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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Eric sat amid the squalor of cans and rotted mattresses, looked them in the eye, gained their confidence, and got them to talk to him. He kept dwelling on the horror that all Kickapoo, including the paint addicts, expressed over the fate of a 26-year-old woman who passed out from the fumes on the railroad tracks one night in 1992 and was cut in two by a locomotive. “According to the tradition of her people,” a poignant item in a small local paper put it, “her soul will remain at the point of her death because she was not in grace and harmony with nature. She had chosen to alter her state of mind with the use of the spirits of the can. Her soul will remain at that site, seventy-two feet north of El Indio Highway on the road of steel, until judgment day.”
Tribal elders and traditionalists hoped that Nacimiento was off-limits to such degradation. “Texas is where we work,” one of the elders had explained to Eric. “Nacimiento is where we go to live our lives as Kickapoo people.” But I found on my trip to Nacimiento that you don’t have to walk far into the brush to kick up one of the distinctive blue cans.
Lions and Tigers
SOLVENT ABUSE IS USUALLY ENCOUNTERED AMONG YOUTHS, and the clinical assumption has long been that if they keep it up, they either wind up dead or brain damaged. But some of the Kickapoo had been sniffing paint for more than a decade, and when they weren’t high, they could carry on a perfectly lucid and social conversation. The treatment program was being designed largely by the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research, affiliated with Colorado State University. It would rely heavily on medical testing, Kickapoo translators, an elderly spiritual leader named Alfonso, and eventually, trained and licensed Kickapoo counselors. Nobody promised a miracle cure. Toluene and other solvent compounds attach themselves to fatty tissues, of which the brain has many: Detoxification could take months. Withdrawal symptoms might range from irascible anxiety to suicidal despair. The therapists believed that a high relapse rate was preordained.
The treatment program called for a site removed from the Eagle Pass reservation, and tribal administrators—who are appointed by the federal government—finally settled on Quemado, a farm town of 426 residents seventeen miles north of Eagle Pass. A resident named Rod Bunsen had fallen on hard times and was scrambling to keep his spacious house and spread, described on a highway sign as a quarter-horse farm, out of bank foreclosure. Bunsen sold ninety acres and offered to lease the remaining property to the Kickapoo for the five-year term of the pilot project.
Neighbors in Quemado were outraged. Led by a Hispanic family named Moses, nearly three hundred residents signed a petition with a timeworn theme—not in my back yard. Lilia Moses, a diminutive math teacher in Eagle Pass, told me, “This is not about the Kickapoo. If you remove their name from the project we’d be just as opposed—because it’s a drug rehabilitation center. Why wasn’t the community consulted? We’re a twenty-minute drive from Eagle Pass, and the county can’t provide us adequate law enforcement or EMS protection now.”
Eight months into the five-year term of the grant, the project was stalled. “First we gotta pay property taxes,” sighed tribal administrator Julio Frausto, an Eagle Pass native and retired Air Force officer. “And we’re still up to our ears in tigers.” I thought it was a metaphor.
With few close neighbors, the Bunsen house sat on a rise surrounded by maize fields, the onetime horse show arena, and an irrigation ditch at the rear. At the edge of the front yard, a brook trickled attractively through a stand of blooming cannas. Peacocks strolled about with their air of lordly fops. Inside, I found a broad expanse of Saltillo tile, a heavy Mexican-style chandelier, a long bar and kitchen designed for entertaining, and a hot tub. But the greater attraction was out back: In pens and cages that did not look altogether escape-proof were African lions, Bengal tigers, a leopard, a black panther, a mountain lion, and several black bears. As back yards in Quemado go, evidently this was preferable to a band of Kickapoo paint sniffers. The heat-stricken animals lay panting while a work crew from the reservation prepared the place for occupancy. Livestock trailers parked around the place would soon be used for the animals’ departure, or so Julio Frausto had been assured. A black-maned male lion took exception to the shrill whine of a Weed Eater operated by an edgy young man named Roger. The lion stood up and voiced a grumble that sent Roger and me stepping smartly to the rear.
