Earth, I Thank You

Earth, I thank you
for the pleasure of your language
You've had a hard time
bringing it to me
to grunt thru the noun
To all the way
feeling seeing smelling touching
-awareness
I am here!

Poem by Anne Spencer

Children (Thich Nhat Hanh Excerpt)

From "Being Peace" by Thich Nhat Hanh

Suppose you are expecting a child. You need to breathe and smile for the baby. Please don't wait until your baby is born before beginning to take care of him or her. You can take care of your baby right now, or even sooner. If you can't smile, that's very serious. You might think, "I'm too sad. Smiling just isn't the correct thing to do". Maybe crying or shouting would be correct, but your baby will get it--anything you are, anything you do, is for your baby.

Even if you do not have a baby in your womb, the seed is already there. Even if you are not married, even if you are a man, you should be aware that the baby is already there, the seeds of future generations are already there. Please don't wait until the doctors tell you that you are going to have a baby to begin to take care of it. It is already there. Whatever you are, whatever you do, your baby will receive it. Anything you eat, any worries that are on your mind will be for him or her. Can you tell me that you cannot smile? Think of the baby, and smile for him, for her, for the future generations. Please don't tell me that a smile and your sorrow just don't go together. It's your sorrow, but what about your baby? It's not his sorrow, it's not her sorrow.

Children understand very well that in each woman, in each man, in each child, there is a capacity of waking up, of understanding, and of loving. Many children have told me that they cannot show me anyone who does not have this capacity. Some people allow it to develop, and some do not, but everyone has it. This capacity of waking up, of being aware of what is going on in your feelings, in your body, in your perceptions, in the world, is called Buddha nature, the capacity of understanding and loving. Since the baby of that Buddha is in us, we should give him or her a chance. Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

Love After Love

The time will come

When, with elation,

You will greet yourself arriving

At your own door, in your own mirror,

And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all of your life, whom you ignored

For another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott, "Love After Love” (1976,74)

Thunder Mountain

On a recent road trip to Colorado, we stopped at Frank Van Zant's (aka Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder) Thunder Mountain Monument on Highway 80, a remarkable work of art in the middle of nowhere. We arrived just before sunset and felt uneasy about whether we should walk in to the empty and eerie, now considered, historical monument. Like a cemetery, Shadow Mountain was deserted yet we did not feel alone. The spirits of Van Zant's numerous sculptures cast a melancholy mood on the property. The golden light of the sun setting enhanced the beauty of his art, and I felt grateful to be in its presence.

The following (from http://thundermountainmonument.com)

tells about the history of Frank Van Zant and Thunder Mountain:

Frank Dean Van Zant was born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma on November 11, 1921.

Okmulgee is Indian country, and although his surname is Dutch, Van Zant considered himself a full-blooded member of the Creek nation. He left home at the age of 14 and enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he picked up pocket change and a variety of skills that would prove useful in later years.

After World War II broke out, Frank enlisted in the Army Air Corps, but had to drop out because flying made him sick to his stomach. So he transferred into the Tank Corps, serving with the 7th Armored Division in seven major campaigns in the European theater.

Years later Frank would tell a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that he had been nearly blown apart “by a German bazooka.” Dan Van Zant can't confirm the story; he says his father didn’t much like to talk about the war.

“Like a lot of veterans, you’d try to get him to talk, and he’d shut up pretty quick. But it changed him, it definitely changed him. Because in talking to my grandmother, she says that he came back from the war a totally different man.”

Upon returning to civilian life, Frank studied theology for a year and a half, intending to become a man of the cloth. “He was going to be a Methodist minister, and was actually an assistant pastor for awhile,” Dan recalls. “But then he saw the hypocrisy and didn’t want to have anything to do with it, didn’t want to be part of it.”

Van Zant dropped out of divinity school and traded in his Bible for a badge. Law enforcement suited him, and for two decades he served as a sheriff’s deputy in Sutter County, working out of Yuba City, California. In 1960 he ran for the office of sheriff, but narrowly lost. He embarked on a second career as a private investigator, a vocation he pursued until he retired, remarried for the third time and set out for rural Nevada--where he would become reincarnated as Chief Rolling Thunder Mountain.

