history

Hildegard of Bingen (also known as Hildegarde von Bingen, l. 1098-1179) was a Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, and polymath proficient in philosophy, musical composition, herbology, medieval literature, cosmology, medicine, biology, theology, and natural history. She refused to be defined by the patriarchal hierarchy of the Church and, although she abided by its strictures, pushed the established boundaries for women.

Along with her impressive body of work and ethereal musical compositions, Hildegard is best known for her spiritual concept of Viriditas – “greenness” - the cosmic life force infusing the natural world. For Hildegard, the Divine manifested itself and was apparent in nature. Nature itself was not the Divine but the natural world gave proof of, existed because of, and glorified God. She is also known for her writings on the concept of Sapientia – Divine Wisdom – specifically immanent Feminine Divine Wisdom which draws close to and nurtures the human soul.

From a young age, she experienced ecstatic visions of light and sound, which she interpreted as messages from God. These visions were authenticated by ecclesiastical authorities, who encouraged her to write her experiences down. She would become famous in her own lifetime for her visions, wisdom, writings, and musical compositions, and her counsel was sought by nobility throughout Europe.

Early Life & Education

Hildegard came from an upper-class German family, the youngest of ten children. She was often ill as a child, afflicted with headaches which accompanied her visions, from around the age of three. Whether her parents consulted physicians about her health issues is unknown, but at the age of seven, they sent her to be enrolled as a novice in the convent of Disibodenberg.

Hildegard was placed under the care of Abbess Jutta von Sponheim (l. 1091-1136), head of the order, an aristocrat and daughter of a count who had chosen the monastic life for herself. Jutta was only six years older than Hildegard in 1105 when the latter entered the convent and the two would become close friends. Jutta taught Hildegard to read and write, how to recite the prayers, and introduced her to music by teaching her to play the psaltery (a stringed instrument like a zither). Jutta may also have instructed the younger girl in Latin (though this claim has been challenged) and encouraged her to read widely.

Hildegard certainly fit this paradigm of the female intellectual, distinguishing herself by her vast learning, devotion to God, and service to others. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard, then 38 years old, was unanimously chosen to succeed her.

Works & Beliefs

Hildegard's vision is all-encompassing in scope, far transcending the common vision of the medieval Church while still remaining within the bounds of orthodoxy. She claimed the Divine was as female in spirit as male and that both these elements were essential for wholeness. Her concept of Viriditas elevated the natural world from the Church's view of a fallen realm of Satan to an expression and extension of the Divine. God was revealed in nature, and the grass, flowers, trees, and animals bore witness to the Divine simply by their existence.

Her first major work, the Scivias, relates 26 of her visions in three sections – six visions in the first, seven in the second, thirteen in the third – along with her interpretation and commentary on the nature of the Divine and the role of the Church as an intermediary between God and humanity. She depicts God as a cosmic egg, both male and female, pulsing with love; the male aspect of the Divine is transcendent while the female is immanent. It is this immanence which invites rapport with the Divine.

Hildegard believed that, prior to the Fall of Man, God was worshipped by celestial song which, after the Fall, was approximated by music as humans now heard and understood it. Music, then, was the best expression of one's love for, devotion to, and worship of God. In keeping with this belief, she ends the Scivias with the text of her morality play Ordo Virtutum and her Symphony of Heaven, one of her earliest musical compositions.

Conclusion

Aside from her contributions to theology, philosophy, music, medicine, and the rest, Hildegard invented the constructed script of the Litterae ignotae (alternate alphabet), which she used in her hymns for concise rhyming and, possibly, to lend to her text a sense of another dimension and higher plane. She also invented the Lingua ignota (unknown language), her own philological construct of 23 letters which served to separate and elevate her order from the mundane world.

