Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Forgotten People
Unassimilated and unappreciated, the Kickapoo Indians of Eagle Pass struggle against the realities of the modern world––poverty, addiction, even laws against hunting their sacred deer––to stay in harmony with the spirits of the grandfathers.
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In a way they lived as they always had. They clung to their language, returned to Nacimiento for the spring holy season, celebrated ultrasecretive rites of spring renewal, then divided into kinship groups for the year’s economic production. But instead of hunting, the young and able-bodied weeded sugar beet fields in Montana and Wyo-ming, picked cherries in Utah, and harvested apples and onions in Colorado. Until they moved to their reservation in 1987, the staging ground for the annual treks was the long flood plain under the bridge at Eagle Pass, where they built wickiups, but not with the cattail reeds and finely detailed craft of their ceremonial houses at Nacimiento. As if to acknowledge their transience and diminished state, they cobbled the domed structures together with plywood and tarp. They had no water, bathrooms, or privacy. Pedestrians on the bridge hurled down insults and trash.
Nacimiento
ABOUT TEN MILES OFF THE PAVED ROAD that winds from Big Bend into the Sierra Madres, Joe Hernandez steered his Blazer through a tiny wan village. The Kickapoo preserve lay across a tree-lined Rio Grande tributary called the Sabinas, which could only be crossed at a rocky ford. Nacimiento, which in Spanish means birthplace, was several hundred yards beyond the crossing. There were some houses of gray cinder block in the Kickapoo enclave, but the dominant architecture was their traditional loaf-shaped wickiups made of the cattail reeds. People were strolling, chatting in groups, sitting on straw cots under the shade of their summer porches—a scene of leisure. As the day wore on, I could understand why the Kickapoo hold such land holy. Under oak-forested mountains cut with dramatic rock cliffs, the village sat beside the clear-running stream we had forded. Its fountainhead emerged from a jumble of smooth white rocks amid thick and towering trees. Strolling through the bottom, I asked Joe if they had a name for their sacred stream. “No,” he said. “We just call it River.”
Like many in the tribe, Joe has had no formal schooling, yet he has learned to read and write a little and is fluent in three languages (he is least confident in En-glish). “I was always with my dad, learning the tradition,” he told me. “But then I found out about money. I know now I was supposed to be going to school.”
Nacimiento had no water pipes or sewage system, though running water was on the way and Mexican officials were encouraging the tribe to start selling water meters. A clock and a small refrigerator in the Hernandez family’s flat-roofed concrete house testified to the arrival of electricity earlier that year. Joe said that his dad was a boy when the lines and poles were first promised. The walls were decorated with family photos and a wanted poster of a woman accused of defrauding the Kickapoo. Joe showed us his family’s most prized material possession, an 1894 model lever-action .30-30 Winchester rifle. Outside we walked among gaunt horses and a mule. Joe affectionately rubbed the neck of a palomino gelding named Flaco, which means Skinny. He asked if I wanted to ride his hunting horse. I told him it would be a pleasure.
But we never got the tack out because Joe’s dad drove up in an old red Ford pickup. Eric had been trying to acquaint me with the mysteries of tribal kinship and told me to watch for the change in Joe’s manner when he was around his father. He grew quiet and seemed wary of looking at his dad closely and directly, even as they talked. Jose Hernandez had an immense head and thick gray hair. He spoke only Kickapoo and Spanish.
Jose was a member of the Traditional Council of elected leaders, and as we talked in Spanish with our forearms resting on the rails of his pickup, he said he worried most about the hunting. “We have no books,” he said. “Our customs are all in our heads.” All the negotiations and entreaties he described were directed at Mexican officials; I asked him if the tribe had tried to communicate with anyone public or private in Texas, where overpopulations of whitetail deer are a widespread problem. He looked skeptical and said he wouldn’t know how to begin. As we left, I told Jose that I hoped I saw him again. “Ojalá!” he replied. May God grant.
It seemed that my first exposure to the Kickapoo and their home in the Sierra Madres would end on that tranquil note—but it was not to be. The next morning, Eric and I emerged from our motel rooms in Múzquiz, a pleasant town on the main highway not far from Nacimiento, and found Joe waiting in the car. With him now was a strapping young man named Fernando, his friend since childhood. Fernando started drinking beer and soon passed out in the front seat. We left him there and went into a roadside cantina, where we bought soft drinks. Inside, some Mexican men in ranching attire greeted Joe warmly, inquired about his father, and invited us to join them at their table. One of the men was a former mayor of Múzquiz. When Joe brought up the problem with deer hunting, the man replied carefully, with a politician’s aplomb. “This is a matter of law, just like in the United States.” As we stood to leave, the man suggested gently to Joe that he might want to check on some Kickapoo who were up the road a way.
