>[Krimel] >I have listened to and come to understand a wide variety of world views and >positions from a host of sources. I have in fact looked over enough of these >to have a pretty good sense of when a position is worth considering >seriously...
- Marsha Krimel, stop it! Please stop it! I have the flu and it hurts my eyes when I laugh. Seriously, mister get some help. [Krimel] Here is something that has helped. Among the worldviews I have labored to understand are Indian cultures. I was introduced to native America philosophy at camp as a boy. I learned the toe-heal and watched hoop dancers. When I was 14, I spent the night alone in a palmetto patch carving an arrow and swatting mosquitoes. The next day I joined other initiates in a day of silent labor. This was of course a very sanitized, idealized and Anglicized white bread version of Lenni-Lenape philosophy and Plains fashion. But it spoke of respect for the earth and nature. It was about loyalty and craftsmanship. I learned to braid leather and the weaving of beads. Every summer I made a new pair of moccasins and by the time school started, the leather soles were wore through. In college I was deeply moved by Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee." I read it maybe a year or so before reading ZMM. If I were to collect my personal cannon of scripture I would include "Black Elk Speaks" beside the Tao te Ching and Ecclesiastes. Just after finishing college I wrote a piece on the Seminoles for a small magazine. I learned about the Seminole War which ran hot and cold from 1817 until 1858. It was longest war in US history. At one point in the conflict the US military took a group of Seminole chiefs captive during a truce conference. Several of them later escaped by starving themselves until they were thin enough to slip from their prison cell, through narrow windows carved into the thick coquina walls of the Castillo de San Marco. (Coquina is formed from the shells of tiny clam-like critters. Huge blocks of compressed shells where cut from the beaches near St. Augustine. They were soft but sturdy and made an ideal fortress for the Spanish. When cannon balls hit coquina walls, they were absorbed like a BBs into Styrofoam.) The most famous of the captured chiefs was the ailing Osceola. He later died in a military prison. I drove across Alligator Alley one summer with my brother in a red '68 Olds. It's maybe 200 miles of two lane black top slashed through the Everglades. Miles of swamp dotted sparsely with palm-thatched huts, airboat tours and alligator wrestling. Those miles of sawgrass swallowed two generations of US troops. I love the Seminole patchwork designs. The men wore jackets and the women skirts striped with geometric patterns of vivid color. Women sewed the scrapes together on hand cranked sewing machines that fit across the bottom of a canoe as families poled their way between small islands in the River of Grass. Their ancestors eluded Andy Jackson and Zachery Taylor. Eventually a remnant glided the green waters in hollowed logs; living on alligator, and swamp cabbage. But they never surrendered. I have visited the Cherokee, Navaho, Hopi, Zuni. I have watch their dances and listened to their songs. I have felt the rhythm of their drums. I have seen the kivas of the Anasasi, visited the Emerald Mound of the Mississippians and hiked to the top of Bear Butte, a natural cathedral of the Lakota. An ancestor was a medic at Wounded Knee. I have read the story of the Ghost Dance and prayed at the mass grave of Big Foot and the families he led to their doom. I guess it is pretentious to claim that I "understand" the worldview of native Americans. They are too diverse and too different from a tourist like me. I suppose that IS funny. But I have sought to understand them and the seeking has changed me. The book I am reading now is "1491" by Charles Mann. I am learning how truly shallow my understanding has been. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