Why such a radical change of course in midlife? Printed accounts vary. Frank himself offered a variety of explanations, depending upon who was asking the questions and how much he felt like answering them. In one version, he said he had a dream one night that a “great big eagle” swooped down from the sky and told him “this is where I should build his nest.”

Another account has Frank and his young bride Ahtrum heading west in the fall of 1968, looking to find a place in the sun. 130 miles northeast of Reno, near a onetime railroad station named Imlay, his 1946 Chevy pickup truck broke down. He couldn’t get it running again, and so decided to set up camp in the sagebrush. Presently the owner of the property happened along and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

What inspired Frank to start building his Thunder Mountain Monument? According to Dan, when his father was young he had once seen “a bottle house out in the desert, someplace around Death Valley. And he said he just fell in love with it. He said that he wanted to do that someday.”

Van Zant’s three-story monument started out as a one-room travel trailer, which he gradually rocked over until it came to resemble Barney Rubble’s stone-age bungalow. As materials became available, he added corridors and stairways leading to upstairs bedrooms formed of daub-and-bottle walls and slate ceilings. He turned automobile windshields into picture windows, scrap iron and galvanized pipe into rebar, concrete and chicken wire into ornamental statuary. Virtually every square foot of the monument’s exterior is covered with friezes and bas-relief tableaux depicting historic massacres and/or bureaucratic betrayals visited upon the American Indian. The roof is adorned with still more statues and multiple arches, the tallest of which soars fifty feet into the sky. At the very top is perched a carved wooden eagle, which only recently was restored to perpendicular by a courageous local, Jim Lacey.

Even as the monument was under construction, it was joined by various Krazy Kat outbuildings, including the roundhouse and the hostel house, a 40x60-foot work shed, an underground hut, guest cabins and a quixotic children’s playground straight out of a Tim Burton movie. Soon Thunder Mountain became a popular hangout for hippie artisans and counterculture characters--much on the order of the Meta Tantay commune established in East Carlin by the Cherokee Medicine Man John “Rolling Thunder” Pope. During the late Sixties and early Seventies, interest in living the Indian way ran high, and there were more dropped-out disciples and vision questers roaming about Northern Nevada than just one Chief Thunder could accommodate.

Was transcendental medication part of the Imlay scene? Dan Van Zant insists that his father was opposed to mind-altering drugs and wouldn’t permit their use on the grounds. Instead, the chief architect of Thunder Mountain appeared to be fueled by tobacco and caffeine, and driven by forces even his closest of kin couldn’t fathom.

“Oh, yeah, I thought the old man had slipped a cog,” says Dan Van Zant. “That’s why I questioned what he was doing, why he was doing this--wanting to start all over with raising a family and building a monument in the middle of nowhere. But that was what he wanted to do. And he didn’t want to live alone. He wasn’t the type of personality that could not be around people. I think he enjoyed being around people; he could never be a hermit.”

As the 1970's drew to a close and the political pendulum began to swing to the right, Thunder Mountain fell into disrepair. In 1983 the three-story hostel house burned to the ground; then the underground hut caved in. By and by the last of the hippie artisans drifted back to suburbia. Finally Frank’s wife left him, taking with her the couple’s three young children. The Thunder family patriarch found himself alone, with no one for company save concrete likenesses of Quetzalcoatl, Standing Bear, Sarah Winnemucca, and his beloved son Sid, who had died at the age of 19. His health failing--the result of a lifelong addiction to cigarettes--Van Zant became increasingly depressed. On January 5th, 1989, after penning a farewell note to his son Dan, the chief lay down on a sofa in the roundhouse and put a bullet through his brain.

Thunder Mountain became deserted, although curious visitors continued to trickle in off the freeway--as did more than a few vandals. Nocturnal thrill seekers would belay themselves down the chimney into the monument’s main chamber, where they would drink beer and tell ghost stories. Water was also invading the structure, thanks to a porous roof. Piece by piece, Frank Van Zant’s monument to the American Indian was going the way of the buffalo and the carrier pigeon.

Although his father had willed him the property in his suicide note, it took awhile for Dan Van Zant to gain legal custody. His next goal was to somehow preserve and protect the place--but how?

