On July 21 last year, during a pro-choice street demonstration, a man approached the crowd of us at the corner and targeted a very pale, nervous-looking young guy for persistent badgering and antagonizing. I remember thinking to myself that the young man will just know when to walk away. I remember hearing the man who … Continue reading »
Category Archives: Emotionally Present
The Last Time I Called Someone A Hatemonger
It was probably about a month ago now, but I’m not going to engage a rigid search for evidence to confirm or rule out the possibility of one more or fewer weeks. It was after a long and already heated discussion had taken place in which I made a public call for concrete action against … Continue reading »
Finished Moccasins, Flood Of Insight
About a week ago, after visiting with my elder and doing more work on my first pair of moccasins, I felt compelled to start making a second pair out of cow hide. But unlike the elk skin moccasins I had just made enormous progress on, these would be plain moccasins. They would feature no beading … Continue reading »
1,444 Prayers
I have been learning a lot through the process of making moccasins, and I have recently been applying those same skills to new forms of beadwork, including the calamus of an eagle feather as a gift for someone who not only helped me in a difficult time, but taught me about himself and where he … Continue reading »
Emotionally Present / Lived Experience/Memoir / Personal Is Political / Race/Ethnicity / Time-specific
Hair Revisited: One Year Later
A little more than a year ago, I published this post about how my and everyone else’s relationships with my hair, my race (which isn’t nearly so simple as “I’m a white person!”), and my apparent social gender radically shifted overnight when I started shaving my hair clean off for a full year and a … Continue reading »
Radical Paradigm Shift
The past six months have been a nearly exact repeat of virtually all of the most difficult parts of my life. But something is different this time. I don’t know exactly when or how I reached the very brink of it, but it’s taken me six months to realize that I’ve undergone a radical paradigm … Continue reading »
Lessons From Raccoon Medicine
If you know who I am, I already know part of what you’re thinking: what in the world is this whitey talking about with this “raccoon medicine” nonsense? Well, it’s not nonsense to me. In fact, I hope you’ll pay close attention, because we can all learn from what I’m about to detail here. My … Continue reading »
Traditional Knowledge
Yesterday night, I had a dream about traditional knowledge. More specifically, about where it came from, to my ancestors many generations ago, and how to begin writing about it now. In this dream, I was the man who found a clay jar, clearly centuries old, buried in the desert. I wanted to open the jar, … Continue reading »
Let This Be A Lesson To You
On December 13th (just passed), I fled the house where just the day before, I had just been called an ignorant cunt, where my face had been spat all over, and where a man reached out and grabbed me by the throat before turning me against a wall and squeezing. I did this because, though … Continue reading »
Moccasins
When I was just learning how to walk, my feet would spread out so much that I just couldn’t manage without special shoes made from hardened leather hide. So my parents got a pair, and as soon as I learned how to walk in them, they were never put on my feet again. A few … Continue reading »
