Rock Creek Park by Dr. Jeffrey Fearing (c) 1990
Anamakeesuk Takwank
Today is Autumn
The year has transitioned from its season of youth to the season of maturity, Takwank (Autumn). We see the corn turning from green to brown. When the corn has completely turned brown and has dried, it is Nunowa (it is dry). It is time for Thanksgiving, harvest, reunions, and affirming our kinship. We gift each other for good health and warmth for the coming winter.
The old folks would decorate the gathering places with what was grown in their yards. To this day we bring food to the gatherings as our way of ceremonial participation and showing that we will care for each other and make sure nobody is hungry or cold or lonely.
I’m getting ready for the Nehum (turkey) and of course Nisinuwuk (three sisters) Ewacheemin (corn), Muskwaseetush (Beans), kat Askutaskwash (and Squash)!
I extend greetings to all indigenous peoples of the world who honor the spirit of this season that are named in each respective native language but are also commonly referred to in English as Fall Ceremonies.
My best wishes and blessings to you all as we give thanks for everything given to us. It is our responsibility to maintain and preserve our native personhood that affirms our humanity and upholds our continued presence on this our Mother Earth.
Wanantowush Takwankanit
Blessings in the Spirit of Autumn
Thank you for visiting!
Hey there!
I know nothing about football but I am fascinated by the fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. On any game day I am drawn to the TV so I can watch the fans. The cheers, the loyalty, the tail gating, the electric hype, the wildly creative outfits are all very exciting - win or lose. I guess that makes me a fan of the fans. Now, I wouldn’t have thought that any of this would be of interest to anyone except I saw something at that game on September 4th when the Eagles played the Dallas Cowboys that definitely fell in line with my findings on systemic oppression. I saw a level of aggression that went way beyond the football stuff that I don’t understand but I understood what I saw. Jalen Carter was ejected from that game and fined over $50K for spitting on Dak Prescott of the Dallas Cowboys.
Ok, so this isn’t about football. Stay with me….
What I saw was an aggressive tactic used to exploit a situation to set up an attack. Carter was wrong to spit on Prescott and it should not have happened. What also should not have happened was what goaded and provoked Carter to retaliate.
My little fingers were ready to hit the keyboard and then some breaking news hit. Someone named Charlie Kirk had been shot. At that point, he had just been taken to the hospital but as we all know by now, he did not survive. I was not aware of him until he was featured in a news montage of MAGA activists and podcasters who were outraged that the Epstein files had not been exposed as Trump proclaimed he would ‘first thing’ during the 2024 presidential campaign.
While no surprise to me, what would occur in the following hours between the shooting, the capture of the shooter and beyond, America would go full tilt into its chronic habit of raging hysterics and baseless claims. In the whirlwind of the American reactionary playbook was what I saw at that football game - an aggressive tactic used to exploit a situation to set up an attack. Very American.
When it comes to exploring systemic oppression, individual events or incidences are not as significant as repeated behavior patterns. The overall objective in systemic oppression is to maintain control and domination by certain tactics used to accuse, destroy, invalidate, malign, gag or disable a person, group, idea or entity by illicit or immoral practices.
There are several forms of aggression that are a normalized part of the oppression machine. Some forms of aggression are direct, others are not. What is significant about this particular tactic is the ability to strike a blow while exploiting a vulnerable or disadvantaged situation that would result in the victim being blamed and/or punished for the initial blow - physical, emotional or symbolic.
While Jalen Carter was fined and ejected from the game for spitting, he had reacted to Prescott’s spitting toward him first by spitting back. Carter was provoked into retaliating which put himself in a position of wrong doing. It was poor judgment. Poor sportsmanship. So was the provocation but it was left unchecked. The grimacing smirk on Prescott’s face taunted that it was no accident and because it was left unchecked, he is emboldened to repeat this demoralizing stunt again.
In the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, there were understandable emotional outpourings of grief and shock. Hysterical rants, reckless and baseless accusations that exploded went beyond the boundaries of grief, however. Ultimately, the hysterics exposed another agenda hiding behind an accepted standard of mourning a loss and cries for justice. The tell was in the hypocritical call for “toning down the rhetoric” that is only of concern in the interest of one entity while stifling, punishing or gagging everyone else. It’s happened before. It’s that same tactic America spins from its greatest hits.
While there are those who were truly horrified by the violent murder and have expressed condolences on their own, the onslaught of false accusations and baseless claims demanded a stifling apologetic disclaimer to preface any expression of opposition to Kirk’s statements. If an apologizing disclaimer did not preface any objections to Kirk’s statements, there were consequences. In addition to being accused of celebrating Kirk’s death, there is the threat of punishment and prosecution issued by the President to be probed and placed under major investigation if one has been lumped into leftist groups stigmatized as the enemy that provoke violence. It’s either be beaten into gagged submission or stand accused of being a crazy violent leftist responsible for Kirk’s death who deserves punishment.
Kirk’s statements were more than just view points. Framing it that way misrepresents the coded narratives of oppression that are laundered as opinions for harmless debate and civil discourse. They are American ideologies of domination rooted in the truth of its beginnings, stolen land, genocide, and the cover-up.
The point is to learn how not to be used by degenerates who seek to attack. The point is not to be goaded or provoked by the manipulative behavior of a predator by heading off their perversions. To do this, it is necessary to learn about and understand the systemic oppression that exists and all the hideous elemental parts and how they work.
