Nuyagi Keetoowah Society of Pomona NY

[DIGOWELI]

Vance said:
vii.] you said—This complex situation demands that you understand completely since you have appointed yourselves judges.   Does that not mean that you should at least conduct a “discovery phase??? including witnesses before you hold a trial?

reply—someone placed faulty information online, ie—yall are accepted by the Oklahoma Keetoowah Society (paraphrasing) and that is why yall came up here, I am pretty sure. When you make claims online you might not realize that some people who know of the REAL Keetoowah might be lisnin . . .  In teh big city, in NY and NJ where there are no or few Cherokee, you are far removed and think it is save to talk about a few thousand people isolated in small towns and farms of rural NE Oklahoma, and you can claim to be some of them. Who will ever know?

REH:
Vance that is insulting.    Are you challenging me?

As for the big city.   There are more Indian people in the New York Metropolitan area than in any area of comparable size and population in the country.   And a very large percentage of them are Tsalagi from Oklahoma, North Carolina and Tennessee.   There are so many Cherokee here that a Cherokee desk was proposed in the state capital.    
If they are traditional then they are Keetoowah because that is the name of the religion in English.   I don't know why its OK for people to be Christian and still Tsalagi but urban Keetoowahs can't speak English.    If the folks at home in those little towns give up their Baptist relatives and challenge the culture of those relatives, then I will quit speaking English.  Of course I mean this with a light touch.   Baptists should be Baptist if that is what they have been given and they are family.   The world is multi-lingual and we should be at least as smart as the French who seem to be able to speak other languages and still keep their French culture, religion and art.  

Vance:
I too am worried about accusing innoscent people, and this was put here is “research needed??? and not immediately on the “fraud??? site.

REH:
I would suggest that you remember the old adage about the snake biting his tail.


Vance:
viii.] You say you are Cherokee. Who are your Cherokee ancestors? Can you prove it or are you claiming it? I trace my ancestors to Brown and Guess (great great grandparents were David B Brown 1822-1865 and Hariet Guess 1818-1886) and no we are not enrolled either, and no, we can not prove they are Cherokee, but he have collected a lot of evidence. Also have evidence of Monacan/Saponi. I’d like to know somehting about the person I am talking to.

REH:  OK, if your family is the reason that you are Cherokee then you are only half way there.     Most of our peoples make a distinction between "two leggeds" and "real people" or principle people.   I was always taught that you have to earn your significance by becoming a member of the principle people.   Coming of Age.   The first stone is blood but that is only a beginning and sometimes people jump over that stone.   There have been some notable exceptions to blood amongst great Indian people.   Many were of other nations that were adopted and some were even European.    Especially women.   By the way I am related by marriage to the Gists.   Maybe we are cousins in-law.   My other cousins are Reynolds, Sullivans, Corn and Rogers by marriage.    I have relatives all over Oklahoma and all over the nation both by blood and marriage.   That is by my natural parents.   My adopted Father and last teacher was a Webber and that is not an unknown name down around Gore.   His wife was Ani-Awi York from Tennessee.   As in Sargeant York who was Tsalagi although like Will Rogers they rarely mention it.   But I know the family.

Continue to conclusion:

[DIGOWELI]

I hate this geneology thing.   It is one of the things that made me leave home.   My faith is my own and my community is also made up of diaspora Tsalagi and other Indian people who wish to sing, dance, study and grow together.   It is our faith and religion and community.   We do not authenticate people, take money from the government, or claim an inheritance.   We simply love our families, are artists, scholars, teachers, and growers of every ilk as well as ex military people who take the care for our families very seriously.    We have given hundreds of thousands of dollars in American Indian Scholarships in honor of my late Elder in Tulsa.   She too was a scholar who accomplished great things without beating people about the head with her pedigree.  Our Founder was at one time a Wolf Clan Chief and a decorated World War II veteran in three different services, and later was the High Medicine (Peace) Priest.   I am a simple Priest who does his job as I am given to do.     We are artists and other professional people who live in the world as it is but do not give up our faith or culture.   We also practice the traditional crafts but do so as meditation and do not mix that up with Art.   Art is something more important.   It is that great mirror with a hole in it that tell us who we are and looks through to the Creator as to who we might become.

