Native Orthodox Church

REV. MICHAEL WAYNE MAROUSEK-BELCHER

NativeOrthodoxChurch.org – Yourhungrycoyote@att.net

(213) 440-0334

Dear Community, I’m a Native Californian of Mission Indian descent, grandson of Artie Ortego aka Chief Little Horse who participated in parades, rodeos, pageants, and appeared in over 24 motion pictures from 1912-1955. I’m a student of Indian Lore, history, and theology. Studied under Ataloa Mary Stone McClendon, Chickasaw. Worked with Red Dawn, director of American Indian Lore Association. Worked with the “Y” Indian Guide, Woodcraft Rangers, and various private camps as an Indian Lore and Craft Director, Camp Counselor, and Archery Instructor. I’ve also worked assistant to Sun Bear, publisher of Many Smokes magazine.

I’ve been an active member and worker of the Indian Center Youth Group and the Navajo Sand Painters Club under the direction of Jones Wallace Benally. On December 1969, I joined the LA Times and worked with the Associated Press on a documentary about problems indigenous people face in the inner city. While working for the advertising department, I sometimes did research for reporters and kept them informed about the Native American Community. In 1971, I was elected to the Indian Center Board, following year appointed to board of directors for the Huntington Park free clinic. In 1980, I became Provisional Scout Master for the Indian Center and became a member of the American Indian Education Commission.

At my son’s elementary school I served as chairman of the Advisory Council, State School Site, Region G Chess Committee, and volunteered at Title VII LAUSD. During this time I was also promoting computers, music, and art in schools. In 1997, I retired from the L.A. Times and to incorporate the Native Orthodox Church.

I’m an independent scholar, I attend workshops, and class lectures at both ELAC, and CSULA. I can be found most Saturdays at the American Indian Resource Center, Huntington Park Library.

My true passion is working to ensure the vitality and relevance of leadership in the community we serve. There isn’t a week that goes by that I’m not moved by how meetings, powwows, and dances have united people and changed lives. It’s wonderful to see our community make new friendships and in a few cases find their life partner. I love bringing people together to break down stereotypes. We have an incredible opportunity to be innovative and take risks to reinvent and reinvigorate our roles in society. I hope we can continue to learn and evolve from one another.

– Rev. Michael Wayne, Your Hungry Coyote

Websites: NativeOrthodoxChurch.org and ArtieOrtego.com.

Here’s an article I had in my archives of newspaper/magazine clippings about games California Natives played and the toys they made.

To the One above, the First Person and the First Maker, we offer pipe to you.  We seek your guidance, over us at all times, for we wish to live well and to be happy always.

Mother Earth, I am offering next this pipe of peace to you. May our lives on you be long ones and happy ones.  Do not permit us to travel crooked trails, not let any of our trails go astray, and may our trails follow the Trail of Beauty Forever.

I turn to the North, where the eternal winter lives, and to you who resides there, take also of this pipe. We are weak against your coldness.  Be kind to us.  Send us only the amount of cold that we can endure.  We ask you to send us only the good snows and healthy winds.  Snows and winds that quicken our bodies and clean our minds.

Now from the East, from when the Old Man, our Grandfather Sun comes over the far eastern hills and brings us daylight, I offer this pipe to you.  May you bring us always good days, bright days, warm days, and we ask of you – let there be nothing to sadden the daylight.

South, where eternal summer lives, I present my pipe to you.

When the days grow longer after winter, we beg you to send us a good summer – one in which fruits grow abundantly so that we may live well, and one where grass grows plentifully for the buffalo to feed upon.

To the West, I point my pipe to you. To the peace where our Grandfather, the Sun, wraps his scarlet robe around him and takes the daylight with him, as he goes over the hill.  Yours is the place where our ancestors have gone, and we ask of you now to have them watch over us safely.  When the time comes for us to follow them, we want to have a joyful reunion with them.

