The Native Road to the Deep North III

July 19

The night raven
eclipsing the twilight sun
steals our food

We sleep and wake to the cry of ravens and magpies in the twilight. When the sun climbs again over the mountains, it glitters radiant on the water. Blue waves scatter into daylight. So we fill our bodies with coffee and good spirits. We stretch our legs and prepare them for the sea.

*   *   *

At Seward, we take a boat through Kenai fjords. We stand on the bow and face the sea spray as our captain drives us through the chop up to Northwestern fjord, where
the tidewater turns to ice. He navigates us through the frozen waters toward the glacial wall that extends before us. Even this has receded against the relentless onslaught of the world changing. It no longer stretches so far into the fjord as it did only a few years ago, Ken tells us. This is a member of an endangered species. Perhaps Edward Curtis was photographing the wrong vanishing race.

The captain shuts off our engine and we are adrift in the ice water. The passengers hush, and the glacier comes to life. The only sound is the creek of ice. It splinters, cracks, shakes, and shudders in the deep rumbling voice of a timeless giant. Now a thick sheet breaks off and crumbles and tumbles into the sea with a great crash of water smashing against itself in different forms. The wave spreads out. This is the sleep talk of a frozen titan raging against the dying of the light.

Icy war cry:
“No, I will not go extinct”—
the ancient glacier

No, no, Alaska will not go gentle into that good night. The captain restarts the engine.

*   *   *

And on the way back, as if to cheer our hearts, a humpback whale finds us and plays with us. It lies on its thick back in the ocean, waving its pectoral fins, and slapping them against the water, making a ruckus. I’m smiling. Twice, it breaches, emerging spectacularly from the water, before diving back down again. We have entered upon its road, and the unspoken question is “How do you pass your days, humpback whale, our daughter, our mother?” “Happily, my parents, my children,” the whale answers. It slaps the water again, and waves goodbye.

A humpback whale
playing hide and seek:
the world rebalanced

So today is a happy day. These whales, too, once slaughtered to near extinction, shall continue. Their children, too, will learn to sing the old songs. And as we return to shore, porpoises join our boat, and dart along the bow. A family of orcas swim in the distance. Their dorsal fins stand tall. The sunlight stays strong, and the rain passes swiftly. We sleep well in our tents tonight.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North II

June 18

We head to Seward. On the road, we stop at Exit glacier. The hike to the base of the glacier is less than a mile, but along the way, we walk through time. We pass where it used to be centuries ago. Signs mark the path with dates from years long past, from when ice still covered the land here, and rinsed it fresh with water. But as the forest path gives way to a younger trail of rock and stone, the dates become too recent. Ken remembers when you could walk right up to the glacier hundreds of feet beneath the gray precipice on which we arrive and look down. Far below us, the glacial ice is melting, dripping, retreating little by little. What will happen to the rivers below when it disappears? This is a living behemoth of pleistocene memory, and like the memories of our human elders, it is slowly fading away. What happens to the memory of ice when it turns into water, I wonder? Does it remember, like blood and bones?

The old ice
reawakens and starts
to disappear

We walk back, and continue on the road to Seward. When we arrive, we set up camp, and after a dinner of Wai’s campfire fajitas and beans, we fall asleep under the night sunlight. In our dreams, the gray dusk finally fades to black, and the sun falls behind the mountains.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North I

June 17

The midnight sun is a companion to the people. It rises and sets to the heartbeat of a different kind of time: one set by the creep of ice and the break of earth. The black mountains that rise from the roiling seas and turn green with grass and forests and white with snow caps before they etch themselves across the sky: these are the rhythms of a dream. Long have we sought to share this world dreamt and lived by our brothers and sisters in the deep north where all of us once tread, long ago, on our many long journeys home. Even for us, this sojourn is a kind of homecoming. Because this is their home: the Athabascans and the Yup’ik and the Tlingit and the Unangan and the Haida, and so many others. We are here to hear their stories and their readings of the land they’ve known since the beginning, in this time as the earth is changing, and its shape is still a vision waiting to be imagined.

Summer mountains breathe
time streams of ancient water—
Alaska’s children

We step into Alaska from the airport in Anchorage, and the road into that world stretches so deep and wide before us. We sleep in the city tonight, before heading into the wild.

(reblogged from here)

Words to live by

". . . in western novels one finds oneself by leaving home, while in Native American storytelling one finds oneself by returning home."

