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A retrospective on the proposed Granite Sculpture Training Program one year later

March 31, 2008, by Stewart Steinhauer

I’ll speak to you, the reader, in my own voice: first person singular. This is a fitting perspective from which to tell my little story, and a revealing insight into how the grammar of the English language is shaped by western civilization’s ideology.

Approximately one year ago, I found myself sitting, stunned, in the Blue Quills boardroom among people I had thought were my closest allies, my inner circle of friends and relatives. From the silent perspective of my private and personal interior world I felt deeply wounded, fatally wounded, with a numbness spreading out from the center of my chest up through my throat into my brain, and down from my heart into the pit of my stomach. The life force in the granite sculpture training program was gone, the intentions reduced to fragments of ideas, lying like rubble around me.

Exactly what happened in that circle I don’t even know now; I do know that I left the room making plans to leave Alberta, plans now coming to fruition. On a spiritual level, a door closed, and, as is always the case, new doors began to open. Perhaps what really happened in that room that day was a spiritual intervention staged by my Rock Grandfather, using the relentless pounding technique I use on him when I carve…that day he carved me.

One year on, I realize that the sculpture training program as visualized would have failed, for four reasons. Number one, I was basing the success of that program on the potential success of the oilfield training program’s hidden agenda, which I read as awakening Rez Zone folks anaesthetized by the ‘genocide, what genocide?’. The collapse of that effort is instructive about the severity of the problem.

Number two, I had unreasonable expectations of an educational institution, trying in my own peculiar way to blend classroom instruction-based curriculi with an active ‘for profit’ business sense 33 years in development, seasoned with a dash of revolutionary fervour. Not a good recipe; like the Chinese fellow who invented gunpowder, I, too would leave a note beside the recipe advising folks to never mix these ingredients.

Number three, my own inner voice, which might not be my voice at all, but the voice of my Rock Grandfather, was very consistent in saying that what I know and do can’t be institutionalized. The lure of an altogether too perfect setting, great instructional spaces, institutional support for expansion and development, great future business exposure, infrastructure mostly in place already, a deep pool of raw human talent, like stored kinetic energy, just waiting to be released, and the release agents, the freedom fighters on BQ’s staff, honing a survival craft under development since the abrogation of Treaty Six by Canadian state forces 131 years ago, caused a momentary bright light of hope to blind me to the reality of institutionalization.

Which leads to number four. To explain it better, let me repeat an anecdote told to me by my late uncle, Mike Steinhauer, about an experience he had in the company of his friend and partner in crime (the crime of cultural survival), Metis Elder Joe Couture. Joe, a PhD psychologist, amongst many other skills, thought it would be beneficial to the august body of a national gathering of Canadian psychologists to hear Mike Steinhauer’s perspective on ‘Indian psychology’. Joe invited Mike to travel with him to Ottawa, where the national gathering was being held. Mike dutifully sat and listened to the proceedings of the conference for a couple of days, and then was introduced and asked to speak to the gathered assembly.

He took the floor, and, very briefly, told them that what they knew was of no use to him, and further, that what he knew they could never learn. He ended by saying that, in his opinion, there was nothing to talk about. Later, Joe was furious with him; it was just one more crack in their crumbling relationship.

One year on from that fatal moment in the Blue Quills board room, I now recognize that what I know is of no use to the BQ group, and that what they know I’ll never be able to learn. A tectonic shift occurred that day, and I find myself on a different earth crust plate, drifting away from Blue Quills, Saddle Lake Cree Nation, and prairie-based Indigenous Peoples. My feet are still rooted to my Great Mother through my Rock Grandfather, though Rocky and I are afloat, headed for the Rocky Mountains, like some bizarre flying rock shower caught on super-slow-mo camera.

As you can see in my choice of words, a ‘me-and-them’ dichotomy has emerged, or perhaps less naively, just made more visible (to me). Blue Quills First Nations College has given me a master class in the intricacies of surviving the unique brand of genocide practiced in Canada, and for that I am truly grateful. After this I don’t know what else to say, knowing that for many hearers I had already said too much at the opening of my first sentence.

In gratitude, and with love, Stewart the irritating Magpie  

Kahentinetha called the other night, and we talked about Mohawk activism, and the mirrored lack of such amongst Crees, but she was really interested in talking about the actual current cash value of land and resources in the indigenous territories where a nation state named Canada stands. She and Katienes, legitimate women title holders following a very long legal tradition, one considerably older than the legal system upholding Europe’s liberal democratic nation state system, want to issue an invoice for moneys owed.

We talked about what Canada’s current net worth might be listed at and what Canada’s GDP is ($1.6 trillion in 2007?)….I asked if she meant invoicing for an amount that would represent a percentage point-based fee, or a royalty payment, but, no, she just wanted to claim the entire amount.

In Haudenosaunee law, and in UN-style global law of the future, if we humans are to have a future, she’s right. It is the full amount. However, in my opinion, invoicing (who?) for the full amount, while having the benefit of pointing out to the few who follow these shenanigans the reality of Turtle Islanders’ current global situation, is not worth the effort involved in doing the research and writing up the invoice.

Such an invoice may be able to appear in the margins, a public free speech space most clearly defined by its lack of corporate advertising, including dusty nooks on the internet, and lowest-cost production newsletters, magazines and videos, usually with what liberal-minded whitish folk (the fair folk?) call a left perspective. What would its appearance there do?

Just to follow that invoice idea forward to its logical conclusion, let’s imagine that Canada’s Supreme Court made a ruling like the one issued a day or so ago by the Supreme Court of Belize, which recognized Mayan title to land and resources, following the concepts recently adopted by most voting members of the UN in its Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous People. Imagine the collective body of Indigenous Peoples inside (underneath?) of Canada suddenly becoming the wealth managers for a $? trillion dollar enterprise turning over $1.6 trillion a year.

We’re strapped down in the colonial torture chamber, and our full attention is devoted to matters arising from that predicament. We don’t have the mental space required to attend to matters of managing a $1.6 trillion GDP. I don’t mean that we couldn’t, theoretically, but I do mean that we currently can’t.

And let’s see; net worth? What about the trillion or so barrels of oil in the tar sands…if it costs $50 a barrel to get it onto the market, and it sells for $100 a barrel, then that’s $50 trillion right there. The handful of human beings who control the global economy aren’t just going to hand it over if we present an invoice. For them, the only law is doing whatever it takes to stay in control. Sure, they’re maniacal mass-murdering war criminals, but, hey, what’s new? From an indigenous Turtle Islander perspective, that’s the way it has been since 1493.

I don’t want to invest any more energy into their system, fighting it, reforming it, or backsliding along with it. My heart/mind is intuitively drawn towards investing my own internal creative energy into envisioning a practical, workable, sustainable global system that encompasses human social, economic and cultural needs, accurately framed within Mother Earth’s larger ecological system.

No current system meets those requirements, left, right or center. My intuition tells me that humanity is waiting for the true voice of Africa, the true voice of Asia, the true voice of Turtle Island, and all other non-Euro centers (in NewSpeak doublethink that would be non-US centers), to speak up, to dialogue, to listen to one another, and to produce from such a true meeting of minds our new collective vision. The Euro-US-centric mind will, of course, be welcomed to listen, and to discuss, but no longer to dominate the discussion. 

On January 26^th  an Arundhati Roy article titled “Listening to the grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial and Celebration” was posted at countercurrents.org, then re-posted at ZNet. My Weypimus blog entry on genocide followed on January 29^th, but I didn’t discover Arundhati’s article until this morning. As always, a brush with Arundhati’s words is both creatively stimulating and reassuring, like an independent assessment on the content and direction of my current thinking.

Sigh….but you may well know how it is….a little bit feels like more, a hunger stirred, and soon I was watching her on Znet’s cache of Arundhati Roy videos, the one on her Town Hall meeting in Seattle, in conversation with David Barsimian. When it finished playing, the You Tube format shifted, offering a visual menu of 17 more Arundhati offerings. Jackpot! In keeping with this morning’s theme of more is better, I rolled my cursor along the menu band, searching for my next Arundhati feast, until I came upon the last item in the popup visual menu at the bottom. A documentary called We: The Documentary Of The Human Race Today. The documentary begins with a screen shot of planet earth as seen from space, drifting across from lower right to upper left, while printed words offset from the image of earth, on a background of the blackness of space, tells you that this documentary is not about Arundhati Roy; it’s about her words.

Watch it. Listen to it. If you want to.

There was a sequence of archival film footage of Winston Churchill with Arundhati's voiceover, narrating, a direct quote from the guy I’ve previously called the greatest Metis warrior ever, because of his Cree nokum….he was talking about the British Empire’s actions in creating the Palestine Mandate, awarding a homelands to the Zionists, defending the attack on Palestinians simultaneously to defending the attack on Turtle Island’s indigenous Peoples, and various attacks staged by the British Empire. My first reaction to hearing her read Winston Churchill's words was to question whether he really did have Cree, or at least Turtle Island indigenous ancestry, as if that would, by default, make him an honorable person.

By looking around me right here at Saddle Lake, I should know better than to hang on to such romantic notions, even though Limerence Day does approach. Just say no to limerence.

Paper or plastic? Either way, you have a great day, now!

Weypimus had been staring at a blank page for a long time. The puzzle pieces floated around in his imaginary space; one part seemed to float past more often that any of the others. He finally reached out to the keyboard and typed: G-E-N-O-C-I-D-E.

Hummm….gene…killing off a specific gene type. Wasn’t that based on the racist notion that humans were divided up into various races, genetically defined? And how did the notion of killing off a gene type fit with The Holocaust? Isn’t Judaism a religion to which anyone can belong? Aren’t the Sephardic Jews in the Palestine part of the same broad gene pool as the Palestinians in the Palestine? Aren’t all humans everywhere part of the same broad gene pool?

If the theory of race to which Weypimus subscribed was correct, namely that the ideology of race was invented to justify a global armed intervention in human affairs staged by western civilization, quaintly called colonization, then he felt that a new word was called for. Using the term genocide to name a systematic mass murder campaign fit safely into the construct of racism.

Here on Turtle Island the mass murder campaign was conducted with about as much attention as a pest exterminator would apply to his task of making someone’s home environment ant-free, or termite-free, or magpie-free. If privileged members of western civilization started out with the notion that they rightfully owned the entire planet, and needed only consult, negotiate or battle with one another over the privileges that flowed from that claim of ownership, then the mass murder campaign conducted on Turtle Island would be like a pest exterminator’s job.

As the poet Walt Whitman said about the colonial pioneers:

“Felling trees and Indians”

Clearing the land so that it could be made profitable. Bulldozers’ work. If Rachel Corrie could talk she would confirm that. Or is she talking? Another voice from the coffin? That IDF armoured bulldozer operator was just another pest exterminator doing his job. Funny how ideas don’t die when the physical brain that produced them is crushed under the tracks of a bulldozer. Fricken things are bullet proof.

