Editorial: Our Roots Run Deep, Yet San Marcos Has Nothing In Writing For True Protection Of Indigenous Artifacts

Professor Lisa Marie Coppoletta |

The Holy Land is everywhere” as stated by Black Elk. San Marcos truly is sacred ground.

The Tour San Marcos website states,

Our Roots Run Deep: San Marcos has been a favorite destination for more than 12,000 years! An underwater archeological dig in Spring Lake at the Headwaters of the San Marcos River uncovered Indian artifacts dating back over 12,000 years to the Clovis Indians, the oldest known inhabitants of the western hemisphere. This is reportedly the longest continuously inhabited site in North America, according to underwater archeologist Dr. Joel Shiner.”

Our community is the oldest neighborhood in the world, and our elected officials on the San Marcos City Council have had ample time to implement in writing true protection for Native American human remains and cultural artifacts in our Land Development Code. 

According to the City hall website,

The City of San Marcos adopted a new Development Code on April 17, 2018. This new development code is the result of the Code SMTX process. Code SMTX was a four-year community collaboration that has provided San Marcos with a better tool kit for managing growth that is in line with Vision San Marcos Comprehensive Plan.”

The New Urbanists are touting the San Marcos Land Development Code as a victory.

A true feather in our elected officials’ cap would be to work collaboratively with Texas State University and have Native American human remains and cultural artifacts carefully removed for preservation.

They could make them available to the tribes out of respect and the public for increased empathy and understanding. Cultural bias and hate can only be ameliorated through education and dialogue. 

The only stomp dancing our current city council is engaged in is shuffling around ultra left-wing ideological stances on the city council agendas to the detriment of featuring social justice issues that impact San Marcos as a whole.

This City Council is tooting their own bells and capturing for their own political capital years of hard work of Native American’s in our community. The city council chants and war cries of social justice have fallen flat.

They have refused to produce solid work on flood mitigation, gentrification, and skyrocketing utility and property tax rates.

The only flatbread our dais is dishing out is cash to contractors for projects resulting in the loss of Native American culture forever. 

This city council sits upon their zoom thrones, with Mark Rockeymoore clearly chatting to colleagues during the debates and while conducting public policy, while city workers are in full swing working up at city hall. 

Max is on social media cop-hating vs. getting the budget under control. Melissa is the biggest disappointment of all and is flying with the buzzards.

Our elected officials beat drums of their own pet project initiatives, slapping each other on the back on social media. Guess what?

This year’s “The Indigenous People’s Day” is a faux celebration. It is self-serving and a hoax. While performances and poetry reading may stir the heart, our community deserves actions not dancing around the Land Development Code. 

Our community deserves braves fighting in battle on the dais ensuring oversight for Mother Earth’s gifts when it comes to road projects.

Our elected officials are emblazoned with peacock feathers, and many of us had high hopes they would be earning eagle feathers soaring to new heights of ecological protection. 

How many trees on Hopkins Street of heritage significance are being butchered for the overlay project with the incense Blessing of tree expert Kelly A. Ebby on city staff? How many trees will be outright cut down in Blanco Gardens for an alley project catching neighbors by surprise?

The artifact found in this clip was given to Dr. Mario Garza, Miakan-Garza Band

How many toxins will be spewed into the air, choking the air spirits and making the water spirits sick as they roll out for New Urbanism agendas into the storm drains?

Your elected officials promised me they would implement solutions. Our leadership is not protecting the habitat of our endangered species. Instead, as the idiom states their leadership is “for the birds” as in worthless and undesirable. 

On the San Marcos River, the CM Allen Parkway Reconstruction Project is daily destroying Native American cultural treasures on this leftie city council’s watch.

Our city council does not have an eagle eye with oversight and proactive measures in place in Code SMTX. Instead, they are as quiet as the snake slithering from one issue to another. They refuse to put teeth into the Land Development Code.

A promise Lisa Prewitt and Melissa Derrick made to me when I volunteered for their campaigns for elected office was the protection of Native American human remains and cultural artifacts.

Prewitt has placed pipelines of pet projects through people’s yards to propel her New Urbanism ideology and does not see the hypocrisy of her own social media posts.  

Desecration of human remains is a moral crime regardless of one’s faith. Destruction of cultural artifacts crushed and hauled off for new urbanism programs is history gone forever.

When will the City Council place oversight on Capital Improvement Projects (CIP), TxDot road projects, and GAP Complete Streets Programs? They have had years to complete this work, in which citizens such as myself raised this issue on countless occasions during the writing of the Land Development Code.

Code SMTX has been an abysmal failure in its rollout. Developers are held to higher standards for Heritage Tree protection while city bureaucrats and their contractors butcher trees, crush artifacts, and allow road work toxins to roll into the storm drains. 