Most of our community really doesn't want to have anything to do with the internet but I believe that it is a possibility for communication and connection.   I hope this will facilitate that but if it doesn't we are still who we are and will continue on the path given by the Creator of All.

oneh dodada gohv'i

Ray Evans Harrell  

[DIGOWELI]

Since you asked:   REH

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[Dr. Richard L. Allen]

Normally, I do not post on web sites unless invited to provide information as was the case on this site.  However, I am posting to address comments made by Mr. Ray Harrell.

I post this in response to the statements made by Mr. Harrell as indicated on April 18.  Today is April 19, 2005.

This posted by Mr. Harrell on April 18, 2005:  I called the High School Counselor Dr. Richard Allen and he did not convince me that he was equipped to make the judgements he made.

Contrary to what Mr. Harrell has posted on this site, he sent me an email this morning dated: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 9:12 AM.  About an hour or two later, he called me.  I emphatically state that this is the first contact that I have had with Mr. Harrell by email or by land line.

Mr. Harrell called to ask whether I had received his email and I responded I had and that "He was still a wannabe" to which he responded that I was  a "sh*thead" and hung up the phone.  That is the extent of any conversation that he and I have ever had.

I reiterate that Mr. Harrell has never contacted me at any time prior to today's date, so his earlier posts dated April 18 in which he claimed to correspond with me is a lie.  What else can I say.

I am a policy analyst employed by the Cherokee Nation not a high school counselor as was stated by Mr. Harrell.  

I often respond to correspondence addressed to Chief Smith from individuals who are inquiring about their heritage, looking for a shaman or want dream analysis or who are misguided about their heritage.  

I have the advantage of knowing the traditions, the culture and history of the Cherokee people having been reared in a traditional manner in a Cherokee community and accepted as the full blood that I am.  I am also a Marine Vietnam veteran so I don't mind a little verbal conflict every now and then.

Dr. Richard L. Allen
Policy Analyst
Cherokee Nation  

[DIGOWELI]

 I realize that Mr. Allen doesn't remember that he told me his PhD was in education and counseling.   If he will remember I mentioned my father as well.   Maybe he has lead damage like those of us from Picher.   The VA has some good drugs for memory and as a Marine he is eligible.   I don't really care what his job is at present.  We all do different things.   I did call him at his home about six months ago on a holiday and he was surprised that I had his home phone number.   I looked it up.    I questioned him about his derogatory Shamanism article which didn't seem to know anything about the seminal work of the Kirkpatricks/Gritts on  "Cherokee Shamanism."    We had a conversation in which I found him rigid, authoritarian and limited in his experience.  

I wasn't in the Marines I was in the Army for six years and I live in New York where conflict is a way of life.   So I too am happy to converse.    Nothing like a couple of old farts trying to remember when their testaterone meant something.  

I tried to call and make it private but he chose this venue.  I'm happy to oblige.   Perhaps we should include our Council and Chief Smith in this as well.   How about the High Priest?  

People whose bottoms are bare should not be so aggressive.   We don't Wannabe anything.   We are who we are.   Wannabe is a vulgar derogatory term that shouldn't be aimed at anyone.     One who does that has a head full of old waste that didn't work then and still doesn't.   I believe it is called a "Trusel".  Sounds good but doesn't work.

Both Allen and Kirk felt no shame at maligning not only a young organization like ourselves, in existence since the 1978 law made it legal, but an old community resource of Cherokees and Lenape  (the Sand Hill People) that Touching Leaves the great Lenape Linguist scholar paid homage to when she came to New York before she died.    The community historian, who happens to be a member of the CNO,  has carefully documented the history of the community and been peer reviewed and is exhibited in two Museums in New Jersey as a cultural resource.   The community is dispersed with only a few residents now but to deny their existence is criminal.   Where is your head Allen and Kirk.   What tunes are you singing?

Ultimately It all comes down to government collaborator's descendants being recognized and Oklahoma traditionals being dis-enfranchised.   Ask him why they don't include the traditional Keetoowahs who refused and still refuse numbers in the nation?    What can't the Stone family exhibit their work as Indian or Cherokee?   Why are imitations of old pieces more relevant to life today than work that represents Cherokees today?     That is what we call "trinkets and trash" here in the Art world and what we call "looney tunes" at the American Indian Community House.    I have fought not to allow prejudice in the opera business against Indians, when essentially we are "invading" European cultural territory.   No one says that a painter who paints on canvas rather than wood planks, berry dyes and bird yokes is not a real Indian Artist and that those sacred belts with wire in them are really European.    Suprise!   all of those special symbols that everybody was stealing from you is found almost everywhere but as long as you didn't know different, you could believe what was in their minds.    This is not the way it was when I grew up in Oklahoma.   We had Moscelyn Larkin,  Yvonne Chouteau, Louis Ballard, the Hightowers,  Maria Tall Chief.   All from Indian families and Northeastern Oklahoma.  

