Blue Lunar Storm/ Blue Rhythmic Monkey - Lunar Scorpion Moon of Challenge, Day 28

On October 1st, 2017, Native American musician Michael Bucher is releasing his latest

 12-track album titled ‘this.’ A work he calls his 'best work yet.'

With Only Seven Fingers: Michael Bucher to Release Newest Album ‘this.’ October 1st:

Michael Bucher says his latest album ‘this.’ is ‘his best work yet’

On October 1st, 2017, Native American musician Michael Bucher, is releasing his latest body of work with a 12-track album titled ‘this.’

In 2015, Michael Bucher was in the prime of his career when he lost three fingers in an accident. He was set to travel to Canada for a television special with other dates in the works; he was on the verge of gaining international exposure on several fronts. The day before he was set to go, he instead found himself in a hospital, looking at a hand with fingers that were no longer there.

Bucher previously told ICMN he reflected on a life without music. “I began compiling a ‘never again’ list.”

Michael Bucher says he realized he had an excuse to give up, but decided he would press on. But he would have to reteach himself to play the guitar, only able to strum with his thumb and his remaining middle finger. The process was not an easy one.

“I have no feeling in my middle finger. There is a second-sense you get when strumming the guitar or hitting chords, so this was definitely a new process for me,” he said.

After spending hundreds of dollars on guitar picks and finally getting it right with a tacky adhesive on the pick, Michael Bucher began practicing his old songs. Even though he was just using his finger and thumb, optimism began to creep in. He thought, “This is going to happen. I’m going to do it again.”

Going back to the studio, Michael Bucher was ready to play one of his most profoundly difficult pieces he says he had ever attempted. At the ready, he recorded One Finger, One Thumb, One Take at the GRAMMY-winning Sound Stations studio in La Crosse Wisconsin. The meaning of the song One Finger, One Thumb, One Take is just that.

Michael Bucher explained his process. “It was so much more than just recording in a studio where you can say, hold on, let’s redo that again, but if you play live in front of an audience, you don’t have that luxury. It may have been just a moment in the studio to someone, but to me everything was riding on this one take.”

“I decided either I do this in one take, or I hang it up. But it worked. The rest is history. And now I have an entire album I have recorded. It is a testament that if we really focus our energies on accomplishing what we want to accomplish, we can achieve anything.”

Michael Bucher’s album this. which includes tracks on the difficulties of living a normal life, addictions in the world and the misappropriation of culture, is making its way to the world in October.

With the premiere of ‘this.’ Michael Bucher says he feels only gratitude.

I don’t think I’ll ever pick up my guitar again without the thought of gratitude,” he told ICMN previously.

Michael Bucher’s album this. will be available on October 1st. For more information visit www.MichaelBucher.com. Watch his video One Finger, One Thumb, One Take. when it premieres on October 1st on Michael Bucher’s YouTube channel.*

By ICMN Staff • September 2, 2017

*https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/arts-entertainment/seven-fingers-michael-bucher-release-newest-album-october-1st/

CAUAC

Kin 119: Blue Lunar Storm

I polarize in order to catalyze

Stabilizing energy

I seal the matrix of self-generation

With the lunar tone of challenge

I am guided by the power of magic.

Appreciation is a supreme magnet. The greater your appreciation, the more is given to you.*

*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.

www.lawoftime.org

www.tzolkincosmology.com

www.13moon.com

www.mayanmajix.com

 The Sacred Tzolk'in

Anahata Chakra (Silio Plasma)

White Magnetic Mirror/ White Overtone Dog - Lunar Scorpion Moon of Challenge, Day 27

Indian Art: Baskets , A WIYOT- KARUK POLYCHROME TWINED TRINKET BASKET .

White Privilege Returns to Indian Island:

Wealthy Robin Arkley protests Eureka, CA’s decision to give Indian Island to the Wiyot Tribe

There is a man who has deep roots in our community and he also happens to be very wealthy. This gives him a certain latitude to go beyond the norm from ordinary citizens as he gives money to charitable causes and has renovated an old theater to be a performing arts center.

His name is Robin Arkley and he recently went on a local talk radio station to protest the decision of the city of Eureka, California to talk with the Wiyot Tribe about giving them Indian Island.

Let me give you a short history of Indian Island. On February 26, 1860 during the middle of a world renewal ceremony, that goes for 10 days, the men of the tribe were out getting supplies. At dawn a group of volunteer militia descended upon the village filled with old men, women and children and began killing them. No accurate number has been determined but it is agreed that over 100 Wiyots were butchered during that massacre. The local newspaper the Northern Californian reported it like this:

“Blood stood in pools on all sides; the walls of the huts were stained and the grass colored red. Lying around were dead bodies of both sexes and all ages from the old man to the infant at the breast. Some had their heads split in twain by axes, others beaten into jelly with clubs, others pierced or cut to pieces with bowie knives. Some struck down as they mired; others had almost reached the water when overtaken and butchered.”

