Sacred Pipe || A World Journey

Dancing With Myself || Digital Gallery Opening

2012-01-18T22:54:00.002+01:00

Bear Went Over the Mountain || 2001 Taos New Mexico || Turtle Heart Ojibwe Artist

Today I make a dance with myself and announce the opening of a digital art gallery of my collected works, from 1979 until 2012. This is the best destination at this moment to see the artistic works of this artist in stone, wood, pigments, photography and type. Shaman Art Gallery is the only place where you can purchase art by this artist. So we are happy to nnounce this new digital gallery in celebration of decades of art exploration and revelation of one American Indian Artist.

Opening ||Turtle Heart has been an artist working in stones, pigments, photography, digital and print since 1975. He is an Ojibway American Indian artist living and working on Pantelleria Island, in the Mediterranean Sea.

Today we announce the Opening of the Shaman Art Gallery :

Collected Works 1979 to 2012, by Turtle Heart.

In January of Twenty Twelve, Turtle Heart has put up a comprehensive gallery of Collected Works || 1979 to 2012. This is the best place at present to see the unique artistoc stylings of an artist with a passion for illustrating and defining American Indian sacred ceremony.

Sales || Collected Works are offered for sale. We use the Paypal system. We have used it for twenty years and it has worked perfectly for us. You may of course contact us directly for any arrangements to bring one of these treasures into your collection.

This is the only authorized location where original works of art by Turtle Heart can be examined and purchased. We will answer any reasonable questions about the art selections. You may also request via email additional photographs or details about any object in the collection.

As an artist, my life has brought me far away from the gallery streets of the famous old towns. I hope that the internet can be the new community of world travelers, of universal citizens. I guarantee completely and absolutely your satisfaction in the purchase of this art.

I am Turtle Heart. I am an artist in motion. I rest with the daughter of the Wind.

Visit the Gallery (click)

Pantelleria Italy
January Twenty Twelve

Russell Means || The Only Good Indian…

2011-11-20T17:23:00.001+01:00

Copyright 2011 Turtle Heart. Means around 30 years ago at Harvard.
Photo by the author. The bundle in front of Means contained a very
Sacred Pipe and other sacred objects. Author was the Keeper of these
ceremonial objects.

In the beginning, his life seemed promising. He ascended into the mainstream media as articulate, knowledgeable and charismatic. It did not take very long for him to be corrupted, for his dark side to become the boss of his life. Through decades of lies, criminal acts, abuse of women, of the truth and in supporting of murder of innocents, Means has come at last to the end of his broken journey.

For reasons that have never been quite clear, the limited attention the world’s media pays to any kind of American Indian issue, was directed mostly at this man. He has seemed to have what some call a “gift” for getting media attention. Of all the American Indians, living or dead, Means got the most media attention, worldwide. Every moment of this coverage was dedicated to Means love of himself, and nothing at all to do with any issues affecting American Indians. It is partly the media’s fascination with its own fantasies about American Indians and a general indifference to any issue affecting American Indians. Means was a product of this media void, somewhere near the middle of fantasy and indifference.

Many years ago….I am not good with dates: I was present as the Keeper of the Sacred Pipes of the Eastern Gate when Means, and the Bellecort brothers, addressed Harvard University Law School. It was a spectacular speech. It was well attended, but not by the Harvard Law School population. Most of those present were other American Indians from around the Boston area. There was some curiosity. This was just before the scam the world came to know as “Wounded Knee”.

These days we have some evidence that the Means story is winding down. If we can believe what is being written, he claims to have cancer and is in the situation of greeting his own mortality. Any words about Means published in the national media must be viewed with some suspicion. You absolutely cannot believe, in the case of Means, that what you are hearing is the truth.

Some of us imagine that right now there could be a sort of Means awakening. A moment in his long life of lies and crimes and bullshit where he decides to do the right thing, one time, before the end.

There is much he could and should and might yet tell us regarding the murder of Anna Mae Aquash, for example. There are other crimes he could illuminate. There might even be a justice department willing to grant him some favors if he tells society the truth about his long-standing criminal enterprise.

If he actually cared about any American Indian on this earth, he would want to tell the truth at the end of his life. He knows how to do it. I have seen him speak truth to power. After so many decades of his little game, he could stand right up and tell us the truth. He might then realize that his many American Indian relatives did not ever stop loving him…they just preferred to stay sober.

There are two ideas about what is a good Indian.

One… is that he is dead. A good Indian is a dead Indian. A dead, lying Indian. Go ahead. Whine and cry and ask for money.

The other is that he looked into the clouds and sings the song of his death, the last song of a Lakota Man, a child of the Sacred Pipe, the male child of his male ancestors, a Grandchild of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and all the other Grandfathers who held their sacred and spoke the truth in the face of their deaths.

Hymhenteqhous Mizhekay Odayin

Ahnishinabeg Aneeg Wabeeno
Keeper of the Four Directions Unity Bundle
Keeper of the Sacred Pipes of the Eastern Gate

Steve Jobs || American Indian Friend

2011-10-07T13:03:00.001+02:00

At the end of the article is the last email I sent to Steve Jobs, this last August.

So much emotion being expressed and felt by so many people. A very unusual thing.

Two days later I still feel a strong emotion myself.

Some years ago I was struggling near the region of Death Valley, to develop what was the first American Indian WWW presence, in the world. My work caught the eye of a field representative for Apple and he paid me a visit. After it was over, Apple donated a state of the art laptop and color scanner to my project, which really took off.

In return I did a large stone sculpture which was for some years in the lobby of the Apple Regional HQ in Santa Monica. A view of it is in the photo above.

He once said, "It is more fun to be a pirate than to be a sailor"....this spirit is one we shared, at least until the iphone came out.

Steve Jobs passed away. I think millions of people around the world feel closer to death. He was a King of the Golden Tower and also its Shining Prince.

He fell down for medical reasons at an early age, though he had every medical opportunity at state of the art levels. One by one and all each within themselves pass through this death. Many flavors but only one bone.

I exchanged a few emails with Jobs. I did not save them. Or publish them online as some people did. One on a Christmas eve and he answered me on Christmas day. I think he became bored with computers and the innovations he could have made to laptops and desktops is now probably lost in the void as he brought his passion into the little mobile devices and also developed an odd preference for severe controls. In what feels like a darkside move to me, he managed to get a piece of every telephone call people make with his phones. Why should the hardware developer get paid for this reason? Of course it deposited a massive amount of cash into their basket, and if that is the only argument in its favor, then his spirit has a wound much like the one which captured his body. The control thing, at its root, is an evil precedent. I have always thought it was great that for every control move Apple made, hackers broke it, and will continue to break it; as they should. Jobs started out more as a hacker of technology than a conformist to it. The closure of the open aspect, for me, is a long shadow. I can appreciate the devilish cleverness of the scheme; it cracks a smile out of me. I guess he had earned the bones for a few “fuck you’s” here and there. I am not optimistic the crew he left behind can do the job, no pun intended. He was building a new home for his family. Submitted the designs for a new home for his vision of Apple. Both controversial and unique projects of their own. He really liked really fine glass. No one has paid much attention, in the media, to all the patented, clever, relentless things he has done with glass. A grand dragon and a sweet provider.

If it were not for Steve Jobs we would all be using ms-dos. Even now. Microsoft copied Apple to produce the so-called "windows" operating system invented by Apple. Just think how that would be?

My dear man, we hardly knew ye.......

My last email to Steve Jobs, back in August 2011

Dear Mr Steve Jobs….

The period just before you came back to Apple I made a long ceremony

in the California desert with an Apple employee named Richard Schlien (or Klien)

a field supporter at Ridgecrest California…..

we went to a sacred place of the Shoshone

and I made a long ceremony with sacred pipe to take

care of Apple and to bring you back

it was a great ceremony in the California Desert

at the China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center…..a place where thousands of years

ago our ancestors made multimedia messages in the stone called petroglyphs

I am a principal keeper of ceremonies

and some of us old indians have held you in our medicine

we still do

even though you did not do shit for us

you are a great character

the old Indians would call you a jesa-kid, a man

who does healing by juggling light

a very honored profession at one time.

Our ancient hardware and software works as well as yours…

and we worked it that day, all day

and feasted together after

With a 540c traded from your Santa Monica office for a big sculpture for the lobby

(did you ever see my big sculpture in your lobby?)

I became the first American Indian in the world to make

an American Indian web site, from the middle of nowhere.

You read some of my emails. I hope you read this one

and it sinks in somewhere that a pricipal pipe of the ancient

way of the Ojibwe American Indians went to work for you

and remains nearby

you have a soul

so you might be able to accept that there is something there

something you can use

the best thing you ever did was stay in your skin

and trust your bones

and keep your silence

and pass quietly through a wall of iron

and you somehow managed

to take most of the world with you

I am the old Indian that

wakes you up once in a while from that restless journey

you call sleep.

Miqwitch man in Jeans. Wave on.

Turtle Heart

Ahnishinabek Aneeg Wabeeno

Keeper of the Four Directions Unity Bundle

Keeper of Sacred Pipe of the Eastern Gate

World Journey of the Sacred Pipe

Pantelleria Italy

Vietnam || The Tragic Legacy of Monsanto and Agent Orange

2011-10-03T12:00:00.003+02:00

People and Power || Children of Agent Orange

Follow the link to the documentary airing now on Aljazeera/English.

Agent Orange, a dioxin-based compound, was sprayed relentlessly over the once lush forests of Vietnam. Even now, so many years later, the rich bio-diversity of this wildlife paradise has not recovered.

The United States government left behind many families who have given birth, over 3 generations now, to heart breaking deformities in their children. the financial, emotional and psychological cost of these health problems on the families and communities is enormous.

Monsanto, the corporation which made the most money from this chemical has done nothing and blocked, at great expense, any effort by anyone to hold them accountable for this horrific consequence of their product. The US Government has done next to nothing. World aid agencies have done next to nothing. The Vietnam government is over-whelmed, the Vietnam medical system is over-whelmed. The United States media could care less.

I am a Vietnam veteran. I was right there, but not in the areas where Agent Orange was used. Lucky me. Many US Soldiers were also sprayed. Monsanto told everybody it was Ok to spray it everywhere. It would kill plants not people, they said.

Why has no one in the west every even brought up the idea that Monsanto Corporation has some liability and responsibility here? the Vietnames government ries over and over to bring action against Monsanto and the USA but it is always shot down, denied, ignored...and so every year they keep trying.

Americans should see this documentary.

One of the most compelling mind-fucks in this documentary are the numerous interviews with American Indian veterans of that war who have gone back to Vietnam to try and help.

Aljazeera has aired some of the most beautifully produced documentaries I have ever seen. This painful subject is presented without sensationalism. It is presented honestly, with real compassion for the suffering people we get to see and hear.

Watch it.

Historical Footnote !! Who Are The Human Beings

2011-09-24T15:16:00.002+02:00

From the traditional sacred sciences vs the plodding "every piece is the whole story" modern science.

Recent DNA studies on aboriginal hair samples reveal that the Australian indigenous people have occupied their lands for upwards of fifty thousand years. Read the full details here.

The prevailing theory about how the earth became populated is generally now called the "Out of Africa" theory. It argues that all human beings evolved from and migrated from a point in Africa. Read about this theory in detail here.

The Ahnshinabeg (Ojibwe, etc), the Tewa (Hopi, etc) have nevr accepted this theory as a fact. We believe their were four great human migrations, originating from four distinct regions around the world, one of them being in North America.

That so-called evidence of this idea has not been brought forward is not because such evidence exists. It does. It exists in oral traditions and ceremonial structures and objects, shared between all indigenous peoples around the world. Science remains clueless in knowing how to read, quantify and interpret this evidence. The problem is not one of evidence, but of consciousness, in my view.

Every few years all of these so-called revelations about the antiquity of human beings and the paths and tools they followed to get where they were change. The charming Aboriginal man who gave up his fine hair 100 years ago is his own revolutionary statement. It appears they may actually know his name, but that has not yet been published.

This short document is just a footnote. An official statement from the keeper of a sacred bundle, which is also a limitless key to the ancient facts. Just wanted to be sure it was written down here somewhere in the Inter-Tubes.

Hymhenteqhous Mizhekay Odayin
Ahnishinabeg Wabeeno Jessakid
Keeper of the sacred Pipes of the Eastern Gate
Pantelleria Italy

Equinox September 23 || 10:04am CET

2011-09-23T19:12:00.002+02:00

for 30 years I have always
made a poem, a song line
on the equinox and solstice
I try to do it
close to that precise moment
the old indians
who were my teachers
told me
just one time
that the solstice and equinox
are gateways
an opening, they would say,
that you could pass through
and so
change everything
i took those words and made a song of them
I say it and i sing it
out here where every day
is just another day
I always take that moment
with the earth
and in my heart
I go ahead and pass through

@2011 Turtle Heart
Pantelleria Italy

An American Indian At ground Zero

2011-09-12T00:41:00.000+02:00

©Turtle Heart 2001. After my ceremony at ground Zero there was taken one photo. This photo.

I am an American Indian. A Keeper of Religious Ceremonies of the Sacred Pipe, a part of traditional American Indian spiritual life. I have had the unusual experience of carrying this Sacred Pipe on behalf of the tribal elders to two regions of this mother earth that are called “Ground Zero.”

The first Ground Zero Journey was to the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico.

During the dark of one night I walked some miles, about 15 of them overnight round trip. My destination was the sight of the first Atomic Explosion. Using a good map and walking the magnificent desert during a full moon I found the little area where the tower that made the first explosion once stood. There is a modest monument there now. Nearby, in the hard sands I made a hole. I sat before the hole I made and sang an old American Indian song. When the song was finished I placed the tip of an 800 year old Samurai sword, blessed and made a sacred “Kami”, its other parts placed in 107 places around the earth….this little sacred Japanese sword and a sacred Pipe bowl of the River Otter Clan of the Ahnishinabe (Ojibwe), blessed by many tribal elders; precious and sacred objects filled with spiritual powers, history and the focused meditations of many people around the world….there in that little hole in the desert was placed The Sacred Pipe and The Sword of Heaven; a radical ceremonial fusion between American Indian and Shinto hopes for peace, healing, balance…for compassion.

The Sacred Pipe was donated for this ceremony by a group of American Indian elders of many tribes. The sword was encased in stone and covered in Shinto prayers, 108 bundles made by Shinto religious officers.

Many times as I walked away from this ceremony in the now freezing cold New Mexico desert, the journey back was difficult. Y mind went away and all I could do was breathe and walk. Every hour or so I would just fall down in the sand and sleep. The cold would wake me up. I would stumble on and fall asleep again. The cold would wake me up four or five times before I finally made it back to my hidden car rental. As I drove away my heart was numb, not from emptiness, but from raw emotion. I told the desert that it had taken a part of me that I can never have back. That is how hard that ceremony was.

My second journey to Ground Zero took place on December 11, 2001.

I left my home in Taos New Mexico and boarded a flight for New York City. From the airport I took a Taxi and asked the driver to take me to the observation platform for the destruction of the world trade center. The driver was a very unsurprised New York cabbie. He took me pretty close and pointed to some police officers at a barricade and told me to talk to them if I wanted to go to that ground Zero. I approached the police and explained to them that I was an American Indian carrying the sacred Pipe and the prayers of the tribal elders to Ground Zero. They passed me on to yet another barricade or checkpoint and I repeated my story. This happened three or four times before I found myself at the entrance to the little visitor’s platform. A military officer was in charge there. I told him who I was. I told him why I had come. He asked me directly “What do you need from us?” I told him I wanted about 30 minutes to make a ceremonial prayer with sacred Pipe and make a song there as well, an old old song.

I went out onto the platform and changed into my ceremonial clothing (I put it over my regular clothing), opened the old tribal bundle, and brought out the Sacred Pipe. Together Sacred Pipe and I walked to the edge of the rather small platform and looked into the center of the great wound that had been made on the earth. I made the smoking ceremony to this great hole. A few hundred feet below there were some workers moving about. They stopped what they were doing and looked up. I felt a little embarrassed for some reason. I was there for the wound in the earth. At that moment, some 3 months later, this tiny point on the earth was receiving more thoughts, prayers, questions, fears, and grief than perhaps any other disaster in my life time.

It was and will remain an emotionally charged point on the earth. I could emotionally feel the compression of life, of the earth itself that took place there. I was surprised that it is really a small space compared to what happened there. After a few moments I sat down on the earth and made a very strong old Ojibwe song to the earth, right there. I noticed that about a dozen plain clothes security people were gathered in a half circle around me and all had looks on their faces I will never forget. They were there every day. They saw with their eyes the people who came and went in that small space just after the ninth of september. I get tears in my eyes when I remember that moment, that small moment with my old American Indian bones and those people. When I think about that experience I feel pressure pushing against my emotions. I reflect on how every door opened to allow me to just go there, get as close as an ordinary person could, and represent in an ancient language and in ancient prayers the weeping of the mother earth, as well as the many families and relatives who were affected on that day.

Now I am an old Ojbwe American Indian man. I married an exceptional Italian woman and together we live on Pantelleria Island. On nine eleven we will make the ceremony of the sacred pipe, and once again sing some old songs and unite in spirit and thought with our other American friends in Italy and of course our cherished Italian relations, family and friends. We continue the work of moving this ancient sacred pipe around in the world. It seems so interesting that right now it lives only 25 miles from the center of the unprecedented and hopeful ARab Spring. On behalf of my tribal elders and my office as Keeper of the sacred religious bundle we call the Four Directions Unity Bundle we send our respects and kind regards.

Rescuing American Indian Ceremonies

2011-08-29T12:09:00.000+02:00

About 27 inches height

Help me Rescue this Person...

From time to time I have rescued American Indian objects from the places they are being held. It does not happen frequently. The first time was in Nashville, Tennessee....an African object of great power...but that is a story for another time.

In America, it was much easier to keep a modest fund I had for this purpose. Over the years a number of profound objects in the hands of idle collectors were returned to daily work in the mystery life. Sacred Objects sent back to their homes. I do not rescue items to keep them for myself. I rescue them so they can be free again. The old Indians believe certain classes of sacred object have status as people.

Here in Italy, for an old Indian, the money is not so easy to gather in for the expenses and services that the sacred bundles require. We spend about 1,000 dollars on candles to stay with the bundle, for example. The care and protection of the sacred requires an infrastructure and the cold hard cash to maintain that infrastructure. This is really true for a bundle like the Four Directions Unity Bundle that is traveling out into the world.

Some of you might want to help. There are two large Hopi Katsina carvings in an art shop in Milan. I could get them out of there for around $1,500, which is a great price. Such things would be more expensive in the USA, but here in Italy the value is lower, along with the understanding. So it is a good price.

I would like to bring them to Pantelleria and install them as guardians of the sacred bundle. They have told me when I visited them that they would like to come to Pantelleria and work hard. They do not want to be collectors items in some random household.

If somebody wants to help an old Indian get these spirits over to Pantelleria, I would be very appreciative. I am running out of time to rescue them. I will show you some paintings and sculptures and you can have your choice of what you like.

I will give you in art something of equal or greater value.

$1,500
Pantelleria Katsina Rescue Fund
email Turtle Heart directly
or telephone Italy (+39) 329.834.2157

Best regards....

Obama Government WILL NOT support American Indian rights

2011-08-12T13:58:00.000+02:00

Obama (Professional Liar)

For all his rhetoric, and a splash of American Indian blood, and in spite of being actually adopted by the great Crow Nation, the Obama administration will not sign the UN International Declaration of Universal Indigenous People Rights and Protections.....

Just like Bill Clinton, who was given an Eagle Feather by Sun Child, Jr, George Bush, and now Obama, the USA refuses to admit to or even recognize that the American and other indigenous people of the world deserve any protection. This hypocrisy in the face of so much horrible and bad news for tribal people worldwide is stunning.

Obama, in particular, should be ashamed. I voted for this black man pretending to be a white man, loud-talking, vote-pimping to tribes, finger-pointing sell out, rich slave of the corporate world asshole. American Indians really came out for this punk of a corporate and wall street slave. Obama may have been born in the USA, he is not a socialist or a closet muslim...he is a dime a dozen cheap politician like all the other slavering dogs that crawl on their bellies throughout the nation's capital. He was just smart enough to know what to say to a disgusted US population to sneak into the White House. He has, in my view, betrayed his base over and over.

Tragically, he remains the best hope for American leadership, considering the rabid clown show being put forward by the deep pockets and brain-dead republican right.....the hopeless slapstick tragedy being confirmed today with the entry of Rick "the Prick" Perry into the slow-motion train wreck called national elections for US President.

I am so glad that I no longer live in the USA...yet it is my birth home and even though I am an American Indian who deeply cares what happens to indigenous people, I also love my home country.

Here are links to two important events announced by international human rights groups in recent days....

US says no to indigenous rights

and

Amnesty Int. warns of indigenous peoples' rights undermined

I hope the left will get up off their complacent, timid, fat asses this cycle and do something, anything......the left has become so timid, so easily intimidated, so unwilling to call out the big pile of shit sitting in the middle of the room....

Keeping a Light on the Sacred Bundle

2011-07-17T14:25:00.001+02:00

The candles here in Italy for altar and religious work are the most horrible, nasty candles I have ever seen. It is perverse that they are so bad. They are made with cheap plastic containers with a metal cap. They cannot be recycled. They are truly horrible.

We keep a candle with the sacred pipe bundle at all times. To overcome the problem we have with these nasty candles, we are starting a candle donation program.

You can donate one or several candles to the sacred pipe. We will send you an email and tell you when your candles is being used.

You can send the candle for yourself or anyone in your life. Also send a candle for a special request or prayer.

Prayers, songs and ceremonies take place every day in this sacred space.

Donate today and in the future.

Candle should burn 3 days or longer. No plastic. Unscented if possible.

No plastic candles. Help us keep the light moving around and pick some up for yourself.

Turtle Heart
Via casoneddra no. 5
Rekhale 91017
Pantelleria (TP) Italy

039.329.834.2147 (English)
038.338.313.3198 (Italiano)

We keep the Sacred Pipe bundle in it's own defined space. We keep a candle on this bundle at all times. In the morning the Sacred Pipe is moved outside to the Ceremonial Morning Tobacco Fire. In the evening, at sunset, it comes back inside. We do this forever.

Prayers, ceremonies and songs are made in this space every day.

By putting in a candle you can become a working part of this American Indian sacred practice and help yourself and help us.

Best regards.

American Indians and the Palestinians

2011-07-13T15:19:00.002+02:00

From time to time the western media likes to report that this or that American Indian is hooked up with Palestinian and Hammas causes, also some like to mention how this or that American Indian supports Chavez, the mafia boss of a South American country.

In all my many years of association with and participation in American Indian life I have never met a single tribal relation who supports Palestine or any of the violent Middle East groups and policies. Nobody.

The only ones who come up in these associations are people identified as “AIM” (American Indian Movement) members. AIM has been and remains completely discredited among American Indians as a group. Its leadership has been shown to be cowards, killers and gangsters. The only passion for which they retain some small talent is in getting their names and faces into the media.

Palestinian support organizations may feel they get to use the plight of American Indians to poke and poison the dialogue on the United States. American Indians desperate for attention and support are sucked into this manipulative and toxic relationship, although in very small numbers. Not one dollar of the billions that move through Palestinian support groups has ever made it to any American Indian cause ever.

Saying American Indians support Palestinian causes because one attention seeking man with some American Indian blood is participating is less than genuine, to say the least. It is a lie, a desperate lie.

My official policy is that any country or culture that uses suicide bombers, anonymous assassination and repression of women are cowards and worthless bastards unworthy of respect or consideration. Cultures that support such behavior in any way cannot be taken seriously and must be viewed as criminals against humanity. Why would any traditional American Indian support such cowards or align themselves with such unworthy people? No good person would ever do that.

Beware any American Indian who claims to support dictators. It is just for spite, and out of ignorance. While any person is free to participate in whatever they want, one individual doing what they want to do is not a “movement of his people”.

In American Indian society today, our tribal teachers and elders put the sacred before the people as an instrument of peace. In many Middle east countries, religious leaders are the ones with the guns and armies and bombers. This kind of thinking is incomprehensible to me.

The tribal elders and religious leaders did not tell the coward Leonard Peltier to murder two young FBI agents minding their own business. He did that for his own reasons. He is one who has tried to make a “movement” from the bad choices made by one person doing what they want. People all over the world have sent him money and gifts and put pressure on the United States on his behalf. He is the poster boy for how bad an idea it is to take the insane and pointless behavior of one stupid man and build a movement that includes all “his people”. His bullshit is so transparent yet the money and the “movement” keep right on rolling along. Once something like this is set in motion, it probably cannot be stopped. Inevitability of motion is also not “a movement”. It is just a part of the pathogenic nature of life. Be informed.

