Traders from Europe bring yellow fever to Wampanoag territory. The geographical area affected was all of the 69 tribes of the Wampanoag Nation from present day Provincetown, MA to Narragansett Bay; the boundary of the Wampanoag and Narragansett Nations. Fully two thirds of the entire Wampanoag Nation (estimated at 45,000) die. This also represents a loss of as many speakers of the language. Hardest hit are Elders and small children; critical age groups for any language. European disease would also place in jeopardy each tribes ability to sustain a population for defense of its territory and culture.
Hopi (contraction of Hópitu, 'peaceful ones,' or Hópitu-
The Black Egyptians are the original settlers of KMT. "The native Sudanese are one of the original pigmented Arabs in that region. They are members of the same ethnic family with the ancient Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Southern Arabians, and the primitive inhabitants of Babylon. All founders and sustainers of the mighty Nilotic civilization we still admire today. They are very great nation of Blacks, who did rule almost over all Africa and Asia in a very remote era, in fact beyond the reach of history of any of our records.
"Native American isnt blood; it is what is in the heart. The love for the land. The respect for it, those who inhabit it; and the respect and acknowledgement of the spirits and the elders. That is what it is to be indian."
White Feather
Navajo Medicine Man
Aboriginal religion, like many other religions, is characterised by having a god or gods who created people and the surrounding environment during a particular creation period at the beginning of time. Aboriginal people are very religious and spiritual, but rather than praying to a single god they cannot see, each group generally believes in a number of different deities, whose image is often depicted in some tangible, recognisable form. This form may be that of a particular landscape feature, an image in a rock art shelter, or in a plant or animal form.
Mitakuye oyasin!
We are all related!
It isn't too late. We still have time to recreate and change the value system of the present. We must! Survival will depend on it. Our Earth is our original mother. She is in deep labor now. There will be a new birth soon! The old value system will suffer and die. It cannot survive as our mother earth strains under the pressure put on her. She will not let man kill her.
The First Nation's Peoples had a value system. There were only four commandments from the Great Spirits:
1.Respect Mother Earth
2.Respect the Great Spirit
3.Respect our fellow man and woman
4.Respect for individual freedom
We must all stand together as a force of love. Be united NOW. There is only one way. Communication. Knowledge. Arm yourself with truth, love and perseverence. Extend your family. Join with others in giving. We are all related. People of the earth take back your heritage. I am not speaking of skin color or religion. Our heritage is this earth... Our heritage is also extended beyond this earth into the heavens where the spirit once lived before our birth into this world. You are bound to both.
THE TEN INDIAN COMMANDMENTS!
Treat the Earth and all that dwell thereon with respect!
Remain close to the Great Spirit
Show great respect for your fellow beings
Work together for the benefit of all mankind!
Give assistance and kindness wherever needed
Do what you know to be right
Look after the well-
Dedicate a share of your efforts to the greater good
Be truthful and honest at all times
Take full responsiblity for your actions.....
FULL MOON PRAYER
We thank the Moon and the stars, who give us their light when the Sun retires....
We thank the Great Spirit, incarnation of all kindness, who directs all things
for the good of Its children."
In spite of their disdain for the indigenous religious culture, pioneer Christian missionaries in general (whether Roman Catholic or Protestant), knew pretty well they had to depend on the indigenous language to communicate the gospel message to the people. While the doctrines and principal religious ideas remained those of their respective Christian traditions, the local language as the primary medium of communication with their host, provided the bulk of the concepts, terms and linguistic symbols and imageries. That is not all. It set limit to thought and understanding of the received message of the missionaries.
The Limba are Indigenous people of Sierra Leone and speak various dialects of a language largely unrelated to other tribal languages in Sierra Leone.
Within the fabric of American identity is woven a story that has long been invisible—the lives and experiences of people who share African American and Native American ancestry.
