Knowings in my bones...(#4)

In the context of a concerted (understatement) effort on the part of evangelical and roamin catholic christians (amongst others) to spread the ideology and culture of christianity to every continent and nation and all the peoples of the world - and have them summarily accept that missionary position, it is more than reasonable to deeply and constantly question the conditions, process and effects of that imperial proposition, along with vehemently resisting the assumptive necessity of same, particularly with respect to the presence of the christian missionary and evangelical message 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 366 days a year on all platforms and modes of media communications, through myriad social and political channels and with the tacit support of the dominant culture giving it validation, moral and financial support to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

Translation:
Don't question people for challenging missionaries and evangelizers who have way more money and time to push their shaky, narrow, privileged message on the whole world.

reply to EWTN “Women of Grace” blog: Is Paranormal State TV for Real?

EWTN “Women of Grace” blog: Is Paranormal State TV for Real?

Vun, the Spirit of Fire, is the portal to the Ancestors
in the Dagara tradition of West Africa.

http://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=14401

My reply to their post  is as follows- “waiting for moderation” (ok fine, it is more than the one paragraph that they suggest, but then there were more than one in the accepted comment on the page....Susan Brinkman can come talk to us here if the WOG blog can’t handle the bandwidth...I’d love to continue the discussion of such things with her and any others so interested and inclined, but I progress):

I have also noticed the great proclivity for drama to be a constant creation in shows such as these, as it is in most, if not all (sur)reallity tv.  This is the first mistake of shows like this.  The connection to human spirits who have passed over can be unsettling as those spirits can be truly unsettled and frustrated and in our midst, but the melodrama around it is not helpful to understanding out traditional responses to assisting those spirits, our Ancestors in their successful passage to the realm of the Ancestors.  Thank you for pointing out one of the fundamental problems with these types of programs in general.

There are, though, problems with the above characterization of these spiritual dynamics:

"First, let me say that I believe homes can be haunted and that spirits can toss around frying pans in the middle of the night. But I don’t believe that these events are due to the behavior of the deceased owner of the house who got lost somewhere between here and eternity and is roaming the halls looking for peace. This is pure theater. Disembodied souls don’t have voices that can be recorded on EVP meters, not only because their voiceboxes have long ago rotted in the grave, but because our God, who loves us beyond our comprehension, doesn’t let any of his beloved creatures “get lost” on the way to eternity."

If we take spiritual energy as purely that (and we know the implications are deep here), we know that energy is conserved, transformed, not deleted or destroyed.  Why then is it impossible to conceive that that human energetic imprint or spirit can not then have a corporeal effect, still, on the potential energy in the movement of objects or emotions or human sensation?  It only makes logical, rational sense that that would be entirely possible, in addition to the multiplicity of occurrences outside of televisual narratives that confirm these dynamics, especially in traditional and indigenous  contexts (even modern ones where people have not shut down their full range of human energetic awareness) where many thousands of years of communal energetic learning, awareness and experience give grounding to such experiences in a functional and integrated way.  This is why so many, many indigenous cultures have traditions, rituals and ceremonies for engaging and reconciling energies and spiritual dynamics in the Ancestral continuum.  Malidoma Some' asserts eloquently in "Healing Wisdom of Africa" that we are in such grave straits in the modern world precisely because we have forgotten and neglected (and been terrorized away from) our Ancestral relationships.  

In addition, the multi-dimensionality of the universe must be taken into consideration when we speak of being able to hear spirits or Ancestors, those that have died.  Of course they don't have voice-boxes.  That's a simplistic argument, but it is wholly dismissive of energetic reality to suggest that we are limited to the creation of sound pressure only in the normal physiological sense.  This is why we call it SUPERnatural or metaphysical!  Nor should we assume that our human ability to hear is only limited to the ear.  Again, that is simplistic in a world that largely agrees that we can see with the mind's eye.  The learned (and coerced) limitations that many of us acknowledge are exactly why we dismiss Ancestral energetic dynamics in the face of "rational", "scientific" objectivism.  It is pure folly and ignorance to relegate ourselves to "Avatar" science, thinking based upon the requirement to have energetic dynamics show up on meters or machines to be real or reliable.  Clearly, though, study and experience shows that this can happen, but it is not the only way that these dynamics can be substantiated.  I am sure there are countless Roman Catholics who can speak to the presence of their deceased loved ones in their midst with great assuredness and clarity.

The other issue that can and must be engaged here is that so many cultures do have the experience and awareness of souls being "lost" if the correct energetic work is not done or if our relationships to them are broken or out of balance.  The cultural perspective from which the Roman Catholic viewpoint is derived is not the only valid one on the earth.  To wholly dismiss the tens of thousands of years old (and beyond) cultural perspectives, wisdom, experience and knowledge of indigenous peoples would be clearly arrogant and ethnocentric at best.  That primary human legacy cannot be undone with the writings of one particular culture, just as the rantings of the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees did not necessarily make Jesus's statements and perspectives wrong.

