Atoms in motion, spinning around,
Planets are forming, orbits are found,
Earth everchanging, no time to rest,
We’re meant to be mobile, I won’t settle for less.
*******
Unci Maka is a nomad. A wandering wonder. She never stops her rotating revolutions. Her liquid consistency has birthed drifting continents. Her elements of change erode any sense of permanence from her timeline. Every cell of her being is gravitationally intertwined with the movements of the collective. The swirls of her species can be likened to that of her atmosphere. Always flowing, never standing still, because to stop, is to perish. It is to give up on the continuation of coalescion. To fear the unknown and hide behind the walls of our mind’s fabrication, is to seal our fate within the claustrophobic tomb of a concrete civilization. To construct these cages of separation, is not to cut our umbilical cord into adulthood, it is to cut the lifeline that connects us to mission control, as we chaotically hurdle disconnected through space. Trying to stop right in the middle of an interdimensional transit hub and build a tower that says “We’re in charge,” is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.
The micro and macrocosms don’t even seem to notice, and while we are successful at slowing the travelers on these plains of existence, even stopping a few that collide with our hardening heads, our destiny is obviously one of being washed away with the flood as our planet evolves around us. It doesn’t matter how tall we build our castles of protection, the sands of time will dissolve the illusion of power, as we are left unprepared for the rising tides of change. We are but a fading dream of the past and the fossils of the future, it is completely ridiculous to think we can stop the clock and leave any kind of permanent mark in this world, other than the dead end road of our own dying family tree.
The crustacean who insists on permanent residence, is never empowered to expand into the next stage of his being, instead fated to suffocate as his body outgrows the capacity of his mind. We have to keep moving, or else our species will become fat, slow, stupid, and unprepared to survive the changing life cycles of a massive planet that we do not have the authority to control.
Forget about us destroying the world with our sorry attempt at infinite creation, even our everlasting styrofoam will dissolve in a blink of her eye. We are the only victims of our idiocracy, as we refuse to admit that our children could ever be smarter than us. And how could they, when we’ve sheltered them with walls and fences and cages for their own protection? When we’ve locked them in cities and enslaved them to the farm, no longer free to mature with the rest of life on Earth. Each generation less adapted for survival, as their inheritance is limited to a weakened photocopy of a blurry genetic code.
Domestication stops evolution, that’s a scientific fact, that’s the whole point of it. A never-changing monocrop of consistent consumables. Every undomesticated species on the planet, however, has been getting stronger through the clouds of adversity that are making the rest of us sick. We have reached the critical point in which our children will reenter the competition for survival, but we didn’t let them attend practice for fear of getting hurt. They will stand no chance unless we let them out of the kennel and back into the real world. There is no app to download that will replace the experience of participating in evolution. If they don’t learn to swim now, they’re going to drown in the tidal waves of the gene pool.
*******
“Aha, what if I don’t believe in evolution? Just not enough room for millions of years in this small of a closed mind. Sure, we can see it all around us, like the adapting populations of viral outbreaks and the Mosquitos that carry them, but that’s no proof of evolution, that’s just God’s hand wiping away those who defy his demands and look his gifts in the mouth.”
Um... I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I’ve been describing. God gave us everything we could ever want in this Garden of Eden, and as long as we didn’t try to take control of it, it would provide everything we could ever need, including an infinitely diverse future as we continued to evolve within it. Unless your God couldn’t figure that one out.
Then man sinned, well, technically the evil matriarch did it, but would you believe that part was written by the patriarchal leaders who weren’t quite ready to relinquish control? Anyway, Adam was this dude that broke the only natural law, and now had to live in fear instead of abundance, had to give up the nudist colony and start his own brand of colonization. He had to build the house of Adam. The thunder-fast reflexes of God’s might was far too scary to let his children sleep outside, so he sheltered them from the rest of God’s wilderness. Man was now separate from nature. Separate from God.
The duality was genetic, DNA obviously being God’s code of creation at the core of every cell of life, so it was inherited by two very different sons. Abel, the herder, or more pertinent to this conversation, the nomad. He followed the flock as they followed their food, much like some folks I know that herded Buffalo, hey, it’s easier than herding Cats. He was never anywhere long enough to set up permanent residence, never left a buildup of crap in his rearview, never depleted the ‘natural resources’ from any one area, never tried to live anywhere inhospitable to life, and probably never had to cut down a single tree or anything living that he wasn’t going to eat.
