Violence Erupts

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 02:44:43 GMT

The earth opened up in Pakistan and 20,000 or more are dead. First we offered $100,000 in aid, then we were shamed into giving $50 million, a substantial sum though only one-third of the $148 million we gave in military aid this year. (There is always money for guns and bullets, only less for bottled water and medical supplies). Right now hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping without shelter in a mountainous place that nurtures chilly winds this time of year. Doctors Without Borders has sent teams and supplies and they need our help.

Across the border in Afghanistan, five suicide bombers have blown themselves up in two weeks, a chinook has crashed, and another US soldier has been killed along the eastern border. Iraq is, perennially, Iraq, where every day brings more despair, more tragedy. Most Americans are against that war, but does it matter? The violence continues, more and more people die, more families are torn apart by the deaths of those they love and our president continues to offer empty platitudes, desperate calls for patriotism. He is trying to convince himself, no doubt, just as he is trying to convince us. Doesn't he know we already know the truth?

In Guatemala, the clouds erupted in a flood of tears, leaving hundreds buried in rivers of mud. This time last year the story was drought, showing that April does not own the market on cruelty.

Many of our water-soaked neighbors in Louisiana and Mississippi are still suffering on this Columbus Day, or Indigenous Peoples Day, including the United Houma Nation. Katrina and Rita left nearly 5,000 of their tribal members homeless and many others unable to inhabit their homes. Organizations like Veterans for Peace have been helping them, but not the Red Cross or FEMA, who has only worked with a handful of families so far. You can help them directly here.

On Democracy Now today, the United Houma Nation's Principal Chief, Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, talked about the troubles her tribe has faced these past five weeks and why Christopher Columbus, the Italian adventurer working for the Spanish crown who never set foot on the land that would become the US, should not be honored with a national holiday. "Let's face it," she said, "Columbus was a slave trader and an Indian killer...This shouldn't be a day of celebration, this should be a day of mourning."

And so it is.

The seasons shift, and still we're here

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 04:03:27 GMT

I drove into Chicago very late Monday evening, almost midnight. As I came around Soldier Field, past the Field Museum and the planetarium, I saw the moon peering behind a splatter of clouds. It hung low, just a handful of hands away from the horizon, and shone a dense, muddled ochre. It felt like an early fall evening, not a late summer one. I woke up with a bit of a chill on Tuesday morning because that bold yellow moon had brought in autumnal weather; the temperature didn't reach above 70 that day.

It has been years since I felt this shift in the seasons. Late August the past three years we've been settling back into our drippy New Orleans apartment, shoring the place up for the coming hurricanes and swimming our way through the city's sweaty air. The heat this time of year there is intense. This past week nearly every day reached into the 100s, compounded by the humidity to make a heat index of at least ten degrees more than the actual temperature. Once I settle into the heat I don't mind it, and during those three years I didn't miss this time of year much. I was too busy finding my way through the South's most fascinating city.

S, on the other hand, missed fall every year. It was and is his favorite season. The first year we were together he took me apple picking in southern Michigan, then came home and baked one of the most delicious apple pies I've ever had. He has the touch when it comes to making crusts, like my grandmother had. He swears against rollers, and instead uses his warm hands to work the dough into the pie pan, molding the scalloped edge with his index fingers. Every one turns out flaky and golden, perfect. He would get giddy this time of year, full of anticipation for the few weeks we had of actual autumn when the trees turned color and the wind blew just cold enough. He made me love this season too.

Today summer came back. It's still over 20 degrees cooler than New Orleans, but it's not fallish anymore. But the change has begun. There's no stopping it now. Soon it will be time for picking apples and baking pies. And lucky me, my dear S will be here for the most early days of it. We found out today he will have his two weeks leave beginning September 15, which means he should get home around the 17th. We will spend our 6th anniversary together while he's here on September 25.

Here is our wedding picture. My mother made that stunning red dress. We were married at Starved Rock State Park, about 80 miles south of Chicago along the Illinois River. This particular place is Skeleton Overhang. There are trails into the oak and hickory forest leading up the rock formations and along a creek past a gentle waterfall. I had been coming to Skeleton Overhang for several years before I met S. I would drive down on a Sunday morning, walk through the woods, and take a few photographs of the river whispering behind swamp grasses, or the moss creeping up on the rocks rising from the creek bottom. It was like my own secret place. When I met S, I brought him and he loved it too. It didn't take much for us to decide to get married there.

