Tuesday, March 17, 2009

First Earth

Our sole obligation, my grandmother instructed, in having been created in the first place by the Holy Grandfather, is to maintain the Principal Religion of the Earthlodge clans. It was agreed eons and eons ago that if these ceremonies were not performed, the world would no longer be held together, the elements of wind and ice would whirl together and splinter us apart. Our forgetfulness, in other words, would become part of a chain of natural and man-made catastrophes--flag wars and ecological suffocation--leading to the end of the earth. And the people who so connivingly and viciously sought to make us forget ourselves by subjugating us, the Euro-Americans, would be the root cause.

It is therefore prophesied that by making us forget who we are, they inevitably kill themselves....

---Remnants of the First Earth by Ray A. Young Bear

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Cellist of Sarajevo

There's a strange sense of relief in knowing where the danger is. It's much easier to deal with than an unfocused sense of doom.

--The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway