CELEBRATING THE CONQUEST. Dana makes an interesting point about Native Americans and naming, but I wonder how much of this is an East Coast thing. New Mexico, when I was growing up, had none of the compunctions Dana details. Instead of naming things after absent vanquished and valorized groups of Native Americans, every year at Fiesta in Santa Fe people would dress up for the Fiesta parades as Spanish conquistadores -- the conquerers -- in commemoration of the conquest of the Pueblo Indians, and subsequent "bloodless re-conquest" of them by Don Diego de Vargas after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 caused the Spanish to lose control of the area. I don't recall a single thing named after Native Americans out there except those areas that took Pueblo names at their founding -- such as Tesuque, founded 1694 -- or are still inhabited or formerly inhabited by Native Americans, such as the various Pueblo reservation towns and Anasazi ruins. The memory of the battle between Europeans and Native Americans is handled a bit differently in the West because of the much greater numbers of Native Americans still living in Western states, and the presence of numerous small reservations and the gigantic state-within-a-state of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. In 1992, 500 years after Columbus landed in this hemisphere and 73 years after the festival of re-conquest was revived by the Anglo population of Santa Fe, I recall Native American groups in Santa Fe saying enough is enough already with the costumed conquerers every year. Apparently various Indian groups had been making similar complaints about the festival since the 1970s, and with good reason, though with little impact. Meanwhile, the local public high school mascot in Santa Fe was the kind of thing I can't imagine would be tolerated in the Bible Belt to the east: the demon. The school's motto -- I kid you not -- is "Home of the Demons."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