The notion of race was a powerful ideology; north american school texts called the armed intervention, mass murder campaign and foreign occupation of Turtle Island by the name colonization. This way of naming it talked about the process from the perspective of western civilization. It is what the real people were doing, making a replica of themselves in a new part of the world. The same influence of the ideology of race was seen in the left progressive attention being given to the IDF act of murdering Rachel Corrie; Weypimus knew her name but he don’t know the name of any of the uncounted mulititude of Palestinian people killed by the IDF.

Weypimus didn’t associate the IDF with Jews any more than he associated the AFN with Indigenous Peoples trapped inside of the modern Canadian state. In his opinion, the IDF and the AFN were both products bought and paid for by global ruling elites, each playing their own little part in the global struggle for geopolitical control of land and resources. Global planners constantly monitored human behaviour and set policy; the IDF and the AFN were each pursuing a strategy course in keeping with global planners’ perceived needs in each localized situation.

Another puzzle part floated past Weypimus’ mind’s eye: $5 billion. What a coincidence that the total payout in the Residential Schools Common Experience Settlement was exactly the same amount as the investment agreed upon in the Kelowna Accords, now scuttled. The Liberals, being good liberals, were going to return a fractionally tiny amount of the total plunder stolen from Indigenous lands and resources in what would be seen as a humanitarian gesture, helping the backwards Indian up into the modern world, with investments in on-reserve infrastructure, especially water-quality, but also housing, and with education, the liberal euphemism for indoctrination, and health, the liberal euphemism for the protection racket that has sprung up around human attempts at well-being.

The Kelowna Accords just spelled more assimilation, but the ideological problem for Harper’s Conservatives was that it attached some importance to the notion of public institutions; the New Conservatives should really be called the Neo-liberal party because their true faith lies with Milton Friedman’s Chicago School Of Economics theory, an extension of the economic theory pushed forward by Fredrick Hayek and grabbed onto with a vengeance by The Iron Lady. Hayekian economic theory suggests that if a society guts all of its social institutions, with the exception of national police forces and international military forces, subsidizes the wealthiest sectors of its society with transfers of wealth from the poorer to the richer classes, and places a public focus on privatization, deregulation and finacialization, then modernity with its version of liberal democracy will flourish.

In keeping with neo-liberal theory, the Conservative Party’s solution was to shift the $5 billion investment away from public institutions and into individual hands, rationalizing it as a debt owed by Canadian society for harms done to individual indigenous people while those people were in the care of Canadian Indian Residential Schools. Weypimus knew that the $5 billion would flash right through the Rez Zone because there were no social institutions capable of re-circulating it; those economic social institutions had been destroyed as part of western civilization’s initial assault on Turtle Island. Car dealers, drug dealers and casino operators would have a windfall; no new infrastructure would be built inside the Rez Zone, which would also be in keeping with the long term planning goal of privatizing the Rez Zone. The worse the conditions of life were inside the Rez Zone, the greater the likelihood that indigenous folks on-reserve would eventually accept what current surveys indicate reserve populations overwhelmingly reject; the transition of reserve lands to individually-held fee simple title, a registered interest in the Crown’s underlying title, as is already the practice throughout the rest of Canada.

Nowhere on the public horizon could Weypimus see a discussion questioning whatever happened to Indigenous People’s original property systems. Like viable economic forms, systems of property allocation and resource sharing were destroyed in the opening salvos of western civilization’s assault on Turtle Island. The ideology of race covered over the reality that Turtle Island’s Indigenous Peoples were, like their European brothers and sisters, real people too, with valid, albeit different, social institutions.

At the last sweatlodge ceremony a discussion had spontaneously arisen during the door opening breaks between rounds, about what to do about the local situation at the Saddle Lake reserve. Weypimus had listened to the comments given voice in the humble place his ch’wam had taken to calling the bunker, inside of the security of the 24 willow ribs holding up the tarpaulin covers. Yes, modernity weighed heavy upon them all, but down at the bottom was the Rock Grandmotherfather; she/he could bear the weight of miles of rock pile up on top of them. She/he could bear the fire Weypimus and his ch’wam had built around them, she/he could sit calmly in the middle of their little human circle, radiating the spiritual energy carried in from the fire.

Western civilization’s attempts to extinguish forever the spiritual core of indigenous identity, whether such attempts were pre-mediated or done without conscious thought, had not yet reached their logical conclusion. Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island were still engaging in the ceremonial relationship with Mother Earth and the universe she was serenely suspended in. What to do?   

Without going into details, suffice to say that I experienced a profound de-legitimizing as a commentator on Canada’s so-called “Indian Problem”, in late March of 2007. Since then, everything published on this blog, including blog entries “de-published”, or self-censored, plus the emergence of a new focus, perhaps seen by some as an out-of-focus view, like the entries on eros and limerence, has been in reaction to my own personal sense of de-legitimization.

Does Canada have an “Indian Problem”? Does Mother Earth have a “western civilization problem”? Do human beings, regardless of their notional status, as created and applied by western civilization, for instance in the grand euro-centric themes of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and hierarchical authority (social power) have the necessary legitimacy to comment on local, regional and global conditions?

Jokes about stragedies to attain full employment in the Rez Zone de-construction industry aside, what space exists for practical comment? When the very existence of the future of the written word is being publicly debated by left commentators, for instance Regis Debray (see “Socialism and Print”) in alternative publications like New Left Review, and Lydia Sargent, from her position on the editorial board of Zmag, (see “Media Revolution”, ZNet), while the euphemistically named “smart money” dives out of print media and into internet transmitted video media, does it make sense to add a few more words to the heap of dead and meaningless words already out there?

Okay, I confess: I have serious and possibly life-threatening addiction to writing in English, to which this blog archive is vivid testimony. Star Woman questioned my bio on a Residential School article published by Parkland Institute’s paper, where I suggested that I write in English to defend my Cree-ness. In her mind such a position seemed oxymoronic. If, as my Parkland article attempted to illustrate, the Residential Schools were part of a broader genocidal campaign waged by the Canadian State acting in concert with powerful vested interests representing the full spectrum of western civilization’s active players, for instance that particularly malevolent social creature, Christianity, but also normal business interests, and across the board white middle class interests too, then how could seeking publication of English language articles in Canadian circulation, no matter how alternative such publication may deem themselves, defend the core of my Cree-ness?

We’ve been discussing the idea that genocide starts with the destruction of the social structures that define a people’s identity, language being one of the primary such social structures, followed on by the forced imposition of new social structures that define the identity of the genocidists, again with language playing a crucial role. That was my point in the Residential School article: those schools were not schools in the sense of what western civilization poses the notion of schools to be. The Residential Schools were sites of the destruction of the characteristics of various disparate indigenous Peoples, and the forced imposition of the characteristics of western civilization upon the survivors of such schools, incidentally, and their former lands and resources explicitly, the real purpose of this particular genocide.  

My addiction…..I draw some comfort from the words of Arundhati Roy, who, during an interview, talked about her attraction to writing in English though she is fluent in her mother-tongue, Malayalam….is it a bizarre twist arising out of the violence of the colonial situation that periodically an adult emerges out of the trapped, slated for extinction population who grasps the killer language as a lifeline, and begins fashioning a hangman’s noose with an eye open to opportunities for creatively tossing it round the captor’s neck?

I’ll hasten to point out that this is a metaphorical use of language, in case it frightens some unsuspecting Canadian (or Indian…the real Indians….India, ya know….Arundhati Roy, and all of those blighters she frightens over there). However, it may be that metaphor, like irony, is wasted upon the mass-produced mind chugging methodically out of the assembly line schools that are foundational to the continued success of the social model known as western civilization. 

Weypimus was whistling lustily in the shower, the toxic Saddle Lake water washing down the dust and sweat of another Eros Day, come and gone. Always future oriented, he was already contemplating February 14^th….Valentine’s Day, the good whitish folk called it, but he thought of it by its true name, Limerence Day.

Ahhh, limerence; now there was a mental illness to die for. Unrequited love? Nothing could be sweeter.

Stepping out of the grungy shower, he reached for the ratty old towel and began wiping down his wizened bent frame. Perhaps he should start a Limerence Day card business, sappy looking cards with “Will you be my limerent object?” in bold print. There could be training cards for the pre-pubescent crowd, with “I limerence you” splashed across the front. Had to have a sexy edge, too, though no promises that seemed likely to be fulfilled, like lingerie and makeup for 8 year old girls.

Exactly how Eros Day and Limerence Day fit together in the good whitish folks’ grand scheme of things wasn’t clear to old Weypimus, but, being in the de-construction business, it wasn’t really his concern. All he needed to know was that social control was the goal, more was always better, a permanent global state of total control was the utopian vision, sustainable of course, eco-friendly, or it couldn’t be permanent.

Eros and limerence….could that be a marriage made in the whitish folks’ heaven? Eros was dangerous, from the perspective of maintaining effective social control. The Catholic Church had made a good try; old Weypimus had to compliment those Vaticanian  ideologues on their social control model. However, you could plainly see just how dangerous Eros was by counting up the number of times priests were moved from parish to parish.

But limerence? How do I limerence thee? Let me count the ways. I limerence thee to the depths and breadths and heights my soul can reach when feeling out of sight….

It was like a jig saw puzzle. Weypimus was holding Eros and Limerence suspended in an imaginary space, slowly turning each piece through an act of sheer will while trying to push them together. Limerence had the double bump with a bum crack part, an image seen widely on Valentine’s Day cards, called a Heart by those comical whitish folk, always joking ya know, and Eros had the funny little sticky out bit….did the two fit together right there?

Shiiiite! The clock! Weypimus had lost track of the time. If he didn’t hurry he would be late down at the de-construction site. On time and on budget, that was his promise. 

The genocide was giving Weypimus an upset stomach. He called the Doctor, and she prescribed medication, two pills, one for the funny bone and one for the…well…bone bone. Libido and laughter to ease the day-to-day pains of genocide. And what a pair of bones they were, if you could really count an inexplicable thinning of protective cartilage and musculature over a nerve signal transmission line, and an engorgement blood sac system with a vascular one-way valve triggered by humanity’s unique capacity for creating polymorphous perverse erotic fetishes, as bones.

Weypimus swiveled his telescope to look into the night sky; Eros Day, nominally slated for January 22^nd, was fast approaching, and he wanted to try to catch a glimpse of the small phallic-shaped asteroid, Eros 433 (or was it Eros 488? Or was it an urban legend, like the story about the guy who strapped a jet rocket engine to the back of his car and eliminated himself from the human gene pool, a legend which gave the Darwin Awards their big lift off?) as it orbited nearest to his dear Mother Earth.  Weypimus was puzzled over why astronomers called an 11 km long phallus small. Did they know how to party, or what was really going on?

Perhaps it had something to do with Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity, which Weypimus vaguely understood to be something about the relationship between the gravity of certain situations, and a tendency for time to take on stretchy characteristics, like the latex outfit he has just received in yesterday’s snail-mail. Watching a clock mechanistically ticking off the seconds you would never guess that, as soon as the old one way valve system in your blood sac engorgement system flapped shut, time would begin marching to a different drummer.

