Orange Shirt Day is Tomorrow

 

Fly Away Snow Goose

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Transport to Fort Providence residential school is only the beginning of their ordeal, for the teachers believe it is their sworn duty to “kill the Indian inside.” All attempts at escape are severely punished, but Yaotl and Sascho, along with two others, will try, undertaking a journey of 900 kilometers across the Northwest Territory. Like wild geese, brave hearts together, they are homeward bound.

Orange Shirt Day is a statutory  holiday in Canada, which means that federal workers have the day off, but U.S. readers probably won't be familiar with it. Orange Shirt Day is the brain child of Phyllis (Jack) Webstad, a North Secwepemc woman. It honors those who, like herself, survived the Canadian Residential School system. 

In 1973 her grandmother took six year old Phyllis to town to buy her some new clothes for school, and Phyllis chose a shiny orange shirt. In 1973, such bright "hippy" colors were fashionable and in many native communities across the Americas the color orange signified new beginnings and good fortune. Of course, when she arrived at school, she was stripped of all her clothes, including the precious brand new orange shirt, a shirt she would never see again, no matter how much she wept and begged. Phyllis would never see her grandmother's gift again. 

I have read of far more harrowing stories of things that happened to children in these schools, while researching Fly Away Snow Goose.  These schools, run by private religious organizations, were tasked with "civilizing" the indigenous children, which meant forcing the children--by means of corporal punishment--to speak only English or French and adopt Christianity. The children became unable to speak to their relatives, and thousands of years of culture vanished. When the children, now teens, were finally released, they found they no longer belonged, but had become strangers among their own people. At the same time, they were mostly trained for manual labor and still despised for being "Indian" in the white world. 

Sexual, physical, and emotional abuse occurred in a system which government studiously ignored and barely funded. The brutalized older children in the schools were sometimes abetted by staff in their cruelties to younger ones. On the American side of the border, the mission of the residential school was frankly declared to be "to kill the Indian inside." 

Sometimes more than culture and language was killed, too. Disease was a continual threat to the children, as so many students were herded together into old buildings without adequate sanitation, clean water, sufficient food, or heat. Influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis (69% of the students at one school) were endemic. Ground penetrating radar surveys recently done on the grounds of one large residential school in B.C., has raised suspicions about a large number of unmarked graves. In many cases, relatives were never notified about the death of a child.

Every Child Matters is the motto of the Orange Shirt movement. Sadly, this is a motto the world at large has yet to adopt. 

~Juliet Waldron

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Before the filles du roi…Desperate to escape her past, Jeanne, a poor widow, accompanies a richer woman to Quebec. The sea voyage is long, one of privation and danger. In 1640, the decision to emigrate takes raw courage, but the struggling colony of Quebec, so far a collection of rough soldiers and half-wild fur traders, needs French women if it is ever to take firm root on the Canadian frontier.

Ixchel and The Water Pots of August by Juliet Waldron

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So many gods and goddesses lost throughout the long stretch of human history! 

Many gods of our European past were lost during the violence of Roman colonization, or absorbed, their ancient lineage lost when these divinities were given Roman names. After the Romans, came the new religion, Christianity, and the old gods and goddesses were this time baptized as "saints," which either cloaked their origins in a doctrinally acceptable story, or simply twisted the story until it fit--often uneasily--with the new religion's teachings. 

When European colonizers reached the Americas, the same thing happened to the divinities of these "newly discovered" lands. Some of those stories are lost forever, but a few kept their names. Among these surviving rarities is IxChel, a Meso-American goddess, who could be maiden/mother/crone depending on the season of the year, the age the devotee, or the phase of the moon. 

IxChel was a goddess whose survival partially rests on the written record left by priests who observed what remained of her original religion after the Spanish conquest. From what we can glean, she was a lunar goddess, and, like so many others around the ancient world, the animals which are associated with her worship, are the rabbit (fertility) and the serpent (bringer of rain.) Below is a modern rendering of the goddess from Sacred Source's catalog. To synch with our modern preoccupation with youth, this IxChel appears as a young woman, although in the few remaining Mayan texts, her "rain" hieroglyph depicts her as Crone.

https://sacredsource.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoogCd36tvDfkvTP9t_CCNoPGWpntD6DE7UZFj9UNwT0lpuIFBYC

Like the Moon, however, Ixchel waxes and wanes; she changes. She, like so many European Great Goddesses, is a triple goddess. She was a special patroness of women, whose reproductive cycles are governed by the moon. Young women prayed to her maiden self for  beauty, or for a husband. To the married women, she was Mother Ixchel, to whom you prayed for sons to please a warrior husband or for continued fertility and good health. Women of all ages prayed to Ixchel as Life Giver, asking this fruitful deity for the blessing of good harvests, as well as for good fortune and for safe delivery during the travail of childbirth. She knew the secrets of all herbs, and was known as a skillful healer.

