5/30/2023 0 Comments Forgotten fields horseriding![]() reservation, eight miles downriver from Eagle Pass. The animals are scarce at their Mexican preserve and rare as polar bears on their U.S. Deer hunting is a sacrament among the Kickapoo in their religion a father cannot bestow a tribal name on an infant unless he can contribute to the rite four slain deer. The troubles of contemporary Kickapoo are legion, but two in particular imperil their existence as a distinct culture. The older man explained that there is no reason for a Kickapoo man to fear a tornado provided one is in harmony with the nature and the spirits of the grandfathers and knows how to get the latter’s attention.” The funnel cloud rose off the ground and passed over their heads, returning to earth a half mile beyond where they stood, and resumed its path of destruction. The old man then said a prayer to the ‘grandfather’ who was the tornado. The man instructed him to stop the truck and get out quickly. In the distance they saw a tornado heading in their direction at a high rate of speed. “One informant told me of an incident,” he wrote, “that occurred when he was traveling in the Midwest in a pickup truck with an elderly male relative. I had been reading a monograph Fredlund was drafting about his work with the Kickapoo. Their migration to the borderlands of Texas and Mexico-which made them citizens of two nations-is one of the most remarkable odysseys in North American history, and they undertook it to sustain a religion and a way of life that abound with supernatural beings and events. Allergic to lakes? The Kickapoo came from the Great Lakes they speak Algonquian and still tell stories of French explorers who found them around Lake Michigan in the early 1600’s. I mused on that cryptic remark as we crossed the Rio Grande and drove south from Piedras Negras into the Coahuilan chaparral. But my dad told me he didn’t want me going up there. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to drive up to Del Rio a lot, to that big lake there, Amistad. ![]() ![]() He looked back over the seat and replied quietly, “No. There is a Lake Kickapoo in the part of Texas where I grew up, and just to break the silence, I asked Joe if he knew the place. He wore boots, jeans, a cap, and sunshades that masked a large, shy face. He was 23 then, five feet ten with thick, broad shoulders, a laborer’s build. Joe’s Kickapoo name is Ta-Pe-A-ah, which he translates roughly as Woody Bramble of Blackberries, Spreading Outward From the Roots. He went inside a store to buy some sunglasses and cigarettes, leaving me in a Chevy Blazer with Joe Hernandez, our driver, guide, and translator. Eric Fredlund, an anthropologist who had befriended the Kickapoo, was taking me to El Nacimiento, the Mexican preserve and adopted holy land of the small border tribe. I began to understand this one day in April 1994 in the parking lot of a shopping center in Eagle Pass. THE KICKAPOO INDIANS LIVE IN A WORLD that barely resembles yours and mine.
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