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2023 - Poem, with backstory - the eternal road trip Tanka: To 2021 - Kototama Sound Practice Condescending Dismissals & Rude Aspersions |
| 12.17.2023 |
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Wealth is War!  There is a story to this poem of mine and Gilbert Kills Pretty Enemy's design which will follow below but first I am announcing that this is the final post on this website, which will go black some time after the New Year, perhaps leaving just this poem and design visible. Should anyone in the future be interested in the content here, I am finishing a book (as we speak, you might say - this post will be near the end) called Out of My Life and Two Visions. My first vision (or "vision" - I'm not sensitive about people being skeptical - they're pretty humble visions) came in 1989 and related to my baseball career and the death of Donnie Moore. The conclusion I reached after grappling with that vision and its implications for several years was that we just weren't acknowledging, addressing, weeping over, our racial past and present. I don't have a flea in my pocket. By "We", I mean the white culture in America of which I am a part. My second vision is the reason this site has existed for nearly 15 years and is explained in the home page essay. A basic conclusion I reached over the following years with this vision is that there is something in Lakota culture that the world needs. Before getting to the story, it seems appropriate also to mention one reason for shuttering Intimations of 2011: When you predict a sea change is coming in the near future and some dozen years after that the world doesn't look all that much different, you either got some 'splaining to do or maybe need to regroup a little bit. Actually that part isn't too hard for me. Believe it or not, I think I was right. There was something in the air that winter of 2007-08. It was, after all, when Obama's most unlikely Presidential campaign caught fire and resulted in his election. Perhaps I was too young to fully appreciate the Civil Rights movement of the 60's, but for me Obama's election was the most important event in American history in my lifetime, and I am not embarrassed to say I shed tears of joy more than once during one or more of his speeches and on election night itself. And as for the year "2011", two things happened in my view that were exactly the kind of things I might have hoped for - spontaneous expressions of people around the world to bring about a better day. One was the Arab Spring and the other was Occupy Wall Street. And then even at the end of Obama's second term, it was impossible for me just on a personal level not to be moved when the NODAPL movement on Standing Rock, where I had been going for nine summers in search of answers, received worldwide attention and recognition for making one simple, incredibly powerful statement to the world: "Water Is Life". Now for the tragedy of the thing, at least from my point of view - it is the accuracy of my first vision that seems to have overwhelmed, so far, the power of my second. In other words, the depth, power, almost separate life-will of racism in our white hearts quite simply and most basically resulted in President Donald Trump. "Now we are engaged in a great Civil War testing whether this nation..." just kidding, sort of, but a fundamental reason for suspending this site on this date is that, for me, how the next year plays out will determine so much. If Donald Trump is President again on December 17th, 2024, I will throw in the towel, or go back to the drawing board, or something. It will be a cicada-cycle for my "Vision" here on Intimations, and that is time enough, I think, for rendering an initial judgment that, at least as far as I am capable of seeing, I didn't quite get things right. ---------------------------- Now for the poem and design. In the summer of 2017, with a friend and my son, I started a little project in Bullhead in conjunction with the yearly powwow the second weekend in August that I called Old-Time Baseball. It was just the idea of doing something on Standing Rock that I knew a little about - playing ball with kids, or trying to getting kids playing ball on their own. We did free baseball and softball in the weekdays leading up to the powwow, provided food and drink, left behind a lot of equipment, and so forth. That first summer I met Emmett White Temple, Jr. It was an auspicious morning for me when we met. I was with my son at a friend's house there in Bullhead getting ready to hike to Sitting Bull's camp a few miles away, the spot where Sitting Bull was born and where he was killed. It is a sacred place, in my view (I know - like all places on the earth), but in this case especially because Sitting Bull's death on the morning of December 15, 1890 started a chain of events that ended 300 miles away with the Wounded Knee Massacre on December 29. I really enjoyed meeting Emmett. He was just someone I felt naturally comfortable talking with from the start. He had studied Environmental Science at North Dakota State. He was on the Water Board of the Standing Rock Tribal Council. This was in the immediate aftermath of the NODAPL events of the previous winter, and we talked about that at some length. When we returned in the summer of 2018 Emmett and his wife Cheryl were instrumental in helping us achieve whatever modest things we got done. The friendship deepened - I just liked the guy. I thought he was funny and intelligent and also empathetic, even kind. The summer of 2019 I went back by myself for the Old-Time Baseball efforts, earlier this time, in June, thinking it made more sense to try to get things rolling at the beginning