various questions coming to me over a few years of putting this together….
song being shared in background: “You got the love I need….” Then, “Who’s gonna show him the way?”
Wow.
So i’m with someone calling themselves, rite now, “An(n) Alter Ego (“Ann AE”, i’ll call hir, or how about Annae!, a.k.a. “A” as in Answerer). I’m “Q”, the MC of this. Annae’s pronouns are: hiz, hee, hym, hir, they.
Annae is a friend of mine, over quite a few years. Annae was not allowed to be listed on the unsettlingamerica blog, and was surprised. I will try to put a photo up that hee used on hiz blog (visionary4evolution.wordpress.com) at the time. A “psychedelic Lord of the Flies” “masque” representing the totally marginalized (?) desert wild pig, known as the Javalina (Have a leen ah).
Q=MC of this interaction. I am typing this from notes made.
Note, i put this interview off for at least four years. Go figure.
Annae wants to be remembered, as they are getting up in age (approaching 58! i thought hee was much younger, say 30s!) and unsure of when it will “be their ride showing up” (to paraphrase the late John Trudell, about passing on). Especially in light of having various levels of spooks firing off threats and etc.
Alritey! Spirit just tripped me OUT (again!) when i seemed to lose the pen i was using, and got all anxious about that! Turn on a light and WHOA there it is, right in a place i had only just SEARCHED!!!!
Q: Ever get that kinda challenge?
A: All the time.
Anyway, we both think that speaking up at this time is a good idea. So more folks may hear out this apparent ‘metis’ man. I encounter hym this time as hee tries to adjust hiz radio antenna to get a good signal on the East Bay Area’s ‘World 1 Radio’ on KECG. They’ve got themself some kinda NDN rig, btw. In fact, hiz life feels pritty uncloned and uncolonizing, rite down to hiz humble:
“When i’m trying to make some ends meet, i’ve learned, over and over, i have to HUMBLE myself, first! Folks, “Normal, Everyday people” are STILL that much IN TUNE with their intuition, (even when they won’t admit it!) that they won’t show interest in my art UNLESS i’ve gotten into a humble, more balanced space!!!!”
Annae is really LIVING their visions, too. The outphitz and visionary texts they made over the years “depth interacted” with diverse folks in over 15 cities, and counting. Since 2003, when hee began broadening out from merely a single issue focus. All while hee was “dropping out.”
“I was already internationally OUT for that single issue, and had achieved a somewhat notorious position, when i began practicing for life ‘underground’. That proved ‘pre-scient’ when someone began legally attacking everyone in the group i had been involved with”– just for having our names on the list of their publication! “A real COINTELPRO-like operation, or at least something very much like that!” Dragging activists’ resources out for long legal harrassment, tends to take the oomph out of building social movements, a lesson from the 1960s/70s realities.
“So, the attackers couldn’t apparently find me, even as some of my colleagues lost their homes, trying to put enough money to fight that shit!”
“So i began dropping out by a FLUKE! And, wow, what a ride. Not for the faint of heart! All the psychic and psychological challenges i have been enduring (nothing physical yet), certainly have built up my resolve! To keep on going just like Martin Luther King, Jr did.”
Trippy-ass “anti-copyright” art hee makes, btw. Have you seen it around? Hee makes it only by the light of day, while sitting, chairless, on “MomEarth”, no “Normal” home, even: “Tarpology, usually, nowadays! Ever since i realized that escaping tents allows for dreds to be made!!!!
No heat, no electric (did get a $21 REI garage sale solar panel awhile back), no plumbing (diggin holes), no internet (duzn’t even own a computer, except for the one hee stashed about ten years back, re-found it recently, but mildew apparently disabled)!
Heez been living “outside of the settler corral” more and more since back in 1982-83 when hee first began “tasting it” in a serious way (hee thinks that an art car, with black fire on the sides, which he drove around the country in 1989, and then a similar one in the late 1990s, may’ve inspired the name behind the band BLACK FIRE, when some one of them MIGHT have seen the car by chance!). 1982, tho, is when hee first began seeing THE POTENTIAL of living freer, when doing a solo bicycle ride at age 17 across hiz home state. Then in 1983, during a 360day transnational ride, and especially in 1985-86, at age 20 and 21, experimenting with such free while bikin from ‘The Aijiganiing’ to ‘Aleyeska’ (a.k.a. Alaska), 4,800 miles. “But 1996 was the year i went in with BOTH feet.”
