The earth is speaking

[R Kym Horsell]

Stefan Rahmstorf #@rahmstorf 14 Jun 2016 08:33Z
NASA data: hottest May on record makes the 12-months running mean
global temperature anomaly (shown) rise to + 1 ?C
<https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ck5XLcLW0AATxl_.jpg>

"Come inside, it's going to rain!" Noah [then a spry 480]
preached. The people laughed, they said he was a "religious
nut, a crazy man, a fanatic."
[Story short: It takes 120 years to build the ark.
Happy ending: Noah and his family live; the denialists swim for it
but turns out the instructions they got off a blog were wrong].
-- "Come Inside it's Going to Rain", My Favorite Revival Sermons.



<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/05/choctaw-climate-change-
earth-speaking-160528090311635.html>



The Choctaw v climate change: 'The earth is speaking'

In the US, members of the Choctaw nation fight to reclaim their
relationship with the land in a world without seasons.

[Image] Wilson Roberts, an elder member of the Choctaw nation,
believes the earth is out of balance [Nicholas Linn/Al Jazeera]

Emily Crane Linn
Al Jazeera
31 May 2016

Durant, Oklahoma - It's nearly June. Every day, the Earth brings
Darryl "Grey Eagle" Brown closer to the Sun, to heaven, to the
Creator. That means it's nearly time for the Eagle Sun Dance ceremony,
a 12-day communal gathering of fasting, thanksgiving and prayer that
takes place around the summer solstice, when the Creator is especially
near.

Fifty-six-year-old Brown is a member of the Choctaw tribe of Oklahoma
and a spiritual leader for a band of tribal members seeking to
practise their indigenous religion. He learned the Sun Dance from
another Choctaw elder who learned it from a tribe in the northern
Great Plains. It is a pan-Indian dance - a blend of traditions and
historic knowledge passed between the tribes of the Great Plains.

Brown has held this ceremony on his family's land outside Durant,
Oklahoma, each summer for 20 years. Every year, it seems to get
hotter, he says, and the weather less predictable. Some years, they
dance on parched ground under a cloudless sky. At other times, they're
nearly blown away by hot, angry winds. Last year, they were drenched
in torrential floods. But regardless of what the weather holds, Brown
must dance anyway because he feels the Choctaw - and the earth - needs
him to.

[WATCH: Native Americans fight for water rights]

"Our ceremonies help keep life in balance," he says. 'The earth is
speaking, but man won't listen'

Brown believes that both his people and the earth they inhabit are
deeply out of balance, damaging one another as a result. "Man's
pollution has altered the earth," he says. "The earth is speaking now,
but man won't listen."

In Oklahoma, the earth seems to be shouting. From 2010 to 2015, the
land plunged the state into a punishing drought, bringing the Choctaw
nation to the brink of a water crisis. In 2011, it was the
second-hottest summer on record, with more than 35 consecutive days of
temperatures above 37 degrees Celsius. Then last summer, the missing
rains arrived, but in devastating 30cm deluges. The seemingly
incessant floods tore through the state all summer long, destroying
houses and wiping out crops.

Brown knows the outside world has a term for these catastrophic weather
shifts: climate change. He knows there have been summits and debates and
policies on the matter. But here in Choctaw nation, Brown doesn't place much
stock in what the federal government or the United Nations have to say. The
earth is speaking - speaking through thunderous rains, violent tornadoes and
scrambled seasons.

"The seasons aren't in order any more," Brown says. "I remember winter
in Oklahoma. I remember the ponds freezing up and staying that way for
months. Now, we get a few days of cold, but no real winter."

[Image] Volunteers gather their wild gardening tools to cut back and
clear out other plant species that are currently out-competing with
the fragile river cane for resources [Nicholas Linn/Al Jazeera]

Historically, the Choctaw have proved to be adaptive to whatever
nature has given them, says Scott Ketchum, a Choctaw member and PhD
candidate studying Choctaw cultural history at the University of
Oklahoma. "But now, you have a thunderstorm in January that normally
marks the change of a growing cycle, and then the next week, you have
a snow storm. What do you do with that?"

The earth is out of balance, Brown says, and his people are partly to
blame. "It's written in our teachings, the knowledge of how to take
care of the earth," he says. "We're out of balance with that
teaching."

The Choctaw cultural identity has always hinged on an intimate
connection with the environment, says Wilson Roberts, a tribal elder
and spiritual teacher. "In my mother's teaching, I was always taught
that all animals and life-bearing things are just like us," he
says. "We're a part of them, they're a part of us. We're supposed to
take care of each other and look out for each other."

The Choctaw have forgotten this, Roberts says. And what's worse,
they've failed to impart their knowledge to the settlers who now
control much of their ancestral homeland. The Choctaw were forcibly
removed to Oklahoma from their lands in Alabama and Mississippi in
1831. Twenty-five percent of the population died during the journey,
and those who remained were converted to Christianity. "The government
came in and took away everything," Roberts says. "I'm talking about
everything #. They burned our pipes and whatever we had that they
thought might have some sort of 'energy', anything that was sacred to
us."

For Roberts, 76, this isn't some far-flung part of his history - these
are his grandparents' stories.

The removal marked the beginning of the imbalance, Roberts says. "I
always tell people that our downfall as a Choctaw nation is that we
gave up what the Creator gave us," he says. "We didn't fight hard
enough to keep it, and because of that, we've lost our continuity with
the Creator."

Healing the earth

Roberts and Brown believe that the only way to bring healing to both
the earth and their tribe is for the Choctaw to reclaim their
traditional relationship to their environment - and then spread those
teachings to the rest of the US.

