Rock Creek Park by Dr. Jeffrey Fearing (c) 1990
Anamakeesuk Nepun
Today is Summer
The year has transitioned from its infancy (Spring) to Nepun (Summer), the season of youth. It is a time of vacation, socializing and recreation. The ancestors would go to the shores of Sewanhaki (“isle of the shells” now known as Long Island). They built fishing camps, went clamming and had lobster bakes building traditional ovens in the ground with stone and sea weed. Of course, honor and prayers were offered to Mishi Kitun (the Great Ocean). Others would stay behind to “tend to the gardens”. The folks would visit other communities for light-hearted socials. The success of the growing corn was most notable as Green Corn Festivals - a time of gratitude for the young vegetation that would be food.
Summer is a popular time for what have become recently known as pow wows which in its original form were very religious gatherings that would become outlawed. These activities in the spirit of summer is largely an East Coast Algonkian thing (not to be confused with Algonquin). My Matinecoc people, as other indigenous peoples, were not inanimate objects isolated in tribalized bubbles. We were all over the northeast doing what was common among coastal indigenous peoples.
I do offer in remembrance of our Pequot relatives the slaughter they endured in 1637. They were attacked in the very early hours during the time of their Green Corn Festival while they slept. This was a very common tactic during the 1600s to attack during the night, burn us alive, clubbing children and babies to death. My Matinecoc people suffered a similar mass murder in 1643. Throughout these numerous acts of savagery on the part of the English and the Dutch, we survived. By holding up our understandings and spiritual connections to our environment honoring our Mother Earth as she revolves in the universe giving us the four seasons, we are still here and will go on.
Wanatowush Neponanit
Blessings in the Spirit of Summer
Thank you for visiting!
Welcome!
If this is your first time visiting, my overall focus is on confronting and ending systemic oppression that I believe got America right where it is. America is now deep in the middle of what has spiraled from its beginnings of invasion, holocaust and stolen land into a rationale of domination. This rationale must end so that we, as a dependency-free populace can build an authentic democracy.
Confronting systemic oppression is not about bad guys and good guys or us versus them. It is an environmental condition wherein everyone is effected. It's like we’re all stuck in an elevator or riding in the backseat of a car driven by a drunk driver going over a cliff. Shall we grab the drunk driver by the hair and yank their head around? Call the drunk driver nasty names or yell at them? Beg them? Cry? Plead? Shoot them? Argue over who gave ol’ drunky-butt the keys to the car again? Fight over who’s paying for the damage this time?
Disaster after disaster it's been said too many times that this is “not who we are as a society”. Yeah it is - it’s EXACTLY who and what this society is and always has been.
The moment a criminal act is covered, denied or disguised as something else, the cover-up must be monitored and controlled. It takes a great deal of enforcement. Enforcing the coverup of ANY crime can bring dumb answers, faulty solutions, temporary bandaids and worsening platitudes applied to disaster after disaster. Of course, straight up obliteration is always an option when the dumb answers, platitudes, and bandaids just don’t work. Kill everybody. Erase everybody. Convince and trick everybody into a mindless stupor.
Who it is America perceives itself to be, by what authority and the choices made out of that mindset has brought everything right where it is at this very moment.
Let me ask you this:
Could I impose buy-outs and fire whole staffs with years of experience providing public service in government agencies? Could I enter the offices of a federal agency and demand access to computers? I’d be thrown out of the building. I have no authority or right to do such a thing. What about defunding such government agencies that only congress has the authority to defund especially if they’ve already been funded? This exclusive congressional power was trampled on in spite of this authority. The firings happened. The defunding happened. Of course I’m not the President but so what! If only Congress has the authority, how does anyone - president or not - step over the exclusive power and authority designated to Congress? How was this possible?
How is it possible to soil the dignity of the office of the President by the most infantile, egregious, cruel, vulgar, low-life gutter-mouth thug behavior? Retribution, revenge and obliteration of perceived enemies using the powers of the President to do so is acceptable policy? America was not incensed? Outraged? Insulted? ALARMED? JOLTED INTO TAKING ACTION?
What is it about an individual who could stand in the pulpit of a house of worship and manipulate those in attendance to chant “bullshit” to hype his lust for self aggrandizement (Phoenix Dream Center, TPA rally, June 6, 2024)? What is it about an individual who threatens and swears revenge against certain states seen as his enemy because they did not comply with his whimsical, frivolous and dangerous indulgences? What does it say about the system that allows it? By any stretch of any kind of imagination, can that system be called a democracy?
An athlete took a knee during the singing of the National Anthem at a football game in protest against racist abuses and injustice and consequently lost his career. American sensibilities wasn’t going to tolerate such disrespect. How is it that America is not as resolved to protect itself from the criminality of an individual found guilty of 34 felonies by obtaining a career in the highest office of the land?
There have been hearings, investigations, meetings and round tables as well as the filing of many law suits and appeals piling up in the court dockets challenging the reckless destructive actions by way of executive order or just by an unsubstantiated, delusional, simple-minded say-so. How is it acceptable for a degenerate to make phone calls to elected representatives to shut down proposed legislation to improve immigration policy in order to invent an advantage in a campaign? Who thinks there’s not a price to pay for this?
