Reports from the Knowledge Labs about our recent findings, research topics, and interviews with lifestyle leaders who are creating their own futures.
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How to stimulate your own powers of foresight. Consider the following thought provokers. Ask yourself, in these categories what are the brand new trends and forces? Which are the ones growing in importance? Which current forces are loosing their steam? Which have peaked or are reversing themselves? Which are the "wildcards" about to disrupt us in the future? POLITICAL AND TECHNICAL thought for food: Electronics, Materials, Energy, Fossil, Nuclear, Alternative, Other, Manufacturing (techniques), Agriculture, Machinery and Equipment, Distribution, Transportation (Urban, Mass, Personal, Surface, Sea, Subsurface, Space), Communication (Printed, Spoken, Interactive, Media), Computers (Information, Knowledge, Storage & Retrieval, Design, Network Resources), Post-Cold War, Third World, Conflict (Local, Regional, Global), Arms Limitation, Undeclared Wars, Terrorism, Nuclear Proliferation, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Governments (More/Less Power and Larger or Smaller Scale), Taxes, Isms: Nationalism, Regionalism, Protectionism, Populism, Cartels, Multinational Corporations, Balance of Trade, Third Party Payments, Regulations (OSHA, etc.) Environmental Impact, U.S. Prestige Abroad. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC Food for thought:
Labor Movements, Unemployment / Employment Cycles, Recession, Employment Patterns, Work Hours / Schedules, Fringe Benefits, Management Approaches, Accounting Policies, Productivity, Energy Costs, Balance of Payments, Inflation, Taxes, Rates of Real Growth, Distribution of Wealth, Capital Availability and Costs, Reliability of Forecasts, Raw Materials, Availability and Costs, Global versus National Economy, Market versus Planned Economies, Generations: Y, X, Boomers, Elderly, Urban vs. Rural Lifestyles, Affluent vs. Poor, Neighborhoods and Communities, Planned or Organic Growth.
Got Knowledge?
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The Journal of 2020 Foresight
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Friday, May 13, 2005
“My God, Why Would Anyone Live Out Here?”
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“Lewis committed suicide a few years after the end of the expedition, and Clark struggled to turn his celebrity into cash. His dubious reward was a job as the superintendent of the Indian Office, a government agency charged with keeping the conquered nations and peoples of Native America under control and supervising their "removal" from the path of white settlement; significantly, he reported to both the secretary of State and the secretary of War.”
Jonathan Kirsch
CHIEF YELLOWHORSE TRADING POST, Arizona. Out of the Grand Canyon, we followed route 64 southeast - East Rim Drive -- which became Navahopi Rd until it intersected with 89 north into the Navajo Indian Reservation. And, then just north of Cameron we stopped at Chief Yellowhorse's roadside stand. We had been tipped off in the Grand Canyon to the quality of the Chief's son's thick sterling sliver bracelets.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: You know what it's like? It's like a meteor hit this area with such force that it made us skip a track on this adventure CD.
Eagle: Huh?
J2020F: Oh, sorry. I was on my cell phone to my wife describing my dream.
Eagle: Oh? I thought you were talking to me - those damn handless cellphone microphones!
J2020F: You know I brought along “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” by Larry McMurty. Last night when we got back to our hotel room, I fell into a dream after reading his passage about the impact that photography had on the West.
Explorer: The “noble savage image” that Mark Twain wasn't buying in “Roughing It?”
J2020F: See for yourself: "By the 1850s there were cameras everywhere, and the romantic landscapes ... gave way to photography that was almost equally romantic -- the photographers, quite naturally, gravitated to the beauty spots, to the grandeur of Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly."
Pathfinder: Like in the Grand Canyon when we visited the Kolb Studio yesterday.
Eagle: And, as in today when tourist hold their digital camera an arms length away and snap photos of themselves with the Canyon as a backdrop.