We are on the right track with critiquing television programs that misappropriate and distort spiritual phenomena, but we are gravely mistaken when we provide narrow and simplistically dismissive filtered reads to time-proven, functional and expansive human cultural narratives.

[reposted also on my facebook page]

Indigenous People Fighting Back Against the 2010 Olympics

Reprinted from the facebook page of the Olympic Resistance Network:

The 2010 Winter Olympics will take place on unceded indigenous land from February 12-28, 2010. The effects of the upcoming Winter Games have already manifested themselves- with the expansion of sport tourism and resource extraction on indigenous lands; increasing homelessness and gentrification of poor neighbourhoods; increasing privatization of public services; union busting through imposed contracts and exploitative conditions especially for migrant labour; the fortification of the national security and military apparatus; ballooning public spending and public debt; and unprecedented destruction of the environment.

The Olympic Resistance Network is primarily based in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories and exists as a space to coordinate anti-2010 Olympics efforts. In doing so, we act in solidarity with other communities across 'BC' - particularly indigenous communities who have been defending their land against the onslaught of the Olympics since the bid itself. Our organizing is largely being done under the slogan of "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land," while creating an opportunity for all anti-capitalist, indigenous, anti-poverty, labour, migrant justice, environmental justice, anti-war, and anti-colonial activists to come together to confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents.

In addition to building ongoing educational and resistance efforts, we are organizing towards an anti-2010 convergence based on the call for an international boycott by native warriors - particularly at the Indigenous Peoples Gathering in Senora, Mexico in October 2007. We hope to see you all in 2010 to demonstrate our indignation and resistance!

ORN website (under construction): http://olympicresistance.net/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While so many are reveling in the legacy of what we perceive to be the Olympics, there is a courageous group of indigenous and non-indigenous activists, anti-capitalist/colonialist resisters and supportive people raising voices and serious questions about the socio-political and cultural effects of that legacy. There is a powerful statement being made, largely outside of mainstream media sources, that is informative on the capitalist, expansionist, globalizationalist, neo/settler-colonialist dynamic that underlies the presence of the Olympics in Vancouver and beyond this month.

The Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) and the Tent City residents have come under great pressure from the Vancouver Police and other authoritative forces during their occupation of the area near the olympic village. In addition, Democracy Now!, through Free Speech TV, has reported that numerous independent journalists deemed by the Vancouver and Canadian government to be supportive of the ORN and Tent City have been stopped at the Canadian/USAmerican border, detained and sometimes had their equipment seized. Amy Goodman, internationally know and respected anchor for Democracy Now!, was even detained and mistreated at the border. On one of the recent Democracy Now! broadcasts, a Canadian resident being interviewed on the show apologized on behalf of the government, moreso out of personal solidarity with Goodman, the journalists and the protestors than as any sort of official representative of the Canadian government.

Exacerbating the popular confusion around this issue of sport and indigenous sovereignty/human rights and justice, the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the Roman Catholic cable tv channel reported in their "Rome Reports" program that the Pope had sent a letter to the archbishop of Vancouver stating, "sports can make an effective contribution to peaceful understanding between peoples and to establishing the new civilization of love." Two things become clear in the light of the ORN's stance against the presence of the olympics. One is that the pope and all of his minions are ignorant of the olympic impact on human life and welfare in Vancouver. That might not be so surprising when we understand how closely related to capitalist and colonialist expansion the concomitant expansion of Roman Catholicism (in particular) and christianity (in general) is. Secondly, the pope and his vatican crew may be well aware of the effect of the olympics on the indigenous and poor populations in and around Vancouver. This would be even less surprising since the vatican has a history of intolerance and outright disrespect toward indigenous people. It is one of the political structures that has been forcibly ripping indigenous people from their lands and cultures all over the world, raping, pillage and killing indigenous people, physically, emotionally and spiritually. It clearly marks the vatican as, at the very least, a disingenuous socially retrograde structure. At worst, the vatican has a program of aiding and abetting the disintegrations of indigenous life and the spiritual energetics systems that indigeny has brought such deep foundation to around the globe over the last few million years. Equally as alarming, that the vatican has come out in support of the olympics' negative existence in Vancouver may help to obfuscate the populace's ability to see the necessity of supporting the Olympic Resistance Network and the indigenous people that are being actively and openly oppressed by the olympics, the Canadian government and other colonialist/capitalist structures (like the vatican).

Burning at the Crossroads: Indigenous Tradition Burning in the Fires of Roman Catholicism

It is with great regret, sorrow and abject anger that I present this photo to you today. It was taken at the Cultural Survival Bazaar at the Prudential Center mall in Boston on December 19, 2009.

