Neighboring Gods - Ka Wahine 'o Pele

ASSOCIATED PRESS At Kauai's Limahuli Garden, a blossom of an ohia lehua tree soaks in the sunshine. (Honolulu Star-Bulletin )

  

So... Down the street from me lives Pele. Yes, the Hawaiian Volcano Goddess who was chased from Kahiki ( Tahiti ) by her older sister Namakaokaha'i for taking her husband. The deity that fell into a jealous rage when she sent her youngest sister Hi'iakaikapoliopele to rescue her lover Lohiau and found they had fallen in love. Pele errupts covering the land with lava and out of the ash a 'Ohia Lehua tree grows. This tree is the kinolau (physical embodiment) of Ku ( one of the three major Gods of Hawai'i) but still associated with Pele. Everytime I pass this tree I look into, say "aloha e ka wahine" and I think of how special it is that this tree is on my block. This tree lives ALL over the mountainous regions of the island of Hawai'i yet, I have Madame Pele as a neighbor in Oakland!

( Pictured clockwise (l to r) is the lehua tree on my street ) 

Recently I have felt detached from my hula practice and wondered if I would see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. And the other day I walked by the lehua tree on my block.... I feel it coming back. This is a good sign. 

here's the same tree a couple months ago in THIS post of mine where i found a cute mirrored dresser tray. too bad it was gone when i went back to get it ! 
 
 

purging fears

i am happy I got to share a great cleansing ritual today with a group of people i consider my folk, my peeps, my ohana, my clan, my kin, my cousins... i think i scared myself though when i sang a song that i've never had any inclination to sing outside of blood and outside myself! ha ha ha! as a person raised in a church ( against my own will, of course ) i've always had a love/hate relationship with the church construct.  (pictured, purging our fears in the backyard)
i come from folks (american blacks,caribbean blacks & mvskoke creek) who have : gone to "church" in the woods and/or given their lives up to the idea of jesus as the great white hope and the ideals of a judeo-christian ideal and/or gone to ritual on saturday & church on sunday. it's not that i don't like church, per se, i love old-time, backwoods church i do. i especially love the singing. it takes me to a most safe and serene place. that's where the comfort is.

when you sing, they all come. they are your folks. your ancestors. the ones who make you who you are. some are long gone from this world and some are right with you. every step of the way. that's why i sang the song i did.

i hope that my kin here, in this present, find that comfort,joy,solace,happiness,gratitude,understanding & patiencePLACE. together we can. i know we can. coming home from this circle i felt a little bit of peace. i hope that my kin take care of themselves and their loved ones approaching the holiday season and remember that better environment makes better people. 
ashe' & a'ho

She came before me

 (pictured : my great gran Sallie Lee Anderson and grandmother Josephine C. Anderson Burnside)
i am grateful to have a whole line of artistic+intelligent+self-sufficient+industrious+interesting+strong and rather witty women-folk that i come from. they are/were diverse and the same. they are/were wild and conservative. they are/were boisterous and stoic. they are/were complex and simple. a midwife,seamstress,farmer,doll-maker,teacher,storyteller,medicinewoman,lodge mistress, organist, cook, and a laundress made me who i am. for better for worse.

WE ARE DESCENDANTS OF OUR ANCESTORS AND THEY GO WHERE EVER WE GO 

Tell the stories

According to Patricia Riles Wickman, the importance of the role of the storyteller cannot be overemphasized:

Cultures in which the entire responsibility for replication and perpetuation of the cosmogony is bounded by the ability of its members to hold its elements within the living memory of each generation, without recourse to written codification, embody a type of dynamism within themselves that is unique to orally codified cultures.  This dynamism is both parent and child of the process: such cultures are constantly required to perform, at the same time, twin activities, regenerative and perpetuative.  They encode and institutionalize a ritualized cosmic past that objectifies the culture, even as they reinvent and reinvigorate a social present that uses as its benchmark the very cosmogony that is constantly being reinstitutionalized. This is the process by which, within orally codified societies, the reproduction of a structure become[s] its transformation. [p.60, Wickman]

Where are all the birds?