Was the Doctor’s prescription going to work?  Weypimus had serious reservations about trying to drive while mixing laughter and libido; the only thing that stood out in his memories of libidinous moments was that they weren’t funny. Not at the time, anyway. In fact, it seemed crucial to the whole polymorphous preserve boom shack-a-lacka process for the libido-inbiber to maintain a certain level of gravity, in order for the old valve to start working. No wonder his ancestors had talked about The Great Mystery; you had to get down when searching for an uplifting experience.

Or was it scientific evidence in support of the parallel universe theory? Libido-inundated moments, elastic and gravity-laden, existed in one universe, while simultaneously in a parallel universe we were watching ourselves through the membrane physicists talked about in String Theory, laughing uncontrollably. Weypimus had a problem with String Theory; it always inadvertently came up as G-String Theory in his dyslexiconography. In his mind’s eye, he could plainly see two buttocks separated by a string, sort of an entry-level student of string theory diagramatic explanation for the parallel universe idea. Book One in the “Astro-Physics For Dummies” series.

In the deafening silence expanding from the singular point of the release of his self-published “Voice From The Coffin”, he had been contemplating writing a second book. It might be “The Oxymoronic Man’s Guide To Muff-Diving” (large target audience there, could be a block-buster), or perhaps a less-accessible but philosophically deeper tome describing a future world where gender war had finally burst out into open combat. It wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine a global conspiracy where the Nazi-cum-CIA’s MK-Ultra program was genetically re-combined with the secret development of an AIDS-like virus, gene-targeting, designed to target women’s XX chromosomes, and lethal within minutes of exposure, meant as a final solution for the problem of uppity women, now armed and dangerous. In true secret police style, the law of unintended consequences causes a blowback of major proportions, where the virus mutates upon hitting the highly radioactive atmosphere caused by the use of depleted uranium ammunition, and attaches instead to the XY chromosome. Within 24 hours Mother Earth’s human population has dropped by 49%: all of the males on the planet. Oh yes….libido. Weypimus knew that in order for a book to be a best-seller, it had to have lots of sexual references, so what were the surviving human females going to do about the sexual reproduction of their species?

Weypimus felt a little bit like the medical researchers who worked on developing what oxymoronic men called breast enhancement strategies, sitting around in the laboratory pondering the complexities of making large fake breasts. How would he resolve the plotline problem posed by the sudden complete disappearance of human males in light of the necessity of the one essential contribution men had been making to human society up to that point in the story? Libido is about creation, rooted in the creative moment, that heavy but elastic ecstatic eternal moment of creation, essential to good health, an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away, unless you yourself are a doctor, in which case…physician, heal thyself!

Weypimus considered what the global female response would be to the sudden absolute and complete disappearance of human males. Yes, all of the hopelessly co-dependent women, and most of the capitalist owning class women, and many of the female to male limerent women would immediately commit suicide. Global owning class planners were already contemplating massive human population collapse as the next solution to the never-ending list of crises self-created by global capitalism. So this piece of the storyline wasn’t far-fetched either; the over-population problem would be instantly resolved. The planetary lockdown structure of global capitalism, driven by perpetual war production and stupidly destructive resource extraction, would just cease to exist in the complete absence of testosterone-laden warrior/extractors. There were enough engineers, managers, and technicians amongst the already existing female population to keep necessary systems running, especially with all energy suddenly diverted away from war production towards group survival, coupled with a smaller human population to feed, clothe and shelter.

But would this be the last generation of humans? Weypimus’ deviant mind made a lateral shift…the law of unintended consequences was a powerful thing. On any given day, there are a lot of pregnant women on Mother Earth. On the day that men died out, there would be many babies still to come, for up to nine months. What if that back-blowing radiation mutated virus added a third X to a certain percentage of those formally XX chromosome babies? This wasn’t too far-fetched, either; XXX chromosome women already existed on Mother Earth, though rare. What if the ovaries of these XXX women were hormonally functional but sterile? What if the Skene’s glands, currently responsible for female ejaculation, morphed into a sperm production site, manufacturing a low level of both sperm and testosterone, along with the high levels of glucose and fructose they now produce? What if, under the influence of mild testosterone levels, these triple X women’s clitori, homologous to the male penis, increased significantly in size, while also becoming the site for the release openings from the Skene’s glands?

Weypimus felt a definite prurient interest in the speculation that, from the ashes of Man’s burnout, a Phoenix would arise. A new Second Sex, taller, stronger, faster, smarter than the old Man, but without the violent competitiveness, and with a strong cooperative sense of mutual nurturing. Oxytocin to the fore!

Without having to slavishly mass-produce and/or consume at the command of the owning class, folks would have a lot of free time on their hands. And other physical spots, too. Heavy, elastic time. In a few generations, as surviving humanity gradually shed a patriarchal racist imperialist capitalist history, such a thing as the concept of sexual orientation would disappear. Under general conditions of polymorphous perversity, and with no oppressor/oppressed world system in effect, active libido would be acknowledged as a key ingredient for good health, along with clean simple food to eat, clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and a sustainable safe and secure energized shelter system….all washed down with plenty of laughs.

A furrow wrinkled on Weypimus’ brow; he wanted to go there, now, but he had nasty XY chromosomes. Was a sequel in the offing? 

While we wait for Grandfather Turtle to respond, I’ll make a summary report on last summers’ big adventure: the construction of a straw bale house. I’ll start by examining the phenomenon of local interest in the straw bale portion of the construction, best exemplified by the way even I refer to the construction system as ‘straw bale’, when the actual straw bale portion of the total construction process is small in comparison to the whole house/building site/infrastructure development. Somehow, the use of square-baled straw as a building material really stimulates people’s imaginations…why?

I don’t have an answer for that, but in the nine years I have been living in a straw bale home, and having visited several other straw bale homes in the region, I can say that I am personally spoiled for living in a conventional stick frame house, and so is every one of the people whom I met living in straw bale homes. Why? The impression I got from listening to straw house dwellers, confirmed from within my own lived experience, is a seemingly illogical attitude….typically expressed as an intuitive/emotional reaction, vaguely defined, but strongly felt. Having lived inside of a straw bale house, we irrationally desire to live in no other type of structure.

The entire construction process lasted about one year, beginning with a three month period of floor plan discussions, tentative structural drawings, ball-park cost estimates, visioning the space in order to trouble shoot potential problems in advance of the actual physical construction phase, leading to finalizing the site plan, choosing a building materials supplier, and setting financial arrangements fully in order. The first house plan meeting was in early winter, 2006-7; five months later, the future roadbed/power line right-of-way and building site were brushed out and the power line in to the building site was constructed.

Physical construction on the building footings began in early May, Now, it is almost complete, with the exception of a few details awaiting either back-ordered building materials, or, as with the top coat of exterior stucco, awaiting spring, 2008. Leaving the top coat until next spring will give the heavy scratch coat of stucco, and the building structure, itself, almost a year to crack and shift and do whatever it’s going to do as things settle into place, before putting on the finish coat. About 8 months passed by as the physical construction proceeded; in early July we stacked the straw bales into position, and for about a two-week period, the straw could be seen. Numbers of visitors to the building site skyrocketed during that period, then slowed down again after we labouriously applied 60 mixer batches of cement/lime/sand stucco mud to all straw surfaces, exterior and interior…up to one and a half inches thick, in some places.

Although we did not have a human being with an engineering degree involved in the building project, my unprofessional mind’s eye sees a very powerful structural frame, rising from the Scandinavian-style frost-protected shallow footing through a cast in place slab on compacted fill up into a 2x8 stud frame, 39 ½ inches on center (average bale length = 38 inches plus ¾ of an inch on each side of the stud bay to account for the thickness of the 2x8) and on into site-built cathedral ceiling style roof trusses supported at the building’s center line by a built in place 3 ply 2x12 ridge beam, resting, at the outboard ends, on the peak of the gable end walls, and, at center, on the top of a single 10 inch diameter lathe-turned pine post 16 feet tall. The built-up ridge beam carries on past the south gambrel wall (two sections cranked out by 15 degrees to form a pointy pokey sticky-outy part at the center of the south wall…like a hip, called ‘gambrel’ in architecture) to a three post (more of the 10 inch lathe-turned pine poles) deck roof support system with a glue-laminated arching continuous brace joining the tops of the three deck roof support posts, built in place on a temporary bending form, using lots of weldbond white glue and 3 inch decking screws to suck the bent 16 foot sections of 2x4 together while the glue dried. The end result was a 42 foot long monolithic brace beam that doubled as the outline of the south gable end cover. Design-wise, the gable end cover looks like a downward fascia extension, thickening the fascia in an arcing form, from 8 inches thin at the east and west edges to 4 feet thick at center, positioned to block out cooling season sunlight while allowing in heating season sunlight. 

A double structural skin of cement-based stucco completely circles the building walls, in and out, from an engineering viewpoint an extremely strong structure. The cement stucco is imbedded in standard 2x2 stucco netting nailed to the interior surface where the faces of the 2x8 stud frame shows, and tied with pieces of tie-wire stapled to the inside surfaces of the 2x8 frame and laid in place, course by course as the straw bales were stacked into position, reaching out to the exterior surface. After stacking the bales, the exterior 2x2 stucco netting was tied in place with the tie wire. Did I say ‘stacked’? No, driven into position in the stud bays with a fat-headed home-made sledge hammer, made from a 12 inch long piece of 8x8 timber fixed to a sledge hammer handle, and two ‘shoe-horn’ concept ‘bale horns’ slippery surfaced 1/8 thick particle hardboard, to guide the ends of each bale as it was compressed into the slightly too small space that a 38 inch stud bay creates. Lots of knee jabs and elbow grease, supported by considerable grunting and silent cursing (we didn’t swear out loud on the construction site; not a conscious decision, more an indication of our advanced state of moral development…chaaa!) 

The center ridge beam support pine pole eventually became the center post for a spiral staircase that winds up to an open loft above the sleeping/bathroom areas of the house. The occupant’s floor plan ideas are the ultimate in the concept of open floor plan….except for the bathroom and mechanical room, there are no interior walls. Two sleeping areas are separated by a bathroom with a flow-through design, pocket-doored at either end, and by the loft floor, overhead. The remainder of the floor space is open up to the ceiling, which rises from 9 feet at the eave walls to 16 feet at the center. The floor plan is also open from the kitchen/dining/sitting area into the two sleeping areas, although, as a concession to the possibility of some occasional need for greater privacy, a barn door style track and hangers hold a sliding wall privacy screen which pulls out from in between the spiral staircase and the south-facing section of bathroom wall. Pulled to the west, it completely closes off the smaller of the two sleeping areas, or, if pulled east, it provides dressing room privacy for the larger of the two sleeping areas.

The building footprint is a modest 1188 square feet, with about 1042 square feet inside of the thick walls. The home-owners had, as major design criteria, voluntary simplicity and reduced space and material use, along with a very creative Cree twist to the notion of an open floor plan; a small horizontal space with comparatively large vertical volume, laid out so that there were interwoven private, semi-private, and public spaces, defined by positioning and architectural elements rather than solid walls.