There is a lot of frustration, and many lives that are diminished that should not be in the American Indian communities. It is understandable that people get fed up and reach for a rock or a gun. At the very least, under normal reality conditions religious and spiritual teachers must council, must demand peace…so far if middle east religious leaders are talking about real peace they do so very quietly because I rarely hear it. All people need to be aware of the danger of letting the loudest and craziest person in the room rule the agenda.

I am an American Indian religious and spiritual ceremonial teacher. These are my words, words from my life and mind. In my travels throughout the world I have yet to meet a militant coalition of any flavor or ideology that I could support with Sacred Pipe or with my presence. I am suspicious of “causes” and arguments from “victims”. This is particularly important when we have all witnessed the terrible murders, genocides, torture and assassinations that are now part of the hourly news cycle.

Many Palestinian arguments like to demonize the Jews and the Americans. There are some bad behaviors on that side of the problem without question. But it is rare for those same voices to be as ardent and determined in denouncing armed religious leaders, inter-tribal racism and suppression of Muslim minorities and the overall repression of women and a thousand other insults to human dignity practiced by Muslims against other Muslims. While so much media attention goes to the hate America and the Jews movement by the left hand, the right hand of darkness is murdering and torturing the village children.

The whole idea brings up a well of dramatic emotions and I could see how some idealistic but misguided American Indian might stumble towards Palestine. On the other hand as much as Palestinian and other very well-funded groups like to use the treatment of American Indians by the United States government as an argument against their policies, no Middle East group has ever offered a single dollar, moral support, or political endorsement towards any American Indian….yet if you get a crazy Indian from AIM to show up at some publicity event for Hammas, the Palestinian press will exploit this as important news and shows it around as high value propaganda. In this way, in my view, any American Indian getting involved with these people is what in an earlier age we used to call a “sucker”. Even among American Indians, we have one born every minute, just like the rest of you.

Religion is toxic when it is used to justify violence, repressions, oppression, politics, separation or isolation. Toxic and useless. When one member of one religion uses that religious identity to join with others doing the same thing, you have a gathering of gangsters, punks and bullies.

The purpose of all religion is harmony with the creator, with creation. Used in any other way, religion is a lie told in the name of religion. I believe this is true for all religious practices from the tribal to the Vatican and the Mosque.

History of the World || Summer Solstice Moment

2011-06-21T13:02:00.001+02:00

Over the last years I have made a strong video study of the history of the world. In the morning I watch the history of the middle east, in the afternoon I look at the history of europe and the evenings bring me to China and Japan with frequent readings and viewings in American Indian and South American issues (mush less material on those subjects is available).

A curious pattern emerges. All of those non-american indian nations have long histories of strong arm bosses, kings, queens, pharohs, sheiks, shoguns, warlords and generals. Native America never had those things. Tribes in North America favor self-determination and self-governing and never had the need for emperors or kings or presidents.

At this point there are many outstanding documentary videos about the histories of the non American Indian world. Not so many on the American and South American cultures.

These boss-emperor-king-president cultures have written the histories of the world which fill our libraries and schools. No one has said it more clearly, in recent years, than the authors Paul Schrag and Xaviant Haze in their important must read book, “The Suppressed History of America”

“….how to define the America that existed before the Spanish conquistadores, French explorers, and British adventurers arrived in the so-called New World. This intellectual battle has been waged for centuries now by two factions of scholars—the diffusionists and the independent inventionists.

To this day the diffusionists are spoken of with derision in main- stream academic circles, as they dig into the past with the same courage that characterized Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) and his journey west. Like Lewis, these rogue scholars continue to unearth evidence that America was visited long before Columbus by explorers crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Moreover, these scholars continue to unearth evidence of rich, vibrant, highly evolved cultures that existed in ancient America. This growing volume of archaeological evidence stands in clear contradiction to many key assumptions held by America’s founders and their scholarly counterparts, the so-called independent inventionists. The inventionist perspective remains the standard among archaeologists and suggests that natives of the American continent are descended from Ice Age relatives who crossed the Bering Strait and developed in complete isolation—until, that is, they were “discovered” by Spanish, French, and British explorers during the late fifteenth century. In the early days of America it was the federal government and its proponents who were most interested in characterizing the continent as an untrammeled paradise populated by savages.

This set of assumptions gave early explorers and exploiters of the American continent the justification they needed to co-opt and pillage its resources, wage war on its native people, and occupy its lands with impunity. It was the perspective that America’s government officials held as they tamed America’s terrain and battled its people for control of the vast stores of resources that would fuel the creation of their New World. It also became the perspective that was later adopted by the Smithsonian Institution, which, more than any other organization, has defined our understanding of America’s origins. Since its inception in the 1800s, the Smithsonian joined the powers in Washington in vigorously promoting the idea that America was an untouched landscape before Europeans arrived to “claim” it. Simply put, the Smithsonian’s initial administrators followed the direction already chosen by America’s early leaders, supported by their own inherited cultural and scholarly myopia.”

I find it gratifying that at last some historians and technical research is revealing clearly the sophistication, complexity, beauty and deep social sophistication of American Indians tribes and lives. It has always been, and remains, in the interests of the United States government to see American Indians defined in the weakest possible terms. After so many generations of this, so many volumes, so many enacted policies, the inmates themselves have come to believe the made up stories which is passed around as history.

Most minority scholars argue that the compiled and accepted histories of the world is a basket of lies and misdirection. These days most educated people do not argue this point, in general, but rather accept it as the status quo.

In private art auctions, very old ceremonial items sell for millions of dollars. In international art galleries, you will never see an American Indian painting in the same showing as a Van Gogh or a Rembrandt. This toxic duality of high profit from the ceremonial and often sacred bones of ancient people while considering them “not artists” in mainstream galleries is a perfect example of how widely accepted this policy of diminishing American Indians has become ingrained in the culture of America.

As a student of both history and life, I have experienced many valuable teachings and experiences from American Indians all over the country, all my life. When I compare those ideas and those experiences to what I have learned from politics in America, American history, Christianity and other world religions and all the rest of it, the ideas of the old Indians shine like a jewel in the mud, to me. The status quo demands that all attention be given to the bosses, the corporations and the institutionalized truth over the evidence of time and our senses.

It seems that the quest for the “truth is out there” is only for fictionalized actors. The real truth has become less important the the flavors chosen for us by our paymasters. Much like the victims of bad government policy, the mainstream itself is a victim to its own desire to accept a manufactured reality.

Today is the Summer Solstice. The old Indians call this moment “a gateway”, implying if you know how, you may pass from one place to another. This is what the old Indians tell us. The Christians, Muslims, Jews and so forth tell us…..nothing.

Violence of Savages and Savage Violence || State of the Tribes 2011, Part Three Final

2011-06-17T22:36:00.000+02:00

This poster is from an election campaign in Italy some years ago (2008). It was related to the issue of controlling immigration. A basic translation is that if we (Italians) do not do something about immigration, we (Italians) will end up on reservations like the Indians (who were not able to control immigration). This poster is from the pro Silvio Berlusconi group. Berlusconi is a butt-ugly empty bag of mostly water who is the long-ruling president of Italy.

Around the world the United States “reservation system” has been a model for ethnic and racial isolation/punishment. Adolf Hitler referred to the American Indian reservation system as an effective way to control a minority population.

Now many generations later, the inmates defend their reservations with a great passion, and perhaps rightfully so. The problems are not so much with the space as it is with the philosophy of the United States in regards to its minority American Indian population.

Many people believe American Indians get a lot of free money and other services. They do not. Tribes have congressionally ratified treaties with the Federal government which grants them certain entitlements. This is not the same thing as a hand out. Every American Indian bleeds a little for every Federal dollar that somehow finds its way onto an American Indian reservation. For every dollar that might reach an actual program, around fifty dollars is spent in administrative costs, overhead and BIA salaries. There is enough money in the federal budget for the American Indian situation to give every American Indian a million dollars a year and still have billions left over. A tiny trickle of that money actually arrives. No one in the actual world ever questions this.

Sometimes, quite often really, only the loudest voices are heard out in the world. Criminal money scams, such as the Leonard Peltier Defense Fund, have stolen millions of dollars over the years from all over the world. Peltier is a gangster and killer who murdered two FBI agents in a senseless act of violence many years ago. He is a punk with no standing among American Indians. His so-called supporters have been clever at feeding on people’s concern for justice to amass quite a lot of money over the years. This scam continues because they are clever enough to promote their agenda relentlessly. Only modern people who really know nothing at all about American Indians get taken in by this scam. Those who know the reality understand clearly the punk that is leonard Peltier. Fortunately there are only a few scams like in the American Indian world. What is more common are tribal officials pocketing money and anything that is not nailed down. Many tribal communities offer very few jobs. Among the few they do offer are jobs in the tribal government. These can be very well-paying jobs with benefits. There is a lot of jealousy and possessiveness around these jobs. Many tribal communities are plagued with this sort of selfish and desperation-inspired corruption. Because of these facts, corruption among tribal officials is a serious problem. It is not universal, but it is wide spread.

There is yet another criminal element which exploits the worldwide interest in tribal spirituality. Among tribes like the Lakota, one of the loudest tribes, possibly the loudest talking tribe, there is a lot of opposition to what they call plastic medicine men. These are non-Indian people who make or pretend to make ceremonies like the sweat lodge, or pipe ceremony, to open groups around the world. They fail to mention the many enrolled “full-blood” tribal members who make all manner of faked ceremonies and faked ceremonial objects illegally available to modern people, in defiance of the clear instructions of the tribal elders. This activity of the “plastic shamans” on one hand and the “illegal ceremonies” of tribal members on the other, is a real mess. Another mess not very well understood outside in the so-called information driven society.

The quiet voices are the ones that have the great power among the real American Indians. Quiet voices are hard to promote in videos, blogs and television. Humility and sweetness cannot be marketed if they are real. Most American Indians live profoundly complicated, often isolated and generally difficult lives invisibly, in the heart of the United States of America. Many of them do it with grace, with a sense of humor. They do it with a determination to remain American Indians, whatever that might mean or might cost at any given moment.

The bad news is that the bad news is pretty bad, and abundant. The good news is that there is no good news, not really. Beyond the normal human capacity for hope and individual triumphs in the face of long odds, there is not so much in the way of good news when we look collectively at the American Indian situation right now. I have not managed to understand any way to make this story a positive one.

Custer last battle flag, recently sold at auction...

Getting any information out to the world at large is not so easy. Every year there is at least one American Indian Film Festival with lists of possibly very significant information from American Indian film makers. As to where and how you can see, buy, rent or download these films there is no information. For several years I sent one film festival web site this question…they never gave me an answer. There are some well made collaborative efforts among the tribes who share fishing rights, hunting issues and natural harvesting of things like wild rice and maple syrup. The five per cent of tribes that have gambling casinos have conferences and web sites but these are just about the casinos and offer zero information about any reality. There is a very nice publisher of American Indian books. You cannot email them, telephone them, you can only use a paper letter to order their great books…they don’t sell many books. These are just examples of the wide problem here. Thousands of web sites, blogs, face book profiles and so forth exist through internet connections. So many of them are making up their content, or babbling with good intentions about subjects in which they have been poorly informed…finding your way to any good information on these subjects is the last great frontier perhaps…it is not easy. One should always be skeptical. Yet being skeptical can lead to many false assumptions and mistakes. Being well informed really helps but being really well informed is very difficult; so there we are, between here and there.

I remember one of my old Indians told me, “The Eagle will not tell you where she has her nest. If you know how, you can find it.” This idea works very well in the Mystery Life, but not so well in the Information Age.

Violence of Savages and Savage Violence || State of the Tribes 2011, Part Two

2011-06-07T16:48:00.000+02:00

(part two from the preceding post)

Looking around the world…one sees a seeming endless succession of dictators murdering everybody in sight and lining their pockets with cash. The middle east “Arabian awakening”, sub-Sahara Africa, South America and near-Asian countries have hatched one murderous dictator after another. Long after the horrific Holocaust of the Jewish people, when world leaders swore it would never happen again, from Serbia to Syria who can count the murdered men, children, families and whole communities?

America has a “reservation” system where it has housed and effectively minimized and isolated nearly 2 million human beings. In the beginning they took away their clothing, footwear, hair, food, religion, language, freedom of movement, government and even the children (sent away to government academies). It is not as brutal as the new wave of dictators, it is more subtle and quiet. It is a population of human beings who do not have freedom, who do not have what you have, a people who see no open doors. American Indians (unlike blacks and women for example) are not even on so-called “affirmative action” lists.

American Indians, nevertheless populate every strata of American society. They have served as soldiers, astronauts, engineers, iron workers, doctors, lawyers, judges, government officials, indeed any profession you could name. People do their best to carry on, even under federal racial restrictions.

While tribes enjoy the unique and amusing status as “Sovereign Nations”, this profound opportunity has been manipulated to a crippling dependance on the federal government and isolation from banks, lines of credit, social services, public education, public health and all the other great services enjoyed by regular American Citizens. Most American Indian men have been arrested at least once by white police, so most of us have some experience with those government services.

Most American Indians know these terrible facts. They are a shadow that accompanies every American Indian. Most of the rest of you have no idea, no idea at all. These shadows stand between every conversation we could possibly have on the subject of American Indian.

What is most savage is when captured, isolated, denied and minimized human beings begin to turn on themselves, destroy themselves. What is most savage is the silence, absolute ignorances (as in not knowing and not caring they do not know), and arrogance of bureaucracy. The national American character flaws are the root of what is savage…and lives are lost with every beat of every indifferent heart.

AmeriKa spends billions propping up dictators in the Middle East, wars of culture in two countries. AmeriKa is indebted to a brutal Chinese nation and is utterly dependent on the exploited labor and resources that country provides. It is governed by a complex council of corrupt and self-serving so-called politicians. It promotes democracy in countries like Iraq where it has transported cash by the metric ton to disappear inside corrupt Middle eastern administrators. Yet they can do nothing, in fact they do what amounts to nothing to help, assist, preserve or even protect American Indian elders, children and communities.

We can now add to this toxic portfolio of bad news the strange behavior of mostly white new age ghosts who believe they have found a new religion built upon the stolen bones dreams and songs of these same damaged and isolated American Indians….without their permission, consent or participation…..and there are millions who do this, making millions of dollars, filling up thousands of web pages and published toilet paper.

Perhaps my only point is that the reader try to know these things, the reality, the current reality.

Violence of Savages and Savage Violence || State of the Tribes 2011

2011-06-02T23:23:00.003+02:00

One Called From Afar (Chippeway)

As I move around in the world I am often in a position to address the so-called condition or state of American Indian people. After all, I know everyone of them. That’s what people think anyway. All minorities experience this expectation from modern people, corporate types. Anyway, I try to do the best I can and take some time to inform my audiences of the violence, addiction, poverty, hopelessness, isolation and doom that faces most, if not all, American Indian tribes.

Usually when people, who care, meet American Indians they want to know about about the fanciful, the magical, the cultural (curiosity)…they are interested in hearing about their domesticated expectation of what an American Indian might be like (if they care at all).

The shadow of the story goes like this…American Indians beat each other to death, slap their wives and children around, neglect their elders, steal from their families, sell their children as sex slaves, join gangs, rob the so-called innocent, lie and cheat whenever possible….really they do, just like the rest of you do. All societies have these problems. Statistical calculations (damn them) tell us that American Indian women are ten times more likely to be beaten, raped, or murdered than everyone else, with many times fewer convictions of their abusers. Homicide by other American Indian kids is the number one cause of death among American Indian youth…..either homicide directly or murder by alcohol and drugs and car smashes in the middle of the night.

Just recently I read a report that informs us that American Indian children have three times the normal rate of untreated tooth decay. Anyway, the report on the bad teeth of American Indians was followed up a few days later by a study of highway deaths, including pedestrians killed by automobiles, and there American Indians are also killed at a much higher rate than any other group.

One of the most iconic (and expensive) images of an American Indian in the present age is the gigantic painting of an American Indian holding a bear can while dressed in ceremonial clothing. This inspiring work was done by an artist who was never an American Indian but who had a little American Indian blood named Frtitz Schoelder. No actual American Indian artist ever made such a painting or was paid so much to do it. The painting is discussed all over the world in “academic” circles as a definitive revelation about the character of the American Indian.

Later I read a US Government report that says the feds refuse to prosecute more than fifty per cent of all serious criminal charges on tribal reservations. The federal government prosecutes all serious crimes on American Indian lands but, says the report, they rarely follow through with prosecutions against tribal members, even in the case of serious felony crime.

These reports can be easily googled. Easy work. What I am referencing here is in just the one week I have been writing this column. Whenever I write about these issues it always becomes a little overwhelming right away. The bad news seems without end for American Indians.

A multi-racial United States President was elected; he was supported by my tribal communities given that he has one fourth of his ancestors were American Indians. Many American Indians and their friends were really optimistic. It is a little tragic to realize, at least at this point, that Obama is not going to do very much at all to help American Indians. There have been some improvements in the administrative levels of health care and law enforcement, but nothing for the tribes real needs. It is harder now than ever for tribes to get loans, financing or consideration for much needed and well thought out ideas developed by tribal business leaders. They have been left holding dust and their vote for the Obama flim-flamon tribal policy. He appointed a man who has never been an American Indian but a working Mormon but who has Indian Blood to a high position. Like the famous artist who sees an Indian and thinks Beer Can, this guy is a Mormon who see what when he looks at Indians? We had an American Indian who was sometimes and American Indian but usually a US Senator for a while. Can’t say he did a single memorable thing or said a memorable word about anything.

If we change the conversation to the geologic and territorial; mining companies continue to utterly destroy tribal lands as the extract uranium from Navajo and Hopi lands. Their lawless methods have condemned thousands of Navajo and Hopi families to early deaths and future generations with dire birth defects. Federal war machine corporations exercise absolute control of tribal lands which contain Uranium and other war materials, destroying local life and giving the sovereign tribes no voice at all in Uranium mining….an occupation by the war machine. If this kind of thing happened in a region filled with white people, there would be international outrage at the highest levels. Because they are isolated American Indians no one cares, no one shares this information. The terrible things that happen every day to American Indians are known only to the victims and survivors and the few academics that can prepare reports which inspire me to this fit of journalism. American Indian tribes are by specific treaty and Law within the Federal government established as sovereign entities. Yet, now more than ever, aggressive state governments have managed to nickel and dime and demand a piece of the pie around most tribal reserves….which is incomprehensible really. The Feds will not help the tribes stand up to the states. They have been left to defend against such mafia-like practices with their own resources, unsupported by the Obama BIA.

What if I had a secret military operation and called it Abe Lincoln? Let’s say it was the code for killing Hitler. This is what happened to one great American Indian hero named Geronimo. His name was the code word for the ugly bag of mostly water called Osama Bin Laden. It is like using Lincoln’s name to talk about Hitler….very nasty and offensive to American Indians. The other side of this is the grossly insulting logos of multimillionaire white man owned sports teams with vulgar tribal nicknames….and last but not least the many tribal names used by the US Military weapons systems to name their weapons. Winona Laduke, one of the bravest, clearest and outstanding American Indians living today, has gone into great detail about the military abuse and exploitation of American Indians by the military. Her new book is an important read, The Militarization of Indian Country.

A pattern begins to emerge that puts American Indians at the bottom of every list of what is good, and the top of many lists for what is bad. It is a strain to bring up the issue of tribal Americans without tears. It is also a strain to accept that each American Indian must “man up” and stop complaining and do something. It is a strain to praise the many programs, advisors and volunteers that do not exist to address these problems.

Even though tribal populations are increasing, cultural specific resources such as language, food, ceremony, religion and lifestyle are being lost at record rates. The blood itself is thinning, with fewer than five percent of all tribal people now with “full blood” of their specific ancestors. Even so, the racial tensions between mixed-blood and so-called full bloods escalates year by year, in particular among the most loud-mouthed tribes, meaning mostly the Lakota.

The Lakota talk to much and talk to loud. Other tribes, many tribes, most tribes are really not saying much to the world. The epidemic of silence is another element in the portfolio of the shadow of the American Indian.

Meanwhile people all over the world send money to a vile criminal, a murder and scam artist named Leonard Peltier who compares himself to Nelson Mandella. This money to free this self-appointed political prisoner is a great disgrace among American Indians who see this money going to enrich Peltier’s friends and perpetuate the marketing of this worthless bastard as a “great man”. New age people pay seven thousand dollars to squeeze into a sweat lodge in the capital of all that is most phony about America….Sedona Arizona. A sweat lodge run by a little white man who has never spoken to an American Indian in his life. Four people died in that sweat lodge and today he sits in prison. It seems it is easy to raise money and people for fake American Indian causes and impossible for American Indians to get a seat at the table for anything real.

Yet, for all this, all of it and the thousand other things I did not add to the list, American Indians refuse to become domesticated Americans and prefer to journey on as themselves, for better or worse.

I am now exhausted and will say more on this, and hopefully make my point, in the next post.

The Arab Awakening and the American Indian Movement

2011-05-23T11:02:00.001+02:00

I can see clearly how the recent so-called Arab Awakening has been driven by the awareness and frustrations of young people who can see the world around them. I see also how important communication, and in particular internet communications, have driven this great arousal in North Africa and the Middle East.

I find myself wondering when American Indians might choose to have such an awakening. It embrasses me that they have not. In the 1970s there was a fierce movement, called the American Indian Movement. It awakened a lot of American Indians, almost all of them at that time. The public attentions, money, and criminal nature of their leadership quickly destroyed in corruption and meaningless violence what could have been something great…it was not. The leadership of AIM revealed themselves as criminals, cry babies, and self-promoting wanna be cultural heroes. And the tribes again fell silent, for most of 20 years now we hear nothing from the American Indian such as we are hearing from the youth of Islam.

Curiously, the Arabic youth seem to have wide internet access, as well as mobile phones. On American Indian reservations there is none of this, not really…not like it is in most world communities now. Tribes still have almost no internet or mobile services on their remote communities. They cannot participate, in one way, because they are the least wired minority in the western world.

They do have lots of satellite television services, so I know they can see the world if they want to. They have satellite services in place where there are no toilets, water or electricity…running the TV from their pick-up truck battery at night.

During the 90s I traveled with a mac powerbook laptop and tried to show all the American Indians I could what you could do with these things. That was in the dial-up days. For a long time I was the only human being trying to do something like this…one guy. Now, many years later, the situation is no better. Tribes have no dsl lines, no servers, no computers for their members. The only American Indian in the news for computers in the last decade was an Ojibway girl who was fined $176,000 for downloading and sharing forty songs on the internet.

When I search in venues like You Tube on the subject of American Indians it is really sad what is found. Some charming pow-wow videos and here and there a few local protests. Nothing really. Nothing real. You cannot count the number of videos being upped by Middle East activists illustrating their situation and desires.

I wonder what it would take to get American Indians to actually talk to the world?

What is published, world-wide, about American Indians and what is really going on in the world of American Indians are two very different things. Most of the time it seems what is published about American Indians is just made up. What is real about American Indians is of no interest….it does not support the fantasy of the published information.

Perhaps the difference is urbanization. The Arab youth seem concentrated, at least the important uprisings, in large population centers with at least an infrastructure sustaining internet opportunities and cell phone towers. Most tribal communities are rather rustic and with highly limited infrastructure, no cell phone towers, and no installed infrastructure to run high speed internet to so many remote locations. The result is the same. A large number of American Indians go into cities for school and work and must have the same opportunities as other modern youth. The urban-dwelling American Indians is the group we hear from the least, almost nothing at all.

It seems to take a proliferation of business interests to gather internet resources for themselves, and this “accidentally” brings the technology to local people who know how. Five per cent of tribes have casino operations that bring in money and business interests, also high speed data lines….but very few (if any) tribes share this connection with the local population. Unlike the business interests of the rest of the world. If you are an American Indian kid on almost every “reservation” and you want to explore the internet, you can not.

So, it would seem tribes are at the top pf the list for fantasy writings, new age movements and death, but at the very bottom of every list for connecting to the rest of the world.

Detailed analysis of the so-called Arab Awakening reveals the critical role bloggers, tweeters and video unloaders affected change in their countries. In some countries very few of the citizens have access to these services, yet the few who do strike fear into the hearts of their repressive governments. Among the tribes the numbers of tribal citizens who have these technologies may be few but even so, they do nothing.

