eight years as a Psychiatric Social Worker in one of the first Crisis Emergency Response Clinics serving Raza Survivors of the holocaust, and how I became a ‘Social Justice Healer developing a diagnostic criteria for what our people suffer as Survivors. This book is full of examples of healing the Dislocados, the uprooted and disconnected suffering from layers of loss.

I describe in detail a healing practice for all the trauma caused by a history of cruel and unusual punishment. I call the healing approach Traditional Healing Praxis and provide case examples of the healing power that emerged from forty thousand years of native self reliance.

This is a story of how we survived the continuation of Corporate America’s Indian Wars. A story of how we never surrendered our native love Huatacame and continued to shelter, feed, clothe, teach, triage-doctor and protect our children.

www.americanholocausthealing.com

INTRODUCTION

Imagine, we are watching a loving documentary of a native mother ministering a home remedy for a native child. Just as she gently places a bowl of medicine soup to the child’s mouth, an explosion startles them into a hyper-awareness of an unfriendly fire now burning a wedge between them. The native soup for the child’s native soul falls, as more explosions repel him further and further from his mother. They desperately hang on, to a lasting embrace. They survive and she prepares him more native love—healing remedies.

The explosions in the living rooms of my childhood were thousands of Americanned negative images of Indians. They intrusively exploded in my innocent native mind, each time my mother brought up anything native. It was easy at first, to embrace my mother and repel the intrusive negative explosive images. But there were times when it was just too hard to bear.

It was as if my brain was being programmed, like these intrusive adds that pop-up on a computer screen. I was conditioned to associate these negative images with a Native Mother healing a Native Child; I couldn’t stop the pop ups in my brain of that’s crazy pagans do that only old wives tales or voodoo medicine and they don’t know better those people and their black magic. I tried, to think only of the loving images my mother gave me, but America was too loud and all over the place.

Yes, this is what happened to me, a Corporate-American Neuron Association Conditioning; the same N.A.C. that Pavlov used to train dogs to experience hunger at the ring of a bell. America’s liberty bell was conditioning me to associate negative images of me and my native mother each time she prepared me her native medicine remedies. At the same time I was being conditioned to associate everything divine with America the Beautiful.

Warm loving experiences are now permanently fused to explosive ugly hateful premeditated startling intrusive insults, burning an imprint in this native mind. They are so glued together in the mind, heart and soul of this native child that I cannot think of my native experience without having to consider the many ways America tried to drive an ugly wedge between my mother and I in order to Kill the Indian [in me to] save the child. I cannot think of one without a guarded awareness of the other. This conflicting intrusion surrounded me and my mother—trying to heal me over and over,

I was recently ministering a healing remedy to my great granddaughter, helping her catch her native breath and at the same time having to triage all the possible ways her breath was taken away, leaving her insecure and afraid of too many situations. I could not help but think about what America did to my childhood, and all that we have to protect her from. One is connected to the other too, when one native generation is taking care of the next three.

It has been like that for me and not possible to write this any other way. To write any other way, so as not to move the reader out of a comfort-zone, would not give justice to how I survived Two opposing World Views with irreconcilable differences exploding in the living rooms of my childhood. Our Unconditional Native Love has been under severe attack by the Unconditional Profit. Can we really talk about one without reflecting on the impact the other has had on US? I thought that would be a mistake, so I did not.

May I invite you to consider our Traditional Healing Praxis is our Indian Dream and both have everything to do with Native Love for our children; providing them with shelter, food, education, medicine and protection.

You may notice in every chapter our discussion about our Indian Dream and Traditional Healing is saturated with describing the American Holocaust from which we are healing our young. This is like having to triage an ailment and the healing process by discussing what caused that ailment or affliction to our humanity. To not triage to the fullest extent possible, would be like putting a band aid over a compound fracture and not concern ourselves with what pushed this native child over the edge.

For those of you familiar with the American Holocaust and what it accosted in US you may get as weary as I do and skim through those parts and focus on the descriptions of our healing. For those of you who need more convincing that there was in fact an American Holocaust you may consider reading Spilling the Beans, my second book.

Here I make a simple but strong correlation between our Indian Dream—Traditional Healing Praxis and Unconditional love. Traditional Healing is as simple as nursing your child and not as complicated as a medical degree from a corporate doctoral program. Our people refer to this Unconditional Native Love as Huatacame. This would not have to be more complicated than loving care for a child, if it weren’t for an opposing Corporate American force that we need to always be aware of; like a Mama Bear protecting her cubs from a serial killer calling himself a hunter thinning out the pack of wild animals.

