Walkara
Walkara, or, “the great horse thief”, an Ute Chief, also known by early Californian settlers as “the Napolean of the desert” was indeed, an accomplished horse thief. From historic reports, all accounts label Walkara as an ambitious and unpredictable character. Up until his death he was notorious for raiding California missions, as well as tribes of other western territories. His booty was primarily horses, but sometimes even included women and children. To give some context: Walkara died in 1855, less than 10 years after California became part of the United States.
Until recently, indigenous cultures of the Americas have been painted in a biased and negative light. On the one hand, this can be explained simply but painfully - the ancestors of the colonists who have told these stories throughout popular culture are no doubt burdened by an unconscious-guilt. The genocide performed on the indigenous cultures by the colonists was one of such recent and recorded time that the information available could drive a person into a state of guilt-depraved madness. There are no words for the subhuman capacity of which we have evidence that our European ancestors displayed in relation to the otherwise benevolent indigenous peoples of the North American territories.
In more recent decades, working more closely with indigenous communities in order to understand their cultural and spiritual practices of stewardship and holistic wisdom, we can start to piece together the logic of why a chief such as Walkara may have taken up the life’s work of being a horse thief. Globally, the holistic morality of indigenous peoples was quickly inverted as colonists introduced materialistic economies that downplayed more vertical spiritual systems of value and meaning. In other words, when a culture’s values are exterminated, compensations occur in order to fulfill a sudden unjust peculation of spiritual meaning.
Stealing horses, in a way, is an inversion to materialism. Theft rejects the economy of currency. Was Walkara driven by a desire for horses alone, or was the act of theft a simulation of spiritual fulfillment—a rejection of the encroaching social institutions on the horizon and an embrace of the freedom that Walkara’s culture knew for time immemorial and was now threatened?
Often, people don’t do things for the evident reason it appears they are doing them. That could be said for why we make cider, here at Bardos. That is, we probably don’t make cider just to make cider. At the very least, we know there are other reasons. Gleaning, trading, foraging, all have a kind of primordial fulfillment arrested from contemporary society. Fragments of our process provide a seminal anarchistic joy that lives outside of the restrictions of social institutions. We feel lucky to have found this little corner of freedom in the abandoned and derelict orchards from which we make our cider.
