“Freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
Ocean Vuong
freedom
Plains Indian Artifacts–Beaded Moccasins
Last evening I attended a new exhibit at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. The exhibit featured moccasins, paintings, and various artifacts made by different Great Plains tribes, including a headdress worn by Quanah Parker. The exhibit also contains many old photographs. A number of Comanches were present including a lady over 100 years old.
After I left the exhibit, I kept thinking about it and wondered how current Comanches might feel when they come to something like this which in many ways honors them but also displays a past that will never return. While contemplating, I wrote this poem about what I saw.
Beaded moccasins,
moons of work.
Ceremonial beauty,
now encased in glass, labelled, dated by someone’s guess,
for strangers who believe in a strange god,
desecrate the land,
waste invaluable water,
kill bears for sport.
Weep
Wait
Palo Duro Canyon, Comanche Country, where they made their last stand and were forced to go to a reservation in Oklahoma after federal troops killed over a thousand of their horses.
Taking a Knee?
When I read this post, I kept think the other times in life when people as he puts it, “take the knee”: when men propose, when people pray. No one see those as signs of disrespect or do they? For all those who think it is disrespectful, try reading every verse of the national anthem. Hint: the author was a pro-slavery slave owner.
Institute of American Indian Arts (Photo compliments of Moni)
Not everyone really appreciates just how powerful the ritual of standing for the National Anthem really can be. I got a real sense of this when I was 14. My Jr. rifle team won the Wyoming-state BB-Gun finals, which earned our way to the International BB-Gun Championship in Bowling Green, Kentucky. …on July 4th. As the child of a career military officer, I was always happy to stand for the Star-Spangled Banner or to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but standing there during the final ceremonies, the whole thing took on a whole new layer of meaning for me. That time, I had my heart in my throat. That time, the whole ritual moved me nearly to tears. I loved my country so much, and at that moment, putting my hand over my heart for that beautiful song was absolutely the…
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Omnipotence: The Ultimate Homage to Male Dominance as Control by Carol P. Christ
I follow Carol Christ for a variety of reasons including her words often make me think about ideas, concepts, controversies in new ways.
The concept of divine omnipotence is the ultimate expression of male dominance as control. Divine omnipotence is the view that everything that happens in the world happens according to the will of a divinity, who is in control of everything that happens in the world. When someone dies or great suffering occurs, we are told, “everything happens for a purpose,” “it was meant to be,” or “everything happens according to the will of God—or Goddess.” In our recent book Goddess and God in the World, Judith Plaskow and I criticize and reject this view on both rational and moral grounds.
The doctrine of divine omnipotence is widely assumed, not only in Christian theologies, but in Islam and to a lesser extent in Judaism. Moreover, it is also to be found in western metaphysical and mystery traditions and in the many New Age and Goddess theologies based upon them. Thus…
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