The Wiyots have been trying to recover from that act of barbarism ever since. Part of their healing has been an effort to reclaim what once was Wiyot homeland. In 2000 they purchased a small portion of the island. In 2004 they signed an agreement with the city of Eureka that returned 40 acres (no mule was handed over), of the island to the tribe.

Recently the city of Eureka resumed efforts to return remaining portions of Indian Island that they control to the Wiyot people. This raised the ire of Lord Arkly who proclaimed that the island is an asset of his and others that he sees when he takes his children on the island. How a parent could take their progeny to the site of a genocidal stain on local history is fodder for another story.

During the course of his diatribe the notion of the city considering giving the Island back to the tribe was “astonishing and flabbergasting” to him. Of course it is; how can the effort to recover from the distress of having nearly your entire tribe killed be more important than having a nice picnic spot for the delight of our effete elite. Heavens forbid we disturb the gentile benevolence of our local patron.

In his largess Herr Arkley offered to pay over the appraised price for the piece of land. I can only assume he would do this so it would be available for his use the few days he is actually in our community, as he sits on his throne and overlooks his fiefdom from Louisiana. How fortunate we are to our own mini-Trump to remind us to stay in our place and bow before the all mighty dollar.

This is yet another example of the 1 percent aristocracy holding their ill-gotten gains over the heads, lives and islands of indigenous people. Manifest Destiny sucks.

Just my two dentalia’s worth.*

By André Cramblit, a Karuk Tribal Member from the Klamath and Salmon rivers in northwest California. He drives on the highway that circumnavigates Indian Island and ponders the possibilities of it’s eminent return to the Wiyot people.

*https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/white-privilege-returns-indian-island/

ETZNAB

Kin 118: White Magnetic Mirror

I unify in order to reflect

Attracting order

I seal the matrix of endlessness

With the magnetic tone of purpose

I am guided by my own power doubled.

Our life and everything we see in the phenomenal world is the articulation of specific cycles of time.*

*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.

www.lawoftime.org

www.tzolkincosmology.com

www.13moon.com

www.mayanmajix.com

 The Sacred Tzolk'in

Manipura Chakra (Limi Plasma)

Red Cosmic Earth/ Red Self-Existing Moon - Lunar Scorpion Moon of Challenge, Day 26

Nez Perce Warrior.

The Nez Perce War and the ‘Wilderness of American Power’:

Suggesting that FIRST NAME Sharfstein explores the Nez Perce War as an aspect of post-Reconstruction America in his latest book is misconstrued

Daniel Sharfstein, in Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce War, notes that people have been writing about the Nez Perce War from the moment it ended in 1877. If you include journalist accounts and U.S. Army transmissions about pre-war federal, state, and local machinations that steadily encroached on Nez Perce lands and traditional self-determined existence, as Sharfstein does, you can say writing about the war started before the war.

The publisher bills Thunder in the Mountains as an “exploration of post Reconstruction America.” That rubric may attract a readership beyond those interested in “Indian” issues, but it misconstrues the plan of the work, suggesting that Sharfstein explores the Nez Perce War as an aspect of post-Reconstruction America. Other books have framed so-called “Indian wars” as episodes in American history, presuming that American history has a trajectory independent of wars against Indigenous Peoples.

The “Indian Wars” are all “American Wars.” And America, from its earliest colonial imaginations, has presented itself as a nation with a religious mission to dominate. Politicians from John Winthrop in the 17th century to Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney in the 20th and 21st centuries, have turned to the Bible to pronounce America “a city upon a hill,” endowed with exceptional qualities to lead the world, whether by example or by force. The trajectory of American history—by its own telling—consists of the theological mission to carry out the colonizing covenant set forth in Genesis, when “The Lord said…’go from your country [and] I will give you this land.'” Congealed in the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” the American mission explicitly aims at “redeeming” Native (and other non-white) Peoples by invading and seizing their lands.

If Sharfstein’s only contribution was to frame the Nez Perce War as an expression of anti-Indian ” Manifest Destiny ” doctrine, he would break no new ground. What sets Sharfstein’s work apart—what makes it stand out—arises from the fact that he explores the Nez Perce War and post-Reconstruction America simultaneously, as an intersectional web of events emerging from “ideas of the white man’s burden and a hard, racialized sense of Manifest Destiny.”

