ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 25
“The thing you have to realize is, talk of climate disaster doesn’t concern
us Native Americans much - we already had the apocalypse happen to us
once. Those of us still here, we’re already the survivors.” 1
Brook Colley. Chair, Native American Studies. University of Southern
Oregon.
José María Uc sold himself into slavery. He decided it was a better option than staying free.
Uc had already tasted freedom. For him freedom meant vulnerability, it meant that when the federal
government came looking for men to work on new infrastructure projects hundreds of miles away,
there was no choice to be made.
He had no patronage, which meant he was fodder.
So when the men in uniform came, they took him.
Uc found himself in a different part of the country, he wasn’t sure where, working on a foreignfunded train line through the jungle. Back home, Uc’s family never expected to see him again, with
good reason, because the taken men - the free men - almost never returned.
He was as good as dead, whether from simple malnutrition, fly and mosquito-borne diseases, to
being beheaded by the wi’it’2 , marauding Mayan rebels who hunted their perceived collaborator
brethren at night, leaving the strongest possible sign as to what would happen to traitors.
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