In Meso-America, where droughts could (and historically did) bring famine and collapse to powerful city states, IxChel's sacred serpent governed the powerful hurricane rains, whose appearance was necessary to "fill the water pots"  (the cenotes which dot the permeable limestone of the Yucatan) with the precious liquid which nourished the maize, beans and squash upon which the communities depended. "Water is Life" was as real then as it is now.

As the Moon, Ixchel governed the night. She opened the womb and then cared for the child growing inside. Her pale face radiated blessings upon her sister-children here on earth; the stars were her offspring.  In some of the surviving stories, she dies and is reborn again, a miracle that, in so many religions, only male gods perform. As a goddess of vegetation, she is a kind of Persephone figure, entering the underworld and then being reborn again.

Ixchel is also said to be first weaver, the woman who taught her human children this civilizing skill. The spindle she holds and the thread she spins governs both life and death. Like the Fates of ancient Europe, she creates the fabric of our lives, and ends them when she wishes, breaking the threads. As a destroying goddess, she is called "Keeper of Bones" and crossed bones often appear in her iconography.

Cozumel, as it is known today, was once Isla Muheres, the Island of Women, sacred to Ixchel, the home of her temples. Mayan women were supposed to make pilgrimage there at least once in their lives. If you today are a fortunate traveler, you might still go and visit Ixchel there today. Offer her copal incense, cocoa beans, or small clay female statuettes, as her devotees once did on that lovely island so long ago.

Goddess Knowledge Cards,

Pomegranate

Art by Susan Eleanor Boulet

 Here she is with an avatar--her powerful jaguar self, a creature who hunts on land and in the water--for she is a shape-shifter too. Though she was married to the Sun, she, like the cat, was a law unto herself, coming and going as she chose. Not even the Sun God could own her.

~~Juliet Waldron

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Calendars - fantastic facts

 

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The month of July always causes me to think about our calendar system. By the original Roman method this is 2778 A.U.C. (Ab urbe Condita = from the city's founding) The "Julian" calendar was Rome's first calendar reorganization and took place during the rule of Julius Caesar, in the year 45 B.C. The lunar/solar cycles don't mesh, because the moon goes from dark to full in 29.5 days and this does not match the observable solar year. At first, it is not a large problem, but as years advance, the discrepancy becomes a problem.  

This "Julian" notion was adopted from the Egyptians. Perhaps Caesar learned of this from his mistress, Cleopatra, who was highly educated and surrounded by a court that included mathematicians and astronomers, as well as the usual priests, historians and linguists. The result was a 12 month, 30 day system, with a day added to adjust the discrepancy between solar and lunar cycles. An extra day resulted in a 366 day leap year which occurred every four years. 

The next Western calendar was introduced by Papal Bull during the time of Pope Gregory in 1582, to better align with what the mathematicians reckoned was the sun's orbit around the earth. (They were taking more accurate calculations/observations, but still fitting it into the Church-approved Ptolemaic interpretation of our solar system.) This correction involved a ten day addition to the year. The Gregorian calendar was first adopted by the European Catholic countries.

European Protestants suspected a "Popish Plot" and did not adopt the new calendar until a century later. The English-speaking world only caved to astronomical reality regarding the calendar during mid-18th Century. By this time, Galileo's 1632 assertion that Earth revolved around the Sun was widely accepted. In 1752, England and her colonies finally adopted the Gregorian calendar, adding those ten days. This adjustment kept to the formula of "every four years, a leap year with an added day", but also eliminated leap years on Century years that are not divisible by 400. For instance, the year 2000 had a leap year, while 1900 and 1700 did not. 

