you learn

you are product

a 4 billion solar year

project of seeding

and think only you know

whether no one is here

inside or among

whether love is

the limit of sharing

rather

than a currency

among everything

birdsong flowerpaint

breathe

under your air dome

be love with love

for you may

be it or us

and you

are the deaf mute

is your only tool

fear through use

betrayal&lying

why can't we talk

you just can't taboo

all opposition as terror

and okay only

your violence

as lawful

eric arthur scratched

that long before

might get the poor folks in the back

who cant do more than read

but it wont hold the clerks you need

any absolute

breaks down

of its own N/A

that rare chance

needlessly repeating

there's nothing solid

in our universe

why cant you deal with honesty

what newspapers used to do

maybe we should uncover

evil and secrets

to each other

and  not let you

decide

how are we ever

gonna get something

like legitimate democracy

not a better zookeeper

but even better

some species serving society

or a family

or a better human

seems like a smart leap to get there

if there is anything built in this society

other than shilling deception and disclaimer

it might be honesty

by  us

taking no credit

I died and went to the World Above and saw it.

You knew me.  I was a sinner, I was a drunkard.

I have come back cleansed. I am as we were in the beginning. In me is a shining power.

In the beginning, we were full of this shining power, strong because we were pure.

We moved silently through the woods.  With a silent arrow we killed the animals and ate pure meat.   In silence the fish swarm in pure rivers and we caught them in silence and ate them.  In silence our corn and beans and squashes grew from the earth, and those we ate.  We drank only clear water after the milk  of our mother's breast.

I have heard that lost silence.

You have not heard it because you have been dead.  Up under the roof of the sky there is that pure silence.  In the beginning our people broke that beautiful silence only to pray to the  great good spirit or speak wisely in  council or to say  kind  words  to our children and our elders or to give war cry.

follow me through the door that I am opening for you

Our creator put us on this wide, rich land and told us we were free to go where the game was, where the soil was good for planting.

That was our state of true happiness. We did not have to beg for anything.  Our Creator had taught us how to find and make everything we needed, from trees and plants and animals and stone.

We lived in bark, and we wore only the skins of animals.

Our creator  taught us how to use fire in living and in sacred ceremonies.   She taught  us how to  heal with barks and  roots and  how to make sweet foods with berries.

Our creator gave us tobacco and said, send your prayers up to me on its fragrant smoke.  She taught  us how to enjoy loving our mates and gave us laws to live by.  Our creator  sang to us in the wind and the running water, in the bird songs, in  children's laughter and taught us music.

Thus were we created. Thus we lived for a long time, proud and happy.

We had never eaten pig meat, nor tasted the poison called whiskey, nor worn wool from sheep, nor struck fire or dug earth with steel, nor cooked in iron, nor hunted and fought with loud guns, nor ever had diseases which soured our blood or rotted our organs.

We were pure, so we were strong and happy.

But beyond the great sunrise water there lived a people who had iron and thosedirty and  unnatural things, who seethed with diseases.

Who fought to death over the names of  their  gods.

They had so crowded and befouled their own island that they fled from it because excrement and carrion were upon it.  They came to our island.

Our singers had warned us  that a pale people would come across the great water and try to destroy us but we forgot.  We  did not know they were evil so we welcomed them and  fed them.

We taught them much of what our Grandmother had taught us.

They saw how much room we had and they wanted it.

They brought iron and pigs and rum and disease.  They came farther and drove us over the mountains.   Then when they had filled up and dirtied our old lands by  the sea, they looked  over the mountains and saw this Middle Ground and we are old enough to remember when they  started rushing into it.  We remember our villages on fire every year and the crops slashed every fall and the children hungry every winter.

For many years we traded furs to the English or the French, for wool blankets and guns and iron things, for steel awls and needles and axes, for mirrors, for pretty things made of beads and silver.

And for liquor. This was foolish, but we did not know it. We shut our ears to the great good spirit. We did not want to hear that we were being foolish.

But now those things of the white men have corrupted us, and made us weak and needful. Our men forgot how to hunt without noisy guns. Our women don’t want to make fire without steel, or cook without iron, or sew without metal awls and needles, or fish without steel hooks.