A tribe in Louisiana was contacted by Arabic internet activists and advised and advised how to create a powerful voice for the tribes, BiJou Healers, who use digital recorders, photography and live interviews to archive and post their problems and concerns. This is one of the few tribes managing to understand this. Those Arabic activists showed at least one group of small tribes how to do it. The Louisiana tribe has seen that taking control over their own information and stories has really helped turn things around. A native American tribe was at ground zero in the BP oil spill. Their story at this point is “jaw-dropping”, and BP knows these people are poor, have no technology access and so forth….and step by step this is being turned around as a small group of activists publish the story of this tribe. Corporations, like dictators, thrive where communication is impossible. Every threat of exposure can bring real change as a possibility….dictators, and corporations fear open information. (The tribe was directly devastated by the spill yet to date no one has been compensated or the community helped in any way, by anyone.)

How To Control (A Living Being)

I heard a historian describe how elephants are “trained” to be controlled and so easy to manage. He says that the baby elephant is chained by one foot to massive, heavy chains, so that he can only move a tiny distance. The elephant baby continuously lifts its leg and try to move but cannot. By the time the elephant is an adult, it can be controlled with a tiny string tied to this foot.

That is how easy it is to control a free living being. With human beings the method is more subtle but the domesticated result is the same. In the Arab world, the young people are resisting the domestication offered by their rulers and pulling against the heavy chains of police state retribution and fear. American Indian tribes remain quite well domesticated for the most part. The few raging, sacred voices fall like whispers in a thunder storm, lost in the wind.

I live (and write) from a place less than fifty miles from Tunisia, in the emerald Mediterranean. In the night we hear high altitude bombers flying to Libya. Our little island how has around three hundred immigrants or escapees from North Africa, living in an old WW2 troop barracks.

I have been, and remain, a voice on the move around the world. It is quiet, intense, and some days, very lonely work. At other times it seems like the best job in the world. So I set myself free from being domesticated and wander the earth where the wind may direct me. This was the first thing I learned from the sacred teachings of the old Indians. At the time it seemed elementary. The number of American Indian persons who feel compelled to travel into the world with their ideas, songs, art and sacred hopes is small, but quite determined. We know that there are many great local people working inside their communities. The question is the world…the waiting world as it is called by the old Indians.

There is such a huge amount of money in the world. Very little, approaching zero, of the world’s resources go into tribal sacred and spiritual matters. The vampires and leeches of the new age have tricked otherwise reasonable American Indians into believing all the work they do must be unpaid work, free work, untainted by money. This idea is like the elephant on a string idea, where the victim becomes self-correcting. Some of the most visible of all the Indians talk like this, on their little “string”, performing for the waiting world. So the work goes slowly, so slowly I sometimes I have to check my pulse to confirm that I am still alive and in motion.

It is no longer a question of if or when or how American Indians can overcome the heavy chains of the modern society and their own poverty….it is a matter of when they will take a single step forward and learn that what is holding them back is…….nothing at all. The young people of the so-called Arab Awakening figured this much out.

The Nest of An Eagle

2011-03-04T22:02:00.004+01:00

Pieces of news ||

House when we first moved in--6 years ago

The World Journey has a new home

As of now, the World Journey now owns the home of the sacred fire and the nest of the Four Directions Unity Bundle Sacred Pipe. We have purchased the house and land. Now we are home. A long time now the sacred bundle has longed for a home. So here we are, just miles from Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Sicilia, at home with what the Arabic ancestors of this island called "the daughter of the wind".

We are scheduling appointments for private work in our home. This will close up pretty soon. Starting in July, there will be direct flights from all over Italy to Pantelleria. About 85 minutes flying time. This will go on until the middle of September.

House as it is May 2011

I express and feel a deep gratitude to the mystery life for this new home for the work.

Twenty-Eleven feels like my kind of year.

Fragments of Italiano||

Coffee in Italy

If you put more than half the cup, the tiny espresso cup, with coffee, the Italian do not like it. If you want more than half (really a little less than half), it is time to go to a bigger cup. Myself, I will fill up, sometimes, the little cup. They think I am a barbarian.

Its is a strange experience living in the land of the Pope, of the old Romans. When I was a boy I read a very detailed biography of Julius Cesear, I liked him, he made a lasting impression. Finally, here on Pantelleria Island I stood eyeball to eye ball with the old emperor. On the island they found hidden in a water cistern a carved-from-life bust of the old Roman. It was on display locally, mounted on a pedestal approximating his height. I thought it was an interesting linkage. Probably, he never had a cup of coffee. He almost certainly sipped the wine of Pantelleria. When he was in Egypt. It is also likely that he ate cooked grains prepared in earthen pots made from the clay of Pantelleria, right where my home is. For some reason, I have always ended up living directly on lands that have ceramic quality clay once used by the ancient people there before me. Here the clay is red with volcanic dust content. In Taos it was pale gold clay with mica fragments all through it.

The wind does not talk, it only sings.

(State of The Indian)

While the gangsters of AIM rose in promise and fell into drunkenness and self-worship, I made my own journey of awakening around the great circle of american indian communities and families. Alone. Alone like the wind. I kept moving. I moved wherever a positive feeling could carry me. I did not run with the thunder. I sometimes ran with the rain. Now I am far away from where I started. I am in another world. I have started a new circle, one that could carry me around the earth…a long sacred circle.

I am my own record keeper. My own historian. My own banker. Rather than main stream, I have made my own blue highway through time, looking for dreamers. Looking for people interested in waking up, as I call it. It is lonely work for the dreamer and for the seeker.

Even so, there seems no other way. The list of American Indians who could do this work is very small, microscopic in fact. There is another small number that is before the public eye. They are not the right ones. They are sexy and talented and toxic. They are obsessed with their own reflection in the light. It has mostly been embarrassing to see American Indians in public presentations. They are not the right ones. Rather than putting forward the keepers of the truth, they divert the attention to their own desire to be on parade. It is pathetic. While there are exceptional men and women within the Red Nations, they are not put forward. Sometimes the gap between those people and the ears of the world is just to great. Given the real problems present inside tribal communities, the rants for money and celebrity of gangsters like Leonard Peltier or drunkards and woman haters like Russell Means, the modern world has the wrong idea entirely. On the other side is jealousy, envy and paranoia about any tribal person who feels moved to speak out on sacred matters, on ceremonial ideas. There are volumes of historical reasons why this paranoia exists. Yet, in the end, only the hand that placed it there can remove that shadow. So I belive there is no one else to blame in this world except the face that looks back at you in the mirror. I have lived in such a way as to be satisfied with who that man is.

I am aware that it seems quite impossible at times. It is easy to believe that anyone could do this except me. I have accepted all along that I have a chance. I made a good education in these sacred matters. I went all around the country and found teachers. Every teacher was a child of the middle way and powered by spirits of peace, living lives close to this mother earth. So I came to believe I had done the right things and had a chance.

I understand very well the noise that comes from strangers and observers. Many of these people are what we called snakes, or obstructions. The hissing of snakes that are suspicious and afraid is not so important, it has no real weight, even though it can seem frightening and intimidating at times. Standing up and holding such ideas as I do, in the manner that I do it, I have expected exactly these problems. At the end of the day, so far, I believe I have moved forward. As we clean out the truth of this long journey, we have to pass through the mud as well as the light.

So I walk alone in the darkness before dawn. I understood all along that it would have to be this way and I accepted it. Years later I have no regrets but realize how much such a choice weighs. It is no less than the weight of the planet.

Vote You Sons of Bitches || Keep the Right Down

2010-10-23T00:48:00.000+02:00

yes
right down where they belong. Pay attention.
It is easy, just step out the door and vote left.
have some icecream later.

sacred pipe
votes democratic.....

Children of Nanaboozhoo, continued

2010-08-02T15:16:00.000+02:00

Going far away. Going unexpectedly.The Children of nanaboozho have gone walking into the void. Going in eight directions, they found their life, and made their ceremonies, their contract, upon the sacred earth….doing so independently and far from home.

Walking in their footsteps, left for me in songs carried by the great wind, I have moved in a spiral which started in North Carolina 40 years ago.

Forty years ago I took a long moment to stand very still. I looked at the eight directions around my life. Standing behind me I saw the old Indians, they were right there looking at me. I moved my life that way, to see what they wanted. That was the choice I made. I have traveled for so long along this winding, coiled road that I no longer have a home to return to. My home has probably become this laptop computer I write on today. The history of that journey is inside of it, with a copy in a digital cloud.

The foundations of the original ceremonial instructions of the Ahnishinabe were the gifts of the journeys of the Children of nanaboozhoo. These gifts were discovered during encounters with Manitous. Manitous are particular spirits, entities with great powers of transformation, who are tied very closely to nature. It is possible to find them. They can be quite dangerous. Not everyone who knows them will survive. They are worthy opponents.

One of those children is my relative, my grandfather’s grandfather, the elder of my bones, so to speak. My vision of him has kept me moving. He showed me the value of standing as a wabeeno on the rocks of the earth and making my song, making that morning fire. It is a really great feeling to stand with sacred pipe on the stones, hills, and plains of the earth. As I write, I stand on the little island of Pantelleria. She reminds me of the great turtle that carried the Ahnishinabeg into the lands of the Great Forest. She is called, by her ancestors, “the daughter of the wind”. Our songs move in eight directions on this island.

From the ground up

I started the world journey of the sacred bundle from the ground up. I had only my skin and bones, and those sacred gifts of those old Indians. I started in emptiness, believing that it was a good idea for everybody on this mother earth if I were able to make a circle around the earth with these sacred rites.

When I left AmeriKa to begin this work, I had a little leather bag with ten US dollars, all in dimes (ten cents), my laptop and the bundle. This is what I mean by saying “from the ground up”. At each step I was always given food or a place to sleep, a hand up to the next destination. I learned to make sculptures in stone and wood, and to make paintings. These arts have become an important part of the long journey. They have helped pay the way, but they are a record as well.

Inside the bubble

It is always indian time wherever I am standing. At least, when it is me. The old smoke long ago wrapped me up in some sort of bubble, a protection. It is a round and rolling bubble, so I keep going, rolling in various directions.

On the island, inside the bubble, we take the sacred bundle outside every sunrise and bring it back into the house at sunset. There is a small ceremony made in each direction. This motion enables the bubble.

Lost Children of NanaBoozho

2010-07-29T00:23:00.000+02:00

©TwentyTen.

Imagine a big, ugly person holding a fragile and delicate masterpiece of art, an ancient bowl filled with beauty and made with rare and beautiful care. Suddenly the person smashes the art into the ground and it shatters into uncountable pieces.

That big ugly person was Modern Man. The Art he destroyed was the civilization of the so-called American Indian.

Most American Indian people spend their lives trying to understand . To recognize, the little pieces they hold in their lives, in their spirits. I have spent my life looking for pieces, fragments, “shards” of time and art and knowledge.

Birds ||

Yes, the Winged Ones are very ancient. In those ancient times they taught the human beings living on the American Earth how to sing, how to dance, and possibly how to dream.

Today I heard an Ojibwe woman singing, it brought tears to my eyes. It made me feel lonely, so far from home, yet strangely satisfied to be a child of these ancient people, a child of Nanaboozhoo…not afraid to jump into the sacred winds and go out into the world. Yes, sustained and nurtured by those sacred powers even as I suffer loneliness and a mission no one but me and the old ones can understand. Alive in an empty world. Breathing in the vacuum of the dead world. Dancing in the stillness of that fear which rides the shadows of this world. A poet, a dreamer, a crazy man who believes what he believes—a student of the middle way.

I have six generations of a small bird family living with me here on the little island of Pantelleria. They have adopted my stone water bowl, which I keep at the eastern gate to my home. Lately I have heard the calls of a young falcon, a falcon has been indigenous to Pantelleria as long as anyone can remember. The shiny little water bowl is well-known to the birds of Pantelleria.

One of my teachers, years ago, could call particular species of birds using ancient songs that he held, passed down over the generations. The songs were long and melodic and step by step the birds he called would come close to us and sing back to him. He taught me a few of these songs. I was very young. One day deep in the forest, all alone, I sat down and started an owl-calling song. At first I was comfortable and had a great feeling. Soon I heard an owl calling from rather far away, then I heard others, from many directions. As I continued to sing the singing owls came closer. Without fully understanding why, I was suddenly filled with fear and more or less ran back to my auto and drove away. The memory of those songs left me at that instant and I have never been able to sing them after that moment of fear.

I am absolutely certain of the veracity, truth, and sincerity of my teachers on this matter. In my travels I have not encountered again a tribal teacher who would admit to this knowledge of calling the birds, but all confirm an ancient and very specific relationship at a social level with the Bird Nation, as we call it.

Shadows (Twenty Ten)

2010-07-03T10:14:00.000+02:00

How would the old Indians feel if they could see us now? Would Grandfather’s smile show contentment?

They said they wanted the land. They said they knew what to do with it. They said we were savages and had no idea at all. Bleeding, one by one, bleeding all together we gave it up. That is what we did. With our blood. With our lives we stood in the way. We did not bend. And so we paid. And now you have it. Today.

Yes, what would Grandfather think of us now? They say when an old Wabeeno dies, a whole world vanishes forever. I am a Wabeeno, I am Ahnishibeg, Time has measured me on the short stick, my body has stumbled and my dreams grown to long. I am the one who made it this far. I did not do it my way. I did it their way, the way of smoke, the way of the old Indians. That way. That was the way I went. In another way, I was the one who went that way. For me it is OK.

First I covered my body with water. I made the songs of the water, water songs we call them. I made them directly up into the sky and the water touched my life. Next I covered my body with tobacco and made a song from the center of my belly. I made it in such a way that it went out into the world. Next I covered myself in corn and sent a song inside my body, I sent all around in there. Next I covered myself in smoke from the sage, cedar and sweet grass. I flew all over the place, I torched the flames making that smoke with the stem of an old pipe, the original instructions for the direction of that smoke, straight up and all all over the place. Straight up. Next I went dreaming and in my dreaming through the dark I addressed shadows down onto the earth, from the horse I was riding. I dreamed again and ate delicious soup. Magical soup. Finally I sat down and rubbed my belly. I breathed again, feeling that I was inside myself and everything was ok.

In the morning sacred pipe is carried outside, to rest with the sea and the sky, looking down the mountain. In the night the bundle of sacred intentions is carried inside to vibrate dreams out into the space, into the stones of the old walls of which the house is made. All this work takes place on the side of an old, yet steaming, volcano.

What did you do today?

The Way of Smoke

2010-05-26T13:23:00.001+02:00

photo by Silvia Santi

The purpose of the Sacred Pipe is not magic. It is not personal power. The sacred teaches us about the joy of life, how to cherish others and to hear the voices of nature speak clearly from inside, rather than outside, our souls.

Until you have helped another person, wept and felt their pain and suffering as your own, you cannot understand what it means to hold Sacred Pipe. Until you can stand inside your own mind and yet hear the wind, feel the water of the earth and know the songs of the birds flying into the light, you are isolated and lonely. Even if you believe you have everything.

Personal desires are like stones deep in the valley. What is sacred is the long road to the top of the mountain. Can you carry the stones of the valley up to the mountain? Until you know the meaning of these things it is meaningless to reach for the sacred. This world is the mirror of your soul, but you have to look into that mirror with your eyes open, all your senses open.

Today Sacred Pipe is a mass-produced item, like toy swords made of shiny metal or play money used in children’s games. You cannot go to the market and buy the sacred. You cannot hold the sacred just because you have some blood quantum or walk inside some particular culture. It is more elusive. Sometimes it is free, but nothing is free. You must understand what to pay, who to pay, and where to pay. And then you pay. This is real freedom.

I have followed the way of Sacred Pipe all of my long life. My path of smoke, and wind, and fire has lead me to this place, the tiny island in the ancient sea. Inside my body I feel time pulling at my eyes, at my muscles and bones. Time has the power to steal what is most precious in the space of a single breath. I am far from my home, but I am still on sacred ground, a land that knows me very well and holds me. I awaken to beauty. It is what I see when I open my eyes. It is what I feel coming up from my feet. Beauty fades. What is beautiful is beautiful because it fades. This is something I have learned from time as I watch its shadow in my dreams. I have always chosen beauty, for what other choice, in what other direction would my satisfaction lead me? The perfect beauty of a storm, the perfect beauty of silence, the perfect beauty of thunder; so I send beauty my smoke and the songs of the old Indians and in thunder, or in flames or sitting still I accept the choices I have made. I smoke in a sacred manner. And I dream.

Following the smoke of the red stone I have traveled in eight directions. I have gone where I have never been before, where no American Indian has been before. It has taken only determination. There is and has never been a question about believing. I understand that my travels with this sacred bundle have changed lives. Each changed life carries even more changes forward, into the seven generations. The changer is also the changed. I remember very well where I started. I started in Hell. Following the sacred smoke I made my way forward, one step at a time.

I have never been satisfied with the tribal reservation philosophy of more or less cowering before the modern world in paranoia and anger. I was never satisfied that my diverse ethnic origins, being part welsh, ojibwe and catabwa would mean that any door in this world could be closed to me. Racial qualifications are a poisonous lie which celebrates fear over change and growth in my view. So no door has been closed to me. I went and breathed, looked into the eyes and lives of teachers from many American Indian tribes…and also from Japan, China, Tibet, South America,, Israel, Egypt and the Old South. I liked those homemade biscuits and the long dirt path to the houses of my old southern catabwa relatives. None of those people had automobiles. They lived deep inside the forest, not at the end of a parking lot like now. Yes, those old souther biscuits took me everywhere. Along with the tobacco that my old relations grew up from sacred beginnings, as food for heaven.There are many kinds of smoke my friend. If you follow smoke you will see this. Sacred smoke has its own color, movement physics and ambient. It is particular smoke.

Out into the world some ancient children of nanaboozho were the first to go far away from the family lands, deeper into the unknown world. What they brought back became the foundation of our sacred rites and teachings. I understand those emotions that drove them forward. It is not a negative feeling, but it is not a feeling of being satisfied. There must be something more. Something more I can do. So I have started moving in this ancient way.

Today, people listen to what is said from far away. There are no ears to hear what is being said right in front of you. I understand this. In the modern world heaven is far away, another place than here. Following the smoke of sacred pipe keeps me inside my body, right where I am, where I happen to be. I treasure this. For me, the answers are not far away. They are nearby.

Over the long years in my private life I am usually alone, or with animals rather than people, something which is very important to me. Inside the ceremonies I am wrapped up, a yuwipi of ceremonial attention in making correction ceremonies….and at those times I am with the people, wrapped up in the waiting world and waiting for their hearts to show me what is possible. A ceremony with the people is a mirror and it can reflect only what is shown by those people who may be looking into it. This, as well, is one of those answers that is nearby. Though no one is listening nearby. Their attention is far away, so I pas by unnoticed but not unfelt. Like smoke.

Feather of an Eagle

2010-04-30T13:30:00.008+02:00

A new Book has arrived ||

(left) Eagle Feather painting. © 2010, Turtle Heart.

For the last several years I worked very hard to write a book about my experiences with the sacred of the American Indian. In the end I wrote over 600 pages of comments and teachings on this subject, my life for the last forty years or so. In the end I found a publisher who thought the work might have some merit, here in Italy. I live these days in Italy, on a small island called Pantelleria.

The publisher and I areed to an edited version that trims the commentary from 600 pages to just around 100 pages. This condensed document was translated into the Italian language. For me this was a great thing. I really love it that my work is discussed in print in this language of my new home. I was able to also include a selection of petry and a gallery of my art images reflecting the mystery life and the sacred.

This book is now available to the world market. My first paper-published "book". I have been writing poetry, prose and publishing original tribal art online since 1986, for free. The published book goes into details that have never been published online.

Here are the details of my first published book:

La piuma dell'aquila

Prezzo € 22,50 || Edizione 14,5 x 22 || Pagine 200
|| ISBN978-88-87944-80-8
|| Language Italiano

Click here to Visit Venexia.it.... or your local bookstore. First edition is only 800 copies.

There is something very compelling about holding a book you have written in your own hands. It is a very different experience than writing something for the internet. I hope this book will help advance the cause of the World Journey of the Four Directions Unity Bundle.

I receive no payments or royalties for the first edition, as my contribution to the cost of translation and color printing (there are 16 color plates of my paintings). For me, this is ok.

I feel really good about this publisher. The owner was very clear in her ideas and proposals. Having a real editor work with you is very educational. Their contribution to the work is very powerful and in this case very comfortable for me. We concentrated on the essentials, a work that contains the positive, the magical. I have no idea how to write a review of my own book.

I hope in the near future we can make an English language edition available.

There are so many good and sweet people in this country. Coming here has saved my life. The hospitality, kindness and support I have for this work is very beautiful in this country. Several god friends help me write this book. The translation and editorial work of Venexia was really supportive, patient and easy. The book was expensive to print, as it contains a large number of paintings and other full page images which illustrate the work of the tribal sacred. I believe the work should be viewed in 3 bodies, poetry, text, paintings-photography. Each body of the book tells the same story in a different way.

Falling Down || Equinox Wabun 2010

2010-03-24T12:46:00.001+01:00

©2010, Turtle Heart

falling down?

yes, I have fallen down.

I was holding my dream up into the light

it was easy to forget the shadows of time

for a moment

yes, I was bleeding

laying there on the ground

I closed my eyes

but all i could see

all i could feel

was the dream

all i remembered was my dream

yes, I have fallen down

but I was moving forward

at that time

equinox spring 2010

Don't Pay To Pray

2010-03-03T14:51:00.002+01:00

Reasonable people understand the relationship between money and the infrastructure of sacred space. There is a vocal and unrelenting, judgmental minority that pesters society on this subject.

I have done hundreds of ceremonies for “free”…meaning I paid myself whatever the costs came out to be. In doing so I have spent a modest fortune over these years. At other times, I require that participants make donations or pay fixed fees to cover the various expenses involved. These expenses include housing the sacred objects (rent), travel, food, telephones, computers and gasoline, to name a few.

While you can function with great freedom, you cannot function in a worthwhile manner for free. This has always been true. There should be no question that you are going to pay. If no one asks you for money, it is up to you to seek out the host and demand to know how you can help. Every other argument on this subject is fear, a lie.

Who pays for Dalai Lama to travel in the world and give teachings to all cultures? And how much is he paid? The answers are simple, it costs millions of dollars to get Dalai Lama around. He personally makes nothing. I, and a handful of others like me, are in this exact situation.

Reservation communities have never had much experience in understanding or in talking about money.From the beginning until the present day, money is not well understood by reservation members. Most reservation members do not grow up in the same capitalist system as modern people. It is a different there. Tribal people do not really understand money. Even today, with some tribes having profitable casino operations, they require outside consultants to actually understand how to make a paying system work on the reservation.

When tribal speakers talk about “do not pay to pray”, or say things like “there is no money in the right to ceremonies” they are speaking tragically incorrect English. What they are trying to say is how much American Indians really dislike the theft of tribal teachings by modern people. This is always the problem. Money is not the problem..

Do the people who say strange like this believe that the ceremonial leader must pay for his airline ticket, car rental, feed everyone and then go home, paying for everything himself?

So, in this argument about “money” put forth from the LookingHorse group, and other loud-talking American Indians, they are not speaking correctly. This is to bad. It has created a lot of confusion. Learning to express clearly what you really mean is a very important part in the desire to communicate with others. Clarity in communication is in fact a foundation of the sacred teachings in question.

The sweat-lodge and other ceremonies cannot be sustained in the outside world for free. They have never been sustained for free in the traditional world, it is an illusion.

More tribal authorities need to take responsibility for standards. Every great tool of spiritual faith in the history of the world is sustained by an infrastructure, payments by those whose best interests it serves.

I travel throughout Europe and have made a number of sweat lodge ceremonies here. I have asked that the expenses for wood, food, travel other required spending are covered. The fees I have charged reflect what these costs are. In this way I am able to make this effort to share in a responsible way. Usually I collect just at or under what the journey and supplies cost. It is that simple. Only a model like this can enable the possibility to share these American Indian practices with a waiting world.

Another model might involve endowments. Some tribes have the power to do this, but so far have not. There are no endowments for the sacred bundles and ceremonial keepers of tribal society. With proper endowments sweat lodge camps could be set up and open at no cost, like the church. They could be dispatched to troubled places around the world to offer assistance, for example. But there are no endowments for this work from anyone, including American Indian tribes…including those who have spent millions of lobbying dollars and other political activities while their sacred objects and languages vanish in front of them….or perhaps I should say behind them.