And then there was his brother, Cain, the agriculturalist, or we know him as the first settler. He converted nature into farmland, which certainly took more sweat of his brow than just walking around picking food, so he definitely had a right to own the land. No paperwork I’d imagine, but I’m guessing he had a fence. Had plenty of wood to build it considering that he cut down a few acres of forest, and enough to build a nice big farmhouse since he was sticking around for a while.
And if you’re justifying the cultivation of an existing garden by claiming that it was already an empty field, no trees, do you not think that God is in every single blade of grass that got plowed under? Or every weed that was pulled to create room for one species’ preferred diet? Perhaps that’s why God didn’t accept Cain’s sacrifice of food that he’d grown at the cost of another’s life, while happily approving of Abel’s flock of minimal hoofprint.
And what were the Sheep to do when they flocked to the fence line? Maybe not a big deal with one fence, but once there’s miles of cornrows, I know exactly what their fate looks like. A settlement of sedentary lifestyle makes the nomadic way of life an impossibility. Just ask the Lakota. The settlers killed the nomads, it’s the story of our country, of all of civilization, and it goes all the way back to the very first book of the most printed publication in the world. Told you the permanence of the printed word was not a good thing, now read on.
So Cain lived on, and continued his father’s colonization, but Adam was just one dude of many, it doesn’t quite spell that bit out, but where do you think Cain found a wife? Adam was just the one guy touched by God enough to defy him, to remove himself from nature as he fell from the garden, and to begin the process of hiding from the natural elements that seem to make everyone else stronger. And now Cain’s taken the food into his own hands, and the housing crisis, which provides lots of storage for excess, which is the only way to survive the cruel winter without flying south for the season.
Now he’s figured it all out, his kids don’t have to worry about a thing, just a bunch of chores to break their backs, and food that’s not quite as healthy as the wild stuff, but at least you don’t have to walk too far to get it. And then their kids know even less about surviving in the wild, while their food is equally tamed. And then their kids are even more domesticated as their food follows suit. And each generation breeds a further genetic disconnect from nature, and a lesser chance of survival within it, which means farther expansion of the colonized farm life, which means less room for any remaining roaming nomads, which means that the living descendants of Adam spread throughout the world and forced their way of life onto any culture that was living a heathenistic life of nomadicism, quite proudly really, it was even their official missionary position.
The spread of the church is the spread of colonization is the spread of agriculture is the eradication of a nomadic way of life, and it has almost defeated the planet. It is the desecration of de-creation, an unraveling of our infinite potential, and it has nearly erased the Garden of Eden. Ok, now I gotta get the hell up outta here before I get hit by lightening, although according to indigenous traditions, a lightening strike means that you have strong spiritual energy, like a medicine person or a heyoka. Now ain’t that backwards?
*******
So I was about to crawl into the sweat lodge and drum and sing and pray to the dirt and the stars and the Wakinyan Oyate, and into our camp of fifteen, out on Pine Ridge Reservation, in the middle of nowhere south dakota, walks two travelers headed directly through asheville, NC. A destination fifteen hundred miles away, the day after I started living in the now, and half a day after I prayed about possibly going home. So I got on my knees and crawled into the lodge to pray some more.
I didn’t even know if they’d still be around when we got out, but the steam helped me to confirm that if they were, I was supposed to go with them. But they were gone. But they came back the next day. And they were down to take me along, as long as I didn’t mind driving, and as long as I didn’t mind making a pit stop in colorado for a couple days of recreation, I’m in.
Said they’d be around for another few days, so I slowly started telling everyone that they were losing their frybread chef, the next morning I finally saw Will to break the news, and a half hour later the ride showed back up and said that it was time to go. Said I should go pack, ha, but I did need to stitch my pants up real quick. I was proud of the multiple layers of scars, and I even had to take off the back pocket to patch the front. Hey, you dropped your pocket. It’s been a fun year to say the least.
Those that knew me well weren’t surprised with my surprise departure, and in general, it’s not that uncommon for a water protector to ride the wind. I’d say that it’s the way of a nomad, but I don’t want to scare you off from the lifestyle, certainly plenty of degenerate itinerants plan ahead a bit more than I , like, probably most of them. But what’s the fun in that?
I had a really good heartfelt toksa with one of my closest spiritual mentors, he’d been at Sun Dance until I’d walked away, and had transferred here while I was still with Unci, so I’d gotten to spend a lot of one-on-one time with him over the last few months. I’d gained so much understanding and perspective from him, he’s a lot to handle sometimes, but anyone with strong medicine seems to be.