I have read that George Washington, among others, refused the change on a personal level by retaining their original birthdate, out of synch with the new dispensation or not. This is personal, as he and "share" a birthday. I thought, when I first heard this story that his attitude was rather backwards. :)

It may be 2025 by our Julian/Gregorian Calendar reckoning, but it's rather different in other parts of the globe.

Jewish A.M. year = 5786 (A.M. is Anno Mundi, Latin) "year of the world's creation"

Islamic = 1447, which is the year of the Hegira of Mohammad, his escape from Medina to Mecca, along with his followers.

Chinese = 4728. The Chinese have an interlocking "lunisolar" type of reckoning, where the Sun determines the seasons and the Moon determines the month, using 29.5 days a month, with an Intercalary month inserted occasionally to keep the solar and the lunar in synch. They also have a zodiac of twelve. As we may know, 2025 is The Year of Wood Snake. 

 ~~Juliet Waldron

  

Simple Gifts

 

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Yellowknife was under fire threat, as more of the terrible forest fires that have ravaged the Canadian wilderness this year raged, moving south toward Great Slave Lake. As the town played a pivotal role in Fly Away Snow Goose and has become dear to my heart, I watched the progress with fear via YouTube. The population was asked to evacuate, and many of the 20,000 inhabitants got out by driving down the single two lane road that would take them out of harm's way. Some were flown out in an all airline effort. This was an all hands on deck emergency and the people of NWT rose to the occasion, as the elderly and the ill were transported to safety in other parts of Canada. 

I could write about causes of these fires, but it's all too dire to explore here. As the fire did not swallow the town as had seemed inevitable, the place was saved, unlike many others in Canada, which have been reduced to ashes during the last few years of extreme heat and drought in a land which is unaccustomed to that.

Instead, I will focus on my summer garden, which is a happier subject. It is also ephemeral, as are our lives on this planet. This year and this year only will my little garden produce this particular selection of vegetables, all planted in hope in the spring. I too have wrestled with early season drought, but, in the end, thanks to the garden hose and a good supply of groundwater in this part of PA, each raised bed has become a jungle of production, providing us with fresh organic food that's better than what can be found in the market. There is also that wonderful feeling of accomplishment that you get when you watch and tend plants from seed to fruit every year!

Tomatoes are now flooding in. My brother in law provided me with two straggly little plants early in the year, which I had to keep indoors for a time as this was before the last frost. Now, I can't keep up with these medium sized red tomatoes. They are tasty, hardy, and leave no leftovers when you are making just two salads at a time. The sweet, mellow cherry tomatoes I raised in the same upstairs window where I nursed red tomato sets. They have a catchy name: I seem to remember "Coyote." 

 

There are also collards, an heirloom variety that I have been lax about confronting yet. These Cabbage Collards aren't huge and they are also milder than the usual supermarket varieties. "Slave food," they are super easy to grow and pack a huge nutritional punch. It's time to get on top of them now, as I experiment with recipes other than the traditional hunk of salt pork or pig's foot bathed in stock simmered for a loooong time.

Next comes "the solution to too many tomatoes." This idea is all over the recipe section of YouTube, but here's mine in mid-process.

You take a big pan like this one, and add: 

Balsamic vinegar and olive oil in a generous first layer. Next:

Sliced tomatoes, sliced green Bell Peppers, lots of diced Vidalia onions, shredded greens and ditto carrots and yellow squash, well dressed with salt, pepper, red pepper, basil, oregano, leafy greens, parsley, chopped garlic, and whatever else you have too much of. The final step is to cover it all with a cup of good stock.

Next, bake in a slow oven until the whole thing looks like the picture above and has reached a sticky consistency. Let it cool at little, and then scoop into a deep bowl. Get your stick blender out, or use your blender, whichever, and whirl until the whole mass becomes a thick paste. 

You can freeze this in little tubs, smear it on chunks of toasted, buttered French bread, or crackers. You might wish to spread it on the cheese sandwich before you grill it. Scoops of the paste can be added to sphagetti sauce or chili really pep them up. (My sauce does anyway, because the one I made is full of garlic, basil and oregano, and, I believe, I also added cumin. 

Nasturtiums, which I grow every year because my Mom always did. These can be used in salads or to decorate homemade cakes. I am always stuffing a few leaves in my mouth as I pass by the garden, and I add them to salads too, for their spicy, peppery kick. 