J2020F: True. However, the Kolb's arrived in the early 1900s. McMurty wrote more on the perception of the West at a tipping point in the history of the “beginning of the end” of the Wild West: "The first photographs of the Plains Indians to reach the East must have been startling to the populace because many of the Indians were so handsome, so striking.”
Explorer: Yup. If Twain saw the photos they might have chipped away at his emerging view of the West. In fact, I think it was Leonard Kriegel who wrote that Twain struggled with an "entire society created by those who had fled civilization, droves of aliens who had come to seek their fortunes on the frontier, most of who were equipped with a sense of individual destiny and little else.”
J2020F: McMurty speculates: “Seeing them in their robes of state, as it were -- the very personification of the noble savage -- must have awakened at least a little ambivalence in the viewers, for the pictures themselves contradicted some of the most wildly propagandistic aspects of the rhetoric of conquest."
Eagle: And talking about “rhetoric of conquest,” in the mid-1800s, according to Dee Brown, the Indian Wars got ugly by the 1860s. Events set in motion when the war with Mexico ended and the '49ers discovered gold in California came to a head.
J2020F: The US government stepped up coordinated military campaigns against the western tribes who resisted, as had the all of the eastern tribes, right?
Explorer: Even though Twain was one himself he became repulsed by the fortune-seeking easterners crossing by the thousands on the emigrant trails through Indian Territory.
Eagle: Brown wrote: “Indians who lived or hunted along the Santa Fe and Oregon trails had grown accustomed to seeing an occasional wagon train licensed for traders, trappers, or missionaries. Now suddenly the trails were filled with wagons, and the wagons were filled with white people."
Explorer: Kriegel on Twain, "His disgust with the swaggering desperado, his annoyance with those who romanticize the Indian as 'the Nobel Red Man,' his fear of lynch law, his admiration for bankers, merchants, and honest miners -- all of these represent the civilized point of view."
Trailblazer: Wow, and here I thought your dream was about the Grand Canyon.
Pathfinder: I thought you were talking about the scenery we've been viewing for hours as we left the Grand Canyon for Indian Country - inhabited by the eight tribes and five reservations.
Eagle: Those would be the Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Kaibab Paiute, and the Navajo on reservations surrounding the park.
Pathfinder: I've read somewhere that in Arizona alone there are 20 reservations covering 25% of the land.
Eagle: Right, and those tribes in Arizona belong to three linguistic families: the Athabascan, including the Apache and Navajo; the Uto-Aztecan, to which the Hopi belong as well as the Kaibab Paiute, Papago, Pima and Yaqui; and the Yuman, including the Chemehuevi, Cocopah, Havasupai, Hualapia, Mohave, Yavapai and Yuma.
Trailblazer: One of the interesting things about this “Four Corners Region” is that while Native American people were present in the region about 12,000 years ago, little remains to describe what they experienced, how they lived, what had happened to them.
Eagle: I think there's an historical gap of about 8,000 years. Apparently we know that the Hohokam and Hisatsinom tribes flourished here when they built elaborate irrigation systems and cliff dwellings until the mid-1400s when two centuries of drought and nomadic tribe invasions terminated their cultures.
Pathfinder: Isn't there some speculation that the may have been absorbed by the nomadic Apache and Navajo tribes?
Eagle: Yes, as I understand it. Likewise, the Paiutes moved into the region once occupied by the ancient Anasazi and Fremont cultures.
Pathfinder: And the Hopi, descended from the prehistoric Pueblo people. Today, they follow the ancient traditions as dry farmers growing corn on plots at the base of mesas.
J2020F: So, we have a gap between the early ancestors and roughly the late 1400s or early 1500s when the Spanish explorers and Jesuits tried to colonize the area, right?
Explorer: From a European perspective, certainly.
J2020F: Franciscan Friar, Marcos de Niza, followed by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado first came looking for trade routes to the orient and Seven Cities of Gold, as well as to colonize the New World in 1539.
