The only good Indian...

May 5th –

“I think I’ll call it America I said as we hit land, 

I took a deep breath, I fell down I could not stand, 

Captain Ahab he started writin’ up some deeds, 

He said, “Let’s set up a fort and start buyin’ the place with beads.” 

OK, you’re starter for ten: Who? 

Name the Track? 

You have twenty seconds……………….GO!

Well done! Bob Dylan – ‘115th Dream’.

The Ohlone Indians of the Californian coastal area of San Francisco, who based part of their mythical tenet around the theory that all humans were descended from coyotes thereby making them clever, wily, greedy and irresponsible (not changed much, have we? Ohlone’s just may have got it right; wasn't Anubis a jackal? What a connection, and so many miles and years apart too) but man was out-foxed (out-coyoted?) by a hummingbird. 
Briefly, Coyote thought he was the cleverest creature, but hummingbird was cleverer. After trying to destroy the hummingbird in various ways, coyote finally swallowed him. The hummingbird scratched the coyote’s insides and he had to pass the hummingbird out in the usual manner and so hummingbird triumphed over coyote; first draft of Beauty and the Beast right there. The Spaniard’s came, gave the Ohlone's Christianity and epidemics in equal measure…that really helped…and the encroachment of their rightful land by settlers, the California gold rush and further epidemics all but successfully wiped out the tribe by the late 19th century, thereby saving the exorbitant cost of giving them beads for acreage.
Back in the late 60’s/early 70’s the San Francisco murder rate, general crime rate, unemployment rate and drug addiction/dealing rate was well above the national average…I know, I know, you’re thinking

“Jeeze, Peter, what’s with the downer on Californians?”

but that’s not what this is about, honest. As you will all know by now throughout these daily gibberings of mine, I have a very healthy disrespect for the way my fellow countrymen have treated other nationalities through the ages too. What with the slave trade and our treatment of the land and people’s of Africa, India, Ireland, we have every right to sit at the table laid with a supper of the vitals of our vanquished foes. What it is, you see, is that it seems odd that San Francisco, this area of outstanding national…difficulty should have gained the reputation as the birthplace of the flower-power-love-peace hippie movement. On this day in 1967, Scott McKenzie’s single, San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) first made the charts and, I guess, it sort of marked the birth of the alternative flower in a gun barrel lifestyle which, in turn, gave a voice to the disenfranchised and disillusioned, of which there were many.
Maybe that’s recompense enough for the near extinction of the Ohlone tribe? (I believe there are around 1400 remaining today out of 20,000). Dunno. Maybe to lose their lands, lands that once belonged to a tribe of indigenous people who lived by way of a wild-gathered diet from a land they identified and harmonised with and a belief that the post-flood friendship of an eagle, a coyote and a hummingbird gave them both life and their portion of the earth was maybe too much to stomach for the greedy whites. Maybe to have injected that philosophy into the bloodstream of a society that had already began to understand and practice the ways of the clever, wily, greedy and irresponsible coyote and named it of government, maybe they feared that train of thinking, that one day they would be unable to contain the grown-clever hummingbird of reasoned society, would have to shit it out in order to survive so they did; time over time.