Lakota Woman

Mary Crow Dog, later Mary Brave Bird, a half-blood native American woman, put her name on a book published in 1990. She was 37 at the time. I just finished reading this book.

Mary is from my own generation. We grew up at the same time, in the same country, but we we grew up in very different worlds.

It is one thing to look at history the way it really happened in previous generations. I look at my own family's history back in the 19th century. I see some very different times, and different events. But the essential way my ancestors lived was not so different from my life today.

Looking back at the lives of Mary's ancestors, it is rather different from mine. They were hunters, gatherers, people of the earth, people living with the earth. Their way of living, their social conventions, their physical and spiritual presence were of a separate reality. They lived this way from antiquity, back before recorded time here in this country, this land. They developed a culture rich in wisdom, strong in body and soul. Religious leaders and doctors were one in the same, medicine men. The mind, the body, the spirit were all one. They could have gone on forever, as long as the Sun god keeps the sun where it is.

Then the white man came. Native Americans were here, but their footprints were soft. Nonetheless, the natives were in the way of the white man. The natives ways were strange, primitive, savage, not the way the white man knew was best. So it began, the long, brutal, bloody, cruel rolling of the white man's wheel across the native landscape. It became official U.S. government policy to destroy native American culture. It moved across the continent like a glacier, crushing the natives, pushing them out. It dragged on for hundreds of years.

The modern white man might think all this ended with Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. The history books seemed to stop there. But it did not stop at all. It continued, and it continued with a vengeance. It is the American holocaust, the deliberate, organized effort of one culture to crush another. I find it almost unbelievable that while I was growing up in benign suburbia, Mary's people were subject to corporal punishment for speaking their own language. The opprobrious prairie schools of the 19th century were still in operation. Mary's people were being beaten, jailed, murdered for the crime of being a native. Incredibly, Mary's life was also little different from her more recent ancestors.

As long as we see others as others, we will never be at peace. We would not treat our family this way. But we are related. I perhaps slightly closer than some, with an ancestor woman coming from the Delaware group of natives. Only a drop in the ocean of blood, but as with all water, Mitakuye Oyasin, we are all related.

New Employment Soon

Yesterday was a beautiful day - sunny, warm, light breeze, a classic day in May. We went to the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain and strolled amongst the lilacs... ah yes, the lilacs, of blossoms bright and fragrances sweet, many hued from white and pink and lavender and violet and burgundy, climbing up the steep grassy hill, a verdant knoll with magical properties, a landscape of dreams...

It seems an act of absolute crassness to sully this halcyon setting by even carrying a cell phone, but being a victim (or should I say participant?) of this crass society of getting and spending, laying waste our powers, I nonetheless carried this rude device. And there, amidst the lilacs and sunshine, it brought me some news. Our crass society wants me back in active mode. I have a job offer.

So once again I will be journeying from the distant hills to the urban cityscape. Once again to the streets and brick buildings, the rails and bridges, the rumble and the roar. To Boston.

World News

It appears my last post was tax day, 15 April. And now it be the 9th of May, so soon? I have been negligent of this space, such that I did not see the kindly corrections to my attempt at simple French until today. Ah well, to France I must travel and stay for a spell if I am to learn the language to any useful degree. Here it seems unlikely to progress very well, provincial vacuum that we inhabit.

Speaking of provincial vacuums, misery around the world continues apace. The good people of Lebanon seem to find it dashed hard to be good to each other - being fellow countrymen means nothing to the goons with guns; does the quality of life in their country matter nothing to them? When you have various Christian sects, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Druze and others all mixed together and living relatively peacefully for 20 years, why set fire to your own house?

In southeast Asia, the rulers of Myanmar (Burma) would rather preside over a vast graveyard than to behave like anything resembling humans - these guys are like the Daleks from Dr. Who; it would be funny if it weren't so painfully tragic. What is the point in being such ruthless bastards? What in hell are they afraid of? That they might not go down in history as execrable pigs?

And in Africa, what is going on in Zimbabwe? The opposition leads in the vote, but evidently Mugabe admires the statesmanship of Idi Amin and is sending armed thugs around the country to terrorize anyone who just maybe voted for the opposition. What to do when you are in danger of losing the election? Break some bones. Burn some houses. Kill some people. Democracy in action.

And China sent a shipload of weapons to Mugabe last month while the election was sinking into chaos. China had to recall the shipment after neighboring countries refused to unload it. China also has close ties with Sudan, another international pariah. Are the Chinese leaders being willfully blind? Do they have any clue what they are doing?

As Margaret Atwood observed, it is dangerous to read newspapers.