And last but not least, I will end with an it-doesn't-do-it-justice picture of Ironweed, which is flourishing in various spots around the yard. Bees of all kinds and butterflies, wasps, and all the usual suspects of the pollination racket are delighted to find this "weed." I understand that neighbors call me "the weed lady" because I have native plants in the yard and diss the grass, but the heck with them! The bees and their compatriots are more important, really, in the grand scheme of things, don't you agree?

~~Juliet Waldron

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How We Saw Tina & Ike - Or, Once Upon a Time in the 70's

 

FLY AWAY SNOW GOOSE BY

JULIET WALDRON &

JOHN WISDOMKEEPER,

a Canadian Historical Brides

Northwest Territory Story

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In the '60's, I was a typical white college kid who hadn't heard much of what has been called Black music, except for the groups like The Temptations, The Crystals, Martha & The Vandellas, Ronettes or the Shirelles, the ones that made it onto rock'n'roll stations. (The only exception to this being Calypso, which I'd danced to during my high school years in the West Indies.) 

When I arrived at college in the States, I got to know new kids, ones that came from big cities, like New York, Philly, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and D.C. This new cohort arrived with plenty of Rhythm and Blues and Soul mixed with their Folk and Rock L.P.s weighing down their college-bound trunks of indispensable stuff from home.  

Some years later, married, mother of two, I imagined I'd found the BFF I'd never had in my HS. I'd always been an outsider, for different reasons in the different places. I had a poor self image and secretly I'd always wanted to be "in with the in crowd" despite my own insistence upon being the nerd in the corner of the room. This new friend was young, glamorous and had three little kids, more or less the same age as my two. Her husband was a junior hot shot salesman who'd been a popular member of his fraternity. They couldn't have been any more different from us, but as young marrieds at the beginning of our lives, from marriage to parenting--not to mention work--we shared a lot. 

This was the early 70's and we were young, still wanting to play. Fresh out of college as we were, "fun" meant that the women cooked dinner--something simple, like sphagetti and a salad. Then we'd drink jug wine and listen to (and critique!) the latest rock LP because we were a generation who'd grown up listening to "our music" on the radio. We also told one another the usual get-acquainted stories about our origins. From childhood, we shared tales of raising kids and usually ended with how we were going to escape having the same lives as our parents. Our own kids ran around the house or out the yard, deep in pretend or hide and seek.

This extroverted couple took us to places my husband and I would normally never go--like a Rock'n'Rhythm review in a nearby city to see Ike & Tina Turner. My girl friend, with an urban background, told me that she'd read that Ike sometimes beat Tina. In those days, such a story was between us, woman to woman, as we all knew that physical abuse was but one of the hazards of being born female.  

The audience, when we got there, was a riot of color, some black, some white and some brown. I'd not been in such "mixed" company since living in the West Indies. Some were dressed to kill, with spangled mini-dresses, big hair, and high heels; others just wore jeans. My girlfriend had, of course, decided that we should dress for the occasion. She let down her blonde hair and wore open toed heels and a floaty hippy dress--white, gauzy, short, patterned 

with cherubs and long church choir sleeves.

She'd explored my meagre closet and come up with one of my mother's decades-old cast-off cocktail dresses. This was hot pink and rose red with a fitted bodice, boat neck and full swirling skirt.  She also discovered a ridiculous pair of heels from England, with pointed toes and extravagently high heels. We decided that a pair of bright green stockings would really proclaim that though the dress was thrift-shop retro, it wasn't the 1950's anymore, baby!

Our entrance, just as my girlfriend had foreseen, was majestic! We couldn't have felt more far-out.  Naturally, we got some put-down comments, but such was the price of our utter coolness.  ;)

Soon, music blasted into the auditorium, as a girl group warm-up band took the stage, to be followed by Ike and Tina. He watched her like a hawk, his dark eyes full of calculation, as he checked out the size of the crowd. He made certain we all would all notice that she was his, hands on her waist and then on her shoulders, but she appeared to want to get down to business, stepping forward and giving us all a flash of her white teeth. She waved the chord, freeing the mike, while everyone cheered and jumped and whooped. The band's name might have still been "Ike and Tina Turner," but it was plain who we'd all come to see. 

