Our blog tracks Jose Arguelles' Dreamspell Calendar. "As chaos and confusion rise, galactic consciousness based on the Law of Time serves as planetary medicine, lifting us into the awareness that we exist within a higher, more expanded realm of existence than the world of third-dimensional form and appearance. Daily practice will elevate consciousness and increase experiences of synchronicity." (Arguelles)
Wanagapeth ("Sweet Breeze"), (?)-1808 was the eldest daughter of Chief Michikinikwa, known as Little Turtle. She married Apekonit, or Capt. William Wells.
William Wells was captured and adopted into the Miami tribe. He had a wife and child who were captured in 1791 and presumed dead. William took Wanagapeth as his second wife, forging a strong family bond between Wells and Turtle that would last until their deaths.
Wanagapeth and Wells had three daughters and one son. Their son, William Wayne Wells, or Wapemongah, graduated fourth in his class at West Point in 1821 and rose to the rank of 1st Lieutenant. He died in 1832 and had no children. One daughter, Ann, married but also had no children. Daughters Rebecca and Mary both have descendants living today.
Little Turtle biographer Harvey Lewis Carter estimates that Sweet Breeze died during the Winter of 1805-1806, because after that year her children moved to Kentucky to live with their uncle, Samuel Wells.
Wanagapeth's father, Mihšihkinaahkwa (known as Chief Little Turtle) fought against Washington in 1791, because the Americans had failed to follow their treaty rules. The treaty stated that Americans would not disturb the land of the Native Americans, and the Native Americans would not disturb them if they did that. But, American settlers failed to do this. So, Washington sent an army under General Arthur St. Clair against the Miami tribe (Chief Little Turtle and Wanagapeth's tribe). The Native Americans celebrated a victory, after killing more than 600 U.S. soldiers. St. Clair retreated, and the Miami tribe was victorious.
In 1794, Native Americans demanded that settlers who were living north of the Ohio River leave the area. In response, George Washington again sent an army, this time under General Anthony Wayne, a revolutionary war general. But, this time, the Miami tribe didn't want to fight anymore, but nobody listened. In August 1794, Wayne's army defeated more than 1,000 Native Americans under Shawnee chief Weyapiersenwah (Blue Jacket) in The Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present day Toledo, Ohio. This defeat for the Native Americans crushed their dreams for keeping their land. In the Treaty of Greenville (1795), Native American leaders agreed to surrender most of the land in what is now Ohio.*
Kay WalkingStick, Wallowa Mountains Memory, Variations, oil and gold leaf on wood, 35 3/4 x 71 1/2 in, 2004, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Kay WalkingStick (born March 2, 1935) is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her later landscape paintings, executed in oil paint on wood panels often include patterns based on American Indian rugs, pottery and other artifacts.
Her works are in the collections of many universities and museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, the National Museum of Canada and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She is an author and was a professor in the art department at Cornell University where she taught painting and drawing. She has been accepted into many artists residency programs which gave her time away from teaching duties to paint. WalkingStick is the winner of many awards and in 1995 was included in H.W. Janson's History of Art, a standard textbook used by university art departments.
Personal life
Kay WalkingStick was born in Syracuse, New York, on March 2, 1935, the daughter of S. Ralph WalkingStick and Emma McKaig WalkingStick. Emma was of Scottish-Irish heritage, and Kay's father, Ralph, was a member of the Cherokee Nation who wrote and spoke the Cherokee language. Ralph was born in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and attended Dartmouth College. Kay's parents had four other children, and as they raised their family Ralph WalkingStick worked in the oil fields as a geologist. He became an alcoholic. While pregnant with Kay, her mother left Oklahoma with their other children and moved to Syracuse, New York. WalkingStick grew up in Syracuse without having experienced the cultural heritage of her Cherokee ancestors. Her siblings, who spent some of their childhood in Oklahoma, had a better understanding of their father's Cherokee traditions. Her mother told her "Indian stories" and talked about her handsome father. The family was proud to be Native Americans. Kay liked to color and draw from a young age. A number of other members of her family were artists.
WalkingStick married R. Michael Echols in 1959, and they had two children, Michael David Echols and Erica WalkingStick Echols Lowry. Michael Echols died in 1989. She is now married to artist Dirk Bach. They married in November 2013 and live in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Education
WalkingStick received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959 from Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania. Ten years later she received the Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Women, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Master of Fine Arts in 1975.
WalkingStick was at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire for a month-long residency in both 1970 and 1971. In July 1976 she was an artist-in-residence in Saratoga Springs, New York, at the Yaddo Artists' Colony, and at Montauk, New York, in August 1983 at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center. In 1992 she painted at the Conference and Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. In 1995 she was a visiting teacher and artist at the Vermont Studio Center for a month. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Arcadia University.