— Gerry William (Spallumcheen Indian Band)

Words to live by

" 'Even though they have never seen me, they will remember me. Their bodies will remember me down to the smallest structures of their flesh. You cannot know how well people's bodies remember their ancestors.' "

— Octavia Butler, Wild Seed

Haiku

lone wolf
never really alone
speaks all night

Elegy

The temperature was 9F. I'm surprised so many people came.

Every inch of my skin was cold before I arrived at the center of campus. My thighs were frozen as I walked. I didn't expect to see many people there in such weather, but it was like an exodus. People kept joining out of nowhere. Everyone walking in the same direction. No one said anything.

When I decided to go, I found a candle on my bookshelf, and tested it, but it was too old and the rim was too high and the wick was too short. I took out a knife and cut out the wax around the wick, so I could pull it out and light it, and then set the flame back inside. I found had no k'yawe a:we, so I took a pouch of tobacco I'd been given as a gift. Not my own tribe's tradition, but an offering close enough.

There were so many of us, so many more than I expected: probably a thousand or more, that even standing apart, I didn't feel the cold. I took off my gloves and lit the candle I'd brought.

They sang on the steps of Hovde, the administration building, in front of the engineering fountain. Probably Christian songs. I couldn't hear. But that's okay. So many people stood together. The specifics didn't matter.

When it was over, I sprinkled the tobacco over the flame. I made a fist and breathed in the breath of those who were there who couldn't be seen, like I was taught to do by tradition, even if my offering was wrong.

The provost said it was over. Told us good night. And thank you. And the people dispersed. I walked to the electrical engineering building. EE was still surrounded by police. Flashing red and blue lights. I walked as close as I dared to one of the other entrances, and saw even there, someone stood guard inside.

So I approached a planter, and set my candle down there on its cement rim. And left.

A black woman with big hair approached me with a white man with a bigger camera.

"I saw you," she said, "with the candle. What did you think of the vigil?"

"It was... nice."

"Did you know either—"

"No," I said.

I walked away.

I broke deshkwi. When we Zuni aren't supposed to buy or sell. I stopped at a bar on the way home and ordered several beers after another. Before coming back home and posting this.

Is it a big deal? Maybe it isn't a big deal. Compared to other things. Maybe it isn't. Lots of other, much bigger atrocities happen. Every day. But maybe it should be a big deal. Maybe it should be a big deal. If we don't make it a big deal, what does that mean? It deserves to be a big deal.

Not because I condemn the shooter. Not because it's another shooting on a college campus in America. Not because it's just the latest news story.

Because the world deserves a little less hopelessness.

Because it was so much warmer, standing there, than I expected, in the middle of the freezing cold. All of us standing, come together, for the sake of someone so many of us didn't know. Because even in the cold, cold, dark of the night, in the icy snow, in the below-freezing temperature, so many people came, and stayed, and stood.

So somehow, despite the last 24 hours, I feel a little bit more hopeful. So I say, Andrew, you didn't die in vain.

And you definitely
didn't die alone.

Godspeed.

21st Century Folktales

About a year ago, I posted my thoughts on magic realism.

Through the course of several recent and not-so-recent conversations, my perspective on the genre has evolved, and I've developed a new way of thinking about magic realism that I think answers some of the lingering questions I've long since had on the genre.

The seed for this post came from a discussion about story conventions from different cultures. A poster mentioned that folktales from lots of cultures around the world seem to have elements of magic realism in them, and I wondered if maybe this was backward: that magic realism tends to have elements of folktales in it. After all, aren't folk tales far older than the relatively more modern concept of "magic realism" as a literary genre?

I posted:

"In thinking about it, that does suggest an interesting conclusion to me. Any supernatural fiction arising from cultures for whom folk beliefs are deeply ingrained and interwoven into the culture will probably resemble magic realism when viewed through a Western lens. Take myths from any culture around the world and re-tell it in a modern voice, and it'll probably look like magic realism. This includes Christianity. To this extent, we can use this to develop a definition of magic realism as a genre of modern-day folklore, which—as a magic realism author—I find to be a fascinating and curiously appropriate definition.

"In fact, I think one could say the demarcation of the speculative fiction genres in general may only make sense at all when viewed from a secular, Western perspective. To a person who believes in ghosts and witches, a story that involves ghosts and witches isn't a "fantasy" or "magic realism" story. It's simply a story."

