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Another news sheet of Emmett's had to do with another Human
Be-In that was proposed by the editors of the San Francisco Oracle,
the HIP merchants' association, and the Leary-like community
shamans dressed all in white. These brilliant wizards wanted to
gather 500,000 people on a reservation near Gallup, New Mexico,
to celebrate the summer solstice of June 21, 1967. They had
already gone to speak with the Hopi Indians who lived there about
it, but were given no answers to questions they had just begun to
ask, when the reservation's Indian sheriff and his deputies threw
them off the land because of their total disrespect and utter
arrogance toward the elders of the tribe. For a group of some
thirty-year-old hippies who purported to have an enormous regard
for the Indians, they did all they consciously could to insult
and disturb them.
Fancy, spangled-dressed HIP merchants committed sacrilege
after sacrilege by entering the sanctity of hogans and coming
back out with the secret, traditional masks of dancers they
ripped off the walls and exposed to crowds of uninitiated
children who gathered outside the doors of the huts and tepees,
startled by what the hippies with their "Santa Claus"
beards were doing in the face of thousands of years of spiritual
tradition. Longhaired couples flung off their clothes and
quick-fucked and gangbanged one another on ground the Indians
considered holy, as an expression of the freedom they found by
dropping out and as a symbol of their unfailing love for and
solidarity with the Indian and his culture. But the Indians
didn't see it quite that way. In fact, most of them got plenty
goddamn mad at all the hippie men and women running around naked
and copulating in the dirt in front of the Indian men, women and
children. Some of the stray white women even tried to seduce a
few of the young Indian bucks which brought a swift reaction from
their wives and wives-to-be.
On top of all of this banality, marijuana and LSD were given
to the children. This was the final outrage to the Hopi who had
not even invited these "Indian lovers" to be their
guests. So they kicked them off their land and told them never to
return, no matter how much money the E~aight merchants insisted
the Indians could rake in behind a Human Be-In. It was shortly
after the hippies had driven away in their VW buses that the
elders of the tribe discovered that several masks and other
spiritual ornaments and accessories were missing--stolen by
children born of the same race of people who once before robbed
the Indian of everything and left him with nothing. [end page
381]
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