Career
Artist
She created representational art works after college which for the next 10 years were self-described as "hard-edged" and "realistic". In graduate school during the early 1970's, her work became more abstract, and they were included in many New York City exhibitions, at a time when Native American artists' works were seldom exhibited. In graduate school she began to study Native American art and history, seeking to understand her "Indianness". WalkingStick began a series of works about the 19th-century Nez Perce "Chief Joseph" who resisted reservation life. She layered wax and acrylic paint, mixed together onto inked canvas and left the design unpainted then cut to create designs. In 1978 she had a solo exhibition at Bertha Urdang Gallery. WalkingStick later integrated other elements into the works, like small rocks, pieces of pottery, metal shavings, and copper. Throughout the process she added paint with her hands or a knife in the areas exposed from the cut wax to create her final work.
"My wish has been to express our Native and non-native shared identity. I want all people to hold on to their cultures — but I also want to encourage a mutual recognition of a shared being."
Kay WalkingStick
In another personal search, Walkingstick created Messages to Papa in 1974 to better understand the conflicted feelings that she had for her father. The work was a stereotypical image of a Native American dwelling, the tipi, although it was not a Cherokee structure. She used the image, as a symbol of Native Americans to people of non-native descent. In the middle of the work she hung a Cherokee language translation of the Lord's Prayer and a letter to her deceased father.
WalkingStick has become best known for her use of diptychs, two-paneled works of art. She said, "[T]he diptych is an especially powerful metaphor to express the beauty and power of uniting the disparate and this makes it particularly attractive to those of us who are biracial."
She began making abstract/landscape diptychs in 1985, for which she gained success nationally and internationally. Generally, she made an abstract work on one panel of the diptych and a representational, or realistic, image on the other. She has made landscapes of the Rockies and the Alps and of the ancient southwestern sites, Mesa Verde and Canyon De Chelly from sketches she had made during her visits there. Walkingstick said, "I do not see my paintings as landscapes, per se, but rather as paintings that describe two kinds of perception of the earth. One view is visual and fleeting and the other is abstract and everlasting. These paintings are my attempt to express the mythically inexpressible and to unify the present with eternity."
Educator
In 1988 WalkingStick was hired by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to be an assistant professor of art. She taught there until 1990 when she was employed by the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a position she held for two years. She returned to Cornell University in 1992,where she taught drawing and painting as a full professor, retiring in 2005. She then moved to New York City to work full-time in her studio. She has retired as Professor Emerita of Cornell University.
Awards
She is the recipient of the following:
1983 - National Endowment of the Arts grant
1991- Richard A. Florsheim Art Fund Award, Tampa, FL
1995 - Joan Mitchell Foundation award
1996 - National Honor award for Achievement in the Arts, Women's Caucus for Art
2003 - Distinguished Artist Award from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, the first woman to win this award
2011 - Lee Krasner award for lifetime achievement, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation*
Velma Wallis (born 1960) is a Native American writer of Gwich'in Athabascan Indian descent. Her books have been translated into 17 languages.
Early life
She was born and raised in a remote Alaskan village near Fort Yukon, approximately 200 km (120 mi) northeast of Fairbanks. This location could be accessed only by riverboat, airplane, snowmobile or dogsled. Velma grew up among 12 siblings. Her father died when she was 13 years old, and she stayed out of school to help her mother with the household. She later went on to receive her GED.
Independence
About 12 miles away from the village, her father had built a small cabin in the wilderness. He had been a hunter and trapper. Some time after his death Velma surprised her family and friends by leaving home and living in the cabin for some years. She perfected her trapping, fishing and hunting skills and lived on what she could provide for herself. At one point her mother joined her during the summer to teach her more traditional skills. In this area, where the Porcupine River flows into the Yukon River, Velma Wallis lived an independent lifestyle. These experiences led to write her first book, Two Old Women, which astonished her publisher by selling 1.5 million copies worldwide.
Personal life
Velma Wallis, who has three daughters and a son, now divides her time between Fairbanks and Fort Yukon.
Awards
2003 American Book Award, for Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River
1993 Western States Book Award
Velma Wallis bibliography
Two Old Women: An Alaskan Legend Of Betrayal, Courage And Survival. HarperCollins. 2004. ISBN 978-0-06-072352-1.
Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun. Alaska Book Adventures. 1996. ISBN 978-0-945397-34-2.
Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River. Alaska Book Adventures. 2003. ISBN 978-0-9724944-7-2.
OC
Kin 50: White Spectral Dog
I dissolve in order to love
Releasing loyalty
I seal the process of heart
With the spectral tone of liberation
I am guided by my own power doubled
I am a polar kin
I transport the white galactic spectrum
I am a galactic activation portal
Enter me.
Harmony is the law of life, discord its shadow; from whence springs suffering, the teacher, the awakening of consciousness.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.
Pablita Velarde (September 19, 1918 – January 12, 2006) born Tse Tsan (Tewa, "Golden Dawn") was an American painter.
Early life
Velarde was born on Santa Clara Pueblo near Española, New Mexico. After the death of her mother when Pablita was about five years old, she and two of her sisters were sent to St Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe. At the age of fourteen, she was accepted at Dorothy Dunn's Santa Fe Studio Art School at the Santa Fe Indian School. There, she became an accomplished painter in the Dunn style, known as "flat painting".