As for Mr. Allen and his complaints.   He is still rude presumptious and ignorant and that is all there is to that.

Ray Evans Harrell  

[educatedindian]

Mr. Harrell and everyone else, a couple of points I should touch on.

A lot of what the Society in NY is doing reminds me a lot of what I've seen from other Cherokee groups that are outside the three fed-recognized groups. A lot of defensiveness, insinuation of deep elaborate dark conspiracies that sound very paranoid, and a hostility towards their recognized cousins. Plus a tendency to use language that is drawn from Nuage more than traditional beliefs.

"They don't know anyone [who] exists who isn't a part of the Dawes "collaborator's and criminal's" rolls."

That is downright abusive towards people you are related to by blood and culture. Not to mention paranoid and just plain untrue. Very FEW enrolled Cherokees were "collaborators". The Watie/Boudinot faction was just a tiny fragment of the Cherokee nation, less than 10%. And, playing devil's advocate here, many of them felt they had reason for what they did, that they would be removed anyway from the homeland and so they should get the best deal they can. IMO that does not excuse what they did by signing a fraudulent treaty. But they (and their descendants) mostly did not see what they did as traitorous.

"There are about 8 million Indian people in America who are culturally NOT European and who don't care now to have anything to do with governments."

There about 7 million with NDN ancestry total in the US, and perhaps half of them say they are "part Indian." They know they have ancestry in a vague way, but they were not raised as such, they aren't treated as NDN by others or think of themselves as NDN other than having a little vague interest in the culture.

About half the self IDd or otherwise IDd as NDNs in the US aren't enrolled, including me and probably half the NDNs on this board too. So we understand your position, but wish you'd cease your largely groundless hostility towards your recognized cousins. They didn't invent blood quantum, the feds did.

And no, Nuage aren't the only ones to use metaphors. But they certainly overuse bad metaphors, and they do it hide their lack of clear thinking. "Mirrors of your mind" is an awful Nuage derived mixed metaphor, a really bad bit of overwriting. That, plus the hostility towards enrolled Cherokee, make me wonder if you have Nuage members that are influencing you.

One fascinating bit you mention is a personal interest of mine: That Sgt. York was Cherokee. I'd never heard this before, and I just finished writing a history book on Native veterans. I searched quite a bit for this, and the only thing I found anywhere close to your claim was this:

Cached at
http://www.doles.org/DelkNews6/DELKNEWS6.htm
"Many of our subscribers wanted to know how they were related to Alvin York. To answer this we need to know that Alvin was a great-great-grandson of Conrood Pile who is buried in the same cemetery him in Wolf River Cemetery, Pall Mall, Fentress Co. Tennessee....
Also, he made profitable deals with the Indians. For Fentress County was a part of the great hunting grounds of the Shawnee, Cherokee and Chickasaw; and one of their trails passed near Coonrod's home....
According to Pile Genealogy by Ferne Sepp, Coonrod Pile was a "long hunter"....
Coonrod Pile and his wife now lie side by side in the Wolf River Cemetery at Pall Mall, with a large slab of limestone covering each grave. While in another grave, only a few yards away, lies the remains of their famous and heroic great-great-grandson -- Sergeant Alvin Cullom York."

Much of the rest of this geneology site talks about Cherokee relatives, but not for York. If you know of any different sources, I'd sure like to see them.  

[DIGOWELI]

Mr. Harrell and everyone else, a couple of points I should touch on.

A lot of what the Society in NY is doing reminds me a lot of what I've seen from other Cherokee groups that are outside the three fed-recognized groups. A lot of defensiveness, insinuation of deep elaborate dark conspiracies that sound very paranoid, and a hostility towards their recognized cousins. Plus a tendency to use language that is drawn from Nuage more than traditional beliefs.