Sharfstein’s counter-intuitive reframing of post-Reconstruction as “an extension of Reconstruction” allows us to see beyond “manifest destiny” as a mission to dominate other peoples—to see it as “a national project…expanding the size and reach of the federal government.” Sharfstein presents the withdrawal of federal power from the post-Civil War Reconstruction project as part of a wider expansion of federal power. The federal pivot away from emancipation of Black people was toward domination of other non-white peoples. As Sharfstein puts it, “The nation’s pivot [was] from emancipation to Jim Crow and empire.”

Sharfstein’s uniting of what others see as disparate and contradictory trajectories reveals an underlying coherence to the increasingly massive exercise of federal power during the 19th and into the following centuries. Understanding this coherence, he suggests, “is crucial to understanding the divisions that define modern America.” I would add that this understanding will not resolve the divisions until and unless it brings about a disavowal of the underlying mission to dominate that informs American history.

Sharfstein presents his view without polemic. Indeed, the writing is lyrical—smooth and engaging, albeit with scrupulous bibliographical notes to underscore its historical authenticity. He builds the intertwined stories by accretion, focusing on two main actors and a host of strong supporting cast. He tells how General Oliver Otis Howard—the “Christian General” in charge of the Reconstruction Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—disavowed the idea that freedom from slavery meant Blacks had an equal right to own property, and carried out orders to restore land ownership to former slave-owners. Out west to deal with the “Indian problem,” Howard carried promises similar to those Reconstruction had delivered to Blacks: the federal government would protect poor and downtrodden people against their enemies. But when he encountered “non-treaty Indians” insisting on a traditional way of life, resisting “Christian civilization” and refusing to be corralled into “reservations,” he took leadership of the war to force the Nez Perce into the missionary-led federal “Peace Policy.”

Sharfstein recounts an exchange between Chief Joseph and Indian Agent John Monteith: Monteith said he had no power to remove white settlers from Nez Perce lands, but would use force against the Nez Perce if Joseph refused to agree that the U.S. owned Nez Perce lands. Sharfstein summarizes, “Apparently, this agent could call in the army and…start a war…to [move] Indians to reservations and [turn] them into Christian farmers. Yet…resolving the question of who owned the [land] was beyond his capacity. He could not make or adjust policies that he had a seemingly limitless ability to interpret or enforce.” “Tribes,” he writes, “lived entirely in a realm of federal power, where it seemed there was no specific center of authority, only sprawling bureaucracies, diffuse to the point of invisibility, resisting efforts to locate, speak to, or influence them.” Even readers unfamiliar with Franz Kafka will get the point, that American “civilization” consists of “a different kind of wilderness, the wilderness of American power, opaque and inscrutable, everywhere and nowhere.”

Chief Joseph, faced with the vagaries of federal power, told the agent to stop speaking with a “forked tongue.” An 1855 treaty guaranteed the Wallowa Valley for Joseph’s people; an 1863 treaty purportedly ceding the valley was never signed by Joseph’s people. Setting legalities aside, the war was the U.S. response to Joseph’s insistence the Nez Perce owned their ancestral lands. As Antonio de Nebrija said to Queen Isabella in 1492, when he presented her with the first grammar of the Spanish language, “language is the instrument of empire.” He encouraged her to understand the importance of language in controlling “the many barbarians” she will “soon…have placed her yoke upon.” Sharfstein shows how at each interaction with federal authorities and their texts, Joseph focused on understanding not so much the particular words as the mechanisms through which “authoritative” documents were created, trying to find his way in the wilderness of American power.

As General Howard prepared to invade the Wallowa Valley, he spurned traditional Nez Perce leaders as “dreamers” who “reject Christ”; he ordered “the guard-house for any dreamer leader for non-compliance with government instructions.” The ensuing catastrophic attack on the dreamers—as on dreamer peoples everywhere—gives the lie to the “American Dream”—or perhaps it actually explains that Dream: the fantasy of a federal power attacking anything that threatens its national imperial project, operating in the name of a freedom that countenances many sorts of unfreedom.

“Manifest Destiny” of “Christian civilization”—the rationale for 19th century U.S. “Indian policy”—continues today in “Christian Discovery” doctrine in U.S. federal Indian law. “Trust” and “plenary power” doctrines may seem to produce contradictory results in particular cases, but they rest on a singular commitment to federal domination, which manifests on the ground at Standing Rock, Oak Flat, Bears Ears, and many other locations, and appears in the language of hundreds of cases.*

By Peter d’Errico, who graduated from Yale Law School in 1968, was Staff attorney in Dinébe’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’diit’ahii Navajo Legal Services, 1968-1970, in Shiprock. He taught Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1970-2002. He is a consulting attorney on Indigenous issues.