There were actions, comments and statements of redress measured in one form or another out of concerns for “angering his base.” The most recent example that I can remember is the hesitancy of handing down some disciplinary action or another during the New York Southern District trial against Trump for falsifying business records. There were other instances sprinkled throughout but what stood out in my mind every time concerns over “angering his base” was mentioned, I felt disgust at the very idea that a nation allegedly governed by a rule of law should hesitate to do anything or make any kind of adjustment whatsoever out of concern for angering a damn base. Rule of law is supposed to stand no matter who is angered. Throw them all in jail if they break the law. Oh yeah. Lots of the base went to jail for crimes committed during the January 6th insurrection. We see where that went. One pardoned maga base-man, was just appointed to a position in Trump’s DOJ as an advisor to a working group exploring ‘weaponization’ which is reportedly going to be used against those who brought charges against the January 6th insurrectionists. What the hell is that about? Should it not occur to us, the people, how absolutely ass-backwards that is?
A sovereign populace of an authentic democracy governed by a true rule of law would never stand for any degeneracy occurring and repeating in its midst. Intervention and correction would be swift and as forceful as the brutal removal of duly elected representatives by masked ICE agents. There would be no fear of angering anybody’s base. Any punk that would jump up in violation of a free people’s Constitution would get a swift and decisive bitch-slap beat down by an authentic rule of law. Fear of Trump’s base my ass.
Deep in that fear of angering 'his base' lies the mental, emotional, and psychological esteem of America - the domination of whiteness. The inability to see this whips America into a tailspin chasing one perversion after the next to be met with a toothless will to enforce any law alleged to protect and correct.
There are supposed to be protections in the Constitution found in the Emoluments Clause, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and the 25th Amendment written to protect society from anyone who would hustle the oval office, grift, or profit from transactional deals and gifts; protection against felons and insurrectionists running for and/or holding office. Protection is supposed to be provided by the ability to impeach presidents behaving badly or who are disabled by psycho-socio pathological impairment.
This is the part that speaks directly to the condition of systemic oppression: America is helpless in enforcing any rule of law. That’s because it was never about any rule of law. It was only about enforcing entitlements and profits on behalf of those who dominate. Hundreds of years of hypocrisy and bigotry has rendered any notion for the rule of law as disabled and incompetent. America is strangled by its failure to enact in real time intervention, correction and prevention unconditionally and consistently as the perversions keep plowing through. Instead, America chases every dumb-ass distraction and destructive bomb dropped by the behavior of someone who brought out a 'duty to warn' on the part of now 37 mental health professionals in their updated book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
Perversions and disasters can happen anytime but the problem does not lie with the source as much as it complicates and repeats by the failure to do anything about it. Whether or not the failure was due to negligence, physical interference, emotional manipulation, deception or innocence the problem failed to be resolved. The failure is toxic, pervasive, and insidious.
Was the problem properly assessed? Can the problem be confronted without intimidation or physical interference? Is there an efficient method, practice or policy for correction or resolve? Is there any kind of blockage in bringing forth accountability? That which is not corrected is protected.
Work to do…
Again, to make it plain America is on stolen land.
That’s not meant to be a protest mantra, slogan, bumper sticker or guilt thing. None of that is the point. It is a matter of fact. While this fact is horrific enough, it is the process by which the crime has been covered up. A cover-up that established a convoluted identity of supremacy. An identity of supremacy that has defined the American rationale, its esteem, its personality. It has been maintained over generations right up to this point where a now adjudicated felon is in the White House again. And where again, there is talk of land invasion moving on Greenland, Canada, The Gulf of Mexico.
There are invasions and pillaging behaviors that have continued through generations of raids, threat, beatings, torture, murder and unspeakable savagery by lynch mobs, vigilantes, militias, and gangs - some hiding behind police badges, others wearing sheets and more recently others wearing masks and shirts bearing a three letters, I-C-E.
In a show of force in October 2024, armed and masked neo-Nazis showed up in Lincoln Heights, Ohio to stand on a bridge challenging the presence of passers by and stopping cars in the name of protecting the area. This neo-Nazi group had police protection as they carried out their mission. This repeated pattern of protected terror and domination is rooted in America’s beginnings and has spawned decades of systemic oppression. That is the point.
Systemic oppression can be deodorized and renamed, however, nothing changes its reality. Yes, it can end and must end or else after all the work and sacrifice it takes to correct and make change, the perversions will repeat. Ending systemic oppression requires an unconditional purge and change of mind.
Gil Scott Heron said the revolution will not be televised. Nor can it be delivered by a popular influencer on your favorite social media. Not even a million “Likes” on your viral video or multitudes of followers or subscribers will bring it. Revolution happens when you change your mind.
We must confront and do the work to end systemic oppression. We really have to get moving on this because if we don’t undo what got us here the perversions will repeat.
Admit, confront, detox and recalibrate.
Thank you for visiting Spirit of January
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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.