The Raven Chronicles: The Fight Against the World Crime League

By Michael E Morgan

The streets of the world have become mean and the darkness seems to prevail everywhere in the moment. The world is no longer a safe place for people to live in harmony and peace. It is no longer a place for the honest hard-working citizens and their children to grow up in a healthy and wholesome environment. There is no chance for them to become

• Language: English
• Publisher: DawnTrader Books,LLC
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780990313311

Book preview

Introduction

Like most Native peoples, the Apache were labeled savages by the white men colonizing the North American continent, suggesting an emotional reaction based on fear and the rigors of survival as opposed to a rational observation of another culture. The negative reactions were called for in many cases, as some tribes did exhibit savagery. Thievery was among their traits, but the Apaches knew who they were and avoided them. Others lacked any kind of mercy in battle.

Three tribes stand out as the fiercest in the southwest. The Sioux Nation had Sitting Bull, a great chief who fought many wars and won the battle at Little Bighorn, a strategic blunder by General Custer, resulting in slaughter. Then came the great Seminole Nation uprising with Osceola. Then finally, there was the Chiricahua Apache, who fought against Mexico as well as the US Army. Among the Apache, two great warriors arose, Geronimo and Cochise, who banded together at times.

Seen by the Apache, white men lived in a seething hive of villainy. The white man was never satisfied. His greed, fear, and a lack of self-knowledge spawned attempts to dominate by aggression, genocide, bloodshed, and destruction. The white man countered the threat of First Nations rising against them by military campaigns and forced tribes into reservations that had little or no food, or water. Entire tribes have suffered extermination by allowing them to wither and die. The remainders of Native peoples live in daily despair.

Before the First Nation Wars that lasted from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Apaches roamed free. They passed along their history and culture, with certain aspects kept from outsiders. Land theft, hunted by government troops, and the final humiliation of the reservation was tragic, but the Apache collective spirit held true. Tribal elders keep to the old traditions and fight injustices in the courts instead of on battlegrounds.

Some outsiders managed to gain the trust and confidence of tribal members. They extracted a few details about the Apache perspective, especially the influence of spirits on daily life. The Apache secret heritage speaks to the forbidden, the field of experience normally attributed to brujos or witches. White people had religious beliefs and moral standards that affected the laws written to govern their society. The Apache also had religious beliefs, though not directed to a specific god. Their beliefs centered on the energies of the world surrounding them—air, earth, fire, water, and father sky. They protected the Apache while mother earth, considered pagan by the whites, supplied them with food and shelter.

The supernatural was the Shadow World and filled with beings both good and bad. Apaches embraced the Shadow World as an equal part of life. Their activities reflected whether the spirits favored their actions or not. By contrast, the white man ignored the wisdom of his spirit sensibility and only appeased his god on Sunday mornings.

An important Apache tradition involved seeking guidance by using a sweat lodge, a covered pit with hot rocks, steam, and spirit-smoke inside to encourage a vision from the Shadow World. Spirits of the Shadow World frequented the sacred ceremony held high in the mountains. The participant seeking guidance entered the sweat lodge led by the tribe’s shaman or medicine man. Even the medicine man went into the sweat lodge for spiritual guidance to help his people.

Without considering their view, the whites assumed to correct the Apache by supplanting their beliefs with devotion to Christian ethics and dogma. The religious passion, devotion, and honor of the white man was impersonal compared to the Apache. Conquest was the white man’s true passion. Instead of living life in harmony with the world and nature, the white man tried to control nature for his own ends. The white man believed in the subjugation of nature. The Apache understood how to co-exist with nature and the necessity of living in harmony.

Why did the culture of indigenous peoples receive the label of primitive? Prejudice and violent rhetoric obscure the true spiritual character of the Apache. The real rift between the white man and the Apache came from the white man’s truth that turned to lies, and his betrayals in the form of broken treaties.

Modern conservatives suggest that Native peoples are takers, eternal welfare recipients that don’t work or contribute to society. This racial and separatist view includes other people of color. Native peoples suffer from anger and sadness at their continued persecution, coupled with depression, anxiety, and despair. Though Native peoples only make up less than two percent of the American population, they are also ten percent of the homeless, many stricken with alcoholism. The racially biased assumption prevails that a savage culture could never develop a high degree of spiritual understanding.

Genocide has almost erased the answers to the deeper spiritual questions of Apache culture.

Despite their dwindling population, the traditions and knowledge held sacred by the elders are alive. These are passing to the younger generation in the hopes for a better future.

Destiny Calls

October on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona passed slowly, and this was fine to the stringy and sand washed Jlin Litzoque, called Yellow Horse. The elderly man had the cares of his years driven into a tanned face, the responsibilities of being his clan’s medicine man, and strands of long mica-gray hair wavered across his dark eyes. He walked in worn denim and flannel along the dirt road off Route 70 outside of Peridot to Wickiup Wayne’s Rod and Gun, as the sun crossed the scrub-dotted plain to light the yellow salt cedars and Ponderosa pine and flashed in the rills of a tributary of the Gila River’s murky waters.