*https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/nez-perce-war-wilderness-american-power/

CABAN

Kin 117: Red Cosmic Earth

I endure in order to evolve

Transcending synchronicity

I seal the matrix of navigation

With the cosmic tone of presence

I am guided by the power of birth.

The purpose of practicing the synchronic order is to track multiple cycles, and to thereby become aware of the synchronization of multiple cycles as different levels, stages or powers of consciousness.*

*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.

www.lawoftime.org

www.tzolkincosmology.com

www.13moon.com

www.mayanmajix.com

 The Sacred Tzolk'in

Visshudha Chakra (Alpha Plasma)

Yellow Crystal Warrior/ Yellow Electric Star - Lunar Scorpion Moon of Challenge, Day 25

                               Courtesy American Civil Liberties Union

Nationally, Native American youth are 30 percent more likely than

 Caucasian youth to be referred to juvenile court than have charges dropped,

 which results in their early entry into the system.

Native American Students Face Ongoing Crises in Education

Racially and culturally insensitive and incompetent educators continue to be a problem for Native American students

American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) graduation rates have been on a downward trend since 2008 and analysis of the socio-economic reasons driving it is ongoing. As The Nation recently found, “Punitive discipline, inadequate curriculum, and declining federal funding created an education crisis.”

Native-specific education media profiles mostly focus on a handful of the states with the largest Native populations (namely California, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Minnesota), Federally Recognized Tribes, and/or well-known reservations like Pine Ridge. In the Fall of 2013, Education Week sent a team to reservations in South Dakota and California, Pine Ridge included, for its multimedia Education in Indian Country: Obstacles and Opportunity project. While this focus is important, the reality remains that 78 percent of Native Americans live outside of reservations with 70 percent living in urban areas (US Census 2010)—many of the challenges facing and solutions for “Urban Natives” will be different.

In her commentary The Miseducation of Native American Students for Education Week in November 2016, award-winning An Indigenous People’s History of the United States author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz examined the dehumanizing myths and misconceptions that hurt Native American students. “Autumn, the beginning of the school year, is the cruelest season for Native American students in the United States. Between sports games where entire crowds chant about ‘redskins’ and other school mascots and the federal holiday of the Indian-killing mercenary Christopher Columbus, there is the misguided national celebration of ‘Thanksgiving’ to mark the arrival of the religious Europeans, who set the stage for Native American genocide,” she wrote.

“These rituals dominate the first months of school, putting Native children in their place, holding up the traditions of white children, and championing the ideals of white supremacy and imperialism. As November’s recognition of Native American Heritage Month ends, educators should… instead discuss the reality of life, historical and current, for the more than 600,000 Native American students in our nation’s K-12 public schools. Internalizing harmful images most acutely damages Native children, but absorbing racist and dehumanizing ideas about fellow classmates also diminishes the understanding and compassion of non-Native children, warping their conception of a history that often erases Native Americans altogether.

“Sadly, the education system lies at the heart of maintaining the erasure of Native Americans. Native children have been miseducated for generations under deliberately repressive federal policy, and all children in public schools are miseducated in U.S. and Native history,” Dunbar-Ortiz explained. This is especially painful for urban Native students unable to benefit from strong cultural ties to their extended family and culture. This can include not being tribally enrolled and/or wholly disconnected from their culture.

Culturally insensitive and incompetent educators continue to be a problem. “Recent statistics from the Bureau of Indian Affairs have noted that between 29 percent and 36 percent of all Native American students drop out of high school. They mostly drop out between the 7th and 12th grades. These numbers are even higher in areas where parents of Native American children complain of a major lack in understanding of native culture,” an editorial in Native Youth Magazine states.

“Many tribal leaders and education experts say these dismal statistics reflect, at worst, overt discrimination—and, at best, the alienation that Native students feel in a school system that has few Native teachers overall as well as limited lessons on Native American history and culture,” Rebecca Clarren wrote in The Nation.

This is even more complicated when disabilities are involved. Some of the most troubling issues for misunderstood Native American students involve “Childhood and Developmental Disorders” including learning disabilities, Autism, and ADHD whether formally diagnosed or presumed on the part of educators due to entrenched ableist beliefs rooted in racist stereotypes about Native American students being “unintelligent.” The same institutional racism that sees disabilities in Natives underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed, drives Special Education being disproportionately used as a form of discipline against students of color, whether they are actually disabled or not, for “behavioral issues.”

The Native mother* of a 9-year-old son diagnosed with ADHD detailed her anguish to me via email over her child being the target of racism and ableism by white teachers and administration at his new, predominately white middle-class school. Not only was her son not afforded accommodations and protections he was entitled to under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), once a “problem” was identified (relating to his disability) others were quickly found even after he was re-assigned to a new classroom as his mother demanded. The straight-As Native American student who loved school grew to hate it and began failing after being repeatedly humiliated as the “brown kid with behavioral problems.”

