Category: Art as Resistance

Tables Turned: A Reflection

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Susie Martin
Photo: Sally Martin. Hummocks Trail, Winter 2015.

By Seth Martin, a folksinger, writer and activist from the Pacific Northwest, now living with his partner Lee Nan Young in Korea. He recently released a collaborative album, “This Mountain” (“이산”), celebrating grass-roots, land-based resistance to militarism and the machinery of US colonial politics and religion–in Korea and North America. You can listen to it here.

Teacher, is the earth alive?

“Sweet is the lore which nature brings.
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.”
-Wordsworth

It was May 18th in Korea. I was teaching English to elementary schoolers. The pre-assigned lesson was about “living” and “non-living” things.

According to the textbook, things that need air, food, water, and shelter are “living”, and they always “change and grow.” Continue reading “Tables Turned: A Reflection” →

When She Died, We Buried All Those Words With Her

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AlexieA poem from Sherman Alexie (thanks to elder Clancy Dunigan for passing this along):

My mother was a dictionary.

She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.

She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.

When she died, we buried all of those words with her.

My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years. Continue reading “When She Died, We Buried All Those Words With Her” →

Brimming Multitudes

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RilkeFrom Rainer Maria Rilke’s Third Duino Elegy:

…Our loving is not, like the flowers’, the offering
of a single year. When we love, there rises in us
a sap from time immemorial. Oh my dear girl,
it is this: that we loved, in each other, not an individual
or one coming toward us, but brimming multitudes;
not a single child but the fathers
fallen to the depths of us like crumbled mountains,
and the dry riverbeds of ancestral mothers;
the whole soundless landscape
under the clear or clouded sky of fate:
all this, my dear, came before you.

Easter’s Aftermath

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ResurrectionBy Ken Sehested, the editor and author of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action

Easter resurrection is never as assured
as the arrival of Easter bunnies.

Clothiers and chocolate-makers alike yearn
for the season no less than every cleric.

And yet, in my experience, the Spirit
rarely blows according to the calendar,
much less on demand. Continue reading “Easter’s Aftermath” →

Momma’s God

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debBy Deb Anderson-Pratt, October 15, 2012

As a little girl I cried “God”
as thoughts of how i could
end the pain of all abuse
verbal, mental, physical, sexual
Momma’s God held my hand saying
“I am here my child in everything”

As an adolescent I cried “God”
as thoughts of how i could
wipe away the words he told
me as he used my body “you’re
just a dirty Indian, nobody will care”
Momma’s God held my hand saying
“I am here my child in everything” Continue reading “Momma’s God” →