Togetherness. Click for full size.
Jayne, Chas and Alfie share a meal.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Random Monday.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Togetherness. Click for full size.
Jayne, Chas and Alfie share a meal.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
A so very serious juvenile Grackle. Click for full size.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
LaDonna Bravebull Allard at Sacred Stones camp along the banks of the Cannonball River. Courtesy Kat Eng.
On this day, [September 3rd] 153 years ago, my great-great-grandmother Nape Hote Win (Mary Big Moccasin) survived the bloodiest conflict between the Sioux Nations and the U.S. Army ever on North Dakota soil. An estimated 300 to 400 of our people were killed in the Inyan Ska (Whitestone) Massacre, far more than at Wounded Knee. But very few know the story.
As we struggle for our lives today against the Dakota Access pipeline, I remember her. We cannot forget our stories of survival.
Just 50 miles east of here, in 1863, nearly 4,000 Yanktonais, Isanti (Santee), and Hunkpapa gathered alongside a lake in southeastern North Dakota, near present-day Ellendale, for an intertribal buffalo hunt to prepare for winter. It was a time of celebration and ceremony—a time to pray for the coming year, meet relatives, arrange marriages, and make plans for winter camps. Many refugees from the 1862 uprising in Minnesota, mostly women and children, had been taken in as family. Mary’s father, Oyate Tawa, was one of the 38 Dah’kotah hung in Mankato, Minesota, less than a year earlier, in the largest mass execution in the country’s history. Brigadier General Alfred Sully and soldiers came to Dakota Territory looking for the Santee who had fled the uprising. This was part of a broader U.S. military expedition to promote white settlement in the eastern Dakotas and protect access to the Montana gold fields via the Missouri River.
As my great-great-grandmother Mary Big Moccasin told the story, the attack came the day after the big hunt, when spirits were high. The sun was setting and everyone was sharing an evening meal when Sully’s soldiers surrounded the camp on Whitestone Hill. In the chaos that ensued, people tied their children to their horses and dogs and fled. Mary was 9 years old. As she ran, she was shot in the hip and went down. She laid there until morning, when a soldier found her. As he loaded her into a wagon, she heard her relatives moaning and crying on the battlefield. She was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Crow Creek where she stayed until her release in 1870.
Where the Cannonball River joins the Missouri River, at the site of our camp today to stop the Dakota Access pipeline, there used to be a whirlpool that created large, spherical sandstone formations. The river’s true name is Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa, River that Makes the Sacred Stones, and we have named the site of our resistance on my family’s land the Sacred Stone Camp. The stones are not created anymore, ever since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged the mouth of the Cannonball River and flooded the area in the late 1950s as they finished the Oahe dam. They killed a portion of our sacred river.
I was a young girl when the floods came and desecrated our burial sites and Sundance grounds. Our people are in that water.
This river holds the story of my entire life.
There is much more to this story, which you can read here.
Support Sacred Stone Camp. Legal Fund Help. Support Native Youth. Sign the Petition. Sign urgent petition.
Credit: Natalie Hand.
I wanted this to be a day of no tears. Just one day. Didn’t happen.
Sacred places containing ancient burial sites, places of prayer and other significant cultural artifacts of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were destroyed on Saturday September 3 by Energy Transfer Partners, Tribal Chairman David Archambault II said.
On Friday, the Tribe filed court documents identifying the area as home to significant Native artifacts and sacred sites.
“This demolition is devastating,” Archambault said. “These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced. In one day, our sacred land has been turned into hollow ground.”
Construction crews removed topsoil across an area about 150 feet wide stretching for two miles, northwest of the confluence of the Cannon Ball and Missouri Rivers.
“I surveyed this land, and we confirmed multiple graves and specific prayer sites,” said Tim Mentz, the Standing Rock Sioux’s former tribal historic preservation officer. “Portions, and possibly complete sites, have been taken out entirely.”
[…]
“We’re days away from getting a resolution on the legal issues, and they came in on a holiday weekend and destroyed the site,” said Jan Hasselman, attorney for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “What they have done is absolutely outrageous.”