The interior is finished with a gypsum-based hand-applied plaster finish over the cement-based stucco scratch coat. The same gypsum plaster finish is applied to the interior partition walls, over expanded metal lathe nailed to 3/8 plywood on 2x4 stud frames. The 1188 square foot footprint has extensive overhead surfaces, more than 4000 square feet in total. All ceilings and soffits are covered with 1x6 V-joint pine tongue and groove; underloft ceiling, main ceiling, and extensive soffit on the long roof overhangs east, west and south. The ceiling was insulated with blown-in-place cellulose insulation, after the ceiling covering was nailed up. Access ports were left open all along the eave soffit area, providing an opening into each of the roof truss bays from outside. The site-built trusses were covered with a 3/8 ply skin on one side; with roof metal and ceiling pine in place, the trusses forming closed bays, which were also then closed at the ridge beam location. We searched for an insulation contractor who understood what happens inside of a cathedral ceiling cavity, and found a good one. He and his wife/business partner enthusiastically joined in both the theory discussion around air-borne water vapour, pressure differentials, the role of venting as per building code prescriptions, the unique properties of cellulose in this situation, and in the action of carefully placing a high density pack, no vented space, throughout the entire roof insulation zone, contrary to existing code regulations.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention…we’re builder outlaws, defying code regulations where our good judgment tells us better. A small loophole in the on-reserve building scene exists: because nobody in their right minds would invest up to $200,000 of their own hard cold cash to build a house that they don’t legally own, and let me point out that this category is further split into the sub-group of those ‘not firing right’ on-reserve individuals who can actually raise such amounts of money, without benefit of conventional mortgage, a very small group indeed, comprised, so far as I know, of my cousin, for whom I’m building this house, and myself, the feds have no regulations in place to cover such a possibility.

There just simply is no building inspector, no code, no red tape process. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want, cry if I want, cry if I want, you would cry too if it happened to you.  

Where were we? The roof…the south roof overhang continues out for 12 feet at the point of the south gambrel walls, 16 feet at the east and west corners of the south gambrel wall, and covers a 525 square foot south facing deck. The deck, part of the front entry pathway, is connected to the parking area by a gently rising cast in place concrete ramp. The finished landscaping around the building creates 360 degree site drainage without using steps or stairs to access the front entry door; fully and easily wheelchair accessible. Architectural signals make a clear and unambiguous indication of where the front entry is, and how to reach that entry from any of the possible approach directions.

The long south roof overhang provides cooling season shade to the large volume of south-facing triple glazed, argon gas filled, low-e coated metal clad wood windows; mid-winter sunlight penetrates to the back interior walls, and, at 30 degrees below zero Celsius, if you hold your hand up to that light you can immediately feel the warmth of the sun. This type of window, when properly oriented, gains more heat during sunlight hours than it loses during hours of cold darkness. The remainder of the windows act as emergency egress, sources of daylighting for interior spaces, and additional fresh air vents should occupants feel the need, but are sized for the minimum needed for emergency egress.

Floor coverings are slate and cork; the slate covers the ‘wet’ zones, the cork all else. The bathroom floor is tiled with 12 x 12 slate, over top of a 110 volt electric heat mat that has been set into a cement-based topping compound on top of the insulated concrete subfloor, to supply comfort heat to the slate tiles (not meant as room heat, just a warm floor to step onto with wet bare feet, coming out of the tub/shower). A five foot wide band of 12 x 12 slate tile defines the kitchen work zone, running from the west wall to the two south sections of the south gambrel wall, acting as an entry landing as it passes the entry door, and traveling on to where it acts as a hearth for the building’s primary heat source, a wood burning appliance.

A long heating theory discussion during the three months of preliminary planning ended with the occupant’s decision to choose a click-lock floating cork floor as the primary floor covering. Several factors interplayed. For Cree spiritual reasons which I won’t go into here, the occupants wanted a wood fire in their home. They also wanted a radiant floor heat system. Cork is a naturally-insulating material; it can be laid over top of a radiant floor heat system, but the two work against each other. The occupants, supported by my own lived experience with combination wood heated and hydronic radiant floor heated systems, in a space with a floating wood floor covering, chose wood heat, only. My own experiences had shown that the two heat systems together where simply overwhelming, an observation confirmed by other straw bale home dwellers who put in double systems. In practice I found that I preferred the wood fire heat, again of course modified by my own Cree desire to have a fire in the home. I also discovered that a wood floor covering quickly picked up the radiant heat discharging from a wood burning appliance in an invisible 360 degree spherical pathway, and was as comfortable to a bare foot as a warm stone floor. A builder’s digression: I have to say that a heated stone floor has become my preferred floor…combining my Rock Grandfather with warmth gives what should be a very hard surface a feeling of softness…go figure….and, of course strength, not much figuring required there. Much as I like the idea of floating wood floors, they always feel fragile to me. Stone floors, properly installed, do not feel fragile, and, with heat under them, feel comfortable, too. And cool in summer. On a hot July day it’s as shocking to step into the coolness of a stone-floored straw bale building as it is to step into the warmth of a radiant floor heated straw building on a minus 40 degree Celsius day in January.

However, radiant floor heat and insulating cork flooring go against one another, and both are expensive to install, so we had to make a choice; the spiritual purpose of the fire in the home cast the deciding vote, so cork flooring and the most efficient wood burning appliance locally available were installed. The stove, a BlazeKing, made in Penticton, BC, gets 24 hour burns on dry poplar, with enough coals at 24 hours to rekindle without a match or newsprint. With the help of an industrial-style overhead fan mounted at the high point of the ceiling, set to run on low speed, the BlazeKing provides steady even heat through the entire building. With care and experience in operation, the occupants will be able to deal with the over-heating that can occur if the sun suddenly comes out and the south window wall kicks in as a heat source. The bathroom stays at 22 degrees Celsius with the pocket doors wide open. If both pocket doors are closed, and the floor comfort heat mat set for 28 degrees, the bathroom stays at 21 degrees Celsius; at 28 degrees Celsius the slate tiles are just warm to the touch.

In the event of an electrical power outage, the wood stove could keep the whole house comfortably warm, the house water system frost protected, and could even be used to cook food and melt snow for water. At the other end of the spectrum, the occupants could leave the home without a wood fire for an extended period of time during cold weather without fear of frost damage to the water system or other frost sensitive interior elements, provided that there was no electrical outage, because of the presence of heat-producing electrical appliances like refrigerators, a deep freeze, a hot water heater, heat collecting windows, and the electric heat mat in the bathroom, in combination with an R-60 ceiling, R-30 walls, and an R-20 apron at and below grade, extending out horizontally 4 feet from the building perimeter beneath the finished landscaping.

A passive non-mechanical whole house air pressure balancing/air exchanger system is built in to the south gambrel wall, entering just behind the wood burning appliance. It functions to control interior humidity, provide fresh oxygenated air for wood fire combustion, and for the human occupants of the house to breathe, while balancing the house air pressure relative to the air that is being exhausted from the building through the wood burning appliance chimney. It uses the concept found in mechanical room fresh air intake pots, but site-built with some attention to what the finished thing looks like on display at the spiritual center of home, by the fire. In action, the combination of the wood stove air exhaust and the passive air entry cleared the house air very quickly and effectively of the odours associated with so-called low- odour interior finishing materials like low VOC clear wood sealers and latex paints. The wood stove burns an arm load of fire wood per day; in my 30 some years of wood stove heating experience I would rate it as very efficient, and user-friendly. With the exception of the capacity of the combined passive solar heat, background electric waste heat and wood heat to cause overheating, remedied by the Cree penchant for throwing open the door on minus 40 degree days, as anyone who has lived in a northern community knows full well, the whole house heating/air quality system seems to be quite elegant in both form and function. There is enough poplar tree growth immediately surrounding the building site to provide an eternity of bio-mass fuel, if selectively harvested…it could be harvested with a hand-powered cross-cut saw, properly sharpened and maintained, and warm the wood cutter twice, as folks who heat with wood that they harvest themselves like to say. Imagine that….getting the fresh air and exercise that humans actually need on a regular basis while preparing your winter heat fuel supply, in a sustainable way, from a sustainable source.

Yes, yes, where did the steel for the crosscut saw blade and handle come from? How was the wood stove and its chimney produced? The question of how to design an actually sustainable industrial base. Would we smelt iron with bio-mass fuel? Produce enough electrical or other types of energy required to power the industrial base required to mine iron ore or recycle steel, plus all of the steps needed to mass-produce swede saws and wood stoves…or just move to the subtropical regions of the planet, and forget about space heating? But there’s still food prep, and do we want hot water for washing and bathing? On tap?

The question of how to build a sustainable industrial base remained unanswered during the construction of a single straw bale building, but questions of how to reduce energy needs, simplify lifestyles, and extend use periods for whatever physical structure is created, while localizing building material sources, and the trades skills to pull it all together were given clear and definite answers. The results are not final results, just more information to ponder on, more experiments to observe and learn from…

It’s a step along the road towards my alternative vision for a future; part of the new story I am asking the Turtle Grandfather to gift to us pathetic humans before we off ourselves enmasse. Which might still be the preferred future, from Mother Earth’s point of view. How badly can we treat her before she rejects us outright?     

He Asked For A New Story

In the beginning…..there was the before the beginning time. Way back when? Weypimus was born out of my insides, and, during more of that before the beginning time, Apisicikakakis was born out of Weypimus. Some of that before the beginning time included a late night phone call from my dear sister, Dr. Betty. She phoned me one cold February night in 2002 to tell me that she had found something on the Internet, and that I should look at it. Something called “Hidden From History”. Reading Kevin Annett’s account of his experiences with the United Church of Canada, and the Canadian State, as he began to study the historical relationship between Indigenous Peoples resident on lands that eventually became part of the modern Canadian State, and the Europeans who built that Canadian State, caused what Steven Covey calls a paradigm shift to occur….Weypimus was born out of the deaths and destruction brought by Europeans to a New World, new to them, at least, and one which they immediately claimed as theirs.

The above-mentioned paradigm shift brought with it a new personal interest in studying our situation, our ‘little matter of genocide’, searching for a global perspective, and, of course, in true ‘who-dun-it’ style, the hand that holds the smoking gun. As my self-directed home study course progressed, I began to question the cause of death category, “accidental”, in Health Canada’s accounting of deaths in Canada’s Rez Zone. Each fresh suicide, each new drug and alcohol induced car crash death, each new lateral violence homicide has become a sharp jab in my heartplace…now I am complicit in the ongoing endless wave of death and destruction, because, as I study, I’ve acquired a fairly accurate sense of who is holding that smoking gun, while calmly squeezing off round after round. As nechwamps Vincent said to a national group of indigenous educators: “How do you wink at an Indian? You close one eye as you peer down your rifle scope.”

Statements like this, while true on both a present real time basis, and as a potent metaphor for the ongoing relationship, if that is what we actually have going on between so-called Whites and so-called Indians, cause a severe reaction in the minds of most hearers. This reaction closes the door to further communication, and enforces the rule of law that says that the strong will do as they can, while the weak will suffer as they must.