About a dozen men were passing the time and bottles of sugarcane liquor in a shaded bar ditch. As Fernando dozed on and Joe grinned at their jests—they took pleasure in reminding him of a Comanche in his bloodline—Eric and I took seats on the ground among them and discreetly tried to decline the quart bottle making the rounds. But it wasn’t easy: Refusing to drink with them was deemed a pejorative act. Finally I relented and took a swallow. The stuff was sweet and potent. The man next to me was not appeased. He had a dark, pitted face, and his eyes kept coming back to mine. “My name is Dave,” he said, with apparent reference to some past slight. “Don’t call me Chief.”
“Pleased to meet you, Dave.”
“Dave,” he emphasized. “Don’t ever call me Chief.”
Most of the men lived among the Oklahoma Kickapoo. They hold Nacimiento sacred too and often move back and forth between McCloud and Eagle Pass. “These are my uncles,” Joe explained, turning up the bottle for the first time.
I remembered that for the convenience of outsiders, Kickapoo lump a great number of male relatives into the term “uncle.” If an uncle asks you for a gift, you can’t refuse him. I recalled this with a sinking sensation when they asked Joe to drive back to Múzquiz and fetch them several more bottles of cane liquor. Fernando’s head fell back as Joe lurched away in the Blazer.
We were deep in a foreign country, and we were starting off the day in a ditch full of drunk Indians. A little old man they called Coni eased forward and went to sleep with his head on the shin of a younger fellow. As if in a slow-motion topple of dominoes, that man turned and slumped until his cheek was lying in the dirt. A string of drool leaked from his mouth and in time formed a small cone of mud. As my gaze fastened on this, another man sought to reassure us, or perhaps himself. “I just do this ever’ once in a while,” he said. “For the good times.”
Joe rolled up then, flung the door open, and strode toward us with two paper sacks filled with quart bottles. He turned the first one up and held it skyward for a long time. “I love these peoples,” he said and almost fell.
Eric finally convinced Joe that we had to go and coaxed the keys away from him. He navigated Múzquiz, but on the way down we hadn’t paid much attention to landmarks. There were no highway signs in the towns, and soon we were lost. I asked some kids on the road if they knew the way to Texas; they shrieked with laughter.
We parked in front of a store, trying to regain our composure. Fernando woke up with a jerk, shook his head, slapped his face, and took command of the situation. “I don’ wan’ you to think we drink like this all the time,” he said in a soft singsong accent. He took the wheel and set out for home at 80 miles per hour; Joe was aware enough to feel badly about what had happened. In apology he offered Eric the gift of his dog and dug in his wallet until he found its vaccination papers. Fernando firmly gripped the wheel and hardly spoke as trucks on the narrow highway soughed past. Eric looked at me with a wild grin. “They can really drive, can’t they!”
The Pariahs
WHEN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ACCEPTED ERIC’S grant proposal for the addict-treatment program, his role was essentially over. But six months of fieldwork had affected him deeply; on days off he often came back to Eagle Pass to see the paint sniffers. Once, I went with him to a graduation ceremony, the tribe’s first. For people whose children seldom stay in school past the elementary grades, five completions of the state’s GED requirements were a signal event. The graduates wore caps and gowns, the families were all dressed up, and the Eagle Pass school superintendent delivered the commencement address. Eric’s friends asked him to make a speech too. He stood before them frozen, then performed an unwitting, dead-on imitation of TV’s Mr. Rogers. “Graduations,” he began, “are special.”
An hour later I followed him as, coattails flapping, he skidded down a slope into the netherworld of Kickapoo paint sniffers. They assembled under bridges, in a city park, along a railroad track, and next to a paved arroyo that winds through town. We found a woman seated barefoot on a piece of cardboard. She clasped his hand, asked him how he had been, and after a few minutes began to cry. “I ain’t got no shoes. My feet, they’re sick.” He gave her a couple of dollars and made her promise not to spend them on beer or paint. He found several pariahs digging through a dumpster outside a fried-chicken place downtown and bought them a hamburger. When they were high they would rant crazily, incoherently, and sometimes they got in knife fights in which the point was to leave a scar, not to maim or kill. Yet he never seemed to fear them.
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