REH
I would remind you that I AM on the defense here.   You are the ones that accused us.   This is no level playing field and it is most definitely a game.    We are a very small group that has our first group of graduates doing well in the nation's universities, including my daughter, and we have given our blood, sweat and tears to maintain the traditions that we were passed at great sacrifice.   I have 80 volumes of personal traditional Keetoowah material that was passed to me from my father, that does not exist in museums and that I am supposed to burn if I don't have an apprentice to pass it on to.   That is the traditional way.   You don't just put things out, they have a life and affect.   If Croslynn Smith or Walker Calhoun converts to Christianity and they have no apprentice, the tradition is dead.   They are both a living legacy, a national treasure.  If they do not have responsible students then the material is gone.     In the case of these materials, if there is no student, they must be destroyed lest they cause harm.    That includes not only the Keetoowah but the Big House and the Apache traditions that were passed to him to me.   There are plenty of Mede and Sundance people.   That material is covered.   I don't have to be responsible for that even though his teachers were the most well known of the day.    Still, there are practitioners of those traditions.    But when the way is lost so are the spirits.    

This is not up for discussion.    

Such non-sense as I have been exposed to by Allen and Kirk on this list is both demeaning of that task and is not good for my name as a serious artist in the Performing Arts.   I have worked hard on the internet for ten years building a good reputation but all it takes is one negative to destroy that.   Ask Ward Churchill.   How do we feed our children given such negative "official" statements?   We have taken guff for thirty years for insisting that Indians CAN do complex music and dance.   Now the "Indians" say we aren't and they don't.   Bad scene.  

We have several good Cherokee Opera Singers and one great composer.   They have not been treated well in either community and modern Indian art is non-existent in the performing arts.   Everything is commercial.   That is bad ulanigvgv.    

I do not take money from the community and I have given around 26,000 dollars a year in free scholarships to Indian students over 27 of the 35 years I've been in New York.    Many of these have gone on to do leads in Broadway, Lincoln Center, movies, opera, directing and choreography winning many awards and honors.   Black Elk Speaks, Powwow Highway, Lonesome Dove,  etc.    Their training here didn't cost them a cent but it was not free for us.  Until now, I never charged them.   Because of distractions like this, and this paranoid external environment, we have suffered this year we are unable to help Indian children who come here for the arts as a result.    

It is not only Indian people who are in love with the past.   When we honored Ned Rorem, we went $40,000 in debt because America does not really know the purpose of serious Art and want only to hear old traditional music.    I learned that as a child in Picher but they haven't learned it yet.   What is truly depressing is that Oklahoma seems to have forgotten it.

I must go teach now but will come back to your other statements.   Ask yourself why we should respect our relatives who do not return that respect and who have jobs and salaries.   We made our choice but we do not have to take abuse from those who don't live in two rooms with a piano and six thousand books.  

Ray Evans Harrell

[DIGOWELI]

back for a moment:

AC quotes me:
They don't know anyone [who] exists who isn't a part of the Dawes "collaborator's and criminal's" rolls."

That is downright abusive towards people you are related to by blood and culture. Not to mention paranoid and just plain untrue. Very FEW enrolled Cherokees were "collaborators". The Watie/Boudinot faction was just a tiny fragment of the Cherokee nation, less than 10%. And, playing devil's advocate here, many of them felt they had reason for what they did, that they would be removed anyway from the homeland and so they should get the best deal they can. IMO that does not excuse what they did by signing a fraudulent treaty. But they (and their descendants) mostly did not see what they did as traitorous.

REH:
Al, I believe you don't know Keetoowah history here.   In 1883 through the turn of the century it was the traditional people, not the Boudinot faction, that resisted enrollment.   In fact Redbird Smith had to be caught, thrown in jail and given a roll number or he would have been in the same boat as over 6,000 traditional people who didn't and don't have roll numbers.   At the time of the Trail of Tears Christians were only about 10% and it had little to do with "blood".   In fact I was taught that a person who was culturally Tsalagi was a full blood and a Christian was mixed.   That is  of course lost with the exception of some very conservative communities.   Traditional Keetoowahs cannot be Christian, it is a different religion and the Keetoowah faith is the original faith of the Cherokee i.e. Anikituwagi.    If Smith had not been jailed, along with the criminals, he would not have had a roll number.    Since it is required that the descendant be direct, I suspect that the current Chief would not have been "Cherokee" had not his ancestor been jailed.   There is plenty of data about this available in the Cherokee Histories.   But remember, because of the "Religious Crimes Codes of 1883" that banned all native religions in America, Keetoowahs basically went underground when confronted by the authorities.    For the government the issue was land, especially for the Sundance peoples and their religious land coops (Tiospayes).   But as the Dawes commission report makes clear, and I quote:

