This morning was the live streaming of the Washington National Cathedral memorial service and life celebration for Dr. Jane Goodall. I had received an invitation to attend along with others who had worked with Jane, but I decided this was not the best time to travel.
I encourage you to watch (linked below) when you have 90 minutes. It was a beautifully planned service that fit Jane well.
It was very moving for me to hear her three grandchildren speak, as well as several others who were touched directly by her.
“Your attention, please,” the mate’s voice says, “we are slowing a moment for a memorial,” and sure enough we all do, all of us, even those entangled in a bustle to get to the other side, restless chunks of festering business waiting, little urgencies pricking us into a stressed huff. Below on the car deck a small group slowly forms, and a mate lowers a rope, beckons them forward, the ferry engines slowing whatever our hurry, and we are all coasting together on a rainy sea.
A heavy-set woman unwraps a nondescript urn from a carefully held towel, handing it in turn to an ungainly boy, a shy girl, an older man, and she watches as each tips the urn to scatter dust into a windy vortex off the ferry’s stern, a fine grey mist streaming over the roiled wake in a high breeze before settling, disappearing into grey oblivion of sea, sky, and late afternoon.
As the ferry’s horn sounds three long blasts, the four bow heads. The woman hesitates, hides her face a moment in the towel, kisses each of her party, and shakes the mate’s hand. He speaks, his words lost to us in sea sounds and engines, then looks up to the bridge, waves, and the small group, holding hands, rejoins some two hundred of us who have in silence watched this mini-delay in our grey crossing. The ferry’s engines begin their normal thrum to push us forward again against a grey sea and under a low, grey sky, where a fine dust disappeared, and white seagulls rise and cry. ~Rob Jacques, “Memorial, Washington State Ferry” from Adagio for Su Tung-p’o
There is a sense of timelessness while riding on the ferry runs between the islands and peninsulas in Washington state. While driving my car on the busy freeways in the region, I am at the mercy of the weather, other drivers and all manner of delays. When I’m on a ferry, I become mere witness, only a rider seeking peaceful passage. Someone else worries about safely getting from Point A to Point B.
I’m able to breathe: watching the waves and the wake, the antics of gulls and cormorants, and rarely, an orca pod.
Next week is a time of memorial and remembrance of those who have passed into eternity. The ashes of my parents rest in the ground under a plaque that I visit annually with my family. Dad would have preferred his ashes to be cast out upon on the open water that he loved, but Mom chose a cemetery plot for them both, a more familiar resting place for a girl who grew up in the Palouse farmlands, no where near large bodies of water.
Last year, a good friend chose to be composted; he rests now in his beloved orchard, feeding the trees that continue to bear fruit.
No matter where our mortal bodies eventually find our rest, we hope to be remembered.
Our souls have risen, free.
video taken on the Samish Sea (Puget Sound) from my friend Andrew
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The mass gravesite at Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation, South DakotaBurial of the dead in the mass gravesite at Wounded Knee
Big Foot, a great Chief of the Sioux often said, “I will stand in peace till my last day comes.” He did many good and brave deeds for the white man and the red man. Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here. ~Inscription on the Wounded Knee Monument
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, — you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. ~Black Elk, (wounded trying to rescue his people after the Wounded Knee Massacre) from Black Elk Speaks
From today’s The Writer’s Almanac:
December 29 is the anniversary of themassacre at Wounded Knee, which took place in South Dakota in 1890. Twenty-three years earlier the local tribes had signed a treaty with the United States government that guaranteed them the rights to the land around the Black Hills, which was sacred land. The treaty said that not only could no one move there, but they couldn’t even travel through without the consent of the Indians.
But in the 1870s gold was discovered in the Black Hills and the treaty was broken. People from the Sioux tribe were forced onto a reservation with a promise of more food and supplies, which never came. Then in 1889 a native prophet named Wovoka, from the Paiute tribe in Nevada, had a vision of a ceremony that would renew the earth, return the buffalo, and cause the white men to leave and return the land that belonged to the Indians. This ceremony was called the Ghost Dance. People traveled across the plains to hear Wovoka speak, including emissaries from the Sioux tribe, and they brought back his teachings. The Ghost Dance, performed in special brightly colored shirts, spread through the villages on the Sioux reservation and it scared the white Indian agents. They considered the ceremony a battle cry, dangerous and antagonistic. So one of them wired Washington to say that he was afraid and wanted to arrest the leaders and he was given permission to arrest Chief Sitting Bull, who was killed in the attempt. The next on the wanted list was Sitting Bull’s half-brother, Chief Big Foot, known to his own people as Spotted Elk. Some members of Sitting Bull’s tribe made their way to Big Foot and when he found out what had happened he decided to lead them along with the rest of his people to Pine Ridge Reservation for protection. But it was winter, 40 degrees below zero, and he contracted pneumonia on the way.