Some look in those mirrors all the time, and no longer teach their daughters to make leather or render bear oil.

We learned to need the white men's goods, and so now a People who never had to beg for anything must beg for everything!
Some of our women married white men, and made half-breeds. Many of us now crave liquor.

He whose filthy name I will not speak,

he who was I before,

was one of the worst of those drunkards. There are drunkards in almost every family. You know how bad this is.

And so you see what has happened to us.

We were fools to take all these things that weakened us. We did not need them then, but we believe we need them now. We turned our backs on the old ways.

Instead of thanking the great spirit for all we used to have, we turned to the white men and asked them for more.

So now we depend upon the very people who destroy us! This is our weakness! Our corruption!

Our creator scolded me, 'If you had lived the way I taught you, the white men could never have got you under their foot!'

And that is why our creator purified me and sent me down to you full of the shinning power, to make you what you were before!
No red man must ever drink liquor.
No red man shall take more than one wife in the future.

No red man shall run after women.

If he is single, let him take a wife and lie only with her.
Any red woman who is living with a white man must return to her people, and must leave her children with the husband, so that all nations will be pure in their blood.

Now hear what I was told about dealing with white men.  These things we must do to cleanse ourselves of their corruption!
Some of these steps will be hard.

Do not eat any food that is raised or cooked by a white person.

It is not good for us. Eat not their bread made of wheat for our creator gave us corn for our bread. Eat not the meat of their filthy swine, nor of their chicken fowls nor the beef of their cattle which are tame and thus have no spirit in them.

Their foods will seem to fill your empty belly but this deceives you for food without spirit does not nourish you.

There are two kinds of white men.

There are the americans, and there are the others. You may give your hand in friendship to the french or the spaniards or the british.

But the americans are not like those.

The americans come from the slime of the sea with mud and weeds in their claws and they are a kind of crayfish serpent whose claws grab in our earth and take it from us.

Wear only clothing that you have made from skins and sewn with sinew.

In  our towns there are dogs  of the white  men's kind, those whose ears hang down.  I saw such a dog watching us from a tree with white men's eyes and I knew.  These are bad animals. These are prowling in our towns with the white man's spirit in them.  And there are cats that you got from the white man.

Yes, I told you-some of these steps to purification will be hard.

The fire struck by white man's steel is not sacred fire. You must put out such fire in your lodges and kindle a new fire using the old way and this will be a sacred fire.

You must never let this sacred fire go out for it is your reborn spirit beginning now and if it goes out so will your life go out. When you move from place to place you must bear sacred coals with you as we did in the ancient times and rekindle the fire when you arrive.
The great good spirit wants our men to hunt and kill game as in the ancient days with the silent arrow and the lance and the snare, and no longer with guns.

If we hunt in the old ways, we will not have to depend upon white men for new guns and powder and lead or go to them to have broken guns repaired.

Remember it is the wish of the great good spirit that we have no more commerce with white men.
We may keep our guns, and if we need to defend ourselves against american white men, the guns will kill them because they are a white man's weapon.

But arrows will kill american intruders, too!

You must go to the grandfathers and have them teach you to make good bows and shape arrowheads, and you must recover the old hunting skills.

I will tell the people I see and you will tell those you see.
The great good spirit will appoint a place to be our holy town and at that place I will call all red men to come and share this shining power.

For the People in all tribes are corrupt and miserable!

In that holy town we will pray every morning and every night for the earth to be fruitful and the game and fish to be plentiful again.
We will no longer do the frolic dances that excite lust.

The great good spirit will teach me the old dances we did before the corruption and from these dances we will receive strength and happiness.

I will go  and  be  alone for a while.

Turn your backs on the whiskey sellers and the traders and do not listen to the Jesus missionaries.

How will you know witches?  They will be doing commerce with the americans.

They will start whispering to you that  I am not a true holy man or prophet.

THAT is how you will know witches.

tenskwatawa 1811

to have chosen

other than the straight line

to keep the jumpiness

the best doesn't start with reason

which we have enough of

then there's giotto

best beyond word

beyond method

and must be done

to find out

if its big enough

after

 

 

atlanta & zimbabwe

amos supuni

how can i rise

norbert shamuyarira

The Indians had no written laws. Their customs were handed down from generation to generation and from age to age by the old men, and had all the force of well-defined and positive statutes, more so than the "common law."