Just in, from ICTMN: What Dakota Access Destroyed: Standing Rock Former Historic Preservation Officer Explains What Was Lost [Video].
This interview was recorded on September 3, 2016. Former Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Tim Mentz explains the destruction of burial grounds and sacred sites by Dakota Access Pipeline LLC. This sacred site is what people were trying to protect when Energy Transfer Partners brought in aggressive dogs to attack unarmed people.
“This demolition is devastating,” said Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman David Archambault II. “These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings cannot be replaced. In one day, our sacred land has been turned into hollow ground.”
https://youtu.be/9EAWpI5L_Bc
We still need help, we need voices, we need people, we need all those willing to boost the signal in every way possible.
Red Warrior put out an all-call for “ALL water warriors around the world to come stand with us, inviting supporters to join us in prayer” during two Weeks of Global Solidarity Actions between September 3 and 17.
Why? Because this is what is happening in response to peaceful protesting:
Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline, or “water protectors,” were attacked with dogs, pepper spray on Saturday near the site of the pipeline route.
Video streamed live over Facebook showed Dakota Access LLC–employed security guards handling lunging dogs.
Courtesy Red Warrior Camp
Water protectors reported a violent encounter between Dakota Access LLC security guards, who allegedly used attack dogs and pepper spray against them.
Dakota Access pipeline security personnel used dogs to try and stop the water protectors in an action that was streamed live on Facebook. (Photo: Courtesy Red Warrior Camp).
In a statement released in a live-stream on Facebook, Red Warrior Camp leaders said that at about 3pm on Saturday September 3, “water protectors successfully stopped pipeline construction as it reached Hwy. 1806 through nonviolent direct action and mass assembly.”
As they did so, private security guards working for Dakota Access LLC “deployed vicious attack dogs, pepper spray and physical assault against the water protectors,” Red Warrior said. “According to the most recent update, six water protectors were bitten by dogs, a dozen or more pepper sprayed, while others were physically assaulted, including women. A helicopter was photographed flying over the area.
Full story here. Support Sacred Stone Camp. Legal Fund Help. Support Native Youth. Sign the Petition. Sign urgent petition.
Sarah Sunshine Manning has an updated story about what is happening at the camps.
Harold Frazier, Cheyenne River Sioux Chair demands answers:
According to many witnesses at the scene, neither state nor county law enforcement officials were at the construction site during the incident. It is extremely suspicious to me that law enforcement became scarce at the exact time when DAPL’s hired guns were planning to attack the water defenders. A press release recently issued by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department insinuates that the peaceful protesters were the provokers of the incident because several individuals allegedly cut a fence and entered the work site. State and local law enforcement officials keep telling the media, without proof, that the protesters are committing unlawful acts. In my opinion unleashing vicious attack dogs on women and children, and spraying dozens of unarmed people simply because they are exercising their constitutional right to assemble, is unlawful.
I am calling on all members of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to avoid traveling to or doing business in the Mandan-Bismarck area until this crisis is resolved. I fear for my people’s safety. Today’s act of terrorism shows us how desperate DAPL and the State of North Dakota government are to keep things at a status quo. I am concerned about the escalating violence against Natives in that area.
When will Governor Dalrymple step up and meet with Tribal leadership in an open, good faith effort to resolve this conflict? The key to settling this situation is in the hands of North Dakota leadership. I requested a meeting with Governor Dalrymple last week, but as of today has received no response.
Matika Wilbur caught much of this on video (complete story here):
Photo: Sara Lafleur-Vetter.
Mark Sundeen at Outside Online has a long, in-depth, excellent story about the camps and the Standing Rock protest. I’m only going to include a small amount here, you should really click over and read, it’s great!
…I parked alongside a towering teepee on the riverbank, slept in the car, and in the morning met my neighbors, a delegation of Pawnee elders who had driven 18 hours from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The degree to which I didn’t know what I was getting myself into was made clear when Chief Morgan LittleSun, 58, a warm and affable welder and teepee builder, told me that his biggest concern coming up here wasn’t cops—it was the Sioux tribes.
