"The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives"
--Sioux
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Seems nearly all Native American proverbs are 'spot on' as the Canadians say. Some of them nail the Achilles heel of modern civilization.....it's like watching a 'Greatest of the Greatest hits in football, or seeing a 'poetry in motion' block-strike that ends the matter before it really begins. Now, the little quote above is a 100-200 years old-they could see the future back in the beginning. It's nothing supernatural. It's keen observation of people and the laws of nature.
Red folks have developed a very dark biting sense of humor over the last 500 years or so. If you are a 'venture capitalist', it would be wise to back a group of Indian comedians. They will stand and deliver....as sure as spring follows winter, as sure as the sun will appear yet again, tomorrow.
AMERICAN INDIAN WALK HIGHLIGHTS SACRED PLACES
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
February 19, 2008
Matt Farley
In the 30 years since the first Longest Walk march flooded Capitol Hill with activists fighting for American Indian rights, thousands of places sacred to American Indians continue to be desecrated and developed, an official of the International Indian Treaty Council said Monday.
Jimbo Simmons and other supporters of American Indian sovereignty launched the Longest Walk 2, a re-creation of the 1978 walk, that stopped Monday at an informal powwow at the Carson Colony gymnasium.
"It's more successful (than the original) in terms of outreach to the public," Simmons said. "We're reaching out to as many people as possible.
"If we get 2 million people walking into Washington, D.C., on the same day, that will draw some attention. And at this point, I believe that's possible."
About 40 people have committed to walk the 3,600 miles from San Francisco to Capitol Hill to draw attention to the damage being done to sacred places and the Earth, Simmons said.
A larger party walking through the South is expected to join the group in Washington to stage a re-creation of the original event, organized to protest a slate of legislative bills that supporters believed would undercut American-Indian sovereignty.
That effort, which drew the support of celebrities such as Marlon Brando and Muhammad Ali, was eventually successful, Simmons said.
Since marchers left the Bay Area on Feb. 11, spending nights at public facilities and Indian reservations, their number has grown and diversified, he said.
Brandt Larsen, a California native who drove to Carson City to join the march, said he planned to remain with the group until it reaches Washington on July 11.
"My grandmother was Sioux, but I was never looked at as (American Indian)," he said. "I never asked to be looked at that way, but this is something I really feel like I should do. The whole country is sacred, but nobody treats it that way."
Simmons said he often has trouble articulating American Indians' concerns about the environment to people from other belief systems.
"We don't have to go to a building or a church to pray," he said. "We can pray anywhere. All land is sacred. Sometimes, that's hard to understand."
The group's worship service near Cave Rock at Lake Tahoe was interrupted by a group of boaters who insisted they move away from the water's edge, Simmons said.
"They were saying, 'We deserve to be here because we paid,'" he said. "But, you know, we were there first. We feel like the human family has one commonality, and that's Mother Earth. We were trying to protect that (during the first march), and we still continue to."
The walk took on a festive air when Oakland residents Calvin Magpie, 25, and Estela Sophia Cuevas, 24, announced they would be married Monday night in a ceremony ending with them being wrapped together in buckskins and a single blanket, Magpie said.
"We were planning to do it in July, but we're going to be walking during the whole time we (should be) planning," he said. "This way, it will be something we can always remember and tell our children."
Magpie laughed and shrugged.
"Plus, you know, it's kind of a spiritual thing. Like the two of us walking on this Earth together."
THE long walk
The Long Walk memorializes the campaign led by Col. Kit Carson in 1864 against the nomadic tribes of New Mexico Territory, primarily the Navajo, to force them to Fort Sumner on the Bosque Redondo Reservation in eastern New Mexico.
Carson's troops destroyed Navajo crops, orchards and livestock and marched 8,000-9,000 American Indians on a 300-mile journey that survivors remembered as a death march.
About 200 people died of cold and starvation during the "Long Walk" of the Navajo people.
Visit the Longest Walk 2 website
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