African and Native peoples came together in the Americas. Over centuries, African
Americans and Native Americans created shared histories, communities, families, and
ways of life. Prejudice, laws, and twists of history have often divided them from
others, yet African-
For African-
Indigenous Culture and Spirituality
The Black Bucket List: Gullah Country
By: Gary Lee
Posted: October 2, 2011 at 4:41 PM
In Beaufort, S.C., tracing language, dance, customs and gumbo back to Mother Africa.
It looked, at first, like just another fun outdoor festival. An R&B band was rocking onstage; a few visitors were chowing down on burgers and fries. And when the Manhattans, the featured group, started jamming, half the crowd took to their feet.
But soon the mood of the program changed and I stepped in closer. A lone drummer,
dressed in traditional Nigerian garb, banged out tunes on an African drum. In the
back of the park, Aunt Pearlie Sue, a local storyteller, regaled the crowd in a tongue
that sounded less like English than something out of Sierra Leone. And then there
was the lanky man with chocolate-
And no wonder. The gathering, last Memorial Day in Beaufort, S.C.'s Henry C. Chambers
Waterfront Park, was the Original Gullah Festival, a three-
Beaufort, a small South Carolina seaside city, is home to one of the most active
contingents of Gullah people, a group of descendants of African people concentrated
in various close-
What binds Gullah people together into a unique subpopulation of African Americans is their retention of the customs, traditions and mores of the mother countries in West Africa.
This remarkably authentic African heritage puts Gullah country near the head of The Root's Black Bucket List of top places of historical interest that every African American should visit before they die.
Even more than three centuries after many of their ancestors arrived as slaves from Sierra Leone, Senegal and other countries along Africa's Gold Coast, echoes of Africa ring loud and clear among the Gullah people. Drive along Route 17N south of Charleston, S.C., and Gullah weavers will be selling sweetgrass baskets, a rich tradition of artisanship that brings to mind the handiwork of the Wolof people in Senegal. Pop into Gullah Grub Restaurant or one of the other eateries along the South Carolina coast and dig into a gumbo of okra, fish and hot peppers, a dish remarkably similar to jollof rice, a beloved staple throughout much of West Africa. Ask around where Marlena Smalls and the Hallelujah Singers are performing and eventually you will find a performance of melodic tunes sung by these nationally known ambassadors of Gullah music.
Language: The Tie That Binds
But the strongest link that binds the Gullah peoples into one group is their common
language. Gullah, a Creole tongue composed of words mixed with English and words
from various African tongues, is still spoken, mostly as a second language, by thousands
of residents of the sea-
Travelers curious about Africa but unable to venture so far should grab a Gullah-
In an interview, Mack explained how this region evolved into Gullah country. In the
17th and 18th centuries, landowners brought people from the rice-
As rice farming grew, more enslaved people were brought in, eventually making this region one of the most populous communities of slaves in the U.S. Left largely alone to labor in the plantations, the Gullah clung strongly to whatever they could remember of home, including cooking traditions, customs and language patterns. When this part of the country was liberated by Union troops early in the Civil War, many of the freed slaves remained in the area, carrying on with the traditions from back home.
My own excursion through Gullah country started at the Penn Center. Founded in 1862
by Quakers as a school for the children of freed slaves, it is spread over 50 acres
amid moss-
From Sweetgrass Baskets to Crab Soup
During a visit to the Penn Center's small York Bailey Museum, exhibits offered a
close-
After a couple of hours touring the museum and the bucolic Penn Center grounds, a
Gullah lunch began calling my name -
Beaufort is charming, easy to walk and rich in visual arts and Southern history. The gallery scene is a major draw; African and Gullah works are featured in several venues across town. Among the venues: the House of Ahhs, the Red Piano Too and Lybenson's Gallery & Studio. I dropped into the latter. The collection included some impressive works from the African Diaspora, ranging from Zimbabwe Shona sculptures to sweetgrass baskets and wood sculptures by local Gullah artists.
