Stain

 August 17 will be a holiday for Native Americans, especially for those living in the state of Colorado. They will be celebrating the day that the proclamation issued by the Centennial State that called for its citizens to kill the original inhabitants of the territory and take their property was rescinded. The proclamation was made way back in 1864, before Colorado was even a state. The cancellation of that proclamation came in 2021.

It took one hundred fifty-seven years to make that change. Why?

Well, it could be that things got so busy, what with the turn of the century coming on, and then the next one, nobody noticed this little piece of legislation just hanging out there on the books. Like the one in Wyoming that says, "no person shall move uphill on any passenger tramway or use any ski slope or trail while such person's ability to do so is impaired by the consumption of alcohol or by the use of any illicit controlled substance or other drug." Or how, in the state of Washington, "slaying of Bigfoot to be a felony and punishable by five years in prison." What about the one in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado that prohibits the use of indoor furniture outside? Interestingly, up until oh so very recently, it would have been okay to snatch up that indoor/outdoor lawn furniture and kill its owners if they had been Native Americans.

So maybe this one doesn't fit so neatly in those "weird laws" stories that get tossed around every so often. Maybe this is yet another moment at which we continue to reckon with our racist past. Yes, I understand that there are plenty of people who will jeer at this idea of being "woke." I also understand that there is a reason for this jeering. It comes directly from that place that makes us so uncomfortable with what we have done to those who did not match our conception of "American." Which is such an odd patchwork or rationalization, I do not know where to begin. Wealthy slave owners who wanted to be free from taxation? Angry mobs who destroyed a Tulsa neighborhood, killing hundreds in the name of "justice?" The list goes on and on, and it is an embarrassment to all of us who call ourselves Americans. 

That 1864 Colorado proclamation eventually led to the Sandy Creek Massacre, where two hundred Arapahoe and Cheyenne people were killed. Most of them women and children. This ugly stain is part of our history. And now, thankfully, so is this moment of reckoning.