Annae recalls the first person who met hym when hee got to hiz final destination in “Aleyeska”, a 59-year-old Inuit man “whom i got to know so meaningfully that i not only made art for him, but put it on a sweater and gave it to him!” before hee left after about a year there. “We used to hug everytime we saw each other! And i used to see him kind of ministering to the other Inuits on the street, often drunken. “He’d drink with them, but try to help them! Help them get in touch with their traditional values!!”
“I remember one time when i wanted to help him, but he had me help one of his more drunk buddies. How did i help? i helped by taking him back to my little rented spot and cook him up a good meal! No religion, no hype from me, just being a human being! Another Native guy i reached out to, saying i’d take him to eat somewhere, couldn’t believe it when i actually did this!”
Very naive to Native realities at that time, at least he was reading the apparently autonomous publication “The Tundra Times”.
Annae got to know quite a few Native folks up thar in the far north and hasn’t stopped since. “I look back at the closest friends i had in highschool, and they were all metis or full-blood. Even tho i never heard conscious discussion on that topic, we had something going on intuitively, i guess.”
“A deeply marginalized aunt of hiz, long character assassinated by all the groanups, told me that she found, in a DNA test, that we are RELATED to three possible tribal nations. She picked the Blackfeet, and somehow obtained land and a cabin in an apparently lovely part of the Blackfeet Rez! I remain a bit skeptical, but open-minded.”
Oh, big deal, Annae’s Native too. Naive whites hoop and holler in celebration, until they recognize the reality. But, a’course, the celebration is (?) about feeling connected, after all. Feeling to be a part of the “LaNd”, and then knowing they have ancestral connexion! Knowing it in their heart, and then, wow, here comes settler technology “proving” it. Ahem.
Hiz earliest recollection of how hee got into this NDN stuff was at age 8, as a member of the “Indian Guides”. “They gave me a name: Wise Owl. It was an Algonquin-oriented focus, and at that age i was VERY moved to be a part of that.”
A more daring Kent Nerburn?
Q: So, you’ve felt a connexion with Indigenous folks for a long time and now you think you’re doing something about it, not merely consuming the spectacle, another culture tourist for stupidized settlers to gaggle at?
A: –Well, that’s what ya get, i think, when ya don’t have any connexion with Mom Earth. When ya’v spent a lifetime restricting yourself from what yer afraid of. But if ya approach life via something like ‘mutualist strategies of protection via enrichment, wow, life opens up AMAZING doorz! The more levels you re-discover/remember. But due to long-reigning European-centric Beliefs, we’ve been separated from even our memory of life ‘beyond Thunderdome’ so to speak.”
Q: Hee refers to the Mad Max movie, #3 (?), where Thunderdome brings all the violent people from a dystopian future to what world elites want everyone to think (like them), that violence and struggle is all that awaits any kind of disaster or meltdown or crash.
A: Visions i get started rather smallish –coming up with regalia for actions i felt it was important to carry out, and then building up and seeming to get grander, and more meaningful!
Q: You write on one of your sites about dressing “up” in a surrealist way that observers don’t yet know how to think about. Their ‘leaders’ and professional influencers haven’t yet taught them How To Think about you?
A: Yes, it’s the basic input from Harry Hay, an early visioneer of the Gay movement (1950s), before it got trapped in Assimilation priorities. The visions basically complement what John Trudell promoted late in his life: the power of our creative intelligence. I think i actually inspired him to use the word “creative” in there, btw.
Q: You’ve read widely…
A: Admittedly, largely unconscious of the toll wood pulp books are having on our ecosystems, world-wide. Hemp, the viable alternative! Tho i’ve had trouble locating paper sources for em, except online. Then it’s not so easy to find a photocopier that can successfully have their ink sticking to the hemp paper, i’ve learned, via trial and error!
Q: And your adventures close to nature have honed your abilities….
A: Where to begin? Well, i’m mostly self-taught on this ‘alt’ stuff. Rainbow family (welcomehome.org), sure, but b4 that, it was about putting myself and my creative intuition out there more and more, informally. Independently and autonomously.