sad.for true.
David Lewis, Jr. is the last living medicine person of the Bird Clan of the Muscogee in Oklahoma.  Lewis description of his role as medicine person to the clan, and the void that will be left if he is unable to find a replacement for himself underscores one of the ways in which Creek culture is being eroded by modern pressures and influences:  

 excerpt from Creek Indian Medicine Ways, by David Lewis, Jr. and Ann T. Jordan

" I know that I'm the only living, true medicine man left who has actually been initiated.  It is nothing to brag about; it makes me sad.  We have a lot of carriers (uninitiated medicine people) who practice our medicine and they are very strong people, but they do not know the history of the origin of our medicine.  The tribe has ceremonial grounds and they use these red roots all through the summer and the other medicine people use the red roots, but they don't know the history of where red roots come from.  The history of our medicine is only taught to the initiated medicine people.  I haven't found a replacement to initiate to carry on this medicine culture.  There is an old story that says you will be given time to find one.  Maybe that is why the medicine people lived to be old people; they put off finding a replacement.  But you just can't find a candidate as easy as it sounds because the selection process is so strict.  I don't think I will ever find one. "

Has the Western Band completely lost their minds?

Thanks uncle. somebody with some sense of the truth speaks. THANK GOD.
Glad to see southern cloth speaking out against this stupid ass shit.
 
A vocal minority of Cherokee Nation votes to reject tribal black Freedmen

By ALBERT BENDER

Tennessee Voices

Oklahoma Cherokee voters recently revoked the tribal citizenship of the Cherokee Freedmen — descendants of African slaves and free blacks, who have lived in the Cherokee Nation since before the Civil War and many since the 18th century.

But tribal policy is often determined by a few registered Cherokee voters who don't hold Cherokee values, and this vote is a clear example.Out of 45, 000 registered Cherokee voters, only 8,733 cast ballots (6,693 in favor of citizenship revocation and 2,040 against). Thousands of full-blood and high-blood quantum traditional Cherokees don't participate in Cherokee Nation politics. The overwhelming majority of registered Oklahoma Cherokees are of minimal blood quantum (some as little as 1/2,000) and are, by physical appearance, white, and they control the Cherokee government at will. This election stemmed partly from a Cherokee Supreme Court decision in March 2006, which declared that Cherokee Freedmen are tribal citizens, under the Treaty of 1866, and struck down a newly minted 1992 Cherokee law that held citizenship was restricted to Cherokees "by blood" (many of the Freedmen have documented Cherokee ancestry). The Cherokee Nation has no blood-quantum requirement, and blood degree varies from full-blood to 1/2,048.

Tribal membership is based on descendence from the Dawes Roll of 1906 and stands at 260,000. Tribal members, opposed to the court decision, collected more than 3,000 names and requested the issue be decided by voter referendum.

Blacks had been with the Cherokees and other Southern tribes in Tennessee and adjacent states since the 1700s.

The first enslaved Africans were brought into the Cherokee Nation by white traders who married Cherokee women and sired mixed-blood families. Later, these same wealthy families purchased more captive blacks to labor on their farms and plantations. Even so, there were never more than a small fraction of Cherokee families who ever owned slaves.

The full-blood Cherokees, then the majority of the Nation, did not own slaves and considered the "institution" as alien to Cherokee culture. But from the early 19th century, slavery grew, largely due to a very complex cultural process. By 1835, there was a strong movement to free all enslaved blacks and make them Cherokee citizens. This was derailed by the Trail of Tears.

Blacks shared all the horrors of the Trail of Tears, including a high death toll. During the Civil War, Oklahoma Cherokees were divided between the minority Confederate slaveholding mixed-bloods and the majority Unionist non-slaveholding full-bloods. The Unionist Cherokee government emancipated all slaves in 1863.

By all accounts, Cherokee slavery was very lenient compared to white plantation slavery ( blacks often ran away to the Cherokee and other Indian nations), but it was slavery, nonetheless. In Tahlequah, the western Cherokee capital, there was a slave market as in Southern white towns.

Historically, the Freedmen have endured all the agonies of native Cherokees and more during slavery, and it is only right that they should have continued Cherokee citizenship. Reportedly, the Freedmen are preparing legal challenges to their ouster ... ( see article link for full view )