For over an hour, Ike and Tiny rocked us. They sang their oldies, as well as covering newer hits. Here's a few that I remember from that memorable night.

https://youtu.be/sTM17bmV4wg  ~ Honky Tonk Woman

https://youtu.be/FwaxT7zL7kA  ~ Fool in Love

https://youtu.be/bpuf6AmQH4M ~ Nutbush Avenue

https://youtu.be/uj0wPrN_Y_4  ~ River Deep Mountain High

It was over far too soon. We left, drenched with sweat and totally hoarse, as you are after a great concert. 

Time passed; friends departed. We moved and moved again. Tina vanished for a time from  pop radio, but then she was back, without the abusive, controlling husband, and better than ever. Many even bigger hits followed. My favorite is the heart-wrenching "What's Love Got to Do With it?" which spoke volumes to so many. 

Then, in the 2000s, I encountered a new Tina, now in a Buddhist incarnation, as were many in our cohort. After years of pain, of suffering, and a lot of growing, the Queen of Rock had found healing and peace.  

https://youtu.be/6XP-f7wPM0A  ~  Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu Om

 

 A rough translation: May there be well being in all, May there be peace in all, May there be fulfillment in all...Peace, Peace Peace.)

Hail the Traveler! I'll never forget that wild night in a Hartford auditorium. 

~Juliet Waldron

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Fiat Lux - Carry the Light

 

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Fiat Lux was the motto of my ("high school," to Americans) Queen's College in Bridgetown, Barbados. I remembered this recently when, while attempting to dust, I pulled out an old copy of The Oxford Book of Verse from the bookshelf and saw the motto on the cover. It was a school prize, for "good work in Form VI b" of which I'd been rather proud. I was a lonely ex-pat in those days and something of a "swot." Studying was how I filled my time as a "stranger in a strange land," while others were spending their free time with family and friends. 

What is the definition of that "light"? I used to believe--this being a school gift, after all--that this "light" was knowledge, and while that's certainly a way of looking at this motto, I'm beginning to see that the "light" mentioned here is perhaps a much simpler concept. Maybe it's just as simple as one word--Hope.

Reading an article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert, I was struck by this sentence: "Despair is unproductive. It's also a sin." Those two short sentences got me pondering, especially as I am someone who finds themselves often stuck in "the slough of despond," expecially after looking at the news. 

Spalding Gray in his "Swimming to Cambodia" speaks of "the cloud of Evil" which continually circles the world, waiting for an opening in which to manifest This image struck me powerfully. When people give up, believing that reality is "hopeless" or "impossible" to change, that attitude simply throws the door open for the Darkness, destroying people, communities, societies--even planets.  

What's is the opposite of despair, then? Hope, of course. In the words of the familiar little song:

 "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine..."

"Hope is being able to see that there is light, despite all the darkness."  

~Bishop Desmond Tutu

Maybe that particular light is the one we all carry, the ability to care for others, to share what we have. It can be as simple as a phone call to an aging relative or looking in on a elderly neighbor, or volunteering at a shelter, planting a tree or a garden.

"There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for." ~JRR Tolkien 

Sam Gamgee says these words to his comrade Frodo, whose heart is overflowing with terror and despair as he faces the completion of an apparently impossible task that will probably end his life--but may save to world.

Tolkien's fantasy is the old battle of Good & Evil, the central, familiar theme of all world religions.

"In a time of destruction, create something." ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Despair can be cast off through action, perhaps something as simple as cleaning, decluttering, writing a blog or a letter to the editor. Even if you feel defeated before you start and believe you aren't going to be able to make anything in your future better, you did take an action that can improve your immediate surroundings, or, at least, your state of mind. 

If it's just seems too pointless to clean or cook or write another letter to your  newspapers/political leaders, sit down and write a gratitude list. At first I scoffed at this practice, but consider. Perhaps you can find three things you are thankful for. 

If you are in a house, under a roof, more or less warm and with internet access and time to read this--well there's three luxuries right there. On a more basic level, most of us also have friends or family, even if they are far away. Most of mine, especially since Covid, are far away and inaccessible for various reasons, except through the 'net. You might talk to a friend, neighbor, to your cat/dog/bird. Write a poem. Greet the sun, admire the clouds or the birds/squirrels at your feeder, the local Canada Geese who have never learned to migrate.

Or, as I'm speaking here to readers and writers, talk to yourself! Begin to tell yourself a story, which is what I have done ever since I was little and feeling sad and alone.  

  Happy New Year!  

 ~~Juliet Waldron

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