In spite of her accomplishments and fame, the Church continued to regard women not only as second-class citizens but dangerous temptations and obstacles to virtue. The highly influential Bernard of Clairvaux claimed that a man could not associate with a woman without desiring sex with her and the canonical order of the Premonstratensians banned women from their order claiming to have recognized "that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness in the world" (Gies, 87). It was precisely this kind of misogynistic mindset that Hildegard struggled against not only within the Church but in medieval society at large.

Even so, the significance of her work was recognized by the Church and she was singled out as a woman of note. Her cause of death is unknown but she died, most likely of natural causes, in 1179. Attempts to canonize her stalled until 2012 when she was recognized as a saint through the process of Equivalent Canonization and was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI. Her famous visions are today interpreted as symptoms of a migraine sufferer but this has in no way detracted from her reputation.

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Is this how you thought the actual Wounded Knee post would be presented? Stroke of genius really, at any rate this is a history I have grown up hearing. I've known the broad strokes for so long it felt like I was an expert when I started the Bands of Turtle Island podcast when I was like 19 maybe just turned 20. I impressed people so much a producer from Jacobin reached out and offered 15k to tell this exact story, and we all know how much Jacobin sucks but it was a great little podcast called "People's History" named of Zinn's book. So I demanded artistic and editorial control. This was paid by 3 entities and paid to multiple people I received 10k which what I received for labor went back into the podcast to make it better. I visited 53 reservation communities and 18 urban organizers from a wide variety of parties/orgs to better understand the conditions of the US. Because of this I learned just how little I knew, and realized there is a missing piece to a larger question of why momentum of the movement slowed to a crawl and is properly better suited for a long form piece that doesnt need pictures to save characters. On February 27th, 1973 (51 Years Ago) my family helped lead the famous Wounded Knee Re-Occupation. There countless people came and went while a core 300 occupied the town for 71 days and declared the Independent Oglala Nation backed by the traditional chief Frank Fool's Crow and Matthew King who commanded considerable political sway among traditional communities on Pine Ridge (often "coincidentally" also the poorest) who were being harrassed and assaulted by Dick Wilson to coerce them into agreeing to sell off a tenth of the reservation to Uranium mines like Union Carbide.

They chose Wounded Knee because of the symbolism in protesting there, it didn't turn into a re-occupation effort until AFTER Richard "Dick" Wilson set up road blocks, and used arms supplied by the US government to blockade. In Dicks mind AIM was coming to kill him, when they drove by the Tribal council building instead he chased them to Wounded Knee to instigate a fight while claiming the American Indian Movement was. In fact one of their supporters had survived the 1890 massacre, and is pictured above.

My elders call this period the Reign of Terror. Dick Wilson killed the equivalent amount of people to Pinochet's first 3 years. My uncle Leo saw his uncle burned alive as the Dick Wilson and his GOON (Guardians of the Oglala Nation) Squad tried to firebomb Fool's Crow who wasn't in his home at the time. OSCRO was even able to successfully collect the signatures needed to impeach, only Dick Wilson oversaw his own impeachment trial. Of course he was innocent.

Their argument was premised on the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty which by precedent set by the Marshall Trilogy in the Supreme Court, was the supreme law of the land equal to the constitution. This led to it be conceived as a Civil Rights issue by the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (which is ironic considering Sioux is a slur), who would be the ones to ask AIM to come protect them as they collected signatures. After the impeachment failed, what recourse were we left with a literal dictator murdering his political opponents?

The reason this history is so mystified and hidden is because it lays bare so succinctly, the continuation of COINTELPRO after it was made public. The solution was a new far more encompassing program that was essentially a domestic Phoenix program called Garden plot at least at the time of the re-occupation. What its become now is anyone's guess but Newsweek uses the limited hangout phrase 'Signature Reduction' which stems from the Douglass Durham infiltration imo and is the premise of the book I am writing.

