Ever since I traveled to Ireland in July, I haven’t stopped thinking about my bloodline. It was maybe a couple weeks after I got back to the States, when the bulldozers started rolling through sacred sites including burial mounds, cairns, and other humanmade formations in North Dakota.
The pain this gave me is indescribable.
I had just been to a tiny island of a country filled with similar cairns and ring forts and burial mounds and druid rock circles preserved for thousands of years, some since 5000 BC, initially out of fear and then out of reverence for a people’s past. Some of these were registered as world heritage sites with UNESCO, but most of these sites were in people’s backyards or on a farming family’s land and no one touched them for that entire period.
Not with a tractor. Not with a shovel. None of the stones were displaced or removed in all this time.
Yes, the Irish are a superstitious lot. If any of them had come and removed a stone they would have had a penance to pay with the fairies that would’ve struck them down.
But this “fear” eventually translated into a sort of respect.
In a few days, I will finally be traveling to North Dakota to pay my respects to a people that have been so disrespected in the last 500 or so years since the European invasion of 1492.
I consider these folks family in so many different ways. I am not a First Nation person. But I relate more to the roots of this continent and the roots of my own tribal heritage than anything that has come since then in the way of thought.
Western society is cruel and sadistic. I have always found a separate peace in the Earth and the Moon. The Sacred Mother and her Luminous Sister. The way the trees grow tall and the wind brings simple wisdoms.
It is 2016 and it is about time the people of this current nation make a stand. No to industrialization. No to petty jobs for petty wages. No to digging up death to stunt the growth of cleaner and safer technologies. No to genocide.
On Monday, I will leave the Tiwa land to go support the Dakota land. I will find folks from all over the world there. Together we will be rising up, but really we will be supporting each other to get there. We will be friends… allies…friendly. Our hearts, which are all made of the same earth, will guide us.
On the surface, we will be defending the Earth against sadistic tyrants who seek to ruin us all for profit. In a much more radical way, we will be ending a centuries long war against a people that were here since the dawn of time. We will be defending their culture, their heritage against invasion, so that they can again walk upon this land and teach us all how to celebrate this existence.
We will be fighting for the bloodline. Theirs. Ours. The Earth’s. Everyone’s. In the end, this old-new way, this dying way…will have to listen.
The Life and Works of Marshall James Kavanaugh 