He’d been one of my teachers of keeping the peta wakan for the inipi, and always open to sharing his ways, because he could see that I was genuine with my walk on this path. We’d talked about me going on hembleciya, he said I wasn’t ready yet, I should keep working on myself and I could probably go on the hill next summer. He told me to make fifty red prayer ties when I got home, an offering to the spirits for all of my safe travels, then he gave me a bag of Hante Blaska to pray with, the sacred Flat Cedar from the dakotas that I would be hard-pressed to find in the east.
He’d seen my transformation since Standing Rock, he knew that I was walking in a good way, and he could tell that I’d sweat all summer with Ben. It had prepared me to journey out into the real world of fake foods and prison camp, he’d seen other protectors start to lose it, but my focus on prayer had me solid throughout it all. And as we shared the strongest hug of the season, he said “You take care of yourself, you’re doing real good, you just keep staying humble like you are and you’ll be just fine.”
I know it might be hard to tell from this perspective, but it meant the world to me that he’d seen it from his. I’d been consciously working on humility for sure, it’s way easier for me on the rez, where I’m constantly humbled by how little I actually know about anything. About the depths of my privilege, or the lows of oppression, or the deep end of a connection that I’ve only just broken the surface of.
I’d been tested a bunch, little stuff like being told to do one thing and then to undo it, and I’d just nod my head and say “no problem.” It wasn’t a problem, that’s why I was here. And constantly having to prove myself to newcomers, or carrying no ownership of the kitchen space, and always being the first to give up my seat to fix coffee for an elder as I quietly listen to them speak. Plus, there was a protector here that always gave me a hard time, the nerve, but I never got frustrated or said an ill word of them, instead I tried to practice understanding, patience, and humility. I knew in my heart that I was getting work done, but it’s tough to imagine that anyone else notices a subtle trait like that. They’ll notice if you’re not, for sure, but they’d really have to pay attention to see that I did. And he did. It made me feel pretty good, reaffirmed, especially once he told me that it was working. Thank you brother.
Oh yeah, and I also heard him talking of a dream he’d had, about a band of post-apocalyptic survivors roaming the country as they cut fences. Mmm hmm, noted. And then we left. On what would prove to be the greatest humility exam to date. Ever. #mosthumble
*******
My gracious transport crew were not a couple, but they were a couple of characters alright. They were Lumbee indians from the eastern part of my home state, a tribe who was one of the earliest to get settled upon. I’d imagine that most didn’t make it, and the few that did were forced to assimilate to survive, which explains how these two indians were more colonized than most of the white people I know. Granted, I run with a pretty select group of white folk.
They’d both been out to Standing Rock, oh cool, so they’re water protectors, eh... I don’t think they camped out, but they did bring donations, bravo for sure, we needed all the help we could get. And they’d just come back to the rez with more donations, she had a bit of money and was helping those who needed it the most, most excellent, and since we traveled on her dime, it meant she was in charge.
Money’s money honey, and she carried the privilege loud and proud. She was indian, but had only recently connected to her roots, and it all seemed for show and more misappropriated than a white dude writing a book about sweat lodge. But she was covering my return ticket, and meals too, so I can suck it up for a few days. And colorado.
At first it was just sassy attitude and ignorance, her accent sounded just like a good southern white girl, as she talked down about the way indians live in poverty on the rez. Offering up colonized advice that was sure to fix generations of ancestral trauma over night. Of course I most appreciated her ideas of turning the open plains into farms and ranches, the exact policy that broke the vitality of the land in the first place. But, if the alternative is to eat crap commods and fake stuff, wouldn’t that be a better option?
I can’t really argue with it, food sovereignty is one way to release america’s grip on their freedom, if they didn’t need us for food, then they might have a shot at survival. As long as they’re locked in a cage and dependent on us to slide them meals between the bars, then we can treat them like the incarcerated animals that we do. Though agriculture and ranching will only deplete the land further, as they spread human superiority to the least privileged of america.
*******
I'm much more into the construct of permaculture. A permanent culture. Much different than the age-reversing qualities found in a culture of permanence. Establishing food systems that actually function, as they reweave the webs of symbiosis. Planting foods that like to live there, alongside the plants that they like to live with, and an open invitation to all walks of life. An eco-community that we may help establish, but whose self-sustained evolution will take on a life of its own, as we become members of our own living environment.
We have dissected enough ecosystems to understand the basics of planting the garden, and as we rediscover a life of letting go, the bounty of abundance will spread like wildfire. The key to food sovereignty is not in the continuation of farming the cattle, it will be found in the partnerships of tending the wild. We will empower the growth of food forests, as we spread the seeds of migration. The Buffalo will lead the way, the hunters will follow, and they will return with a bounty of mammoth proportions. The gatherers have gathered, the growers have grown, and the chefs have cooked up some kinda concoction that will nourish the entire community.