Two men drove up and unlocked one of the sheds—Rod Bunsen and his son, Rod Junior. The younger Bunsen had written a letter published in the Eagle Pass News-Guide that accused the neighbors of bigotry and racism: “The Anglos in Quemado want everyone to be white and Protestant, and the Hispanics dislike the possibility of Native American neighbors due to their (Hispanics) continual denial of their own ancestry.” Rod Senior said that if the lease was voided and he lost his homestead because of it, he would sue everyone who signed that petition. “Ah, these rednecks,” he said of his neighbors. “They haven’t liked anything I’ve done for twenty-two years.”
It Is Lost
ALL THROUGH THE SUMMER OF 1994 THE Kickapoo found themselves in battle with hostile Texans, though on more formally polite terms than a century ago. In June there was a face-to-face confrontation with the Quemado residents. Tribal administrators and defenders of the treatment program sat at a table facing the sullen crowd. Margie Salazar, Joe’s wife, read a statement. She is the assistant tribal administrator—the highest position any Kickapoo has attained in the management of their own affairs. Visibly nervous, she recounted the tribe’s history and asked for Quemado’s support. “We were a self-sufficient and proud people. We maintained our culture, our tradition, and language over the years. But in 1944 a drought set in over all of northern Mexico. To survive, we had to resort to migratory work. As a child, I remember traveling with my parents on long, difficult journeys. I worked in the fields, and we all chipped in to survive, but I knew there would be a better life. I worked very hard between trips to get my education and complete my GED. I did not want to keep working with my hands and never know the things that other citizens enjoy. You see, I am an American citizen too.” There was a polite round of applause, but then the residents had their say, and within minutes other Kickapoo women walked out of the hall, weeping. An Anglo man with reading glasses and a graying crew cut had a chair at the front. As the jeers and shouts from the crowd grew louder, he stood up, waved his arms, and loomed over the table. “I want to understand this young lady,” he said, pointing a sheaf of papers at Margie Salazar, “and the tradition of the Kickapoo tribe. But this community has pride also. And we’re the ones who have to protect this place. The ones who live here. And we don’t appreciate this business of you people—outsiders—using our taxpayer money, coming in here, without even consulting us, and telling us, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be! Whether you like it or not!’” The hearing adjourned without a resolution.
The other dispute between the Kickapoo and Texas is over gambling. Like the Tigua, whose reservation is near El Paso, the Kickapoo are trying to parlay their status into revenue from gaming. (The thrust of the argument is that by instituting a lottery, the state has already legalized gambling, opening the door for Indians under federal law.) The Kickapoo had contracted with a Nevada firm called Southwest Casinos, which had commissioned a set of architectural plans for a glassy edifice on the reservation at Eagle Pass that would look like an extraterrestrial shipwreck. If a full-scale casino could not be obtained through legislation or court action, the Kickapoo hoped to gain at least a bingo parlor. The Kickapoo met with state officials in Austin that September, and Joe’s father, Jose, made the drive with his son and daughter-in-law. He attended the meetings and ate the consultants’ barbecue, but he seemed to dislike the whole business. At the hotel, he didn’t want to talk about it.
Jose had heard enough of my Spanish not to put much stock in it, so he spoke Kickapoo and asked Margie to translate what he said into English. Algonquian is a plosive and consonantal language; the Kickapoo dialect is spoken slowly. While Joe sat on the bed, quiet and receding in the presence of his father, Jose reposed in an easy chair and reflected on the Kickapoo spiritual life. “God made the deer. God put them on the earth—not man. If you go hunting and see that a deer is someplace very difficult, at the top of a mountain, you will probably let it go. But a Kickapoo will do anything, go anywhere, climb the highest mountain to get the deer. Because to us, the deer is sacred. If you kill a deer, it has one life. But if a Kickapoo kills a deer, it has four lives. That is how God made the earth—so there will never be a shortage of game. There is a story of a Kickapoo man who lived as a deer for one year. That is the reason the deer and the Kickapoo know how each other think.”
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