NAFPS Forum

… operating on Facebook still. https://www.facebook.com/apela.colorado

Where is the origin of this suppose prophecy?

His blog is far less active, likely because of less interest. It's pretty amusing he accuses me of being a member of ISIS. 
Less amusing his long and libelous attack on Arvol Looking Horse. Then he's foolish enough to quote the late white supremacist David Yeagley. James Swan is also smeared, but it seems as useless as his attempts to attack me. Seems Denton tried to invade Lakota land with his Rainbow cult and Swan shut that down.
https://christianfaithunderfire.blogspot.com/2022/

I also later visited the Hopi elders ( Kevin Lomotska) to talk about their prophecies and ours -and the mysterious sacred tablet that speaks about the lost white brother. All of these encounters are recorded.

In a visit to Hopiland we did this interview with Elder Kevin Lomotska , keeper of the sacred tablet. Here for the very first time we share the sacred wisdom of this amazing tribe about what is to come.

Beardslee has been selling art for more than 20 years marketed as Ojibwe and Native American art

F’d by the Vagina Monologues - By Lois Beardslee
Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140724134737/http://www.indiancountrynews.info/fullstory.cfm-ID=47.htm

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I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls lately, from the ladies who’ve claimed ownership of the Traverse City contingent of the Vagina Monologues. They put on a show last year, featuring Eve Ensler’s celebrated work honoring women and their anatomy, interspersed with essays by local white women. Ensler’s essays include pieces in the voices of women of color as well, written not by women of color, but by Ensler herself.

The first phone call was from a woman asking me to try out for the part of the Native American woman who would be reading the Native American portion of Ensler’s monologues. It was put to me in such a way that I felt I was expected to prove I was good enough for the distinction of reading the words a white woman had written for me, a Native American woman.

Since I’ve probably had more experience with public speaking than most of the community leaders and staff at my local junior college and university center, it was an odd request, to my mind. And since I’ve probably written and published as much as Eve Ensler, it was an even weirder request.

I suggested to my caller that I might have as much to say about the sexual roles of Native women as Eve Ensler, because I, unlike Ensler, am a Native American woman, and – what a bonus! – I share my strong opinions on the topic through the written and spoken word.

Alas, it was not her job to consider giving me my own voice. She had merely been instructed to invite me to the “try-outs,” as though the ladies were putting on a high school play, and I were one of so many wistful young Native American maidens wringing my hands and hopeful for the part that Ensler, and subsequently my white neighbors, had determined it was appropriate for me to play.

It’s a phenomenon I encounter every day of my life. My friends and neighbors from the dominant culture expect me to live up to their stereotypes of a docile young Indian maiden, not unlike Pocahontas, or perhaps some young, sweet girl in a beaded headband and buckskin fringes who no doubt handed the deserving Pilgrims a basket full of venison tenderloins and wild blueberry corn muffins.

People often get downright huffy if I don’t act that way. So I didn’t join the nonexistent line of Native American women trying out for the part, even though she was a really nice lady.

The second call came from another really nice lady, younger than the first. She’d taken on the task of finding artwork for the back cover of the performance program and thought maybe Native American women could be represented by my contributing maybe the artwork and maybe a little poem for the cover, to show that maybe they had, like, you know, taken Native Americans into consideration.

Suggestions were made as to the nature of the new original piece of artwork I would be expected to create for this volunteer assignment. And so, being the teacher that I am, and having a receptive and intelligent audience, I began to explain why, why, why...

I cannot be Uncle Tom for the women of Traverse City any more than I can for your school districts, your museums, your parks, your churches, your families, your children’s literature, or your fantasies.

And, at the end of it all, I agreed to provide a signed, limited edition print for scanning, and a copy of it to be sold to fund the project, along with a quote from a book I’d written, and a no-way-definitely-not-short poem that would address women’s issues pertinent to the northwest corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula... because, oddly enough, I was as competent as the local white women whose pages were to be interspersed throughout the program. My friend the printer found a male business sponsor for the extra pages I had generated.

But, alas, the poem was left out, and the benign illustration and quote were proudly displayed. I’d been Uncle Tommed, and the white ladies of northwest lower Michigan patted themselves on the back for giving the impression of being culturally sensitive and compassionate and inclusive, while I tried to wipe the experience of my interaction with them from my mind, as though it were offensive goo on the heel of a boot.

A week later, I heard one from that selective group of civic-minded women on the local public radio channel, congratulating herself for developing the ability to say “vagina” out loud. I was saddened, because the women of this region would never know that the Ojibwe have a tradition so respectful of women that we only use anatomically correct terms for human body parts, counter to every European language I have ever learned.

