Category: epritchard

June 8th, Tuesday, This morning I had a lot of pills to take and things to take care of, trying to make peace with my body which is undergoing healing. Then there was a phone call, and I was a few minutes late for my panel meeting at Stony Kill on bringing ethnic diversity to Outdoor Education, with Reba Lax, regional director of NYSOED. The company was august to say the least. Nate Davis, a good-looking big burly black man who is a pioneer in the field of Ecological Justice, (Arbor Hill Environmental Justice Corp) Rodney Davis, (his brother I presume) also with EJ, Yaritza Cuevas, director of the Greenbelt Outdoor Education Center at Staten Island; Ranger Rick from Urban Park Rangers, and the legendary Brother Yusuf from Brooklyn and Albany, who works to help reformed ex-convicts find peaceful work in the community. We had a lively discussion on how to involve the full range of ethnic backgrounds in the environmental field. I was a spokesperson for aboriginal concerns. Nate talked about “quibbling” and I responded. We agreed that when teachers are subconsciously closed to the values of an ethnicity, they tend to quibble with the beliefs of the other person, and their ways of expressing it, leading to tension and loss of interest. Yaritza was very lively and enthusiastic. I explained some of the native history of her immediate region in Staten Island, and she invited me to come down at some point to look around, perhaps talk to her people. I said that many people who hail from Puerto Rico have Taino blood and are therefore part of the Native American community. She raised her hand and said, “That’s me! My Grandmother is Taino!” I also mentioned that there is an affinity between most blacks and Native Americans via the Cherokee, and all heartily agreed.

Later on I had a one on one discussion of calendar turtles with Ranger Rick, who is an expert on turtles, but did not know that the local Lenape used the backs of certain turtles as calendars, with 13 moons of 28 days, marking 364 days of the year. We found that most turtles have 13 central “moon” platelets, but the outer ring varies, always just short of 28, which is easily remedied by marking. He said scientists today also mark the outer ring in order to identify individuals!

Reba Lax took us on a tour of the site, and we visited the VerPlanck servant’s quarters from 1760. I recounted how the great Wappingers Chief Daniel Nimham was apparently friendly with the family (as they had a son Daniel at the time) and probably visited this house. Such a friendship between Nimham and the Dutch leading family shows a real dedication to diplomacy and peace, given the circumstances.

Today was the Venus solar eclipse. I completely rewrote “Madly In Love” a tragic-comic screenplay about a crazy couple; she is a somewhat violent person who falls in love with a pacifist who is involved in trying to kill the President,.and she’s trying to stop him. Of course it is filled with irony and satire. I printed out one copy to take to the city. I also posted an article on space weapons to peacefile.org.

June 7th, Monday, Dentist appointment with L Z first visit. It was rather violent as far as my teeth were concerned, but Lily and her crew were very gentle. I had managed to avoid Western medicine for about twenty years (except one course of antibiotics for Lyme’s disease, which was not known during traditional Algonquin times). It was a shock. I needed a lot of Novocain. I couldn’t talk after that, so I drove the 90 minutes to Sloatsburg to retrieve my turtle shaker which had been left there during my talk on the Ramapough Indians. I knew I’d need it for my “Path of the Shaman” class at The Open Center. I have been fasting for the last week as part of my cure for my infected tooth, which has worked both for the tooth and in preparing me for my Path of the Shamans class. I realized that the turtle, which has always had a life of its own, was letting me know I was not ready to teach this class yet. Now after making a blood sacrifice (to a healer who reminds me of Kwan Yin) and fasting for a week on and off, I feel more ready, and suddenly the turtle rattle is back in my hands.

June 6th. Sunday: Shawna the “antiquarian” and I met Ted Timreck the anthropologist (producer of the History Channel Segment “The Red Paint People”) at the Beekman Arms and went in search of a stone structure in the wilderness of darkest Rhinebeck, NY which Shawna had seen seven years ago. We spent several hours marching up and down steep hilly pathways in the forest behind Shawna, our guide, but we could not find the stones. Our discussions however turned out to be important, and we all realized the importance of the stones. We found a pile of loose stones, and Ted filmed me talking about other similar piles in Rhinebeck which local lore says are cairn burials of late 19th century Mohicans. He used that clip for a new film on stone structures. Ted then treated us to a light lunch at Schermy’s Diner on Main Street, and we had a great chat, swapping tales and ideas. Ted as a filmmaker is trying to overcome the racial stereotype that Eastern Algonquins were/are backwards and primitive and incapable of creating stone structures. I as an Ethnic Algonquin am trying to help. Algonquins are the landkeepers for much of North America, and are by tradition, extremely peaceful people. What befalls the Algonquins is therefore important to the entire world as they are in a powerful position to pray for peace to emanate from the United States (and Canada) if and when it is possible. Certain “official” powerful offices seem determined to keep alive the myth that the Algonquins were a few scattered beggars with no culture, people that we are better off without. The opposite is true. Even though we didn’t find our “quarry” (sorry for the pun) our conversation increased our enthusiasm for the task. What we didn’t know was that an amazing discovery had been just a hundred feet away from us at one point, and we didn’t know. Since I’d been fasting, I was quite pooped when I got to Shawna’s, and had to rest. I was so zonked that when I awoke I had no idea where I was at first. Shawna has an amazing collection of books, I read from Mercia Eliadie’s Shamanism. Then we talked about peace and justice issues for an hour, and it helped inspire me to start this blog.

Posted by Evan Pritchard at http://www.peacefile.org/wordpress

June 6th is the first day of my Peaceblog Diary to be posted. In this Peaceblog I will attempt to record some of the more significant events of my life as I work with others for peace and justice here in the US and Canada, and around the world. Peacefile webmaster Greg Moses and I discussed the various types of blogs via email and I suggested this was perhaps the “real” blog, the day to day nitty-gritty work trying to keep people informed and inspired towards peaceful solutions. As Gandhi said, peace must be re-won every day. These recorded here are a few of the highlights of each day, and perhaps a few low lights as well. I have always enjoyed reading other people’s blogs, but have had trouble finding the time to do my own. I like blogs where people write deeply about very small, but moving incidents; blogs that go on for a page or two about the cat coughing up a hair ball, but in a way that makes you really care about their cat. This is not that kind of blog; but maybe some will find it amusing and inspiring as well. It is an ‘action’ blog, of one person working for change in concert with many others.

I have kept some notes from the previous five months of what I nicknamed “my Promethean Year” back in January; the name has turned out to be fitting, as it has been a struggle to keep my light shining amid such chaos and darkness as many are experiencing now. I will attempt to create and post a back file of significant moments earlier in 2004 as well, as time permits.