Autumn is magical in the midwest. The summers are oppressive, which makes the crisp weather of early fall even more welcome. The day of our wedding it was perfectly warm -- not too hot to sweat, but not too cool to need a jacket. We had sun, too, which shone through the trees a golden yellow, a light premonition of the color the leaves would be turned to in a few short weeks.

Around the time of my step-father's illness and death, I began to travel around the midwest researching and photographing Native American earth and burial mounds. The mounds, some earthen wombs for the dead, nearly all planted near waterways, somehow helped me through the loss of my step-father, a man who had been a father to me for thirteen years before he died. I visited mounds in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Ohio, and was surprised more than once to find myself standing next to a mound at a run-down rest stop along a state highway. The history of our country is deep and ancient. The mounds up here are between 2,000 and 500 years old, but there are some that are even older in the south, including a number of significant sites in Louisiana. Some are where the dead were cradled in earth, their bones coated in red iron oxide; others are animal totems, where fires were burned at the heart of the creature before stones and earth were shaped around the ashes; others still were foundations for structures, pyramidic mounds that were once topped with houses of worship, perhaps, or houses of power.

One of my favorite sites was Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa along the Mississippi River. S and I went there several years in a row, in the early fall and in the dead of winter to celebrate my birthday which is on one of the year's darkest days in early February. We stayed at a small B+B that, not surprisingly, always had space that time of year. Each year we were the only visitors. One year we had complementary black eyes from karate class: his on the left, mine on the right. The owner of the place was a bit taken aback when she opened the door to us, as you'd expect, and seemed downright nervous about having us in her house. We laughed about that one.

Snaking through the woods on a cliff above the Mississippi are a train of bear-shaped mounds, each one about 20 feet long. There are more than a dozen of them, and each has evidence of a fire burned at the heart of the animal before the earth was hand-packed over the remnants. They are affectionately called the "marching bears," as they are all facing the same direction and seem to be headed somewhere, perhaps to join their brothers in the sky. There is a connection between the cosmology of our ancestors and the mounds, something that S decided to study in school after spending time with these bears. He was a chemical engineer when we met; now he is an archaeologist studying the ethnohistoric significance of a astronomically-based ceremony and the temples connected to it in a small village outside Oaxaca City in central Mexico.

At some sites the connection between the cosmos and the mounds is obvious -- at the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, for instance, the bends of the snake (or comet, or something else we can't imagine) point to seasonal solstices and moon rises. The marching bear mounds do not have such an obvious connection, but during the winter months when Orion the hunter and his dog Sirius rise above the bears, the marriage of earth and sky feels clear and true.

Here are the bears on their walk through the woods:

This mound in the shape of a person, called "Man Mound", is in the backyard of a dusty white farm house. To the left of the mound is a tire swing and beyond the fence of trees are fields of corn. The mound's legs were truncated at the knees when the state route was paved years ago. The man is a horned man. His arms hang straight down his sides:

I took this picture at the end of autumn one year. Beyond this mound in Aztlan State Park in Wisconsin, S and Casey played in the field, circling around the conical mounds that sit as a string of pearls along one end of the park. Beyond the bare trees is a tributary of Rock River, which is itself a tributary of the Mississippi:

My master's thesis was a chapbook of photographs, poems, and essays about the mounds titled "Sky-Map: An Earthwork Diary". I was able to publish 100 color copies when I was awarded a grant by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, most of which are still sitting in a cardboard box at the bottom of our downstairs closet four years later. I don't know if I will visit the mounds again this year, or if S and I will drive the five hours to Effigy Mounds while he's here. Everything is up in the air, nothing is certain. And though I wish it was, I have to accept that this is the way all life is, constantly changing, shifting from this season to the next, where birth and life and death weave together and make this beautiful, heartbreaking world we find ourselves in.

Heil Papa

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 18:39:03 GMT

Say hello to the new Pope.

May God have mercy on us all!!

Kate Ingold: Native Rights

Violence Erupts

The seasons shift, and still we're here

Heil Papa