Growing older

I've been re-reading my blogs about my Mother written those years she was with us before she died. Then today a friend came by and talked about her Mother who is experiencing the early part of dementia. My mother taught me a lot, as she has always done, about this path of life. She was not the example I wanted to follow through adulthood, but she is the person whose words and action throughout my childhood, and now, as I am 66 because she and the woman, Granny, who mothered me from the time I was 40 until her death, taught me how to age.

Let me begin by saying, it is not easy to grow old in this country during these times, just as it is not easy to be born and grow up here. This is not the times or the country to be vulnerable, to be participant in a society where individualism, materialism, hierarchy and the size of the paycheck measures a person's worth and where stress is the norm and silence is judged as non-productive. The whole idea of a productive human being already tells the story.

I have found that aging feels as awkward as entering into adolescence. The body, the mind, the feelings are going through a change. Hopefully, I have learned some grace about the change so that I can enter this stage more gracefully and with my head up than I did as a teen.

My environment is also going through the same sort of upheaval of my youth. Everything I believed amounted to a house of cards. The direness of our future was revealed. Here I am at 66, and damn if it weren't all true. Some people call it political -- but the political has become my reality. Since Will and I are Winnemem we are, as the Chief says, the canary along with the salmon, the water, and our belief system. Before others, being at the bottom of the social ladder, we are already experiencing what all others who are steps above will be experiencing.

I hope I have some time to write this blog. I know re-reading my blog about my Mother gave me a perspective which I did not experience while going through the life I recorded. I would not want my thoughts of entering my sixties to be lost to my eighty year old self. My friend Carmen told me to write a letter to my 80 year old self. I think it's time for another one.

Blessing Hands Rock

Being Winnemem is like an uphill road. Here's a youtube video of the area where the puberty ceremony will be held this summer for Marisa. These are the important parts of the land. Lyla and Caleen took a walk there to see what would be covered and by how much if the BOR were allowed to raise the Dam higher which is their plan with the support of Westlands (largest water corporation in the world) and with the nod by federal agencies because of the money involved. It's all about money. These are the people who do not want the fish to come back and for the Winnemem to remain. Goliath.

Please Write and Send Two Letters Today for justice

Please write a letter to Ms. J. Sharon Heywood, Forest Supervisor/Shasta-Trinity National Forest/3644 Avtech Parkway/Redding CA 96002 and cc: Randy Moore, Regional Supervisor/ Pacific Southwest Region/1323 Club Drive/Vallejo, CA 94592


Here is the issue, and thank you for taking some time for Marisa and her right to religious freedom and safety, and her right to be a strong traditional Winnemem woman and future Chief of her tribe.

In 2004, Chief Caleen Sisk brought back the Coming of Age Ceremony
after a decades-long interruption due to the drowning of the Winnemem
homeland by Shasta Dam. At that time, and again in 2010, Supervisor
Heywood refused to impose a mandatory closure and only approved
a “voluntary closure.” As a result, the ceremonial participants, elders,
children, and guests suffered racist taunts and heckling, and even a
drunken woman flashing her breasts, from boaters who ignored the
“closure”. Both years, law enforcement had to close the river during the
fourth day of the ceremony due to serious safety concerns. A video of
the incidents during the 2006 ceremony is posted on the tribe’s YouTube
page, youtube.com/winnememwintu.

We have exhausted all options in trying to convince Shasta Trinity Supervisor Sharon
Heywood to close a short 300 yard stretch of the McCloud River, where it runs through the ancestral village of Kaibai and meets Shasta Lake in Northern California during our Coming of Age Ceremonies for our young women.

Please respect our young Winnemem women’s right to become strong traditional women.
Please use your authority to order the mandatory closure of a short 300 yard section of the McCloud River for our “distinctive traditional practices.” While it may be a small inconvenience for the USFS, for the Winnemem it means the future of our people, because it is the traditional women who are the foundation of the tribe. Our goal is very simple – that the Forest Service honor the provisions of the UN DRIP, signed in 2011
by President Obama, and federal and state laws which protect the rights of indigenous women and their ceremonies and traditions.

It's a Matter of Human Rights

I'm putting this up for you to see -- a new improved youtube video by Will -- to ask you to please help us with my next post. This summer the next chief of the Winnemem must go through her Coming of Age Ceremony, but once again, the Supervisor of Shasta Trinity, Sharon Heywood, is convinced that a "voluntary closure" has proven successful by turning away 90 percent of the recreational boaters during our ceremony. The ten percent who come through to harass and interfere doesn't bother her. The fact that the Sheriff or a Ranger must eventually use their own authority to close it down on the fourth day when people swim across doesn't faze her either. Sharon Heywood looks at the tribe as real second class citizens and looks at our religious freedom as a non-existent right rather than an inalienable human right.

Writer's Block, RIP

It's been a long time since I've written from Outside the Belly. Our lives sort of tipped on its axis for awhile. Being Winnemem became harder than usual. But we got through it still believing that it's still the "hardest and the best life in the world" for us. So here lies Writer's Block, may it rest in peace, and with it, the weirdness of 2011.

Michael Klindt, Chapter One

This is one of the most remarkable young men I have known.

Ainu Fishermen @ Japan News

Ainu Fishermen @ Japan News