Thursday, December 29, 2022

“Our Relatives’ Things” by Charmaine White Face

“Our Relatives’ Things”


By Charmaine White Face


On Dec. 29, 1890, in a small valley near Wounded Knee Creek, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, shooting Gatling guns from the surrounding hills, killed more than 300 mostly elderly men, women and children. The victims who were not shot were chased down by soldiers on horseback and either shot with pistols or stabbed to death with long swords, especially the children and babies. This occurred after the soldiers had gone through the camp collecting the few rifles used for hunting by the last remaining adult men.


The victims were the people from part of the Minnecoujou band of the Tituwan subnation of the larger Oceti Sakowin called the Great Sioux Nation by the soldiers. They were trying to reach Pine Ridge village and were asking for protection under Red Cloud. One of the survivors said that the massacre was a cover-up of the assassination of Big Foot, the leader of the group. The survivor saw a soldier go into Big Foot’s tent then heard a shot ring out after which the soldiers opened fire from the surrounding hills.


The author’s great-great grandmother was there and although she survived, her name, White Face, is on the obelisk and marked as killed.


The other day, one of my granddaughters called and said, “Grandma, did you hear? They’re returning articles from a museum in Barre, Vermont, of things that belonged to our relatives that were massacred at Wounded Knee.”


“What?” I said. “What kind of things?”


She said, “Things they were wearing or had when they were murdered at Wounded Knee in 1890. There are even baby moccasins, and little kids’ moccasins in there. The soldiers took them off the bodies and they kept them in a museum all these years. Now they’re giving them back.”


As descendants of survivors of Wounded Knee, it is our relatives’ things that we are talking about so it hit home really hard. What was in there that might have belonged to our relatives? Moccasins? A shirt? A shawl?


Then she asked, “What do you think should happen to these things?”

 


“That’s easy,” I said. “When our relatives die, we burn their things. That is our old way. There should be a sacred fire built at Wounded Knee and all those things reverently put in that fire. Then Peta, the Spirit of Fire, can instantly return the things back to our relatives.”


“But,” she added, “the Oglala Tribal government wants to build a museum and put them all in there at Wounded Knee.”


“On no,” I said. “Those things are being moved from a wasicu (white man) museum in Vermont, then our own people are going to put them in a museum at Wounded Knee? That’s not our way. Where is the respect?” I asked. “Where is the spirituality? Putting them in a museum is wasicu thinking.”


“Yes,” she said, “and it all has to do with money. Money to build the museum. Money to hire the workers to work at the museum. Money to attract tourists to come to look at our relatives' things that were stripped from them during the massacre. It’s so gross!”


“It makes me so sad,” I said, “that our own people have lost the respect that used to be shown to the dead. How would they like it if someone came into their house, killed their mom, or grandma, or children, then stole their shoes and clothes and other things and put them in a museum. It doesn’t matter if it happened a hundred years ago or yesterday. Those are our relatives’ things. We still have to show respect.

 

“It makes me even more sad to realize that the colonization is still at work dividing us even as we want to show respect to our own relatives. No, my girl,” I said, “we’ll just have to keep praying for all of our relatives’ good health, even those that want to act like the wasicu and make money off of our relatives’ things. It’s kind of like grave robbing to me.”


[Twenty (20) United States Medals of Honor were given to the soldiers who participated in the Massacre of Wounded Knee.]

Paha Sapa
[Black Hills, South Dakota]

####


Charmaine White Face, or Zumila Wobaga, (75) is an Oglala Tituwan Oceti Sakowin elder, teacher, writer, and can be reached at cwhiteface@gmail.com

 

 
 
 
 

OFFICE OF THE HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

1994/45.  Draft United Nations declaration on the rights of

Indigenous Peoples

The Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities

Article 36

(Original)

Indigenous peoples have the right to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements concluded with States or their successors, according to their original spirit and intent, and to have States honour and respect such treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements.  Conflicts and disputes which cannot otherwise be settled should be submitted to competent international bodies agreed to by all parties concerned.
 
