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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He went on: “Our traditions cannot be written down. They’re told by fathers, passed down by sons and grandsons. A Kickapoo does not pray for himself alone. He prays for all people. And if Kickapoo are not allowed to practice their traditions, this will be borne out in wars, disease, natural disasters. Kickapoo always wanted peace. We would move on to avoid conflict and maintain the traditions. And that is how we arrived in Mexico.” Jose applied a Kickapoo slant to Mexican presidents and history. Benito Juárez, himself an Indian, asked the Kickapoo to help fight the Comanche and Apache, and they did. In return Juárez offered them money, but they turned that down in favor of Nacimiento, their treasured place, which was akin to an autonomous region. They could go armed like soldiers. In 1939 President Lázaro Cárdenas amended their agreement so that in perpetuity they could hunt in the Sierra Madres nine months out of the year and carry on the ritual naming of their children. But the wilderness had turned into ejidos, or “communal lands,” and ranchos whose owners did not respect the historical rights of the Kickapoo. Carlos Salinas, he said, just ignored them.
I asked Jose what he thought would happen. He said the tribe was trying to arrange a meeting with the new president, Ernesto Zedillo. “We will tell him our story, perform a dance, and hope he responds to the story.” But he wasn’t sanguine about their prospects. “Es perdido,” he told me, wearily. It is lost.
Ceremony Is Prayer
MORE THAN A YEAR PASSED BEFORE I saw Joe again. Margie gave birth to their third child in January 1995. The little girl was properly named; Joe would only say that the deer were taken in Texas. Unable to find work as a roofer, a trade practiced by many Kickapoo, he went north as a field hand. In a pickup with Montana plates, he came home to a bitter summer. His dad was briefly hospitalized with heart pains, and in Nacimiento the drought was so severe that the grass died and the spring almost dried up. Hay was either non-existent or priced beyond the Kickapoo’s means. Most of the Hernandez family’s cattle survived, but the horses, in desperation, browsed a plant that the Kickapoo believe is poison. The only one of Joe’s five horses that survived was the favorite palomino gelding he called Flaco. Late in the summer I called the tribal office and was heartened when Margie said that Joe was in Laredo, going to some kind of school. He told her when he came home that he had checked into a treatment clinic to get help with his drinking. With leather, paint, and feathers, he made a sign that hangs in the tribal office. “Nekotenoe Nakoti Wodii,” it says in Kickapoo, One Day at a Time.
In November 1995 I returned to Eagle Pass to see Joe. He worked now for the public housing agency in town, and on the reservation I found him standing proudly beside the home that had replaced the cramped travel trailer I had seen on a previous visit. It was precisely half of a nicely painted frame house; from the peak of the roof, the rear wall dropped straight down. He had built it himself, and he figured he would pour the rest of the concrete slab when he had the money.
We set out the next day for Nacimiento in a cold gray rain. It was still falling at twilight when Joe forded the river and steered through a maze of bogs and harder ground. We were unloading our bedrolls and gear when a man in coveralls and a wool cap walked by with a flashlight and a jambox radio slung across his shoulder like a rifle. He and Joe spoke Kickapoo for a long while, and in time I recognized the man. His street name in Eagle Pass was Kisco, and he was one of the paint sniffers befriended by Eric Fredlund. His favorite hangout was an arroyo bridge right beside the police station.
Joe and I spread our sleeping bags that night on the ground inside the wickiup, which smelled like clean straw. We lay on our backs in the light of a kerosene lantern and watched water drip through the ceiling vent. We spoke of language—and my admiration that he could manage three. “Sometimes I get them mixed up,” he said. “And it’s not just that the words are different. My dad and I don’t speak nothing but Kickapoo, and there’s some things that Kickapoo don’t say. I can’t tell my dad I love him.”
I told him I had met Kisco in Eagle Pass. Joe said the man was his mother’s cousin and had just spent several months at the treatment center in Quemado, which had finally opened. Joe spoke with obvious respect for the man; in Nacimiento the paint sniffer and street pariah of Eagle Pass had the reputation of a great hunter. “We come to a hard mountain and ride all day to get to the top. He leads a pack horse and just walks right over it.”
Joe and I had become close and confiding friends, and we talked late into the night. “In your religion,” Joe asked me, “what’s the difference between prayer and ceremony?” I thought about it and said prayer is when you speak to God or address Him in your thoughts; ceremony to me implies an activity and place. Joe nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose for Kickapoo peoples, ceremony is the prayer. I remember hearing the sound of it early in the morning, almost every day. It has to be done a certain way, exactly. My generation is losing it because we haven’t had the chance to practice.” I asked him if he could perform the ceremony, if he had to. “I don’t know,” he said. “And, you know, it’s dangerous if you get it wrong.”
The Women’s Dances
KICKAPOO BELIEVE THAT WE ARE LIVING in the last of four worlds. The first three were destroyed by air, rot, and water; this one will be consumed by fire. But their faith seems largely free of apocalyptic fret and doom. As long as they observe the tradition and conduct their lives honorably, at peace with nature, they will have an eternal reward somewhere in the western sky. In early spring the helper spirits of nature convey two signals—the second thunderstorm of the season and the leafing out of a certain kind of tree. The tribe’s spiritual leader summons the people, and at Nacimiento the holy season begins. For several weeks Nacimiento is closed to anyone who is not Kickapoo. Near the end of the season, a few friends of the tribe are invited to join them. Last April I received such a call.
I arrived near sundown at a clearing among the wickiups and cinder block houses. Joe urged me to get something to eat—fried chicken, beans, bread, and venison—but it wasn’t a time for talk. It was the night of the women’s dances.
Wearing brightly colored frocks sewn with pennants, the women formed a row, pressed closely against each other. They were aligned by age, from the lead dancer, who must have been in her nineties, down to the little girls, some of whom were wearing modernity’s running shoes with blinking reflectors under tradition’s long skirts. As male elders in ordinary attire sang to the accompaniment of a drumbeat, the women performed a shuffling dance around a fire, above which four cast-iron pots hung from a pole. It went on like that for hours. I had no idea what I was witnessing. Nor, had I known, would I have fully understood the spiritual significance, at least not like the Kickapoo. The sky was moonless over the Sierra Madres: flares of meteorites, and the first time I had seen a comet. The music was monotonous, mesmerizing. At the end of each dance the tribal elders raised a shrill cry: Ki ki ki ki ki.
Horses Know Things
A MONTH LATER, BACK IN TEXAS, THE residents of Quemado got their way. What finally shut down the treatment center was budget pressure in Washington. Roberto de la Garza, an Eagle Pass resident who succeeded an ailing Julio Frausto as tribal administrator, enlisted Eric Fredlund as a consultant to salvage the program. The state came up with enough money to keep it going, on the condition that the center move to the reservation in Eagle Pass. Not far away from the two portable buildings on the reservation that houses the treatment center is the bingo parlor and a plain modular building called the Lucky Eagle where there are only slot machines and blackjack tables. The local crowds have not generated much revenue for the tribe, and the issue of whether the operation violates state gaming laws has yet to be resolved.
Last summer Eric Fredlund became the director of the treatment center. Joe Hernandez works on the staff and is training to be a counselor. “It’s no silver bullet,” Eric told me. “I still have friends living under those bridges. People relapse, then try again. But solvent-exposed births have decreased sixty percent. And the arrest rate in Eagle Pass is down forty percent.”
The modern world is neither arranged nor disposed to accommodate the Kickapoo way of life. Perhaps the only haven left to them is high in the Sierra Madres. Many times Joe and I have talked about my going with him on a horseback ride into the high country. As a gesture of friendship and hospitality, he kept asking me if I wanted to ride Flaco, his treasured hunting companion, but I think he also wanted to gauge my experience and skill in the saddle. Once, we even entered the tack shed, but we never mounted up. Instead, we climbed a hill and sat on a rock ledge over the river, while Joe pointed out cliffs and contours that marked the deer hunters’ way into the higher elevations. He described sudden snowstorms, fearing that he was lost in the forest, and the time a friend’s horse fell off a cliff to its death and almost took his friend along. He said that I could go along on the next ride, perhaps on Flaco, but the more stories Joe told, the more that sounded like a young man’s adventure. I explained that in my culture and family, the next week was Thanksgiving. The ride would have to wait.
He gave an embarrassed and respectful nod and said he had forgotten. But he would go anyway. For the next several days I thought of him up in those mountains, practicing his religion, doing what he loved. I called Margie at the tribal office and asked her to have him tell me the whole story as soon as he got back. Maybe I would ride into the mountains after all.
When he called, he said four Kickapoo had gone for five days and brought back four deer. It was cold but beautiful up there. They saw a lot of deer and quite a few bear tracks. The deer he killed, he said, was a small buck. It ran from him, and he ran after it; then the deer stopped and looked back, about one hundred yards away.
Then there was a long pause. “But you know Flaco? Skinny? When we got home, Flaco died. I didn’t ride him too hard, and he didn’t act sick at all. But the minute we got to Nacimiento, he started shaking and couldn’t breathe. He just died.”
When he told me that, I had to sit down. What more misfortune could happen to these people?
“My dad told me not to feel too bad,” Joe said philosophically. “He told me, ‘You know, sometimes horses know things, see things that are about to happen. And sometimes horses choose to die, to keep something bad from happening to you.’”
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