..."I wear black on the outside cuz black is how I feel on the inside" -- The Smiths.
Brought back a black-white-and-red slender little bead/buckskin Blackfeet bracelet for Marta, herself from Cuidad de Mexico, and of Indian blood. Marta works on our "grounds crew" at work (MIT jargon -- from the putt-putt golf played in the corridor of 7th floor of the AI Lab), since she asked for a trip memento. No one else did. This is the Marta from my poem "from monday to friday from monday to friday" (title in Spanish, poem bilingual). In UPenn's CrossConnect.
...a touch of ...London? ...New York? ...Paris? ...Munich?
...Cody, Wyoming, calling...
...the story I want to tell is the naming of Nez Perce. The French named the Nez Perce (Pierced Nose) after the French asked: Who are you -- and the Nez Perce signed (the Indians often sign; I saw in Cody vintage footage from 1890 of Buffalo Bill signing with Chief Iron Tail -- "We (index finger, right hand) are who follow the buffalo (in a hooking and looping motion) through the mountain passes (motion under the nose and across the body to the East/left)".
Because the Nez Perce lived west of the Rockies and east of the Snake River canyon (Oregon border), from Canada to Yellowstone. They were very friendly to Lewis and Clark in 1804 and later. They were not friendly in the late 1890s, cheated, dispossessed, coerced to a shriveling territory, hungry, and oblivious to the larger gestalt of the U.S. Army as a massive, closing-in insurmountable trap, not just a band here or there of white horsemen to be defeated or eluded, to reclaim the open spaces and the hunting of buffalo vs. sitting tawdry and destitute on a sagebrush reservation, eating not much of anything at all, not even the government-promised food coming in.
...Hi-ho, magenta and gold! -- come one, come all -- see the show!!! The biggest museum complex under one roof between Minneapolis and Los Angeles... the preeminent western museum... in a town of 8k people and dusty front-street (a Sheridan!) facades... and Wyoming's Rodeo Capital.
...It was a dark, dark night, and the High Plains sky was a nameless river... of stars, like, well, like a giant fuzzy twirling amaranth on fire... And no one sleeping, warriors, women, children, knew that the Bluecoats' own Indian scouts where already in the willows across the river... Big Hole Battlefield, a grand flat valley in Montana ... on the thousand-mile Nez Perce Trail... the beginning of the end...
So... My Merry Berry 1997 Card is handmade, about 10 acres worth, in Banff National Park, Canada, floor of the valley just south of Lake Louise. I figure they don't mind the strings of lights provided I take them off before it gets real dark, before the animals wake up...
Ok, this is Kristie's hand-made postcard, front, which she made for making me eat deep-fried gizzard. Later I met her mom who stopped by. Nice folk. Um, *nicer* than nice.
Reverse. I blacked out private info. Of immediate interest is one of
the supply of St. Francis Hospital address stickers which I took with
me on the trip as a convenience. I felt good about using them having
donated a trifling sum to the hospital. Having been hospitalized in
it just now in Feb 98, I feel a sense of unbearable lightness of
excellent nursing and foodplay...
To Clickable Geographical Map -- Marek's Magical Mystery Tour Toplevel
Index of already active regions of the Clickable Geographical Map: