O’siyo to all my Relations:
Now that it appears that a disciple of Joseph (156) Smith (510) = 666 will be the GOP nominee, there exists a concern that the “Obama hatred” fomented by the Religious Right, will give the Oval Office to a surrogate Satan.
I also encourage Americans who still believe in this farce of a political system, to take steps now, today, immediately to begin to undermine the undemocratic process it has become. This can be done by adopting an idea whose time came and went in the 1960s and 1970s. but has swung around again. Speaking collectively for my generation, after burning our draft cards, chaining ourselves to flagpoles on college campuses, burning Nixon and McNamara in effigy, protesting at the ’68 Democratic Convention and storming the National Guard and marching on Washington did not work, someone — I’m still not sure who it was — came up with the real solution.
The only hope I see today for America is the same hope for which “we” were bloodied and bruised and denied in the late 1960s and 1970s: An amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving the people a voice through a “national initiative.” The initiative by a majority vote would allow Americans to overturn anything our elected by Super PACS and bought-and-paid-for-by-lobbyists Congress would force upon us. When Congress is “bought,” and the election is rigged with unlimited negative ads about which the media will not complain, the people have no other alternative.
Thirteen years ago to this day, (I drafted this on Friday, April 13), I was invited to address a group of Georgia “constitutional lawyers” and warned that playing politics with the Supreme Court was the formula that would doom America. I explained in some detail the laws of Torah that were being ignored in our judicial system and concluded, “The Almighty will tolerate many things before He will judge, but when “Justice Perverts Justice,” I warned, Judgment is near at hand.” This is because Justice is Grandfather’s (The Almighty’s) attribute. (“When ‘Justice’ Perverts Justice,” ALG, 2 hours, 4-13-99, now available on DVD).
Thanks to the perversion Gog Walker Bush — an earlier 666 in the Oval Office — allowed our Supreme Court to become, corporations are people and unlike ordinary people, they are people who can assemble SUPER PACs (political action committees) with multiple millions of dollars. And unlike ordinary people, Corporations do not have human feelings. And so our “constitutionally sanctioned” Supreme Court and Law of the Land is bought and paid for and in the pockets of whatever president or political party is controlled by these mega-millions and their negative advertising.
So my “anti-government” sentiment is not misunderstood or perhaps I should say understood out of perspective, I need to relate some family history.
My late grandfather, of blessed memory, was half Cherokee and detested the government on every level, mostly because with the help of the government, his “oil-rich” property was stolen. And after that when he just wanted to drink his troubles away in peace, they would not let him make his whiskey – which he never sold to anybody but just drank himself. “Ain’t no personal liberty,” he told me many times. Maybe it was to get back at him, maybe not, but about two years before Grandfather saw fit to let me enter this life, my late mother, of most blessed memory was charged with murder. Front page banner headlines every day in the Shreveport Times. She was acquitted but might as well have been convicted because of the ostracizing she received ESPECIALLY FROM CHURCH-GOING CHRISTIANS.
As often happens in mixed Native circles, I had three stepsisters by two different fathers and two different mothers and two siblings with my parents, so I grew up with a family framework similar to Joseph but with sisters. (I’ll trade 10 older brothers for older sisters any day of the week and twice on Shabbat). After surviving third degree burns to my face and head (all of my skin was burned off) at age 4, I was the quiet one in the family. My mother used to tease me about being “her K’alija,” a wooden Indian. Looking back on things today, I can see that one of the things that bonded my Mom and I so closely was that we both were emotional crutches for one another — her after the horrendous crime for which she was acquitted and me for not even appearing human after the fire.
“Wooden Indian” stuck for a while, and I learned from her years later that she had called me this because on the day I was born, August 31, 1952, Hank Williams Sr., wrote his song, about a “wooden Indian” named “Kaw-liga (K’alijah). (I found out only a few years ago that there was actually a Chief among the Creek Nation called by this name. He, according to the best research then available, was named after the prophet, Elijah).
Hank recorded “Kaw-liga” the next day, Sept. 1, 1952, on the radio in Nashville and apparently my Mom who was a fan of “Louisiana Opry,” heard that song at some point.
It became her favorite and was the first music I can remember hearing. When the recording was later released on an album after Hank Williams death on Jan. 1, 1953, it was No. 1 for 14 weeks, before it was overtaken by a song on the opposite side of the LP, “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” But my earliest memories are my dear mother, squeezing aloe vera juice on my burns as she would sing along with Hank, “Kawliga.” But we made up our own stanzas. One was about what a wooden Indian would speak if given a voice, having heard everything said from every viewpoint imaginable if it stood outside a barber shop for instance.
Growing up “mixed,” anything Native sounding on the radio drew attention. Cher was a big hit with us, first because she was Cherokee and she sung about our Cherokee Nation, which I ached to know anything about. My only exposure growing up was accompanying my half-Cherokee grandfather to a few places when I was very young. But my hero – and the hero of every Native mixed or not — was Billy Jack. I was even gifted with a Stetson like his, which I wear to this day.