“My first thoughts were that I would just donate it to the state of Nevada,” he says. “They could make it a state park. And a person who was director of the state parks division actually came out, met with me, and he walked the property. He basically was pretty candid; he just said, ‘This place is a mess.’”

Dan Van Zant and his wife Margie have since hauled away a couple hundred pickup loads of trash--what his father would have called building material.

“That was what he used to build with," says Dan. "He had it scattered around so he could see what he had.”

Today the bone yard is confined to just a 400-square foot area against the west wall of the burned-down hostel house, and Dan estimates there’s enough used lumber in the pile to build a visitor’s center. He’d also like to install an underground irrigation system so he can keep the shade trees alive and green up the grounds. “Green it up, put in some park benches, picnic tables, and make it a little more appealing to the general public.”

All of which will take time, not to mention money. For that, the propreitor of Thunder Mountain relies solely on the kindness of strangers--one of whom, after taking a tour of the grounds, mailed Dan a check for $20,000. A large chunk of the cash went toward replacing the leaky roof; a smaller chunk toward casting a bronze plaque honoring the munificent benefactor.

Dan regards the twenty thousand dollar contribution as nothing short of a miracle--one of many said to have have occurred upon the patch of land his father held sacred. Once, back when the monument was fully occupied by improvident hippie artisans, there arose a food shortage. The story goes that the chief did an Indian dance and offered up a prayer. Later that same day, a semi-trailer truck loaded with frozen food crashed on the highway. The driver, grateful to be alive, told the group to help themselves to the spilled groceries.

Frank Van Zant never planned too far ahead, preferring to rely on divine providence. His son Dan, confident that the Great Spirit still abides at Thunder Mountain, is determined to see that his father’s life's work will not soon fade away.

(story by Richard Menzies)

Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder

1921-1989

Tales From the Sock Drawer: Multicolored Complications

Check out this 3-part political puppet show film that my fellow MSW students and I produced as a project for our Community Work class with Dr. Michael Yellow Bird. I co-directed, filmed, and edited it. Enjoy!

The Chicano Movement

The following is Part 1 of Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.Video. NLCC Educational Media, 1996.

Photos of my mom and friends in high school, North Denver, mid 1970's

Community Organizing By Native American Youth

EHS Indian Ed Parent Night, November 2009

I am very grateful and honored to have the opportunity to facilitate the Native American Club at Zane Middle School as part of my MSW internship this year. The Eureka City Schools Indian Education Program is going through a transition this year, part of which has included the continued effort to provide comprehensive support services to Native American students at Zane Middle School, Zoe Barnum High School, and Eureka High School. As an intern, I am involved in the planning and implementation of Indian Ed services at Zane. The Native American club meets once per week during the lunch period. Its development is ongoing and strengthening with relationships and purpose. What began with our first club meeting, consisting of three students and myself, has grown to nearly thirty students, teachers, and parents attending and welcoming guest speakers. Initially, the students brainstormed their ideas about what they wanted for their club. For the most part they wanted to learn more about Native American culture and create opportunities for the entire school to learn as well. Topics brought up included: languages, songs, stories, traditions, art, and history. The students also offered many ideas of community members and relatives that could be potential guest speakers. So far we have welcomed a Native drummer/singer and a local Native author/historian, and we hope to have many more guest speakers throughout the year. We will also be partnering with Eureka High School’s Indian Club to create a bridge between schools and plan community events. I was very inspired by the Eureka High School Indian Ed Parent Night that was held in November. It was organized by a student who took it on as her senior project, with support from the EHS Indian Club, EHS Multicultural Club, and administration. Local well known Native community members performed and gave speeches, many local businesses donated items to raffle, the EHS Multicultural club prepared Indian tacos, and families contributed food for the potluck. Over 100 people were in attendance, which set an unprecedented turnout for Native families at an Indian Ed event. The success of that evening showed that Native students, when given opportunities and support, can be powerful community organizers who may be able to reconnect their families with schools and set standards for other Native students to work towards and maintain. My hope is that the students at Zane will likewise learn to organize and facilitate their club themselves so that it will be ongoing and cohesive long after my internship has ended.

EHS Indian Ed Parent Night, November 2009