********************* 

1894 Sioux Nation Treaty Council

Statement of Charmaine White Face

Spokesperson for the 1894 Sioux Nation Treaty Council

United Nations Human Rights Council
 51st Session - Geneva, Switzerland

Panel discussion on the negative impact of the legacies of colonialism
 


Saturday, December 24, 2022

Cochabamba Protocols: Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth - SELF DETERMINATION and INTERDEPENDENCE

 Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth

 DECEMBER 24, 2022

MIDNIGHT


SELF DETERMINATION and INTERDEPENDENCE

 

December 25, 2022

*******

The Cochabamba Protocols 

Sunset

December 23, 2022
COMPLEMENTARITY
 Sees Far, Sees Within
************
Noon
December 22, 2022
INCLUSION
Inclusion not Assimilation

****************** 
Dawn
 December 21, 2022
RESPECT
From Cognition to Recognition,
From Recognition to Respect

Huitziltonal Matlaclti Tochtli Xihuitl
21 December 2022

“Inevitably, cultural self-government and cultural self-determination must precede their political and economic counterparts if these latter areas are to have any substance and significance.”

 

The Nations Within – The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty

By Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle, ©1964 

 Dawn of December 21, 2022

RESPECT
From Cognition to Recognition,
From Recognition to Respect


Background

 

It was to befall the Maya K’iche ceremonial leader Policarpo Chaj to be the emissary of the Maya Nations of Iximuleuw [Guatemala] and the Nahuat Nations of Cuzcátlan [El Salvador] when he traveled to the sacred S’moadoag Mountain of the O’otham Nations in Arizona to conduct the Maya Calendar ceremony on the winter solstice of December 21, 2012.  The ceremony marked the completion of the the calendar cycle of the 13th Baktun consisting of 5,130 years, where each Baktun is a count 144,000 days comprised of 20 kʼatun cycles of the ancient Maya Long Count Calendar.

 

The ceremony had been invoked by the Izkaloteka, Nahuatl relatives of the O’otham who trace their ancestral Azteca-Tolteca lineages to the territory of Huehuetlapallan, the Ancient Red Lands of the north which corresponds to the watershed of the Great Colorado River in Arizona.

 

The migration of the Tolteca south into Mexico is said to have originated from Huehuetlapallan led by Mixcoatl, whose name means “Cloud Serpent”.  Mixcoatl is also the name given to the great celestial arc of star clusters commonly known today as the Milky Way galaxy.

 

According to legend, Mixcoatl is the father of Quetzalcoatl.

 


In Mexico, the Tolteca established the center of their confederation at Tula in the state of Hidalgo.  It was from Tula, Hidalgo in the year 1054 that Topilzín Acxitl Quetzalcóhuatl, the great iconic leader of the Toltecayotl, departed to establish the Tolteca settlements of Izalco and Cuzcátlan in what is now called El Salvador. Also, Tula is named in the Maya sacred narrative of the Popul Vuh as a primary location of the spring of knowledge from whence the ancestral calendar emerged.

 

Purpose

 

While most of the narrative around the 2012 date corresponds to the markets of popular reporting and cultural expropriation aimed for the general public, the event in Arizona was distinct.

 

With the 13th Baktun ceremonies which occurred at Smoadoag (South Mountain) in Arizona on the winter solstice of 2012, a millennial cycle of historical continuity among the Maya-Tolteca, Nahua-Izkaloteka-O’otham also came to maturity, strengthening and advancing the international agenda of self-determination as Indigenous Peoples. As was noted by Vine Deloria, any agenda of self-determination by any peoples requires the cultural component as base. There can be no effective agenda of indigenous self-determination within the conceptual constraints of the colonizers calendric systems. Such constructs are platforms of reduction and control, commodification and dehumanization, and ultimately alienation from the natural world.

 

The celebration of the fulfillment of the 13th Baktun on the winter solstice of 2012 has as its measurement of cyclical proportion a fundamental set unit of 20 days which is marked by the Maya Long Count starting on August 13, 3114 BCE.  Known today as the cicitlalmina, the original date has correspondence to the annual appearance of the Perseid Meteor Shower every year in mid-August.  Today, the Tolteka-Izkaloteka continue to celebrate the annual arrival of the cicitlalmina.  The active imagery of this astronomical phenomena symbolically depicts the falling of rain upon the original milpa (cornfield) of the ancestral nations of Anahuac.

 

With this history and foundation in place, in 2020 the Continental Commission Abya Yala called for the Izcalli Abya Yala Continental Indigenous Uprising and Emergence to coincide and synchronize with the Spring-Fall equinoxes of that year. 

