Author Archives: d.perry

“Real Power is our relationship with the earth. We are the earth… [human.beings]…are just different shapes and forms of the life of the earth,…no more or less than the trees …[and]… stones…human physical, being spirit. Authority is not power. Authority is something man creates. All authority is usually based upon aggression or implied aggression. Whoever has the most money has the ability to [buy] authority, but that is not power. The industrial technological authoritarian political system that we live under, has developed a way to mine the human spirit just as it mines all natural resources. We are being mined in the same way that [oil] is mined, out of the earth. The pollution of the air, of the water, …of the environment …comes from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. Every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads,—that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit …by the confusions that are in our minds. There is no existing cure to the problem, the disease, than the one we create by using our intelligence as intelligently and as clearly as we possibly can. Either we know or we don’t know. Our ancestors are our power connection to knowledge. Real Power is what we come from. It is part of the natural order of the universe. Real Power has no limitations. Real Power cannot be removed from us, it is a natural part of us. Any relationship we will ever have to Real Power is our relationship to the earth. [We must re-establish]…our connection to that basic reality, we must take care of the earth.”

(Excerpted from the spoken words of John Trudell at the memorial for Earth First activist Judi Bari, April 26, 1997.)

e. crampton

‘…heal the wounds that colonialism had inflicted on me my whole life — wounds I previously lacked the capacity to see.

…

A press release once defined her style as “an adoption of sonic dialects across the Americas [that] shape the way different communities hear not just sounds but frequencies.

…

As Nishnaabeg academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2014), indigenous people don’t relate to the land by possession or control over it, but through connection; “a generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship” with the land (Simpson, 2019) is exactly what Crampton has been investigating in American Drift. As she remarked in an interview in 032c last year, “The notion of stone is something that is prevalent in our daily lives because of geography and praxis, becoming part of the languages we signal — chemical, tactile, textual, textilic, iconographic, oral, etc. That affiliation with stone, with all of its becoming, all of its generativity — all of these things come into play and that’s a long history that also created me. The stones are my family and my ancestors, a shared becoming, a shared story.”’

‘After leaving Harvard in 1668, John Wompas became a sailor, one of the earliest American Indians known to participate in the transatlantic trade. This decision probably also made him one of the most highly educated common sailors in the Atlantic World, one “who could recite and read Latin and Greek, along with a smattering of Syrian, Chaldaic, and Hebrew.”‘

“As shown by the writings of Increase Mather, the colonists attributed the decimation of the Native Americans to God’s providence in clearing the new lands for settlement.”

The pink fairy armadillo is nicknamed the “sand-swimmer” because it is said that it can “burrow through the ground as fast as a fish can swim in the sea.”

To be at the tip of the spear.
It’s like asking for loneliness.

Craving for a longing
on an empty belly.

It’s always empty hands,
palms up, nothing to show.

place to place
giving nothing
taking nothing

Always unnoticed when nothing goes,
“An emptiness emptied out and swept
clean of being, Clean of deceive, Queen of windy.”

place to place
hands up in front
just passing through

“I went to one village and saw 100 corpses, then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people.”

‘The cover featured photographs of the Auschwitz Orchestra, a group of concentration camp prisoners who were forced to play classical music as people were herded into the gas chambers. The back cover included the text “The moral of this work: the past punishment is the inevitable blindness of the present.”‘