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

ART AND RELIGION

Beyond the value of learning that diversity as well as change exists among Indian peoples, an authentic examination of their art is perhaps the best channel through which we can understand their values and world views.

Art and religion often go hand in hand. Although the Indian tribes did not produce a systematic theology (in Western terms) most of them were deeply committed to certain attitudes, beliefs, and practices. In fact, many of the practices were rigidly institutionalized, and undoubtedly certain individuals adhered to their beliefs with as much ardor and faith as anyone else in any other religion has done. Religion is what ultimately brings meaning and makes sense out of life. The Indian artistically and often ritualistically expressed what made sense to him.

Alas, the settlers and missionaries had little tolerance for Indian beliefs and their ways of expressing them (they assumed it was heathenism)–let alone any desire to understand them. The virtual absence of Indian religious studies from our universities and schools indicates just to what an extreme extent this lack of understanding, has gone. Even in so many Native homes, there is little detailed knowledge of the religious part of their heritage.

But if there is any Indian renaissance today, it is in the world of religion. Young people are coming to the elders for spiritual guidance and the elders are once again sharing their secrets with them. Practices, such as the Sun Dance and the use of sweat lodges, which were once institutionalized but later prohibited by white laws, are coming back. The Indian’s close communion with the earth is being recognized and re-affirmed,

Who Speaks for the Indian?

By WILCOMB E. WASHBURN; Wilcomb E. Washburn is the author of The Indian in America and the editor of The American Heritage History of the Indian Wars. (May 20, 1984)

MIX together the following ingredients: a threatened natural environment, endangered plants and animals, and Indians resisting change, and you have the formula for a story that will be bought by an American public quick to applaud the fight against change when it is perceived as unjust or unnecessary.

Peter Matthiessen. a naturalist and journalist who has only recently (in his In the Spirit of Crazy Horse) moved from the natural environment to Indians, has in this book combined both. Indian Country is neither history nor social analysis. It consists of personal reminiscences by Matthiessen and his informants. His principal informant, Craig Carpenter, was, in the 1950s, “by his own account, a ’half-baked detribalized Mohawk from the Great Lakes country trying to find his way back to the real Indians. In the “spiritual” journeys the two take together, many other detribalized urban Indians, far from their original homes, appear in the guise of “traditional” Indians, usually as “spiritual advisers” to other detribalized Indians.

The pretensions of these Indians to represent the 500 Indian tribes, nations, bands and villages officially recognized by the United States as having governmental character have not been accepted by these governments. The white media, on the other hand have uncritically treated the tiny handful of individual Indian activists as somehow representing the Indian point of view. Why? Because the Indian activists have learned to phrase their denunciations of the while man and legitimate Indian leaders in terms of stereotypical values familiar to white (e.g., reverence for “Mother Earth”) even though in most cases these activists have only a casual (at best) or cynical (at worst) acquaintance with these values.

It need hardly be stated that Matthiessen’s book has no scholarly value except for the light it throws on these detribalized activists and their white supporters and agents. Beginning with Matthiessen’s suggestion on the first page that the Indians were named so not because Columbus thought he had arrived in the Sea of India but because he believed he had found a people living in harmony with nature (una gente in Dios), we are treated with partisanship, innuendo, opinion and rumor masquerading as fact.

One cause involving Indian land after another is spread before us:

Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida and the “Miccosukee, or ‘true Seminole'” whose bewildering factional rivalry in opposition to the officially accepted Indian jump to page 11 Reorganization Act of 1934 government even Matthiessen has trouble cataloguing.

The Hopi Reservation in Arizona where “traditionalists” backed by white support groups in Los Angeles and occasional;-, infused with a dash of American Indian Movement (AIM) violence confronts the “puppet” Hopis—the elected tribal council—on issues ranging from coal leases to introducing electricity.

The fight to block the Tellico Dam project in Tennessee in which the claims of the tiny “snail darter” gave wav to the relig:: us concerns of traditional Cherokees.