Historically, tribes never developed a habit for cash. To this day, tribal members rarely have a good understanding or a good feeling about money. It is symptomatic of poverty. Guilt and confusion over what money is and where it should arrive is a source of great confusion in American Indian life, and in the expectations and mythology of tribal ceremonies. This great confusion has become a mythology which sounds like a policy. It is only confusion.

Understanding how to use money to protect and move the ceremonial original instructions around is a challenge for even the best American Indian community. There is a lot of healing which needs to be addressed about this issue.

I have always believed that it was a good idea to enlist the help of modern people and their money to support the infrastructure of the tribal sacred. With some sense of money management the tribes can move their dialogue out into the great waiting world. By insisting everything is free, they stay home while the mountain of bullshit which surrounds them grows higher and higher. Having the money to send runners, bundle holders, sweat lodge leaders, out into and around the world where they are needed can only happen with a supported infrastructure. This is not paying to pray, it is praying and building and growing, when it is done right.

Tribal ceremonies are more important, and contain more sacred real world information than “prayers”. We Wabeeno people do not believe mouthing your desires and hopes to the creator (praying) is very real. The ceremonies and the sacred bundles are something much more important than prayers. A sacred space is like a mystery life machine. You can enter it and go on a great journey.

Society in general allows religious and spiritual groups to build an infrastructure, a financial system that takes care of the work and the objects. That is why there are so many tax and political reliefs for such groups. Only in tribal society, in loud voices dominated entirely by the impoverished Lakota Nation, do the people talk about “don’t pay to pray”. They talk about it loud and they talk about it often. What they are trying to say is they don’t want people to steal their ceremonies and make money from the theft. I agree with that. When the wrong people do the wrong thing and make money, it is ugly. It happens everywhere, not just to American Indians. We all have to work our way through the same pit of snakes to find a true path for our lives. Stealing and selling is not the same argument as the act of providing support and expenses to the great sacred work. Confusion between these two ideas has come out as a loud and vulgar argument called “don’t pay to pray”.

I have made many ceremonies with tribal people. I always paid for this. I considered it my obligation and part of my education. I was happy to pay. I paid as often as I could. I would just leave as much money behind as I possibly could when I stayed with and shared ceremony with my tribal relations. It was like bring home-made cookies. People bring cookies to a meeting and everyone eats. I used to bring cash. And just left it behind when I left. I made no noise about it. I am a good example. It is one reason why my tribal elders love me.

Tribal leaders and keepers of ceremonies need to brace up and embrace a more balanced and thoughtful view of these matters. Under the current entrenched attitudes, the ceremonial teachers, sacred bundles and ceremonies are vanishing. This attitude contributes to the continual shrinking of opportunities and qualified people to carry on the tribal sacred.

I could imagine a great university filled with teachers of the sacred teaching day and night. The great school of the sacred American Indian teachings has yet to be built. The current attitude may sound noble, but it is not correct. When tribes scream and yell about the money they are missing the point entirely. They are trying to object to the theft and acting out of tribal sacred, but using this language it comes out as something else..

Update || 25 march 2010.
Arvol LookingHorse, a keeper of an important sacred bundle of the Lakota has gone on record to answer some of the hysteria directed his way by tribal members who are angry that he "raises" money or "accepts" fees for his work. His answer is similar to mine, as you may read above. It is great that at least one other keeper of a tribal bundle has spoken with some clarity about the need for tribal keepers of bundles to raise funds to meet their escalating expenses.

"This whole conflict is happening because of money that these individuals think should go to them personally and to others they convinced of their hardship that is due, any money raised is for what efforts wolakota was created for and the people involved in those efforts. There are other state and non-profit organizations that help the concerns they have and have helped them. They can also spend their energy on their concerns and creating their own program, instead their energy to attack people."--Arvol Looking Horse, statement June 2007. The full statement can be read at this link....

Additional clarification on this issue can be found by clicking this link....

Lakota Fraud

2010-01-29T12:12:00.002+01:00

I use a Google alert to track stories and articles about Sacred Pipe. Every day the most astonishing claims and behaviors by modern people show up in my mail inbox. Some disturb me more than others.

I have recently found notice of several UK women, calling themselves life-coaches, who claim to be “certified” Lakota shamans and keepers of tribal pipes. They offer discounted vision quests, one even lets you vision quest using emails, for $400, at this link, for example. This crazy woman wants you to believe the impossible and apparently does quite well finding suckers to go along with her.

Most American Indian tribes do not use or embrace the Sacred Pipe. It is the traditional and historical practice of a small group of tribes. Most tribes, therefore have no opinion on the abuse and theft of its teachings out in the modern world. Likewise, tribes at present have no power to prosecute or sanction the many, many liars and pretenders who damage the sacred truth by this dangerously misinformed behavior. If you pretend to be a catholic priest or a doctor, you can be prosecuted in most governments. If you pretend to be a keeper of tribal sacred objects, no one does anything. Because of this the modern society is facing an increasing population of self-appointed shamans and pipe keepers. This behavior, aside from being fraudulent, is doing a terrible harm to tribal truth, tribal integrity.

Who are these thieves? What motivates a frumpy British woman to believe for a moment that she is a keeper of a Lakota Sacred Pipe? The recent case of James Arthur Ray, another thief and liar, who caused the death of four human beings who should have known better in Arizona, are but the latest in examples of the harm this behavior brings to society.

What has happened inside the Lakota culture that has made this kind of fraudulent claim so incredibly common? It is ironic in many ways. There are many Lakota people who scream and yell about the theft of their sacred, yet it is other Lakota people who seem to be selling and playing tricks on white people, for money, and so making this problem so serious. The very victims of this crime are the ones who seem to be making it all possible.

The Lakota tribal society is deeply damaged and troubled. Child sex slavery, domestic sexual abuse, alcoholism, violence, rape, drug addiction, unemployment, illiteracy and all their associated ailments are an epidemic among the Lakota. It is almost as if they are cursed because of the fraud and lies and violence that they condone and seem powerless to do anything to stop.

Are they, as a people, strong enough to clean up the rotten people in their own community? No, they are not. There are over 500 American Indian tribes. The sure sign of the fraud is how consistently the pretenders and liars invoke the Lakota, one small, troubled tribe. I have reached a point in my life that when some modern person starts talking “Lakota teachings”, I am sure they are liars and thieves at worst, self-deceiving fools at best. Anyone with any real, authentic experience inside American Indian culture will understand this.

There are moments when this problem makes me physically sick. As real tribal people try and try to hold their culture and sacred ideas together, they are mocked and insulted by white Anglo-Saxons whose need for attention, whose psychotic natures, bypass everything real and distant and just appoint themselves sacred officers. It is perverse. Why are modern people so easy to fool, to deceive, to hoodwink? It seems that for every American Indian who struggles against these dark forces to survive yet another day, ten more white people spring up, like toxic weeds, to claim the credit and power to hold the tribal sacred.

There are multiple problems at work in this situation. One is the easy way in which modern people, by being habitually uninformed, allow themselves (give permission) for crimes like this to thrive. Another is the complete inability of American Indian tribes to come together and pressure the world government to give the same protections and legal rights to American Indian religious leaders as they do the other world religions.

I have spent my life addressing this travesty. It shows no sign of going away….seems to just keep getting worse. I don’t mind crazy people, angry people, lost people….but these fools who are suffering a mental illness causing them to feel perfectly all right deceiving everyone and fraudulently collecting money are just disgusting, tragic, and lost.

People need to pay attention. There are no Anglo-Saxon shamans. There are no Anglo-Saxon Pipe Holders. There are no initiated Lakota Anglo-Saxons. Not one.

Taino Tribal Land || aka Haiti

2010-01-15T01:31:00.003+01:00

There were Indigenous “Indians” on Haiti. They lived a good and sweet life. They were wiped out by the colonialist behavior and replaced with slaves from assorted brown-skinned countries. The Arowac Tribes (Taino), were ceremonial migrations of the Inca.

These tribes were sacred tobacco tribes, carry the ceremonial plant from long trade routes which connected them, through layers (not directly), to the tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley (Creek-Catabwa). The first arrivals were not interested in these sacred ideas. No one asked them anything, except to move along. The Colonialist occupation was served up by the church and the state.

The Taino Indians were wiped out.

The sacred house (wrapping) of the Sacred Pipe of the World Jouney of the Four Directions Unity Bundle wears four Taino Indian beads, of baked ceramic.

The Rev Pat Roberston has said there was a deal made with the devil in Haiti. He seemed to think that the devil was not him, not his Republican Favors Party Christian Values and Discount Value Mechandise Church (Membership Required)…he forgot that he is the devil with whom the deal was made. I am sure he has a picture of Ronald Reagan somewhere nearby. That is the Clubhouse of Deals.

Why so many bad people have kept this country down, and why so many great western nations have spent so much time and effort to keep a puppet regime in power is strange to me. A few very white and privileged people need to keep making their money. This seems to be strangest but truest answer we have at this point.

The long suffering of this land of Haiti, from the people who first came there with love, following ancient ceremonies, to the long strings of the Puppet Masters who will play out the "humanitarian rescue" of these suffering human beings..... and they will make even more money.

I wonder if Obama has even noticed?

Whose knife has the butter here?

I wonder why the MSM is so proud of all the photos of this suffering, pain and loss in Haiti, yet never show us a photo of Afghanistan or Iraq? Sure are a lot of photos of smashed people, thousands of them.

If I were looking for the devil, I would start at Rev Pat Robertson's house.

Twenty Ten

2010-01-07T20:27:00.005+01:00

I find myself wondering.

WTF? Here on the little islnd it is a sunny 70 degrees. the flowers,which are in great abundance and variety, scent the air as the blue moon falls back down into a normal winter. Soon the local Pantesche will drink homemade wine all night and dance and eat in the stone caves they call "circles",something that was once true everywhere in Italy.

Things start to really quiet down around here about now. This is the warmest winter season I can remember. The lizards did not go to sleep this year. they usually climb into a deep hole until March, but the lizards did not sleep this year. A few new developments continue to encourage me that the Journey of this great bundle of the intentions of my tribal elders may reach another country this year. I don't run around and make much of a promotion for this work. It seems to require movement that is quiet, arising from the middle way. there is a lot of noise in the modern world. Anyway, the little sacred fire is a steady signal and we keep it going, sending up the news to the mystery life. In a noisy world that steady signal means something. the old Indians used to tell me, "if you do something, something will happen. If you try, something will change..."

...and some things have changed, looking more interesting and complete. I spent years following the sacred river to the sea. Today I am on the Great Sea, on the back of an ancient Turtle....the island of Pantelleria. I have ridden slowly in a circle just a little outside of time, not quite on the map of the paymaster.

A lot of the old teachings have been beaten down. One life can only hold these sacred mysteries for so long. If there is no one there, the way falls into the dust and so becomes dust. I inch forward towards eternity with this understanding. My arms are full. It is all right here before me.

Persons who may be interested in sharing their support to bring the Four Directions Unity Bundle to other countries of our world should feel free to contact me.

Aboriginal Sicily

2009-11-06T10:34:00.003+01:00

I am spending a few days in Catania, the eastern city of Sicilia. It is a charming and interesting city. Very close to my B&B there is the old castle of this ancient city. Last night they started an international folk music festival, so I wandered over to see what is was like. I immediately saw three aboriginal Australian people in the crowd and made my way over to them to say hello.

A few minutes later this elder stepped up and played this instrument. It was quite the blessing, quite the surprise. Later I spent about an hour talking to his sister. I will have more on this later. Video was recorded with a Nokia E-71 mobile phone.

Stolen Land || Welcome to Native American Awareness Month 2009

2009-11-02T12:26:00.002+01:00

In my mind, what has always been important has been how a human being can connect with the direct power of the mother earth, stuffed with a type of consciousness that is fully informed. In Ojibway culture we sometimes call this type of person an eight-sided character.

I have a sense that eight-sided characters exist in some small but unknown number.

I am the Keeper and Protector of the Four Directions Unity Bundle. It is perhaps the only American Indian Sacred Bundle in the history of the world which contains so many inter-tribal sacred objects.

It contains 18 sacred pipes, from 18 sacred tribal people. It contains eagle feathers, sacred pottery, weavings, carvings, rattles, sacred drums, bones, songs, silences and movements from tribal medicine people, keepers of sacred, protectors of the ancient future. This bundle, as we say, is my only client. This sacred bundle is my life’s work. I am the one who went there and face to face and heart to heart received these sacred promises and objects from American Indian actuals.

I have the eight-sided responsibility to understand what this bundle means, and where it should travel. I have the eight-sided responsibility to remember what the sacred people said to me. I am a Wabeeno.

You are all standing on stolen sacred ground.

You are all standing inside my dreams. Every bilions of you. I am not afraid of you. I am the one who has made my life. I could feel the waiting world. You are the waiting world. the waiting world has made this sacred bundle I carry in their dreams. The Four Directions Unity Bundle is the undreamed, the unsong, the unspoken prayer that rests, waiting, inside your soul.

Notes from Correction Way ceremony, world version. 2009.

WOJB - Woodland Ojibway Radio

2009-10-25T17:09:00.003+01:00

This is a little radio station operating from the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.Sometimes the program lapses into Ojibway language. It is a small public radio station with a lot of spirit. The do a good job. They do not have enough money or support to run Ojibway culture 24 hours....so they fill out other program sections with all sorts of offbeat public programming sections. One day, a local DJ brought in tapes he made of his Big Band era 78 vinyl LPs. They occasionally offer long songs and segments of good tribal American Indian music.

Attached is an interview with Ojibway elder Harold Frogg. Not many places where you can hear Ojibway elders talking about what is on their mind. This is from the Podcast library.

To check out WOJB, follow this link......

They interview American Indians. Right now, some important ceremonial leaders have been interviewed about the Arizona sweat lodge event which has become well-known among American Indians. The local American Indians up that way seem angry about what they perceive as the abuse of this purification ceremony. There is almost nowhere else in America where you can hear what voices in the American Indian community are saying.

James Arthur Ray || the anti-self

2009-10-21T09:52:00.004+02:00

James Arthur Ray and Sedona Arizona

Warning. Reality may be further away than it seems in Sedona Arizona.

Sedona is the world capital for pretenders, imitators and self-worshiping. I have a long history and knowledge of Sedona Arizona and its endless parade of thieves like James Arthur Ray. In recent years it has become such a spoiled and lost blackhole in the desert southwest that I would never return there. Everybody in Sedona is (they believe) a sacred person, a sweat lodge leader and a pipe keeper. Why not? User beware.

Anyone who has three first names, and uses them to speak about himself, should always be viewed with suspicion. Tribal elders would rarely even look in the direction of a person holding and using such a name. This is the first warning sign. Yes, in this case I am using names. I am responsible for my words. This man's behavior is so offensive, it begs to be called by name.

James Arthur Ray is the ideal poster boy for everything that is immoral, incorrect and abusive of the teachings and sacred property of American Indian cultures by modern people, by the so-called new age.

1. Cost. the tribal elders prohibit profiteering from tribal ceremonies. There are no exceptions to this rule. It is acceptable to gather money for expenses and keeping the bills paid. This is a capitalist society after all. However, such extreme fees, even for the rich, are vulgar. They are a corruption of the intentions and implicit beliefs of the tribal elders.

2. James Arthur Ray does not have the permission or support of any American Indian, living or dead, to hold American Indian ceremonies.

3. No qualified sweat lodge leader would ever put so many people inside a ceremony. It is not a ceremony for large groups.

4. Presently, tribes do not have the authority to arrest or seek litigation from people who are stealing and corrupting American Indian sacred teachings. The elders rely upon a common sense form of reasoning. Doing the right thing. This man is a thief. Everyone like him is a thief. It is tragic that a loss of life has come from his behavior. He does not care about this. What price will he pay? What price does a thief pay when he sits before the mirror of the soul?

5. Bad information. Why would 64 people arrive at a ceremony by James Arthur Ray? Does the victim, by refusing to be informed at all, even in common sense, have some responsibility for their suffering?

6. Why are the media, citizens, publishers and governments so reluctant, even unwilling, to talk directly to tribal leadership? And by tribal leadership I do not mean gangsters and media whores, but keepers of sacred bundles, ceremonial elders, medicine society and tribal clan society leaders? Those sacred people are standing on their own two legs right on the same earth as these thieves and liars are standing.

7. Mistaken Identity. James Arthur Ray is not important. Personalities are not the point in an American Indian sweat lodge ceremony. This sacred teaching is personality independent. ANY American Indian teaching that is marketed as the work of a "special" person is a lie. A sweat lodge is a sacred experience for the soul of human beings. Over my 30 plus years of conducting sweat lodge ceremonies, I rarely even ask the names of the participants. It is not a teaching about personalities. Only modern religions have a (fatal) fascination for "personalities".

If you ever have a sweat lodge with a seventy year old nameless American Indian in some unnamed wilderness, you will understand the difference. All the money in the world, and all the "special gifts" of a typical ego-maniac and his cult of followers cannot find that sacred man or know that sacred place. If, instead, they act out and pretend and imitate, they have nothing. I think this is clear enough. It is up to you to understand the difference.

Tribes, I must admit, should carry some responsibility for this problem. The US Government has not yet allowed American Indians to sue or seek injunctions against people like James Arthur Ray. Freedom Of Religion seems to be the root cause. As I write this, I understand that tribes have been reluctant to test this hypothesis. Perhaps injunctions could be granted, but the tribal leadership has never tried. Until tribes at least try and help solve this problem, they also have some responsibility for their suffering on this matter. On the other hand, other religions do not have people running around pretending to be a Rabbi, Priest or Imam.

Ameri K a || While the Good Keep Quiet

2009-10-05T13:39:00.003+02:00

It looks bad, from here....

watch this here......

The Great Indian Wars || DVD Toxic Release

2009-08-07T14:57:00.003+02:00

...digital image (art) ©2009. Turtle Heart

The Great Indian Wars
2005. Now circulating the internet p2p, torrent and avi networks.  
Recently released as a DVD boxed set. 
Bci / Eclipse || 235 minutes || ASIN: B000ALM4IA

Viewer warning |
Facts in this video series are farther away than they may seem in your monitor.

The only Good Indian is a Dead Indian. While they don’t say this out right, that seems to be the implicit message in this terrible 5-part series now making the rounds….no it was not made in 1950, as the attitudes would suggest, but is in fact a contemporary and one-sided look at the wars with the Plains tribes, north and south.

While the film claims to be about all the so-called Indian Wars, they have virtually nothing to say about the wars with the Spanish on the west coast and southwest. What is talked about is so unbelievably one-sided that I was taken by surprise.

The production is entirely contrived, a running narrative with pasted in film clips from bad movies, hobbyist re-enactments and entirely un-credited illustrations from who knows where.

There are a very few comments by people loosely identified as “historians”, but who look more like random beer-buyers in the local 7-11.

If there is a more one-sided, paranoid and phony story about the American Indians and the invading Americans, I have not yet seen it or heard about it. There is not a single positive American Indian voice anywhere in this series. This film seems like propaganda. They praise the virtues of butchers like Sherman (the US civil war general), and the lunatic Custer as if they were heroes who saved the country from a terrible fate. The murder, assaults, theft and destruction of the American Indian culture is seen as a justified and righteous manifest destiny. The most useful revelation was how dedicated the leadership of the US Military to decimate the tribes, their culture, property and beliefs. This part they make perfectly clear along with the fact that the American Civil war introduced a serious quantum upgrade to the character and destructive potential of the weapons used against the savages.

There are a lot of highly questionable maps that are used to claim to understand who all the American Indians are and where they came from. There are numerous errors as well as outright false information contained in the narrative. One of these cultured facts is the assertion that “as many as 23,000 American Indians” were killed in these wars. This is the lowest attribution I have ever heard.

As we gain even more distance in time and memory as to the clashes and struggles between the modern Americans who came to North America and took by force, murder and lies the homeland of another culture, it is tragic that films like this will probably be studied and taken seriously by students interested in this period. The tragedy of this series is that it was made by thoughtless people with zero interest in understanding what is true.This is happening even as we see more and more openness in telling the truth about WW 2 and so many other historical events really going all out to cover all sides of those events.

I wonder how the Jewish people, for example, might feel if Hitler’s friends made their version of the story of the killing of so many Jewish people? As an American Indian, that is close, I expect, to how I felt watching this series. If I were making a film like this I would show it to the American Indians to see what they thought of it. Maybe they should have shown this film to an audience of psychologists before releasing it. While, every now and then, some modern people struggle at great expense and rivers of good intentions to come to terms with its history and its American Indian bodies still living on this earth, it is rare that accuracy, fairness or honesty is the result. I am not entirely sure I understand why this is. I have very little confidence or belief in the majority of video material I have seen on the subject of American Indians. Perhaps it is because it is also rare for any of these well-intentioned and financed people to actually know any living, informed and initiated American Indian people. Hey ! I wonder why that is? They can be found. I seem to remember most of the American Indians were rounded up more or less and put onto little rectangles of land called reservations. Perhaps that is it. All of these efforts seem to be the view of the distant stranger, the voyeur who knows no one, touches no one yet has to much to say about what they think they see.

It is not easy to understand what the intentions of the producers are in this series. If their intention was to create a sound historical document, they have failed completely. While it would be unfair to say everything about this film is bad, the truth is so much is wrong with it, that is the only choice I feel that is left to me, as a reviewer in this case.

Name Ceremony || Recovering

2009-07-16T20:16:00.003+02:00

Over the last week, we held a name ceremony for one friend who lives in the middle of Italy. Long Arrow (Dreaming) was the name she was given. She is a gifted dreamer, quite a unique dreamer. However, a good name is not a reward, but a map to new information about who you may be and where yo may be able to go in this life.

Name-giving is a serious task. A ceremonial namer can be an American Indian of many flavors, styles and methods. name giving is ancient. for many of the more ancient tribes, some level of ceremonial naming is an essential element of their original instructions.In the culture of the Ahnishinabeg, the Ojibway, receiving the name is one of the eight sacred rites of Initiation into the sacred rituals and objects, the Mide-Wi-An Society, Wabeenos and Jessakids, those persons educated and experienced in the ceremonial rites of knowledge, medicine and dreams.

Inside this world the tools of long singing, long drumming, and dreaming together in the night add a dimension to that name. inside the mystery life, inside sacred ritual space, you are that name. Your journey into the mystery life is as that named person and not as the person named by your family.

Almost everyone has distant, ancient ancestors who worked hard, or went through something spectacular, and received a new name. the naming is within the cycle of teachings we call the original instructions.

Most American Indians today have accepted the names imposed upon them by the United States government in the management of the Federal American Indian Reservation System. Many of the American Indians who are close to their original instructions have various names either as a result or in imitation of this long and ancient tradition. However, even today, most American Indians use the names imposed upon their families by the United States Government. As a young man, one of the first acts of returning to and recovering my tribal ancestors was to understand through vision quest, long travels and many ceremonies, what my name really was and is. I called the act of finding this name an act of restoration.

This Long Arrow (Dreaming) is a brave woman who is trying to wake up. Inside her struggle is the memory of a sacred dream, a dream of power and beauty. Every human being has had this dream. Learning how to awaken inside this dream is the work of the sacred ceremonies of the Four Directions Unity Bundle. the name was given from the sweat lodge, the water drum, the morning tobacco fire, corn pollen, tobacco, songs and silences. At the end of the time the name was given. We closed everything out with a long song around the big drum that Tewa tribal elder Red Shirt made for me so many years ago.

You do not have to be some kind of American Indian to receive a name in this tradition, by these ancient methods. We have always said that when one person finds their way inside the mystery life, inside that sacred circle of time, song and smoke, well, then they are not indians or men or women or anything but a human being trying to open their heart right there on the earth at that moment and receive and understand the truth. It is not a moment for sissies or fools. It is in fact a gateway, an opening into another use of time, space and in realizing who in the world you might be on this mother earth. the old Indians always told me it could happen just this way.