“There were days that I would keep him home for ‘mental health days.’ Andy* got up on Monday morning the last week of school and was so upset by the prospect of another week of school that we finally withdrew him. The following year we enrolled him at another elementary school in the same school district. He continued having problems at the new school, however, the new school took a real interest in making school a positive experience for Andy. He is [still] attending the same school and is doing extremely well. Later on, we learned that the old school had been rejecting open-enrollment students with learning or emotional disabilities but accepting their non-disabled siblings.”

In February 2016, the National Council on Disability welcomed “the Equity in IDEA rule proposed by the U.S. Department of Education, which seeks to address widespread disparities in the treatment of students of color with disabilities who too often enter the ‘school-to-prison pipeline,’ which refers to all policies and practices that have the effect of pushing students—especially those most at risk—out of classrooms and into juvenile and criminal justice systems.” Despite this, Native American students are still disproportionately disciplined more than most other racial groups with a dropout rate twice the national average. They represent less than 1 percent of the student population, but 2 percent of out-of-school suspensions and 3 percent of expulsions.

“Many education analysts have noted that when educators don’t acknowledge Native American culture with their Native student body, the students begin to feel disenfranchised, said Native Youth Magazine. “There have been a number of schools that have successfully implemented programs that teach educators and staff about Native culture, giving them a better perspective on how to interact with Native students. The schools that have these ‘cultural sensitivity’ classes have seen a noted decline in the amount of disciplinary actions they take against Native American students. Some credit the sensitivity training itself, but only time will tell which programs were the most effective.”

For information on Native-based solutions including those organized and run by youth, check out NERDS, Pathkeepers for Indigenous Knowledge, and Education Week.**

*Identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect the child and his family.

By Lisa J. Ellwood • September 3, 2017

**https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/education/native-education/native-american-students-face-ongoing-crises-education/

CIB

Kin 116: Yellow Crystal Warrior

I dedicate in order to question

Universalizing fearlessness

I seal the output of intelligence

With the crystal tone of cooperation

I am guided by the power of elegance.

Selflessness means giving without attachment.*

*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.

www.lawoftime.org

www.tzolkincosmology.com

www.13moon.com

www.mayanmajix.com

The Sacred Tzolk'in 

Svadhistana Chakra (Kali Plasma)

Blue Spectral Eagle/ Blue Lunar Hand - Lunar Scorpion Moon of Challenge, Day 24

“American Progress” by John Gast is one of the most-cited examples of propagandist art.

Propaganda: 6 Works of Art That Shaped America’s View of Natives:

Not just art, these pieces represent artistic propaganda that had huge impacts on America’s views of Natives

It is often said that history is written by the victors. Canonized U.S. history is full of accounts honoring the conquerors while the voices of the conquered remain silent. But how has artistic interpretation and even propaganda influenced such events and, perhaps, altered history in the making?

“There are some very famous early works that were used as propaganda to shape public opinion of Native Americans,” said David Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber professor of art at Wake Forest University. “You’ll see some that demonize the Native Americans, turn them into monsters, and others that show Indians as Greek statues, heavily muscled and lean.”

Early American painters often used their creative licenses to make political or social statements—influencing public opinion, helping to justify concepts like Manifest Destiny, or even calling to task governmental powers for their treatment of Natives.

Here are six works of fine art that helped shape America’s view of Natives:

The Death of Wolfe (1770) by Benjamin West. Born in what would become the state of Pennsylvania, West was the first American artist to rise to international fame. A self-taught artist, West created paintings that were a mix of history, religion and mythology.

In his most famous work, The Death of Wolfe, West captured the moment when Major-General James Wolfe was mortally wounded near Quebec during the Seven Years’ War. Included in the painting is a tattooed Native American shown in a contemplative pose—or “the Native American as stoic philosopher,” Lubin said.

                                                    Courtesy National Archives

“The Death of Wolfe” by Benjamin West captures the moment when

 Major-General James Wolfe was mortally wounded near Quebec during the Seven Years’ War.

The Death of Jane McCrea (1804) by John Vanderlyn. A protégé to Benjamin West, Vanderlyn called on his neoclassical training to capture Jane McCrea, a young white woman who was killed by a stray bullet during the Revolutionary War.

The facts of McCrea’s 1777 death, which occurred as she was traveling to meet her fiancé, are unknown. Vanderlyn based his painting on legend, which placed the blame squarely on Natives who allegedly scalped McCrea and killed her.

The legend, and later Vanderlyn’s painting, severed as propaganda to spark settlers’ anger and recruit soldiers to rally forces against the British. The painting depicts McCrea as a helpless but sensual white woman in the clutch of dark and savage Indians.