No single piece of writing posted here on this blog has elicited as much response as the re-posting of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ “Hating The Rich”. Judging by the public response, speaking in public about the rule of the strong over the weak law is apparently a violation of that law. By making public statements that cause dialogue to stop, and that turns potential allies away, makes me complicit because my actions re-enforce the 5 century deep denial universal in the human society that calls itself western civilization. That society, by it’s very structure, automatically produces a ruling elite who commit global atrocities while believing they are The Good Guys. As Margaret Thatcher declared with the fall of official communism, in the late 1980s, there is no alternative to neo-liberal capitalism; within the construct of western civilization, she is absolutely correct.

That a tiny fractional percentage point number of human beings, globally, hold the smoking gun, and, as a consequence of their actions, cause death and destruction on a global scale, escalating to the place where we now have an open public outcry about the endtimes we humans are creating for ourselves as a species, while obviously massacring the entire planet’s eco-system, is unmentionable on the daily news, itself a component of the smoking gun.

What up, dawg? Where do we trudge from here?

As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ earlier article, “What The Left Is Missing Out On”, following the slow but inexorable rise of indigenous insurgency in occupied Turtle Island points out, a response to the arrival of western civilization is bubbling up from the groundsprings of indigenous grassroots activism. Returning to an observation made by my younger “older brother/mentor”, Vincent, using what I will call metaphor, as a shorthand explanation for folks who’ve never had direct contact with the Cree spirit world, “when you pray to the turtle for help, it will be slow in coming, but when it arrives, it will last for a long, long time.”

So. Here’s my prayer to the Turtle spirit, Turtle Island’s lead spirit.

Yes. Grandfather sweetgrass, clean me and my words with your smoke, so they can drift, like you, into the places where they are needed. Clean my thoughts, clean my actions, make me ready for meeting the Mystery, speaking to the Mystery.

And you, Mystery, I show you these thoughts, these feelings….I hold them up for you to see, you who are not a you as I am a me…you who is the thread of love running through the universe, the creative moment, the expression of energy and matter, the pattern in the chaos, ever-changing, never repeating, building, re-building, RNA, DNA, etc, etc…

In a humble way I show you these thoughts, and ask for help in reaching for a truer understanding, a deeper level of humbleness, at least a little bit more than I have today, ayiwakes…. and am grateful for the humbling experiences that your chaotic patternless patterns have steered my way so far.

And you, Red Thunder, comfortable in your southern nest, and your partner, too, The Eagle…yes, I show you my thoughts, and ask in my pitifully inadequate version of humbleness for guidance, for direction, in making this prayer to The Turtle. You, Red Thunder, who has gifted Mother Earth with water, a most precious gift, the gift that causes there to be rain and streams and rivers and lakes and oceans, all places well-loved by The Turtle….yes, I ask, you, too, for help, here, with my Internet-transmitted thought-prayer to the Turtle. And today, I ask your partner, The Eagle, to keep an eye out for the Turtle, from her high place, and to forgo, for just a short time, any thoughts of turtle soup, and to look ahead, alongside Grandmother Raven, to the future, both near and far, folding wings protectively around The Turtle, and all you other Birds, too, together…we are all in this together…I beseech you to make a fluffy nest of your down for my words to fall upon, and to help float them up and out to wherever they need to go.

And you, my dearest friend and companion, The Bear, fellow traveler, lodge-builder, earth healer, sweetgrass picker, yes, you too, hear my words, now….in your western mountain den, deep in slumber, pull from your dreams a message of hope for the hopeless, a dream for the sleeper’s tomorrow, when she awakes….heal the woundedness in my word-forming place, the wicked rips and tears in the fabric of my heartmind, the nasty gouges suffered from rubbing up against the modern world….in a humble way I ask for help with healing these injuries, the injuries of oppression, so that my heartmind can become clear enough to say something meaningful to The Turtle, an urgent call for help….at least make it a local call, because I’m short on spiritual jing, and this call has to go through.

Yes, and you, too, Grandmotherfather North Wind, with your waving long white hair, blowing your cleansing breathe across Turtle Island’s lands, and through her skies….the breathe that is the last thing to leave, when we leave our earth bodies…you, too, I ask in a humble way for good advice, not the free kind, not the cheap kind, but good advice, and I offer to pay in hard cold labour, labouring out in your frigid chill, paying my dues to you and your wisdom, the source of wisdom, raw experience, the ultimate teacher…I do not ask for kindness, I ask for the sheer force that we fragile humans call gale-force….sweep away the illusions from in front of my eyes, the self-deception, the layers of denial, and make me ready to meet The Turtle, face to face, being to being…

Yes, and you, too, Grandfather Sun, Grandmother Moon, lighting the eastern sky, as Mother Earth rolls over from her nap, bringing the light of meaning into my dark world…I ask in a humble way for your help with these words, today….fill them from their insides with a luminescent honesty that chases out that illusive ghost, Truth, leaving behind the only real form of truth we can have in this world, a stretching out of our cognitive abilities, expanding our consciousness, especially, in this urgent moment, expanding our fragile human consciousness from me to we, and onwards, from a human we to a universal we…help me ask this of The Turtle.

Yes, and you, too, my beautiful Mother Earth, from inside of whose body I have come forth, and who gives me a place to stand, shelter, food, and a stunning beauty to behold, to be entranced by, enamoured of, bonded to with a sweet sweet bond of love…I ask in a humble way for help, here, now, with my prayer to The Turtle. Hold me gently to your breast, let me hear the rhythm of your heartbeat, feel the solidness of your being, nurture the gathering pool of love that must be in my heartmind for my prayer to reach out to where it needs to go…

Yes, and you, too, kind humble strong wise old person Rock, help me with my words, you who promised the Mystery that you would help us fragile humans in our pathetic attempts at communication. Block with your solid strength those thoughts and feelings that don’t belong in this prayer, and carry forward all of those thoughts and feelings that must go forward, to all who need to hear them, especially The Turtle. Crystallize my resolve, compress my inner strength until it can bear the same weights you easily bear, under a mile of stone piled high into a mountaintop. Soften my jagged edges, make smooth my rough surfaces, as glaciers have smoothed your skin over eons, so that I can pass through here, today, without causing accidental injury, on my journey to meet The Turtle….

Yes, and you, too Grandfather Turtle, I come to you at last, though a bit slow….firstly I apologize for the long-windedness of the Crees, Cris, Cryers, Grass People, Four Part Person People, Nehiyawak, because it has taken me so long to get around to you. If you have time, then I need to speak with you, in a way some would call prayerful, though you know by looking in my heartmind, as I now hold it open to you, that I am not what my fellow human beings call a prayerful person, nor a religious or spiritual person. It is for this reason that I come to you in my best attempt at humbleness, as a not-atheist/not religious person, shaped by the human cultures of the original inhabitants of this great island we’ve named after you. I come to you today specifically to share with you what is in my heartmind, about my little matter of genocide. I ask for help in making a jump, a leap from here, inside of the prison of the endless pain of destruction, to a new place of understanding and being, into a new vision of reality, one with a future. You have survived through many of Mother Earth’s ages, from before the time of dinosaurs, and are still quietly here with us, today. We humans threaten our own future, as well as the future of Mother Earth; here on Turtle Island, we original Peoples have been subjected to incredible suffering and humiliation, for centuries, and our beautiful Mother Earth lands have been savaged, senselessly. I come to you for help with creating a new story, a new human story, a story so compelling in its simple honest clarity that humans everywhere turn to it as the story of their own future, and their children’s future, and their seventh generation descendant’s future. A global story, with infinite variations, and a unique space in it for every hearer, beyond the boundary of the binary, this or that, Left or Right, rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, gay or….gay or…well, Grandfather Turtle, you might know what I mean….oh, yes, or heterosexual…those nasty het creatures…..I didn’t mean you, Grandfather Turtle…are you het?….well, beyond the boundaries of the binary, zero or one, on or off….after all, physicists have been able to demonstrate that light is both a particle and a wave, simultaneously, two supposedly mutually exclusive states of being, while existing here, there and everywhere in general, and nowhere in particular.

That’s the story I am searching for, Grandfather Turtle, the story about how we get ourselves out of this one, this time. A story with some shelf life to it, something like you, Grandfather Turtle, perhaps going on for what may seem at times to be too much, ayiwakes, but going on, all the same, and with the capacity to keep on going on, a fit for Mother Earth’s natural cycles, as part of the global family of her many children.

Grandfather Turtle….are we too late? Can you help us?

With gratitude and a beaten and sore but not dead yet heartmind, I say these words to you…and return to Grandmotherfather Sweetgrass…as I lower my voice back down to the sounds of silence. 

Words were tumbling about like a slosh of sea shore surging…insurgent….urgent.

Without opening his eyes, the Magpie focused his mind’s eye upon the meaning of those sloshy words, and discovered that many voices were speaking, in many languages. Somehow, a sense of the meaning behind those multiple word sounds sparked clear images across his cerebral landscape, regardless of the language or the speaker. The sparking images gradually coalesced into a mosaic pattern, rippling, glittering.

Sound bites were drifting in from across thousands of years of utterance, from across a massive physical space that stretched from ice-capped fringe to ice-capped fringe on Mother Earth’s beautiful robe, a space that the Magpie knew as Turtle Island. A new story, a story of renewal, a new beginning for Mother Earth’s human children.

Those pesky humans; they were so irritating. Why did they have to make so much noise just when sleep was sweetest? The Magpie was trying to sleep, but it was too hot. In fact, it was extremely hot. Why was it so damn hot? The Magpie was alarmed, and tried standing up….his wing tip brushed against bear’s fur. A tiny pinhole of light stabbed through the black canopy, and he reached for it. Tumbled sweetgrass pushed aside, and the pinhole widened; he pressed his beak to the hole as cold fresh air poured in. Thrusting his feathery neck, he pushed up out of the hole in the tumbled sweetgrass; behind him he now recognized the Bear’s gentle snoring sound. Ahead of him was a deep snowdrift, and then cold, cold air.

Staggering out onto the snowdrift and turning slightly against the wind, he watched the hole he had just made, coming up out of the Bear’s winter home, drift shut with dry swirling wind-blown snow. He took two hops, leapt into the air, and fluttered off. He was hungry; no, he was starving. He was so hungry he could eat MacDonald’s garbage! He was convinced that toxic sludge really was good for him, cautioning himself that he would just have to be more careful in the future around garbage that might be a glittery Something.

The End  

“Okay, I’ll bite. If building a solid core of me-ness is the first level of training, and if moderating that me-ness with an attitude of humble kindness, turning me-ness into we-ness, is the second level of training, then what is the third level?”

The Magpie’s host tapped the side of her head:

“Opening the analytical mind’s eye: sharpening your capacity for critical thought.”

“How?”

“Humour.”

The Magpie’s host picked up a small round pebble from the ground, and tossed it into the air, then, without dropping it, quickly stooped and grabbed a second small pebble, gracefully tossing and catching it in a counter rhythm to the first.

“Here’s me-ness”, she said as the first went up, “and here’s we-ness”, as the second went up. In sudden fluid motion she stooped and grabbed a third pebble, adding it to the tossing game…a circle of small pebbles going up and down, from hand to air to hand….then concentrated her gaze upon the Magpie.