The one thing a predator cannot abide is exposure that resists and destroys the cover, the con, the grift, the delusions and normalized aggressions in all forms that upholds illicit control and perverse gratification.
A dependency-free and sovereign mind cannot be oppressed. It’s like kryptonite to a predator. For a wholesome resolution to America’s condition for the possibility of establishing a true democracy governed by an authentic rule of law once and for all, confront, unlearn, detox and end systemic oppression.
If we don’t unlearn the process by which we all wound up in the American mess we are in right now, after all the resistance, fighting and finally achieving the purge of the felon elected as president, we will repeat it. Even if the felon president has a radical change of mind like the segregationist George Wallace (“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”) who later ‘softened his stance’ on segregation, so what. By failing to end this systemic process, we will foster and accommodate this condition to repeat. The condition is specific and has resulted from a fact that cannot be denied.
The fact is, the United States of America was never a democracy. Trying to “save democracy” is a non-starter. What never existed cannot be saved. If America is ever to be one, what does in fact exist must first be recognized, confronted and eradicated. The very process of pretending it is a democracy, or ever was, has brought us to a morbid state of where we are now.
The land was stolen as hideous mass murders, displacement and dehumanization of the land’s indigenous nations of human beings went on. An economy was built on a system of human beings exploited and dehumanized as chattel slaves. As the American decades continued with romanticized notions of its fabricated beginnings, so did a psychosis enmeshed in a false identity of entitled supremacy.
If the process of a criminal beginning is to continue under the guise of another name, it has to be enforced because it isn’t natural. It isn’t true. Repeated control by threat and attack is oppression and by its nature of repeated patterned methods makes it systemic.
Rule of law? What rule of law? There is no law. If a law is not consistently upheld, enforced and unconditionally applied, the result is lawlessness. To pretend this country was ever about law that is supposed to provide “order”, is to be embalmed into a mental stupor. There was never any rule of law, there were only statements of arbitrary controls.
If an enraged mob can break into an official jail, bust past an officer of the law (like a sheriff) and drag a person from the jail cell out to be tortured, mutilated, burned alive with charred remains hung up for a jeering crowd and none of the murderers were ever brought to justice, there is no law. We saw that entitled mob running on that same symptomatic engine on January 6th.
America as a democracy is a brand. Rule of law is a slogan. It is like me hyping myself as a trapeze artist with no actual skill, training or discipline, no mastery of physical awareness for motion, speed, and balance. When the reality of my claim to be a trapeze artist meets the reality of getting on a trapeze, truth will prevail. The consequences will stand.
Similarly, the claim to be a democracy without the consistent discipline, application, practice of its meaning is only a brand because when the stamina of a democracy is needed, it is not there. The moral integrity needed to resolve or rescue any situation is not there. What results instead are knee jerk reactions that come off weak, helpless, lost, desperate and dangerous. The consequences will stand.
The tricky thing about the nature of oppression is that many think of those whose behavior is out of a certain bucket are uninformed, unintelligent and coerced. However, oppression is environmental wherein all interactions, institutions, identities are defined and controlled to uphold domination.
To end oppression it is first necessary to know what it is. We first have to be able to believe what we see, feel, think not what somebody else dictates.
The nation of my people are misrepresented as extinct. I am of the Matinecoc Nation, indigenous to what is now called Long Island. It is not my job nor inclination to convince anybody of our existence (especially those who want us dead) it is only imperative that I know it and by what authority and with receipts.
The most efficient form of genocide is to convince and condition a people that they are dead, erased, extinguished. That erasure includes an agreement to accept all forms of dehumanization in order to feel safe and approved of. The only antidote is to be able to answer ‘who am I?’ and by what authority. Confront, detox and unlearn systemic oppression.
We are good. I mean, here we are many of us ready to neutralize the degenerate and purge the poison. Systemic oppression runs by the perverted control of a predator or a predatorial entity. We as human beings are naturally wired to be caring, protective, responsible for well-being of others and exist as family, community as a matter of basic survival as a species. That’s who WE are.
One more thing - a word to the survivors who were traumatized by the criminal perversions and sexual assault on the part of the Jeffrey Epstein and all the other wealthy high-profile privileged degenerates. I especially direct this to those whose names we may never know but who suffered the horror anonymously. We deserve justice, and yes I said “we” I am a survivor too. But one thing I learned on my journey, whether or not this society will ever be capable of delivering justice, there is an inner power. See, even if those who violated you never go to jail, you know what happened. You know the truth and if not allowed to consume or destroy you, that pain can be flipped into a formidable, undeniable, everlasting power. You have the ability to unravel how predator works. You know your way around the haunted castle. You have the ability to head off any sick agenda. If there is one thing a predator cannot stand is a pure inner strength that can see right through them. Pursue justice however you will but know that regardless of what happens, you have the power to take down all forms of aggression that repeats in a system seeking to violate you, erase you. Have none of it. You are correct. You are here. You are entitled to have access to your own sovereign mind that directs your path.
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Asiba
Matinecoc Nation
Confront oppression
All it takes is a change of mind
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Rock Creek Park by photographer Dr. Jeffrey J. Fearing appeared on the very first issue of my print newsletter, “The Spirit of January Monthly” in 1990. Rock Creek Park is in Washington, DC where we both attended Howard University in the late 60’s. It was a golden time at a phenomenal institution where I met Jeff, a friend for life, Nemot - my brother. I am honored to share this photograph once again 30 years later.