From the expanses of the south of Texas, to the Amazon and beyond, Indians continue to fight for the right to their lands, to defend their ways of life and to rise up from rubble and once again be mountain, as Mercedes Sosa sang in her song, Indio. I explore the stories of the past that refuse to be forgotten, by summarizing the hefty volume titled Beneath Sacred Ground, by Martinez de Vara, in which the funerary records of the Mission San Antonio de Valero are the main attraction. The news reports about contemporary Indigenous communities in Brazil and Paraguay serve as reminders that the Indian continues to refuse to be discounted as mere rubble, he and she long once again, to be mountain, to be river, to be forest, to remind us all about the Green Humans that we are each descended from.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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