Another answer to the Great Anasazi Question -- the one provided by many Hopis -- is that they haven't gone anywhere: they're still planting corn, beans, and squash, and practicing their ancient religion in the Southwest, only they're called Hopi now. They take grave offense at the Turners' suggestion that their Anasazi parents were maneaters. (Probably more than any other American Indians, the Hopis promote themselves as a peaceful tribe.) Cultures clash: new sciences like taphonomy and glottochronology versus Hopi oral tradition and enigmatic petroglyphs; the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of the Interior versus medicine men and elders. The Navajo Nation, the Bureau of Land Management, Barry Goldwater, Christy Turner, and the inevitable flocks of lawyers -- they all tiptoe around each other and take turns thumb wrestling over the consequences of a definitive answer to the Great Anasazi Question. It may be politically useful for some, culturally necessary for others, to put the facts of history forever out of reach. Even the short history of the Khmer Rouge, which rose and fell in my infinitesimal lifetime, has already been forever mucked by conflicting agendas and unreliable reports. When history brings material consequences upon the present -- who is entitled to land, who may be held responsible for others' deaths, and so on -- many people would prefer to keep it buried. I remind myself that the Khmer Rouge have never been tried.

Last week I wrote about hoping that the Cambodians were letting us frolic and scavenge on the adults' playground of Angkor, while keeping mum about the 'sacred books' hidden in the kingdom's architectural marrow. I didn't have to hope on the Reservation. The Hopi religious and historical traditions are oral, and despite nominal autarky, neither they nor the Navajos have written national constitutions. The kivas where the Hopis worship and hold important tribal meetings are, tellingly, burrowed underground. Traders, anthropologists and artists, tourists and park rangers all have found their interest in Indian theology and culture stymied, no matter how much time they spend with the tribes, nor how respectfully they treat them. Quiet evasion, gnomic smiles: outsiders' questions get so many answers, and then the door is gently closed and quietly katy-barred. Whatever they know, or seem to know, the Hopis aren't telling us; otherwise, we'll steal it just like we stole their land.

Fortunately, I wasn't seeking "Indian wisdom," that hoary old (not to mention false) commodity; nor, despite my Friscophobia, Escape from Urban Life. I already have ample respect for the land, and I think the old TV commercial where Chief Picks-Up-Litter sheds a single tear over a discarded soda can is corny and offensive and small-minded. I was in no need of more spiritual awareness; it was the only thing I really had right then. (I returned the $150 shoes.) No, it was perimortem again, something about the process of dying, that seemed to draw me here from Southeast Asia. So many similarities: Like the Akha and Khmu villagers of Laos, the desert Indians live primarily off the land; like the Cambodians, they have been massacred, relocated, pillaged, enslaved, and ignored by successive regimes. Their holy stone structures have been plundered and then "returned" in politically correct displays of imperialist charity. As in Indonesia, the American Indians' land borders have been arbitrarily drawn and redrawn by people impelled by greed and personal advancement, to the great detriment of those trying to live by those borders.

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