The Billy Jack movies are admittedly fictional, but Tom Laughlin was mixed and most of the details of the movies are based on actual facts, except “Billy Jack Goes To Washington,” which was a movie with a clear political motive, I will explain below.
In the first Billy Jack, “Born Losers,” (1967), which I saw shortly after my family relocated to southern Louisiana in a movie house that had neutria running down the aisles!, we learn why Billy Jack had to learn to become a “wooden Indian.” He was a Vietnam veteran who returned to the canyon in Southern Colorado in which he was raised by a full-blood who taught him Native ways. After witnessing but refusing to be a part of a Me-Lai type massacre, he attempted to become a pacifist. But in the movies, every distraction possible from that goal takes place. He has to confront his inner demons and his anger, which almost kills him.
The later 1971 “Billy Jack” and the 1974 “Trial of Billy Jack” took place during my college years at LSU. Between the two, I moderated a panel discussion between representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the American Indian Movement, sponsored by the LSU Student Government Association. It was quite a heated discussion, which I allowed to heat up but kept from getting volatile because the AIM participants at that time were being patronized, marginalized and minimalized by the BIA bureaucrats. However, this piqued my interest so that Billy Jack movies were almost a cult and to this day I can still recite most of the few lines Billy Jack spoke. (His feet did most of the talking).
These two movies were supervised by full-bloods and are factually correct in just about every detail, including the spirit visitations inside the purification lodge. I would encourage all from Ephraim who want to better know the heart and soul and spirituality of Native M’nashe to watch these movies, if possible. I would especially point out the Dance of Welcome in the second movie, simply called, “Billy Jack” (1971). This is the dance given to Native Americans by our Big Brother Jesus at Walker Lake, Nevada in 1890. It later became the Ghost Dance of Sittingbull after which it was outlawed by the Federal Government. The Native American prophet, Wovoca, is quoted. If anyone doubts these accounts, rest assured I have personally researched the newspaper accounts, which were full of Wovoca and the so-called “Indian messiah.” The dance is similar to a Hebrew hora but is done in a spiral instead of a wide circle. Little did I realize when returning from Israel in 2001 that Grandfather would plant me among Native brothers in Colorado whose goal is to revive this Dance of Welcome. If any would like to help this project financially, contact me and I will put you in touch with Jimmy Tenrivers.
Convinced after his release after serving an unjust imprisonment that “the American conscious is dead” and “the Great Spirit can never be revived” without there first being a Judgment Day (the theme song of the movies), Billy’s inner spirit tells him, “Before turning from society, to do the best he can to change it.”
Ordinarily, Native Americans, especially full-bloods shy from American politics. But the injustices toward Native Americans led to the establishment of the Native American White Roots of Peace Council. This was an attempt by the Twin-Fires (Hopi and Cherokee) to advise Washington against the Vietnam War and other “black roads” such as nuclear proliferation and the rape of the environment by strip-mining … and also relate some of our Native American prophesies that pertain to Turtle Island’s fate, long before it was called America. Led by the Membreno Apache Mad Bear Anderson the delegation of mostly Hopi and Cherokee was invited to the United Nations but not Washington. However they were invited to speak to the U.N. delegation only in the late evening hours when few attended.
The movies are a result of this “snub” to the White Roots of Peace Council, for which ironically, years later, I held the talking stick with the eagle feather to speak to the 500 Nations about the Birthright concern, and therefore had to learn of the council’s initial goals and history. The goals were to 1) Give the Twin-Fires their due voice before American leaders, which American leaders have ignored to their own peril 2) Promote the Great Law of the Haudenausaunee (6 Nation Iroquois confederacy) which was the model adopted by Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and others for the U.S. Constitution. Only the G’yana Shagowa (the Great Law) included provisions the patriarchally-framed Constitution did not: “No poor, no orphans and no jails and perpetual matriarchal rule.”
When Daganaweida, a “pale” Huron appeared with the Great Law around 950 C.E., both his mother and grandmother attested he was “born of a virgin.” He set up his J’consaseh (matriarchal rule) less than 15 miles from the front door of what would later become the boyhood home of Joseph Smith. (Another whole can of worms). See www.torah-voice.org/BoMDCT.htm
The series of Billy Jack movies ends with a mixed Native coming to Washington, something expressly forbidden for full-bloods and frowned upon for mixed because of the evil, corrupting influence of politics. If you have never seen these movies, I do not want to ruin them for you. But Billy Jack concludes as I am doing again today for about the 2,000th time in the past 40 years since those movies surfaced, our only hope against the lobbyists is a “national initiative” amendment.
Ironically, Sen. Billy Jack communicates this hope with a filibuster. The wooden Indian he became finally gets his chance to speak about the initiative and (in the movie) brings about the repentance of the very senator who tried to have him removed from Washington.
“National initiative” is what this ole “wooden Indian” would speak today having seen and heard it all.
Gah geh you e,
“K’alijah” ben Yoseif
Power to the people
A raised fist in the air
An initiative for FREEDOM
From tyranny’s despair!