“Here, the American Indian symbolizes the brutality of the colonists’ enemy, England,” Lubin said. “Jane McCrea is a figure of civilization, of lightness, of enlightenment. The Indians are steeped in shadows, emerging out of darkness like monsters out of their lair. She’s the white consciousness beset by beastly figures.”

                                                            Courtesy National Archives

“The Death of Jane McCrea” by John Vanderlyn depicts a romanticized legend about the death of a white woman at the hands of dark and savage Indians.

Falls of the Kaaterskill (1826) by Thomas Cole. This oil painting depicts a romantic view of a forest and waterfall, based on the Kaaterskill Falls, a two-stage, 260-foot plunge along Kaaterskill Creek in New York’s Catskill Mountains. The tiny figure of an Indian stands on a ledge between the two falls, a stick in his left hand.

“You can barely spot the Indian at the center of the composition,” Lubin said. “But he symbolizes the primal nature that Cole believed white civilization was wrongly destroying. For Cole, Indians represented the true America that capitalism was trouncing.”

                                    Courtesy National Archives

“Falls of the Kaaterskill” by Thomas Cole depicts a romantic view 

of a forest and waterfall based on Kaaterskill falls and shows a tiny Indian on a ledge.

The Rescue (1837) by Horatio Greenough. This 12-foot-tall marble statue that stood in front of the U.S. Capitol building depicts a confrontation between a tomahawk-wielding American Indian warrior and a pioneer family.

To the left of the sculpture, a pioneer woman withdraws from the warrior in terror, clutching a small child. In the center, an outsized frontiersman subdues the warrior but refrains from killing him, showing control of the situation and reducing the warrior to the status of child.

Greenough meant the statute as a memorial of the Indian race, he wrote, but also to “convey the idea of the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes.” The statue and its companion, Discovery of America by Luigi Persico, were removed from the Capitol in 1958.

                             Courtesy National Archives

“The Rescue” by Horatio Greenough is a 12-foot-tall marble statue that once stood in front of the U.S. Capitol showing a confrontation between an American Indian and pioneer family.

The Death Struggle (1845) by Charles Deas. Born in Philadelphia in 1818, Deas was in his 20s when he journeyed westward to study and paint Indian tribes, earning a reputation for his oil paintings depicting Natives Americans and fur trappers in the mid-1800s.

His work expressed psychological tension between trappers and Indians, and often captured the moment of starkest danger. The Death Struggle depicts an Indian and a trapper falling to their deaths while locked in combat.

“This is a symbolic battle between a white fur trapper and two braves who try to prevent his territorial encroachment,” Lubin said. “The white guy and one of the Indians plummet off a cliff into the abyss.”

                                     Courtesy National Archives

“The Death Struggle” by Charles Deas depicts an Indian and fur trapper falling

 to their deaths while locked in combat.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast. Perhaps one of the most-cited examples of propagandist art, American Progress portrays a large and precariously clad female version of America floating westward through the air.

Below, herds of buffalo and bands of Indians flee the encroaching settlers with their symbols of progress: trains, wagon trails, telegraph wires and America herself, toting a school book representing enlightenment and wearing the star of the empire on her forehead.

Intended as an allegory of Manifest Destiny, the painting conveys the ideas of American progress and Westward Expansion as inevitable. Created by Brooklyn artist John Gast, the painting was commissioned by George Crofutt, who published a series of western travel guides and reproduced the painting to help sell the Western frontier as a destination.*

By Alysa Landry • September 1, 2017

*https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/history/people/propaganda-6-works-art-shaped-americas-view-natives/?mqsc=ED3907148

MEN

Kin 113: Blue Spectral Eagle

I dissolve in order to create

Releasing mind

I seal the output of vision

With the spectral tone of liberation

I am guided by my own power doubled

I am a polar kin

I transport the blue galactic spectrum

I am a galactic activation portal

Enter me.

In galactic culture individualized diversity is subsumed into mythic diversity.*

*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.

www.lawoftime.org

www.tzolkincosmology.com

www.13moon.com

www.mayanmajix.com

 The Sacred Tzolk'in

Ajna Chakra (Gamma Plasma)

White Planetary Wizard/ White Magnetic World-Bridger - Lunar Scorpion Moon of Challenge, Day 23

Pitseolak Ashoona, “Woman Hiding From Spirit” (1968)

 stonecut, 27 1/4 x 24 1/4” (courtesy Dorset Fine Arts)

A Family of Artists Creates a Portrait of Inuk Life Across Three Generations

The exhibition of work by Inuk grandmother, mother, and daughter contains prints and drawings that resonate with intergenerational themes of motherhood and community.

