Sounds like this old NA prophecy is about us, the New Seminole. If you read my books, you know just about every race made up our ragtag band of renegades. You don't have to be a full-blooded Seminole or Native American to be one of us. You just gotta care about the world you live in and are crazy enough to join up with us to protect it. And avenge it. The New Seminole, before our devastating loses at Rendezvous Point deep in the Everglades, was a real "rainbow coalition" with roots in hippie culture thanks to its passed founder and my father-in-law Busimanolotome Osceola. Here's a guy who won the Purple Heart from Uncle Sam who came back and "rediscovered" his true Seminole self. And Hair, the "American tribal love rock musical." I didn't know how much he liked the musical until I asked his 14-year-old daughter Gerryragni what her name meant in Muskogee. She told me it meant "Hair." I thought, WTF, I knew Busi was certifiable, but naming your only daughter "Hair" seemed over-the-top even by his standards. Later Nokosee told me his sister was named after one of the co-writers of the musical: Gerome Ragni. Anyway, whenever I hear "The Flesh Failures" from Hair, I think about Busi and what could have been. Not just for the New Seminole, but all of us. Give it a listen. It is muy powerful.
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Since Trump got elected president I've been having a hard time sleeping at the Embassy. I keep thinking about my passed father-in-law and founder of the New Seminole, Busimanolotome Osceola. Busi for short. Or at least it was for me. Anyway, he borrowed heavily from just about everything to invent the New Seminole. Part of its "Mission Statement" is built on pop culture and the influencers of his time. One of those influencers was the witty and urbane iconoclast novelist and essayist Gore Vidal. Busi introduced me to him deep in the Everglades while watching a YouTube video during "Family Night" under a chickee thatched roof (you can learn how we did that in my books). He loved watching him take on arch Republican conservative thinker William F. Buckley, especially the time when the two were debating on TV during the tumultious 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (see below). I mean, he nearly got Buckley to belt him one as he pressed the repressed man's buttons by calling him a Crypto-Nazi (around 10:45 in the video). Looking at that video clip now almost 50-years later reminds me of how "Right On!" (as they use to like saying back in the day) Vidal was about cops, oppression, and America which is to say, not much has changed. Part of Vidal's thoughts about America serve as the foundation of the New Seminole. You can find most of them in an article that appeared in the 410-page January 1979 25th Anniversary Issue of Playboy magazine. I am not making that up. Busi always swore he read the magazine for the articles and one day gave me that smelly old issue to read up in my tree (see other blog posts)-- provided I returned it as I received it: mint condition. It's called "Sex is Politics" and part of it can be found here. It's one of the few things in that issue that isn't embarrassing (the jokes are sexist despite Playboy's pretense of championing women) but the nudes, although objectifying women, are refreshingly naive. Here's a sampling of the Vidal mind re sex and politics and how one rules the other in America. "Although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled. Any sexual or intellectual or recreational or political activity that might decrease the amount of coal mined, pyramids built, the quanity of junk food confected will be proscribed through laws that, in turn, are based on the divine revelations handed down by god or whatever gods happen to be in fashion at the moment. Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.
Now, it is not possible for a governing class to maintain its power if there are not hot buttons to push... In desperation, the nation's ownership has now gone back to the tried-and-true hot buttons: Save Our Children, our fetuses, our ladies' rooms from the godless enemy." --Gore Vidal, 1979 A few posts back I mentioned the first time I heard Avicii's Wake Me Up When It's Over. It was on our wedding night deep in the swamp. Micco Mann, that SOB FBI fuck sent me this pix following that post to let me know "they know everything." Apparently they comb the net for pixs of anyone they're looking for, like Nokosee and me. Unbeknowest to me, someone had taken a picture of us when we were at the Ultra Music Fest last year and put it up on Facebook. This was before Nokosee got his first tat, that way-cool bear claw thing clawing his bicep (see earlier post). He knew I was going bonkers in the Miccosukee Embassy because I couldn't leave it unless I wanted to get arrested and our baby Haalie taken away from us. But, as you probably know by now from reading our books, we're both pretty much certifiable so we took a chance. Houston Cypress, the Miccosukee Ambassador, found us a babysitter from the tribe and we took off in the middle of the night. I wanted to party like it was 1999-- especially since I knew Avicii was going to be there-- and "let my hair down" so I died it cotton candy lime and stuck it high and proud. I wore a traditional see-through patch work quilt cut-off top with my go-to metallic mini skirt I turned into a loin cloth. Nokosee wore a studded black leather vest and loin cloth. Believe it or not, we did NOT stand out from the crowd as you can see above. We had a wild and wonderful time and Special Agent Mann-- we know you read this blog-- we hope to do it again.