“As we train, each level of training is incorporated into the next level, without disappearing. It just adds more complexity, an adaptive response to the universe’s diversity.”

The Magpie was struggling to watch the accelerating circle of stones and listen with comprehension at the same time, while pierced by his host’s unwavering attention.

“We develop our capacity for critical thought by examining our environment and then inventing new and original ways of expressing our observations through a gentle form of self-teasing….humour that bounces back and forth between our solid core of me-ness, and our overcoat of humble we-ness.”

She suddenly dropped the third stone, as quickly raising one foot in the air to catch the stone on her toes, and stood evenly poised on the other.

“It creates a subtle vibration, and that vibration tickles…the faster the back and forth bounce, the greater the tickle-i-ness.” She was tossing the two pebbles still in hand directly back and forth, faster and faster.

By now the Magpie wasn’t so much struggling to maintain some semblance of coherent attention to the lesson, as to retain some coherent form of consciousness. With a blurring speed directly inverse-proportional to the rate of synaptic firing going on in the Magpie’s cognitive centers, she hopped onto a fourth pebble with her ground foot, gripped it between her toes, and managed to flip it up into the air so that it joined the two in her hands, while keeping the third stone calmly balanced on the toes of her other foot. Then, smiling brightly at the Magpie, she flipped up the third stone from its toe perch and began a hopping dance, alternating the stones between hands and feet.

“There is a fourth level of training….”

The Magpie lost aural contact with his host; the light quality was rapidly changing, too. In freeze-frame slow motion, a thought floated past the Magpie’s mind’s eye, in a cartoon bubble. He had returned to the place that he had been mysteriously sucked into, way back when, on that snow-dusted Saddle Lake roadside where he had touched beak to a mysterious glittery Something. As the magno-electric pulsation amplified, and the air turned into an opus magnum of deep space black punctuated by a twinkling star bright white, he was sure he could hear a singing voice, somewhere off in the distance….a snatch of his host’s voice drifted in, now singing, and in the starlight he could faintly see her hop/dancing, while juggling pebbles with her hands and feet, her song melding into and adding a new syncopation to the rhythms already in play.

A deep shudder wracked his frame as he hit the ground, backwards; then there was nothing.

Coming Next:  Multiple Times, Multiple Spaces      

“Shhhh…”

That’s got to be the most difficult thing for a Magpie to hear; an order to be quiet. His guide had her ear to a carved rock, and was listening intently.

Leaning away from the stone sculpture silently, she motioned for the Magpie to join her, and gestured for him to put his now human ear up against the rock, too. Hesitantly he leaned into the sculpted boulder, and gently pressed his new ear up to the mirror-polished surface of the rock.

Immediately he could hear a voice inside of the stone. Hadn’t he heard that voice somewhere before? Wasn’t that the voice of old Weypimus?

He leaned away and gestured to his guide to come with him away from the rock.

When they had reached a certain distance, she turned to him and asked “Yes?”

“Why do we have to be quiet over there?” he asked,

“It’s like an observation window where we can keep an eye on what’s going on back in the dimension you just came from. Whenever we listen in, we are quiet out of respect for those we listen to.”

“Do you mean that they can hear us over there?”

“Well, some can some times, but, no, that’s not the reason why. Listening with respect is part of our second level of training, a key action we learn to take as we grow up. In our first level, as newly-born physical beings just entering these realms, we are cherished by all of the mature beings around us, as they help build up the core of our being….it takes about 4 years. That’s our first level of training. Then we begin the task of becoming part of the mature circle of beings who helped us take physical form….by learning humble kindness. The key to achieving humble kindness is being able to listen with respect to any other being.”

These were two radically new concepts for the Magpie. Being cherished? Listening to any other being with respect? What a strange place this was. No wonder these beings or whatever they were had to run away from the march of progress….if you developed those traits in the Magpie’s world, you’d be dead by sunrise. But….being able to listen in on what the humans back home were saying? His recent transformation into human form, albeit in a parallel universe, spurred his interest….yeah, he could be like Cease from CSIS, listening in on everybody’s conversations. Was Cease listening with respect?

Well, the Magpie wasn’t about to, either…he hadn’t been through those training levels, himself, and it sounded kind of hokey. He just plain and simply wanted the vicarious thrill of peeping into folk’s private lives.

Hoping that his guide couldn’t read his private thoughts, he nodded towards the glistening carved rock and said, as nonchalantly as he could:

“I’m going to begin practicing listening with respect right now; I’d like to try your second level of training.”

Without waiting for her response, the Magpie hurried back to his window of opportunity, and carefully applied his listening ear to the glassy stone surface. That was Weypimus! The old man seemed to be muttering to himself, as if addressing an imaginary audience:

Sharing is one of the cornerstones of many indigenous worldview constructs, here on Turtle Island, a vast region stretching from the Inuit Peoples’ Arctic territories to the Yamana Peoples’ Tierra del Fuego territories. Adjusting the CIA space camera lens to focus in on the US Empire’s safe oil supply, located in the US Empire’s Alberta region, if you look very carefully you can see a number of pinko-zones on the map; Indian reservations in US Empire-speak.

If you’ve been following the development of the notion of the rule of law, you may have noticed a contradiction in legal theory, and we won’t go into the contradictions caused by US Empire rogue state behaviour. Like all other good robo-citizens of modern Canada, we’ll pretend that the US Empire doesn’t exist on Canadian soil, or inside of the Canadian psyche, and just look at the notion of the rule of law as touted by Canadian legal professionals inside of Canada.

Canada claims ownership of lands and resources inside of the imaginary lines drawn on maps….a nation state called Canada. Canada’s claim to such ownership is disputed by Indigenous Peoples resident at least a little bit longer that any Canadians: 8000 years longer? 12000 years longer? 15000 years longer? One hour longer would count for Canadian rule of law-yers, if it were a claim being staked by Encana….or Exxon Mobile.

Which brings us abruptly to the discrepancy. Why does the prior claim made by indigenous folks, and collectively Indigenous Peoples such individuals aggregate into, for instance Inuit and Yanama, not count in Canadian law? 500 years of development of an ideology of race goes a long ways towards explaining this slight discrepancy; perhaps Indigenous Peoples are not as fully human as the shareholders and upper management teams at Encana or Exxon Mobile.

However, a Canadian Supreme Court judge, well, except for a BC Supreme Court judge, won’t be saying something like that out loud. If we decide to reject a notion of human capacity based on a notion of race, would the discrepancy over title to land and resources with accompanying full jurisdiction disappear? I’ll be a risk-taker, here, and suggest a tentative “No”, for a specific reason. The rule of law that Canadian legal professionals theorize about is based in a very deep, perhaps foundational legal concept, articulated a while back by the some Greek guy named Thucydides:

“The strong do as they can, while the weak suffer as they must.” 

This explanation of the rule of law stands all test questions, but raises a side question.

How much can the weak suffer and still survive?

Sharing is a one of the cornerstones of many indigenous-to-Turtle Island worldview constructs, and is, along with other features such as humble kindness, honesty, and determination, the reason for a continuing presence of Inuit and Yanama. Plus thousands of other Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island, in spite of the rule of law applied by the strong who trace their traditions back to Ancient Greece.

Before we look further at an alternative reality constructed on the foundation of sharing, humble kindness, honesty, and determination, let’s look at the limits to power faced by the strong. As Thucydides correctly observed, “the strong do as they can”….it’s not “as they will”, it’s “as they can”. There are limits to what the strong can do, with a sword or a gun or a nuclear bomb.

The easiest limit to spot is that total babe, Mother Earth, and isn’t she a beauty? Well, some think so, even when she seems to be in a mood, like a hurricane force gale mood. Ten thousand nuclear bombs set off at once could sterilize her surface for a short while, but bacteria would be back at it right away, and perhaps this time they wouldn’t form into colonial structures that end up looking and acting like humans, a possible origin of so-called higher lifeforms on earth theory, as put forward by the authors of “Microcosm”. But ten thousand nuclear bombs set off at once won’t control Mother Earth for the exclusive benefit of the strong. She has her own agenda, and it doesn’t take into consideration the momentary whims of a small group of socio-pathic humans who believe they are the strong because they can wreak any kind of havoc they want to upon humans they consider to be the weak.

In modernity this concept of strength is consolidated into the coin of the realm. Those who have, do as they can; those who haven’t, suffer as they must. The coin of the realm is generated by financial transactions, currently spinning off into an abstract space transparently filled with financial instruments like derivatives. While dominating world financial activities, these financial instruments are not tied to real world production. They will spin out, sooner or later, leaving the land, Mother Earth, and her resources, as the ongoing actual foundation for generation of the coin of the realm.

Now we can adequately explain why Canadian legal professionals cannot acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ title to land and jurisdiction over resources. Such an acknowledgment would transfer the current source of strength from the hands of the few who believe Thucydides not only got it right, but that it is Rightly So, over into the hands of many who believe in….sharing.

Hmmm. There’s a problem with the idea of sharing. It would be impossible for a human elite to exercise control over the human many when the strength consolidated into the coin of the realm is being shared back out again.

Imagine the US Empire’s private oil reserves stored in Alberta’s tar sands being shared out with everybody. Imagine, as a condition upon such sharing, that Mother Earth must be respected, and that we humans individually exercise our capacity for determination to bring ourselves to work together to figure out what respect in this instance really means. Imagine that we become as honest with ourselves, and with one another, as possible, in bringing this strength-sharing into being. Imagine that we re-discovered the capacity to practice humble kindness, relishing our place inside of Mother Earth’s circle, valuing such a fit over the fantasy of lord. 

Just an illegal thought….

Old Weypimus was silent. The Magpie stepped back from the rock, filled with a joy that probably only Cease from CSIS had experienced before; Cease and the Magpie were sharing the joy!

Coming Next:

The Third Level Of Training On Cloud Sixty-Nine 

The Magpie inspected the hole in the side of the mountain. It narrowed quickly from its entrance. The Magpie squinted his eyes. Was that a tiny spot of light at the end of the tunnel? He gingerly put his left foot in. Nothing happened, no convulsing magno-electric shocking something. Hah! Cockily he strutted in, as the stone walls closed in around him. Yes! There was light at the end of the tunnel.

Emerging from the Other end of the hole in the mountain, he stepped out into a warm, sun-filled day, looking down over a vast valley bottom, a miniature fringe of hilltops in the far distance, unbelievably green, and dotted with herds of buffalo. Then he noticed a human tipi village, below and to the left. Where were the human’s power lines, their roads, their landscape dominating endless clutter?

“Hello”

The greeting startled the Magpie, and he jumped and whirled around…..but it was all different somehow. As he tried to look simultaneously at his wingtips and the source of the voice, a terrible realization began creeping over him. Focusing for a moment on the voice, he saw a human holding out a hand; re-focusing down to where his wingtip should be, he saw another human hand…this one was attached to his wing…wait a minute, it wasn’t a wing, any more. It was now an arm. Mimicking the outstretched hand movement of the human standing in front of him, the Magpie stuck out his hand, too, and the human grabbed it and gave it a firm shake, once.

