Moses on the mesa 01

09/06/2023

I'm not as white as i look 🧡
Keanu Reeves was abandoned by his father at 3 years old and grew up with 3 different stepfathers. He is dyslexic. His dream of becoming a hockey player was shattered by a serious accident. His daughter died at birth. His wife died in a car accident. His best friend, River Phoenix, died of an overdose. His sister has leukemia.
And with everything that has happened, Keanu Reeves never misses an opportunity to help people in need. When he was filming the movie "The Lake House," he overheard the conversation of two costume assistants; One cried because he would lose his house if he did not pay $20,000 and on the same day Keanu deposited the necessary amount in the woman's bank account; He also donated stratospheric sums to hospitals.
In 2010, on his birthday, Keanu walked into a bakery and bought a brioche with a single candle, ate it in front of the bakery, and offered coffee to people who stopped to talk to him.
After winning astronomical sums for the Matrix trilogy, the actor donated more than $50 million to the staff who handled the costumes and special effects - the true heroes of the trilogy, as he called them.
He also gave a Harley-Davidson to each of the stunt doubles. A total expense of several million dollars. And for many successful films, he has even given up 90% of his salary to allow the production to hire other stars.
In 1997 some paparazzi found him walking one morning in the company of a homeless man in Los Angeles, listening to him and sharing his life for a few hours.
Most stars when they make a charitable gesture they declare it to all the media. He has never claimed to be doing charity, he simply does it as a matter of moral principles and not to look better in the eyes of others.
This man could buy everything, and instead every day he gets up and chooses one thing that cannot be bought: To be a good person.
Keanu Reeves’ father is of Native Hawaiian descent
Also read Keanu’s life
🧡I think you will be proud to wear this T-shirt👇

08/02/2023

08/01/2023

A life worth remembering!
Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird / Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)
Zitkala-Sa (“Red Bird”) was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota on February 22, 1876. A member of the Yankton Dakota Sioux, she was raised by her mother after her father abandoned the family. When she was eight years old, Quaker missionaries visited the Reservation, taking several of the children (including Zitkala-Ša) to Wabash, Indiana to attend White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute. Zitkala-Ša left despite her mother’s disapproval. At this residential school, Zitkala-Ša was given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons. She attended the Institute until 1887. She was conflicted about the experience and wrote both of her great joy in learning to read and write and to play the violin, as well as her deep grief and pain of losing her heritage by being forced to pray as a Quaker and cut her hair.
She returned to live with her mother on the Yankton Reservation in 1887 but left only three years later. She felt that she did not fit in after her experiences at the Institute. At fifteen years old, she returned to the Institute to further her education. Her study of piano and violin led the Institute to hire her as a music teacher. She graduated in 1895. When she received her diploma, Zitkala-Ša gave a speech advocating for women’s rights.
Instead of returning home, Zitkala-Ša accepted a scholarship she was offered at Earlham College in Richmond Indiana. It was while at Earlham that she began to collect stories from Native tribes. She translated the stories into Latin and English. In 1897, just six weeks before she was to graduate, Zitkala-Ša had to leave Earlham because of financial and health issues. Again, she chose not to return to the Reservation. Instead, she moved to Boston, where she studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music.
In 1899, she took a job as the music teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. From 1879 until 1918, it was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States and used as a model for many others. In 1900, the school sent Zitkala-Ša back to the Yankton Reservation to gather more students. She was shocked to find her family home in disrepair, the extensive poverty, and that white settlers were occupying land given to the Yankton Dakota people by the federal government. She returned to Carlisle and began writing about Native American life. Her autobiographical and Lakota stories presented her people as generous and loving instead of the common racist stereotypes that portrayed Native Americans as ignorant savages. These stereotypes were being used as arguments why Native Americans needed to be assimilated into white American society. Her writing, which was deeply critical of the boarding school system, was published in the national English magazines including Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Monthly. In 1901, she wrote for Harper’s Monthly a piece that described the profound loss of identity felt by a student at the Carlisle Indian School. She was fired.
Afterward, she spent some time back at home on the Reservation taking care of her mother and collecting stories for her book, Old Indian Legends. She also took work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office at Standing Rock Indian Reservation as a clerk. She married Captain Raymond Talefase Bonnin in 1902. They were assigned to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah, where they lived and worked for the next fourteen years. While there, they had a son, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin.
In 1910, Zitkala-Ša met William F. Hanson, a professor at Brigham Young University in Utah. Together they collaborated on an opera. The Sun Dance Opera was completed in 1913. Based on the sacred Sioux ritual that the federal government had prohibited, Zitkala-Ša wrote the libretto and songs. The Sun Dance Opera was the first American Indian opera written. It is a symbol of how Zitkala-Ša lived in and bridged both her traditional Native American world and the world of white America that she was raised in.
While on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, Zitkala-Ša joined the Society of American Indians, a group founded in 1911 with the purpose of preserving traditional Native American culture while also lobbying for full American citizenship. Beginning in 1916, Zitkala-Ša was the Society’s secretary. In this position, she corresponded with the (BIA). She became increasingly vocal in her criticism of the Bureau’s assimilationist policies and practice, reporting abuse of children when they, for example, refused to pray as Christians. Her husband Raymond was fired from the BIA office in 1916.
The family moved to Washington, DC. Zitkala-Ša continued her work with the Society of American Indians, where she was colleagues with Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin. From 1918 to 1919 Zitkala-Ša edited their journal, American Indian Magazine. She lectured across the country promoting the preservation of Native American cultural and tribal identities (though she was adamantly against the traditional use of pe**te, likening it to the destructive effects of alcohol in Native communities). While being sharply critical of assimilation, she was firm in her conviction that Indigenous people in America should be American citizens, and that as citizens, they should have the vote: “In the land that was once his own – America… there was never a time more opportune than now for Americans to enfranchise the Redman!” As original occupants of the land, she argued, Native Americans needed to be represented in the current system of government.