Eagle: In 1680 however, the Hopi revolted killing the priests and burning the missions during what became known as the Pueblo Revolt.
Pathfinder: Shortly thereafter, Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino began the first successful mission work in Pimeria Alta (presently southern Arizona) with the founding of several missions, including the presidio and mission at Tubac as well as the still active San Xavier del Bac
Trailblazer: But, the Hopi Pueblo Revolt continued for two centuries. The Apache and Navajo joined in with their resistance to the Europeans and later to the Mexicans when they asserted their sovereignty.
J2020F: After leaving the Grand Canyon on 64 it became clear that the Navajos occupy by far the largest reservation --16 million acres just east of the Grand Canyon
Eagle: The Navajos are also the largest of any other North American tribe and for this part of our trip served as a portal into “Indian Country.”
Pathfinder: If you had a copy of the Santa Fe Trail map, that served as the main artery opening up the “Southwest Frontier between 1800 to 1850” for “white Americans” you'd see we were in the “open territory” well to the west of Santa Fe, Taos and Albuquerque (the Rio Grande) between the Colorado River to the north and the Gila River to the south.
Trailblazer: Novelist Tony Hillerman loves to roam this area -- known to the early emigrants from the east as the Great American Desert -- for a source of inspiration. He travels “the vast empty space, Indian reservations, mountain ranges, nameless canyons, old volcanoes and rough country where it is easy to get lost.”
Explorer: Nowadays, the AAA calls its map of this area in the Southwest simply “Indian Country.” Four states - Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah -- later carved out of the territory sit in the middle of Indian Country. On the eastern border you find Sandia Mountains in New Mexico.
Eagle: On the opposite border to the west is Nevada from where we came. In the extreme upper left from Utah's Indian Peak Range down to the extreme bottom left we find Arizona's Bozarth Mesa.
Explorer: And from Colorado's Bear Peak in the upper right it runs down to the bottom right to New Mexico's Rattlesnake Hill.
J2020F: The scenic route we took from our Grand Canyon hotel retraced our east rim tour past the Desert Watch Tower and onto the vast expanse of Navajo and then, finally Hopi reservations.
Pathfinder: Talking about life zones, we passed from Eastern Sierra-like pine trees, like the ones we were used to viewing on the trip here from Mammoth, hiding the view of the Canyon to lower elevation and flatter, rolling hills of the reservation land.
Trailblazer: We followed 64 to Cameron and picked up the 89 which boaters take past Page in route to Lake Powell. We took to 160 instead past Tuba City and the Navajo National Monument.
J2020F: After miles of passing roadside trading post stands offering authentic Indian jewelry artwork, we pulled off -- at one of the two Chief Yellowhorse venues.
Explorer: Pulling off, gave us the opportunity to photograph a lower fork of the Colorado River that had carved lesser, but more spectacular gorges.
Trailblazer: But, between the Canyon and the Mesa country the landscape turned almost lunar from ancient volcanoes. We all marveled at how tough it must be to scratch out a living.
J2020F: That is unless you happen to be a Native American, an anthropologist, archeologist, a geologist or a novelist like Tony Hillerman.
Trailblazer: Let's see, what else is on his list of attractions? In addition to the Grand Canyon - “Valle Grande in the Jemez Mountains, the world's largest caldera (collapsed volcano) valley; endless magnets for anthropologists: the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, the mysterious Chaco Canyon structures and countless others; the entire Navajo Nation; a long list of lively Pueblo reservations; and too many national parks and monuments to mention….”
Explorer: If we had more time, you'd probably want to discover El Malpais, for example, a sea of ancient black magma - the lava stream from Mt. Taylor.
Pathfinder: He would definitely. For me, I'm reminded that this is the same general area where Cochise and his Apaches came through. Where Geronimo roamed. Where the Civil War played out after the Mexican American War and where Kit Carson called home - to the dismay of the Navajos.
J2020F: Why do you say that?
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
5:51 PM
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