This world will continue, with or without humans
Going through the boxes of “stuff” I just couldn’t throw out the week I was doing a final clean out of my Mom’s apartment last spring, (we moved her to an assisted living facility closer to where I live), I came across a 5 subject, spiral bound notebook manufactured by Herald Square and distributed by F.W. Woolworth Co. Its 130, narrow-ruled sheets were filled with my Grandmother Jessie Anne Creswell Seifert’s school teacher handwriting (it was extremely even and legible, and yes she was a school teacher). Although most of her entries were not dated, I did find reference to the 1970’s and 1980’s and I suspect some entries were from well before then. (Grandmother died in March of 1994 at the impressive age of 96. More impressive is that she graduated from Maryville College in 1920; four years after her older sister Lula Baxter Creswell (Rankin) graduated in 1916 from the same institution! Their father, Marion Gambol Creswell, believed the women should be educated as they were those who raised the children.)
One of Jessie Anne’s writings was of the speech that Sitting Bull gave in 1875, one year before the battle of Little Big Horn. She copied the words of this speech into her notebook after which she commented “If anyone has a sense of history, it is the American Indian. In Boulder [Colorado],Tom Fredericks, an Indian lawyer, treasures this speech. He believes it explains the basic conflict between Indian and non-Indian culture”.
As I perused my LinkedIn feed today I delighted to see some other references for further exploring trust and respect not only among humans, but among all things. One of these was a You Tube video of an interview of Oren R. Lyons Jr., a Native American Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan. The Seneca are one of the Six Nations of the historic Haudenosaunee Confederacy. After I listened to this (posted in 2016, but based on some of his references, I suspect it was conducted a decade or so earlier?), I told my husband we had just “gone to church”. Organized religion is not my thing; my idea of a place of worship is outside listening to the sermons nature whispers, sings, trumpets and sometimes screams. One of my favorite places to be is in the gardens, digging in the dirt, caressing the plants and rocks, letting the elements revive all my senses, rejuvenate my spirit and fill my heart with hope.
Chief Lyons’ message sounded so similar to that of Sitting Bull and reaffirmed my belief in the wisdom of indigenous peoples. I so want our current culture, especially the children for whom the future exists, to embrace and embody this wisdom. We adults have much to learn from our elders and our youngsters. Below is Sitting Bull’s speech, thank you Grandmother.
“We will yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors the same right as we claim to inhabit the land. But now we have to deal with another breed of people. They were few and weak when our forefathers first met them and now they are many and greedy. They choose to till the soil.
Love of possessions is a disease with them. They would make rules to suit themselves. They have a religion which they follow when it suits them. They claim this Mother Earth of ours for their own and fence their neighbors away from them. They degrade the landscape with buildings and their waste. They compel the material earth to produce excessively and when it fails they force it to take medicine to produce more. This is an evil.
This new population is like a river overflowing its banks and destroying all in its path.
We cannot live the way these people live and we cannot live beside them. They have little respect for nature and they offend our ideals.
Just seven years ago we signed a treaty by which the buffalo country was to be ours and unspoiled forever. Now they want it. They want the gold in it. Will we yield? They will kill me before I will give up the land that is my land.”
Sigh.
