【快意寒冬IV】仰望雪山 (Snow Mountains)（图） - 珍珠湾ART

三公:

Your scene of an Indian chief quietly sitting on a solitary rock enjoying perfect peace with Mother Nature certainly was superb harmony. And a pastoral one indeed. That passive stance, however, probably was the very cause that finally displaced the chief and his tribesmen out of the world wonder (to use your lyric) that his ancestors from Asia discovered way before Columbus.

Mother Nature of course was quite beautiful; She was created so by God. Or by the Great Father as the Native Americans called Him. For that matter, Mother Nature also was very much enjoyable, especially when the beholder came to full terms with Her and chose to leave Her undisturbed and as is.

The problem is: peace was never the entire nature of Mother Nature. Nor was it ever the only nature of the human race. Our Earth does erupt in volcanic fire and stir in hair splitting shivers. To cope with these catastrophic moods of Mother Nature, the wise man among the human beings decided early on to figure out who Mother Nature really was and how to humor Her if not to fully tame Her.

That wise man happened to be white.

He was ever curious, even more adventurous, and often vehemently aggressive for the newer, bigger, and better in Nature and beyond. That spirit is marvelously shown in the fantastic picture of two people teamed to succumb the huge upright wall of the mountain. The determination in their face and deportment left any beholder with no doubt that these two folks would settle for no less than reaching the very top of the hill.

Their goal was definitely assisted by their preparedness. They had the right tools, the solid, good equipment they skillfully maneuvered to help them conquer the seemingly impossible mountain.

Their determination to discover, conquer, and expand was unfortunately what the American Indians lacked or only weakly showed at the times when Magellan, Columbus, and Captain Smith came to the shores of this side of the Atlantic hundreds of years ago.

Had all the natives in this wonder world been more or less blessed with the courage, insight, and wisdom of the ancestors of the daring mountain climbers we witnessed with awe in the picture and reality, there would not have been the Smithsonian Museum of Native Americans in Washington, D.C. Simply because there would NOT be such a name or title as Indian Chief. The chief would remain a native chief. Columbus would not have returned to Spain but would most likely be buried here or eaten up by wolves after receiving a fatal shot from a gun powered by the powder that the Chinese invented and sold to the natives here.

Columbus, dead within the first ten minutes of his landing, would never have had the chance to even utter the word Indian.

Or even more dramatic, Columbus and his sailors all became slaves to the native chief.

History would thus become a very different one than what our kids are reading in schools.

The world wonder would have remained in the free sight and hand of the native chief who never was nor ever will be named an Indian.

History, alas, can’t be undone. It’s way too late for the native chief, now widely known as an Indian, a term he never liked, to reequip himself and his tribes well enough to safeguard his treasures and expel all the intruders from the other side of the Atlantic.

China, the land of the ancestors of American Indians, learned this in pain.

The world will not ever call the Chinese people Indians.

天涯