2009-06-30T16:05:00.003+02:00

Nurse Jackie | Edie Falco

A new Showtime series, starring Edie Falco. I download episodes to my computer. At first I was initially interested in Edie Falco. She is an interesting character herself and through her character is really an exceptional actress. A good actor takes us on a journey, and compels us to come with them. I was in the medical profession for some years, though now many years ago. This is a series where Edie Falco portrays an emergency room nurse. The rich complexities of her characters life are balanced by her direct and take no prisoners response to her responsibilities and vices. I am really impressed by this new medium for a gifted artist to use the acting arts in this interesting and powerful way. The stories are interesting. The central figures of the cast are women, each a jewel in their own right. The central men are an interesting mix of fools, gay men, heroic and poetic heterosexuality. In this sense the inter-social weaving of this setting is as artful as the acting. Nurse jackie shows us the system…the medical system, the insurance system, the uninsured, the immigrant, the pompous, the noble dead and dying. This is a matrix one could easily surmise of all the best elements for art and talent to flourish. The window we have moves from humor to horror to sarcasm to revelation to mediocrity that comes from gifted staff and crew efforts. The whole effort is very satisfying….and goes by quickly. Episodes run about 55 minutes, but it goes by so quickly I had to check to be sure.

The acting arts and film making are great tools and refuges in the mystery life, in a good life, in an open society. A good film is one of societies treasures. I have not written many reviews of film. I do watch films and really enjoy the experience sometimes. Most of the time I am disappointed or unimpressed or just nonplussed by what is made available. I really like Edie Falco. I am happy to see her take on a new project, be recognized, and invite us to come with her. If you watch television or download video from your computer, I would check this new series out.

Hopefully within the year there will be subtitles and local language versions of this show available. I have been watching the English episodes, now in the 5th episode of season one.

I do not have a television, not for some years now. I do enjoy films and video and have followed a few of my favorite shows using the internet, which is now pretty easy to do. I invested in a good 24 inch monitor for my computer and this makes a good viewing experience for two people.

I find I like using the Internet to find films and videos more and more. With high speed internet you can get what you want, even experiment if you like. In recent years the whole experience of selecting for yourself what you want to watch in the media has made a huge impact on the take what we give you network system that I grew up with for nearly sixty years.

I found this new show just by word of mouth in Internet reviews, so I am doing the same and passing along the news. If you like real life served up with spice, character, wit and just an edge of the forbidden, Nurse Jackie is a gem.

Breaking || Republican Party Reorganizes

2009-06-08T07:31:00.002+02:00

"WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Troubled by dwindling membership and numerous setbacks, the 155 year-old Republican Party filed for financial, intellectual and moral bankruptcy and announced its reorganization as a tax-exempt church. The new GOP will be officially called The First Church Of Jesus Loves America And Latter Day Lower Taxes Anti Foreigner Old Time Heterosexual Do As I say Not As I Do Affluence Ministry Hoop N' Hollerin' Revival Gun Lovin' Banker's Club Outreach Hootenanny, Inc but will still use the name "Republican Party" for most functions." (Lee Stranahan). Find out the details here....

(Departure) the Faithless Void ||

2009-06-05T22:38:00.003+02:00

The Faithless Void || Murdering the Truth

The tremendous reception and importance of the words of Obama, June 4th, are having around the world are one thing : clear evidence of how strongly the citizens of the world are hoping for change of the status quo, in every direction. People at the top to nameless dogs at the bottom of society are all hoping everything will change. To change the world you need to just stand up and move forward, taking responsibility for yourself and the powers of choice that you posses. To the right the foaming dogs of discontent wring their hands and throw shit at every word. Their poison is their drama, and they are the queens of the anal empire which we see on Fox news. Such cowards thrive on good news and hope, something they can poison. The most popular television in the ameriKa. Elsewhere the police say they are looking for an assassin who has written Obama’s names on the righteous bullets. They say they can’t find him. Nearby Dick Cheney tells us that he saved the world by torturing muslim criminals. I wonder when someone will erase him, or at least arrest him. The last eight years of rule by white texas trash leaves a lingering odor in the world.

Often, in the middle of the night I am unable to sleep. All around my life are the fruits and jewels of the sacred life, the promises of those distant beginnings when all life was sacred and there was peace in eight directions, the history of the beginning of my tribal ancestors, of the original life. Once I was sustained by these things, carried by them into the unknown world.

I rise sleepless in a wide world of cowards and liars, murderers, thieves, liars and people without souls. Some of the people are American Indians, some of them are Jews, others are catholics or Republicans, or Muslims, or workers, sometimes the idle rich. Sleepless in a land of Italian corruption, dominated by communist police and absent the human rights we once dared called freedom. I sleep dreamless in a land without leaders and eat at the table of poisons and garbage laid on a plastic table by yet more thieves and profit-mongers and liars. We voted them into office.

I walk streets of the world paved with emptiness, carrying people without lives or hope to places that never existed across lands stolen in blood from those who passed here before me.We are the children of the lies, the crimes, the blood and terror of those soulless dogs who made our world in their image. People of conviction, education and opinions. They dress very well and all of them have iPhones.

I no longer believe in tribes, religions, communities, governments, churches or leaders. I don’t believe in eyephones. I believe only what is before me, what I can lift with my two hands and sense with my own eyes wide open.

The modern media continues to create the fear which they pass over as truth. They are professional, well paid liars and thieves, deranged people who know nothing acting out in front of cameras to tell stories about the American Indian on PBS. People who know nothing see this trash and think it must be true. When you look at who the writers, producers and money people are, you see only white people…white people who willingly allow themselves to elevate liars and cowards, lonely desperate poor people, into a light which has no illumination and which casts longer and longer shadows onto the lives of real people. They do this with every American Indian issue, with issues of the Mexicans, Gypsies, Jews women, and all the other struggling minorities who have lost control over their own histories, languages and lives. The main stream media has never once told a true story about the American Indian. Ever. It seems an accident if they tell us the truth about anything.

Like many of the Old Indians I have imagined some way to avenge the murder of our tribal ancestors. Like many American Indians I find it difficult to forgive modern society for its crimes against the sacred, against the ancestors, against the land. I have known, however, all along, that there is only one way to fight back. I know my anger and pain must be directed into the sacred. I know my revenge must be made entirely of love. I know the sacred of the sacred pipe and the mystery life teachings of compassion are the only weapon at my disposal. I have known this all along. In the darkness I have only the power to reach for the light or close my eyes and be still inside the darkness. I am learning to fight back without fighting. It is not easy, but it is more satisfying.

Sleepless again that night I dreamed I had a big red cadillac which I drove around into the countryside, the wild desert of california. I drove all night, drinking beer. The next morning my wife told me I sang indian songs all night. I watch the sun come up, out of the corner of my eye I see the full moon setting over the emerald sea and make pasta. This dream has replaced the dream I had for many nights when I did sleep where I had a big 18-wheel truck and in the back was a small sacred fire, which I was driving around the world. I miss the truck.

Vecchio Mulano

2009-05-19T23:08:00.004+02:00

The Old Cantina || Founded 800 A.D.

In the last few days I went to Tuscany. there we met a so-called famous Alchemist who gave us a feast and later we drank an alchemical extraction in alcohol of pure gold, as a shared meditation. This was quite interesting as a meditation. The so-called famous alchemist was more or less an empty bag of mostly water. A man apparently incapable of listening to anyone, interested in nothing but the sound of his own voice. I found him shallow and false in every respect. He seems to be one of those people, so numerous on this earth, who really knows not much but is good at the BS behavior. He is very famous in Italy but his name is hardly worth mentioning. It was quite tedious listening to his diatribe about how great he is. He offered our small group the magical gold extract in plastic cups. I alone refused. I told him I do not believe the truth can be served in a plastic cup. He got up and found me a wine glass, and so I alone had the magic drink in glass. He seemed to have no idea at all about how to present such an opportunity. The dozen or so other people present were all doctors, potential clients of his famous extracts- So I learned it was not so much a ceremony (which is what i thought it was) as a sales pitch for his products. Sometimes even fools do something good by accident, in the same way that a broken clock is right twice each day for a moment. I was not surprised at this broken attempt at pretending to the sacred. It is something i have seen more often than I can count.

The real fruit of the journey was that we stayed in a charming historic old hotel for several days in Tuscany. Tuscany is a magical place. The food and wine are legendary and deservedly so. On the last day of our trip we went driving into the high mountains around Tuscany. These mountains have the famous white marble and we saw magnificent white marble mountains, the very place where Micaelangelo gathered his stones for his masterpieces of sculpture.

In one small village we stopped at an interesting old cantina. A place where you come in and sit down and they serve you little bites of the local food in fruit, cheese, meat and vegetables. It was quite a magical place. We ended up meeting Andrea Mulano, the owner. He tells us the cantina has been in the same building, serving this food and wine since the year 800. He is the man in the photo above. Next to him is his sister, Cinzia. Their family has operated this cantina, this house of wine and food for 1,200 years. Think of that! This big man was everything the famous alchemist will never be. His blessing was worth more than all the gold we consumed in the plastic house of plastic knowledge of the famous wise man. His sister was charming. Together, in this small cantina in a tiny village in the mountains they offer the true sacred magic of Tuscany, of the ages, of the true divine spirit of great humanity. What a contrast. Andrea has some good English. He says he picked it up some years ago when he visited Napa Valley. I was very impressed and touched by his kind and loving spirit-

Sometimes when you look for what is wisdom, and what is a treasure, you find it in the most unlikely and humble place....and almost never in the golden tower where everyone says it is. I enjoyed drinking the gold, even though I had to endure three hours of bullshit from the stuffed shirt wise man. I will treasure forever my two hours drinking wine, eating the treasures of Tuscany, drinking the wine and talking to Andrea Mulano and his sister Cinzia.

We are thinking to move away from Pantelleria and feel Tuscany would be the perfect new home for our sacred work. It was a rewarding trip.

PBS Propaganda Archives "white"-washes tribal history (again)

2009-05-12T10:37:00.005+02:00

The American Experience || We Shall Remain
PBS Series, airing in five parts. Check your local listings.

With enormous fanfare, abundant grants and the absolute hype of the white-controlled media, a nasty series of propaganda fantasies about American Indians has been rolled out onto our televisons to praise, awards and accolades of the “true” story of the American Indian. This highly speculative, and largely manufatured fairytale is presented as if it is truth. Though few to no real facts are available on these subjects, the series unfolds from the beginning, middle and end as if everyone knows what really happned, even though it is cerain they did not.

They tell no stories of the medicine society people, of the keepers of the sacred, of the Kiva or the Sacred Pipe. Once again they go to the well of sensationalism and perpetuate the lies of criminals like Rusell Means and sensational killers like Geronimo. While pretending to tell some sort of true story about the American Indian, they draw up the same old chiches, sterotypes and pointless bullshit which the white media has been spewing for 400 years. Nothing has changed. It has just become more slick, better produced and presented in such a way that a reasonable person who knows almost nothing about the American Indian will accept as “true”.

One would like to say kind things about such a lavish and well-connected effort to tell some sort of story about the American Indian. The list of sponsors, grants, consultants and donors is truly impressive. There is even a dual cast of actual American Indian people. On one hand there are the actors who act out for us the narrative. On the other hand there are present descendants and relatives of the American Indians being talked about adding their scripted comment. There are scripts, producers, wardrobe and many “reenactments”. It all has a lot of polish and is a highly professional presentation. The scripting, however, is the problem. There is a lot of conjecture and guessing (and imposition) of historical events posing as facts. People who are not very well versed or knowledgeable in tribal history and information will think what is being said represents truth. There are no disclaimers that it is all speculation. This absence of clarification is a serious shortcoming.

Given the credentials and resources of the production professionals, one can wonder why the focus Is so narrow. The rich diversity of tribal lives and history is ignored entirely. Whole geographic regions of long tribal histories are just not mentioned.

Tribal people and communities continue to drown in a deep ocean of really bad information. This series does nothing to help this problem…in fact it only compounds it. Many of the segment directors and crew are American Indians, which gives the errors and weaknesses of this series a decidely odd flavor.

There are to many unidentified white people commenting as “experts” who clearly have no demonstrable way to illustrate how they know what they claim to know or any history to allow the viewer to understand who they are or how they arrived at their speculative points of view.

The good that can be here is thereby eclipsed by the omissions and errors of presentation. The very act of scripting reenactments of largely undocumented events and histories is itself highly questionable.

Is this yet another ongoing example of how shallow, contrived and unable to muster a clear view of reality which seems to be an epidemic in the mainstream media? Yes, it is.

When historians must manufacture and act out a narrow view like this, something is lost. Perhaps what is lost is the truth. All this scratching around the bleeding earth to tell some sort of American Indian story is covering up the real story, the story the world continues to wait to hear and see.

Given the noble historical context of “preserving” the history of heroic leaders like Tecumse, one can only imagine why at the end they felt it relevant in that context to focus on the lies and criminality of the so-called Wounded Knee incident? What about the struggle of the Navajo against the uranium industry or the long and noble history of the Hopi? Two million American Indians and over 600 tribes wait for the real story. This is not it.

This is worthwhile viewing and recommended. Just be forewarned that this is yet another variation of revisionist and highly selective, manipulated, speculative history. It is great to see the Wampanouag get their due credit for the salvation of the Pilgrims. It is great to see innovative and brilliant leaders like Tecumse receive historical recognition.

America, and the world, has yet to take any honest steps towards truly seeing the American Indian history that rests half-buried in the shadows of the truth. For what it does accomlish one can be appreciative. For what is missing, we tribal people continue to wait. As we have for 500 years.

My rating for this series. 3 out of 10. Best regards.

A Sweat Lodge in Parabiago Italy

2009-04-14T15:16:00.001+02:00

For the fifth year, I go to Parabiago to conduct the ceremonies of the four directions unity bundle. We will build a new sweat lodge and go through the dream ceremony. A small group of people coming from all over Italy will attend these ceremonies. These will be the first ceremonies since I have finished writing the book Roots of the Sacred Tree…as well as the first since turning 60 years of age.

We are started working some ceremonies in a new community near Farrara. However, the space and the principles organizing this work have proven to be unsatisfying, requiring that we postpone and rework what may or may not be future possibilities for work in this region.

This has been a winter of pretty strong changes and challanges. My health continues to be a problem. It has gotten better on some fronts, only to present new problems on others. The biggest one at the moment seems to be in walking. I cannot walk very far before my left leg cramps up with a great rigidity in the muscles and great pain as well. My movement has become restricted, perhaps in a dangerous way. Other more subtle problems persist. At the moment my spirit is quite ready to get around the world but for my body it may in fact be impossible until there has been a stronger change for the better.

Lately my dreaming has been dreams inside the regular world. The world we see inside modern life. The most unusual development has been the arrival of a large 18 wheel truck which has had various parts in my recent dreaming.

Realizing so much of my dreaming has been inside modern society, I have asked my dreaming to change this. The results so far have been interesting. A few nights ago I was in a regular sort of house. My late father arrived and changed into a loin cloth and a big feather bustle. The bustle was a unique design. It had many very large feathers, with small feathers, like dongles, one hanging from each big feather. He actually started dancing and said to me “now I get it”. I actually started dancing with him and happened to mention to him that the old Indians figured these sacred feathers were just as important as the King James Bible he had so much affection for when he was alive. Well, this ended the dancing straight away and the dream became a big argument that woke me up. His dance was very good, a traditional style that really set off his feather bustle in a good way. This may be first dream I have ever had where my father presented himself fully as an American Indian man. In terms of the inner emotional journey I have made with this man, it was perhaps even a breakthrough.

Friday night. One man who has arrived early has settled into a very strong yoga practice that involves strong vocalizations. As I sit and listen to it I am not disturbed or irritated but not entirely comfortable with it. I will have to enter an instruction once the fire is made that only the practices we are here to share can be conducted. At the moment he is on free time. Once the fire has started he needs to go on Indian time. I have had encounters with strong yoga students who behave rather competitively or who seek to impose their schools of practice into the ceremonial work. The American Indian elders have always believed when you arrive in their lands, that you place yourself under their direction. This is all together a curious question which must sometimes be considered when working with people from diverse cultures and experiences. In these mystery life teachings I usually consider everyone present a white belt beginner.

This round we need to make a lodge for 14 people or so, or at least that is the rumor. (Ended up being 11-ed)

This round I will seek to bring forward the rule of silence in a strong way. `Much of the ceremonial space is an opportunity to clean out the back of the brain. `If there is to much talking, the noise of that prevents the subtle energy from getting to the back of the brain. The silence has a great power, between the singing, putting tobacco into the fire and the other elements of ceremony…properly these things can be tied together in a powerful way in the rule of silence, and kept from linking entirely by to much frontal brain noise…so, creating and maintaining that opportunity is always a big burden of the work.

I recently gave my wife an Eagle Feather. In this ceremony, I will ask her to be the one who touches the people with Eagle Feather. This will be the first time she takes her eagle feather into a ceremony in this way.

We are building a new sweat lodge this season. We have found a good group of hazelnut trees which have given us the wood for the frame. They are very fresh in the spring season, flexible and willing to work for us. We had to sneak up on a public park in the night to get these saplings. That is how it is in the city life. You have to make an expedition to find what you need, and you have to be careful doing it.

12:30 we have finished making the sweat lodge. The unusual angles of wood growing in the city creates an unusual shape this time. By the time we were finished it resembles an egg somewhat more than a circle. The wood has a fierce energy. Some of the saplings have many little flowering branches which I did not remove. It gives a great sweet sense of life to the completed frame. The egg-shaped frame.

1:30 before we have the lunch, we are covering the sweat lodge. I tell the Italians we have transformed a place on the earth into the womb of a sacred woman, that it is up to us now to understand this and make it true.

3 pm. We begin by seeking agreement. I am old, you are young. You are over there, I am over here. We cannot agree intellectually or culturally. We define ceremonial space in terms of where it is possible to agree. We can agree at the level of breathing together. We can agree using the rattles, using our silence. We can agree to enter the sweat lodge together. We can agree to dream close together. So we begin by standing together at the fire. In this round I will have them go one by one to the fire where they will see two fire keepers, women. One will touch them with an eagle feather and the other will show them the tobacco and the way to make an offering into the morning fire. They will come from there to the sweat lodge stones waiting for the fire. As they return each will will take a rattle and start shaking it. When the group is completed, we will al go together to the tobacco fire and place in tobacco all together. I will take fire from the morning fire and use it to start the sweat lodge fire and we will have started in the formal way. The sky gate will be open at that time.

8:30 pm. We talk about putting something in. I tell them if they put something in there, if they open up and put something in that ceremony they will get something back. This was just after asking two men who had traveled a long way to go away, without any explanation to anyone, even them. I did not even ask my brain why I told them to go. If after all this time I cannot trust my instincts and my spirit I am in the wrong line of work. I believe you should do the best you can. If you do that and the answer is no, even so, you should be ok. Though we do not speak the same language I told them that was unimportant. I do not need language to understand what is going on with people inside a ceremony. Once they cross the line of the sacred morning fire they pass under my direction and I see them clearly. Language at that point means nothing…at least not anything important…it does not have to stop our progress.

Fragment ends.

The Most Ignorant Pope || A Monkey's Ass

2009-03-21T13:53:00.005+01:00

This new beady-eyed Pope is one of the most intolerant and uneducated leaders the Catholic Church has yet to produce.

Every time he opens his mouth only the garbage of intolerance gushes out. As he parades around in his gay clothing, he has managed so far to insult everybody. When I see photos of him, his smile is like that of a badger and his eyes are dead little stones with no light, only rage and judgement. Of all the people in the world who need to shut the fuck up, this is the number one guy.

His latest tirade of racists supremacy and Nazi ideals is directed at the tribal spiritual practices of Africa. He tells the world that these people who believe in and practice their traditional tribal religions are bad people who need to be converted to the faith of this enshrined Nazi bigot parading around as a religious leader.

Many indigenous people had hoped we had long ago passed the point where traditional tribal spiritual practices were being condemned and judged by a Christian majority. However, since he crawled out from under the dark rock the old Pope kept him under, this new Pope has renewed the war against traditional tribal belief systems.

This is a retrograde philosophy at its most dangerous. His smug finger pointing should be taken as a personal insult to every person of reason and intelligence.

The world has so many ineffective world leaders. Clowns and punks who disguise an agenda of intolerance and hatred in educated words and phony appeals to unity. So far, the career of this mousy little man has managed to insult everybody. It is perhaps the strangest ascension in my lifetime, this rise of this ugly and hateful man.

Tribal people have their own religions. After many lifetimes of trying to get the language used to talk about indigenous religions cleaned up, we have this new international voice which has dragged the discussion back into the gutter.

This Pope is a sorry, sorry human being. I am 100 per cent against him. How much damage will he do in the free world before real justice catches up with him? The Church appointed a Nazi to head the Church. And he is moving right along with the supremacist views and racial hatred promoted so destructively by the Nazi culture.

He is a dangerously out of touch clown in red slippers. I ask no forgiveness for speaking in a harsh way. Sometimes polite language has no urgency or emotion sufficient to express the outrage society should feel to have this monkey's ass on the world stage. I am 60 years old. I can count the decent and effective world leaders we have had in my lifetime on one foot.

I have had, for the last several years, an experience of living within a Catholic culture. What i have learned here in Italy is that nearly every sensible adult working man and woman could care less what the Pope and his talking ass have to say about anything. On Pantelleria the head priest thinks his job is to tell people what to do. He thinks he is some sort of godfather or boss on this tiny island. He is so out of touch and closed in his mind that some of us wonder if he even has an asshole. He sticks his stinky assless face into every detail of daily life where the answer is almost always no. As in the rest of the world, sensible people pay him zero attention. The problem is the children and the innocent. There are so many kind and innocent people who just know no better and should not be blamed for looking to the church and its leadership. these are the one who are being betrayed. I could care less what Pope and his talking ass have to say, but I see the harm that it does to people unable to muster up a judgment against an office they consider sacred. It is the hope and hard work of the most innocent among us, perhaps, that holds the daily work together. the cynical truth is the Pope and his talking ass know this very well. they know to a certainty, a cynical, drug-dealers certainty, to whom they speak. Didn't they use to drive wooden stakes into the hearts of vampires? Now they make them Pope.

I have looked now at many photos of this Pope. Examine his eyes and hands in particular. His hands always look like claws, like they are trying to grip your throat and choke you. His hands are never open, they are always claw-like, threatening and filled with anger and tension. His eyes are the same. He has beady, unsmiling eyes, regardless of what the rest of his face is doing. Those are not the eyes of a man at peace, or of a man who believes in peace.

The innocent are being betrayed.

Shadows Breaking Into the Light

2009-03-12T23:39:00.006+01:00

For American Indians the news seems mostly to be bad news. Today we read a report which tells us that while most American people are living longer lives, American Indians are not living as long as a generation ago. American Indian suicide is the highest in the country, elevated way above the suicide rate of all other Americans. This portfolio of darkness is carried throughout tribal communities. Understanding problems like this seems to be the best work we could make in these days. The problem with shadows is that no one wants to turn around and look at them. The people who count these numbers are just number counters, they offer no help. In my lifetime, what has been lost is astonishing. Looking back I am stunned. Many reservations of the American Indian have no news. They don't even know what you and I know. The vast majority of reservation residents probably receive little or no news about what is going on...in the world, or 20 miles away. You and I are informed. Today you and I know American Indian babies die at a rate 44% higher than just ten years ago.

Next week we arrive in Milano to make ceremonies around the Equinox. We will go inside the sweat lodge and make the dream singing in several places. I have appointments with several of my doctors. Possibly I will have some days in the hospital in my continuing struggle against a relentless virus that is in my body. At the moment my ability to walk is about 300 feet. Something is wrong with my legs and they have stopped working in general. I go, but I go low, as the old timers used to tell me. Go Low. I can't drum as long as I used to be able to. My arms have problems of their own. My body was pretty well trashed about 10 years ago in a crash with a big truck on the Hopi reservation. I don't feel like an old Indian ready for the drop anytime soon, yet my health situation has slowed down and limited the opportunities which could be present for more ceremonies, more songs, more prayers and more sweat lodges. This is my work and I will make it up to the end, doing that work. I can't shake the strong feeling I have that the work makes a difference. No matter how bad things may seem, perhaps they would be much worse if not for these prayers and ceremonies that our people make as often as they can.

Inside that sweat lodge we talk about life and death. Inside that sweat lodge we are seeking life. We are seeking the knowledge of the universe, which is different than the knowledge of the family, of the job, of the statistics which say we are all dead or dying. Many of my old Indian teachers were in their nineties, a few over 100. One of my dearest teachers passed way recently and he was only 63. His father was almost 100 when he passed.

If I could show you a single image of what is going on all around the homes of the American Indian people right now it would look like hell itself, it would stun you and reflexively you would look away, change the channel, blink. Yes, there is and are some great beauty, some gathered space, some shining moments. These two possibilities are both true at the same moment.