“Pawnee and Sioux hated each other forever,” he said. Even though the tribes had signed a peace treaty, LittleSun had seen hostility at powwows, and even fights.
I asked when the Pawnee and Sioux tribes had made this uneasy peace.
“150 years ago.”
As far as LittleSun knew, this was the first time since then that Pawnee chiefs had traveled this far into Sioux territory. While dates of Indian wars and treaties are history-test minutiae that most white people (like me) tend to forget, LittleSun was one of many Native Americans I met for whom the past was not really dead, as the saying goes, not even past. They rattled off these 19th-century events like they happened yesterday, and this gathering at Standing Rock was occasion for a new round of history making. The site was called Seven Councils Camp, indicating the first time all bands of Lakota had gathered in one place in more than a century. That afternoon, the Crow Nation marched into camp in war bonnets, waving flags, singing and whooping, bearing a peace pipe and a load of buffalo meat, offering the first real reconciliation since 1876, when Crows were scouts for Custer at Little Bighorn, where the U.S Cavalry got its ever-loving ass kicked by the Lakota. At last count, representatives from more than 120 tribal nations had arrived from as far as Hawaii, Maine, California, and Mississippi.
But when I asked LittleSun, whose tribe historically had a proud tradition of stealing horses, if he’d felt uneasy here, he shook his head emphatically, and a smile spread over his face. “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. All day long, strangers walked into his camp and offered food and firewood and asked which tribe he belonged to, and when he told them, they didn’t flinch but embraced him as a brother, an uncle, an elder. “But when I raised the Pawnee flag on a pole,” LittleSun added with a laugh, “everyone moved their horses to the other side of camp!”
This is something most people don’t understand. For many Indigenous peoples, history is not old, dusty past, something to be discarded, forgotten with maybe a trip or two back for reference. History is living, it’s a thread of continuity, of stories, of life, of connectedness. Time is all one flow, and if you drop a big ol’ dam down, you lose so much, you cut yourself off, isolating yourself. And yes, of course, in these current times, there’s a need to chop time up into tiny compartments now and then, but if you’re not careful, you do that with all time, and it’s a painful loss, even if you aren’t terribly aware of that right now.
Not too long ago, Jim C. Hines edited personal essays on representation in SF/F, and it was excellent and eye-opening. It was certainly uncomfortable at times, but that discomfort is just panicked relics of oblivious privilege trying to assert itself. I had more than a few stabs of serious guilt in reading this anthology, particularly the one about Albinism. (Having enjoyed that “evil Albino trope” more than a few times in the past, without ever thinking about actual people.) The essays in the first Invisible are:
Introduction by Alex Dally MacFarlane.
Parched, by Mark Oshiro.
Boys’s Books by Katharine Kerr.
Clicking by Susan Jane Bigelow.
The Princess Problem by Charlotte Ashley.
Autism, Representation, Success by Ada Hoffmann.
Gender in Genre by Kathryn Ryan.
‘Crazy’ About Fiction by Gabriel Cuellar.
Evil Albino Trope is Evil by Nalini Haynes.
Options by Joie Young.
Non-binary and Not Represented by Morgan Dambergs.
Representation Without Understanding by Derek Handley.
Shards of Memory by Ithiliana.
I Don’t See Color by Michi Trota.
SFF Saved My Life by Nonny Blackthorne.
If you missed Invisible the first time around, I could not possibly recommend it enough. While happily slumbering away under my rock, I was unaware that Invisible 2 had been put together and published. That’s been remedied, and like the 1st, this is excellent reading. As Jim C. Hines notes in the afterword, “They help us to become better readers, better writers, and better human beings.”
