Light and Shade

Return Voyage

Iokepa and Inette visited KBOO radio on both "Mitakuye Oyasin" and then the following day on the new program "Indian Country."

Some years 12 or 13 years ago, Iokepa, a successful business man in the Seattle area, was told by his grandmothers it was time to go home. He had a multi-million dollar contracting business in Seattle. He gave it all away, including his over 1.6 million in the bank in less that a week, then returned home to Hawaii where he lived on the beach for 10 years listening. Inette, his wife, joined him shortly thereafter (they met after his decision to do this). They have had quite the interesting adventure living on the beach and helping the Hawaiian people especially after hours when the poor and homeless hit the beaches. They have had to work with domestic violence, drug abuse, day to day violence, etc., in helping the people. Read more at the Return Voyage website.

I have seen many guru types and have seen so many of those self-help people who suck money out of yuppies for a few drops of wisdom. Wanna know how much Iokepa and Inette charge for one of their Return Voyage lectures? $0. It won't cost you an affordable $300-$9000 to be saved. There message isn't even designed to save you. It seems just a message that there is another way of life. Something else to strive for other than alleged civilization.

I don't see Iokepa and Inette as gurus. I see them as human beings who are motivated to share a message with the world. They start their journey on faith, take the journey on faith, and return home on faith. They don't have money, yet they are always supplied for.

This will be the third and last journey through the U.S.

Iokepa told two fellas fighting on the beach, "Is this the way your ancestors would want you to live?" I ask myself that question everyday, now. Is this the way my ancestors, my wife, my family, my people, my community and communities want me to live?

Two Murdered and Three Missing in Oaxaca

Two people have been murdered and three are missing when a large march headed to the autonomous Triqui municipality of San Juan Copala carrying food, water, and other supplies to the town under seige by paramilitaries for the last 6 months. The murders happened on Tuesday. This is in Mexico. Read the story here.

Stay Awake, Dammit! STAY AWAKE!

Driving down the road at speeds up to 59mph for long...boring...straight...stretches of I-5 between Portland and the city of Eugene, I listen to books on CD to keep me awake.

"And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Using assumed names for all the characters and a fictionalized version of an event that shaped the beat poets, it is a very interesting novel. It is about the murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr in 1944. Damned good story.

Then I listened to one and a half CD's of "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs. I love Burroughs "A Junky's Christmas" story, and figured this would be pretty cool, too. I got so disgusted by the imagery I had to turn it off, and I read about real stuff like genocide. I never heard shit so disgusting. I had the sense the Burroughs wrote that way (1959) to be the most shocking he could be in a novel. Folk give this book great praise, I could not listen to it anymore. And I still have about 60 miles to go!

Well, how about some community radio...some of the most boring country music with draggy type voices trying to lull me into lala land. ARGGHHH! OPB? blah blah blah blah...*snore* SHIT! I'M STILL DRIVING!

I know, nothing. The sound of the road. A dead eye stare from not getting enough sleep. That was the best idea of the day.

Freeways are Not Free

I watched her as she ran toward the freeway, brown and leaping through the tall green grass. Her ears so big and her head narrow and pointing the direction of her own impending doom as she bounced from the grass to the gravel at the edge of the freeway heading into traffic. The car, some 80 yards ahead of me, slowed quickly, not wanting to kill the sweet brown beast.

The deceleration startles her and I can feel her fear that tempers her compulsion to run headlong into traffic and turns her around, back into the spring grass.

Her nature is to go where she will. The freeway isn't natural, but it is natural that she would walk a path to a new pasture or to visit her other deer people or just an ancient compulsion that tells her the direction in which to travel. Maybe its all of these things or none of them at all, but she has her nature, and we...we...it is we who are fighting against it, or maybe looking for it in her big doe eyes or her leaf shaped large ears. Maybe she reminds us to see and listen.