of summer. I had finished seven weeks of chemo-radiation a few months before. I couldn't have done anything that summer without Emmett and Cheryl's help and guidance, along with another friend I'd made, Matthew Yellow Earrings. For a number of reasons, I felt I could only make the one trip out to Standing Rock that summer. I missed the powwow weekend for the first time since I'd started going out there in 2008. I talked with Emmett on the phone that Friday, the Opening Ceremony to begin that evening. They were staying in Fort Yates then and I had sent a package with some small gifts to their Bullhead address. It was several days late, they knew it was coming and were in Bullhead for the start of the powwow, and called to touch base about the status of the package. I checked the tracking - it arrived the next day - and we talked things over for a little while. Early the next evening Cheryl called to tell me that Emmett had died suddenly on their way home from the powwow. One of those shocks of a lifetime. Cheryl talked at length in a tone of voice I will never forget - I believe the right term is "keening". Can't really discuss this further. It was pretty devastating to me. Not long after that phone conversation I was hanging out in the garage, trying to come to grips. I have spent a lot of time there over more than 20 years, usually just thinking things over. And now, while I am not changing the title of my book, I had a third vision. It's a big garage and we leave the two overhead doors open year-round and in those 20+ years a lot of things have flown in and, usually , back out - birds and insects, of course. But on this night for the first time in my memory or experience a dragonfly flew in and bumped into the closed window pane next to me. I typically shepherd the birds and insects trapped this way back out to freedom. I realized not only that I had never caught or touched a dragonfly but also that I'd had a fear of the darn things going back to childhood. At any rate, I caught this one easily and learned they are almost soft to the touch. As I walked to the open door to let it go, I looked at its face and as god is my witness, I saw Emmett's face there. I let it go and as it flew off to the south, it was Emmett's voice I heard quite clearly: Just let my spirit go, bro. People who knew him, if they can still remember, would recognize the intonation immediately - Emmett! ---------------------------- Fast forward a year - the pandemic summer of 2020. The powwow was called off. The weekend powwow, or wacipi, is actually called the V-J Day Celebration, remembering, remarkably in this remote Native American village, the end of World War II and honoring Veterans of all wars. It was the 75th Anniversary of the end of the war and I got some money together, some letters of congratulations and support from people and organizations in baseball, some t-shirts and caps made, and so forth, and gave away these things in Matthew's driveway the Friday night the powwow would have started. Very informal. It was also the first anniversary of Emmett's passing, and I had a dozen or so t-shirts made with his name on them, in his memory. In the middle of handing out the stuff, really just a fun and impromptu gathering, someone there felt it was important to tell me that Emmett had died in a meth house. The way this hit me is hard to describe - it basically just added a layer of sadness for me about his death. But also, being told in that way at that moment, I felt a kind of undercutting - it may not make sense, but were people looking at me all this time as some sort of an absurd person from outside doing dumb or meaningless things? I also sponsored a radio broadcast the next day on KLND - the reservation radio station. This was to be a virtual powwow hosted by former tribal chairman Jay Taken Alive. The story of that broadcast is crucial to this whole thing but I am telling it elsewhere. Have to buy the book if you want to know about it. Sounds like cheap hucksterism, I suppose, but like everything else in the next year, who knows what will actually happen? I did receive a modest advance to write the book, but would say it's less than 50-50 at this point that it will ever see the light of day. The point here is that sometime over the next year, mulling over the impact of the dragonfly vision, the revelation about Emmett's death, the way I felt about our friendship, it hit me very powerfully: it's the greed, stupid. Emmett and I were simpatico. He was every bit as capable as any of my friends from high school and college who went on to great success, great material rewards, in their adult lives. What hit me like a rifle shot one night, again out there in the garage, was that the driving force behind my culture surrounding and suffocating Emmett's, the destruction of this continent and the people that had been living on it, was plain and fucking simple: Money, and hoarding it. The power that sees an ancient forest and thinks only of the money to be made cutting it down. So I wrote the poem above and I asked Gilbert Kills Pretty Enemy to make a design. We had to talk about it a bit. He said to me once - there's a lot of different kinds of wealth and I said - O no, I know - this is the kind of wealth that drives destruction, taking, taking, taking, and hoarding, and so forth. His having a kind of Trump-figure pulling the strings, so to speak, was a stroke of genius, to me at least. But the central idea for me, which I asked Gilbert about and he said - Yes, that's what I told you already - is that the design is a kind of medicine wheel gone wrong, with the four corners pitted against each other and the demonic center - greed - out of control, out of the center, and crazy-evil |