The aborigines of this country enjoyed absolute freedom. Their sachems made their own tools for war and husbandry. They worked the grounds in common with other tribes.

They entered into no great war or scheme without the consent of the whole people or movement of a public nature.

If their council declared in favor of war, their warriors declared their approbation by painting themselves with various colors, and rendering themselves horrid in the extreme to their enemies. In this shape they would rush furiously into the council and begin the war dance, accompanying their steps with fierce gestures expressive of their thirst for vengeance, and describing the manner in which they would wound, kill and scalp their victims; after which they would sing their own glories, exploit the glories of their ancestors and of the nation in the ancient times.

Their festivals consisted of dancing around in a circle of curved posts or a fire built in a convenient part of the town, each having his rattle in his hand, or his bow and arrow or tomahawk.

They dressed themselves in branches of trees or other strange accoutrement.

They had no idea of distinct or exclusive property.

Every man could cultivate and abandon whatever land he pleased. They reckoned their years by the coming and going of the wild geese — "cohunks" they called them — a noise made by these birds.   This coming was once a year.

They distinguished the parts of the year by five seasons, viz. : The budding or blossoming of the spring;  the earing of the corn or roasting ear time;  the summer or high sun;  the corn gathering, or fall of the leaf; and the winter, or the "cohunks."

They counted the months by the moons, though not with so many in the year as we do, but they made them return again as the Corn Moon,  the First and the Second Moon of Cohunks.

They had no distinctions of the hour of the day, but divided them into three parts — the rise, power and lowering of the sun.

They kept their accounts by knots on strings, or notches on sticks.  They were grossly superstitious and idolatrous.

He was the most improvident animal existing; his present necessities satisfied, and he was happy.

He wasted no thought on the morrow.

A man could have as many wives as he could support.  He could abandon one and seek another when he pleased, and the wife could do the same.

hon. james henry miller  1906

Confession

'I shall now give a short sketch of my life. I was born in Floyd County, Virginia in 1858. I was raised in the beautiful and picturesque All-egheny Mountains. I lived there until I was twenty-five years old, and moved to West Virginia in 1883. In 1884 I moved to Hinton, Summers County.

In 1886 I married Ann Brown.

Owing to my illiteracy, I will not give a history of my early life. I will commence from the time I came to this State, and give only a sketch of my trouble after I was married. I had always been a hard-working, sober, peaceful and quiet man until I came to the realization of the fact that I had married a vile woman. Being the husband of a woman of this character caused me a great deal of trouble. I considered it the downfall of myself and children. The fact that I had married a woman of that char-acter caused me much trouble, and finally I took to drinking, thinking to drown my mortification and shame ; but it did not suc-ceed. It led to much trouble.

My wife was not true to me, and besides, she was very high-tempered and abusive to me. In spite of all I could do she became worse to me and harder to please. Finally, she got to dividing her attentions between other men and myself. In the fall some men came to my house on account of her, and abused me, and tried to get me to do or to say something to give them a chance to shoot me. She had frequently taken rides with those men, and afterwards they said she was the cause of it, and they had nothing against me.

After this I saw it was danger-ous to live with her, and we parted, she going to Fayette County at my expense. After she had been there two or three months she wrote me to bring or send her some money, and I sent her money two or three different times, and also went to see her. She soon got tired 'of that place, and wrote to me to send her some money so she could come back to Hinton.

She said she could not,would not live without me any longer, and if I did not send her money, she would come if she had to walk.

I sent her money, and she came back and lived with me two or three weeks, and left. Her excuse for it was that she would not live with my peo-ple, or where they lived.

She then came across the river opposite Hinton, in Raleigh County, and rented one room in a house that Bud Galloway lived in. After she had rented this room she wrote to me to come and bring her things. After I had received her let-ter I went to see her. I asked her what she was going to do, and how she was going to get along. She said she did not know, un-less I helped her, or would come and live with her.