Three generations of artists from Kinngait, the renowned center of Inuit printmaking best known as Cape Dorset, are on view in an exhibition that consists of a century-spanning matrilineal exchange of forms, stories, and values. Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait is titled for the Inuktitut word akunnittinni, meaning “between us,” and features work by Inuk grandmother, mother, and daughter Pitseolak Ashoona, Napachie Pootoogook, and Annie Pootoogook. Their prints and drawings resonate with intergenerational themes of motherhood and community, and the exhibition is itself a sampling of the history of the resilience of Inuit life in the face of the complexities of modernity and globalization as seen through the lens of a single, extraordinary family of artists.

Work from Kinngait is not infrequently shown in New York. Most recently, in late 2016, the Brooklyn Museum presented programs with the Cape Dorset Legacy Project to supplement its collection of Kinngait work from the 1950s to the present. It is also a major moment for Inuit artists internationally. Kananginak Pootoogook, a family member and one of the first Kinngait printmakers, is now the first Inuit artist to be shown at the Venice Biennale, having been selected for this year’s Arsenale exhibit seven years after his death. Closer to home, the exhibition SakKijâjuk, organized by Heather Igloliorte — the first major show of Labrador Inuit art — is now currently touring across Canada.

Pitseolak Ashoona, “Dream Of Motherhood” (1969)

 stonecut, 33 3/4 x 24” (courtesy Dorset Fine Arts)

However Inuit art’s popularity has never taken off in the United States in the way it has in Canada. In part, this is due to the history of Inuit print making’s ties to efforts by the Canadian federal government to promote Inuit arts as a means of economic sustenance for northern communities and the resultant craze for the highly collectible work that emerged in the rest of the country. In 1957, James Houston, a representative of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, later hired by the Department of Northern Affairs, introduced techniques of printing to Kinngait with stone-cuts and stencils, and in 1959 he brought printing and workshop techniques from Japan to guide and organize the work of the newly incorporated West Baffin Eskimo Co-Operative. Under these Japanese methods, original drawings by artists were chosen by separate block-cutters and printers who completed the printing process, and for the first two decades of its operations a team of nine men did the majority of the block cutting and printing at Kinngait. The co-op model encouraged profit sharing and consensus decision making, and the egalitarian setting allowed Inuit values to operate with support from business savvy of advisors like Houston who capitalized on the market’s desire for what it saw as authentic representations of Inuit culture.

At the same time, this model accommodated southern Canadian desires and ambivalent feelings towards the Inuit, while modernizing Inuit labor and maintaining their traditional values and distinct culture as highly collectible works of art. While the first critics of Inuit art debated what precisely was “authentic” in Inuit art, southern audiences eagerly consumed work that often omitted elements of the contemporary in favor of timeless images of arctic life.

Annie Pootoogook, “A Portrait of Pitseolak” (2003–04)

 colored pencil and ink on paper (courtesy Edward J. Guarino Collection)

The promotion of Inuit art was thus an attempt to encourage assimilation to a capitalist, colonial economic system and the formation of permanent settlements for indigenous peoples who had otherwise been self-sustaining while seasonally transient. Following its great popularity, Inuit art has since become a national symbol for Canada, as evidenced by the work of famed Kinngait artist Kenojuak Ashevak recently being added to the $10 bill. At the same time, it has flourished over the last sixty years as a site for individual Inuk agency and cultural expression that is resilient to and representative of the pressures that modernity has exerted on life in the North.

Akunnittinni, though, moves past the belabored topics of market making and the in/authentic modernity of Cape Dorset printmaking to pursue matrilineal discourses internal to the community. The effect is an inward-looking familial history, rather than one, as described above, that focuses on the needs and desires of southerners.

Pitseolak Ashoona’s drawings and designs were a feature of the beginnings of Kinngait print making, and her subject matter reflects the concerns of that early period. Born in 1904, she grew up with a family life of subsistence living, and, following the death of her husband, moved to Kinngait with several of her seventeen children to seek out an income. Her prints tend to omit signs of contemporary life and the south, as most early Kinngait work did, thus appealing to audiences seeking images of a timeless and pristine Arctic life. Ashoona often lingers on the spiritual as well as the stories and ways of life of previous generations. In “Woman Hiding from Spirit” (1968) the negative form of a female figure lays in front of a bear-like spirit that does not seem to see her. Sprouting from the spirit’s head are antlers and birds who fight over berries; the woman is nearly face to face with one such bird — speaking to the closeness of the human and spiritual worlds in the North. While none of Ashoona’s best known works are on display, prints like “Dreams of Motherhood” (1969) put the theme of the exhibition into the long line of generational knowledge that reaches back to precolonial life. Sitting on the main woman’s head is the image of a mother holding an ulu knife and carrying an infant in her hood — an image of transgenerational motherhood that is of a value beyond Euro-American consumption.