Art career
Her early paintings were exclusively watercolors, but later in life she learned how to prepare paints from natural pigments (a process similar to, but not the same as fresco secco). She used these paints to produce what she called "earth paintings". She obtained the pigments from minerals and rocks, which she ground on a metate and mano until the result was a powdery substance from which she made her paints.
In 1939, Velarde was commissioned by the National Park Service under a grant from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to depict scenes of traditional Pueblo life for visitors to the Bandelier National Monument.
Following her work at Bandelier, Velarde went on to become one of the most accomplished Native American painters of her generation, with solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including her native New Mexico, as well as Florida and California. In 1953, she was the first woman to receive the Grand Purchase Award at the Philbrook Museum of Art’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Painting. In 1954 the French government honored her with the Palmes Académiques for excellence in art. In 1960 she published a book of stories and paintings, Old Father, the Storyteller.
In a 1979 interview she said, "Painting was not considered women's work in my time. A woman was supposed to be just a woman, like a housewife and a mother and chief cook. Those were things I wasn't interested in."
Velarde's work is exhibited in public and private collections including the Bandelier National Monument museum, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, the Avery Collection at the Arizona State Museum, the Ruth and Charles Elkus Collection of Native American Art, and in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Personal life
In 1942, Pablita married Herbert Hardin, a graduate of the University of California, whom she had known for some time. Her daughter, Helen Hardin, and her granddaughter Margarete Bagshaw became prominent artists in their own right.
Awards and honors
Palmes Académiques, 1954
New Mexico Governor's Award, 1977[4]
1990 Lifetime Achievement Award - national Women's Caucus for Art [5]
The experience of cosmic consciousness must coexist with an attitude of compassion and selfless service extended over the entire universe for the liberation and uplifting of all sentient beings.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.
Misty Anne Upham (July 6, 1982 – October 5, 2014) was a Native American actress. She attracted critical acclaim for her performance in the 2008 film Frozen River, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female. She also appeared in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian and August: Osage County.
Background
Upham was born on July 6, 1982, in Kalispell, Montana, and raised in Auburn, Washington. A Native American, she was a member of the Blackfeet Nation. She was reportedly sexually abused, assaulted and gang-raped, first as a child and then later in life as an upcoming actress in Hollywood. Both Upham and family members reported that she suffered from depression and the severe after effects of these traumas.
Career
Upham's film credits include Expiration Date, Edge of America, Skins and Skinwalkers. In 2010, she appeared on HBO's Big Love. In 2013, she played a major supporting role in Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, selected in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 66th Festival de Cannes. She played the housekeeper Johnna in August: Osage County, which starred Meryl Streep, and played Liz in Cake (which starred Jennifer Aniston).
Death
On Sunday, October 5, 2014, Upham left her sister's apartment on the Muckleshoot Reservation in Auburn, Washington, on foot. The following weekend, her family announced via Facebook and other media that she had not been heard from since then and that they were concerned for her welfare, citing past mental health problems. A spokesman for the Auburn Police Department told CNN that police had not opened an investigation and were not regarding Upham as a missing person at that time. He confirmed that family members had contacted police on several occasions in the past year to report Upham missing but that she had been located and determined to be safe within a few days in each previous case.
On October 16, 2014, Misty Upham's body was found by a small search party organized by her family and other members of the Muckleshoot Tribe. She was found at the bottom of a cliff in a wooded area, just a short distance from where the family had previously searched. Members of the search party believe her death was an accident; that she fell off the cliff in the dark and that her life could have been saved had there been a prompt and thorough search. Citing lack of action on the part of the Auburn police, and alleging past abuse of Misty Upham by members of the Auburn Police Department, Upham's family released a statement that reads in part:
"But the real tragedy is this could have been prevented on a lot of levels. We pleaded with the Auburn Police to help us find Misty but Commander Stocker made the decision that Misty did not fit the criteria of the Washington State Endangered Missing Persons Plan. This became a point of contention between us and the Auburn PD. In a statement he gave to the press he said Auburn PD doesn't have any evidence that Misty is actually missing. He went on to say that Misty packed her belongings and left her apartment. This was an inaccurate statement. We believe that Commander Stocker had animosity against Misty due to a previous encounter."
"Now press reports are saying that Auburn police department found Misty. The truth is the Native American community formed a search party and found her after several days of searching without the help of the Auburn PD".
On December 3, 2014, the King County Medical Examiner released a report stating Misty Upham had died of blunt-force injuries to her head and torso on October 5, 2014, the day she disappeared. The medical examiner stated that "the manner of her death – whether by foul play, suicide or accident – could not be determined."
In late October, 2016, the upcoming release of a documentary on Upham was announced. 11 Days - The Search for Misty Upham investigates her disappearance and death, and the search for her led by her family in what they report was the absence of police support. It is scheduled to appear at Native American film festivals, notably in the broader context of the ongoing issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).
On October 15, 2017, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations, Upham's father, Charles Upham, went public with allegations that his daughter was raped by a member of Weinstein's production team at the same Golden Globes ceremony where she was honored, and that other members of Weinstein's team had not only witnessed the rape but had cheered the rapist on.*