Between my recent musings about magical girl monomyths, and increasingly drawing from Zuni and Japanese folklore for inspiration in my writing, I've been thinking a lot about the role of myths and legends and folktales in literature. Surely many literary genres—fantasy in particular comes to mind—draw inspiration heavily from mythology. But what genre would myth, legend, and folktale fall under?

Although all are related as traditional stories, my discussion will primarily consider folklore, so as not to be burdened with the sacred narrative nature of mythology. The Wikipedia page (forgive the source) describes folklore thusly:

"... folklore can be used to accurately describe a figurative narrative, which has no sacred or religious content. In the Jungian view... it may instead pertain to unconscious psychological patterns, instincts or archetypes of the mind. This may or may not have components of the fantastic (such as magic, ethereal beings or the personification of inanimate objects). These folktales... speak to deep psychological issues."

While folktales and fairy tales may often share many of the outward traits of the fantasy genre, such as trolls and dwarves and magic spells, it doesn't feel quite right to call them "fantasy," does it? Why? A telling trait of fantasy and science fiction—to me—is an implicit admission or recognition that the fantastical, supernatural, or futuristic elements aren't real. These elements in fantasy and science fiction are deliberate fabrications, consciously departing from a scientific, rational understanding of reality (or the reality of what is possible at the time of writing, for science fiction). While folklore differs from mythology in that it is not usually part of a sacred narrative, it does reflect a particular cultural understanding of the world, a particular perspective of reality.

Perhaps this is why the stories of folklore so often resemble magic realism when viewed through a scientific, Western perspective, and why writers from non-Western cultures where folk beliefs still run deep (or writers who are deeply influenced by such cultures) produce stories that are so commonly called "magic realism."

This brings me to another characteristic that I think is a marker of magic realism (and probably surrealism to an extent as well), which is that in magic realism, there exists a profound belief that the "magic" in the story is an accurate reflection of reality.

This belief may not be true on a literal level, and is often true instead on a symbolic or metaphoric level.

Another way of thinking about this is that while the fantastic elements in fantasy and the futuristic elements in science fiction exist as a deliberate departure from current reality or present-time possibilities, the "magic" in magic realism and the "surreal" in surrealism are used to evoke an experienced reality that is more "true" than could be evoked without their use.

This interpretation is evident in the very term itself, as "magic realism" is fundamentally a form of realism that is not limited by a scientific, rational, Western, linear understanding of the world. This goes back to the interesting, initial observation that the discussion of magic realism as a literary genre is only really meaningful in the context of Western scientific thought. While much of the Western world follows an Abrahamic religion, the role of its more fantastical mythology and folklore has largely been relegated to matters of the afterlife, and not an understanding of the day-to-day life affairs with which magic realism tends concern itself.

Mythology as a sacred narrative examines the world and tries to explain its reality, often through the use of the magical and supernatural. Similarly, folklore uses the same traditional, mythological understanding of world to examine psychological experiences and common themes and motifs of the human experience.

But is that not so unlike magic realism? On the other hand, is that not so unlike much of fantasy as well?

It is here, where the magical merges with one's understanding of reality, where the differences between the two genres dissolve. It seems to me that one's conception and understanding of "reality" is key to distinguishing the speculative genres, if they are to be distinguished at all (from both each other and from straight realism). Much like in Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," context is the key to the interpretation of a text. The nature of reality, how one perceives it, and how the reader perceives it, can all drastically change the interpretation of a story and even its very genre. If one writes a science fiction narrative, and all the technologies are then invented, what is left that makes the work science fiction? If a writer or reader believes in the experienced reality described by a story—literally or metaphorically—what makes it speculative anymore?

A final thought is to consider what kind of questions motivate the different forms of stories: if fantasy and science fiction answer "what if," and myth and legend answer "why" or "how," then magic realism and surrealism answer "how does it feel?"

In the end, magic realism are just mundane stories that happen to be magical.

Or perhaps more simply, and more magically, magic realism are just mundane stories told by people who (still) happen to believe in magic.

And maybe I just like to tell fairy tales.

The Mahou Shoujo Monomyth

(actually posted on May 21; reposted from here)

I'm suddenly tempted to write a treatise proposing the steps for a heroine's journey by analyzing the structure of various magical girl anime.