“Akwesasne Territory” or the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation along the Canadian border of New York where traditionalist initiated physical violence against the elected tribal government and were later on the receiving end of such violence.

The G-0 Road (Gasquet-Orleans Road) in Six Rivers National Forest in the Siskiyou Mountain-Klamath River area f northern California, stopped by the hasty mobilization of Yurok and Karuk “medicine men” testifying to its religious significance for the Indians.

The Black Hills, sacred to the American Indian Movement, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists fighting uranium exploration in the area, and asserted to be a “spiritual area” from time immemorial although history records that the Lak ta (Sioux) first arrived in the Black Hills driving out the original inhabitants) only shortly before the whites arrived to drive out the Sioux.

Point Concepcion in southern California where Archie Fire Lame Deer, a Lakota, served as the “spiritual adviser” to the Chumash Indians in the successful fight against plans to locate a liquid natural gas terminal there.

The Pit River (California) land claims featuring the “Legitimate Pit River Tribe” versus the “official Tribal Council.”

The ‘Western Shoshone Sacred Lands Association” claiming much of the state of Nevada against a varied assortment of vacillating tribal councils and the U.S. Air Force, which wanted to base the MX-missile system there.

The Four Corners area of the Navajo Reservation in Arizona where the huge energy generating power plant offends environmentalists, the uranium mining offends anti-nuclear activists, and the Navajo Tribal Council under former chairman Peter MacDonald offended traditionalists like John Redhouse and the general Navajo electorate who will now see whether the new chairman, Peterson Zah, can do any better.

Big Mountain, in the heart of Arizona’s Black Mesa, w here Nava, s who have been adjudged to be illegally occupying Hopi land, are seeking to stay the effects of the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974 (requiring them to leave) by invoking the sacred character of the land in accordance with their traditions.

In almost every one of these disputes concerning Indian land, the picture presented is one in which a handful of beleaguered “traditionalist” is battling an insensitive elected “puppet” tribal government established under the authority of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, part of the sweeping New Deal revision of Indian affairs undertaken under the leadership of J ‘ Collier. The courts, which have vigorously defended and expanded the sovereign character of Indian governments in the Iasi 40 years, are also denounced by Matthiessen when they rule against the pretensions of a handful of “traditionalist” in favor of elected tribal governments. The efforts of a few of the “traditionalist” to bring their “case” to the United Nations in Geneva, or to……………….

NORTHERN PLAINS INDIAN PRAYER

To the One above, the First Person and the First Maker, we offer this pipe to you. We seek your guidance, over us at all times, for we wish to live well and to be happy always.
Mother Earth, I an offering next this pipe of peace to you. May our lives on you be long ones and happy ones. Do not permit us to travel crooked trails, not let any of our trails go astray, and may our moccasins follow the Trail of Beauty Forever.

I turn to the North, where the eternal winter lives, and yo you who resides there, take also of this pipe. We are weak against your coldness. Be kind to us. Send us only the amount of cold that we can endure. We ask you to send us only the good snows and healthy winds. Snows and winds that quicken our bodies and clean our minds.
Now from the East, from when the Old Man, our Grandfather Sun comes over the far eastern hills and brings us daylight, I offer this pipe to you. May you bring us always good days, bright days, warm days, and we ask of you – let there be nothing to sadden the daylight.

South, where eternal summer lives, I present my pipe to you. When the days grow longer after winter, we beg you to send us a good summer – one in which fruits grow abundantly so that we may live well, and one where grass grows plentifully for the buffalo to feed upon.

To the West, I point my pipe to you. To the peace where our Grandfather, the Sun, wraps his scarlet robe around him and takes the daylight with him, as he goes over the hill. Yours is the place where our ancestors have gone, and we ask of you now to have them watch over us safely. When the time comes for us to follow them, we want to have a joyful reunion with them.

AUTHOR UNKNOWN