 


The call of the Izcalli Abya Yala of 2020 was to vision, to organize and exercise the Right of Self Determination as Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples acting in Continental Alliance and Confederation in defense of the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth. Since 2020, the processes of uprising and emergence, evaluation and organizing from local-regional, continental-global scales of incidence by the Indigenous Nations of Abya Yala continues to develop and mature.

 



The Cochabamba Protocols

The World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia took place in 2010.  The event was attended by some 30,000 people from over 100 countries.

 

After Cochabamba, the conceptual and political disconnect between the rhetoric of the “progressive” and “ecologically sustainable” discourse at the international levels collapsed of its own weight.  It became evident, not for the first time of course, but in today’s time that there was an urgent need to intentionally shift the paradigm of context of the global climate beyond the limiting and controlling agendas of the “sovereign state” Westphalian system (AKA the UN system) and move strategically into regeneration of a global set of relationships of INTERDEPENDENCE as Nations of Peoples of Mother Earth.

 

In Cochabamba at the World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, these principles were hailed as the Cochabamba Protocols, but when Bolivia dropped the ball and abandoned leadership of the initiative, all of the global movements of social justice who saw the Climate Chaos crisis as the common field of struggle were left in the lurch.

 

The Cochabamba Protocols

Respect

Inclusion

Complementarity

Self Determination and Interdependence

 


Today in 2022, in the wake of the recent failures of the UN systems to competently address the climate crisis impacting the planet and all humanity, the call is now for the invocation of the defense of the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth as a fundamental and complementary principle and strategic framework in order to interconnect, interrelate and move forward outside of the fractured and competing agendas of the states, and the economic interests of supra-national corporate dominion and exploitation that control and define the terms of the climate change crisis in terms of “development”.

 

This year 2022 will mark the first ten years of commemoration of the 13th Baktun ceremonies of 2012 that Policarpo Chaj conducted at the sacred site of the Smoadoag, South Mountain. Ten years from now, the first twenty years of the current Baktun will have been fulfilled, which will complete the first of 20 cycles of 20 years of kʼatun, a count to be completed 400 years from now. Seven generations and regenerations of the Original Nations of Abya Yala will then continue on to the next level of the sacred cycle of Baktun.

 

This time of accounting, remembrance and sacred regeneration is to be marked by the Izkaloteka during the Huitziltonal, Hummingbird Sun ceremonies of commemoration during the Winter Solstice Sun of December 21, 2022.


In a moment’s time

There is a place

Where all that came to be

Arrives

In grace

then-there

Here-Now

Nican Tlacah

 

CEMANAHUAC

Abya Yala

 


 

 

In furtherance of which we affirm and now proclaim our mutual commitment to defend and protect the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth as a fundamental tenet of International Law which integrates the Right of Self Determination of the Nations of Indigenous Peoples to intervene in the defense of Mother Earth and to take necessary corrective action in exercise of the right of Free, Prior and Informed Consent in defense of their territories and nations.

Continental Commission Abya Yala






The Geography of Self Determination

 

 *************

May 29, 2022

NTCP: New Technologies for Corporate Privilege and the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth

Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee in response to request for input on new climate technologies and human rights per UN HRC Resolution 48/14

from

TONATIERRA

 

Friday, December 23, 2022

Cochabamba Protocols: Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth - COMPLEMENTARITY


Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth

SUNSET

 COMPLEMENTARITY

  Dawn
RESPECT
December 21, 2022
*****
Noon
INCLUSION
December 22, 2022
*******
Sunset
December 23, 2022
COMPLEMENTARITY
************
Midnight
December 24, 2022
SELF DETERMINATION and INTERDEPENDENCE

 

 

Thursday, December 22, 2022

Cochabamba Protocols: Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth - INCLUSION


Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth

N O O N



Huitziltonal Matlaclti Tochtli Xihuitl
22 December 2022

“Inevitably, cultural self-government and cultural self-determination must precede their political and economic counterparts if these latter areas are to have any substance and significance.”