I posted that here on December 22, 2012, the day after the world ended. Half a year later, I decided "Okay, I'm going to actually do this." This is the result.

While the Hero's Journey actually works perfectly well for a female hero, I do see lots of major deviations from it in works that I would consider prototypical of a "Heroine's Journey". It's hard to make conclusions about what constitutes a "man's journey" versus a "woman's journey" without falling neck-deep in gender biases and stereotypical gender roles, but I'm going to try. I'm not nearly as well-read on classical texts as many people I know, so for better or worse, I'm building off of modern examples.

In particular, as I mentioned, I am thinking of the genre of magical girl anime, and series like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, and Magical Girl Madoka Magica. I am also considering Western shows likeBuffy the Vampire Slayer, which I think can basically be considered a Western take on the magical girl genre.

I'm just going to go through the steps of the monomyth as given on Wikipedia and give some of my thoughts on them...

In the very first steps in the Hero's Journey, you have the Call to Adventure and Refusal of the Call. But in works I consider Heroine's Journeys, it usually goes the opposite way. The heroine seeks adventure, but her desire is refused, often by society or some other artificial hindrance. Or, there is a call, but she doesn't refuse it. There is often less internal conflict over whether to accept the call in a Heroine's Journey, and more external conflict due to outside forces that make acceptance of the call difficult for the heroine.

I think Supernatural Aid is a rather gender-neutral step, and I'd leave this one alone, as I think it works basically the same in both.

Then you have Crossing of the First Threshold and the Belly of the Whale. Here I think is where the Heroine's Journey begins to deviate further from the classical Hero's Journey. In the male version, there is a departure from the hero's familiar world, and a journey into an unfamiliar world which is new and different from the old. I think it works differently for heroines. Rather than a departure, there is often a revelation that the familiar world is different than it appears, and there is the discovery of new and unfamiliar things in the same world. The post above me mentions a "Secret World" as a possible step in the Heroine's Journey, and I think that fits this idea perfectly. I think the Belly of the Whale works sort of the same as in the Hero's Journey, but represents a different kind of separation from the old self, since in the heroine's journey, the two worlds are actually the same. For a heroine, this could represent an acceptance that the Secret World is the real one, and the familiar world is a facade, for example. These steps are exemplified by the revelation that vampires and demons exist and slayers are born to fight them, that witches exist and magical girls exist to fight them, and that there are secret duels and a floating castle above Ohtori Academy.

I'd add a step before the Road of Trials, called something like Collection of Companions. The male monomyth is very much about a lone hero, and even though in many versions there are companions, there is not nearly as much emphasis placed on the idea of friends and companions, but I think it's emphasized much more explicitly in the stories I'm considering Heroine's Journeys.

I think the Road of Trials can fit into the Heroine's Journey in some ways, but I'll introduce one way it doesn't fit, which I think is a key difference in how I think the Heroine's Journey differs from the Hero's Journey: the goal. The male monomyth is extremely goal-oriented, even if that goal is an arbitrary MacGuffin to justify the adventure in the first place. The Hero's Journey is thoroughly and essentially quest-like. The Heroine's Journey is antithetical to this. Maybe a short-term goal of defeating the Big Bad is introduced, but that's rarely ever the main goal, and the "goal" in a Heroine's Journey tend to be much more abstract. Buffy must slay vampires and protect the world. The magical girls in Madoka must fight witches to protect the world. Utena wants to become a prince and protect Anthy. In a Hero's Journey, the Road of Trails is a path toward the goal at the end of the quest. In a Heroine's Journey, it's often part of a never-ending struggle.

Now we get to some of the really problematic ones. The Meeting with the Goddess, the Woman as Temptress, and Atonement with the Father.

I don't think it's as simple as replacing the Meeting with the Goddess with a God, and since love and companionship is often emphasized from the beginning with a Heroine's Journey, the encounter of love doesn't fully fit. There are examples of it, but I don't think it's a necessary step in a Heroine's Journey. I would replace it with maybe something like Testing of Friendships.

The Woman as Temptress obviously doesn't work, and I don't think the whole step really works in a Heroine's Journey at all, even if you replace the woman with a man, or just consider it in terms of a false and seductively easy answer to troubles. That doesn't really happen in the stories I consider Heroine's Journeys. Rather, there's often a Rejection of the Burden. This isn't quite like refusal of the call. Instead, it's the heroine's struggle with the endless nature of her struggle, questioning whether it will in fact ever end, or if it's even possible, or if it was a good idea in the first place.

