Prophecykeepers Internet Radio is a Native American operated non-profit foundation
and Congressional District Program endorsed by elders of the #1 Medicine Society
in North America, The Original Keetoowah Society, "Nighthawks"

SUPPORT THIS COUNCIL & SUPPORT PEACE...

It's Creator's only "Only Way Out" for us.

Are You "Walking The Walk" or Just "Talking the Talk?"

Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is...
and start Walking The Walk... then go get ceremony!
"Purification Day" is right around the corner...


This Week's Guest Is:


Grandfather (Robert Smith) Bigtree
-Tonawanda Band Seneca-
-Traditional Earthkeeper-

Website

This is Grandfather (Robert Smith) Bigtree's first Prophecykeepers Radio Interview.

"When I was growing up only one of the three Seneca Rez's in NY still had traditional chiefs and maintained the Great Law of Peace. Tonawanda Band of Senecas also had at that time one of the two long houses for ceremony."

"The other was maintained by Grandmother and Uncle Bob (Big Tree) in Kinzu, PA. That was flooded by the Allegheny Reservoir. As was the whole town. That's why I'm not living in hometown any more. Big Tree is the name of whoever holds the peace chief seat of the Tonawanda Band. A news article that says it all. Ties everything together and warns us one last time."

Harjo: Listen to Mother Earth

Posted: March 28, 2005

by: Suzan Shown Harjo / Indian Country Today

Everyone is talking about the weather. The water lilies and cattails aren't as tall this year. This means that they will have less medicine for us. The birch bark is more brittle these days. Everything from baskets to canoes needs it to be more supple. The cedar strips, even in the rain forest along the Northwest Pacific coast, aren't as damp and elastic as usual. The hats and baskets will not be as strong as they used to be. The medicine plants at Bear Butte are going away again. They made a comeback after the big fire a few years ago, but now they're hiding. The natural corn is getting smaller. The genetically-altered corn is taking over and no one knows how big it will get, or how scary. Everyone's talking about the fish that aren't coming back from the ocean and are disappearing from the rivers. And the frogs. And the salmon. Innocents with multiple eyes and poisons in their cheeks. There are fewer bats, and more mosquitoes which carry more West Nile virus - West Nile, as in Egypt - to people in most of the United States. People are seeing riverbeds that haven't been seen for 20 and 50 years. Burials from thousands of years ago are being exposed. There are more and more fields of beautiful wildflowers. These make people feel good about being alive, but they're the kind of flowers that come out after everything's been burned to the ground. The Earth is parched and trying to start over again in the dead places. Inuit people of the Arctic tell us that global warming is endangering their homes, their food, their way of life and their very lives. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as any other place on the planet, 300 scientists told us in 2004. After conducting the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment study for four years, they said the ice and permafrost are melting and the sea levels are rising. The Inuit and the scientists warn that polar bears may be looking at their last days. The Bush administration has ignored all the evidence, all the voices, all the signs, even its own State Department's 2002 report on U.S. Climate Action, which says, ''Greenhouse gasses are accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing global mean surface air temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise.'' Another alarm about global warming was sounded this year by the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. In an address at an international conference, he told delegates from more than 100 countries that the world may have ''reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.'' He called for deep cuts in pollution levels, warning that we are ''risking the ability of the human race to survive.'' Instead of mobilizing American people and businesses to stop cooking the air and water and get busy cooling things down, the White House and leadership in the House and Senate are cracking the foundation of environmental protections that have been built over the past 30 years. They are weakening protections for animals, birds, trees, plants and water under the National Forest Management Act, and are all but putting the lumber companies in charge of the forests. They are weakening the Clean Air Act through a maneuver with the cruelly deceptive title, ''Clean Skies Initiative.'' This, at a time when asthma is at an all-time high nationwide and increasing numbers of American children are gasping for breath. They are making new rules to increase mercury emissions, which will cause deformities throughout the food chain, even to nursing human babies. They are exposing more and more sacred places and sacred beings to damage and destruction, even giving a lifetime judgeship on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to former Interior Solicitor William Myers, who has a demonstrable record of threatening sacred places. They are closer to their goal of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with full knowledge of the harm this will do to all the creatures that live there and to the Native people who depend on the porcupine caribou that give birth there. Over the past year, we have seen the worst storms in 50 years in Africa, the most devastating earthquake and tsunami ever in South Asia, the greatest number of tornadoes on record for any August and snow in the spring in places that usually register 70 degree days in winter. Within days of each other at the start of this year, three volcanoes began to erupt: Mount St. Helens in Washington, Mount Etna in Sicily and Volcano Colima in Mexico. Colima's ash plume is high enough to interfere with air traffic routes. Helens' steam and ash plume is six miles high. Etna is putting on a spectacular show of spewing lava and magma. There are active volcanoes in Alaska, Hawaii, Australia, Costa Rica, Japan, the Philippines and all over the world. For any three volcanoes to erupt at the same time is an extraordinary event. I don't know if volcanic activity is related to global warming, drilling deep holes and taking oil out or to any other human activity. It does seem to me that Mother Earth is talking to us, telling us something. Whatever that something is, we'd best discover it immediately and do what we can to address it. The current American political leadership is moving in the opposite direction from prudent and provident action. If we cannot alter that political course, we need to do what we can to protect our part of the garden in the best way we can. We can start by listening to Mother Earth and doing what we can to heal her wounds or, at the very least, to not injure her further. Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C. and a columnist for Indian Country Today.

© 1998 - 2005 Indian Country Today.

Let us build and host your website!