(part 2)
Below is a link to the article on the issue in the Arctic Refuge. Below that is an additional link to an action you can take if you so choose. I am sure there are other actions available to take as well.
I believe one of the main reasons @Jeanne-Mayell came here and gathered this beautiful and loving tribe together was to help save this earth, to help lesson the impact of the catastrophes which lie ahead. Jeanne, is a fierce Warrior Goddess, an Earth and Water protector who rises up to champion Gaia with honor and passion.
She has also warned us for decades.
We know the severity of the destruction ahead can be lessened if we make some dramatic changes. Let's renew our efforts to take actions. We have accomplish a great step in electing a president who will get us on the right path. We have ridden out that horrible dark time together. We must continue forward, to to make our voices heard and champion our Mother Earth..
It is time for a GREEN WAVE.
Let's focus on the big and the small environmental issues and bring attention to them.
So, I wish to spotlight this issue today. We must not allow the Arctic Refuge to be auctioned off for corporate greed. For any reason.
Be like Jeanne but in your own way and honoring your own self . Be a Warrior God/ or Goddess for Earth. For your future generations. For all life on our planet currently existing and those further lives which are yet to dwell upon her.
Let's help bring about a GREEN WAVE.
Very positive news about Oak Flats.
The Biden administration has withdrawn a Final Environmental Impact Statement and decision that would facilitate the transfer of ownership of Oak Flat, a sacred land to at least a dozen Indigenous Tribes, to a mining company with ties to the destruction of an Aboriginal site in Australia. The move follows years of opposition from Apache-Stronghold , the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, and other Tribal entities, religious leaders, locals, and environmental groups.
Oak Flat is a holy ground where the Apache have prayed and performed ceremonies for centuries. The site is also home to numerous Apache burial grounds, sacred sites, petroglyphs, and medicinal plants.
https://www.resolutionmineeis.us
Thank you, Lovendures, for creating this beautiful thread. I've just come up for air from weeks of focusing on getting our town to vote to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day. We won two battles for votes, but there remains one last and most important vote - to get our Select Board (top board of five people) to vote it through. It's been a long process and there is more to come.
Once Columbus Day is finally dismantled and voted out, and Indigenous Peoples Day is voted in, and I pray it will happen here, the collective awareness will rise of indigenous people both those who are here now and those who are gone.
Every October, the schools will be teaching and the media will be reporting the true history of indigenous people. And they will be paying more attention to the work that indigenous people are are still doing today, as well as the philosophy and practices they have kept alive to protect the sacred earth and her waters.
@Bluebelle sent me this poem today which I would like to share here. Thank you, beautiful Bluebelle.
“I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.
Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to
write to Washington, and even then,
whatever they said,
would you believe it? Sometimes
I would like to paint my body red and go into
the glittering snow
to die.
His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.
After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,
it was over, except
his body could not be found,
and you can do whatever you want with that, say
his people came in the black leaves of the night
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home down the rivers. Anyway
this much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.”
― Mary Oliver
@jeanne-mayell. As soon as I read this poem, I thought of you. It touched my heart deeply.
Oh my! Such a beautiful poem. Thank you BlueBelle and Jeanne for sharing its haunting message.
@bluebelle There is something strange and interesting that you posted a poem about Tecumsah and that Mary Oliver's poem of him should end with a reference to his anger.
Two years ago, a Native American woman spoke at an event in our town to promote the book she'd written about Native American history. During the Q&A, she got testy with the overwhelmingly white but very respectful audience. Someone asked her what she wanted for her people, and she snapped, "We just want to be left alone!" I did not understand her answer nor did I like her beating up on a respectful gentle audience. But afterwards a woman I had considered to be a friend looked at me solemnly and said with some bitterness, "She reminds me of you."
I was hurt by this comparison. Another friend at our table looked concerned and said she disagreed with the comparison. This criticism has festered like a sting in my heart for two years, until I read that poem today.
My primary spirit guide is a Native American shaman; the woodlands my sanctuary, the trees my friends. Perhaps that anger is for the trauma that was inflicted upon them and upon the land they treated so tenderly for 20,000 years. Perhaps that anger will continue to burn like a flame within.
@jeanne-mayell After four years of a presidency espousing racism and white supremacy, our country is waking up to an awful truth: our racism has always been part of the national fabric. It has been swept under the rug, so to speak, where it festered and exploded in our consciousness over the past four years. This utterly destroys the myth of American exceptionalism. I’m sorry your friend didn’t understand your passion and your anger on behalf of Native Americans. The injustices of the past are not in the past at all; these injustices created generational trauma in the lives of Native Americans that continues to this day. If we are going to acknowledge the legacy of racism that has been handed down generation by generation, we ought to include our nation’s mistreatment of Native Americans in that reckoning, too.
@bluebelle COVID was necessary for the US to change and to expose the weakness within. Things will change for the better. I remembered the reading from you about this would be the new norm. My actions in life are a metaphor for the changes in the environment.
If you supported those protesting at Standing Rock, you should learn about Line 3.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/02/24/enbridge-line-3-divides-indigenous-lands-people