05-09-08 Day 1
welcome to our lives in real time, or as real as we can make it, as we travel on limited battery life, building history. we are THEMES and this is your country.
05-09-09 Minneapolis, MN. DAY 1
Into The Great Plains…On The Trail Of Treaties.
We awake to the spring sun, as flowers opening. Rubbing our eyes clean of the night times vivid visions. I am alive, awkwardly trying to relate to there return of the bright glowing presence in the sky, that has eluded us for the previous six months. Leaving the Twin Cities, I am filled with a familiar feeling that washes over my shoulders like a cool stream running of a mossy shale cliff. It is a feeling of relief that comes to me when I travel. It comes like a message in the forest. It comes, as a reward for working hard with ones hands, and I am satisfied. The feeling in my guts however is an uneasy one, as we travel past the reservation where I used to live. The sprawling buildings of overpopulation and
capitalist expansion cloud my vision almost erasing my childhood memories of tracking animals in that forest of my past. Now gone. All I am left with here are stories as. I squint my eyes and try as hard as I can to remember empty spaces. I used to say “I see the future in empty spaces”, but these days it has become more a challenge for me to maintain this belief. It seems our values are in as much
danger as mother earth is and I believe it to be crucial to heed the warnings we are being given. I’m not sure what will become of this place, although I’m afraid it’s so far gone with endless miles of concrete I cannot help the feelings of disassociation that drive me to move on from this place.
For hundreds of years the leaders of our states
and country have built up organizations that govern the usage of land and the people who walk on it, to land us in an almost imperialistic crisis of boundaries. We were once forced onto pieces of land that were deemed less favorable. We made them our own, and now they are being slowly repossessed by the same organizations that sanctioned them initially. History has an institutional connotation and Folklore has one that may seem too mystical to some, but it is, our own failure to pass these things on
first hand that hinders us from maintaining moral values through generations, and that is most prevalent reason our nation is so divided. There is a War over the Great Plains, and we have risen up from these reservation lands, so rich with colorful stories, with a respect for life and privilege that grows stronger than any Oak tree. This how our story will begin and how it will ultimately end in a struggle we can never quite come out on top of. This is our folklore, and it’s all we’ve got, as we walk the Trail of Treaties.
Passing through small town southern Minnesota is like opening a dusty old book, filled with tales tribal conflict, and stories of massacres so terrible my arm hair stands on end and my tear ducts swell. Despite all, there is a quiet haunting poetry here, in the freshly plowed fields as the wind slides across them filling the air with the smell of ripe wet earth and carrying the whispers of ghosts, across the swollen rivers that divide us.
They land safely on the muddy banks of our eardrums, cradled as a secret, and we know why they are here.
-moon son of chief