We are genteel, intelligent. We have a wealth of traditional stories that deal with women’s roles, verbal abuse, domestic violence, trans-gender issues, and every other social issue that any society would need to function for millennia... as we did, and still do.

Outside of your public schools, we have our own social institutions that teach mechanisms for avoiding dysfunction, because dysfunction happens in all cultures.

Yet the ladies of Traverse City did not have the opportunity to learn this, because they could not fathom a Native American voice bigger than their own stereotypes of ignorance and docility, perhaps mirroring their own culture’s attitude toward women. Just as importantly, it voiced their culture’s attitude toward people of color.

These women are a few of the thousands of white escapists from Chicago and Detroit who have worked their way up the coastlines and the interstate highways into the ancestral homelands of the Woodland Indians of the northern Great Lakes.

In our neighborhood, the existing sparse populations of whites and Native Americans had begun to make their peace and intermarry one another, just when the white flight began in the 70s, after that messy bussing/integration/poverty-driven-race-riots thing that nobody wants to take responsibility for.

The phenomenon of white flight into this area happened with such speed and intensity that we could not overcome the fear and ignorance you brought with you. Perhaps we should call it “white blight.”

Last week, I was mailed a copy of the part of Ensler’s monologues that are written as the voices of Native women. It was an act of friendship, from one of the women who genuinely wanted to know, after the fact, if the monologues met my approval. No one had originally considered that the monologues might not meet the needs of the Indian women who were “included” as a form of political correctness.

It’s hard teaching you all of this, one at a time, at the expense of many of my own unpaid hours. I would much rather be paid what a white woman with my credentials makes, or better yet, what a white male with my credentials makes – but minority employment in education in this corner of the state runs at, oh... around zero percent.

I would have like to have had the opportunity to have spoken out before the damage was done, before Ensler’s damaging words and stereotypes pertaining to Native American women were performed, celebrated, espoused as the gospel by a white school teacher from Traverse City, who will take those stereotypes back into the classroom with her.

You see, public education is one of the least integrated professions in America today, and the option of educating you in groups is not available to me in the mainstream press, in the public schools, or in any format other than as a token Indian.

So I will be reluctant in the future to let my artwork be used, giving the impression of consensus for the status quo, consensus for the bizarre forms of racism, sexism, and ignorance you have brought with you while you’ve been busy fleeing from those awful colored folks down in those awful big cities you left crumbling. I do not like Ensler’s stereotypes of me any more than I like the ones you brought with you.

Ensler did damage to Native American women. Her essays in Indian voices spoke only about domestic violence, in contrast to the essays in white women’s voices. Ensler did not make clear to her audience that, in fact, the bulk of partners who abuse Native American women are not Native Americans themselves, but non-Indians who have sought out a weaker, vulnerable element of society – as abusers do.

You see, Native American women who are abused – by domestic spouses, neighbors, employers, big business, and even suburban escapees – are not trash deserving abuse as depicted by Ensler and interpreted by my neighbors... we are wasted human resources.

Even worse than Ensler’s stereotypes is the fact that today, in this twenty-first century, when Native American authors, artists, and activists are educated, outspoken and available, she took it upon herself to tell our stories for us, as though she could possibly be a competent substitute for our own voices.

By wearing the hat of a writer rather than that of an open-minded editor of contemporary Native women’s voices, Ensler has trivialized us and presented us as stereotypes within a vacuum. While Ensler and dozens of other non-Indian authors who write about Indians reap the economic benefits of giving the dominant culture what it needs and wants to think about the competence of Native American people, Native scholars find themselves waiting years for the publication of materials contradicting those stereotypes.

Native American women in Michigan have more college diplomas per capita than any other group, yet we have the highest unemployment in the state. Our children’s schools are staffed almost exclusively by whites. Public school administration has become a highly paid white male gravy train that models racism and sexism to our children.

We are followed around your stores by security guards. White women tighten their grips on their purses when we or our family members enter the room. Ears close to our concerns. We fear for our safety, and the safety of our children. All this, because you have found our neighborhood to be more desirable than your old neighborhood, and you have reinstituted the policy of Manifest Destiny.

So I offer up to you the poem that was left out of the Traverse City performance of the Vagina Monologues. (See “A Love Letter To My Community” on page 9.)

Lois Beardslee is an Anishinabe teacher and writer, who is accomplished in basketry, quillwork and birchbark biting. Beardslee is the author of Lies to Live By (grades 7 -up), Michigan State University Press 2003. Her article “Arguments for Integration in the Field of Education” appears in the Spring ’04 issue of Multicultural Education Magazine.