You cannot change another person. You can change yourself. If you do that, if you wake up, you will know what you can do. There is something there you can use. It is the same for the people, these sacred relations of my mystery life...there is something there they can use. They can find their way. We awaken one by one. Into a life. It is right there.

Change The World

2009-03-05T16:29:00.003+01:00

What if the world changed? If you, yourself, stay the same, you would not notice.

Change begins within. Today I took the little bus that goes along the winding sea road from Rekhale to Pantelleria Village. Down the line an elder, a man got on the bus. he seemed 75 or so, could have been 95. He seemed ancient. He was wobbly. He was dressed in an impeccable Italian wool suit, perfect for the weather today. he had a little beret hat and good Italian shoes. he was so impeccable, and so old school. i was impressed by his spirit, by his impeccable sense of being correct. I just turned 60. I feel the burn. getting old is not for sissies. While I have burned, I have grown.

In the last Blog I talked about the murdering gangster leonard peltier. Some people told me my account of his worthless life and the liars and fools who support him was not accurate. Looking at the sun and pretending it is the moon is a common sickness in society. If the truth is the truth, but liars and clowns and bullies can't see it, is it still the truth? Short answers, yes.

The American Indian community in particular has an enormous assortment of clowns and monkey's asses, with names like "freedom warrior" or "big canupa" parading around using testosterone instead of brains, using noise instead of respect or silence, using the shaking fist rather than the eagle feather. At times it seems like being and American Indian means you have to walk hip deep through mud and darkness just to see the light far away in the distance.

I recently reviewed a report which shows that American Indian young men kill themselves at the highest rate of any minority, and at a rate far higher than seems real. the innocent and tender American Indians, worn down at last, take this escape while the blowhards and rifle pointers and fake warriors find reasons why you should give them money and believe in their warrior wisdom. My old tribal teachers called the sacred tribal life the shrinking path. They called it this because those who should stand up and be counted in the sacred light are lost in the shadows of their own rage and denial.

Even if the world changes, people like this will not notice...so in their dark homes everything remains the same. And the world appears to have not changed at all. That seems to be the message for this week.

I learned something watching the old Sicilian. Something about silence and something about style. Life is sweet, and I keep dreaming. Maybe one day, the warriors will shut the fuck up and let the children speak, let the women breathe and let the elders bring the light around.

Leonard Peltier || A Scam that keeps on Scamming

2009-02-19T14:11:00.007+01:00

The Leonard Peltier scam keeps on giving. It has a new ambition, the ear of President of the United States, one Barack Black Eagle Obama.

Presently a man has been presenting a petition on-line, in cooperation with Looking Horse,Keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Woman Sacred Pipe of the Lakota Nation. His bizarre petition can be found here. I encourage readers to enter comments against this petition at the site.

They want to meet with US President Obama. Do they want to ask the US to help with the rampaging violence, alcoholism, rape, unemployment suicides and poverty, elder abuse, child sexual abuse, violence against women, illiteracy and mountains of other problems which is the daily life of the Plains Tribal nations?

No.

They want Obama to let convicted murderer and gangster Leonard Peltier out of prison. This is the big and most important issue for these crazy people behind this petition. Peltier is serving a life sentence for the assassination of two FBI agents. Freeing this gangster is why they want to meet with the President of the United States.

Arvol Looking Horse, the Keeper of a very sacred tribal pipe bundle, has aligned himself with this petition. This, to me, is the strangest development of all. Why has he aligned himself with this publicity stunt?

I do not know, personally, a single American Indian who has ever believed Peltier was innocent. Peltier initiated an unprovoked attack against two FBI agents investigating crime on Pine Ridge reservation. He attacked two young men with a combat grade, M-16 automatic rifle, against 2 FBI agents armed only with small caliber pistols. The attack was unprovoked, except in the paranoid mind of this gangster and his gun. Peltier has many crimes he has yet answered for, including his part in brutalizing, torturing and murdering Anna Mae Aquash. As I say, I have never known personally an American Indian who believed this punk was not guilty. The man circulating this petition seems to have questionable motives…selling his crappy books, being “chosen” to be among the great Sioux “warriors”…..what is most phony? This ongoing scam to get this murderer freed from the just sentence imposed upon him has now brought in the name of a person we hope would be above such vulgarity and fraud, namely the keeper of the sacred Pipe bundle of those long-suffering Lakota. Who is this man that he would lend his name to seeking to talk to the president of the united states about this punk Leonard Peltier…but has no interest in talking to the government or the world about the many problems and disasters which are the reality of the day to day life on Sioux reservations?

This whole petition for Obama is opportunism. I think this petition, with the name of Looking Horse attached to it is strange. It brings questions about that sacred pipe, that man, of the elders and leadership around him. While the propaganda theatrics of the so-called supporters of Leonard Peltier avoids the truth, it is a tragedy that the name of the sacred pipe is being associated with this monumental flim-flam. There are so many vitally important and pressing issues in American Indian life. This one issue, this Peltier issue, is a fog, a cloud over what is real and what is important right now. While people are free to behave in a politically active way, even for a cause such as this, it is sad to see sacred officers and spiritual leaders lend their name to such questionable work. Peltier is a symbol of nothing good. Helping Peltier does not help any American Indian anywhere except Peltier. People desperate for attention are not the best people to rely upon to understand what is needed to support the American Indian. A lot of people around the world have been fooled.

2009-02-09T13:35:00.003+01:00

Copyright ©2009. Turtle Heart.

Finish the book

After two years of work I have completed a book about the nature of sacred pipe and the philosophy of American Indian ritual that is best described as the shrinking path. Commentaries on the teachings of the shrinking path. That is the subtext, but not the title.

A few days before the book was finished at last, I turned 60 years.

I bought myself a $1,000 pipe lighter. Palladium. Very well made, beautiful. A little reward that I can carry around in my pocket for the next sixty years. I will use it to light the morning tobacco fire.

Here on Pantelleria Island, we are in the season of the wind. She is known as the Daughter of the Wind. When I knew that this island was known as this elegant and powerful name by the ancient ones, it brought me a lovely feeling. What better place for an old American Indian to reflect, write and prepare himself to take Sacred Pipe around this mother earth. There is so much peace, so many sweet people. It has been a revelation to me of an entire other side of my nature. I have been fighting the indian wars all my life. So it seems. Fucking indians. We are still here. I am still here. I dwell and thrive on the edge, on a crumb left behind by an old volcano. My home has volcano vapors which come up from the garden.

I wrote this book on an Apple iMac. This computer is a toy really. An accessory for your iPhone. It crashed many times, went to repairs twice and still behaves badly whenever it can. I wrote the final draft using Apple’s “Pages” program. It is a nice clean writing program. I composed it and organized it in a nice writing program called “Scrivner”, which is about the best program ever for organizing and composing a book with many chapters and parts. When I was finished I exported it to Pages to finish the writing. 54 chapters. 54 files. When it came time to put the chapters into InDesign so I could publish it in a digital format for copyright registration, I found Pages does not play well with other programs. Apple keeps making toys that work only with itself and not so well with the tools professionals use on computers these days. Apple has been a big disappointment lately. After converting the Pages chapters of 700 pages to Rich Text (RTF), I converted the RTF files to a single PDF. I then converted the collected PDF to a single RTF file and imported that into InDesign with the help of a $75 plug-in that automatically flows so much text across so many pages (fucking InDesign does not do this itself). I then had to remake all the tabs and paragraphs, add graphics and poetry. Mamma Mia.

60 original paintings. 54 original poems. 654 pages of writing. Completed February 08, 2009 at 9:21:44 pm, CET.
I will be looking for a publisher. I need to see this thing on paper. I will also offer it as a digital download soon.

Today I listen to Flamingo music, smoke, and go walking in the wind. The Great Wind is my mother.

Mazzacane | and the final draft of the book is finished

2009-01-21T02:58:00.001+01:00

Writing the Book

My attention in these last weeks has been directed entirely at finishing a book about my life with Sacred Pipe. At the moment the initial draft is finished and soon it will be sent for copyright registration.

It has taken two years to write this book. The last four months it has taken many hours each day to work to bring it home.

There has never been a book written in the first person by an American Indian on this subject. It makes sense that the first effort in this direction would be from someone like me. I have spent my life under the direction of my tribal elders. I have held the form without surrender or compromise.

The gigantic mountain of trash on these sacred subjects which is regurgitated on the internet and in the few published works available have contributed one notable factor to the truth about tribal sacred matters: confusion.

Readers who find my book will not be confused. Clarity in intent and delivery has been the abiding rule I established in my relationship with the many tribal elders who guided and supported my work over these last forty years or so.

A blog is a kind of journal, at least that was the original intent. The journal of the World Journey of the Four Directions Unity Bundle does not break the way daily news breaks. It is a slower movement. Most of the real work is not in a verbal realm.

The holiday season fills me with a curious indifference and this has been reflected in very few blog entries. In the end the blog is my own reflection about myself and about the work.

A new US President comes into office today. He inherits a vulgar and thoughtless disaster brought to us by one of the most incompetent leaders in recent history. I can only dream of the remote possibility that a new administration would bring georgefuckingbush before a criminal court. The new president has some American Indian credentials. It remains to be seen if this will bring any relief or changes to what is basically a neglected, abused and somewhat desperate American Indian population. I will not speculate. If his own blood can have a voice in his soul, Obama will make a difference. He cannot save everybody. If he can just save himself from a bullet and stand up as a decent and thoughtful human being I will be relieved and satisfied, as should the world.

I wish they would bring back stoning and publicly stone george bush and his father to death. Not a threat, just a wish. Where I live we have a special stone which is called, in the local language, “mazzacane”, which means “kill the dog”, in Pantesche. Goodbye, asshole.

The book is over 800 pages, with color paintings and original poetry added to the text. Mamma Mia. Now to find a publisher interested in publishing the first ever book of American Indian sacred ceremonies written by an American Indian. Yes, I know good luck. If you have any ideas make a note in the comments section.

Obama. Yes. The word is go. I have just the slow analog modem but I read the speech and looked at photos and hot emotional and cried. This is really a great moment. Billions of smiling people all over the world, smiling and happy and filled with hope for a man who is just a man, but a moment something greater than just a man. Very emotional and important moment for the USA.

Let the goo dtimes begin. Yes, a lot of suffering but maybe the pain won’t be wasted this time. For the last 8 years there was suffering and it was pretty much you are on your own. Something has changed. Stay alert. Get off you ass and help the good times come back. Be happy and do something.

Buy my book. My Big Book. Two years of work. We need this book. Maybe I will send a copy to Obama.

Solstice of Winter 2008

2008-12-27T02:08:00.002+01:00

Solstice
Sunday 21 Dec 2008 || 1:04 pm (Pantelleria Island)
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Day Before The Day Before the Big Sale

2008-12-23T18:03:00.000+01:00

Santa Claus is a dick....read the full story here.

Best regards

ThanksGiving....?

2008-11-27T11:18:00.001+01:00

Thanksgiving is a dick. Read the full story here....

bon appetite....

Fritz Scholder Painting Used to Wrap Old Dead Fish (Breaking News)

2008-11-27T07:41:00.009+01:00

Here we are at another cycle of the new American Mythology, "Native American Awareness Month".

The most notable event which has been referred in this empty gesture has been worldwide reviews and pontificating over Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, an exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in the USA.

While Scholder made some sort of an impression on the rich white people's art market, he made none at all on American Indian culture. He was not any kind of tribal person. He did have some "Indian Blood", whatever that may mean. Millions of Americans have some little drop of American Indian blood. What makes an American Indian an American Indian is participation in the culture, in the life, in the struggle, in the reality. Scholder did none of that, ever.

When one considers the many incredibly talented tribal artists working in both the past and the present who are actual participants in their tribal cultures, this national press worship of a dead artist who painted large smudgy paintings of American Indians he never met is perverse. His paintings are very good, which is not the point. He has, as many people do, American Indian ancestors, or "blood" as it is sometimes called. Not the point. Sometimes it seems harsh when people are challenged about their heroes. The artist is gone from caring what we think. Arguably it is not his fault. It is not right to say Scholder is an American Indian artist. That is the point. He was a very god artist, I like much of his work.

The media is clearly dominated by people who are white, think white, sleep white, drink and eat white and have white fantasies about who and where the Indians are. Sometimes it is rather cute, amusing, watching this behavior. Where in the world is one actual American Indian that the white press can applaud, salute or exhibit?

My vote for a really great, and really real American Indian Artist is one T.C. Canon. This guy was one real American Indian. His art was real, often profound, sometimes encompassing the great mysteries of real life in a tribal person's real world. I think my favorite painting of his was one he did where he showed his mom walking about in Santa Fe while pregnant with him. How many artists have that kind of eye? TC Canon dies at an early age. He died to young. I look at the content of his work and sometimes weep for many reasons, not the least of which was his astonishing clarity.

Looking at Scholder's paintings is like looking at mud pies made by children. And dollar signs. His work is very valuable. But who the fuck is he? In my view he is nobody. A ghost painting pictures of the ghosts in his own mind. Shame on the so-called Museum of the American Indian. What a bunch of stiffs, white stiffs.

Scholder had ZERO influence on American Indian artists. None. I rarely meet an American Indian who has even heard of him. Yet he is the darkling icon of white liberal writers, the same ones who made lifelong Catholic officer and shuffling tourist dancer Black Elk into a "holy man". White society prefers to manufacture its heroes rather than discover them.

Native American Awareness month means something, somewhere, to somebody. Like Thanksgiving. To real American Indians, not so much. It is puzzling. Latin Americans have produced real heroes to be trotted out by the white press, as have African Americans. What is it about real and actual American Indians that the white press cannot look around and find one actual human being from that culture to celebrate, pontificate over, and drag out for the annual holiday propaganda they put in between their advertisements?

As for Scholder's painting of an American Indian with a flag draped around him, I am waiting for the painting of a Republican Presidential Candidate, with one of Scholder's big muddy paintings wrapped around him as he raises his middle finger to everybody who is not white.

A Song in Sardinia

2008-11-20T11:36:00.006+01:00

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01 August 2008.
An honoring ceremony for late Andrea Parodi, an enormously gifted singer and cultural teacher of the Sardinian, Italia people and culture. This video was made by Silvia, my wife, at one point in the long ceremony we did that day. The beautiful woman in the video is Valentina, wife of Andrea Parodi and a beautiful spirit who shared all the ceremonies on this lovely day...

19 November 2008 ||

2008-11-19T13:15:00.003+01:00

Strong dreams
Come in from the mystery life dances
We shared together. Strong dreams and feelings
About all this light
And all that noise waiting in the dark.
Can I return from where I have been
Breaking old stones to free the wind
That breathes within
To carry me where I have never been.

Correction Way || New World Ceremony

2008-11-10T12:56:00.003+01:00

If you have lost something, you can retrace your steps and find it again.

In tribal life this is called “correction way”.

If you have lost your soul, it may be to late to apply a correction, John McCain.

If you have only lost your way, it is possible to make a correction from within yourself. The first step is to take responsibility for yourself and recognize how the choices you have made have either helped you or hurt you.

A good problem can be a tremendous blessing. Understanding that you may have a problem is a revelation. Accepting responsibility for the problem, you become immediately empowered with the possibility to solve it.

The United States has an opportunity to enter into a grand state of correction way blessings. This is in fact the best opportunity we have had in a generation. The dark face of corporate domination has shown us the dangers of ignoring the opportunity to make corrections.

The blog here is a process in the correction way adventure. It is a chance for a man like me to speak to you from american indian space on my own terms. The number of places on this earth where you can hear from an american indian on his own terms is very small.

Sometimes it is to late to fix what is wrong. The best you can hope for is recovery of what is broken and a new direction made from the ruins. It is never to late to keep going.

Many people base their life’s work on using the past as a kind of weapon to punish and harass those who are trying to go forward. This is a type of moral cowardice. It is exemplified by such useless dogs as Rush Limbaugh, a drug addicted narcissist leading a legion of sleep-walkers deeper and deeper into…nothing. Imagine that somewhere is a mother who gave birth to this piece of human garbage.

From somewhere, Americans in rather large numbers, a clear majority, actually stood up straight and looked change, and a new generation, in the face and opted for correction. It is the first time in many years, a lifetime, that so many have stood up for the unknown and the untested because it had the right feeling. They did this in the face of a mean name-calling machine that has pushed the limits of good taste and honest opinion to a breaking point.

Obama is not an American Indian. He has some tribal ancestors. Both in Africa and North America. I think a person is attached to the race and culture which has dominated their life. For Obama that is the African American culture, but also the new culture of the Multi-Racial Human Being. I am like that. I am part White, part Ojibway, part Catabwa, part Celtic. I love all those parts. Where I have lived and worked and grown and fallen in my life has been from inside American Indian culture. That is where I find my identity and my work. Obama was adopted formally by the elders of the great Crow Nation. Rather than expecting Obama to step up, I think it is time at last for tribal leaders to step up. American Indians have justified complaints against modern society. However, these leaders in tribal america must do their part. Time for them to step up.

Our sacred teachers tell us that the sacred truth can only take you halfway there. You have to come the other half yourself…on your own steam, standing up and eyes wide open.

Emotions of Hope

2008-11-05T14:44:00.002+01:00

I am here on the tiny island of Pantelleria. There are just 2 Americans here. Curiously, the people of the island pay little attention to the outside world. Even so, they all were pulling for Obama. It is hard to find the words to explain how much they hate george fucking bush....or how charming it is that they have embraced Obama. I am feeling a lot of emotion. I am proud of the country, of the people. We have grown up a little. We have become more open, more accepting of new possibilities.

While this new president has inherited a disaster, a group of tragedies made entirely by the ignorance and arrogance of george fucking bush, we cannot how such a positive wave of energy can affect everything that happens from now on. Positive energy is a magical force. it enters the body bone-deep and changes everything. yes, the whole world has changed in ways we can feel and ways we cannot yet imagine. underestimate

I stayed up all night using my old analog modem to get updates. Finally, about 5 in the morning my time the election was called for Obama. I went to sleep feeling different. Today moving around the little Italian island the emotions are more deep. they are a combination of relief and hope. A fullness of the heart that I know and respect and cannot contain or hold in reserve.

The many vulgar and insane things the opposition attached Obama with never stuck. It has been a long time since I have seen so many people resist and turn away from the poisonous bullshit of the dominant political forces that have disgraced the United States for so many years.

I watched a 105 year old black woman make her vote. Obama mentioned her in his speech of victory. Seeing the faces of the black Americans made me happy. I also look at Obama and see somewhere the old Indians. Maybe now, at this time, the American Indian might have a new opening, a healing and a sense of sharing and belonging which they have never had, not for one fucking day in this country....until now. The emotions I feel for people of color, for blacks, for Indians, for the kenyan people who see their tribal ancestor in this shining place at this shining moment. I am proud of the white people who never shouted out the poison of race....except for sick dogs like Rush Limbaugh or the Drudge Report. Rush Limbaugh I don't care if I spell his name right or not), a disgrace of human pig-ness and pathologic drug addiction. george bush seemed impressed, possibly even humbled a little at the revelations facing his own life at this moment.

Yes, a complete and complicated and far-ranging set of emotions have filled me up. The BBC had an automatically refreshing text messaging page online that worked with my dial up modem very well. So I read the incoming messages all night, finally hearing at my time of 5 am, after California was called for Obama that real change had won the day.

I am happy and hopeful and ready.

Vote || Get Up Off Your Ass and VOTE

2008-11-04T09:52:00.002+01:00

Vote !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Get out and Vote. Wake up and Vote. Stand in line and Vote|

Welcome to Native American heritage Month. Elect the first ever (part) American Indian US President !!

Vote. Sing and Dance and Vote.

Voting is a great way to not feel like an asshole if someone asked if you voted.

Christopher Columbus || Homicidal Hustler and Pimp for the Pope

2008-10-13T11:56:00.003+02:00

Chris Columbus was a Dick. Read the full story here.

Another “columbus” day. Here and there in the distant background you will hear Native Americans weeping and screaming while you are on the way to the columbus day sale at walmart.

Having made slaves, murdered, stolen, lied, he becomes a manufactured hero. Another plastic hero for the age of plastic. If you really knew the true story of this man you would be sick to your stomach.

I hope it rains on your parade.

DreamTime in the Flat of the Po

2008-10-02T12:06:00.002+02:00

Julius Caesar, when he returned to Rome gave rich farmland to his soldiers. They complained it was to far from Rome but accepted the gift of land. The descendants of this land worked in floods and drought to build the agricultural center of the Italian table. Mussolini spent a fortune draining and establishing an intricate canal system to tame this region. Today it is a farming paradise in the middle of Italy. It was to this place that I gathered with 12 other Italian people for 4 days of ceremony at the time of the Fall Equinox.

Ferarra is a historic old Italian village. Its castle is one of the few which still has a water-filled moat. Of course, being the drainage field for the Po River, water is everywhere. The water is clear and clean in most places. A few miles from the village our host operates a small inn. It is here where we made our ceremonial work.

We started with a small morning tobacco fire. Gathering here we all introduced ourselves to the mystery life and so started our ceremonial work together.

We had everything we could have wanted in one place. Food, private rooms, a big meditation and group work space. We laso had a small group of Polish immigrant workers in a “workers” house next to the main house we used for the ceremonial work. They were just to the right of the ceremonies. I can’t imagine what they thought of what we were doing. They behaved very well and sometimes I would see one of the younger workers peeking through a crack in the door at us.

The morning fire is such a great teaching. We always begin with this small fire and end there as well. The fire burned five days using wood from pear trees, like knots the size of a football. By far the most unusual wood I have burned so far. The water of the PO was in drainage canals all around us, together with an impressive collection of trees.

As our work went into the inside space, we put out all that everyone had brought with them. There were drums, rattles, all sorts of medicine bags, a few feathers and even a few dignified little pipes. Here is a little slide show of the scene around Farrara in these days.

The nicest feature was created by the group when I asked them to bring out whatever little stones they brought with them. Turns out every person present had brought some stones, shown in the photo above. We could have made a ceremony of a few days based on the circle we made with those stones. As it was the stones of the people became the center around which we worked for three days. The first night there was the dream singing while the people slept, the next day we all went inside the sweat lodge we made with local willow trees. We concluded with an equinox ceremony inside the restaurant and heart of the property of our host. We drank blue corn and later everyone went to their homes.

Burning Feet || Correction Ceremony ..... (Moving with the Moon)

2008-09-12T02:06:00.005+02:00

Copyright ©2008. Photo by __©2008. The Old Man in Charge of Dreams at a ceremony to honor a fallen artist. font

Preamble |- Money for Sacred People (more stories)

An older American Indian friend of mine once told me a story about a ceremony he and a friend of his did for someone. They had been approached by this person who was very unhappy. It was a woman, a white woman. She asked this man for a ceremony to help her with her life. The old Indian man really could feel her and agreed. Later, with his helper, he showed at the luxurious home of a woman who was obviously very rich.

The old Indian worked his heart out and made a strong and beautiful ceremony for this woman. When it was finished she sure felt better. She was filled with satisfaction and relief at last, or so it seemed. I know this man, so I know how beautiful and strong his work is. In a different society, people like this would be treasured and nurtured.

She asked the old Indian what the cost for the ceremony was. He had not thought about it really, he said. He was not expecting anything in particular ahead of time. He told her to make a donation which reflected her appreciation. She gave the Indian man an envelope. Later, going away from her home, he was excited at last. Being a very poor man, as far as cash goes, he was curious to know what she gave them. Even before he opened that envelope, he said, He was thinking a new used pickup to replace the dying old truck he had been nursing along for some years now….Opening the envelope he found a single folded twenty dollar bill. That twenty bucks did not even cover the cost of the gas to drive to her house and come back.

To many American Indians show up in the modern world with no money. When was the last time you loved someone who had no money?

I have traveled the world with the sacred dreams of my tribal ancestors. In a few months I will be 60 years old. I have no home, no money, no retirement. Somehow, when I am hungry someone feeds me. Somehow, when someone wants a ceremony I get to where they are and do my best to help them, to honor my tribal teachers.

Because human beings are crazy, they think American Indians do sacred things for free. It reminds me of the song Hotel California….it costs nothing to get in but is very expensive to get out.

The people who shout out in print all over the world that American Indians work for free are liars and thieves who understand nothing. American Indian people need to take far more responsibility than they have in educating these monkey-hearted people about what is real in this world. First, they have to believe it themselves.

I once calculated that with two million us dollars I could use these ceremonies to change the whole world in about two years. That’s how good these ceremonies are and that’s about what it will cost. I believe someone will give me that money in an envelope one day. I will go back to the grave of my old tribal teacher who healed the rich white woman for twenty dollars, and weep. I will fly there, first class, in his memory.