 

The Nations Within – The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty

By Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle, ©1964 

 Noon of December 22, 2022

INCLUSION

***********************

CEMANAHUAC

Background

 

It was to befall the Maya K’iche ceremonial leader Policarpo Chaj to be the emissary of the Maya Nations of Iximuleuw [Guatemala] and the Nahuat Nations of Cuzcátlan [El Salvador] when he traveled to the sacred S’moadoag Mountain of the O’otham Nations in Arizona to conduct the Maya Calendar ceremony on the winter solstice of December 21, 2012.  The ceremony marked the completion of the the calendar cycle of the 13th Baktun consisting of 5,130 years, where each Baktun is a count 144,000 days comprised of 20 kʼatun cycles of the ancient Maya Long Count Calendar.

 

The ceremony had been invoked by the Izkaloteka, Nahuatl relatives of the O’otham who trace their ancestral Azteca-Tolteca lineages to the territory of Huehuetlapallan, the Ancient Red Lands of the north which corresponds to the watershed of the Great Colorado River in Arizona.

 

The migration of the Tolteca south into Mexico is said to have originated from Huehuetlapallan led by Mixcoatl, whose name means “Cloud Serpent”.  Mixcoatl is also the name given to the great celestial arc of star clusters commonly known today as the Milky Way galaxy.

 

According to legend, Mixcoatl is the father of Quetzalcoatl.

 Dawn
RESPECT
December 21, 2022
*****
Noon
INCLUSION
December 22, 2022
*******
Sunset
December 23, 2022
COMPLEMENTARITY
************
Midnight
December 24, 2022
SELF DETERMINATION and INTERDEPENDENCE

 

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Cochabamba Protocols: Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth - RESPECT

 Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth

 

D A W N 


Huitziltonal Matlaclti Tochtli Xihuitl
21 December 2022

“Inevitably, cultural self-government and cultural self-determination must precede their political and economic counterparts if these latter areas are to have any substance and significance.”

 

The Nations Within – The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty

By Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle, ©1964 

 Dawn of December 21, 2022

RESPECT
From Cognition to Recognition,
From Recognition to Respect

***********************


Background

 

It was to befall the Maya K’iche ceremonial leader Policarpo Chaj to be the emissary of the Maya Nations of Iximuleuw [Guatemala] and the Nahuat Nations of Cuzcátlan [El Salvador] when he traveled to the sacred S’moadoag Mountain of the O’otham Nations in Arizona to conduct the Maya Calendar ceremony on the winter solstice of December 21, 2012.  The ceremony marked the completion of the the calendar cycle of the 13th Baktun consisting of 5,130 years, where each Baktun is a count 144,000 days comprised of 20 kʼatun cycles of the ancient Maya Long Count Calendar.

 

The ceremony had been invoked by the Izkaloteka, Nahuatl relatives of the O’otham who trace their ancestral Azteca-Tolteca lineages to the territory of Huehuetlapallan, the Ancient Red Lands of the north which corresponds to the watershed of the Great Colorado River in Arizona.

 

The migration of the Tolteca south into Mexico is said to have originated from Huehuetlapallan led by Mixcoatl, whose name means “Cloud Serpent”.  Mixcoatl is also the name given to the great celestial arc of star clusters commonly known today as the Milky Way galaxy.

 

According to legend, Mixcoatl is the father of Quetzalcoatl.

 


In Mexico, the Tolteca established the center of their confederation at Tula in the state of Hidalgo.  It was from Tula, Hidalgo in the year 1054 that Topilzín Acxitl Quetzalcóhuatl, the great iconic leader of the Toltecayotl, departed to establish the Tolteca settlements of Izalco and Cuzcátlan in what is now called El Salvador. Also, Tula is named in the Maya sacred narrative of the Popul Vuh as a primary location of the spring of knowledge from whence the ancestral calendar emerged.

 

Purpose

 

While most of the narrative around the 2012 date corresponds to the markets of popular reporting and cultural expropriation aimed for the general public, the event in Arizona was distinct.

 

With the 13th Baktun ceremonies which occurred at Smoadoag (South Mountain) in Arizona on the winter solstice of 2012, a millennial cycle of historical continuity among the Maya-Tolteca, Nahua-Izkaloteka-O’otham also came to maturity, strengthening and advancing the international agenda of self-determination as Indigenous Peoples. As was noted by Vine Deloria, any agenda of self-determination by any peoples requires the cultural component as base. There can be no effective agenda of indigenous self-determination within the conceptual constraints of the colonizers calendric systems. Such constructs are platforms of reduction and control, commodification and dehumanization, and ultimately alienation from the natural world.