You may also notice my poetic use of words referring to the AmeriCanned experience, manufacturing you consent, so it comes to you canned or wrapped in plastic see through windows. You can see it but cannot touch it. Or AmeriConning you to believe it is in fact The Messiah—God’s gift to the world. This AmeriCan Dream has a class infrastructure of prosperous AmeriCans and a class ceiling for the AmeriCan’ts or those who Cannot.

Corporate America owning and controlling the world view is in direct conflict with our Indian Dream and relationship to Earth Mother; necessitating my constant reflections pointing out all the horse-shit.

I am compelled to do this so you do not step in it, track it into your house and drive yourselves crazy looking for the smell of AmeriCaCa. I repeatedly call your attention to it because there is so much of it, so please don’t blame the repetition on me.

Also please excuse the focus on gender specific terms like men; the intent is not to exclude my daughters, nieces, sisters, mothers, nor yours. I have simply experienced a large part of my own healing and work with men. I continue for example to be an active member of National Compadres Network.

I continue to say proudly that I am a Mama’s Boy, because she taught me how to be a man; I am the native man she hoped and prayed for—healing me many times with her traditional healing remedies. I learned from her how to lift a voice of gratitude and respect to all women; and I learned from her how to lift a voice against any form of abuse of children and women; this is also the seven traditions that we promote in the work of National Compadres for all men to do.

The use of capital US when writing about us is done with the purpose of stimulating an historical experiential awareness of how the U.S. United States purposely excluded us; so now when you read about US you may exclude United States and realize we are talking about US, not them. It is my hope that you may include US now by considering each time you read about US, this also represents 40,000 years of self reliance.

In this book I offer for you what has worked for me; Our Indian Dream is dedicated to all the Dreamers and Healers—Native mothers and fathers trying to shelter, feed, clothe, educate, heal and protect our children like its 1491.

Samuelin MarTinez

This is my beloved Ama and I back home where I was born

TRADITIONAL HEALING PRAXIS

Some cultures are defined by their relations to oppressive regimens; Cultures that maintain their historical roots that predate that oppression are not. Traditional Healing may in fact be what sustains a culture defined by its own terms and this in fact has been my experience.

In 1977 I met for three days with an old man from Brazil, Paulo Freire, author of the book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed I struggled to read nine years earlier. I encouraged him to ‘teach’ me about what he wrote in his book, so I could apply it to my struggle for social justice. I asked him questions and sat there ready to take notes. He helped me realize how dependent I had become on the corporate design of teaching; being lectured to, taking notes… but not really taking note of the false sense of education.

Instead he fostered a process in which I learned from reflecting on my own experience. He called this way of learning Praxis. As I reflected on that saying ‘practice makes perfect’ I experienced what he was saying. His process of learning, by stimulating our own critical thinking, validated my mother’s way of teaching; her healing remedies always came with a lesson of triaging and self-care, like calling our attention to one of her sayings—dichos ‘Nuestra experiencia es nuestra escuela’ our experience is our school.

What made Maestro Paulo Freire’s explanation so profound for me is that I could see my mother, our Medicine Woman, had been using this same method in her Traditional Healing Praxis with me. She, for example, would explain that children learn from . . . Lo que ven y oyen what they see and hear. Our experiences in the housing projects of Apartheid Oakland were saturated with oppression, and her lessons came with warnings—trying to protect US

A learning process that recognizes the oppressive conditions is healing because it validates what any child as young as three intuitively does with the experience; discern between what is fair or unfair and raise a critical thinking voice questioning, Why? To teach a loved one surrounded by oppressive hate crimes-against-our-humanity is liberating-love. A love for teaching emerges from these intimate relations like a mother rescuing a son from oppressive conditions; they both hope not only to endure that oppression but to overcome it.

This respect for people who are being oppressed allows one to not be defined by oppression, therefore not allowing your perception of the oppressed to be defined by the oppression either. This level of respect allows one to engage in a teaching-healing experience that is not in itself oppressive, but liberating! Yes, I see there is reciprocal interdependence between teaching and healing. I hope to convey with liberating words a correlation of Traditional Healing Praxis with 40,000 years of self-reliance and 511 years of self-reliant resistance. I hope this is a liberating thought for you too.