Next door stands the Tabernacle Baptist Church, an impressive white wooden structure dating back to the early 1800s. Robert Smalls, an enslaved man who became a Union Naval captain during the Civil War and later a U.S. congressman, is buried in the courtyard.
But to grasp the depth of Gullah influence in Beaufort, I had to walk the streets and cock my ear. In cafes, restaurants or just on the street, wherever local black people were gathered, I could hear them blending in and out of the Gullah tongue.
"Um binnuh he'p dem," said one woman to a friend. ("I have been helping them.")
"Hunnuh mus tek cyear ahde root fah to heal de tree!" said another. ("You must take care of the roots to heal the tree!")
"It's not something we really think about," explained Da'Renne Westbrook, a Gullah descendant and resident of Beaufort. "It's just how we express ourselves."
The Gullah tongue is sometimes heard at worship services at black churches throughout the region. Versions of the Bible, translated into Gullah and first published in 2005 with the help of the Penn Center, have made recitation of the gospel in Gullah a popular Sunday morning tradition in several churches.
A Congressional Designation
While some observers have viewed Gullah as a corrupted version of English, African-
Although the Gullah tradition is most richly felt in enclaves like Beaufort, remnants of it can be found along much of the Southern Coast. In 2005, Congress established the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, stretching from Southern North Carolina to Northern Florida. It allocated $10 million over ten years to be designated for the preservation of the culture throughout the region.
"This has encouraged people to discover different Gullah communities that were little-
Small museums have cropped up in the past couple of years here and there with the
mission of introducing the public to Gullah-
While forging a self-
Every fall, the Penn Center holds an event-
The Original Gullah Festival, organized every Memorial Day weekend, always aims to deliver participants deep into a Gullah state of mind.
"Our goal is to keep the memory of this rich tradition alive," explained Westbrook, the Beaufort resident whose family started the festival in 1979 and still organizes it.
Surveying the throngs of visitors gathered in Waterfront Park around basket weavers, storytellers, food vendors and other experts, I saw that the promoters of Gullah culture seemed to be meeting that goal very well.
Gary Lee is a freelance feature writer specializing in the culture of urban areas in the U.S. and other countries. He is based in Washington, D.C., and can be reached here.
Native nations have fought hard for self-
Tribal regulations concerning these decisions often require a certain degree of Native
ancestry, kinship, and/or proof of descent from an ancestor listed on an official
membership roll. Many African-
Why American Indians Keep Their Hair Long
Hair Is An Extension of The Nervous System
This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Viet Nam War .
Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair style is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue.
Back in the Viet Nam war however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.
In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical hospital. He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder.
Most of them had served in Viet Nam.
Sally said,
"I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor's Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands.
Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again.
What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example. As I read the documents, I learned why.
It seems that during the Viet Nam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities.
Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.
With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.
Serious casualties and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.
When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer 'sense' the enemy, they could no longer access a 'sixth sense' , their 'intuition' no longer was reliable, they couldn't 'read' subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.
So the testing institute recruited more indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas.
Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests. They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut. Then the two men retook the tests.
Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.
Here is a typical test:
The recruit is sleeping out in the woods. An armed 'enemy' approaches the sleeping man. The long haired man is awakened out of his sleep by a strong sense of danger and gets away long before the enemy is close, long before any sounds from the approaching enemy are audible.
In another version of this test the long haired man senses an approach and somehow intuits that the enemy will perform a physical attack.
He follows his 'sixth sense' and stays still, pretending to be sleeping, but quickly grabs the attacker and 'kills' him as the attacker reaches down to strangle him.
This same man, after having passed these and other tests, then received a military haircut and consistently failed these tests, and many other tests that he had previously passed.
So, the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long."
Comment
The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years. Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural.
Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive. Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole. The body has a reason for every part of itself.
Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized
nerves, a type of highly-
Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.
When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment
are greatly hampered. This results in 'numbing-
Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems. It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds.
It contributes to sexual frustration.
Conclusion
In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error.
It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror. The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us.
When Delilah cut Sampson's hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.