In a modest trailer that serves as a government office building, Ryan
Spring labours to do just that. As the director of historic
preservation for the Choctaw nation, it is Spring's job to study his
tribe's past, relearn its traditions and help people like Roberts and
Brown pass it on.

"The more culture and heritage we give back, the more we become whole
again," Spring says.

For Spring, a good place to start is by re-teaching traditional
gardening. Historically, the Choctaw were adept farmers whose
ceremonies and gatherings revolved around the growing cycles. Since
their removal, however, they've become highly dependent on processed
foods handed out through state welfare programmes. A return to
traditional gardening will help members regain independence from state
handouts, reduce their risk for heart disease and stroke brought on
from the unhealthy foods they are given - and reduce their imprint on
the environment.

There is a growing interest in learning traditional gardening, Spring
says, but climate change poses a formidable challenge.

[Image] Volunteers join Cain for a day of 'wild gardening' in the
Sequoya National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Oklahoma [Nicholas
Linn/Al Jazeera]

"The growing seasons are getting more and more unpredictable," Spring
says. "We'll have longer cold snaps or six-year droughts. There's no
average."

Spring teaches members to keep small gardens that are easier to
manage, regardless of the weather. Brown has one, and he has learned
to shift his planting and harvesting year-to-year and
season-to-season, depending on what the weather appears to be
doing. He can't depend on regular, consistent cycles like his
grandfather taught him to do, but by paying close attention to the
weather - by listening to the earth - he can grow his food anyway.

Likewise, he has learned to perform his ceremonies not according to
the seasons but according to the cycles of the Sun and Moon. This too
is a departure from the Choctaw's ancestral ways, Ketchum says, which
revolved entirely around growing cycles. "You used to know to start a
particular ceremony in June when a certain plant bloomed," he
says. "But now, it might be June and the plant won't bloom at all or
maybe it will have bloomed early."

This sort of creativity and adaptability is a good thing, though,
Brown says - perhaps even a divine thing.

[READ MORE: Hupa - a language that refuses to die]

"The weather will do what it does and we have to be adaptable," he
says. "We have to get creative, we have to find new ways to keep
[ceremonial items] dry, which normally would already be dry or to hold
a sweat lodge even when it's chilly outside. But creativity is part of
the [Creator], we have that creativity in us."

Creativity is an essential feature of religious ceremonies like the
one Brown is preparing to host. In preparation for such a ceremony,
traditional families would historically have spent weeks weaving
beautiful, brightly-coloured baskets to hold food for the dancers and
sacrifices for the Creator. There will be no baskets this year,
however: climate change and industrial agriculture have all but wiped
out river cane, the plant used to make the baskets.

[Image] Roger Cain is one of a handful of academics studying river
cane. A Cherokee, Cain is working on a project to map what remains of
the river cane on Cherokee land [Nicholas Linn/Al Jazeera]

The bamboo-like plant used to cover Oklahoma, growing in
kilometre-wide swaths called "cane breaks". Now, as much as 98 percent
of it is gone, says Roger Cain, a river cane specialist from the
nearby Cherokee Nation. "We had a massive die-off in 2011," he
explains. "We had two weeks in February where it was below [-17C]. I
haven't seen that kind of weather in my whole life."

Flooding in 2015 further emaciated the river cane population. "We had
floods wipe out entire cane breaks," Spring said. "It's grown back
some since then; it's surviving, but not on the level where we can use
it to make baskets."

Cain has worked with the Cherokee nation to declare river cane a
culturally-protected plant species and has begun a project to map what
populations remain in an attempt to preserve them. He holds regular
"wild gardening" sessions where he visits these cane breaks and weeds
out any invasive species that pose a threat to the plants. He is
hopeful that with time and care, he will be able to restore these cane
breaks to a level where tribes can resume regular large-scale basket
weaving.

As Brown prepares to host the Sun Dance ceremony, he is keenly aware
that everything he is doing is different from the ways of his
ancestors. So much has changed. So much has been lost. But he will
dance anyway. He will dance with what he has. "[Because] our
ceremonies are helping," he says. "They're helping the cycles, they're
helping the earth."


--
Assaad Razzouk #@AssaadRazzouk 13 Jun 2016 12:00Z
Every Time the World's #Solar Power Doubles, the Cost Of Panels Falls 26%
http://buff.ly/1UdKZGz #climate
<https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ck1HHXMWkAA10AZ.jpg>

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Those who haven't booked a holiday yet might soon be tempted to as
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Strong storms hit metro Denver, eastern Colorado in waves
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Denver. It was a rough time in the Denver metro area and on the eastern
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[Catoni]

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at 5:47:21 AM UTC-4, Kymmie Horsesmell wrote:

>"The earth is speaking"

WTF ? ? It's got to be one, of three things.

You're either on some crazy ass drugs, or you're suffering brain damage... or you're a pagan worshipping and offering sacrifice to the Earth goddess Gaia ... .

[Wally W.]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2016 09:47:18 +0000 (UTC), R Kym Horsell wrote:
>Durant, Oklahoma - It's nearly June. Every day, the Earth brings
>Darryl "Grey Eagle" Brown closer to the Sun, to heaven, to the
>Creator. That means it's nearly time for the Eagle Sun Dance ceremony,
>a 12-day communal gathering of fasting, thanksgiving and prayer that
>takes place around the summer solstice, when the Creator is especially
>near.

During all of May and June, the Earth-Sun distance is inceasing toward
aphelion.

https://in-the-sky.org/news.php?id=20160704_08_100
4 July 2016: The Earth reaches its furthest point from the Sun.

Nice demonstration of science literacy.

Maybe you should stick to drawing graphs.