[MD] 1491

[MarshaV]

Krimel, the Wizard, you are often quite lovely...



At 01:34 AM 4/10/2009, you wrote:
> >[Krimel]
> >I have listened to and come to understand a wide variety of world views and
> >positions from a host of sources. I have in fact looked over enough of
>these
> >to have a pretty good sense of when a position is worth considering
> >seriously...
>
>- Marsha
>Krimel, stop it!  Please stop it!   I have the flu and it hurts my
>eyes when I laugh.  Seriously, mister get some help.
>
>[Krimel]
>Here is something that has helped. Among the worldviews I have labored to
>understand are Indian cultures. I was introduced to native America
>philosophy at camp as a boy. I learned the toe-heal and watched hoop
>dancers. When I was 14, I spent the night alone in a palmetto patch carving
>an arrow and swatting mosquitoes. The next day I joined other initiates in a
>day of silent labor. This was of course a very sanitized, idealized and
>Anglicized white bread version of Lenni-Lenape philosophy and Plains
>fashion. But it spoke of respect for the earth and nature. It was about
>loyalty and craftsmanship. I learned to braid leather and the weaving of
>beads. Every summer I made a new pair of moccasins and by the time school
>started, the leather soles were wore through.
>
>In college I was deeply moved by Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart At Wounded
>Knee." I read it maybe a year or so before reading ZMM. If I were to collect
>my personal cannon of scripture I would include "Black Elk Speaks" beside
>the Tao te Ching and Ecclesiastes.
>
>Just after finishing college I wrote a piece on the Seminoles for a small
>magazine. I learned about the Seminole War which ran hot and cold from 1817
>until 1858. It was longest war in US history. At one point in the conflict
>the US military took a group of Seminole chiefs captive during a truce
>conference. Several of them later escaped by starving themselves until they
>were thin enough to slip from their prison cell, through narrow windows
>carved into the thick coquina walls of the Castillo de San Marco. (Coquina
>is formed from the shells of tiny clam-like critters. Huge blocks of
>compressed shells where cut from the beaches near St. Augustine. They were
>soft but sturdy and made an ideal fortress for the Spanish. When cannon
>balls hit coquina walls, they were absorbed like a BBs into Styrofoam.) The
>most famous of the captured chiefs was the ailing Osceola. He later died in
>a military prison.
>
>I drove across Alligator Alley one summer with my brother in a red '68 Olds.
>It's maybe 200 miles of two lane black top slashed through the Everglades.
>Miles of swamp dotted sparsely with palm-thatched huts, airboat tours and
>alligator wrestling. Those miles of sawgrass swallowed two generations of US
>troops.
>
>I love the Seminole patchwork designs. The men wore jackets and the women
>skirts striped with geometric patterns of vivid color. Women sewed the
>scrapes together on hand cranked sewing machines that fit across the bottom
>of a canoe as families poled their way between small islands in the River of
>Grass. Their ancestors eluded Andy Jackson and Zachery Taylor. Eventually a
>remnant glided the green waters in hollowed logs; living on alligator, and
>swamp cabbage. But they never surrendered.
>
>I have visited the Cherokee, Navaho, Hopi, Zuni. I have watch their dances
>and listened to their songs. I have felt the rhythm of their drums. I have
>seen the kivas of the Anasasi, visited the Emerald Mound of the
>Mississippians  and hiked to the top of Bear Butte, a natural cathedral of
>the Lakota.
>
>An ancestor was a medic at Wounded Knee. I have read the story of the Ghost
>Dance and prayed at the mass grave of Big Foot and the families he led to
>their doom.
>
>I guess it is pretentious to claim that I "understand" the worldview of
>native Americans. They are too diverse and too different from a tourist like
>me.
>
>I suppose that IS funny.
>
>But I have sought to understand them and the seeking has changed me.
>
>The book I am reading now is "1491" by Charles Mann. I am learning how truly
>shallow my understanding has been.
>
>
>
>
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Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.........
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