Q: Most conscious oriented people might assume you’d live QUIETLY in the underground–
A: But i learned from jewish writings around the Holocaust, to NOT GO SILENTLY. And from world Indigenous, to ‘go’ (to other lives beyond ‘this world’) LOUDLY and CREATIVELY! Shining the spirit of the gifts i’ve been given to others whom might be in similarly solo-stuck and self-teaching!
Q: You endured many years of having to suppress a side of who you are, and that informs you in a basic, kind of foundational way?
A: Yeah!
I’ve been a target of psy ops for decades, as well. Maybe even since i was a kid, as my father was known to be a semi-radical highschool teacher in 1970s Flint, MI. And whom appears to have been targeted himself by the MK-ULTRA program while he was in the army in San Francisco. And my ma gets almost continuous crank calls.
The last time i was particularly challenged was by a spook, outwardly seeming to enjoy his Misery-stuckness when he Told me that if i ever get ‘famous’, i’d have ONE DAY to live. Funny thing, if i wasn’t already a bit famous, he would never have been deployed at me, eh?
Q: Then there was the standing threat on your life, from a complete stranger, to not return to Montana, which you just recently returned from!?
A: Ah, yes, my aunt was the one to uncannily share this threat with me, after i had told her why i really thought her brother, my uncle, would not take a DNA test! The people she hangs out with in her small Montana town….probably merely Trump supporters, trying to build up the ‘civil’ war threat, who believe that anyone “from” a big liberal town, where i wrote to my aunt at the time, is a strategically-challenged Liberal asswipe!
Q: You just spent 10 days bicycling over there, including into Browning.
A: And maybe i should have told some of the people i met, but i didn’t. they have enough problems from crazy white folks, i figure!
Q: You’ve said your art is inspired by Klingit/Kwakiutl carving and art.
A: yeah, i was 15 when i first truly saw their depth! And began applying that style to settler norms all around me. Like, drawing a car in that style.
Q: Then, years later, when some street Natives invited you to a pow wow.
A: That was like 2008 or so. Turns out that a Native street woman (a regular drunk) i had a surprising connexion with was herself Blackfeet! She shared a name of her connexion when i told her i would be walking with Dennis Banks in the Long Walk. Not knowing if she’s still alive, i don’t feel free to share that name and further identifying info here.
But i was exploring creative social intervention beyond the bounds of settler Normalcy since around 1993, when i was at the height of my single issue focus. Going into regular Unknowns in d.c. and minneapolis, mn, wearing my improvized regaliahz, and challenging Gay Assimilation-oriented survival beliefs! With an electronic bullhorn and long-meditated-on “yell cards”! The culmination of which challenged even YOUR settler-church-planted beliefs and assumptions!
Q: Yes, a doooozy, for sure.
A: I’ve been called a “radical’s radical” for such provocative daring.
Q: I can see why. Root of the root, ay?
A: Well, touching its heart, for sure. But to even speak of such could get your blog shut down.
Q: Continuing neocolonial realities….
A: The bottom line of each of our (including unwitting settlers) experiences of unjust suppression is that the stupidized tyranny/elite running things has itself been hoodwinked into believing in the NECESSITY of each insane suppression. Anyway, they don’t want to be involved, its just that they cannot avoid it! And their ambivalence shines thru in their severely alienating policies!
Q: Sidenote: wow, the typing i’m doing has become really slooooowwww. Weird! Same old again….
A: I think of sharing with your readers some of the whistleblowers, but what would be the value? What can i share that might inspire already woke folk?
Q: Try us.
A: Well, Jeremy Seabrook in Vol.1, #1 of globalization.icaap.org. And how about Carole Gallagher’s cofee-table -sized book, AMERICAN GROUND ZERO? Or COMMAND AND CONTROL about the MANY close calls of nukes almost going off!
Q: But you don’t wish to call them “evil”.
A: No. And i think that’s the design (?) or mistake of leftism, post-left anarchy aside. i think that the SEVERELY ALIENATED, and even their “elite” schooling and the Machiavellian-like ideology that is pushed on them, is IMPOSED. Coerced and otherwise wheedled into and upon them, as kids!!
(FIRST PART ENDS HERE)
unsettling.subtle.settler.unsettlers 