 

The celebration of the fulfillment of the 13th Baktun on the winter solstice of 2012 has as its measurement of cyclical proportion a fundamental set unit of 20 days which is marked by the Maya Long Count starting on August 13, 3114 BCE.  Known today as the cicitlalmina, the original date has correspondence to the annual appearance of the Perseid Meteor Shower every year in mid-August.  Today, the Tolteka-Izkaloteka continue to celebrate the annual arrival of the cicitlalmina.  The active imagery of this astronomical phenomena symbolically depicts the falling of rain upon the original milpa (cornfield) of the ancestral nations of Anahuac.

 

With this history and foundation in place, in 2020 the Continental Commission Abya Yala called for the Izcalli Abya Yala Continental Indigenous Uprising and Emergence to coincide and synchronize with the Spring-Fall equinoxes of that year. 

 


The call of the Izcalli Abya Yala of 2020 was to vision, to organize and exercise the Right of Self Determination as Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples acting in Continental Alliance and Confederation in defense of the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth. Since 2020, the processes of uprising and emergence, evaluation and organizing from local-regional, continental-global scales of incidence by the Indigenous Nations of Abya Yala continues to develop and mature.

 


The Cochabamba Protocols

 

The World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia took place in 2010.  The event was attended by some 30,000 people from over 100 countries.

 

After Cochabamba, the conceptual and political disconnect between the rhetoric of the “progressive” and “ecologically sustainable” discourse at the international levels collapsed of its own weight.  It became evident, not for the first time of course, but in today’s time that there was an urgent need to intentionally shift the paradigm of context of the global climate beyond the limiting and controlling agendas of the “sovereign state” Westphalian system (AKA the UN system) and move strategically into regeneration of a global set of relationships of INTERDEPENDENCE as Nations of Peoples of Mother Earth.

 

In Cochabamba at the World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, these principles were hailed as the Cochabamba Protocols, but when Bolivia dropped the ball and abandoned leadership of the initiative, all of the global movements of social justice who saw the Climate Chaos crisis as the common field of struggle were left in the lurch.

 

The Cochabamba Protocols

 

Respect

Inclusion

Complementarity

Self Determination and Interdependence

 


Today in 2022, in the wake of the recent failures of the UN systems to competently address the climate crisis impacting the planet and all humanity, the call is now for the invocation of the defense of the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth as a fundamental and complementary principle and strategic framework in order to interconnect, interrelate and move forward outside of the fractured and competing agendas of the states, and the economic interests of supra-national corporate dominion and exploitation that control and define the terms of the climate change crisis in terms of “development”.

 

This year 2022 will mark the first ten years of commemoration of the 13th Baktun ceremonies of 2012 that Policarpo Chaj conducted at the sacred site of the Smoadoag, South Mountain. Ten years from now, the first twenty years of the current Baktun will have been fulfilled, which will complete the first of 20 cycles of 20 years of kʼatun, a count to be completed 400 years from now. Seven generations and regenerations of the Original Nations of Abya Yala will then continue on to the next level of the sacred cycle of Baktun.

 

This time of accounting, remembrance and sacred regeneration is to be marked by the Izkaloteka during the Huitziltonal, Hummingbird Sun ceremonies of commemoration during the Winter Solstice Sun of December 21, 2022.

 


In a moment’s time

There is a place

Where all that came to be

Arrives

In grace

then-there

Here-Now

Nican Tlacah

 

CEMANAHUAC

Abya Yala

 


 

 

In furtherance of which we affirm and now proclaim our mutual commitment to defend and protect the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth as a fundamental tenet of International Law which integrates the Right of Self Determination of the Nations of Indigenous Peoples to intervene in the defense of Mother Earth and to take necessary corrective action in exercise of the right of Free, Prior and Informed Consent in defense of their territories and nations.

Continental Commission Abya Yala




 Dawn
RESPECT
December 21, 2022
*****
Noon
INCLUSION
December 22, 2022
*******
Sunset
December 23, 2022
COMPLEMENTARITY
************
Midnight
December 24, 2022
SELF DETERMINATION and INTERDEPENDENCE