[In 1883 a small group of Eastern humanitarians began to meet annually at Lake Mohonk, where with an agreeable background of natural beauty, congenial companionship, and crusading motive, they discussed the Indian problem. At their third meeting Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, a distinguished Indian theorist, gave a glowing description of a visit of inspection he had recently made to the Indian Territory.  The most partisan Indian would hardly have painted such an idealized picture of his people’s happiness and prosperity and culture, but, illogically, the senator advocated a change in this perfect society because it held the wrong principles of property ownership.  Speaking apparently of the Cherokees, he said: “The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own.  There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar.  It built its own capitol, in which we had this examination, and it built its schools and its hospitals.  Yet the defect of the system was apparent.  They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common.  It is Henry George’s system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors.  There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.  Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress. (36)]

(36)  1900,   pp. 25-32; Lake Mohonk  Conference, Report, 1904, pp 5-6; Department of the Interior, Annual Report, 1900, pp. 655-735.


That was the myth told by the Americans  but it was really about closing the Nation down and getting the excess land for settlers.   Redbird Smith and the Keetoowahs as well as the Four Mothers and other traditional societies were dead against that.   I do realize that some traditional families accepted and even pushed roll numbers.   I was told that by an artist descendant, but by and large the "mixed" cultural Cherokees were NOT the ones resisting enrollment, and I'm not talking blood here.

I know a man who lost a huge ranch and was required to take 160 acres, so he shot the Marshalls and spent the rest of his life on the run.   He went from Prince to pauper.   The ranch was three Oklahoma counties.    The argument that it was going to happen anyway is the same argument made by the treaty party in Tenn.   I don't accept it and neither did my Grandparents.   They just stayed in Arkansas amongst our people there until it was all over.     They resolved to keep their community and family as well as the traditions but elected not to get involved in the fights.   The Civil War had nearly destroyed the family and they weren't going to do that again.

Ray Evans Harrell

[DIGOWELI]

AC quotes me  
"There are about 8 million Indian people in America who are culturally NOT European and who don't care now to have anything to do with governments."

There about 7 million with NDN ancestry total in the US, and perhaps half of them say they are "part Indian." They know they have ancestry in a vague way, but they were not raised as such, they aren't treated as NDN by others or think of themselves as NDN other than having a little vague interest in the culture.

REH:
Actually, what Garcia Lorca called the "deep springs" are not all that hard to find.   They are vague feelings only if your feelings are vague.   Native studies begins with the clarity of the senses and proceeds to programming and archiving those senses in a systems way that is imprinted on the child very early.    Over forty eight years of teaching in the Arts private performance market, I've found that a serious cleansing of one's perceptual skills and exploration of how one thinks adds up every time to a cultural and linguistic style.   You can see it in the way Indian people use English for example.   Even if they never knew their own language they absorbed the verb process and use that instead of the "object relations" of European noun oriented English.   A serious study of one's expressive modes shows by style where things came from.     I remember a Long Island woman who was doing an exercise in class that included improvisational singing.   She imagined she was her ancestor and began to sing in that spot.   What came out was an incredible middle-eastern mix that made absolutely no sense with who she was in the world.   Then we realized it was Armenian which was her mother's people.    But to her it was unconscious.   I've seen Medicine People recognize "skins" over distances that were far too great for mere recognition.  

My point is that claiming on the census that you are native doesn't necessarily mean that, as we know.   But what does is family style and the systems that are deep within the person.   We say the first bible or "sacred library" is yourself and you must know how that works and where it comes from.   The second is the world that is our teacher and mother.

There are 30 million descendants of 52 survivors of the Mayflower.    There are more descendants of Jamestown then that.   I suspect that there are more than eight million descendants of those millions of native people but that is at least a little less than there are Moslems in America.   I'm using logic here.  

AC:
About half the self IDd or otherwise IDd as NDNs in the US aren't enrolled, including me and probably half the NDNs on this board too. So we understand your position, but wish you'd cease your largely groundless hostility towards your recognized cousins. They didn't invent blood quantum, the feds did.

REH
True but the CNO is not blood quantum but direct lineage.   It has nothing to do with blood.   As for hostility.  I would appreciate it if you realize that I didn't start this, you did.

[JosephSWM]

Ray,

I have been thinking about many of the things you have written here, much of which has nothing to do with questions posed to you. I asked you about the Sacred Fire and I took insult with your answer.

So you know, I am the first mixed blood on my mother's side of the family. They were traditional people from Texas and Mississippi and only my mother and grandparents converted to catholism so she could attend school, not being allowed in public school cause she was an Indian.

That said, why didn't they know of any Sacred Fire brought to Texas or Miss. or all the other Cherokee in these states, why don't they know?

You mention the Sacred Fire in Georgia. It is your sacred fire that you brought to the Southeast Cherokee Council. I read it in their newsletter and posted it here somewhere in all these posts. Also I would assume that the one in Alabama is one you brought to them, and most likely the Echota Cherokee there.

Also, you keep mentioning over and over again that the IRS recognizes your group. So what. Anyone can form a group and incorporate. You know, I have seen nuagers use that same line "the IRS recognizes us".

And for this Blood Quantum thing, to me it is important. I don't care who calls me a bigot. If you have 1/32 or 1/64 blood you are not an Indian in my opinion. I have know idea what you look like or what your blood is. You have danced around that issue quite well. I do know what David Michael Wolfe looks like though. He's the other head of the Nuyagi Keetoowah. He's a fat, pink skinned, balding, white man claiming to be Cherokee. Maybe we'll all be lucky here and he'll start to post too.

That's all I have to say for right now.

Joseph

[DIGOWELI]

AC:
Plus a tendency to use language that is drawn from Nuage more than traditional beliefs.

REH:
Interesting.   How old are you?  

AC:
And no, Nuage aren't the only ones to use metaphors. But they certainly overuse bad metaphors, and they do it hide their lack of clear thinking. "Mirrors of your mind" is an awful Nuage derived mixed metaphor, a really bad bit of overwriting.

REH:
Actually it comes from Quetzalcoatl and his journey.     The four directions carry different mirrors.   The Nahua were great pedagogists and I did a production of a new work twenty years ago at the American Indian Community House written by poet Rafel Jesus Gonzalez and translated from the Nahuatl.    That was when I built my Meso-American Library.   It was good because when my father apprenticed me I already knew the elements of that in the ceremonials.   Since both of my fathers were teachers as well as my mother, and since I was trained as a pedagogist in undergraduate and did four years of educational research, it is now my language.   It is funny that you call it nuage.   Life cannot be expressed directly.   Especially in teaching.   You mustn't steal the learning by being obvious.   In music that is the difference between a teacher and a coach.   Remember the first fallacy of teaching is "I tell you therefore you know."

AC:
That, plus the hostility towards enrolled Cherokee, makes me wonder if you have Nuage members that are influencing you.

REH:
No I did a search and came across reference to myself and our community in a Cherokee talk group that used you as the authority for slandering us.   We have enough problems in the city as it is.   This is a city filled with groups that enjoy poking.   We work to be peaceful but we do not let anything get by lest it fester.

That is the source of my hostility.   Wouldn't you be PO d if you and your close friends found your name in the fraud column of someone you never knew or heard of?     As for the "official" group, I don't like the way they have handled a lot of things including the Churchill issue as well as Red Lake.   I had a student who is Sac & Fox go to Germany and talk about blood quantum and racial purity.   They told her she was a Nazi.   That is too uncomfortably close to Red Lake for my taste.   We do not live as private islands in the world.   That was never and still isn't an option.   The only option is to have the skills to survive and maintain our traditions in the world.   Imagine a canoe.   Which will you use for the rapids, a lake canoe?  

First I don't understand how you could list as nuage TSALAGI the Cherokee language phonetic of Cherokee which is an old idiom no longer spoken.    Everyone in North Carolina, here and elsewhere says chalagi or t-s-a-la-gi depending upon their dialect.   But New Age?   Makes no sense.   It's like Nuyagi which we take from Nee yacki, an Algonquin word for the great rock Manhattan is built on i.e. "Place of Rocks."  The city of Nyack, New York is a derivative of the word.   We are Tsalagi so we say Nuyagi but that is where we get the word.   Perhaps they got it elsewhere from the Japanese.   Where do you think they got the word Dick-tu-lane-uh?

Secondly:  New Age is a type of Commercial Art.   It flows from World Music to Steven Spielburg.  In therapy it comes from Fritz Perls who founded Gestalt therapy with Laura Perls.   Both studied with an Ojibwa in Canada and the mix was Jewish and Canadian Ojibwa.  If you want to feel it purely "Canada" read some of the legal works of Rupert Ross or the Indigenous Science books by Physicist David Bohm and F. David Peat.   There has been a good dialogue between Indigenous Science and Physics through these European Quantum pioneers.    The language is what you call nuage but with an Irish accent since the Ojibwa love to clog.  