Likewise, for Atonement with the Father, I don't think you can just replace the father with a mother, though again there examples of that being used. Since the essence of this step is essentially about being initiated by a figure of ultimate power over the hero's life, I don't think it fits with the Heroine's Journey at all. I think the Heroine's Journey rejects that, and instead I'd replace it with Acceptance of the Self. This is the step after the heroine overcomes Rejection of the Burden, when she decides to believe in herself as a heroine. It's about believing in her own heroism.

Like Supernatural Aid, I think Apotheosis is pretty gender-neutral, and works perfectly fine in the Heroine's Journey.

Finally, I don't think the Ultimate Boon has any place in the Heroine's Journey at all. The Heroine's Journey isn't quest-oriented in the first place, and so there's no point to the step. The Heroine's Journey will never end as long as the world remains the same.

Which brings us to...

Revolutionize the World!

I'm just going to group together all of the "Return"-type steps, since they're basically just alternate endings to the Hero's Journey, and rarely do they all occur in the same story, unlike the other steps. However, they all carry the same theme in the hero making some kind of peace between his old, familiar world, and the new world he has encountered on the adventure. This doesn't work at all in the Heroine's Journey, because part of the inherent difference I've suggested is that these worlds are different faces of the same world. The Secret World completely overlaps with the heroine's previous, familiar world. So how is this handled in the Heroine's Journey? I think the Heroine's Journey tends to end by rejecting the system itself. The heroine always picks a third option.

That's why the final step is Revolutionize the World. In believing in her own heroism, the heroine develops the power to overcome the endless struggle by changing the rules themselves. The heroine neither stays in the Secret World, nor does the heroine return to her previous world (which would in fact be possible anyway, because you can't un-see the Masquerade). Rather the heroine changes the world itself, and leaves both her original world and the Secret World behind.

(spoilers abound below)

Utena destroys the castle and leaves Ohtori Academy, freeing Anthy from her burden. In the movie version, Utena and Anthy leave for the real world together. Nanoha rejects that her enemies are enemies at all, and in defeating them, she "befriends" them, and turns them into her companions. Madoka uses her power to rewrite the laws of the universe so that magical girls don't become witches, finally ending the cycle of despair, and becomes a god who exists outside of time. Buffy rejects that she is a lone heroine (incidentally, a rule initiated by men who must have subscribed to the Hero's Journey) and awakens slayer powers in every potential; then she finally takes the fight to Hell itself, destroys the Hellmouth once and for all, and leaves Sunnydale.

(end spoilers)

I'd love to hear what everyone thinks of this potential model of the Heroine's Journey. I think I've done my best to avoid ingraining any inherent gender biases or gender roles into it, and instead build the steps from the stories I love most about heroines and the common motifs they exhibit. I also think it can work perfectly well for a male character (and can think of at least one anime example that does follow this pattern with a male hero). But this is my idea of a woman taking a woman's journey, a Heroine's Journey.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone Final – And of the Native American Dream…

(actually covers June 18-21 and August 23; reposted from here)

We went to Yellowstone. We did.

But I won’t bore you with the details of that, because they’re details you could find in any tourist guide or travel book, and that’s not what’s important here.

The point is we went searching for the Native American dream, and to understand the way this twisted world and our machinations and industry on the body of the earth have changed and corrupted and re-inspired it, and where it lies today, and a path toward hope. We came looking for a glimpse of a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, and somewhere along the way, dizzy, dirty, and overwhelmed, we lost track of it.

While we were doing things like looking for fossils of ancient, esoteric sea creatures in the rugged, rocky hills on the road to Cody (and ending up chasing horny toads instead) where the sleek, brown teeth of prehistoric squid lay sprawled across the pebbles like so many seashells, or while we were standing dangerously on the edges of cliffs at Devil’s Kitchen (or Devil’s Lunchbox as Patrick often called it) where the painted canyon below us spilled out in an overflow of pastel colors and wild, jagged formations that looked like a madman’s map of Mordor, or while we were looking at waterfalls and massive, man-made dams at the edge of Yellowstone and climbing hills we weren’t supposed to, to look down at the great crowd of students we were supposed to be watching, or while we were shivering and wrapped in sleeping bags on the icy, windy shores of this great, ocean-sized lake that appears out of nowhere in the center of the caldera that is Yellowstone and greets you like the arctic sea, while we were walking amidst the hot springs and geysers that funnel boiling water from under the earth and reek of sulfur and cover the blue sky in thick, gray steam, while we were waiting for the bison we’ve been looking for for so long to cross the roads while tourists took tens of hundreds of pictures, while we were hiking along the circumference of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and gazing in awe at its walls of yellow stone for which Yellowstone wasn’t named, while we were chasing bears and hitting antelopes and herding high schoolers…

