Laughter Looks Good on You. Find a reason to laugh today. And share it. Laughter opens the way to love and joy and beauty and so many good things.
Today I am reposting a blog from the “Native Bloodline” FaceBook page. Check out her page and show her some kindness.
Indigenous Joy.
The laughter emanating from these faces, the pleasure of the sounds of corn husks rustling as harvests roll in. The essence of pure joy on those faces is the embodied wellspring to which I make my daily offerings.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=256710984180295&set=pb.100095241862188.-2207520000&type=3
We are sowing seeds of Indigenous joy. When the days are long, when the row is long to hoe, when the smoke fills the sky and uncertainty creeps into the corners of my mind. I bring my embodied prayer back to this; that the fruits of our labor and also our creativity will continue to carve into being a world where it is safe and nourishing place for grandmas to teach their children the stories that are held inside the seed corn, that the deft hands of grandmothers conjure up magic in the simple beauty of a knot being tied or the way a knife is handled.
Remember this. They want us to be defined by our intergenerational trauma. Yet the blood in our veins carries wild rushing rivers of intergenerational resilience, reverence, pleasure, joy and collective creative force and a spirit fire that could never be extinguished against all odds and acts of atrocities.
Let that be our North Star, our ancestral blood memory of beautiful resistance. Make yourself into a vessel where that song can be sung…
Don’t despair. This resistance is intergenerational work, and it is alive and sprouting. The seeds of hope of this movement have been planted a long time ago, by loving humans who cared so deeply that you might know no hunger. These prayers have been whispered around many fires, in birthing rooms, in final breaths, heaved towards horizons at first dawn light, to the winds, under rustling dry corn stalks during the harvests…
Don’t despair. Those seeds of hope are sprouting. We can hear the seed-songs of generations in that reverent inhale.
Let us hold the vision of Indigenous joy as we move in community and tend the hearth of dignified resurgence.
YAHOKE, ikana! Thank you, friends. All my relations!
We are all one if we choose to be!
We can choose to practice tolerance and compassion instead of judgment and ridicule.
Much GRATITUDE for spending time on a Choctaw Journey with me.
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Sources:
Photo Credit: from a collection at the Minnesota State Historical Society of Arikara/Mandan/Hidatsa girls.
>>The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) announces the digital repatriation of the Gilbert L. Wilson collections to the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation (MHA Nation), Aug 30, 2022. Read more.
The photographs will be housed at [Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish] NHS College’s special collections, New Town, North Dakota.
Inventory of works by Gilbert Livingston Wilson, about the Hidatsa and Mandan Indians at Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota when Wilson gathered data on Indian cultures for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Approx.1106 photographs.
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Choctaw Journeys into the Past 