I turn on my hazard lights and slow to about 35 as I come up beside her. She has decided to parallel the barbed wire fence. I look in her eyes as she runs and honk my horn several times warning her that it is dangerous for her in this world of the freeway. I can tell her heart is racing faster than she is.

She is a streak of brown lightening tumbling through the green grassy sky of a spring cloudy day.

I say a prayer for her safety from a world that has stolen much from her people.

Mascots Are Racist

Yesterday on "Mitakuye Oyasin" we had another call in.

One of the issues we talked about was racism through mascots. I believe mascots to be a form of dehumanization in which it makes it easier to do inhuman things to your fellow human beings. Some folk believe this type of racism to be honoring. Why don't white people want to be honored? Why aren't there teams like the Washington Whities or the Cleveland Caucasians? What? Aren't you proud to be white?

Shusli called in and mentioned that folk saying things like "Native Americans did it this way." She mentioned how folk co-opt Native spirituality and tokenize it for their own gain. They call this honoring, but it is really racist, as not all Native Americans believe the same way.

These methods of dehumanization make it easier to do inhuman things to their fellow human beings. For example:

71 of the 72 declared Superfund sites in the U.S. are on Indian reservations.

Garbage dumps and chemical waste dumps are put on reservations because they are not as regulated. Makes it cheaper for industry to dump their waste there. Cancer rates skyrocket, but who cares, just a bunch of Indians. Not like we're really human beings. We're being honored by teams like the Washington Redskins. We should just get over it.

If you would like to read a fella who gets it who isn't Indian, I suggest this post by Urban Scout on his blog.

Next week on "Mitakuye Oyasin," we will be interviewing Iokepa about issues surrounding Hawaiians and his Return Voyage project. Iokepa and his wife, Inette, have started their third journey of Return Voyage. They travel the U.S. without any money, and usually get enough in donations as they talk around the states to get them to their next destination. More on that later, but you can check out their website.

"Mitakuye Oyasin" airs every Thursday from 6-7pm on KBOO, 90.7fm in Portland, or on the web at kboo.fm.

Anymore (off of the top of my head)

Anymore, I just live my life.

I know the world is being murdered by corporations so the few can profit off of the many. I have gone through despair and powerlessness. And here I am, one piece of a long forgotten gone through the landfill human being like so many others who are wondering, "What in the hell do we do about all of this shit?"

I think about it often. But I don't feel despair or powerlessness anymore, anymore, anymore, more, I live my life and more. Anymore I just live my life, more than life, much more than my life.

I have said I feel like I've come to a massive wall and there is no way around it or through it or over it. What do I do about it? I can watch TV. Pretend it's not there like I'm a good American. Pretend that the glacier meltoff is a television show, a sitcom, called global climate change. At least I have a computer and a cell phone.

I hear others play video games. Games. Fun and games. Distract. It is good to distract, but to live you life as one long distraction?

So I listen to classics on CD. Moby Dick, The Three Musketeers. I watch movies about these books to compare notes. The different kinds of story telling. The different approaches. The cultures.

I try to unite. I think uniting might help. I think to lock arms and kick and scream at the wall it might just come down. But, it is so much easier to beat up my neighbor than to figure out how to get this wall out of the world. This wall out of the world. The world is being murdered, and no one will see over the wall, no one really wants to do anything about it.

What do we do about it? There are so many simple solutions. "I HAVE THE ANSWER." "NO! I HAVE THE ANSWER!" "NO YOU DON'T! I AM THE ONE WITH THE ANSWER." I don't want any answers. I want this civilization to stop killing the planet. That means a whole lotta changes folk don't want to make, so used to the conveniences in their lives.

I could give it all up myself, but then you'd still be doing it, and you, and let's not forget you, and nothing will really change because there is a monster killing our world and we don't want to unite because everyone wants to be the king...or is it no one...

And still, I love life. Anymore, I just love life. I Love my life. I Love my wife. I Love my kid!

Have you noticed some parts of the world are so green? Not green like, "Go green gasoline and save the planet." Real green. Really green. Some parts of the world are really green.

Anymore