Helen Keller once stated, “As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.” 

I wonder what the birds are thinking about all the Heritage Live Oaks that are being butchered constantly for road “improvement” projects? 

Many are upset about all the trees to be cut down for the Blanco Gardens alleyways project.

Melissa Derrick posted on Facebook, in reactive proverbial damage control to assure residents their voices are heard. This is not the case.

City staff is still showing up unannounced requesting residents to sign paperwork with no opportunity to review said documents with their attorneys. Even sidewalk projects after my fight, now require a sixty-day notification to the landowner.

This was not the case when the letters were sent out to Blanco Gardens residents last month. If the project is on hold, massive amounts of city staff time have been wasted with payroll expenditures.

If the project is not on hold, elected officials are giving inaccurate information. When city staff show up in someone’s yard and can be heard from the kitchen, “oh this shit has to be moved,” have the Blanco Gardens not endured enough from City Hall? 

Of course, the almost decade long project in Victory Gardens is going at the pace of the Tortoise.

And Rockeymoore is trying so hard to parley this as a campaign issue, and those in-the-know know he is just like the beaver with his busy tail selfishly building walls between people in this community for his own personal gain.

It’s clear he does not give a damn.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in editorials, opinions, commentaries, or LTTE are not necessarily those of Corridor News or staff. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

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5 Comments

  1. “One poor little arrow head got crushed.” — Let me be clear. There are ZERO indigenous people to the Americas. We are all descendants of immigrants. Whether you came from the east on a boat or followed herds over a land bridge from the west. Your ancestors came from somewhere else. We are an invasive species.

    Moreover, I feel like our ancestors would be laughing at us right now. We cannot afford to let progress be halted because someone found a few random, not readily identifiable, crushed bones and broken arrowheads. These were disposable tools. We know how these people lived. This search for “artifacts” isn’t adding to our knowledge. It feels more like planted evidence designed to block a project they don’t like. I’d say that belief is justified by the overall tone of the editorial.

  2. Mr. Holdman:

    There is all the difference between progress which in fact is progressive, and progress which is intended to delay the outcome of progress essential to a result. If for purposes of faulting research into our indigenous Tonkawa indians who have been documented living here long before arrival of the mere anglo you thus now label them “disposable”, may I remind you that were it not for them, you would not have corn today, okay?

    Typically, white supremacy to this day alleges “historical” evidence of cannibalism attributed to the Tonkawa for obvious reasons of racism and fear of the unknown. As such, our President Denise Trauth has done her best at preventing this culture’s burial-by-racism. In the event you would care to pick up a shovel and join us I would be glad to help your lack of understanding which delays the outcome of progress essential to your own personal result of plasticity in the discourse and appreciation of internationalism and antiracism, by means of the Statement on Race provided by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

    1. No thank you. I’m more interested in understanding why, how, and the impacts of my family’s forced migration west on behalf of Andrew Jackson. — But all means, go collect your arrowheads. I’m sure pre-K kiddies love it.

      *** And FYSA, it looks like corn was first cultivated in central America. But that is really kind of like saying Benjamin Franklin invented electricity or someone invented the wheel. Nope. They just recognized what was already there.

    2. And since you brought it up… Here is the entire Encyclopedia Britannica article on the Tonkawa indian tribe. I don’t see anything about corn or any other type of cultivation. They probably did it, but it doesn’t appear they were leaders in that area.

      “North American Indian tribe of what is now south-central Texas. Their language is considered by some to belong to the Coahuiltecan family and by others to be a distinct linguistic stock in the Macro-Algonquian phylum. Satellite groups of the Tonkawa included the Ervipiame, Mayeye, and Yojuane.

      Before colonization, the Tonkawa were nomadic bison hunters; their mobile villages of tepees were dispersed across the southern Plains landscape. They were notable warriors, whose offensive weapons included bows, arrows, and spears. In battle they wore leather jackets and caps decorated with horns and brilliant plumage. At one time or another the Tonkawa fought most of their neighbours, from the Apache to the Caddo.

      After 1770, when their relations with the Spanish became friendly, the Tonkawa obtained firearms in exchange for tallow, deerskins, and buffalo robes. For a time they also had friendly relations with the Texans. In 1858 they were employed as scouts against the Comanche and Wichita. In 1859 the Tonkawa were removed from the Brazos River reservation to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The Tonkawa population of perhaps 1,500 at the time of their first European contact (1691) decreased as a result of warfare and disease; Tonkawa descendants numbered more than 300 in the early 21st century.”

      1. wooooaaa hard to starboard there holman, as old hickory would say, jus caus onelittle egohead gets crushed in the passing is no reason to be spillin the firewater

        whites of their eyes an i’ll drink to that ….. where is it ?

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