11 Caban
Red Spectral Earth
Passing through a new galactic Beam
Earth liberates herself from Civilization –
Systems collapse; Nations dissolve; False
values fade
Beneath Waves of Time run the Rivers –
Aboriginal/ Indigenous waters of Wisdom
Where Time keeps natural Laws; where Time
is Art
Earth shakes off deadly useless Ways
While dancing around the Sun
The human Soul begins to shine again
All we require to thrive lay
Between the Earth and Sky
Love for the Earth our Mother
Love between You and I.
©Kleomichele Leeds
Florence Owens Thompson
Florence Owens Thompson (born Florence Leona Christie; September 1, 1903 – September 16, 1983) was the subject of Dorothea Lange's famous photo Migrant Mother (1936), an iconic image of the Great Depression. The Library of Congress titled the image: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."
Biography
Florence Owens Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie on September 1, 1903, in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Both her parents were Cherokee. Her father, Jackson Christie, had abandoned her mother, Mary Jane Cobb, before Florence was born, and her mother remarried Charles Akman (of Choctaw descent) in the spring of 1905. The family lived on a small farm in Indian Territory outside of Tahlequah.
Seventeen-year-old Florence married Cleo Owens, a 23-year-old farmer's son from Stone County, Missouri, on February 14, 1921. They soon had their first daughter, Violet, followed by a second daughter, Viola, and a son, Leroy. The family migrated west with other Owens' relatives to Oroville, California, where they worked in the saw mills and on the farms of the Sacramento Valley. By 1931, Florence was pregnant with her sixth child when her husband Cleo died of tuberculosis. Florence then worked in the fields and in restaurants to support her six children. In 1933 Florence had another child, returned to Oklahoma for a time, and then was joined by her parents as they migrated to Shafter, California, north of Bakersfield. There Florence met Jim Hill, with whom she had three more children. During the 1930's the family worked as migrant farm workers following the crops in California and at times into Arizona. Florence later recalled periods when she picked 400–500 pounds of cotton from first daylight until after it was too dark to work. She said: "I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I worked in the fields. I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids."
The family settled in Modesto, California, in 1945. Well after World War II, Florence met and married hospital administrator George Thompson. This marriage brought her far greater financial security than she had previously enjoyed.
Iconic photo
In March 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Florence and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." On the road, the car's timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp on Nipomo Mesa. They were shocked to find so many people camping there—as many as 2,500 to 3,500. A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay. Years later Florence told an interviewer that when she cooked food for her children that day little children appeared from the pea pickers' camp asking, "Can I have a bite?"
While Jim Hill, her husband, and two of Florence's sons went into town to get the car's damaged radiator repaired, Florence and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As Florence waited, photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. She took six images in the course of ten minutes.
Lange's field notes of the images read:
"Seven hungry children. Father is native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers' camp … because of failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tires to buy food."
Lange later wrote of the encounter with Thompson:
"I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."
Thompson claimed that Lange never asked her any questions and got many of the details incorrect. Troy Owens recounted:
"There's no way we sold our tires, because we didn't have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don't believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn't have."
In many ways, Migrant Mother is not typical of Lange's careful method of interacting with her subject. Exhausted after a long road-trip, she did not talk much to the migrant woman, Florence Thompson, and didn't record her information accurately. Although Thompson became a famous symbol of White motherhood, her heritage is Native American. The photograph's fame caused distress for Thompson and her children and raised ethical concerns about turning individuals into symbols.
According to Thompson, Lange promised the photos would never be published, but Lange sent them to the San Francisco News as well as to the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. The News ran the pictures almost immediately and reported that 2,500 to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in Nipomo, California. Within days, the pea-picker camp received 20,000 pounds (9,100 kg) of food from the federal government. Thompson and her family had moved on by the time the food arrived and were working near Watsonville, California.
While Thompson's identity was not known for over 40 years after the photos were taken, the images became famous. The sixth image, especially, which later became known as Migrant Mother, "has achieved near mythical status, symbolizing, if not defining, an entire era in United States history." Roy Stryker called Migrant Mother the "ultimate" photo of the Depression Era: "[Lange] never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture ... . The others were marvelous, but that was special ... . She is immortal." As a whole, the photographs taken for the Resettlement Administration "have been widely heralded as the epitome of documentary photography." Edward Steichen described them as "the most remarkable human documents ever rendered in pictures." Later, however, Lange was criticized for taking inaccurate notes.
Thompson's identity was discovered in the late 1970's. In 1978, acting on a tip, Modesto Bee reporter Emmett Corrigan located Thompson at her mobile home in Space 24 of the Modesto Mobile Village and recognized her from the 40-year-old photograph. A letter Thompson wrote was published in The Modesto Bee and the Associated Press distributed a story headlined "Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo." Florence was quoted as saying "I wish she [Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."
Lange was funded by the federal government when she took the picture, so the image was in the public domain and Lange never directly received any royalties. However, the picture did help make Lange a celebrity and earned her "respect from her colleagues."
In a 2008 interview with CNN, Thompson's daughter Katherine McIntosh recalled how her mother was a "very strong lady", and "the backbone of our family". She said: "We never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something. She didn't eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate. That's one thing she did do.*
CABAN
Kin 37: Red Spectral Earth
I dissolve in order to evolve
Releasing synchronicity
I seal the matrix of navigation
With the spectral tone of liberation
I am guided by my own power doubled.
You control the body, the breath and the thoughts in order to bring your whole being into alignment with the all-abiding reality.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Muladhara Chakra (Seli Plasma)
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