“How did you get here?” asked the human.

“Folks from your space dimension are not usually able to come through to our side of the hole in the mountain. We were over there, a long time ago, but a few of us have come through to this side to wait in safety until the danger passes.”

The words slid over the Magpie’s comprehension centers like water off of a duck’s back. A rising sense of horror was slowly overwhelming his capacity to stay focused on the present moment. A human! He had been transformed into a human! It was his worst nightmare. He glanced down at his left foot, lifted it up and moved it forward, then moved it back, and then he shook it all about and did the hokey-pokey…a deep cry of despair welled up inside of his real Magpie self, but his true voice could find no vent. It was true; he had become human, right down to the innate impulse to do nonsensical stuff.

He spun around, searching for the entrance to the hole in the mountain….gone! He spun back to face the human greeter. She was making that strange grimacing facial gesture that humans make when they are experiencing pleasure. They called it smiling.

“Until the danger passes.”

She repeated the words, and then reached out to take the Magpie’s new hand.

“Come with me and I’ll show you around. You are safely beyond the boundaries of the binary, now.

Coming Next:

What The Magpie Heard  

It was total anarchy. Nobody seemed to be in charge. People sat on the ground in clusters and crowds, talking or listening, while the whole vista of seated people stretched out in every direction to the horizon, a ring of humans inside of a ring of mountain tops.

The Bear and the Magpie picked their way carefully through the crowd; the Bear had accidentally brushed up against a human, and, though the human couldn’t see the Bear, she sure seemed to sense that he was there, and had set off quite a rucus….something about being touched by her grandfather.

The Bear was obviously looking for something. He stopped, pointed with his lips, and said, “There.”

The Magpie looked. An odd circle of beings sat in the middle of a cleared off area, with no humans immediately nearby. The Bear was gingerly making his way across the crowd towards them, so the Magpie fluttered up into the air and followed along. He could hear the humans talking, in choppy bits… “indigenous insurgency in occupied Turtle Island”, “indigenous summit”, “the summit at the summit”….

As the Bear neared the odd circle, several of the beings looked up. Mr. Wee Sacky Jack was there, and called out for the Bear to join them. Old Man Napi was seated next to Mr. Wee, and he nudged his neighbor, NanaBouzo, and said with a chuckle, “the Magpie got our message”. The Raven nodded in agreement, as did Gloscap and Ol Coyote.

“Welcome to the northern caucus of the first true indigenous summit at the summit. Insurgency is the agenda topic.”

The Magpie opened his beak to respond, but the seated circle spoke in unison:

“Shut up and sit down.”

The Bear and the Magpie scooched in beside Mr. Wee Sacky Jack, and listened to the talk go around the circle.

“There’s the socialism for the 21^st century talkers, with their ‘from below and to the left’ rhetoric, and there’s the fascism for the 21^st century talkers, with their ‘from behind and to the right’ actions, but this binary thing is strictly of euro-origin.”

The Raven was warming to the subject.

“If these pathetic humans whom we are creationally linked to, the original humans of our beautiful Turtle Island, are going to survive, they have to develop a new story of their own future, a story so compelling that the occupying force of invading euro-humans will be swayed to abandon their 5500 year old quest for hegemonic Empire, and get diggy with indiggy-ness.

A ripple of approving chuckles did the wave around the circle….until it reached the Magpie.

“Wait a minute. I don’t know nothing about indigenous insurgency whatever.”

He turned to the Bear.

“The only reason I’m here is because I saw Something, which I can’t describe, nor can I forget it, and this fat lazy Bear is supposedly helping me to figure it out, but, instead, we’re in a weird dream/vision sort of event thingy, and have landed here on this summit. I really could care less about humans. In fact, I’m certain that humans are an evolutionary mistake, and will sort themselves out pretty quickly here, with their nuclear bombs and global systems based on the most rapid possible destruction of the ecosystem upon which they depend for survival.”

The wave continued on around the circle as an intense silence.

“Yeeaaah?” sang the Bear, and leaned forward to look at the Magpie’s beak. The light was incredible at this altitude and latitude, though the air was a bit thin for his taste. All of the other beings also leaned forward to look at the Magpie’s beak, curious to see what the Bear saw.

In the silent moment, something glimmered at the Magpie’s beak tip, and a faint hint of steam wisped up into the thin high mountain air. Nanabouzo chuckled again.

“Oh, that. The message we sent. The silly bird has stumbled upon a wormhole leading to another dimension. There’s a hole in the mountain right over there were he can walk through if he wants.”

Nanabouzo tossed his head that-a-way, then looked back at the Magpie.

“Well? Are you going? We’ve got important stuff to talk about here, surviving genocide and that crap.”

The Magpie looked to the Bear, who immediately began studying the claws on his left foot. Craning his scrawny Magpie neck, the bird scanned the mountainside at the horizon…a dark spot was barely visible, a hole of some kind. The memory of his encounter with the mysterious piece of roadside garbage flared up and burned brightly, but….wasn’t he in the bear’s den imagining all of this? Would it all vanish if he left the Bear’s side? Then a tsunami of lustfulness washed over his quasi-logical mind, and without another thought he fluttered up into the air and off towards the dark spot on the mountainside.   

Coming Next: Beyond The Boundary Of The Binary 

Dawn Rose twitched in her sleep; it was that flying bear, again. She was running from the bear, heading towards a cliff. At cliff’s edge she just kept on running and discovered that she was flying….but so was the bear. Keeping pace, they circled upwards into the night sky and soon became twinkling lights dancing along.

In the darkness, the Magpie could see the dancing lights, sudden popping intensely white sparkles that just as quickly disappeared. Why he’d agreed to crawl into the Bear’s den was very much on his mind. The Bear had cleared a small space for him by the Bear’s side, then had pushed up a bunch of sweetgrass into the mouth of the entry tunnel until total darkness settled in. It immediately began to warm up.

“How are you going to look at my beak in these lighting conditions?”

“Shhhh…”

The Bear hummed a wordless tune, and the first of the bright white popping lights snapped open and shut, too fast to be sure it had really happened. Sweat trickled down the Magpie’s neck…this wasn’t warm, it was hot.

Perhaps he’d passed out. Or something. Was he just coming to, now? The Magpie stood up with a start. He wasn’t standing on anything. It was no longer completely dark…a little ways off to his Left, he could see the shadow of the Bear, flying alongside of him….no magpie wing flapping, no bear paw flapping, just gracefully gliding along through….gracefully gliding along over….where were they? 

He looked to the Bear, who must have read the Magpie’s quizzical expression, because the Bear pointed ahead with his lips. A spine-shaped ridge of mountain tops appeared far below and to the left; as the image of the spine entered the Magpie’s consciousness, it bump bump bumped along in either direction, extending itself in a gently sinuously line to the limits of the Magpie’s imagination.

“That’s Turtle Island’s backbone” intoned the Bear in his humming voice, fitting the words into the rhythm of his song.

They were gracefully gliding towards the mountain tops, as if they were falling, but with no feeling of air resistance or gravity. In a rush, the mountains loomed up so close that the magpie could see the details of the landscape then boom the imagery was still.

It was as if some kind of cosmic dust was settling….gradually a space cleared around the Magpie, and he could see the Bear sitting next to him, as if they were still back in the Bear’s den. As the cosmic dust drifted back, the Magpie could see that they were not alone. Beak gaping, the Magpie watched as a circle of humans came into view…the magpie and the Bear were sitting in the middle of a circle of humans! As far as he could see in all directions, the seated crowd of humans extended.

Humans were dangerous; the Magpie was trembling uncontrollably. A gentle touch on his shoulder made him leap with a squawk; it was one of the Bear’s claws. The Bear was laughing:

“Relax,” he sang. “They can’t see us. We’re just here as observers.”

Coming Next:

What The Bear Saw  

The Bear sat wrapped in his winter bed of sweetgrass, peering up out of the neatly dug entrance to his winter den, gazing at his un-expected visitor. Scrubby bush crowned the sandy knoll into which he had built his home, and there, on the well-trodden path made by the many foraging trips in search of sweetgrass, stood the Magpie. A light skiff of snow dusted the dry prairie grass beyond the sandy knoll, set of by a ring of low poplar and willow that shaped the clearing in the miles of rolling brush surround.

The Magpie’s beak was strangely steaming; the Bear watched with mild amusement, as the Magpie, obviously confused, and perhaps even a bit lost, stood with his back to the Bear.

The Bear cleared his throat as if to speak. The Magpie startled up into the air, then settled back down again when he was able to locate and recognize the sound.

“Are you lost?”

It was a traditional form of greeting used by many Turtle Islanders, and not just the humans. Magpies and Bears had a long history of acquaintanceship, though not really mutual: Magpies would follow Bears around, waiting for the opportunity to steal some tasty tidbits.

A rapid assessment told the Magpie that this bear was denned up for winter, just not in deep snooze mode, yet. No tasty tidbits today, but the Magpie needed someone to talk to about the glittery something that had caused his beak to steam.

“No” he lied, the traditional form of response used by many Turtle Islanders, and not just the humans. “I’m here because I want to talk to you about something…something glittery.”

The Bear’s eyes glazed over. A thieving Magpie who, lacking any material thing to steal, was going to rob him of a few delicious moments of heavy nodding before The Big Nap kicked in.

“Yeeeaaaah?” drawled the Bear, with deep notes of resignation reverberating up though his chest. He knew enough about Magpies to know that any other approach was pointless. He put on his listening ears, Bear’s Ears, and continued staring up out at the Magpie.

The Magpie was quit agitated, strutting about in a random pattern, this way and that, occasionally rubbing his steaming beak in a bit of snow blown up against a cluster of scrub brush stalk.

“I saw something,” he blurted.

“Something old, very old, too old, not from now, and when I tried to peck at it with my beak, it pulled my mind into some Other place, a different time and space.”

The Bear blinked, a long slow-motion blink, then nodded:

“Yeeaah?”

“I can’t find the words for it….an Other place, but right here, right beside us, or inside of us, or something….and it was glittery….and I want it.”

The wave of lust that suddenly wafted off of the Magpie caused another Bear blink, but this time the fast-motion sort of blink that intuitively fends off potential eye injuries. Down, boy, down ran though the Bear’s mind, but, in the spirit of good listening, he said:

“Yeeaah?”

Anti-racist cranium capacity studies had meticulously proven that physical brain size had nothing to do with intelligence potentials; the tiny space inside of the Magpie’s skull was a veritable lightning storm of synaptic gap jumping. The Bear knew a lot…about a lot of stuff….maybe he would know something about this glittery Something.

“Could you have a look at it for me?”   

The Bear squinted his eyes and tried to get a better view of the steam rising off of the Magpie’s beak.

“You’ve got a trace of whatever it is on your beak. Come in, and we’ll have a closer look.”

I’m sure that you think I’m just making this all up at this point, because how likely is it that a Magpie would crawl down into a Bear’s den, but we’re not talking about any ordinary Magpie, like the ones that wake you up way too early on a fine summer morning, with their irritating squawks, leaving the garbage you had hoped would be hidden away forever in the dumpster strewn round the yard for visitors to see, and so, yes, this Magpie, in his state of desperate confusion, crawled down into the Bear’s den.