During the period of 1965-1973 are 71 Red Power actions, one of which is led by Herb Powell and is the first example of a landback protest. This resulted in a lighthouse being returned and utilized as a Survival School and Indigenous spirituality led rehab center to combat the AA/NA Christianity underpinnings that often drove away Indigenous people. Akewsasne Notes are some of the most comprehensive resources available of the period beside archive footage and are archived online. Madonna is my aunt, sister to David Swallow Jr and Russell Means and you can learn so much about her in Warrior Women (just wait we will make it accessible)

Madonna's daughter Marcella actually incredibly went to Cuba for the 11th World Youth Festival in 1978, she went and met the youth movement of the PLO around the same period too, my mom wrote the Denver youth program charter, this has always been one generation building of the other. Madonna calls it "a movement of families" I argue what we need is a family of movements united under one.

It's no exaggeration either! David's grandpa rode with Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, Fool's Crow was 88 in 1974 (John Denver sang at his birthday oddly and we have the footage and me the people who filmed it) people think these things are so far away but literally up until the 90s you had to speak Lakota on my rez. Now the language is practically gone. Is it any wonder the ghost dance which caused so much fear they murdered a childs mother while still breastfeeding, while under a truce flag, caused just as much fear in the state agents hoping to kill more Indians?

This year we were the ones who funded the gas, water and part of the food being provided, we are housing the victims of this violence after decades of continuously being tossed around. The photo under this one was taken by my former boss Nick Estes, in it you see a Palestinian Flag next to the AIM Flag and next to an upside down American Flag. When the flag is upside down it means you are under duress during war, this is a war. Its still be raged, just in the 90s under Clinton the ATF, FBI and more raided our Sundance accusing David of forming a militia and having bazookas. They found only a Buffalo gun. They are so afraid of us picking up the rifle again, and this spring David will be going to the senate and demanding the BIA and Tribal Council dissolve operations on our reservation. He will be demanding the reinstatement of the 1868 land claims, as a starting point to honest relations and building a future. This will be denied. There will be turmoil. You need to be ready.

If you enjoy these posts, want to support this movement, and in general learn more about us check out our https://linktr.ee/chunkalutanetwork where you can see our other social media to get updates on our public works, read our first year organizing strategy, or find our patreon/liberapay links in order to support this work monthly. Otherwise right now we have a huge ask for $1000 for an electric bill that got away from the Indigenous family, enbridge owns their utility too and I just find it particularly moving to help them fight their electric being shut off by some one poisoning their lands right now as we speak. You can donate to $ZitkatosTinCan on cashapp and @zitkato on venmo we are hoping to fulfill this one by the 8th. We also have ask for that we currently are at 1500/4500 for a trailer to house an elder, unfortunately the trailers we got donated were falling apart and would definitely collapse on the journey to the Rez. This one is in Rapid City and we can haul it with a pick up and just need to winterize it and hook it up to electricity which we are estimating to be 1500+ as you can tell we always have a ton going on this will be the 2rd home we provided this year, and we are sending a permaculture crew to the land this March who will be staying in a Tipi until we build several A Frame Cabins this May-September during our construction caravans. We have been asked to also help develop an ID and passport production system like the Haudenosaunee have, and are looking for ideas and pointers. This is far more than a mutual aid organization, and people should learn just how much we are doing and how much our base already believes in us. I dont know any other party where we are, and we barely have our governing documents together so why not support us and see where we can go

Lastly fuck commas and the English language

Sorry for the late post, we wanted to get this uploaded for the 14th but due to a clusterfuck of several things occurring all at once, my time on the computer was eaten by moving and planning a funeral at any rate we wanted to share these photos on here (and they were already shared on instagram on time albeit without alt text) as time allows a statement will be made wrt to what happened as its relevant, Otherwise no we did not use CLN funds to untag people from Instagram posts. We did however ask them to remove us, so whoever did it did us a favor we asked for a week prior to any animosity. This decision was made due to the effort we put into our posts, and the lack of effort involved in screenshotting your posts from one site and re posting them. While the drama and theatrics were carried out, I was studying the genocidal campaigns of Cook for a week and plenty of real life issues for a reasonable criticism to have gone so poorly handled.