The truth is I left Yellowstone more than a month ago. We drove down to Salt Lake City in the long, restless PM, and took a plane out the next morning, and finally returned home to Indianapolis, red-eyed and sleepless, after an eight hour layover in Denver. The journey was finished, but the story wasn’t over yet. Something was missing.

So here I am, sitting in my cool, air-conditioned apartment in West Lafayette, on the third day of classes re-starting, sipping green tea and listening to music from the stereo speakers attached to my HDTV, staring at an article about how 2,000 acres of land in the Black Hills called Pe’ Sla, an area sacred to the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arikara, and Arapahoe, is about to be auctioned off by a private owner to the highest bidder. The tribes have raised money in hopes of buying back the land once taken from them and still sacred to them, but the “property” is expected to sell for approximately eight times the value they’ve raised. The state of South Dakota will likely put a road directly through the sacred areas, and open the land for private development.

This is not the Native American dream.

On our last nights out there, in our cabins in West Yellowstone, we sat and talked in hushed tones about all the things we’d seen. The sadness. The greed. The hopelessness. The false hope. The despair. The futility. The beauty. The reaping and weeping.

We talked about Leon, the Lakota small business owner we met on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, who owns a small but popular coffee shop. He’d talked to us about his struggles on and off the reservation. His attempts to do things that weren’t designed to be done, here and elsewhere. His return to the reservation. His opening of the coffee shop. Today, he is successful. He’s writing a book. There is a glimmer of the dream.

I wonder if he knows about this auction. I wonder if he’s tried to do anything. I wonder if there’s anything he can do. (I know he can make a damn good cup of coffee.)

The stars on those nights out there were clear, but the future they foretold was not.

As I sat there, listening to my friends and compatriots on the journey, I began to wonder if we weren’t misguided from the very beginning. We came this way in search of answers, but we’ve found only scars and scar tissue and more unanswered questions. We’ve learned so many things, but we still don’t understand what they mean. We don’t understand a thing. The things we’ve learned along the way are the smoke of a distant signal fire, but where does it lead? It’s dim, and there’s a storm in the distance and a flood at our backs, but though the rain will muddy and obscure the little trail we’re on, it’s what’s needed to invigorate the earth beneath our feet. The smoke and the distant fire we see is a sign that though the path we tread may be a lonely one, there have been others on it before us, and we are not alone. We are never alone. And we need to get there, to tend the fire at the other end of this rocky path, and keep it lit, and kindle it to burn brighter for those that follow us. The people we’ve talked to are waiting for us. The dreams of so many are waiting on us.

I think maybe we were wrong — maybe I was wrong — to think that we’d find a dream of any kind out there. What we found were memories. Or maybe prayers. But maybe we needed to go out there to find the dream within us. Maybe I needed to go.

To learn what needs to be done. To learn what should not be done. To learn from the successes and failures and mistakes. To learn from the tears shed and the stories behind them. To rediscover things forgotten, but never lost. That some things we can never buy back, but some things we can change. That you can sell your soul, but never your heart.

I hope one day to return to the Black Hills and walk in Pe’ Sla, as I walked up Bear Butte, on its stony paths lined with trees with branches tied by ribbons of prayer, where no wars were ever fought and no battles ever joined, where people went for peace, and where all tribes could go to talk to the wind and the earth. I hope I can bring my children to a place that isn’t a parking lot, where we don’t need water slides to feel the rush of energy, and the stars are clear and the future is bright.

I don’t know what will happen, but I can hope.

But we know it’s not enough to keep hoping.

So we will keep working. There is a dream to be tended. Our friends are waiting.

Update: Two days after the writing of this post, the auction of Pe' Sla was cancelled by the owners for reasons they declined to make public; the sacred land remains private property, publicly listed, and its ultimate fate remains uncertain.