If I found and reported historical evidence that a group of marauders cut off the arms and legs of an entire group of people, I’m pretty sure people would freak out. Those who are related to the marauders would passionately discredit my evidence. Those who come from the limbless would scream for retribution and perhaps revenge. People who come from neither would see the evidence, feel badly for the limbless, and either create a public campaign to bolster the limbless’ claims or they’d jump of the marauder’s bandwagon and conclude that the limbless had it coming. Regardless of the side people chose, I seriously doubt that anyone would be neutral or ignore my report. If anything, there would be so much emotion that I’d probably regret writing and publishing my evidence. I probably couldn’t handle people’s responses, favorable or otherwise, simply due to its sheer magnitude and force.
However, my life has taught me, without any doubt or reservation, that a stupid Treaty did something far worse than cut off people’s arms and legs. Yet, when I’ve discussed the Treaty of Guadalupe HIdalgo, no one seems to really care. Maybe because it was ratified close to two (2) centuries ago, people find this document to be irrelevant and unimportant. But I know for a fact that this now ancient document was the core programming element in Northern New Mexico’s current substance abuse issues. I have no doubt and I believe that I can prove it. And people should care because in remaining naive about this Treaty’s impact, we are condemned, as a people, to an imprisonment that we neither earned or deserved. I believe it’s common knowledge that when a someone with a substance use disorder neither wants nor sesks treatment, his SUD will get worse and he will probably end up dead or in prison. What I think isn’t well understood is that this same dynamic happens on a macro level, as well. That is, when a group of people don’t attempt to redirect he programming they’ve inherited from history, that group’s issues will worsen in time.
The Treaty took land and language away from a region of people. For those of us who have inherited the impact of this document, the poverty, mental illness, and subsequent substance abuse that is now genetically programmed into our biologies is worse than if our ancestors lost their arms and legs. Really, not only did our ancestors lose their land and language, but they passed on the trauma consciousness that became coded into their biology to their ancestors and we have yet to reprogram that identity.