Cultural Survival is an activist advocacy organization based in Cambridge, MA that provides multi-level support through numerous programs to and with indigenous people around the world. As stated in Cultural Survival’s materials:

“Through our programs and campaigns we help them get the knowledge, advocacy tools, and strategic partnerships they need to protect their rights. When their governments don’t respond, we partner with them to bring their cases to international commissions and courts, and we involve the public and policy makers in advocating for their rights.”

Cultural Survival is one of the few organizations, and seemingly one of the best, providing functional and substantial ways for indigenous people to maintain, sustain and grow their cultural practices, lifeways and traditions in a world growing more hostile to them and the environments they live in. The bazaars are important fundraising opportunities for the organization and the vendors, which include indigenous people and non-indigenous people who represent indigenous organizations, groups and cultures. The bazaars are powerful in bringing not only the material culture of indigenous people worldwide into modern society, but also the idea of indigeny and the issues that surround and often engulf these cultures and people in conflict and struggle.

“Before the day is over, an Indigenous person will be killed or displaced, simply because he or she has a different culture. Before the month is over, an Indigenous homeland will be clear-cut, strip-mined, or flooded by a dam. Before the year is over, dozens of Indigenous languages will disappear forever, taking with them unique worldviews and a priceless piece of human diversity.” (Cultural Survival document)

It is within my deep desire to validate and support and live the indigenous idea and cultural mandate that my renewed anger and sorrow finds foundation. It was at the table of a Congolese vendor and his son that I found the statue depicted in the accompanying photograph.



A note was stuck to the statue with tape, written in red magic marker and read:

“Congo, the last Sakata mask (original) 100 years old”



Keenly, palpably aware of the tenuous hold many indigenous people and indigenous traditions have on this physical earth, I inquired as to the veracity of the note’s message. Through our struggle through multiple levels of translation of meaning, mundane and esoteric, it was stated that this was in fact the last statue of it’s sort surviving in that particular Sakata village. A chief of the Sakata had given it to the vendor. The vendor’s report implied that the chief did so in some moment of desperation. I inquired more deeply as to how this could be and why. The vendor’s explanation, moistened with generous, seemingly nervous smiles, hit me hard in a place deeper than my heart was used to going, but somehow knew the way.

All of the other remaining statues had been thrown into a fire by the Sakata at the insistence of a roman catholic missionary priest. Though I didn’t ask him details on the timing of this crime, it came across as having been a recent atrocity. It might be more interesting and melodramatic to say my mind reeled with a montage of emotional cinematic images of white hunters and jungles and lions and village women clutching wide-eyed children and subservient African men dutifully acquiescing to the European “bwana”, watching their lands and lives shrink in the wake of inevitable colonial expansion. This would have been all-too-easy given the persistent Follywood depiction of the christian, capitalist Europeans vs. indigenous relationship. No tender, yet somber, bitter sugarplum visions danced in my head. This was much too sobering an occurrence for the license of culturally irresponsible film-making as this was no mere movie. It was all too real.

The vendor’s story bored a narrow, but deep hole into my being, full of a painful dual resignation. Not only had the long documented history of roman catholic and christian barbarism toward indigenous people played itself out on its bloody, cruel, rationalized stage, but a late show act was still being enacted just under our own modern-day noses, too close to relegate it into antiquated dead memoriam or for comfort.

My throat closed as my head spun down from a reflexive testosterone drive to summarily “fix it” to a back-bent and sullen realization that any response I could muster at that moment could be lost in pressured, but measured emotional translation. His desire to sell the statue, hopefully to a museum, was no consolation to the ages-old legacy of the cross and sword binary that built itself so effectively on the dead bodies and disintegrated cultures of people who had welcomed these armed and collared bandits into their homelands and homes. I asked him how much he would sell it for, hoping that his number would have something to do with what lay inside my wallet. maybe I could go as high as half my bank account. Math didn’t matter here. Maybe he was fishing, car dealer style, as he quoted $800, $200 less than what he finally, really wanted for this priceless item, lone harbinger of a legacy that no dollar amount should ever have been allowed to define.

But this simple and enraging story had another twist, another level of destructive force to a culture already beset by arrogant religious charlatans. The vendor informed me, upon further inquiry, that this mask, these statues, held within them the energy, the power to support women in the birth process. The roman catholic christian tradition, “pro-lifers” by decree if not by definition, had convinced the Sakata to disempower this fundamental life process by taking away their spiritual technologies, their tools for focusing nurturance on this important moment in the development of the bond between mother and child, between the living and the newly alive. It seemed a fitting companion, though, to their legacy of rape of African women at the hands, loins and minds of men who claimed to be proudly, if not arrogantly, European and likewise christian, having long since largely submerged their own indigenous traditions under the philosophical contradiction of christian political and cultural structures. The council of Nicea was friend to no one.

