“A pen conquered us and a pen can wipe us out as a Nation”

We, Indigenous People of North America, “Indian Country”, are inherent speakers for our Mother the Earth. We need to come together with one heart and mind to protect the future of our Great Nation.
When the United States drafted the Constitution, the word conquered written gives the U.S. Congress the authority to take our land without being indebt owed to Tribes. Since Europeans set foot on our lands to this date not one contract, treaty, law or promise has been honorably fulfilled with our Nation.
We as a Nation know that it is the habit of the United States to deceive. They are a society of lawbreakers, laws of their own making. The United States Government run by the rich untouchables of the world do not plan for their unborn children as we as Indian people do. It is our daily habit as Indian people to mention our future generations in our ceremonies. We do not send our elderly to nursing homes. We honor our veterans who have served in the defense of our lands for the United States Government at our pow-wows. We should not forget our past and remember our ancestors who died for our survival. We live our lives daily honoring our unsung heroes in the present. We must come together now as one for the future of our Nation.
It is of great importance that we begin to plant seeds now instead of waiting for the bread to be set on the table. Tribes, Bands, Nations, Indigenous Peoples, Indian Country and their relatives need to stop being distracted by the morsels (casinos) that our Governments and the Bureau of Indian Affairs throw at us.
In the United States, senators are giving commencement speeches at Universities talking about alternative fuels. In North Dakota and Montana on the plains are some of the riches fields of grasses for these fuels. Coal is going to begin to be in demand and it is on our lands that they will be harvesting these fuels. Tribes must not sign any more contracts with States.
The Mohawk Nation has been writing about a Super-Highway that George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani have already contracted with the Canada and Mexico. This super-highway will run right down the center of Turtle Island and will be the route of free trade between countries. This highway will run right over many of our lands. These trucks will be carrying our resources for foreign trade. Tribes have an inherent interest to write into their Constitutions their rights to their natural resources, air, water, earth and all of the written and unwritten stories, songs and customs of their on unique heritage, your Cultural property rights. Some Tribes have already done so than it would be good to contact other Tribes by way of moccasin highway or faster yet internet assisting other Tribes with this knowledge. It is time to awaken the sleeping giant that is our Great Nation.
Recently, at 34th The Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth held by Harry Beauchamp Sr. and other tribal members at the Assinibione Reservation of Fort Peck Montana many Nations combining knowledgeable tribal leaders met from all corners of North America. From Greenland where the staff has gone for the next conference in 2008 to the Mayans who brought their two hundred year calendar predicting the 2012 effects of global warming. Many tribes validate the changing of the winds. Testimony on the Assinibione Reservation, mentioned they had never seen their prairies so green.
The Chief Greenland Manu said, “We the Indian people at the top of the world are the only people that could survive in this land. From ancient time, our hunting grounds of tundra and ice have provided for us. Now we rarely see a Knorr whale of a beluga whale. Our trails of ice become soft and dangerous.”
Oren Lyons, Chief of the Onondaga Nation shook my hand as he arrived from Sweden to the meeting in Montana and said “It is worst than we are being told.” Again, the United States and its affiliates are deceiving us. They are predicting a 20-30 year effect of global warming. At the Conference of Indian Elders and Youth with first hand knowledge from Manu, we must consider 10 years or less.
Oren Lyons also mentioned that fifty percent Africa is a Nation of parentless children. Dysfunctional Nations including Middle East and Asia will become dangerous to our Nation once the disease, famine, and children raised in war become adults. This reality to our Nation needs to be an issue and considered seriously today and not when our lives and our children’s children lives are in danger. The world is changing fast and Nature can again as it was before Columbus is our means in survival. We must again blend in with the laws of nature.
Tribes must protect their natural resources and utilize all tribal members from the old to the youth in the retraining of growing and naturally preserving foods provided by our great mother the Earth. Allotted Tribal land should be utilized to grow food uncontaminated by the chemical poisons. The Pueblo people have a method of storing foods for four years taking the latest crops first. Seed stores, wild rice, berries, molasses, nuts etc. etc. etc. By harvesting these natural crops on your lands, they will renew themselves and multiply in the coming years. Part of these crops can be sold to incorporate future financing and finance future growth while bringing our tribal elders and youth together teaching and learning our traditional ways.
Are the Algonquin people aware that white society is trying to hybrid the wild rice of our people? Betty Laverdure of The Turtle mountains Plains Pembina Band said that “Einstein predicted that when bees no longer existed it would be the end of humankind”. It could be the possibility of the cross sectioning of our natural flowers and possibly the unnatural airwaves from cell phones and satellites. Nevertheless, it would be wise of tribes to begin to harvest honey with the learning and investing in manmade hives on tribal lands. What would be the affects of hybrid wild rice?
The Chief of the Seminole Billy, said that we are drinking purified water made from the urine of the white man when we buy and drink bottled water. Tribes need to begin protecting their water and testing and using their own water resources. All natural tap water sources are tested more than bottled water. It would be wiser to drink and protect our own tap water in the future more vigorously and make it our law.
Tribes need to begin to implement alternative energy sources such as solar and wind energy. These two factors are vital and plans should be made with timelines with completion for important focal points within the tribal system. Tribes must remember you are not a myopic island. What happens to one tribe will begin a domino effect that will affect all of Indian Country.
Trees and clear-cutting must be replaced and replanted this will encourage animal inhabitation and promote the oxygenation for human and animal alike. This system will also offset the effects of global warming.
Tribes that have methods for fuel renewal and recycling should notify other Tribes so that we can be a part of the solution and not part of the problem for each other. There is so much more and many more minds that walk upon our people. This is your calling for your voice I welcome you to send this letter to every available media.
Within the near future a common web source will be developed that all Nations will be encouraged to cooperatively communicate ways and means. Their will be another longest walk for 2008 to Washington D.C., I encourage tribes to send delegates as well as promote the largest and most diverse membership attendance as humanly possible from one end of North America to the next. It will be planned Oct 10, 2007 and a city event schedule will be posted timely. More information can be obtained at E-mail jimbosimmons@treatycouncil.org or www.treatycouncil.org.

