Writing #

The problem with Brazil doing any settler-colonizer style agriculture is they have just the smallest bit of suitable land. They have just the smallest bit of natural prairie at the south side of the country. It’s only in the State of Rio Grande do Sol. That same prairie bioregion extends down into Uruguay and Buenos Aires, but it’s absolutely tiny in Brazil (Overbeck et al., 2008). So what’s Brazil to do? The grileiros (from grilos, locusts) come to plague the land. They tear down existing biospheres. They steal land and kill Indigenous people. (Butler, 2011), (Arsenault & Mendes, 2017), (Zaitchik, 2019)

Root beer is now a ubiquitous soft drink in America, but it’s modern form is nothing like the original teas brewed by Indigenous peoples on the American continent. It’s loaded with sugar. It’s made with artificial flavoring. It’s much less of a medicine than it originally was made to be.

Concentration camps or internment camps are any mass imprisonment of people without charges, typically of citizens of an enemy or anyone suspected of terrorism. Often times, these camps are not called concentration camps or interment camps, as the intention at first may vary. No matter the original intent, concentration camps or interment camps always seem to evolve into situations where death reigns.

Facebook and Twitter already know every link you click on and everything you’ve liked and every person you’ve even interacted with on their platform. However, their reach doesn’t stop there. Every time you visit a web page which uses an advertising platform as a partner (which might include Twitter, Facebook, or a number of others), those companies are informed of exactly which pages you visited on the Internet. They know which blogs you frequent, what news articles you read, and the items you might have considered buying. They may even know what sex toys you’ve been thinking of buying from the supposed comfort and privacy of your own bed.

I met MLKJ’s statue in Birmingham, AL. He’s on a platform, standing tall and regal. He’s looking across the way past the statues of the four little girls frozen in time, where they likely used to play on the street corner, towards the church where those four girls were killed by a group of racists who planted a bomb intended for organizers at the church.

The conflict between elder Nathan Phillips and the #MAGA kids is more than racism. The kids who were harassing the Omaha Nation elder may have been racist, but it’s still about the plundering of nations. Women and children disappear from reservation territory daily. The current laws make #MMIW cases likely fall under federal jurisdiction, but with additional complications and holes.

I seem bound to wander the earth. I seem to be called to many places to either observe and communicate, to pray, or to help in the most appropriate way. I suppose I am a teacher of sorts, not the kind you’d find in classroom. No, I’m more the kind you might find from a time long ago. I tell stories as the rhizomatic strands of reality become woven into the patterns I see.

A mathematical look at logic versus emotion.

My family’s ties to the fate of the Lakota Nation.

How time transformed and carved our forests and the lessons embedded within.