Big Foot was sick, he was flying a white flag, and he was a peaceful man. He was one of the leaders who had actually renounced the Ghost Dance. But the Army didn’t make distinctions. They intercepted Big Foot’s band and ordered them into the camp on the banks of the Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot went peacefully.
The next morning federal soldiers began confiscating their weapons and a scuffle broke out between a soldier and an Indian. The federal soldiers opened fire, killing almost 300 men, women, and children, including Big Foot. Even though it wasn’t really a battle, the massacre at Wounded Knee is considered the end of the Indian Wars, a blanket term to refer to the fighting between the Native Americans and the federal government, which had lasted 350 years.
One of the people wounded but not killed during the massacre was the famous medicine man Black Elk, author of Black Elk Speaks (1932). Speaking about Wounded Knee, he said:
“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”
Like most twentieth century American children, I grew up with a sanitized understanding of American and Native history. I had only a superficial knowledge of what happened at Wounded Knee, a low hill that rises above a creek bed on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, gleaned primarily from the 71 day symbolic standoff in 1973 between members of the Oglala Sioux and the American Indian Movement and the FBI, resulting in several shooting deaths.
Nine years ago, when our son was teaching math at Little Wound High School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, we visited the site of this last major battle between the white man and Native people, which broke the spirit of the tribes’ striving to maintain their nomadic life as free people. This brutal massacre of nearly 300 Lakota men, women and children by the Seventh Regiment of the U.S. Army Cavalry took place in December 1890.
The dead lay where they fell for four days due to a severe blizzard. When the frozen corpses were finally gathered up by the Army, a deep mass grave was dug at the top of the hill, the bodies buried stacked one on top of another. The massive grave is now marked by a humble memorial monument surrounded by a chain link fence, adjacent to a small church, circled by more recent Lakota gravesites.
Four infants survived the four days of blizzard conditions wrapped in their dead mothers’ robes. One baby girl, only a few months old, was named “Lost Bird” after the massacre, bartered for and adopted by an Army Colonel as an interesting Indian “relic.” Rather than this adoption giving her a new chance, she died at age 29, having endured much illness, prejudice in white society, as well as estrangement from her native community and culture. Her story has been told in a book by Renee Sansom Flood, who helped to locate and move her remains back to Wounded Knee, where in death she is now back with her people.
There is unspeakable desolation and sadness on that lonely hill of graves. It is a regrettable part of our history that descendants of immigrants to American soil need to understand: by coming to the “New World” for opportunity, or refuge from oppression elsewhere, we made refugees of the people already here.
As Black Elk wrote, the dreams of a great people have been scattered and lack a center. He was not only speaking of his own tribe, but was presciently speaking of our current divisiveness – due to extremism, we lack “a center” in our current governmental discourse.
We must never allow hope to be buried at Wounded Knee nor must we ever forget what it means to no longer be safe in one’s own homeland.
Lost Bird after her adoption
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This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart as the sun rises, as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open — pools of lace, white and pink —
and all day under the shifty wind, as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies, and tip their fragrance to the air, and rise, their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness gladly and lightly, and there it is again — beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open. Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever? ~Mary Oliver fromNew And Selected Poems
It is not about love or sacrifice, nothing vestal or sacred. The light comes from an open window, and perhaps a breeze too that has caused the white peony to drop three delicately curved petals on the red jacquard. They cast purple shadows. The eye must seek them out, must avert itself from the ceaseless action in the midst of other objects: a runcible spoon, a quill, a tankard, two ripe quince. Athena Kildegaard, “Still Life with Beating Heart” from Ventriloquy
White peonies blooming along the porch send out light while the rest of the yard grows dim. Outrageous flowers as big as human heads! They’re staggered by their own luxuriance: I had to prop them up with stakes and twine. The moist air intensifies their scent, and the moon moves around the barn to find out what it’s coming from. In the darkening June evening I draw a blossom near, and bending close search it as a woman searches a loved one’s face. ~Jane Kenyon “Peonies at Dusk”
At the end of May, I bring our peonies to the graves of those from whom I came, to lay one after another exuberant head upon each headstone, a moment of connection between those in the ground and me standing above, acknowledging its thin space before one more humble and silky life shatters and becomes nothing, its petals perfectly scattered, lush and trembling, to the wind.
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