The tensions among such seemingly timeless subject matter, modern materials, and the production and marketing model of Dorset Fine Arts (the marketing division of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative) vexed anthropologists seeking to define from an outsider’s perspective “authentic” Inuit culture. But as Napachie Pootoogook’s work shows, Kinngait prints have never shied away from chronicling the flux of life in the North. Her work on display shows some of the darker aspects of a history that certainly do not fit the idealized image of an innocent, unrecoverable Arctic life. In “Trading Women for Supplies” (1997-98) and “Whaler’s Exchange” (1989), women are given to Euro-American sailors in mercantile transactions of sexual exploitation exchanged for supplies. Cannibalism is the subject of “Eating His Mother’s Remains” (1999-2000), a practice that, while not part of Inuit culture except in case of extreme famine, has been projected onto many indigenous cultures throughout history. “Alcohol” (1994), depicting a group of figures reeling, with several bottles strewn about them, demonstrates Pootoogook’s foray into particularly contemporary issues that were not necessarily present in Ashoona’s work.

Napachie Pootoogook, “Alcohol” (1994) colored pencil and ink on paper

 (courtesy Edward J. Guarino Collection)

It is the work of Annie Pootoogook that most strikingly demonstrates the ways traditional Inuit family life has been integrated into the modern North. This is the first substantial exhibition of Pootoogook’s work in New York since her widely mourned death in 2016 — a tragic reminder of the continued effects of the colonial legacy on indigenous women. Her drawings alone are reason enough to see the exhibition. A Sobey award winner in 2006 whose work was shown the following year in documenta 12 and in a 2009 solo exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York, Pootoogook’s work brings her family’s legacy into the immediate present by exquisitely picturing the intimacies of family life in a North inundated with southern goods and media.

The bands of color in “Couple Sleeping” (2003-04) demonstrate how sensitively, with her colored pencils, she treats the same paper used for Kinngait prints, creating an alluring surface that recalls the starry texture of Ashoona’s early prints. It is the epitome of an Inuktitut word sometimes substituted for art, sanattiaqsimajut: “these things that are finely made.” “Watching the Simpsons on TV” (2003) is an intimate and lusciously detailed domestic interior scene of family life that fills the page with details of a contemporary Inuit experience. It is a stylistic break from the isolated Inuit figure as seen in the work of her mother and grandmother, yet she also draws on that heritage. “Pitseolak’s Glasses” (2006) depicts her grandmother’s eyeglasses in a near-abstract manner that is reminiscent of engraved ivory forms. And a portrait of Ashoona herself on an isolated white background, not wearing a point-hooded parka, but a patterned dress and headscarf, ties the three generations of the exhibition neatly together — akunnittinni.

Annie Pootoogook, “Watching the Simpsons on TV,” (2003)

 pencil, ink, pencil crayon, 20″ x 26″ (courtesy Edward J. Guarino collection)

The selection of Annie’s work avoids some of the darker themes that she, like her mother, had taken up to critique the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the North. But the repeated emphasis on family and generational conversation rooted in matrilineal love and care can do the same work. The thematic connections across the generations of this family — motherhood, Inuit life in the face of modernity, and resilience — tell their own history of the Inuit response to an increasingly globalist present. Counter to the ambivalence that defined the southern reception of modern Inuit printmaking, Akunnittinni presents a model of intergenerational relations rooted in the Kinngait community that stands in the face of an increasingly globalist and precarious present.

Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait continues at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York (the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House

One Bowling Green, the Financial District) through January 8, 2018.*

By Christopher Green

*https://hyperallergic.com/397997/a-family-of-artists-creates-a-portrait-of-inuk-life-across-three-generations/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Unique%20Egyptian%20Gilded%20Coffin%20Acquired%20by%20the%20Metropolitan%20Museum&utm_content=Unique%20Egyptian%20Gilded%20Coffin%20Acquired%20by%20the%20Metropolitan%20Museum+CID_fa2f3d15f74642a89e05d0beeb7195f5&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=Read%20More

IX

Kin 114: White Planetary Wizard

I perfect in order to enchant

Producing receptivity

I seal the output of timelessness

With the planetary tone of manifestation

I am guided by the power of spirit

I am a galactic activation portal

Enter me.

Samadhi is the state of entering prolonged union with the all-abiding reality where there is no thought.*

*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.

www.lawoftime.org

www.tzolkincosmology.com

www.13moon.com

www.mayanmajix.com

The Sacred Tzolk'in 

Muladhara Chakra (Seli Plasma)