I told her I thought she was giving me poor encouragement to do anything, but that she knew I would do anything I possibly could for her, and always had, if she would only do right. The way she talked, I thought she was about whipped out running around, and the promises she made me led me to believe that she was going to do better. After we had concluded to live together everything moved along smoothly until two or three days previous to that unfortu-nate trouble.

A man came to the door and knocked one night two or three days before the trouble. When he knocked I was sitting and she was standing before the fire. When he knocked she darted to the door and opened it a very little and looked out. The man at the door gave it a violent shove; it staggered my wife back, but she held to it. When he had thus pushed the door open, he asked her where her eldest boy was; she told him he was at the watch-house, and he walked away. The boy he had inquired for had just set him across the river. I knew there was something wrong by his actions.

The only thing I said was, 'Who is that?' After that there was a considerable change in her treatment to me. The next day she took my revolver and hid it. When I missed it, I asked for it, and her answer was, 'You have got to quit carrying revolvers,' and she would not give it to me. "She had never done anything of this kind before. I had car-ried a revolver almost constantly since we had the trouble in the spring.

The day my wife was killed I went up on the mountain to work, and, as well as I remember, I started home about three o'clock. I came by my sister's, and she told me she had heard that there was some fellows coming to my house to run me off. At the time she was telling me I thought very little of it, and only said, 'Let them come.'

I went on down to Hinton and got to drink-ing a little. I commenced to think of those things my sister had told me, and I thought I might meet with some danger at any time. I went to Mr. Burke Prince's store and bought me a re-volver. I thought if any one came to my house I would not run, for I had done nothing to run for.

I knew-there was a change in my wife, and if any trouble come up she would be the cause of it, and for this reason she had been too intimate with other men. When I went home I had no idea of shooting her, although I was greatly aggravated over the trouble she had caused me after the promise she had made.

While in Hinton I bought some goods and a pint of whiskey. It was about sundown when I reached home, and I was about half drunk. I also bought a pair of shoes for myself.

After the family had ate their supper my wife came into the room and began to grumble about me not getting her a pair of shoes. I told her that I did not know that she wanted a pair, but if I had known it I would have gotten them for her.

As soon as supper was over her oldest boy walked off. 1 did not say anything in regard to what I had heard about the parties com-ing there to run me off, but I walked out of the house to look after the boy. I stood in the yard a few minutes, but did not see any one, but I heard talking down at the ferry.

I went back into the house after drinking at least one half pint of whiskey. I sat down, and she commenced to quarrel about the shoes.

I sat there and listened at her and also listened for some one to slip in and commence shooting at me at any minute.

I thought she had given my revolver to some one to shoot me with. I did not say much to her, anyway. I was standing before the fire and so was she when she said, 'If you can't get what I want, there is a man that can, and he shall do it, too.'

When she said this I thought of my condition. I had broken myself up trying to please her, and all the time I was expecting to be shot at any minute on account of her. I don't know what kind of a condition I did get into.

I flew into a mad fit, and, taking my revolver from my pocket, I fired at her. I was standing in about six feet of her when I shot. When I shot she went towards the room Mr. Halloway stayed in, and I went out of the back door.

It was all done in a flash. I did not know whether the shot struck her or not or how bad she was hurt, or anything about it, until the next day. I came back to the house in the course of the night, and when I stepped in the door I realized I did not want to see my wife, and I walked off about fifty yards from the house and stopped.

I heard at least a half a dozen men talking just a few steps from the house, and I was afraid to go back to the house any more. "The next morning about nine o'clock I went to my sister's, and she met me in the yard and told me that there had been some men there looking for me, and they had said I had killed my wife and left.

I was greatly surprised to hear that she was dead.

When she told me of it, if I had had a million dollars I would have given it if I could have-recalled that fatal shot.

I knew it would not do for me to stay there. I left the country. I was in Virginia and Tennessee until arrested.

In conclusion, I want to say that I hope my sad fate will be a warning to all that wish to live a happy life, to beware of bad women and whiskey.

I want to thank the jailer, Mr. Hawley, and the guards, Frank Godby and Wm. E. George, for the kindness they have shown me while in jail.

W. I. MARTIN.

Martin was hung October 3, 1890 before five thousand people.