It may seem that I've slipped back into cartoon mode, a romanticized version of a fairytale myth, but I've fully experienced the magic of camp life. And even those less privileged than I, the oppressured people on the rez who didn't get to choose their own adventure, they've even figured out how to make it work in a backdrop of modern warfare. They've created traditional food banks, an open space where hunters and gatherers and growers and preppers can easily distribute their contributions to the commons. Everyone in the tribe walks a different path, and as the diversity of ingredients converge, the menu of creation becomes a boundless web of possibility. The people are once again bringing their traditional knowledge to the table, and the next generation of rez food is growing up above the barcodes of commodity.
We don't have to live in caves as we eat nuts and berries, though I don't quite see the problem with that one. We will experience an endless evolution of ways to come together, to share the bounty of abundance, as the entire community's quality of life spirals out of the control mechanism. We will not hold back the cornucopia as we fear the scarcity of society, we will rejoice in the glory of giving, as we manifest a destiny worth living for.
We will see the return of homegrown reservation dinners, and the exotics of new native frybread pizzas, with only the primoest of wild-tended toppings. We'll roam the Sun Dance grounds and grab the gourds for dinner, as another prepares the Buffalo stew, and we'll deepen our connection to Unci Maka as we consume the local products of our own personal prayer vibrations. This is not a dream, this is our only way chance to live in a good way, and the only one with a proven track record. It is not about giving the land back to the indians, it is about giving the indians back to the indians, and giving the land back to the land.
Our Mother Earth cannot be owned. She is in charge. We are but a fraction of her magnificence, yet we have attempted to fractionate her entire existence as we box up her very essence. We must release the cages of her garden, at all levels of oppression, only then will we be free to bloom into our true potential. No piece of paper is worth a single drop of life, the perforations of the paycheck only imprison the populous, and the titles of entitlement only chain their freedom further. We must return the Earth to herself, as we rejoin our place in her symbiotic symphony. And we must empower the indigenous guides of our globe, as they lead us out of the darkness, and reconnect us to the sacred energy centers of our living planet.
*******
Speaking of, the Hills are on today's agenda, but first we stopped by the Badlands. A beautiful barren wasteland, but in a good way, an endless maze of deep inescapable chasms. Bad guys used to hide here, or hide bodies, and many got lost as they could never find a way to climb out. Crazy Horse loved them, and of course he knew the layout, so he'd often lose his enemies as they wandered for days without food. We caught some really good views and I took some photos for them, I'm not too much for pictures anymore, not since dapl had that photoshoot at the frontline.
Mt rushmore was next, no colonized admission cost though, we just parked on the side of the road and I took a pic of her flipping off those who slaughtered her ancestors. Wonder what the super white family thought as they walked by, probably no idea what an indian could be mad about at such a glorious national monument of excellence. Wait, there's still indians?
In fact, I've seen a picture from the partial construction of the stone atrocity, and there's clearly an indian in a war bonnet off to the left, a naturally occurring formation that is obviously an important chief. No joke. Sure, they had photoshop back then, and that would be easier than forcing our forefathers over top of some sacred stone formation that held the images of the ancestors, a whitewashed colonization of the land herself, which was technically never finished as debris still litters the ground. And it’s curious why this national park service reminder of the “rich heritage we all share,” the one carved by an imported member of the ku klux klan, why would they choose to put roosevelt up there with such legendary genociders, when he openly admitted that, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good indians are dead indians, but I believe nine out of ten are.” Slacker.
But believe it or not, there is actually a monument dedicated to the indians that we killed in order to preserve this national forest. For real, there's a massive stone carving of Crazy Horse himself. Crazy Horse was an Oglala war leader who fought with Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapas at Greasy Grass, or what you might call little bighorn. He was an exceptional battle strategist, and actually beat the american superiority complex a few times.
Of course he had the power of prayer and stuff, and the advantage of going up on the hill at Bear Butte to receive the vision of the victory. And of the water protectors. Sitting Bull was no slacker though, he once even carried his prayer out into the line of fire and sat through a cloud of bullets, and then he walked away untouched by a single projectile. I bet that scared the piss out of the army, which explains their sneak attack murder at his home, and their blatant attack on prayer that continues to this day.