07/31/2023

NATIVE AMERICANS – THE FIRST OWNERS OF AMERICA
Native Americans, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America and their descendants. Those who live within the boundaries of the present-day United States are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, bands and ethnic groups, many of which survive as intact, sovereign nations.
Most authorities agree that the first evidence of people inhabiting North America indicates that they migrated here from Eurasia over 13,000 years ago, most likely crossing along the Bering Land Bridge, which was in existence during the Ice Age. However, some historians believe that people had migrated into the Americas much earlier, up to 40,000 years ago. These early Paleo-Indians spread throughout the Americas, diversifying into many hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes.
Application of the term “Indian” originated with Christopher Columbus, who, in his search for Asia, thought that he had arrived in the East Indies. However, there is considerable evidence in support of successful explorations which led to Norse settlement of Greenland, the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement in Newfoundland, and potentially others some 500 years prior to Columbus landing in the Bahamas. From the Native American aspect, many tribes’ oral histories indicate they have been living here since their genesis, as described by a wide range of creation myths.
By the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century, scholars estimate that more than 50 million people were already living in the Americas. Of these, some 10 million lived in the region that would later become the United States. As time passed, these migrants and their descendants pushed south and east, adapting as they went. With these new arrivals came centuries of conflict and adjustment between Old and New World societies. Today, Native Americans account for about 1.5 percent of the United States population, many of whom continue to take pride in their ancestral traditions — still practicing the music, art, and ceremonies that took place many years ago.