There is not a place on this Earth, Cook went, that he was actually respectful of the people. With all the typical euro-swagger of a "self-made" settler, turned explorer extraordinaire due to birth lottery, he sailed around the world finding himself related to the many colonial activities of the time carried out by Britain.

The French-Indian War, or Seven Years Wars holds a lot of the contradictions the affected the Great Lakes Region and later expulsion of Indigenous nations across the Mississippi. His cartography would directly help several massacres occur nearby where I currently live, or have lived thanks to helping people navigate the St. Lawrence river easier. This essentially exacerbated tensions with peoples in the Great Lakes regions leading to Pontiac (Odawa) and Guyasata's (Seneca) War which is most known for the takeover of Ft. Detroit through a LaCrosse game. Thats a story for another time (trust me I tried to write that story short and we decided its worth its own book because I can reach all the way to Tecumseh and later)

Cook's trajectory into later voyages was set by this initial colony effort, however benign his role seemed, mapping and land surveying are the first steps to colonial occupation. By using science as a means to fundraise efforts to colonize, one of the most insidious colonial tactics of claiming Indigenous people are anti-science for recognizing the white supremacy inherent in academia as it exists, was created.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/captain-cooks-1768-voyage-south-pacific-included-secret-mission-180970119/ you can find the quote above here, as we discuss the red line on the shown map. Which began with colonial activities in Tahiti and islands across the ocean as they went. Ultimately this was to beat the Spanish and Dutch to finding Australia

Of course they would map what was called New Zealand but is Aotearoa, being chased away for being assholes. Then due to sickness Cook was forced to stay close the ship when they landed in Australia

Now there is amazing groups like our friends at the Black People's Union who you can hear us talk to their president on the Chunka Luta Podcast on wherever you listen to podcasts, who are showcasing the horrors of this legacy and how to build toward a future where the colonial relation has ended.

I wish we could blame him for Climate Change, but Cook helps us understand the extent colonization changed the climate, with studies suggesting the genocide here on Turtle Island reduced the Earth's temperature. As well as acknowledging how the destruction of the bioregional agriculture practices established across the hemisphere, has sent the Earth's regulatory systems into a change.

So sorry this was so late, we are currently raising money to help people pay for groceries and their electric bills due to several programs running out of funding on Pine Ridge. We have another effort post planned for the 27th so whoever is in charge of those Megathreads let me know or I guess Ill ask Nikolai (hands broken so trying not to bother) about the Wounded Knee Occupation which we helped fund the 51st annual Liberation Day walk to remember the people who gave their lives for the movement.

If you are in the area I recommend you go see for yourself the gas we are cooking with. If you want to support those efforts and more related to send donation to $ZitkatosTinCan on CA or @zitkato for now as we finalize the org admin stuff to open up a collective bank account and have org accounts. You can also support us monthly via patreon or liberapay found on our linktr.ee/chunkalutanetwork

We also had a new branch begin public organizing in the Vancouver Canada area, which will be launching a program this April to help houseless relatives in the Area. Interac [email protected] PaypaI @vancouverchip And you can reach out to us to get ahold of them or email them at the same interac email

There's Always more but this was a late post anyway so forgive me for not trying as hard as I might normally

We last left you discussing the concept of the bordertown and the racialized violence enacted there through settler vigilantism, which is obvious through physical violence. In a new era, however, what about online discourse? This is one thing I’d like to introduce to our discourse and hopefully help settler allies understand when they might accidentally dawn a hood and cape for the state. I see settler vigilantism as synonymous with Kluxism, or at least they stem from the same psyche. The spirit of Manifest Destiny seemingly possesses these settlers to act out in monstrous ways, depriving us and themselves of humanity and life. There are no more bounties to collect for a scalp, so this shows these actions to murder Indians are deeper than just monetary gain. It is always about the land. Briefly we spoke on Raymond Yellow Thunder and Wesley Bad Heart Bull, both victims of settler vigilantism. Raymond died due to injuries sustained in a fight, and Wesley was stabbed in a fight at a bar. Both resulted in AIMs activism, and ultimately pushed them further to Wounded Knee. Raymond Yellow Thunder was killed before the Trail of Broken Treaties in 1972, and inspired the famous “AIM Song” which is actually the Raymond Yellow Thunder Song and should be respected as such.There is a great deal of controversy still surround Raymond’s death, but from every perspective I’ve heard one thing remains true; it is colonialism that murdered him.