So many of these essays resonated, and others were serious wake up calls to stop being so bloody blinkered. Like the first anthology, this one is littered with highlights, bookmarks, and notes. Too Niche, by Lauren Jankowski about the complete invisibility of asexual people in SF/F was one of those that was a good smack on the head. In her essay, she mentions that Stephen Moffat declared Sherlock Holmes can’t be asexual because he’s too interesting. That left me spluttering and outraged. That’s an incredibly wrong, stupid, thoughtless, and insulting thing to say. Other essays which really hit home were Breaking Mirrors, Fat Chicks in SFF, Not Your Mystical Indian, Exponentially Hoping, and Colonialism, Land, and Speculative Fiction: An Indigenous Perspective.
The Essays in Invisible 2 are:
Introduction by Aliette de Bodard.
Breaking Mirrors by Diana M. Pho
I’m Not Broken by Annalee Flower Horne.
Next Year in Jerusalem by Gabrielle Harbowy.
I am Not Hispanic, I am Puerto Rican, by Isabel Schechter.
No More Dried Up Spinsters by Nancy Jane Moore.
False Expectations by Matthew Thyer.
Text, Subtext, and Pieced-Together Lives by Angelia Sparrow.
Parenting as a Fan of Color by Kat Tanaka Okopnik.
Alien of Extraordinary Ability? by Bogi Takács.
Accidental Representation by Chrysoula Tzavelas.
Discovering the Other by John Hartness.
Lost in the Margins by Sarah Chorn.
Too Niche by Lauen Jankowski.
Fat Chicks in SFF by Alis Franklin.
Not Your Mystical Indian by Jessica McDonald.
Exponentially Hoping by Merc Rustad.
Colonialism, Land, and Speculative Fiction: An Indigenous Perspective by Ambelin Kwaymullina.
Nobody’s Sidekick: Intersectionality in Protagonists by SL Huang.
The Danger of the False Narrative by LaShawn Wanak.
Both these anthologies are excellent, if often uncomfortable, reading. Seriously recommended if you haven’t read them.
Chicago-based photographer Reuben Wu recently photographed the Nevada SolarReserve, a grouping over 10,000 mirrors which power nearly 75,000 homes during its peak season. Wu photographed the mass of reflective panels during nightfall, allowing the brilliant colors of the sunset to be doubled into the shining surfaces below. Wu likens the energy facility to a topographic ocean, considering it one of the greatest land art installations ever built.
Stunning photos, and it’s always good to see alternate energy in the works, but I’d like a lot more information about these, so I’ll do some digging about. In the meantime, there are more of Reuben Wu’s photo’s at Colossal Art, and they are stunning!
© Jimmy Nelson.
How often do you learn a valuable lesson from pissing yourself drunk, besides, “never drink that much again?” While traveling with a Central Mongolian tribe, photographer Jimmy Nelson learned lessons both in reindeer psychology and humor after downing too much vodka and wetting his tent. As the story goes, he woke up to reindeer charging into his bed (apparently they love human urine). Nelson tells this and more stories, accompanied by his majestic portraits of the customs and trappings of indigenous peoples from accross the world, in a new video from the Cooperative of Photography. Like Aesop’s fables, Nelson’s anecdotes have lessons touching on knowledge, vulnerability, and pride. Young photographers can also learn a lot about how to interact with subjects respectfully and purposefully.
© Jimmy Nelson.
© Jimmy Nelson.
Jimmy Nelson currently has a show at Gallery KNOKKE through September 18. See more of his work on his website. Visit the Cooperative of Photography for more tips, tricks, and interviews with photographers.
Via The Creators Project, where there are more photos.
Robert Geronimo, a descendant of Geronimo, works at the Inn of the Mountain Gods, the tribe’s resort and casino in Mescalero, New Mexico. He became aware of his famous ancestor when he was in kindergarten. Photo by Kerri Cottle.
Meet the family of Geronimo:
Their Apache ancestors were chased, hunted and herded into history. Shaped by decades of war, Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio, Lozen and Mangas Coloradas (and those they ran with) cultivated a genius for survival so their descendants could live on.
But live on, how? By letting the ancestral legacy of greatness and distinction define them, or by wearing the identity lightly? For the living descendants of the Geronimo family of Mescalero, New Mexico, the answer is both.