After recovering initially from the shock of this man’s story, translated to me in a scarily matter-of-fact way, it became clear that I might be relegated to fighting this backward, inhuman practice far after the commission of the crime, far outpaced by the runaway train of missiological opportunism.

Taking a snapshot with a cheap camera barely felt like a fitting tribute to an icon of a powerful tradition of feminine spirit and healing, but it was what I had. The very thought of this spirocide brought me near tears in the following days and it was then that certain images started to rise in my consciousness. They were, again, simple and were instructive.

There was another bonfire, bigger, hotter, in the same place as the one that was set in that Sakata village to burn the hearts and souls and spirits of the Sakata to their core, deep in the bowels of a European-created hell. This fire, though, was heaped up with christian crosses, the kind that I and my sisters had on our walls above our beds above our own African heads for so many of our childhood years. They were the crosses that had the candles inside the with the little bottle to hold holy water so a priest could perform the last rites on you - on your death bed. I remembered they had cheap metal figures of Jesus, plated with some cheap yellowish metal to make it look nice. I remembered the ominous nature of these crosses as they hung over our beds, that they represented something threatening, foreshadowing an occurrence that I didn’t want to happen. The bonfire was heaped high with these crosses, hundreds of them, maybe more.

And I pondered the lesson of that image, that bonfire that would destroy as fire destroys, that bonfire that cleanses as fire cleanses, that bonfire that consumes as fire consumes, also pondering the blessing of fire, the baptism by it, the renewed, liberated life of a people destroying the process of their own destruction. I gazed into that fire and watched the piles of crosses, engulfed in the ancestral flame and felt the stark reprisal, the fear, the anger, the terror, the trauma of all those who would hold those crosses near to their heaving hearts. I could feel their indignant disdain trying - trying - to look down on me for the crime of having conjured up such an unconscionable scene.

And I pondered then, if it were even possible that these same christians, these same roman catholics, could imagine then even an iota of the psychic horror that the leaders and followers of their politico-religious tradition had meted out upon African people all over the continent, meted out upon Asian people from South Sea islands to inland deserts, had meted out upon the American people of Turtle Island and the continent to the south. I wondered if their bible held within it the gift of insight and clarity to be able to see inside, feel inside, be inside the hearts, minds and spirits of children, women and men that didn’t look or act like them, inside the lives, homes, villages, towns and cities that didn’t look like theirs. I wondered if they knew justice beyond the defense of the shaky foundations of systematic self-righteousness that seemed to be their legacy on this earth. I wondered if they could see this image of their beloved crosses burning, there on the ground in that same Sakata village, if they could also see that they were at an important crossroads of consciousness, of transformation, of cleansing, of the opportunity to empathize with the cultural terrorism of their own complicity in a political and ideological dominance that has burned across the globe with frightening speed and soaring temperatures, leaving whole cultures burnt, destroyed, traumatized, smoldering in the embers of their own flesh. I wondered if they would have the wisdom to be able to see through, burn through their own reactionism in the face of an idea that challenges their very presence on the earth - equally - as they have challenged - and then decimated - others.

And I couldn’t help but think of all the other crosses that have been burnt to terrorize African people released from chattel slavery’s bondage into subsequent social, mental and spiritual bondage all in the name of Jesus, in the name of their gods.

So I weep for the Sakata, forced, coerced, traumatized into destroying with their own hands their own sacred symbols and technologies. As they place their own statues in the fire, they carried with it their traditional, sustained reverence for the feminine divine that lived inside them all, as if they were sending Sakata womanhood to a hell not of their own making...and indeed, to my knowledge, African indigenous people were not in the practice of creating hell in their spiritual or physical lives.



Ponder, then, the image of christian churches full of roman catholics forced to carry their statues of their goddess, Miriam, placing those statues into the mounting flames.



Ponder, then , the utter arrogance, the audacity, the psychosis, the flagrant disrespect, physical and emotional violence of even the suggestion from the lips and life of a roman catholic christian man-priest that any people should sacrifice their own indigenous soul upon the fire of cultural hegemony and oppression. That priest, there in the Sakata village, knew not the meaning of the turning of the cheek or the true inheritance of the earth or the cleansing of his own temple unfamiliar.

The spirit made flesh, goddess made wood, of the Sakata burns on today, smoldering still, divine people drowning in tears pouring from ancestral eyes burnt by the smoke from the charred bodies of their own children.

A crime, upon countless crimes, has been committed. We all stand at our own crossroads, and at our collective human crossroads of cultural survival. I can still smell the smoke of our African mother burning, all of the masks, the statues that still lay burning in the villages. I try to wipe the tears of the one that remains.