What was radical in the sixties and seventies is now mainstream both  commercially and psychoanalytically.   I studied with Ilana Rubenfeld for six years and she was a student of Perls, Feldenkrais and an expert in Alexander as well as being one of the great choral conductors and head of a major music school in New York (92nd street Y).  I also worked with the Minimalist Artists in Soho (Experimental Intermedia Foundation) in the seventies and pop culture has absorbed much of our language from that time, including rap.   I've also taught many different cultures to sing and relate to their physical instrument in their music.   These "nuage" terms may seem to the layman not to be specific in meaning but that is not true in my business.    I also worked with Robert Lewis one of the two founders of the Method Acting school and head of Yale Drama.   He was Brando's teacher.     The people you speak of have absorbed the language of Art, the Theater and physical and psychological therapies.   That is not the problem of the language but of capitalism and commerce.   I was a part of the people who invented the stuff years ago when I first came to New York.   Later the commercial souls took it over to sell it.   But they often missed the point.    Don't blame the serious artist for the foibles of capitalism.

Ray Evans Harrell

[DIGOWELI]

AC:
One fascinating bit you mention is a personal interest of mine: That Sgt. York was Cherokee. I'd never heard this before, and I just finished writing a history book on Native veterans. I searched quite a bit for this, and the only thing I found anywhere close to your claim was this:

Cached at
http://www.doles.org/DelkNews6/DELKNEWS6.htm
"Many of our subscribers wanted to know how they were related to Alvin York. To answer this we need to know that Alvin was a great-great-grandson of Conrood Pile who is buried in the same cemetery him in Wolf River Cemetery, Pall Mall, Fentress Co. Tennessee....
Also, he made profitable deals with the Indians. For Fentress County was a part of the great hunting grounds of the Shawnee, Cherokee and Chickasaw; and one of their trails passed near Coonrod's home.... ?
According to Pile Genealogy by Ferne Sepp, Coonrod Pile was a "long hunter".... ?
Coonrod Pile and his wife now lie side by side in the Wolf River Cemetery at Pall Mall, with a large slab of limestone covering each grave. While in another grave, only a few yards away, lies the remains of their famous and heroic great-great-grandson -- Sergeant Alvin Cullom York."

Much of the rest of this geneology site talks about Cherokee relatives, but not for York. If you know of any different sources, I'd sure like to see them.

REH:

The only source I have is the family and that is the branch in Deer Lodge, Tenn.

Ray Evans Harrell

[DIGOWELI]

Rereading all of this work, I missed something that Richard Allen posted.   Since he did not equivocate but called me a liar, then it is possible that there is another Richard Allen who claimed to work for the CNO and who wrote a scurrulous article on the religion of 123 million Indigeneous people.....

I keep thinking of those Medicine people who were surprised that their Medicine Wheel was found in Africa as well.   We all have to get out a bit.

Richard finished by saying:
I have the advantage of knowing the traditions, the culture and history of the Cherokee people having been reared in a traditional manner in a Cherokee community and accepted as the full blood that I am.  

REH:
OK, maybe you weren't the one because that one told me as I remember, that he was not a native speaker of Cherokee but that it was a second language.    Obviously I am mistaken about the Baptist.   As for blood.   That is the first stone, the second is love.   As a specialist you know there are seven.

I too have been cared for by the Cherokee people in my most difficult times.   When I couldn't relate to Tulsa because of the culture shock, Dr. Gene Curlin and Marvin Curlin practically took me into their home and helped me through.   She was an artist who knew the berry dyes and egg yoke on board ancient traditions.    Each time I was in need there was a teacher there from the people.   That is why I have given the scholarships as my give-back to those who gave to me.

I am culturally 100% Nuyagi Keetoowah.   That was one of many horses in my corral.   That was the one that the Creator led me to and that is what I do.  I certainly don't do it because its fun or financially profitable.

Richard:
I am also a Marine Vietnam veteran so I don't mind a little verbal conflict every now and then.

REH:
You should feel right at home on our Council we have two Special Ops folks from that era.    One the Council President and the other retired and you insulted him recently.