Black people need to be thinking along these same lines!

From Sista Ana’s comment at AfroSpear:

“There is still hope for the Africans. If we can create a Pan African movement, not only of intellectuals, but by Black people of all socio economic groups on the continent and troughout the Diaspora, then our future as a people on this planet is certain. We must work toward an awakening of the masses of Black people, to unite for our own good.

This movement must have at the forefront an agenda based on restoring respect and acceptance of our identity as Africans, and it must be structured with plans based on independent, sustainable, economic developement. I am tired of hearing on these Black blogs what the enemies think of us, and how many of us are sellout. We need to stop the masochism. Inadvertently, we think too much of the enemies, hence we are always taking off our vision of what we should be doing as a people. We also have given the enemies too much power over us.

Yesterday October18, I read an artucle in The NY Times that left me elated. The article was on a Black community in Colombia-San Basilio de Palenque. They are the descendants of runaway slaves, who had carved out a community far away from the Spaniards during the colonial period. The Palenqueros (people of Palenque)had conserved elements of the Congo language, mixed with Spanish. Their language is the only Creole Spanish spoken in Latin America.

But what really hit me was what one of them said. Mr. Salgado a Palenquero schoolteacher said: “Our ancestors survived capture in Africa, the passage by ship to Cartagena and were strong enough to escape and live on their own for centuries. We are the strongest of the strongest. No matter what happens, our language will live on with us”.

I believe this is the manner many of us should be speaking. The descendants of Africans in the Diaspora are all the strongest of the strongest. I do not believe that there is a people on this planet who could have endured what our people went through, and live on to leave descendants like us today. we just need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves, roll up our sleeves and become active.

The word Palenque in Spanish is runaway haven for slaves. The Portuguese version is Quilombo.The English version is Maroon town.“

Lawd have mercy, speak sista, speak!!!

Pornography.

Demeaning.  Degrading.  Ugly.  Atrocious.  Controlled exclusively by men.

Sex-positive.  Empowering.  When done by women (and some men), it can be educational, sexy, and rarely, liberatory.

Opinions are split.  My opinion is split.

What say you?

Marimba Ani (Yurugu) discusses the process whereby the religious/spiritual rites of indigenous, independent peoples were attacked by a prosletyzing, imperialistic mob touting a proseletyzing, imperialist, Universalist,  religion featuring an angry, jealous God that loves those who love Him.  Heaven help those who don’t.  Everywhere and fairly suddenly, pagans, gnostics, animists and other believers of tribal or folk religions became prey - prey to Christians who insisted that THEIR religion was the ONLY religion and all must bow to it.  Practicing anything else was punishable by death.  Small wonder that Christianity spread far and wide.

Why couldn’t Christianity co-exist with religious/spiritual practices that had never before asserted themselves as Universal, had never sought to force their practices down the throats of other independent people?  Is there a connection between a people’s ability to practice a religion born of their unique locale and their true autonomy?  So it would seem.

Black Americans are some of the most religious people on the planet; but our religion might as well be sushi.  Its a great meal but its not our creation, not born of our creative mind.  Its an adaptation of some else’s.  And built into that structure are the seeds of the enslavement that we are still bound by.  Those who argue that Africans were the forbearers/creators of Christianity cannot believe that what is being practiced on these shores is anything akin to what developed in Egypt, Ethiopia or wherever else in Africa it may have sprouted.  The version of Christianity here is a white invention, designed to profit white people.  And it does.

That being said: Is there a religious Charlie Parker, the brilliant alto sax genius, who has taken the white Christian instrument, taken the bar lines, chord changes, harmony, rhythm and put a unique, revolutionary African spin on it, that obliterates the Dixieland religion of his predecessors? Is there some religious/spiritual innovator who has adapted this white imperialist religion and made it a mighty tool for black liberation?  I’m looking but I don’t see anyone or anything that fits that bill.  Yes, we have TD Jakes, we have Brother Weeks and Sister Bynum, Jesse, Al.  We had Rev. Ike, Father Divine; we’ve got some phat churches and rich preachers, but where is our Black Moses?

I’m not saying churches don’t do good works, but good works and liberation are not the same thing.  Are the good works that churches - providing services to people in need who are victims of the system - simply helping maintain said unjust system?  Or are these religious do-gooders doing the work required to tear down the system that keeps our people in a perpetual cycle of need?  Pruning the flower beds in Auschwitz might be a good thing, but it is not revolutionary and it is certainly not what the emaciated victims of Nazism needed to escape the concentration camp; it only made living in the concentration camp more tolerable.

I submit that a true religion for black people (and I am not religious in the least), one born of our mind, soul, history, creativity, would have to be divorced from the oppressor who brought us here.  We could not swallow the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, when we should know something of Isis, Osiris and Horus, when we should know why Isis couldn’t be allowed in the Christian religion and what that means.
Where are our Touissant L’Ouvertures, Nat Turners, Sojouner Truths, Harriet Tubmans, Malcolm X’s, Ella Bakers?  These are our spirit guides, our High Priestesses and Priests.  What good is a religion that keeps you on the plantation, a religion that produces spiritual midgets who can’t see anything beyond a bankrolls, clothes and hoes mentality - with a little charity thrown in to mystify the issue?