Language more important than land - academic (fwd link)

[Richard Zane Smith]

ha! love that "calcified synapses"
hey, it was a gem...needed to be said!
Some of your story is familiar, in that my kids were also raised in the SW,
Arizona and New Mexico, so when we pulled up our stakes and moved "back" to
the area of our Wyandot(te) people in the corner of NE Okl..... it was a
severe land and culture shock (as your dog, experincing that strange
prickly cut grass. )

I have a friend who encountered a Navajo boy growing up on the inner city
streets of London.
Even if he were to come "home" to Dinétah(Navajoland)...what would that be
like?
like an astronauts child growing up on Mars?.....visiting earth....?

I think "pilgrimages" as you described to return to the source of your
peoples memory is often necessary.
The Georgian Bay is also our Wendat ancestral homelands before the great
dispersal in 1649, and unfortunately
many Wendat/Wyandot pilgrimages there are to hold reburials, to take care
of our dead, disrupted by bulldozers and "progress". Burial grounds
(without rows of headstones) seem to be thought of as "archaeological data"
and we are often
burying ancestral remains that have been sawed in pieces, and MOST their
grave goods somehow vanish into the vaults and shelves of convenient
academic forgetfulness.

our ceremonies we conduct here are more like pictographs ,
symbolic pictures of something that was once as tangible as aching winter
hunger, or real joy in finding wild strawberries
to make faces shine.
Now we hold ceremonies to remember our ancestors delight and thankfulness .
But the ancestral joy in finding those little red fruits? we can only
pretend to know....

unę́h!
Richard




On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Rolland Nadjiwon <mikinakn at shaw.ca> wrote:

> **
> Well Richard...this just came back at me, so, I guess I did share it with
> the list instead of just you. I can't begin to imagine what my 'future'
> will be like...calcified synapses...
>
>
> wahjeh
> rolland nadjiwon
> ________________
>  "I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty." George Burns
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:
> ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU] *On Behalf Of *Rolland Nadjiwon
> *Sent:* September-25-12 1:38 AM
>
> *To:* ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
> *Subject:* Re: [ILAT] Language more important than land - academic (fwd
> link)
>
>  It now seems so far 'after the fact', to post to the list. What I did
> have in mind to reinforce what your post was very succinctly pointing out
> is the incredible and symbiotic relation of language, place and
> ceremony/ritual.
>



-- 

 "…revitalizing our language is really just an act of returning to what we
are supposed to be. It is like a fish returning to the water, breathing and
living once again. "Xh'unei Lance E. Twitchell (Tlingit)
*

richardzanesmith.wordpress.com

**

**

*
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