Considering a pedagogy of the oppressed and engaging the oppressed in a healing process may become liberating if inspired by self-care; which is healing from a basic tenet of oppression, self-neglect. Self-neglect makes people more exploitable and self-care may lead to protest. Imagine with me how protesting injustice is a healing—liberating experience. Oppression thrives in the superimposed conditions of self-neglect, this had led me to believe that teaching and healing by inspiring self-care is liberating from the internalized oppressive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Through actions of self care, oppression is transformed into liberating thoughts and emotions. This is what Paulo Freire and my mother taught me to trust; Our Innate Resilience. My mother proclaimed this to the world by saying I am a Survivor!

I must now emphasize honestly here, not just because this was a basic tenet of my mother’s teachings, but to recognize how difficult this is when the learning process has been saturated by exploitive and oppressive conditions filled with conning deceit, made out to look honest but the basic intention is to manufacture consent, instead of looking honestly. Paulo Freire and my mother acknowledged this oppressive history and focused on how we learn under oppressive conditions to be as honest as we can.

Under oppressive conning conditions it is very difficult to harness the level of trust needed to learn from that experience. An honest reflection on how much that oppression has influenced us is difficult and at least recognizing this difficulty with an honest heart has helped me.

I have learned that I must ‘honestly’ reflect on what I practice in order to determine how much my practice has accomplished the intention, to then honestly refine it. I have to stress this because in America we have been over exposed to ‘not learning from history and repeating mistakes’ because that history has been white-washed so dishonestly and called education, to mask the indoctrination needed to manufacture oppressive conditions; necessary for Corporate America to ‘make a killing’ and call it American History—laundering stolen money with In God we Thrust. Yes I misspelled it with purpose.

Praxis on the other hand is a process that embraces our life time effort of practicing what we pre/teach, like our lives depend on it; and this reflection makes our intention mas clear, mas better, and therefore mas perfect—progressively. We then put in some more practice, with the intention of learning more from and improving upon what we practice. We can then honestly ‘Walk-our-Talk.’ In this way I am able to fulfill my mother’s teaching-healing remedy when in 1963 she called my attention to the cultural fact that my little sisters were learning from what they see and hear me do and say.

My experience with Paulo Freire validated my life-time experience with, a Medicine Woman, my mother. My experiences with my mother’s Traditional Healing Praxis made me a historical person; rooted to thousands of years that informed her practice and now informs mine.

Healing remedies are established, from a history of learning from practice—to know what works. This is no different than any so called ‘western medicine’ that is promoted as ‘evidence based’ because of its class privilege and related ‘laboratory tests’ supposedly proving the validity of AmeriCanned practice. But learning from our oppressive experience we may see that this AmeriCanned practice lacks the forty thousand years of Praxis our Traditional Healing benefits from; making our healing practice mas perfect and this makes mas sense to US.

When considering Traditional Healing we must also re-member. This is spelled in the double sense of the word in order to emphasize memory in terms of membership or reestablishing a relationship that has been fragmented; thus our healing process is like re-rooting what was uprooted by America. My native roots, from a history of native self-determination, were watered with each traditional healing remedy my mother ministered to me.

Traditional healing therefore is not so complicated nor so far removed from US as we were led to believe by Corporate American class-privileged best practice miedra—feces spread across our ancient lands. Driving a corporate—military wedge between US and all of our historical traditions—resiliency, has been America’s intention, not healing nor educating US. America’s healing practice has been more like doctoring a work-horse in order to exploit the labor for profit. What ‘best-practice’ can come from corporation running health care? I am amazed that some do.

Yes, you may have noticed too, it is not possible to talk about our Traditional Healing without talking about what has become our severest challenge. Healing from what America has done to a parent trying to shelter, clothe, feed, teach, protect and love a native child—the way we have for forty thousand years before America invented itself by invading US.

It can be apparent that Traditional Healing begins naturally when a parent triages the need of a native child and prepares a remedy to cure what has sickened that child. It can also be apparent that a parent healing a native child was a threat to Corporate America’s self-deception of divinity—trying to control our native healing process, so America could profit from Indian Wars. Yes, America has profited from making US sick and preventing our healing, and our self-reliance. The aftermath of America’s Indian Wars was controlling all Indian Relations under The War Department including our Traditional Healing Praxis.

It was apparent that a parent raising a native child was a threat to Corporate America who passed legislation to remove native children from native parents to be schooled and indoctrinated religiously by churches who made contracts with The War Department; driving a military wedge between a parent and child. This also happened to me in Oakland Housing Projects Public School and Oakland churches.

Consider with me how America stigmatized and even outlawed traditional healing as witch craft voodoo medicine black magic and degraded our efforts to heal in movies and Americanned history books. America even replaced Parteras—Women delivering babies with white men graduating from white ‘men only’ medical schools. They even had Witch Hunts and burnt alive, in public view, their own white