Colonialism’s claws come from many directions, and it brings death in a systemic, planned and targeted manner, contrary to Engels' view of social murder. In a colony that target gives a slight reprieve for the colonizing nation’s working classes, and seemingly at the root of every boot strap story, is a mystified deluge of the eldritch horrors of capitalism and colonialism. These horrors which possess, steal, and murder are often described as primitive accumulation by contemporary Marxists (or the motor of capitalism), the tongue-in-cheek humor often becomes lost. Primitive accumulation which once derided the ruling class's view of themselves, now it is used by chauvinists to be synonymous with pre-Columbian political-economy. In the case of the Oceti Sakowin, we remained primitive in the eyes of these chauvinists until 1868. The people who make these arguments don’t seem to realize the cloak and hood they have proudly proclaimed as their own, but to us the colonized, we see the same two mouths our white siblings have become known for.

English is known for its one word with many meanings, or perhaps many words with the same sounds, but each uniquely specific. In the case of Wesley Bad Heart Bull we can see this most clearly in the settler’s courts, which proclaim law and order, but really only on behalf of the landowner. When there is no clear land owner, it's about which party most represents the landowners. In a settler-colony with a case of assault with prior consideration to ‘kill him an Indian’ it is of course manslaughter when you kill somebody who was fighting another person. This is of course sarcasm, generally speaking when you “accidentally” kill someone it is still a degree of murder especially with prior expression to want to kill an Indian, and when the assailant wasn’t involved in the fight. Murdered in the street like so many before and after, and that was a well known fact of life in South Dakota. You could be murdered and like Raymond or Wesley, your attackers might get charged with a small fine and manslaughter, but when you ask every settler when justice comes they all play innocent. This is why AIM went to the streets. When you ask Pine Ridge elders when AIM became a symbol, you are told the Gordon protest. When Russell Means took the Chief of Police’s hat and threw it, David Swallow Jr recounted his feelings as “we can do that?” This is where a fire was reborn that still carries on today, as my nation’s president banned Kristi Noem from our reservation after she tried to stoke xenophobic fears at a rally. We are standing once again, and it is time to stand with us and learn our revolutionary history.

So today on February 6th was the day of the Bad Heart Bull trial in Custer, South Dakota. To this day as landback grows more prominent and our elders and leaders move forward with decade old plans and conversations, the contradictions here grow. Because of this I’ve sought to see the perspective of various communities and generations, on the ‘Indian problem’ as it has always been called here. The Indigenous question is only the colonial question, and the communist movement has had a century, decade, and a year to discuss this since Stalin's publishing on the subject (1913, of course the conversation predates Stalin). One of Lenin’s last works was on this specific topic, and the question of who should be okay with having an autonomous region of their own in a larger state: is one that places great nations at the whim of the nations they oppressed.

