HOPE: Just For A Moment: Away From The Democratic Convention
August 28th, 2008
By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
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This is the annual Crow Fair at Crow Agency, Montana. Normally, some of us would be there. But, this year, we’ve sent word to ask for prayers for a loved one who is struggling. My grandmother, an old believer, used to say, “There is no distance at all in between hearts in prayer.”
The Crow live, as you see, with a mix of modern pick-up truck steeds, and work/heart companions: How it is sometimes said out West: “She owns horses.”
The women riders here are wearing traditional shirts which are patterned this way since the 1800s. What looks like white polka dots on the women’s shirts are elk teeth, from years and years of food gathering. Nothing is wasted, most all things seen as beauty.
What anthropologists sometimes call rituals, are actually down at the earthy level, the ancient ways of gratitude, ways of lacing people together in soul and spirit….over and over again.
Often the dancers, especially the little ones here, are dirty-faced from eating one sort or another of fry bread quite enthusiastically. That too is beautiful.
The clothing here is not ‘costumes’… most wear on their backs… their grandmothers, grandfathers, great-great grandparents lives and work of the hands… those are Memories the Crow wear in honor. And hopes.
Hope is a feathered thing, wrote the woman poet Emily D.
Here, in old-style wrapped braids that are not just for ceremony but rather washed, sun-dried, and braided daily, is a living personification of Hope. The kind of Hope that is carried from the underground into daylight time and again by the whirling, stomping, dust-raising dances, by the eerie sounds of the sings that rise up into the sky… not to rouse the crowd, but to draw all hearts together, so together they can cross an ancient threshold over into remembering again… the matters most important to spirit first, and these then turned into action in the world, after.
A lot of hearts would rather be at Crow Agency under a night that tonight will look like a billion salt shakers spilled across the cobalt blue floor of the sky… than at DNCC under Klieg lights and stadium blazers.
No matter. Far far north of Denver, Hope will still be the feathered thing… fully alive, fully dancing, just as the grandfathers and grandmothers have called hope straight up out of the ground and out of the skies, for centuries.
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images by Adam Sings In The Timber ©2008, All Rights Reserved.
1st pix: Women Riders
2nd pix: dancer Darcy Anaquod
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Denver Democratic National Convention, Montana, Newsweek Blogitics, Native Americans, Moral Values, Social Commentary. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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