When I was a younger man, living in New York City, I used to make pretty good money selling my sculptures and paintings. I made enough money to travel and visit with my teachers for several months each year. I always showed up with food and would hide carefully folded 100 dollar bills around in the food packaging….so they would find it when they opened the food.I loved doing this. I would never visit my old tribal teachers without gifts, practical gifts that work in the real world.

Burning feet || A Container for what is True

Restless eternity, my heart was dreaming
Of a day when the indian wars would end at last.

Sometimes something is to broken to be fixed
It took a long time to accept that. It was painful.

Do something useful with the pieces? Yes, I believed a long time ago that this was possible. That good idea became my work. Inside the broken time and soul of the tribal sacred some fires have hot coals. Some of the wounded people are nearby, their eyes still bright and open. Help me gather up the broken pieces I said. We called this way of life “the correction way” ceremony. That’s the one we are taking around the world right now. If we can make this correction way ceremony in a circle of sacred fires around the world, then the world will change. Change broken pieces into something useful, something we never even imagined before we found it. Have you ever felt this way before? How did it make you feel?

Go and grow corn from these seeds he said. You are the sacred stranger they said. The traveler, the lonely Nan-ne Boozhoo, the Little Otter Boy carrying his sacred stones on his belly. I cry all night sometimes. I heard what they said. They always told me the truth. These old Indians always told me the truth. I have never seen that anywhere else. It changed my life. It turns thunder into rain and broken pieces into keys to a new dimension, another place.

Restless. My feet were burning. Pressed down close to the earth by time. Feeling it go by, rushing by. Waiting world. Waiting child. Waiting With the Wind. Building sacred stones on which to stand and sing and remember everything.

(Tomorrow we go up to the Italian Mainland and three weeks of ceremonies for the dreamers, corrections for the ancient future. Good people. They have really strong hearts and love being all together doing something. It is a treasure to have some support and work with these brave and sweet people. Sometimes something quite remarkable happens. During tis time I will limit my posts. We are trying to make opportunities for video and other visual records of some portions of the ceremonies. In future postings we hope to have announcements of the availability of new resources.)

Sacred Bowl of water || Part Two

2008-09-09T14:12:00.002+02:00

©2008. Photo and text by Turtle Heart.
I woke up this morning. My old legs were really hurting. It is something that comes and goes. When it comes I remember how much of every human life is spent in pain and suffering. When we are suffering we remember such things. When we are happy who has time to think of compassion?

I eat the fine “white” grapes of the island. As most of the grapes of Italian wine do not come to ripen until late September or even October, I enjoy a small breakfast feast of the last of the grapes of August here on Pantelleria.

I carried my old legs to the pool shown in the photo above. It is the perfect temperature for an aching Otter Boy. Hot. Very hot. Volcanic. Right next to the sea. There seems no one around so I take off my clothes and go in the water naked. It feels really good.

These ancient waters are all free on Pantelleria. If this pool was in AmeriKa it would cost a lot of money to spend time with it. I would probably have to wear clothes. I love Pantelleria.

Peace. Gentle and sweet people. Mediterranean Food, fresh every day. The Sun. The ancient stones and my computer which struggles with a dial-up modem connection. Am I the last guy on earth to get dsl? They have it now in most places on the island but not my little house on the side of an ancient volcano.

Meanwhile the four generations of my little bird families come to my big stone bowl of water every morning to dance and play in the water. I am going away from the island for about three weeks. The water will all go away. I have tried to find someone to stop by and keep the water going for the birds. Our people are lazy and I can’t find anyone to do it, even if I pay them.

The island has done more to bring healing and peace to my body then any other place or time I have known. I did not realize until I got here and was introduced to this sacred peace how beat up I was from the endless Indian Wars that go in in the United States. Yes, I am a bruised and aging old Indian finding his way in a new land, healing from the endless bullshit which marks American life.

My heart is the sacred water. It is there I have found my peace, make my magic, and contemplate the service of one ancient Pipe Carrier out into the arms of the waiting world. I move inside a separate time and space than the harried relations of this modern society, of the cities and the reservations. I have become a friend to sacred silence and have passed well beyond the need for argument or even small talk.

I am the water that feeds
My dreaming river, ocean, sea, even the rain
Soaks me from the inside out. I am never dry.
Flying above the clouds I travel to the land of the dreamers
Waiting for the songs, the hot stones and the drum
Which will test them and deliver them
Closer to their dreams.
I was the one who went and found himself.
I took up my life with my own two hands
And turned it around
Like a stone in the shadows
To face the light
And rest in the sacred water…

©2008 Turtle Heart.

What Place the Savage ?

2008-08-31T19:10:00.006+02:00

The internet is filled with strange people. Some of the most strange of all time are self-appointed protectors and self-appointed guardians against, excuse me, I mean for American Indians.

In a polite society if someone decides to be your guardian, and you have not asked them for help, this is a crime called stalking. Criminal stalking is a felony crime in North America. Because of that little privilege called freedom of speech, stalkers can use words on the internet, making them up as they go along.

This is what is happening in many places. I recently read a story about myself on an Italian blog. They were wondering why I was so far from the reservation. They seemed personally offended that some American Indian that they don’t know was doing something they know nothing about. Even so, they bill themselves as the protectors of American Indians in Italy. No one asked them to do this.

So let’s get this straight. A group of people I don’t know and never heard of writes about a man they know nothing about in way that sounds like they have some sort of official status in the tribal world. Sound strange?

Groups like this are relentless and quite numerous. They have zero official status among American Indian people. If one of the subjects of their admonishment articles contacts them they have nothing to say and run and hide their computers. This is like crying wolf or yelling fire before you know what is going on. It may not be criminal press, but it is certainly psychopathic press.

Why does American Indian culture have these plastic police looking for plastic indians? What sickness has befallen modern society that American Indian people are allowed to have no work, no travel, no peace, no culture, no support but only judgement, finger-pointing and the occasional fantasy about the sacred noble savage????

In my tribal culture we measure people by the quality of their actions and know how to decide for ourselves what and who is right for us. Isn’t that how you do it in your family?

Not all American Indians are collecting casino cash on some reservation with their star-studded enrollment papers clinched in their red little fists waiting for some white man to tell them they are ok, they are approved indians.

Strangers offering approval and disapproval ratings of other strangers is just to odd to take seriously. Charles Bronson once said about film critics, “The actors and directors and film-makers are the center of the wheel of the movies, the fans and audience are the spokes of this wheel, the critic is the slimy stuff that sticks to the wheel as it goes around". Sticky trash sticking to the wheels as it goes around. People who need to pick through the trash to find their daily news may not be the most reliable reporters.

There is an old saying that he who looks in the mirror and sees only shit is because he is looking at shit. People who make their life looking for trouble will always find it. Even if they have to make it up. Plastic people see only other plastic people....

Of all the strange problems these days! Tribal people have to work through so much bad information in order to communicate at all with the people of the modern world. I have always accepted that part of the work of the Four Directions Unity Bundle is to offer opportunities for people to speak clearly, openly and honestly with each other. Call it a resource of good information. Good information is hard to come by on many subjects. Naturally it is a little harder when the good information is attacked by people who have never heard it, investigated it, participated in it or had a conversation with anyone who did experience it.

If I were a drinking man I think I would get drunk tonight.

Sacred Water || Sardinian Ceremony of the Keeping Spirit

2008-08-21T10:09:00.004+02:00

©2008. Turtle Heart

part 2

A bowl of water
Our moment together lives inside of me
A bowl of sacred water
Drawn up from a deeper well
Our song together began in the sky
The sacred open sky
Flowed under the sleeping stones
And up from the roots of an old tree
Sacred old roots
To become a fire
That lights up my dream
My sacred dream

Who Pays for the Sacred?

2008-08-12T22:25:00.010+02:00

©2008, Turtle Heart

Who Pays for the Sacred? ||

Part 1: Don’t Pay To Pray

Reasonable people understand there is a relationship between money and the infrastructure of sacred space.

There is a vocal and unrelenting, judgmental minority that pesters society on this subject. This divisive issue distracts and affects the dialogue about tribal ceremonial matters like no other issue. It has lead to accusations and a mythology that American Indian ceremonies are “free”.

I have done hundreds of ceremonies for “free”, meaning I paid with my own money whatever the costs came out to be. In doing so I have spent a modest fortune over these years. At other times, I require that participants make donations or pay fixed fees to cover the various expenses involved. These expenses include housing the sacred objects (rent), travel, food, telephones, computers and gasoline, to name a few.

While you can function with great freedom, you cannot function in a worthwhile manner for free. This has always been true. There should be no question that you are going to pay. If no one asks you for money, it is up to you to seek out the host and demand to know how you can help. Every other argument on this subject is fear, a lie.

Who pays for Dalai Lama to travel in the world and give teachings to all cultures? And how much is he paid? The answers are simple; it costs millions of dollars to get Dalai Lama around. He personally makes nothing. I, and a handful of others like me, are in this exact situation.

Reservation communities have never had much experience in understanding or talking about money. From the beginning until the present day, money is not well understood by reservation members. Most reservation members do not grow up in the same capitalist system as modern people. It is a different there. Tribal people do not really understand money. Even today, with some tribes having profitable casino operations, they require outside consultants to actually understand how to make a paying system work on the reservation.

When tribal speakers talk about “do not pay to pray”, or say things like “there is no money in the right to ceremonies”, they are speaking tragically incorrect English. What they are trying to say is how much American Indians really dislike the theft of tribal teachings by modern people. This is always the problem. Money is not the problem….

Do the people who say strange like these believe that the ceremonial leader must pay for his airline ticket, car rental, feed everyone and then go home, paying for everything himself?

So, in this argument about “money” put forth from loud-talking American Indians, they are not speaking correctly. This is too bad. It has created a lot of confusion. Learning to express clearly what you really mean is a very important part in communicating with others. Clarity in communication is in fact the foundation of the sacred teachings in question.

More tribal authorities need to take responsibility for standards. Every great tool of spiritual faith in the history of the world is sustained by an infrastructure, payments by those whose best interests it serves.
I travel throughout Europe and have made a number of sweat lodge ceremonies here. I have asked that the expenses for wood, food, travel and other required spending are covered. The fees I have charged reflect what these costs are. In this way I am able to make this effort to share in a responsible way. Usually I collect just at or under what the journey and supplies cost. It is that simple. Only models like this can enable the possibility to share these American Indian practices with a waiting world.

Another model might involve endowments. Some tribes have the power to do this, but so far have not. There are no endowments for the sacred bundles and ceremonial keepers of tribal American Indian society. With proper endowments sweat lodge camps could be set up and open at no cost, like the church. They could be dispatched to troubled places around the world to offer assistance, for example. But there are no endowments for this work from anyone, including American Indian tribes, including those tribes who have spent millions of lobbying dollars on gambling interests and political activities while their sacred objects and languages vanish in front of them….or perhaps I should say behind them.

Historically, tribes never developed a habit for cash. To this day, reservation tribal members rarely have a good understanding or a good feeling about money. This is symptomatic of poverty. Guilt and confusion over what money is and where it should arrive is a source of great confusion in American Indian life, and in the expectations and mythology of tribal ceremonies. This great confusion has become a mythology which is spoken of as a do not pay to pray policy. It is only confusion. Understanding how to use money to protect and move the ceremonial original instructions around is a challenge for even the best American Indian community. There is a lot of healing that needs to be addressed on this issue.

I have always believed that it was a good idea to enlist the help of modern people and their money to support the infrastructure of the tribal sacred. With some sense of money management the tribes can move their dialogue out into the great waiting world. By insisting everything is free, they stay home while the mountain of bullshit which surrounds them grows higher and higher. Having the money to send runners, bundle holders, sweat lodge leaders, out into and around the world where they are needed can only happen with a supported infrastructure. This is not paying to pray, it is praying and building and growing, when it is done right.

Tribal ceremonies contain more sacred real world information than “prayers”. We Ojibway Wabeeno people do not believe mouthing your desires and hopes to the creator (praying) are very real. The ceremonies and the sacred bundles are something much more important than prayers. A sacred space is like a mystery life machine. You can enter it and go on a great journey. If you know how.

Society in general expects religious and spiritual groups to build an infrastructure, a financial system that takes care of the work and the objects. That is why there are so many tax and political reliefs for such groups. Only in American Indian tribal society, in loud voices dominated entirely by the impoverished Lakota Nation, do the people talk about “don’t pay to pray”. They talk about it loud and they talk about it often. What they are trying to say is they don’t want people to steal their ceremonies and make money from the theft. I agree with that. When the wrong people do the wrong thing and make money, it is ugly. It happens everywhere, not just to American Indians. We all have to work our way through the same pit of snakes to find a true path for our lives. Stealing and selling is not the same argument as the act of providing support and expenses to the great sacred work. Confusion between these two ideas has come out as a loud and vulgar argument called “don’t pay to pray”.

I have made many ceremonies with tribal people. I always paid for this. I considered it my obligation and part of my education. I was happy to pay. I paid as often as I could. I would just leave as much money behind as I possibly could when I stayed with and shared ceremony with my tribal relations. I used to bring cash. And just left it behind when I left. I made no noise about it. I am a good example. It is one reason why my tribal elders love me.

Tribal leaders and keepers of ceremonies need to brace up and embrace a more balanced and thoughtful view of these matters. Under the current entrenched attitudes, the ceremonial teachers, sacred bundles and ceremonies are vanishing. This attitude contributes to the continual shrinking of opportunities and qualified people to carry on the tribal sacred.

I imagine a great university filled with teachers of the sacred teaching day and night. The great school of the sacred American Indian teachings has yet to be built. The current attitude may sound noble, but it is not correct. When tribes scream and yell about the money they are missing the point entirely. They are trying to object to the theft and acting out of tribal sacred, but using this language it comes out as something else..

Arvol LookingHorse, a keeper of an important sacred bundle of the Lakota went on record in 2010 to answer some of the hysteria directed his way by tribal members who are angry that he "raises" money or "accepts" fees for his work. His answer is similar to mine, as you may read above. It is great that at least one other keeper of a tribal bundle has spoken with some clarity about the need for tribal keepers of bundles to raise funds to meet their escalating expenses: "This whole conflict is happening because of money that these individuals think should go to them personally and to others they convinced of their hardship that is due, any money raised is for what efforts Wolakota was created for and the people involved in those efforts. There are other state and non-profit organizations that help the concerns they have and have helped them. They can also spend their energy on their concerns and creating their own program, instead their energy to attack people."--Arvol Looking Horse, statement June 2007.

Part 2 || Who Pays for the Sacred?

One American Indian teacher told me that a person must try in this life to be honest and respect time, sex and money. Behaving responsibly, she said, in these areas is important in leading a balanced life.

The Four Directions Unity Bundle and the World Journey is an official enterprise or project created by well-qualified and realistic American Indian people. To make this project work it has been necessary to secure housing, materials, transportation, communication and a sustaining force so we can continue to work now and well into the future.

Most of the funding to date has been from my own sales of sculpture and paintings. This has been true for many years. During my long studies and relationships with my tribal teachers I continuously gave them gifts, paid their bills, brought food to their homes and gave them gifts of cash when I could. I never stayed with any of the old Indians without doing what I could to take care of them and ensure that I was giving back and showing support and respect for their time and friendship. They never had to ever ask for my help, or ask for money or food. I always came with these things. No one had to ask me. I wish more people followed my example.

Many modern people hound and pester and get up in tribal lives and leave nothing except the occasional empty McDonalds hamburger bag or an empty pack of cigarettes. Yes, it is worse than that. I am trying to be nice. Every good tribal American Indian knows that if you visit the house of the sacred you have to give back, help out. Good tribal relations do not have to be told this fact.

This sacred silence about what is really obvious has been translated into a belief that tribal people, if they are real, must work for free, without any kind of payment or assistance. I really wonder what kind of person would visit the home of sacred American Indian teachings and not leave something behind, not try to help in some way.

In my travels I am often put in the position to rely upon the people who are hosting and who have invited the ceremonies into their community. When we are invited in the proper way to bring the Great Bundle to a community of people, we must rely upon their resources and their fairness to travel there and come home, as well as to do good and productive work for them.

Good work needs what it needs. Sometimes it needs money. Sometimes it needs an airplane or a long automobile drive. Good tribal relations really struggle with this issue and try to find a point of balance. To get something real done in the world tribal people, like all people, need financial resources. These come so slowly to tribal sacred teachings. Most of the tribal members who do this work do it on his or her own, because it needs to be done...money or no money.

I have never known a single American Indian who grew rich from doing ceremonial work. Some American Indians have grown rich by exploiting this system and by telling lies to everybody. These people are rarely in possession of Sacred Bundles, though they may talk about them. If there is money available, there are always people who will lie and cheat to get it, even if it is only one dollar. This is a big struggle for those brave and beautiful tribal people who really hear the waiting world, the need modern people have to hear from the sacred of the American Indian. This is yet more in a long history of bad information which is so damaging to tribal culture and tribal people of North America.

In Buddhist society, the monks are there for the people and there is usually little talk about money or what things cost. The monks are taken care of by the monastery. The monastery is built by the faith and donations of the people whom it serves. In many cases, in tribal society, this system of balance has failed. There is a lot of cynical and unreal talk about how ceremonies are free and no money should be involved.

Historically, tribal communities were so immersed in the normal ceremonial lives day to day that it is hard to point to a direct system of payments. However, there has been and never will be a free ceremony. Somebody pays, even if no one asks you or your friends for money. In every society on this earth the work of specialized ceremonial, religious and cultural work must be paid. They must be fed, housed. Supplies wear out and have to be replaced. The persons who receive the work of the sacred are responsible for its survival and its good health. A good ceremonial leader needs clean clothes and new shoes for example. On the other hand tribal people do not like to see spiritual and ceremonial leaders behaving in an indulgent way.

Modern society for some reason feels the normal attitude in these matters is to press Native Americans to do strong ceremonial work for free. Not only is this an insult to common sense, it has disoriented tribal society so they feel guilty and outraged over the issue of money completely. The damage has been severe.

The services of ceremonial rituals and their people have never been free in any society at any time anywhere. The method of payment and maintaining form may be subtle and hard to detect but it exists in every case.

The thinking that would allow people to believe an American Indian can travel to their homes and make long ceremonial teachings for free is an insult to the very idea of what is honest. It is an idea that has come from the shadows and lives like a bee, stinging the spirits of every poor tribal person. It has created a bony and ugly pointing finger of accusation to those American Indians who have tried to get out in the world and get some work done.

The Catholic Church is most likely the largest single private land and property owner in the world, in the history of the world. The people of Catholic society gave this great wealth to the church. Because of this system you can go and talk to a local parish priest for “free”. The priest receives a healthy salary, a home and most of their expenses, including health care.

The Sacred School |

The families and other relations who sought out special ceremonies made traditionally and historically serious payments. The same was true for those who wished to advance their knowledge by studying to achieve higher ranks in the sacred societies. In Ahnishinabe Society, many favors, payments, gifts and services to the community were required in order to advance in the great Mide-Wian Society.

Sacred Pipe prays with and for all people. There is no way to put a price on such things. There is no payment for prayers because only you can pray, only you can reach and understand this place in your own soul. An education can help you. In our work we do not charge people money to pray. We do need to pay for the firewood, the food, very often the transportation and other expenses of life in this modern world. It is in balance that the students help pay these expenses. That is all we have ever approached as far as fees go. Anyone who needs this experience can come without payment, but they must work or make some other trade. This is what is in balance. Everyone works together to make these moments possible.

Here in Italy you cannot go out and cut firewood. You have to buy it. The people in the cities have no food growing in their small yards. We have to buy the food and prepare it. I cannot ride my horse to a city across the sea. I must buy an airline or a boat or a train ticket. The sacred objects live in one house on Pantelleria. This house costs us $9,000.00 dollars a year. Electricity, telephone, gasoline, and all the other expenses must be paid in cash. These same facts are true on tribal reservations as well. Someone must pay the expenses, every time. All to often there are no resources to keep a good gathering of people making ceremonies going for very long. These days it is more like a guerilla operation than a polished organization of ceremonial professionals.

This house where the Sacred Four Directions Unity Bundle lives is safe and protected and strong. It is a good place for several people to come together and study the sacred ways of the mystery life. Sacred Pipe is happy to have this house, needs this house. We are happy to pay. If we travel in Italy a long distance to one ceremony it usually costs about $1,500 to go and come back for three or four days.

There is a lot of phony talk from self-appointed new age people about how all the American Indian ceremonies are free. Every tribal person has heard this talk for years. This kind of talk is nonsense. It implies something that is nonsense. It is manufactured hysteria masking the troubled spirit of angry people who are not very well informed about the real world. Perhaps these people were disappointed in their lives and believe pointing a finger at other people is a good way to get attention and love from American Indians who otherwise would ignore them?

American Indians need to be more responsible about these money issues. They need to take more control, build more infrastructures for the sacred and otherwise learn how money can be used in a sacred way to preserve, protect and share the sacred in a responsible way. This is what is real.

Here at the home of the Sacred Morning Fire of the Four Directions Unity Bundle we have a sacred fire that any person on this earth can visit and use for prayers and sacred silence without any cost. We also conduct many ceremonies for people here for which there is no payment asked. In other situations, we offer special programs that involve travel and real world expenses, so we charge a modest fee for these moments. Wherever we travel, we are available to talk and work with people and no money is involved in this work. It is also my policy to make no charge of any kind for any tribal people, anywhere. I am quite satisfied to absorb all the costs myself for work with tribal people, and have done so for more than 30 years.

Talk by new age barking dogs about the "shame" of tribal people trying to manage the practical money and other issues required to do actual work out in the real world is one of the strange new problems which pound on the hearts of any tribal person who dares to think such work is important.

It seems like any tribal person who tries to get out into the world has to run through a long line of snakes and barking dogs. It can be intimidating. Well-informed people understand the value in supporting the expenses of worthwhile work in this world. The old Ahnishinabe Elders know all about this kind of problem. These snakes and barking dogs are prominent realities around any sacred place, around any sacred work in this troubled world. Every person knows that it is dangerous to try new things, try to change old bad things. That is why many people don't even try. This work we are doing is clear in our minds, clear in the continuing consultations we have with tribal elders and clear that money is not the point or purpose of our work. I believe this is true for many other American Indian people trying to work with modern society.

In this work we try to help people in the best way we can. There are many people who visit and share ceremonies that never offer a penny and are never asked for one. We believe the World Journey of the Four Directions Unity Bundle is a group of teachings, a school in the movement of the Sacred. Nothing we have done or will ever do involves charging people money to pray, like the Christian Churches do every Sunday. In the Christian King James Holy Bible there are numerous references to "tithing", which is giving ten per cent of your income to the Church. This is one way the churches build their great power and influence in society. Who says American Indians must stand at the door in rags, homeless and begging people to let them pray with humanity for free?

For many decades tribal people were forbidden to even practice their spiritual and sacred ceremonies. They were forbidden to pray in their language or even speak their languages in many places. Today those repressive practices are no longer "legal". American Indian people have the right and privilege to create their own sacred schools and make their own plans for how these works are to be managed. There is a difference in being in a situation to "pray" with someone, and offering some days of teachings and formal experience in tribal ceremonial life. Schools and sacred teaching are specialized services, learning opportunities and an effort to build something lasting, organized and regular. The world may seem like a complicated place....but it IS possible to build something and get other people to help you build something. I hope every day that more American Indian people and communities will take responsibility for understanding what is real about these serious issues....and that others back off on the phony "the sacred is free" codeword’s about something they fail completely to understand.

It may be true that there are people who think the sacred is free..... People who really think it is ok that you have to give nothing, give up nothing; contribute nothing in order to stand with the sacred. I don’t want to know such people.

The Big Eagle || 1916 - 2008

2008-08-08T12:27:00.005+02:00

©2008 Turtle Heart, Photo and Text

Grandfather
I carried your red body into the open sky
Grandmother has opened her arms and become the moon
Changing woman, changing lives, changing dreams
You have passed through the sky
Carried like the smoke, today we sing, we remember
We enter the great wind, the eastern gate
The bloody past and the ancient future
As we pass with you and through you
All around you where we find ourselves, find ourselves
And empty the sacred bowl
Sacred and empty

At 92 years, the Tribal Chief of the tiniest and oldest American Indian Reservation has passed away. Chief Aurelius Piper was a great character. He was strong, tough, brave as 10 other men and gigantic in stature. He was named perfectly among tribal people as Big Eagle and he was the Hereditary Chief of the Golden Hill Paugussett of Trumball, Connecticut.

