They brought their guns, they brought crosses, they brought an end to the ancient ways of this land. They came on horses that trampled the soil, that fed on the maize, that drank from the river. Spotted dogs sniffed out the places of refuge. During those first days the ancestors painted their ghosts on this rock wall, marching through a dream beneath the twin suns fleeing the robed one who came to crucify an older way of believing. ♨
Gazing into the blue-green depths through this watery portal to the underworld, we don’t see the fiery hell of our imagination, but instead only reflections of our own worlds. Our demons do not dwell in the boiling, stinking waters that ooze from the earth’s bowels. They dance instead in the forests and meadows that surround us. ♨
Mountain man Joe Meek’s first summer of fur trapping in 1829, which put him among the earliest of non-indigenous people to enter Yellowstone.
The Rio Grande divides two lands, two tongues, two ways of seeing and believing. It occupies a borderland where the living, the dead, and the river’s watery sustenance follow a winding course to distant seas.
It seems fitting on Labor Day to celebrate the wisdom, commitment, and courage of Mother Jones where she chose to be buried beside immigrant mine workers killed in the struggle for labor rights.
San Antonio, Texas, boasts a magnificent World Heritage treasure in their Spanish colonial missions. These places serve both religious purposes and tourist pleasures. Which raises the question, are the San Antonio missions sacred or secular? ♨
On a sojourn to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, author Tom Fate discovers the detourist’s novel ways of seeing, being, and relating.