07/31/2023

Bull Chief ❤️, born in 1825, Died February 4th 1914, was part of the Crow, or Apsaroke tribe.He was interviewed by a man named Edward S. Curtis, who visited many tribes during the 20th century for interviews and to take portraits of the Natives. As a young man Bull Chief was never very successful when he was part of war-parties and always returned home without honor. He believed it was unnecessary for one to fast in order to be successful in a battle, and therefore opted not to fast. Being so unsuccessful after returning from battle after battle, Bull Chief decided to climb Cloud Peak, which is the highest peak of the Bullhorn Mountains in Wyoming. Bull Chief stayed up on Cloud Peak for one day and one night hoping to have a vision, but having no luck he had to leave because mountain-rats were biting through his clothes and a fierce blizzard was causing hazardous conditions. When Bull Chief returned home, his village was getting ready to be moved to a new location. Based on landmarks mentioned in the new location, it appears the tribe was moved near Red Lodge Creek, MT. During this transition time, Bull Chief decided to continue trying to fast in order to have a vision. He fasted for four days and four nights, but still had no vision. After which, he tried two more times unsuccessfully. Seeing that his current attempts were failing, and all of the other men in his tribe counting coup he again decided to try something new. For this attempt, he went up to the head of Red Lodge Creek to fast for four days and for four nights in blinding snow. This time his experience turned out much different from all of his previous attempts. He had a vision in which he, "Saw his own lodge and a splendid bay horse standing in front of it." It was not explained as to what this vision meant, but thereafter Bull Chief began to do remarkably well in battles. Shortly after the vision, Bull Chief was able to get his first honor and started counting coupe frequently. Counting coup is the highest honor for winning intertribal wars between Plains Indians. Bull Chief's determination and personal strength helped him to his successes as a hunter, in combat, and in spiritual pursuits.
Bull Chief was a fierce warrior who led his warriors into battle with the United States Army in the Great Plains, raiding white settlements during the course of the 1870s, operating in Apsaroke territory to help his people survive against the westward expansion. But after the wars were over, he moved to the Crow Reservation. In 1908, he met photographer Edward S. Curtis and had his picture taken, an elderly veteran whose war years were long past.
Bull Chief took 15 wives in total and gave up 13 of them.[2] One of Bull Chief's wives, most likely his first because she is referred to as his young wife, was killed by a bank of earth falling on her. In order to mourn for his young wife, Bull Chief decided he wanted to go through some form of torture to honor her death. Shortly after he made his decision to endure torture for his wife, two local tribesmen went out and killed a buffalo bull and brought back the head attached to a long strip of skin and including the tail at the end, to the edge of the village.[2] When Bull Chief heard of this, the next morning he went out and bathed; afterward, he went to Big Shadow, a clansman, to ask him to pierce him.[2] Big Shadow accepted and instructed Bull Chief to go bathe again, remove every ornament from his body, rub himself with sage, and he would come and meet him.[2]
After Bull Chief had concluded his tasks, Big Shadow came and found him, bringing with him three other men. Big Shadow started off the process then by painted Bull Chief from head to toe with white clay.[2] Once Bull Chief was painted, Big Shadow then pierced Bull Chief's back muscle in two separate places and thrust skewers through the slits in his muscle to attach the thongs fastened to the nostrils of the buffalo head.[2] Next Big Shadow pierced Bull Chief's shoulders and from those slits, hung the shield and tomahawks.[2] Bull Chief was then given a staff and instructed to get up off the ground. After getting up Big Shadow told Bull Chief he needed to walk around the village four times while the three men with them would smoke. This was a difficult task for Bull Chief to accomplish, because the dogs in the community would jump on the skin and when dogs were not jumping on it, it was getting caught in the sage brush under it.
At sunset Bull Chief went up on a hilltop and laid down with his head between the horns of the buffalo and his feet at the tail, pointing east. He stayed up on the hilltop all night to rest from the day's activities. During his sleep, Bull Chief had another vision, this time of a man standing at his feet, then turning and departing.Big Shadow came up on the hilltop around sunrise and informed Bull Chief that he knew someone had some and visited him the night before. At first Bull Chief did not tell Big Shadow what the man looked like who had visited him, but after Bull Chief bathed and cleaned up he joined Big Shadow again and then told him about the man.The description Bull Chief gave Big Shadow of the man led Big Shadow to believe this man was his father, Morning Star.

07/04/2023

Follow @ mreeddesigns So amazing !

04/02/2023

Xx Awesome Vintage Photograph of A Native American xx
Xx Photographer & Tribe: Un Known xx