Because of the words Lenin has spoken on the subject, people like Ho Chi Minh froze all night just for a chance to see the great man’s body. The pan-African revolution, the third world movement, fourth world theory and so much more have a red light shining on them from the star that is Lenin streaking across the sky: calling us to revolution. We don’t know if that star was shining at the time the molotov was thrown, but when the court house went up in flames, it certainly caused a stir. Nobody knows who threw it either, I’ve talked to a considerable bulk of living participants, but it was thrown after the cops pushed Wesley’s mother down the stairs with a billy club. Only 3 people were going to be allowed into the courtroom, and when Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and David Hill entered the cops stood in the way of the mother of the victim, and brutalized her. David punched that pig-fucker in the face and the riot ensued. Custer is THE symbol of settlement in the Black Hills, it's one of the first towns, and to this day makes its money from exploiting the land and treating it like an amusement park. While people on my reservation don't have water, Rapid City has a water park. Custer had a literal amusement park that flew a replica of the 7th Calvary's flag; we already had the real one, so during the riot that replica flag was also taken. Cy Griffin was a film maker from the video freak movement that was there, he went back to New York and told his friends about everything happening there. A war in South Dakota is how he described it. We call it the Reign of Terror. See, it wasn’t just in the bordertown we were being murdered in the street, on Pine Ridge a seemingly innocuous man named Richard Wilson (only one parent was Lakota) became Tribal chairman. He employed his family (legal in our laws) , began embezzling money (not legal) and established a right-wing paramilitary called the GOONs (Guardians Of the Oglala Nation, questionably legal). The GOONs would enact violence on Dick Wilson’s political opponents by firebombing, drive-bys, and gunning people down in the street. This spurred the organization OSCRO (Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization) to form, and begin collecting signatures to impeach Wilson. They were successful in collecting the signatures, however Dick was the one who presided over the impeachment, and of course found himself not guilty. OSCRO is an often overlooked organization, and I believe this to be the goal of federal agents to remove the grassroots elements from these struggles and obfuscate the lessons we could learn. As mentioned in a previous post, Dick Wilson would oversee the equivalent amount in deaths to Pinochet’s first 3 years. This is in South Dakota, and nobody knows these facts, and pretend colonialism is some bygone era. Because of the fire lit in Custer, in Gordon, in the Pacific Northwest, in DC and so many more places, we see the modern land back movements stem. Those movements stemmed from the wars, those wars stemmed from the early capitalists accumulation of wealth to jump start global capital today. In these circles we see how yesterday is today, and only by understanding both can we move on to tomorrow. We must pull capitalism up from its roots which are soaked in the blood of the colonized, until we do that we are doomed to fail. We mentioned briefly how these concepts go beyond physical violence, and one way is the erasure and silencing of Indigenous and other marginalized voices. This might sound farfetched to the insensitive, but in a critical period of rupture, we have to make sure we don’t get bogged down in what is socially mainstream. If the mainstream is saying our talking points then we have failed to stay at the head of the movement, and are merely another voice consumed into the acceptable protest movement. We have to stand arm and arm with trans comrades as opportunists and state agents both turn their sights on them across the country, seeking to separate them from would-be allies who are worried they will lose mainstream support for daring to stand against the face of oppression. Those who can’t stand in solidarity with everyone, yet voice opposition to Israel in this critical moment, are capitalizing and being opportunists. This has to be combatted. People like Jackson Hinkle make Trans and Indigenous people their target for a reason and you should learn why. Especially if folks like Hinkle can sell stolen Palestinian Gold, and people give passes to communists defending him. The movement is in a critical moment where it has to struggle with the colonial contradictions, failure to do so, means failure to form a vanguard. In our next post we will discuss Captain Cook and his death on February 14th, my birthday is then next so y’know if you like these posts and the work we do I recommend supporting us! We have a linktr.ee/chunkalutanetwork with all of our social media, gofundme efforts we are engaged in, a liberapay and a patreon that all go to supporting the work CLN does. This post was short as it's mostly a timely bridge to send us on our way to the real Wounded Knee 1973 post at the end of the month, so lots of learning to do. I also recommend checking out the Indigenous Anti-Colonial Institute podcast and the CLN podcast for more education. Our patreon also has a ton of episodes, and there’s also Marx Madness where we read you theory. Right now we are reading a custom Gramsci Reader that you can check out in our library listed on the linktr.ee. I also want to stress, don't wait for us to learn about this stuff, start with Blood of the Land by Rex Weyler, read the Erdoes biographies, and then ask what a Marxist perspective on this stuff should be. I will be releasing a companion to the book later this month hopefully, of a stream of thought journal kept on my 3rd read through.