San Carlos was home to the Chiricahua among other clans, known collectively as Nde, the people. Wayne’s sold bait, ammunition, fish and game licenses, soda pop, and beer to tourists in the summer from a pockmarked clapboard house, and to residents of the reservation, along with methamphetamine. The proprietor wore a green track suit with the jacket zipped halfway down to expose a yellow tee shirt and read receipts gathered on a clipboard. His shop was lit from above by florescent tubes and lined with shelves bowed by the weight of canned goods, stands of fishing rods, wire racks of snap back caps and beef jerky, and a long glass display counter that showed hunting knives and boxes of ammunition.

Yellow Horse touched the wide brim of his black felt hat that had seen too much sun and pulled open the screen door to the shop.

Let that door slam, Yellow, and we’ll be having words, said fat and sweaty Wayne. He had chubby cheeks stained with broken capillaries, a nose that oozed grease, and hair cut to a flat top and kept like that. Wayne was in his fifties and harbored ill feelings against the Apache. Him and his kin had let his wife, Lorraine, die of stage four breast cancer two years earlier, her people too backward to give any real help. Wayne stayed with her through chemotherapy and the last days at the hospice. The loneliness of waiting got to Wayne and he decided that every Apache was a bloodthirsty animal, except for himself. He looked for any opportunity to cheat the Nde and arbitrarily hiked the price of his goods when they entered his store. He put the difference in his pocket.

Not here for a tussle, just beer.

Only reason I opened today was for late tourists wanting a license to hunt javelinas and you’re out of credit.

Better they should wait until December or so. Javelinas too lean after running around the summer. Tastier when they go to forage for a bit of fat. He walked to the bank of coolers and took out a six pack of Budweiser tall boys.

Put it back. Wayne reached under the counter and gripped the .45 Colt long barrel he kept for protection, six chambers loaded with hollow point bullets.

Check coming next week. I got a notice in the mail.

Notice this, said Wayne, and showed Yellow Horse the pistol.

So much hate for your brothers. Selling crystal is fine, but don’t let me have a beer after I promise to pay when the money comes.

What did any of you do when Lorraine was ailing? Not a goddamn thing worth a goddamn thing. Sure, the women sent over casseroles and other shit, and they went bad on account of Lorraine couldn’t eat or get no rest. What about the great medicine man, Yellow Horse? You shook a rattle and prayed, and she died faster.

She was sick from the white man spraying the Gila with Agent Orange in the sixties. They said it was to stop the algae bloom and make the water safe in Phoenix. My magic comes from the elements and spirits. No magic could go against a chemical that remains in our air and water and land.

Stop with the crazy talk. Magic doesn’t exist, never has, and you can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat any more than I can fly by flapping my arms. Put that beer back in the cooler and get out.

I have the cancer, too. These beers help get down the medication. Here, let me show you the notice about my check.

Yellow Horse rummaged inside his denim jacket and Wayne took this as a threatening gesture and shot him in the chest. The tall boys dropped and spun on the floor as the bullet’s force threw Yellow Horse into a Doritos display, then bent from the waist to collapse on the scarred linoleum floor. His hat rolled off his head to rest against a stack of canned tuna fish. Wayne placed a field knife from the display counter next to the dead man as proof of a thwarted attack before he called the tribal police. They sent a squad car and ambulance and suspected foul play but since there were no witnesses, had to accept Wayne’s version of events. Attendants covered Yellow Horse with a brown blanket and removed him from the store without a word. Soon they headed for Route 70 and the Pinal County medical examiner.

***

News of the old man’s demise spread quickly among the Chiricahua. Yellow Horse’s successor had been chosen years earlier by the elders in the event of his death. Ka-e-Te-nay’s son, Nantan Lupan known as Gray Wolf, was found worthy at the age of four and named the next medicine man. His station in the tribe became fixed.

Ka-e-Te-nay approached his son at work on the engine of an aging Chevy pickup that had sat on blocks in the front yard of their clapboard home for years. Gray Wolf was two inches shorter than his father, with black hair cut so it barely reached his shirt collar, brown eyes highlighted by flecks of amber, and teeth that looked like a patch of snow on a cleared open field. He felt Ka-e-Te-nay before he arrived. As a young boy he dreamed of being a great warrior and wanted Yellow Horse to live forever, but that childhood wish had not held. Gray Wolf’s dream of leaving the sad confines of the reservation stayed far away.

His father rounded the corner of the porch of the house and sat on the battered unpainted steps. Ka-e-Te-nay stood six feet tall before scoliosis bent his spine, face wrinkled by the sun and bad habits, long black hair showing streaks of silver, dressed in the usual rez uniform of jeans and flannel shirt. He took a crumpled cigarette from his pocket.

Those things will kill you one day, Pop.

His father gazed on another beautiful sunset debuting in the western sky. He was unmoved by his son’s criticism and lit up. Halfway down the cigarette, Ka-e-Te-nay began talking.

"The light of a medicine man