HessForGovernor Government Coruption Position Paper - Scrog Hill

It’s Still Scrog Hill, To Me

I first came to appreciate Scrog Hill on the last night of the last day of 1980. Since then I have always thought of it as a public resource and a treasure that has come to represent Arizona, Phoenix in particular. It was one of those landmarks, like Camelback Mountain or the Praying Monk; that you could count on to stay the same. Now it’s been tainted by political fingering, an insulting pat on the figurative head of all those of American Indian descent.

Now before you get yer panties in a bunch, you should know that “I” have standing to comment. I recently found out that a family legend that suggested the interruption of our ‘pure’ German lineage by a full-blood Cherokee was true. It seems that one of my great-grandfathers did in fact marry a beautiful local gal. This great-grandfather, by the way, was a remnant of a part of our family that was hired by the British to help quell an uprising by insolent colonists who thought they could run their own lives better than government, or the King. Imagine that.

What the first Hess to set foot in the colonies found on his arrival was not what he had expected. He soon learned that he agreed with the ideas forwarded by those lunatic fringe colonists and he joined them in their struggle to be free of an oppressive government.

What a concept; that all individuals were endowed by their Creator, not the King, or even the Constitution, with unalienable individual Natural rights. The very thought that each and every human being was exactly equal, and completely owned themselves was revolutionary. Unfortunately, to many ‘modern’ liberals—it sill is.

For some of us, the appreciation and acceptance of these simple concepts has never diminished, only enhanced with the passage of time. We are a family that teaches self-reliance and charity, so I won’t be asking for a cut of the tax money stolen from working families, just because I happen to have Indian blood running through my veins.

I don’t believe in ‘entitlements’, or ‘reparations’ or any of the other terms invented by pandering divisive politicians to tell me that I ‘deserve’ something, anything, from anybody. These insulting terms intone that I am a lesser being who can’t make my own way in life just because of my heritage or bloodlines.

Maybe this revelation of bloodline is why I liked being the Indian when we played cowboys and Indians as children. I thought it was because I admired their sense of ‘place’ in the universe, honor, dignity and respect for the land. So who was it, who sold the honor, the dignity and the self-respect of ‘the ancestors’ for a few pennies, a patch of dirt and couple of trinkets?

I don’t know, but they were over-sold.

It must be the Indian in me that fervently resents the condescending pat on the head by our new, politically opportunistic Governor. To my way of thinking, she might just as well have offered me a bottle of firewater—in exchange for my vote. Thanks, but no thanks, Janet.

You say, “Wait a minute, Chief Flapping-Mouth, what the hell are you talking about, what could possibly be ‘wrong’ with re-naming a mound of dirt and rock after a casualty of war?”

I’m glad you asked, but the question might be better put, what’s NOT wrong with it?

Let’s start by asking what any self-respecting Indian was doing forwarding the aggression of those who are often said to have vanquished her own people? Those people, by the way, still supposedly retain their own sovereign nationality, even though the Supreme Court called them ‘dependent domestic sovereigns’, whatever that is. By definition, a sovereign isn’t dependent on anyone or anything. I call these ‘weasel words of the oxymoronic’.

Are you fuming yet because of my lack of ‘sensitivity’? Well just settle down. I mean neither disrespect nor any lack of appreciation that this young mother lost her life. It’s her ‘afterlife’ as a political pawn that tweaks me, like Jim Jones saying, “Try some Kool-Aid, it’ll quench your thirst”. It’s the Governor who was and is, in the wrong.

Next, we might ask why an Indian, and not a Brit or an American should be so profanely honored?

That answer is easy. Votes. Our Governor is politically savvy and she knows her support among the Tribes is on the wane. It’s a political ‘cookie’. See, many Indians in Arizona are starting to question whether they’ve been conned by the Democrats. After all, they have been promising all kinds of favors for a long time….but never deliver ‘the goods’. That political party seems to have no use for the Indians, except around election time. Take a look around. The reservations are still embarrassingly impoverished and uneducated—with no real plan to change it.

I would submit that if we all held government to the simple standard of ‘no special favors or treatment for anyone’, (the old: what government gives to one, it must give to all approach), that the Indian community would be doing as well as those not on a reservation.

Talk about a forked tongue! Only a Democrat, as a recent example, could twist it so that the line-item veto could be used to increase the budget. Now that’s a trick that would make David Copperfield proud, but that’s a story for another day.

It really does irk me that the good governor would send her gnome out to put the squeeze on the naming commission, and it irks me that they caved, in abject disregard for the established and reasonably prudent re-naming protocol. Political cowards. Any thinking person has to ask why such a commission even exists if it won’t stand up. Perhaps they should all give back their tax-funded salaries and go find real jobs.

The truth is, since the reign of our cartoon president, making up the rules as you go along, is the ‘new’ liberal rule. At one time we were a proud democratic republic. For those who don’t know what that is, it is a body of law that has been reduced to writing, and that is the law…unless or until the writing is changed. A simple and brilliant check on despotism.

There was and is a sound reasoning behind the five-year waiting period. No disrespect by intonation here, but we really don’t know anything about this lady, except that she was of at least some Indian blood, lived pretty much in Arizona, and she died as a single mom. The passage of time will tell.

Jim Rohn says the hippies had a good question, “What’s happening?”, and the sophisticated hippies asked, “What’s really happening?” Shouldn’t we be asking what’s really happening?

Let’s look at this. Was Ms. Piestewa really the ‘first’ native American woman to die in combat? I can say with some certainty that the answer is ‘no’. Consider for example why the name was Squaw Peak in the first place. The most credible answer is that it was named after a young native woman who, pursued by an enemy army, flung herself from its peak to her demise. Surely this would count as a death from combat by most standards. If the story is true, doesn’t this re-naming nonsense amount to a slap in the face to all other Indian women who also died in combat?

So, is one life worth more than another? Or is it only when Democratic support among the Indians is vaporizing? If you say it’s not, then why not put up a memorial to all those Arizonans who lost or will lose their lives in Iraq, male and female. I guess that’s a little too benign huh? Equality doesn’t seem to score political points. The death of a man, a son, a father or a brother just doesn’t rate. Who knows, maybe our governor shares common ancestry with the one who made the deal for Manhattan.

You probably think I have completely ignored the most popular topic regarding this landmark, the word “Squaw” as a derogatory term to the obscure, Potty Mouth tribe. The nine tribal members who make this silly argument seem to relish in the press paying any attention to them at all. It’s not a derogatory, but rather a descriptive (woman) term in Cherokee and all except the Potty Mouth language. I’d just have to say, no offense meant, none should be taken. Do you know that there are those who would object to calling it “Scrog Hill”? Some things you just have to deal with or we’d be changing ‘Haboob’ to Habib (nothing intended, Liz) and the imported list of terms that offend someone, somewhere, would never end.

I can say this. If they ever make a movie of all the used-grain surrounding this mound of rock and dirt, they’d have to name it, “Dissing Private Piestewa”.

Oh well, no matter what comes of it all, it’ll still be Scrog Hill, to me.