The Crazy Horse monument is actually way bigger than rushmore's, which explains why it is only fractionally finished. Construction was started in 1948, and it’s only a few percent complete after seventy years, and surprisingly a lot of natives don’t quite agree with the concept of further scarification. Who knows how long it’ll take to chisel out the details, but at least that's a few hundred years of good old national forest construction jobs. There are artist renderings of what it will eventually look like, almost as good as the real thing, plus there's a big display of native artifacts that haven't been returned to their rightful heirs, so that you may feel like you get a bang for your buck, as you continue america's profiteering at the cost of indian welfare.
She was allowed to go pray for free though, her tribal card bought her access to a sacred space designated by old whitey, so that she could pray at another piece of our ancestral Earth getting demolished for profit, but at least that's something. Yet, somehow I'm having trouble grasping the legitimacy of destroying another hill as a reparation for destroying all the rest.
The better place to pray would be Bear Butte, which we stopped at next, the sacred hill that we'd visited during the Unity Concert to raise awareness about the upcoming return of the Black Hills. Remember how magical this place was, covered in colorful prayer ties, a strong energy of connection, and probably some radioactive element buried deep below, shhh. So of course we wanted to stop here... so that I could take a picture of them by the sign at the entrance. Are you sure you don't want to get out and walk up the trail and actually take in this moment of sacrednicity? Pray maybe? “Oh, you have to walk uphill, I don't think so. This picture's all I need anyway, ooh look, I already have thirty facebook likes.”
And this was the theme of the entire trip. Not a moment of actually living in the moment. Every step of the way was about documenting the adventure, not living it, and the worthiness of the experience was directly valued by facebook. It was maddening. I'd noticed it back at camp, but I just figured they were excited to be there, but now I saw that the whole trip was just a photo-op. Who even takes a picture by the sign of some sacred space that they didn't even want to walk into? She couldn't even be present in the 'now' while she was driving through curvy mountain roads, as she clicked away and posted what could have been us going over a guard rail, though she'd have only noticed the like count. And she simply could not understand my committed aversion to my picture being taken, which meant she had no need to respect it, as she constantly tried to catch me unaware.
*******
My no picture policy has a few different angles. The most obvious is that I'm an outspoken member of a resistance against a nefarious government regime that openly uses facial recognition to track its targets, specifically through facebook, so even if you don't tag me, they might. I'm not scared though, it's a good day to die. Plus, I bet it'll boost book sales.
The other main reason, well, it's actually something I picked up from Crazy Horse himself. There's not too many pictures of the war hero out there, because he claimed that any photo 'taken' of him, actually captured a piece of his soul. Well now, that's certainly a bunch of uneducated superstitious hogwash, he had simply never seen this cool new technology and had no context with which to understand its mechanics. Some mysterious box that 'captured' his image and transferred it to paper, it would certainly be confusing to someone new to technology, and if anything, it just immortalized the spirit, kinda like printing the spoken word.
But we've been taking pictures for a long time, capturing memories so that we don't have to try to remember them, even to a point that we now have selfie sticks for taking our own glamour shots for no apparent reason other than vanity, and we're just fine. Shouldn't we see some massive trend away from a connection with the soul of humanity if old Crazy Bones was right? That is if there even is a soul in our secular world of tomorrow.
I guess it does seem that our society has gotten continuously more trigger happy as the technology put progressively better, cheaper, smaller cameras in all of our pockets, which also seemed to coincidentally coincide with our disconnect from the spirit of the land, but it's hardly noticeable when the majority of our time is spent flipping through pictures on the phones that have become smarter than us. Smart enough to not only auto-tag our featured faces, but to also automatically listen and record everything as they build a composite image of 1984. It's now an unquestioned commonplace to sit in public and see every soul occupied by their screentime, the 'now' completely escapes them as their mind is somewhere else. They wouldn't even notice if an Eagle took a dump in their latte, or if the corporations that imprison the phone factory are poisoning the waters of our planet.
I haven't had a phone for over a year and I've been living the life, even called up an uber back home with nothing but my growing connection to spirit, and now I'm the only one on the trip actually experiencing the ride. But at least they can look back at what they missed, though a review of the past isn’t very much of a now, and dreaming of bygones is no way to find new ones. If this moment’s experience is focused on that moment, then I at least hope you experienced that one to the fullest. And remember that a person is a path, not a single point in time, and no still image will ever compare to a magical lifetime of momentous occasions.
But all this is just a testament to our obsession with our phones and ourselves, and at the cost of actual human connection, that's not too much of a debate these days, but even Crazy Horse couldn't have seen this ridiculous reality coming. How could the act of taking a picture actually remove a piece of the eternal light th