While more famous American Indians have made their progress and notice in this world, Big Eagle was a force unique among tribes. His tiny tribe on his tiny land was the nest of a great Eagle. From there he touched the entire world, several times.

Though not federally recognized, the Paugussett Tribe was recognized for over 300 years by the state government. His reservation was the VERY FIRST reservation for American Indians and was imposed in the early 1600’s. Most Federal tribal reservations were established in the mid to late 1800s.

He was tough as ten sailors. Behind his fierce nature was a strong, intelligent mind with formidable instincts. I am sure very few of the people close to him understood him very well.

We have lost a Gate Keeper and most likely the Gate he was keeping.

Big Eagle gifted me my first ceremonial clothing. As a young man I was called upon to work Sacred Ceremonies for Big Eagle but had no real tribal ceremonial clothes at that time. He gave me some of his own ceremonial clothes from when he was much younger. I still wear the leggings he gifted me so many years ago. They are shown in the photo above.

Big Eagle played upon the Mother Earth like it was a mighty drum. His determination and personal resolve was formidable and a lesson and example in life for every American Indian on this earth. I was proud and amazed to know him, to love him, and for a while to serve him.

Red People and Wild Goats

2008-08-04T11:33:00.004+02:00

A powerful ceremony and ritual in Sardinia, Italy

©2008, Turtle Heart photos and text

Sardinia. 01 August 2008

I was invited to bring the ceremonies to Sardinia in a festival to honor the life and music of Andrea Parodi. He was a gifted artist representing the culture and spirit of sardinia. He has passed away, passing into the couds. Two years ago now. When I arrive I see his two daughrers, so young and sweet and bright. His wife looks into my eyes when we are introduced. I saw and felt only her kindness my heart received a strong burst of light from her right away. When I arrived after 12 hours of travel to a diner of some ten or so persons. These were his family and close friends and we stood up together in once sacred circle and were touched on our hearts by one eagle feather and we looked at each other. I used an old song to look around each of them and feel them. They were really there, every one of them. No one was bored. No one was out of their bodies, or at least not far away.

Maybe we were all a little nervous.

Also, I think, when people think of an American Indian or anyone really, they build a picture of what they look like. I remember one woman who makes the most amazing potteries, ceramics. Looking at those I build the most detailed picture of what she must look like. Years later when I finally had the pleasure to meet her, I was not even close in anyway, in any way. I think this most likely happens when people think of one american indian coming to their home. He must look like “this” or “this”. Then I arrive with my big head, my pale skin and the look on my face (which is more or less impossible to forget), because it is the face of Sacred Pipe. When I travel this way I hope I let go of the dead world and present only what might be possible with the help of sacred pipe.

Immersion is on my face. Sacred Pipe is a Spirit and so understands very well how to travel and keep the Spirit of one of the Fallen Dreamers of another culture. Their hearts might believe it is possible if I blieve it is possible because Grandfather said it could happen just like that. That is my “performance method.

I had arrived in a real place, with real people. They put their sacred right down in front of me.They put us into a good bed after feeding us good food and bringing us safely across the wide land into their lives for less than 24 hours.

They had their own medicine to make, they were living in the middle of their own ceremony. They had their own sacred rites right in their hands and on their minds. We were invited guests. I arrived in the middle of a life that had been lost. I carried with me two stones which I gave to them after the evening meal, the late evening meal. After one glass on the wine of sardi, of our host. Hand made. After a meal of grilled vegetables and arabic grains and sweet Sardi cookies.

I gave them one stone, a message from the Old Indians,I carved and gave them another stone, red sacred pipestone, a message for his wife, Valentina. More later in the week about this.

Turtle Heart || Public Record

2008-07-28T11:29:00.004+02:00

I am by traditional birth into the family of the Ahnishinabeg. This happened through the bloodline of my father. Through my mother I have bloodlines that are Welsh and Catawba.

I am highly and determinedly independent. First and formost I believe I work for the ancient future, for this Mother Earth who gave all tribal people their original instructions. My work is with and for the human spirit, of and for all people.

By accepting responsibility for understanding who my ancestors were, I placed myself under the direction of my tribal relations. Not all of them loved me for making this choice. However, wherever I have lived or walked I have received love, support and guidance.

I have received teachings from more than forty tribal elders over a period of 30 years. When I was a young man I was given Sacred Pipe. As I traveled with Sacred Pipe I was given the education which I now treasure and hope to share with others. My teachers and I agreed that I might in my own way share what we learned together.

My ceremonial work does not come from a political, governmental or ethnic agenda or authority. This bundle of sacred ideas and objects, which are the instruments of my work, was created by the male ancestors of their male children according to the rights of freedom and their own responsibility to do what they hope is right.

Following the historic and spiritual tradition of my own cultural relations, the Ahnishinabe of the Northern Woodlands, I have started a long vision quest to carry Sacred Ppipe around the circle of Mother Earth. Many of our most ancient sacred teachers made this choice and returned after great time and experience, to enrich the lives of all Ahnishinabe people. I am a child of that ancient family.

I am not a part of any other alliance with any tribal organization or tribal government. My work is spiritual, traditional and the birth rights bestowed upon me by my tribal elders. There are no tribal authorities other than the living tribal elders that can say or should say who may be a child of the Ahnishinabe. I accept no money or services from any tribe or any government.

It has been my view that the combined stress and problems of nearly all tribal religions, culture, language and ritual has created confusion, pain and rage. There is also a lot of confusion and bad information coming in and going out from modern society. Sometimes I feel like tribal people are either drowning in an ocean of bad information, hunted by the sharks of intellectual good intentions….or starving in the windless desert of societal indifference.

I believe that Sacred Pipe and many of the original instructions are floating in a sea of mud, in cloudy water and gray skies. From the long life I have made with my teachers we came to believe that a strong ceremony made by one man could bring new information and open new and needed possibilities to everybody. Everybody.

As Keeper and Protector of Sacred Pipe Four Directions Unity Bundle I have a responsibility to use the ceremonial instructions it contains to respond to the world and journey within myself for all my relations. I have that right absolutely and without question.

I am a volunteer who accepted this responsibility 25 years ago from my tribal relations face to face, breath to breath, eyes wide open. We believe this is a ceremony created and supported by the original instructions and by the rights of personal vision, which is the right of all people who hold tribal sacred objects and who place themselves before the living faces of their tribal elders.

Because I had taken it on myself to travel all over the United States on long journeys to seek out tribal elders and tribal teachers, I seemed like a good candidate for this work. My education took me to many tribal communities. I also have a well-founded education in modern society. Under the guidance of my teachers I studied many of the world’s religions, as well as world history, medicine, art and much of the world’s fine literature. I created this educational journey myself and went out and found the teachers who gave it to me.

The world journey of Sacred Pipe inside the Four Directions Unity Bundle is an extension of those ideas, those rights, and those hopes of those tribal elders and teachers whom I believed spoke only the truth to me. Truth which I accepted as my life's work.

My work takes place many times in solitude as I move around this Mother Earth. When I meet and work with other people it is always in small groups over several days. In this way the work has time to produce the rich details which come from taking real time, a few days, to sit and understand what this world ceremony is about, and what it can accomplish.

I receive no personal payments for my work. Sometimes the people I work with help with the expenses of travel and support for things like our computer system. Sometimes they give me nothing at all.

We have never needed or required the permission of anyone except ourselves. I am satisfied that I have lived before and under the direction of my Native American Elders, who are the final and only proper authority for Sacred Pipe and the Ceremonies of Four Directions Unity Bundle.

Turtle Heart
Ahnishinabe || River Otter Clan
Wabeno Jessakid Nan-ni-Boozho
Summer 2008 || Pantelleria Sicily

Gold

2008-07-24T13:17:00.001+02:00

©2008 Turtle Heart

________________________________________

Gold, in time one day
Mountains, nearby golden in time
Where i was passing by
Golden flowers in my dreams

________________________________________

Let the Truth Be Known Though the Heavens May Fall

2008-07-11T11:17:00.004+02:00

©2008 Turtle Heart

Part of the work of a Sacred Bundle and its Keeper is the pursuit and understanding of the truth. Of course, the first issue has to be where and what is the truth? The answer to that is that it is within you. That is the place where the truth begins.

To help us know and understand what is true the mystery life gave us the original sacred teachings of the tribal ceremonial life. Different tribal cultures received their ceremonial life from their relationship to the earth around them. People in the forest received forest ceremonies. People in the desert received desert ceremonies. Different tribal communities used the power of their truth to receive what is sacred to them. They say it is sacred to them because with it and through it they can understand what and where is the truth. To some tribes it is the sacred kiva that is the instrument, to another it is sacred pipe or a sun dance.

The purpose these objects serve is that their ceremonial language, when properly understood, will teach you what is true, an in particular, what is in balance. It does this by giving you the personal power and clarity to understand what is true. The truth must be understood from within. It is not a truth based upon rules and regulations. There is no formula. When the ceremonies work correctly they give birth to your knowledge of yourself.

Some people believe the way to understand all ceremonies is to freeze one ceremony in time and then copy it word for word and gesture for gesture. Ceremonies are copy protected. You cannot learn anything by copying down someone’s recipe and “authority” for doing a ceremony.

The teachers hope that those who seek to be inside the ceremonies will receive the gift of a vision. This dream of the life, as we call it, is the one you have the power to realize. In the oldest of the tribal languages (tewa), going to a ceremony is translated as “seeking life”.

If you know your vision, your song, your name, your dream, your silence, your body from within the sacred space of ceremony then you will know what is true in the world.

Ceremonial life of the tribal ancestors is a sacred resource for this work of first finding the truth within yourself and then helping your relations and the creation. There is a fine line of balance between the guidance of the teachings and the responsibility of the person who may be seeking life. It is an art of great softness, an art of life itself.

We call the ceremonies and their keepers sacred because when they do their work right, they are keepers of a doorway into clarity and truth and the liberation of the unique vision that is a seed in every human being.

And that’s just the first step. After you actually wake up and remember, the ceremonial life will lead you out into the waiting world where your clarity and faith in what is true from within will merge with the seven generations as they flow through time. Where, now, we find ourselves in a very different world. A world where truth is not a ceremony but a word, an idea that can be manipulated, reinterpreted and tricked, murdered. Now we find ourselves in the troubled, and dangerous world. Here, for example. As you stand here now, the truth is entirely in your hands.

Sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman (Universal Blues)

2008-06-28T12:57:00.003+02:00

©2008 Turtle Heart. Art and Text.

Apparently the most famous story about tribal sacred teachings is the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman. In their stories about Sacred Pipe, the Lakota say a sacred woman appeared to two men. One of them was a fool who was killed, by the sacred woman, straight away, as seems just. The other was given a sacred pipe and told how and when to use it. The sacred woman then went away, turning into a white buffalo as she vanished.

In modern Lakota histry the sacred woman seems all but forgotten as the keepers of canupa talk over and over about a white buffalo. Canupa is an old word that means “wooden stick” more or less. It is now the preferred word when activists plains tribal members talk about sacred pipe.

Many modern people have transfered this story to bizzaro land. Here they view every sign that a white buffalo has been born somewhere as the second coming of…something vague. It is a statistical certainty that white buffalos will be born from time to time. Nevertheless, whole hordes of one can hope otherwise composed people declare these births quite sacred and prophecies of a great future which is described in glowing terms as….vague.

The story of White Buffalo Calf Woman is so well documented that one wonders where these interpretations come from and why. What is it about people that even as they seek to be educated they behave as if they know nothing at all.

This sacred pipe came to the Lakota about 450 years ago, by their own reckoning. In other tribes sacred pipe came thousands of years ago. The great woodland tribes of the central and eastern United States have known sacred pipe throughout their long history. Like the people who forget that the pipe was brought oto the Lakota by a sacred woman, most people forget and have failed to notice the long history of sacred pipes elsewhere in North America. They are to busy looking for white buffalos.

More people, particularly the Lakota Nation, need to be reminded of the role of sacred woman in the gift of sacred pipe. Indeed, before one Arvol Looking Horse somehow became Keeper of this sacred pipe, it was held by an old Lakota woman. No tribe disrespects women more than the Lakota tribal nation. None. Instead of looking for white buffalos, those people who believe in this sacred pipe should be looking for sacred Lakota women who have not been raped, beaten or abandoned and try and protect them from the grand council of old wooden sticks that dominate Lakota public politics.

A tribe can well be judged on the position and treatment of the women in its membership. Far to many tribes have dealt women out of the picture, out of the ceremonies and out of the official responsibilities of the tribe’s daily life. It is so common that we can really appreciate that handful of tribes who continue to honor and protect, and listen to their women.

Writers like to find some dramatic story and put this out as history. More often than not, something is lost in translation. Like American Indian people, Sacred Pipe suffers and is diminished by an ocean of bad information put out by self-appointed prophets and self-serving journalism, such as the celebrated work Black Elk Speaks. This book is the perfect example of a well-meaning but dangerously uninformed, famous writer finding, almost by chance, a great “prophet” on which he could build his certainly to be celebrated opus on the noble savage of his times. The author of Black Elk Speaks was an opportunist who knew almost nothing about American Indians. Black Elk himself was one Lakota man among many. He was not the first or last to have a vision. He was not the first or last to have knowledge of the ceremonial life. When he was alive, there were many tribal elders alive who knew more, and had more experience than Black Elk. Black Elk spent most of his adult life as an officer in the Catholic Church, to whom he swore an oath to never follow his own traditional religious ways. Later in life he performed “healing ceremonies” for the throngs of tourists who came to visit Mount Rushmore, then under construction. By a traditional measure, Black Elk was not the best choice one could have found in the tribes in those days. By a traditional measure, Black Elk was in fact not even remotely considered a holy man. By the hype and projections deduced from this book, one would think Black Elk was a great teacher and ceremonial leader and a lot like Jesus. The hype around the book transcends all of these issues, and as usual, makes what is really true more or less irrelevant. It has created multiple generations of white buffalo watchers who would not know a sacred woman if she blew smoke on them.

No matter how carefully the truth is spoken, it is the projections of the ego, of the need for miracles, that somehow flavor and dominate all of our public information on sacred matters, and in particular tribal sacred matters.

The Four Directions Unity Bundle, of which I am the Keeper, contains a group of very Sacred Pipes. These sacred objects, all of them, have been understood and addressed by sacred women of the four directions. Tribal sacred women have blessed them and agreed to them. Wherever this bundle travels in its World Journey, it encounters, embraces and celebrates the sacred women of all cultures and nations. Every ceremony of sacred pipe contains the wisdom and direction of those sacred women who have embraced this work, embraced my life’s journey.

In our historical Ahnishinabeg culture, it was the women who choose the men who would carry and keep the sacred of the people. It was the women who owned the land, the women who owned the water.

Sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman did not give virgin birth to a Savior. What she did do was speak to simple men in desperate times and show them a way forward and give them the means to light their way. Sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman was a Distant Dreamer, a Manitou, a Chindi following herself, not following some man. She has given birth to generation after generation of dreams and dreamers.In her memory, the blind look for white buffalos while those who are honest and who remember her best, look within…and remember.

Dead World Indians

2008-06-18T14:38:00.003+02:00

North American Indian: a type of human being found sitting nearly naked on the Belly of the Mother Earth, before a small fire, holding a rattle and an Eagle Feather, singing…until they were reduced to the size of a small pill and we were forced to swallow them.

I recently went through Pisa Italy during their one day a year street festival. Americans spell it differently. It is a beautiful, historic old Italian city…the one with the Leaning Tower.

I was presented with the strange sight of Inca Indians pretending to be North American Indians. Where they got the clown suits they were wearing is a mystery. They were wearing plastic and fake feathers. They had on the most insulting imitation Plains style crap I have ever seen.

Why? WTF? If they showed up on American tribal lands with such clothing there would be serious violence, perhaps even murder. Here, there was only a huge crowd of beer-drinking Italians. They seemed to like it.

A friend explained that Native Americans are very “in”, very popular right now in Italy. So, to make money these guys make music that pretends to be Native American. They have art posters, music CDs, T-Shirts, the whole package. All these things are designed to make them look not like Inca Indians, but Plains Indians. We saw two performing musical groups and dozens of tables with Incas selling the most horrible fake Indian crap I have yet seen. It seems like a weird new epidemic. Now Indians from one place are pretending to be Indians from another place. WTF?

After enjoying the huge crowd and a fantastic meal, we started our way back to the hotel. This time as we passed one of the performing Indian Clown groups….the crowd had thinned, things were getting more quiet. I had one of these guys pretty close to me, with his fake feathers tied to a plastic band around his pointed head. I grabbed one of the feathers and tugged on it, from behind. The fellow turned around and looked at me. I asked him what was up. I said to him “What are you doing here with this crap on your body?” I said several other tense things. Slowly, he seemed to understand me. Apparently he knows a little English and he told me he was “Inca”. When I asked him about what he was wearing he said it was his clothes. I pointed out that these were fake clothes from the fake Plains. At that point he asked me if I was an Indian. I told him that I was, yes, an Ojibway. He said “Fantastic!”. That seemed the limit of the English between us. He seemed pathetic and proud and stupid and lost and sweet…the little bastard.

I have no idea what to make of this. Is it harmful to parade and pretend before the uninformed masses? I would have to say yes. The whole business did not make me angry so much as it made me just sad.

This street festival is to honor the patron “Saint” of Pisa. Every city in Sicily has a patron saint. These patrons are the product of the Catholic Church and this “tradition” is apparently imposed upon every Italian village one day each year. I have no idea how these festivals looked in the older days. In these modern times, in Pisa, the streets fill up with vendors of color, from Hindus, Africans, and these “Indians”, and the whole affair becomes something from another dimension.

If you listened to their music it was very strange music. It was made up of largely Peruvian flute music, played in poor imitation of North American flute music, and singing that was trying very hard to be of the Plains style, but far wide of the mark. My friend said that Indians are popular and this was one way these “poor boys” had to make some money. I have been without money. Not once, but many times. In those times when I had no money it never came into my mind to pretend to be anything or anyone. How many Indians over time put on clown suits to dance for stupid tourists?

Remember Black Elk, the so-called Holy Man of the Lakota? He spent quite a few years dancing and performing for tourists at the construction of Mount Rushmore, one of the most hated places on earth for tribal people. Most people do not know that. Twice a day in the summer he would perform Indian Healing Ceremonies for the crowd. Sitting Bull did some performing as well, but he did not play anyone other than himself and did not perform tricks.

How many Indians have tricked themselves into becoming dancing clowns for white people so they could have some money in their pocket?

When I say the first group in Pisa, I wanted to get fruit and start throwing it at them, or maybe beer bottles. It was a real shock. There was quite a crowd of young Italian people all around them, really taking it in. Since most people know almost nothing about tribal people and culture, I guess whatever is presented will work.

While I, and people like me, do try and work as near to the truth as we can, it is really this kind of trash that gets the attention and is more common. I wonder if we are fighting a loosing battle? Personally, I believe the truth matters. I was wondering what my old teachers might have thought of this picture of plastic Indians. I could feel their tears and humiliation somewhere inside my own semi-composed sadness at having seen this situation.

May the Great Father Bless and Watch Over all His Children, the sorry bastards that they are. After so many years and years of Indian bodies being killed by the church and the white man’s governments, we Indians are now killing each other’s souls, for pocket change.

Sweat Lodge Journals | 31 May 2008 Villastanza

2008-06-10T22:00:00.002+02:00

©2008 Turtle Heart. Photo by Turtle Heart

A sweat lodge with friends. We have been making sweat lodge ceremonies here now for four years. I am not sure how many people we have made these ceremonies for here. It has been very satisfying to have this long standing sweat lodge camp in the north of Italy. Usually we have a mixture of men and women. Today we have for the first time only a group of men. Tonight we will also make a dream ceremony, which we have been doing here as well.

One of our participants has spent three months in Texas working at a sweat lodge camp run by a Lakota Indian woman. Quite interesting. He was gifted an eagle feather and a very fine peyote rattle during his visit. He has turned out to be an experienced firekeeper and keeps the standing stone fire going very well. It was nice to have some experienced and calm assistance.

The people eat and talk, which is the Italian custom. If they put tobacco into the fire for each story they tell at the diner table I would be more satisfied. When Italians are together they have their own sweet, but automated rhythms. It takes some effort to get them to pay close attention to subtle ideas like putting tobacco into the fire. The fire for the tobacco needs to be fed one hundred times for each person present. I will be lucky if they do it five times. This is a universal problem. Most people just do not have any experience thinking about the subtle opportunity a small sacred fire provides. One can learn many things by watching what people do not do. Watching people understand but fail to use this really fine tool is nevr satisfying to me.

Tonight the lodge was very strong and everyone could feel the power of the hot stones and the sacred water. After the lodge was finished the people lay down on the warm earth and no one moved or spoke for quite some time. I do not believe in tough guy sweat lodges...experiences where everyone is so tough that the hot stones and sacred water rolls right off of them. This sweat lodge put us all the way down on the earth and I am happy and grateful for this. When people are so tough and hard that the sweat lodge rolls right off of them I usually feel like I have failed. This time I had to come out of the lodge twice. The second time I laid down on the earth outside the lodge with the people inside and sang my pain and sorrows right into the earth between the fire and the door to the sweat lodge. I feel softer when the earth humbles me and lays me down. I feel it helps me remember my suffering and how far I have come, how far I have yet to go. I have no joy for a sweat lodge where only tough people who cannot be laid down are present.

We stay inside for about two hours. I always build my songs inside the lodge from those people who are present. I tell them this. I tell them that if they give nothing, they receive nothing. I tell them I will go to an old place and if they want to learn they have to go to this old place with me. It is not an easy thing for modern people to do. I think they try but the energy from this group of men is very mixed and the results are strange. My throat feels strained and I find it hard to sing. I wonder what they are thinking in there..

I am recovering from a long illness and discover that I am weak. The heat puts me down several times and the singing is hard to find. This is a symptom of seperation. When the union is strong the songs come more easily.

Two days later we have another sweat lodge. The people are quite different. Two women are present, both older women who are quite composed and alert. They came a long distance to try this experience. We also have a woman, our host, who is working the stones from outside. She is doing a very good job. The singing this time is really good. One of the women is very good at singing and the energy she adds helps the music flow like water. This sweat is in the end very different than any other I have done. I feel softer, less intellectual and more in touch with my feelings. Again we are inside about two hours. These stones we use get very hot, some of the hottest stones I have worked with. Different stones tell different stories in different ways.

When the door is opened I put my head outside and lay down on the ground looking at the sky. There is one tiny cloud hanging up in the sky right over the lodge. I see a single star. In the distance the thunder beings are making their own song and I try to bring this energy down iniside the lodge. Over and over we make the songs and everyone does a good job of getting some sound out. In the earlier sweat it was only me singing. This time everyone is making an effort and the sounds we make together becomes quite beautiful …..this builds up a lot of strong energy. I tell a long story about those teachers who come to us and who then go away. It is a song about giving up the fear. I look up a couple of times and everyone is on four legs with their heads down. Sacred animals seeking life.

Afterwards we have several hours of great conversation. I am asked about medical healing and so end up talking at some length about the nature of these ceremonies which in general I call correction ceremonies. I talk about the different levels of healing medicine, how there are many ways to come at the problem of healing. I talk to them about my approach and explain the reasons why I work as I do.

I was asked about healing practices of tribes. I found myself explaining that the work that I am doing with this World Journey is a kind of healing taken in another direction. We believe that these ceremonies are a “correction”, an adjustment to the thinking of the modern world as it comes to tribal people, to the earth itself. I explain that until we can effectively make these corrections, it is difficult for more specific healing procedures to be used. I explained that this work is similar to the work a healing doctor might exercise over a patient, but applied at a different level of the problem…farther out into society and closer to the earth.

I explained that many Native Americans associate illness with a message from earlier choices made in life, where something went wrong. Sometimes what went wrong may have been a choice, or it may have been a mistake. We need to understand what this mistake was and whose responsibility it is before we can make a correction ceremony. I explained in this way, as we look at modern society, we are applying this great correction ceremony to society in a collective way, carrying it all the way around the earth.

The question was interesting because it asked about healing teachings as if they were something different than the sweat lodge we had just shared together. I explained that they were the same thing in essence…or at least that the principles and results are similar when compared to the details of more personal therapies which her question implied. In my case, my patients are the citizens of the world. My studio is a portable operating room called the Four Directions Unity Bundle.2008