"On November 12, more than a dozen Americans were arrested for disrupting work at a natural-gas construction site. One man locked himself inside a tanker truck delivering water to the work area, and protesters say law enforcement officers punished a crew of demonstrators and arrested all 14 of them.
But that skirmish didn't occur in North Dakota, at the infamous Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protest camp. The arrests were made outside Gainesville, Florida, as part of a parallel protest movement to stop a $3 billion, Gov. Rick Scott-approved pipeline from plowing across Alabama, Georgia, and Florida to deliver natural gas to the perpetually sketchy Florida Power & Light... (Although the pipeline does not cross Native land), the Sabal pipeline will cross the Santa Fe, Suwannee, and Withlacoochee Rivers, which contain invaluable stretches of vulnerable Florida wetlands." (To read more of the Miami New Times article, please clickhere.) As you may know from reading my books or from following this blog, the New Seminole has a real problem with this kind of corporate BS; enough so that we stopped turning the other cheek and started fighting back. Unfortunately, we couldn't win a one-on-one with Uncle Sam and were decimated one night in a battle deep in the Everglades. But we're coming back, one crazy brave bastard at a time. Until then, those taking on the humorless, hardass, greedy fucks trying to ram this ecological disaster waiting-to-happen down our throats will have to soldier on without us. Hopefully the peaceful way will work here and at Standing Rock because our "proactive" approach failed big time. But now that Trump will soon be in power, I doubt it. Instead, corporations and Repugnicants will be emboldened to try to get richer by any means necessary. It's as if the part of Gaia we call America is getting it from both ends. ![]() And again and again until DAPL goes away. Consider this new dance this time's Ghost Dance. And let's dance to "The Virus." An Indigenous DJ trio out of Ottawa, CA, A Tribe Called Red has released a music video to support the release of their third album "We Are Halluci Nation"-- and to support the Water Protectors fighting DAPL. The Virus is a way cool dance hall (chickee hut?), dubstep, Indigenous Peoples music mashup from the album. Upon its release, ATCR sent a note to the media written by poet/activist Saul Williams which in part reads: "...What does it mean to stand your ground? What does it mean to protect and serve? What does it mean when corporate interests encroach upon communal resources? What does it mean when we let the oligarchs of industry dig up the graves of First Nations to suck the blood beneath the bones and boil the profits in contaminated water? We are the seventh generation. We are the protectors of this land, the protectors of water. We are not a conquered people. We will issue no warning. It will come thinly veiled or not veiled at all. The drum will beat. And you will hear it. There is no question." Standing your ground for something you believe in is something everyone must do at least once in their life. Right now for Native Americans it's at Standing Rock. We particularly like the last part of the last paragraph. Very activist. Like the New Seminole. As for The Virus, we love it for its ideas and it's music. We wanna see the Water Protectors dancing to it. I will be working on steps of my own at the Miccosukee Embassy that include pow-wow and dubsteps. Maybe like Marquese Scott. Well, maybe not exactly like him. He's sick. But you get the idea. Maybe if we can get enough of us dancing for the Water Protectors, they will feel our support and will somehow gain strength knowing that they are not alone. Hey, maybe we could shoot videos of ourselves dancing to The Virus and flood YouTube with them. Anything to get the word out that this pipeline on Native Land is not acceptable. In any event, for the Water Protectors out there at Standing Rock, play The Virus LOUD, point the speakers at the cops, and dance* in their collective face. Contemptuously. Proudly. Bravely.
*Choreographed in a pow-wow dubstep en masse in their faces would be my choice. But that's just me. |
AuthorHolatte-Sutv Turwv Osceola. CategoriesArchives
April 2020
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