We sit together on the mesa and watch.

From the west comes a band of warriors, moving fast on good horses, armed with bows, arrows, and the random scavenged thirty-ought.

In their path to the east, from the east, a wagon train, lumbering and slow, coming in to the territory to colonize and pioneer and tame these wild savage lands, even though they were already sparsely settled thousands of years ago by the grandfathers of the painted men on horseback.

The train stops. Atop one of the wagons, a hide tarp is pulled away to reveal a Gatling gun, the finest weapon yet produced by American ingenuity.

I’ll spare you the gore, but it won’t be long until the wagons start their journey again, past the littered corpses of the indigenous warriors and the dying cries of their masterless ponies.

You turn to me and speak the words.

“Well, didn’t they have every right to defend themselves?”

Of course they did.

It was kill or be killed. Own this turf or forever live without a home that isn’t a Reservation, or an open-air concentration camp on the shores of Galilee.

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