The first time Robert Geronimo became aware of his famous ancestor was in kindergarten.
“A kid comes up to me and says ‘I want to beat up a Geronimo.’ I said ‘I haven’t done anything to you, you haven’t done anything to me.’ The kid threw a punch and I returned it,” he explained, “and we both ended up in the principal’s office.”
From then on his grandparents taught him to read between the lines of accounts of his great-grandfather as a blood-thirsty killing machine, or even as a “chief” leading his people.
You can read more about the Geronimo family here.
Hazel Spottedbird, seen here with her husband Tommy, is a descendant of Cochise. (Photo by Kerri Cottle).
Meet the descendants of Cochise:
Their Apache ancestors were chased, hunted and herded into history. Shaped by decades of war, Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio, Lozen and Mangas Coloradas (and those they ran with) cultivated a genius for survival so their descendants could live on.
Cochise (c. 1805 – June 8, 1874) was a reluctant Apache warrior, but a persistent one who survived the Battle of Apache Pass to fight on another decade. His descendants, who live on reservation lands granted after the Indian Wars in Mescalero, New Mexico, are inheritors of that doggedness. By vocation and avocation they continue their ancestor’s fight for Apache survival.
[…]
Hazel Spottedbird’s grandfather Christian Naiche Jr., grandson to Cochise, was born a prisoner of war and lived the first 13 years of his life in the Apache prison camps of the Southeast.
“Grandpa didn’t say a whole lot to us about his early life as a child prisoner, because we were still young ourselves,” Hazel explained. But he was among those Apache elders who provided oral histories to Eve Ball, whose papers are archived in the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department at the University of Texas in El Paso.
“I am a very proud Chiricahua Apache because of those names Naiche and Cochise,” she declared. “My grandpa lived without fear, my mother also; she would not be told what to do, she had her own mind. I feel like I’m like that now, out of my three sisters I’m the one who’s out there: I dance, participate, I’m not afraid.”
You can read more about the family of Cochise here.
A lot of people make jokes about famous, well known Indians. Pretty much everyone has heard Geronimo’s name used as an adjective and an exclamation. What people don’t realize, or think about, is that these family lines are alive and well, and their ancestors are much loved, in the same way of people everywhere, who love grandparents and great grandparents. So, the next time you might think about joking in that manner, or hear someone else doing it, give a gentle reminder to yourself or another, that these were people, and they still have family who don’t think they are jokes. Why hurt people when you don’t need to, yeah?
No facepalm today. No eyerolls. No head shaking, no crying, no despair, no sense of hopelessness. I need healing, and it’s days away until the camps and wacipi. So, just for today, I’m going to pretend that all people are good, and all people are as connected to all as they should be. Way back when these photos were just taken, I uploaded some to a photo forum I used to frequent. I had a person take me to task over the 7th photo, because the dancer “ruined the moment and atmosphere completely” by wearing NBA socks. I never noticed until that moment, being captivated by the young man’s dancing, which was beautiful. Public perception, it really, really has to change. Clickety for full size.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Whooooosh. Female Black-headed Grosbeak. Click for full size.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor is one of the best things I have read in quite a while, and I’ve read a number of very good books. Ms. Okorafor’s books resonate with me in a way that many other wonderful books don’t. That’s because these works have an Indigenous mindset and outlook. They are woven. And connected. Binti not only concerns itself with the main character’s decision to leave a finely woven net of family, tradition, and the earth, there’s the contentiousness of making that decision. It not only concerns itself with aliens who aren’t very happy with humans. It concerns the thoughtlessness which drives colonial actions, even academic actions, and the consequences of such thoughtlessness. Through all of this, there are wonders, questions, and harmony. At the end, I found myself wanting more of Binti’s story, and it was with absolute joy I found out there will be another novella, early in ‘017.
In this, Binti and Okwu travel to Earth. I can’t even say how very much I look forward to more of Binti’s story, and Okwu’s too. You can explore more at nnedi.com.