The Lovely Bones

(Ed Note: This post is inspired by a dream I had last night. )

Call me Geronimo, most famous of all Apache medicine men, but that is a name the Mexican soldiers gave to me; originally I was called Goyathlay, or, One Who Yawns. Perhaps they say I yawned because I never slept-- raiding military settlements and neighboring tribes with wild abandon and impunity, after Spanish troops killed my wife, my mother and three young children. Such is the Apache way.

As the American Empire expanded west, stealing the lands of the Native tribes, I led the Apache's to fight for our land as the government pushed us into Hells Forty Acres, or what the Americans called the San Carlos Reservation in eastern Arizona. We exercised the option to flee and fight, raiding settlements and causing Uncle Sam much consternation.

During the late 19th century, it is said that one quarter of the American Army tried to locate my secret base in the Sierra Madre mountains.  Once captured by the honorable General George Crook, I thought that I had honored my ancestors, and my bones would indeed find rest after a life of battle well fought for my Apache bretheren. Alas that was not to be.

Ultimately, after fighting the good fight, I died of pneumonia on February 17, 1909. That should have been the end of things. That should have been the end of things. But it wasn't.

Prescott Bush, father of the first President Bush and the grandfather of the current President, stole my bones, just as the American government took away from me freedom in the final years of my life. This is a crime, this captivity of my bones, which has led me to roam unburied, unable to enter the happy hunting ground.

Prescott Bush stole my bones from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for the pleasure of his secret society Skull and Bones. I wish to be buried in the Triplet Mountains, but the frat boys at Skull and Bones, the gatekeepers of power, will not let me, an old Apache chief, achieve his final reward. They dug up my body in 1918. My body is at the Skull and Bones Museum. The Skull and Bones Society admitted that it held my remains as early as 1986. The palefaces hold my remains in a glass cage. The Skull and Bones Society log book records the 1918 grave robbery. According to the Skull and Bones log book entry, Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, and five other officers at Fort Sill, Okla., desecrated my grave.

I ask the current President Bush (S&B, '68) or even John Kerry (S&B, '66) or even the first president Bush (S&B, '48) to atone for the sins of your grandfather. Please give my bones back to the Apache people, so that I can be buried on Apache land. I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to obstruct the light of our common father, the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures. And now I am trapped in these stone walls.

Let this part of our history be closed.