Article and photos by Steve Pavey
Apache Stronghold Sacred Journey
Censored News
DENVER -- Stronghold Sacred Journey was welcomed by Grupo Tlaloc at its annual Xupantla ceremony in Denver, Colorado. Blessings and Prayers offered for safe travel to the Poor People’s Campaign action on June 23.
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Manzanola, Colorado, June 16
Our sacred journey to DC to convene with the Poor People’s Campaign follows a spiritual schedule and not an issues or rallies schedule, Wendsler Nosie, Sr reminds us. So our route is arranged according to Prayers and Dreams and they are leading us to places of deep pain for native people, to places where the earth suffers because of the colonizers’ extractive profit driven ways, to our members families to offer protection and where we celebrate and laugh together eating Fry Bread & buffalo soup, to sacred places to connect with their deities, and along the way we are laying a path of sacred black stones to heal all that this Nation has destroyed and disconnected. We need to reconnect what the colonizers ways has broken.
When we entered the Sweat for prayers in Manzanola, one of the local elders who was guiding our Sweat, Chief Gordon Plain Bull Jr, began by telling us he needed this. “It’s been too long,” he said, “I need this to get back to reality.” This is the reality that the Poor People’s Campaign is calling Moral Revival that we need to get back to. Prayer is the way to begin rejecting the lies and delusions of what the colonizer calls reality. We need to listen and learn from our spiritual native brothers and sisters in order to learn to see what is real and begin to live in ways that heal our brokenness and the evils of materialism, systemic racism, militarism, ecological devastation and Christian nationalism.
When we entered the Sweat for prayers in Manzanola, one of the local elders who was guiding our Sweat, Chief Gordon Plain Bull Jr, began by telling us he needed this. “It’s been too long,” he said, “I need this to get back to reality.” This is the reality that the Poor People’s Campaign is calling Moral Revival that we need to get back to. Prayer is the way to begin rejecting the lies and delusions of what the colonizer calls reality. We need to listen and learn from our spiritual native brothers and sisters in order to learn to see what is real and begin to live in ways that heal our brokenness and the evils of materialism, systemic racism, militarism, ecological devastation and Christian nationalism.
Copyright Steve Pavey, Stronghold Sacred Journey