Coming Next:

A Flying Bear Takes A Magpie On A Visionary Journey 

Enough cold had settled on Mother Earth’s shoulders for Her to keep Her blanket of fresh snow snugged up to Her lovely ears. The freeze-dried grasses and poplar stands tufted out of the snow blanket in many shades of tan, gray and brown, leaving the Magpie in stark black and white. He fluttered down from his perch in a twin crown poplar tree, the kind the sundance center tree hunters wander about in the bush hunting for, and strutted along the packed snow at the road’s edge. What sort of interesting offerings might he find here today, gifts hurled out of noisy stinky machines by those wild and crazy humans rushing past. Where were they going? Where had they come from?

Mr. Wee Sacky Jack had told him the one about the muskrat diving for mud, and the creation of Turtle Island….in the middle of the story Sky Woman had arrived…was arrived the right term? Fallen? Suddenly landed? And rolled in that mud….somehow those pesky human critters had turned up shortly after. Were they Sky Woman’s? The Magpie decided that he would have to have a serious talk with Sky Woman, if he ever ran into her, about her errant children, if that was who humans really were.

A glitter caught his eye. Bingo! First lucky find of the day.

Hmmm. It glittered, but what was it? The Magpie approached cautiously…this thing did not have the familiar brand labels associated with various toxic sludge fast food corporations, nor the addictive odours that would advertise the immediate presence of such sludge. This thing was substantially different…had it even fallen out of one of those noisy stinky machines? Moving very carefully, the Magpie stepped closer. Odd. When he stared directly at it, it became blurry, but when he scanned it with his peripheral vision a focused view of something emerged; something old.

Studying it by looking off to The Left, the Magpie decided that it hadn’t been tossed out of a noisy stinky machine; it must have fallen through a crack in the time/space continuum. Recalling Sky Woman’s fall into the mud, he wondered if this came from the same place. Gathering up all of his courage, he stepped close enough to touch it with his beak. As his beak touched down on the glittering something, a magno-electric impulse surged through him, temporarily freezing him to the glitter….in fact, into the glitter.

It was as if he had thrust his head through a membrane into a parallel universe, and could suddenly see…what was all this?

With an intense effort, he wrenched his beak free of the glittery something, and staggered back a few steps. His beak tip was steaming in the sub-zero air, and he quivered uncontrollably. The urge to take flight overcame his curiosity, and he leapt into the sky, streaking past the twin crown poplar, off to a farther perch.    

Coming Next:

If you put your shoes on the wrong feet, you will meet a bear….   

Snow.

On the ground. Now it’s official….let the story-telling begin! My own little budding Che was story-telling, yesterday, and I made a side comment about him giving uncle Peaches some competition, to which he immediately responded:

“What I just said is true.”

Reminded me of uncle Peaches’ question at the end of a story:

“Tell me which part you found unbelievable, and I’ll change it.”

Nechwamps was wearing his Chavez red beret at the sweat, last week; looked good. He’s going to meet up with Ward Churchill tonight, at Meyer Horowitz Theater in the University of Alberta’s Student Union Building…wait a minute….student’s union? Isn’t that a commie-inspired sort of thang?

If it wasn’t snowing, I’d even consider driving the 200 gas-guzzling miles round trip to Oilberta’s Capital City to listen to Ward’s latest take on Empire, imperialism, genocide on Turtle Island, and all that other interesting stuff he likes to talk about in public, and for which he’s been publicly censured….yeah, censured. It’s a relative of censored, one of the rich relatives who made it big and moved off the Rez, into the Money Zone. Rez Zone. Money Zone. Who knew?

The reason for censorship is to keep the power relationship running smoothly; in a supposedly free speech society, liberal democracy version, folks in the Money Zone have found it to be a good investment to censure dissenting views by de-funding those views’ support systems…like professorships at universities. Owning all of the important public media space helps quite a bit, too. Leaves dissenters quietly blogging in obscure corners where, if need be, the handful of Money Zoners who privately own all of the public media space can point as proof of the actual existence of freedom of speech.

Blogheads thus play an important role in maintaining the smooth running of the power system, a phenomenon Noam Chomsky described decades ago in his “Manufacturing Consent”. As his theoretical model predicted, few heard.

The first snow. Let the story telling resume. Several months of quiet time is hard on irritatingly noisy magpies, although perhaps a boon to those who enjoy the sound of silence.

How long can a magpie remain silent? Perhaps, like the fish that Donald McGilvary tried to kill by holding it’s head under water on his first ever fishing trip, a magpie can remain silent until old age or water borne illnesses finalize that silence. Or, perhaps not.

Let’s try the “not” option.

Water borne illnesses? Not that Rez Zone scat, again! Are magpies subject to censorship, or should the noisy buggers be allowed a sort of freedom of squawk, say, in the margins of the internet? Oh….Cree cultural protocol….no story-telling until after the first snow.

Hmmm. The magpie strutted back and forth, to the left, to the right, considering this cultural dilemma. Was there such a thing as a Cree magpie? Was he bound by Cree cultural protocol? Could he resume telling the stories that no one wanted to hear, before the first real fall of snow? Yes, there had been that incredibly depressing early morning flurry two weeks ago, but it hadn’t left any trace of snow on the ground. Had anybody else even seen it?

Always attracted to border-crossings, the magpie thought about uploading this little note, and recalled Janice Makokis’ comment, at her mosom Mike’s supper table, that the magpie didn’t cross lines, he blurred them. Colouring outside of the lines was also a favoured pastime. 

So. What was it going to be? The sound of silence, or some way too early, way too disturbing squawking? 

Today, children, a guest lecture by that 60s hottie, Kahentinetha…all the Old Bulls here in the Wild West still rave about her, but on with the story….

WHAT IS THE ONKWEHONE DEMOCRATIC AGENDA?

 MNN.  Feb. 25, 2007.  We've been complaining about the top-down bureaucratic agenda of the colonizers.  Do we have something to replace it?  Yes we do.  It’s called the Kaianerehkowa/Great Law of Peace.  Our  philosophy can build a society based on a better understanding of peace, power and righteousness.  These words have meanings that are deeply rooted in our culture and completely different from the kinds of expectations they raise among the colonized.  Our understanding of these concepts has nothing in common with the command and obedience model of predatory capitalism that exploits the ordinary people for the power and profit of a few.  The new (colonial) world order is incompatible with a way of life based on the principles of fully informed consent and consensus in all our relationships. 

 For more than a thousand years we have had a participatory democracy.  In an article by Stephen Lendman, in CounterCurrent.org entitled “Hugo Chavez’s Social Democratic Agenda”, he describes how Chavez has "constructed socialism from below", built "from the base" in the communities”.  He has found a way "to carry out the battle of ideas for the socialist project to rebuild Venezuelan society.  He wants a coalition of smaller parties whose power comes from the communities.

 Chavez wants to build 21st century socialism using state revenues to benefit people in new and innovative ways.  He wants to give more power to the people at the grass roots level which he thinks is the way democracy should work.

 There are presently 16,000 regional federations of Communal Councils organized across the country dealing with local issues.  Each has 200 to 400 families.  That number is expected to grow to 21,000 councils by year end 2007.  "They are the key to people's power".  This looks like the embryo of a new state, driven by the same basic philosophy of egalitarian human respect that underlies the Kaianerehkowa.    

 An intergovernmental fund for decentralization will distribute billions to these Councils in 2007.  This is more than triple the amount allocated in 2006.  If the people so chose, billions can be put into a “National Development Fund” for industrial development.  Yellow journalism has been attacking this thinking.  They put fear into people’s minds, calling it "nationalization", which is a dirty word to capitalist colonial economies.   Capitalism is really a one way road for the privileged few.  Hostile rhetoric and outright attacks can be expected when true grass roots orthodoxies are ignored.  Development of democratic programs look threatening to those who have violently struggled their way to the top of the old hierarchal heap.   

 As we assert our sovereignty, we have lots to think about.  What can we Onkwehonwe do with all our land and resources and all the squatters who are here?  The land still belongs to the Indigenous people and always will.  All the resource revenues can be used to compensate the colonists fairly.  The rest can be put towards rebuilding a safe and healthy environment.   

 U.S. and Canada will, of course, become irrelevant.  The old hierarchies will cling to their delusional powers.  They will keep their guns pointed at us and try to invent more lethal weapons.  We’ll have to bring out the feathers and start tickling them so they get real.  If they don’t, we might have to ask them to leave.  They have legal obligations.  They are violating the Geneva Accords.   Their hysterical megalomania is getting them involved in serious violations.  They risk being declared persona non grata worldwide.

 With all the money from our land and resources, we could buy out the big corporations so that we have the major shares, say 40%, as Chavez is doing.  The rest can be joint ventures with us.  In other words, we want all these companies under the control of the people.  The colonists can have shares after we take everything out of private control.   

 The money should be put back into our hands where it belongs, out of the hands of private for-profit bankers.  We would invest it into worthwhile projects that meet our priorities and that will restore and protect the land so that the coming generations can be healthy, happy and prosperous.  The days of genocide and exploitation are over.  We must benefit most from our resource revenues and other businesses that provide essential services like public utilities.  Clean drinking water and fresh air to breathe would be one of our top priority.     

 Private businesses will have to be transparent and abide by new standards of fairness.  This will be a big adjustment for those who are used to having their way.   

 We will redefine and restructure our relationships.  It goes without saying that Indian Affairs has to go.  Communal power at the grass roots will be the order of the day.  This is the basis of the post-colonial model.  Kaianerehkowa can make this happen and can be the start of a real egalitarian and humanistic society.    

 All social structures will have to be reorganized.  Selections of local officials, the economy, finance, banking, transportation, security, public safety and policies related to energy are part of this.  There is no need for a top heavy governmental structure when everyone takes responsibility at all levels. 

 The current colonial bureaucracy will have to be dismantled.  Some of it could be adjusted to the new reality.  Corruption is a major problem and has to be eliminated.  Social justice and economic independence will be based on equitable distribution of national wealth spent on health care, education and social security.  Education is of utmost importance.  Racism must be eliminated from all school curricula.  Science and technology has to benefit all of the people.  So must education, health, the environment, biodiversity, industry, quality of life and security.  Financial sectors, including banking and insurance, will have to conform to the Kaianerehkowa.  Responsibility has to be returned to the people so we can take charge of our own welfare. 

 Public health, rehabilitation, identification and migration regulations are all matters that we can deal with ourselves using the Kaianherehkowa methodology.  We will not need a judiciary.  We will be able to solve everything through consensus.   

 The people must control the energy sector including oil production.  Private investors can still play a role.  But it will be based on equitable joint ventures that include the people as decision makers, not just consumers.     

 Local, community and territorial organizations will be set up.  The principles of the Kaianerekowa will inform all our relationships.  As long as representatives are carrying out the will and the wishes of the people, they may remain in their positions.  All procedures and decision making must be public and the work of all administrative officials will be subject to constant review.  They can be removed from office if they do not follow the people’s dire