Ray Evans Harrell

[Vance Hawkins]

Ray,

I have a BS in mathematics with a physics minor. To me "living outside of time" is a bit more complex adn precise than your hazy description of it, and it is meaningless unless you are speaking of something that is "imaginary" in a mathematical since.

You donated $26,000 to something -- that's a year and a half salary for me. You must be rich.

You are longwinded and talk too much, and never answered many questions. I won't ask 'em again -- no point.

I have noticed a tendacy in groups that try to organize into "Cherokee Tribes" or bands to put down enrolled Cherokee and I hate that. I think they do this to explain to their "converts" (whom they call tribal members) why they are not accepted by federally recognized tribes. Some of these groups act like cults and I steer clear of them (learned that by bad experiences). Some seem to be run by little cult leaders who make up history and tradition to fit their personal spin on things.

Also the first Keetoowah were about the time of the Civil War and they opposed slavery (so Al, you were right about that dispite what Ray says) -- if I remember my history -- they were called "Pin Indians" and opposed th Ridge/Waite faction -- these "Pin Indians" aka Keetoowah were aided greatly by Christian preachers in those days and this is documented in history. So Ray you are twistin' history just a tiny little bit there in your portrayal of Christianity . . .

There are websites that mention the things I said, just look to the links at the beginning of this lengthy thread. They DO say your Nayugi Keetoowah Society is recognized by what is called the "revered" Keetoowah Society of Oklahoma. If you don't like it go to those websites and tell them to take that down as it is misleading. It might be a site that mentions David Michael Wolfe as head of the Nuyagi Keetoowah Society, tho, and not you -- I am not sure. So when you say you are head while he is saying he is the head of it -- well who is the head, you or him?

Also I don't think anybody would call themselves a "high priest" of a Stomp grounds . . . for someone that opposes "European" Christian religion, that's a very "European" term if ever I heard one . . .

Vance

[educatedindian]

Ray, for someone who claims to be so traditional and to be a guardian of culture and knowledgable about not just Cherokee history but also alleged "hidden history," you don't seem to know the most basic facts about Cherokees.

I talked about Watie and Boudinot and you started discussing history that happened forty years after them. The Trail of Tears and the Dawes Act happened half a century apart, but you didn't seem to realize that. And you seem to be confusing Allotment (the dividing up of land) with enrollment (being listed on the federal rolls).

And for someone claiming to be a Priest, or High Priest, or Peace Priest as you've claimed to be at different times, you can be awfully childish. Not only in your shrill denunciations of the CNO based on a dubious understanding of history, but also in your attacks. Insinuating Dr. Allen has brain damage from lead poisoning? That alone tells us that Allen is likely truthful when he describes the conversation between the two of you as being all of three sentences with you ending it by cursing at him.

"I hate this geneology thing. It is one of the things that made me leave home."
Not sure what to make of that.  Were you kicked out of the CNO?

(Discussing those with distant Native ancestry)- "They are vague feelings only if your feelings are vague.  Native studies begins with the clarity of the senses and proceeds to programming and archiving those senses in a systems way that is imprinted on the child very early."
That's about the most Nuage thing you've said yet. It could've come straight out of a Waldorf School manual. And you keep on coming on with one bit after another.

"...derogatory comments on a seminal work on Cherokee shamanism."
Shamanism is an outsider's term. I realize anthros use it all the time, but for an alleged traditionalist like yourself to hold it so dearly, and to seemingly rely so much on ethnography for your knowledge of tradition?

"Wannabe is a vulgar derogatory term that shouldn't be aimed at anyone."
Oh please. I've never met an NDN yet who didn't use the term, and every alleged NDN I've ever met who hated the term turned out to be a wannabe.

It's a lightly teasing term at worst, humorous, mild, dead on target, and objected to the most by people who've never known *real* racism or prejudice in their life. Try going to Montana and getting called a prairie nigger, as happened to me one summer I worked there. Or being in Arizona when the front page of the local paper defends calling a local landmark Squaw Peak. *That* is what is truly derogaory.

"New Age is a type of Commercial Art.   It flows from World Music to Steven Spielburg. "
LOL! Well, you certainly have the commerical part right...
Seriously, Wendy Rose makes a very good argument that Nuage is primarily consumerism and not spirituality. I realize some good Native artists like Nakai peddle to the Nuage market, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about in here. And your defense of Nuage certainly confirms your being influenced by them.

So much for you claiming to be so traditional...I agree with Allen much more than I did before you came here, and it's your own words that are hanging you.