December 26, 2008

DEAR FRIENDS,

Greetings to everyone from our high desert home here in northern New Mexico, where the winter storms are arriving in waves like geese flying in from the north. This past year was the twenty-second of The Tracking Project and the thirtieth since I began to work with Native communities in the global arena. As always, the tracks of the turtle led us to distant lands and new adventures as we shared our Arts of Life programs of natural and cultural awareness with interested people around the world—from the moist Pantanal region of central Brazil to the snowy slopes of Mt. Rainier, from the piñon/juniper belt of the Upper Rio Grande watershed to the mauka forests of windward O‘ahu.

But it was the news coming into our office from our mentors and partner projects that truly inspired us. All these years of planting seeds within our students, nurturing the educators, the youth and the elders in Native communities, working to preserve indigenous knowledge, have really paid off. This year more than ever, we are happy to report on new friends, new projects, new organizations, new links—all letting us know that our system is viable and that our global network is vibrantly alive.

This is our annual newsletter reporting on our activities in 2008, with special reports on: Australia—O.A.M. Honors to Dookie O’Loughlin and Uncle Jimmy James; our Arts of Life / Hawai‘i programs and Nurturing the Roots / TTPHI; our work in Brazil, Hawai‘i and Tahiti through Nurturing the Roots: Mentor Outreach 07/08; and the continued success of Círculo dos Saberes, an indigenous youth and elder gathering in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Inside you’ll also find our Annual Project Summary for 2008, our Products pages and a Calendar of upcoming events through late Fall 2009.

Our website—www.thetrackingproject.org

In 2008 we continued to upgrade and update our website. The flow of visitors to the site was steady—an average of about 4,400 per month. In December 2005 we reported our 100,000th visitor and now, only two years later, the visitor total since we posted the site in 2001 stands at 315,000!

A capivara swims over to say hello, Pantanal, Mato Grosso, Brazil, 2008.
(photo by Solar Law)

This year we added lots of new links to friends and partner projects around the world: in the United States, The Jane Goodall Institute and their Roots and Shoots programs for youth; in Africa, I Want To Go Home (the Bushmen of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana), whom we met through a project in 2004; in Brazil, Instituto Centro de Vida (Center of Life Institute), the organization who hosted our October tracking camp in the Amazon; and in the Philippines, EarthMusic Foundation, Mothers for Peace, Mindanao Commission on Women, and Mindanao Literature, Arts, and Culture, projects and institutions connected to our webweaver Geejay Arriola.

Last June, photographer Jenny Yagodich from O‘ahu’s North Shore offered to provide us with new photos of all our T-shirts for the website. She and her husband Palakiko are members of our new TTPHI (The Tracking Project / Hawaiian Inside) mentor program. With North Shore model Renée Nobriga, Jenny produced some beautiful photos which you can view on the Products page of our site.

Geejay Arriola
Mebuyan Peace Project / Mothers for Peace
/ EarthMusic Foundation

Geejay Arriola, who manages our website from the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, is a wonderful example of what one artist/educator inspired by the Arts of Life can do. We first met her in March 2000 when we traveled to Mindanao for Panday Buhat, our Philippine mentor program which was organized by Gus Miclat, director of Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID), himself a graduate of our first Nurturing the Roots mentor program (1996–1998) in New Mexico.

From the beginning, Geejay distinguished herself to us as an artist, a thinker and a social activist. She carefully listened to all the teachings, and at the conclusion of the program she noted that she had been particularly moved by the story of the Great Peacemaker of the Iroquois Confederacy. “It seems that if we want to work for peace, we must be like the Peacemaker—we must use the powers of our mind, be fearless and work with the worst first.”

In a 2006 online interview for American Theater Magazine which she has recently posted to the web, Geejay describes her meeting with The Tracking Project (TTP) as “a major event in my life that influenced my work.... Years before I met members of The Tracking Project, I was already dancing with thoughts of forming an all-women group. The highly spiritual yet humbling experience I had with TTP inspired me to pursue that thought. Thus in 2001, Mebuyan Peace Project was born.”

Joined by artists Gauss Obenza, Lyndee Prieto and Malou Tiangco of the original Panday Buhat group, Geejay established the Mebuyan Peace Project—a theatre and musical storytelling group—which has now grown into a group of 18 women arts and development workers based in Mindanao. Their guiding principle was to produce artistic performances that respond to women’s and children’s concerns in relation to the issues of personal, domestic, community, regional, and global peace.

Each year that we have known Geejay and the women of Panday Buhat, we have watched the list of organizations that these women work with grow to include the Mebuyan Peace Project and its music group Mebuyan, Mothers for Peace, EarthMusic Foundation and more, assisting individuals and communities in the Philippines, India, and other countries of Asia.

We extend our thanks and our aloha to Geejay, the women of Mebuyan Peace Project and Mothers for Peace, to Gus, the people at IID and all our friends in Mindanao. And we continue to dream and plan of helping to bring this inspirational group of women to the United States sometime in the near future.

Secrets of Natural Movement workout with 250 young people, Encontro de Jovens, São Paulo, Brazil 2008. (photo by Paulo Cassis)

Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World

The Thanksgiving Address series continues to move with a life of its own, spreading a message of respect and gratitude for all living things. Though we did not add any new language editions to the series in 2008, we learned that the Hawaiian language edition will soon be ready for publication. And we did reprint the English/ Mohawk edition for the 12th time, bringing the number of books in print to nearly 60,000 copies.

Last year we reported that the words of gratitude to The Animals from the Thanksgiving book had been excerpted for the visa section of the newly-designed U.S. passport. This year we learned that the Address was selected by Native poet/editor Linda Hogan for inclusion in a new anthology representing pieces on Native traditions from Parabola magazine’s 30+ years of writing. The Thanksgiving words originally appeared in Parabola in conjunction with an interview of Mohawk leader Tom Porter by Abenaki writer Joseph Bruchac. The new anthology will be titled The Inner Journey: Views from Native Traditions, and will be published by Morning Light Press sometime in 2009.

Earlier in the year an Akwesasne Mohawk tribal courts administrator wrote us that she has begun to use the Thanksgiving Address in an educational package for attorneys who want to practice in the Mohawk tribal courts, and she has also posted the Address on her website, which can be viewed at www.peace4turtleisland.org. And this fall we corresponded with Angela Daddabbo, Artistic Director of Auburn Public Theater (www.auburnpublictheater.com), a new arts center located in downtown Auburn in the heart of the Finger Lakes region of New York State, who had the idea to develop a Thanksgiving Show for children based on the Thanksgiving Address.

For years, the bookstore at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), run by the Smithsonian Institution, has carried the Thanksgiving Address in all its language editions. NMAI has now developed a new teaching poster and website materials for teachers Grades 4–8 titled American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving which utilizes excerpts from our translation of the Address. The poster has been distributed to 140,000 educators across the United States with the goal of changing “what and how educators teach about Indian histories, cultures and lives today.”

Currently, the Thanksgiving Address book is available in English, German, Swedish, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Bisayan and French—each paired with the original Mohawk text to remind readers of the source of these Thanksgiving words, and to show that the Mohawk language is alive, with almost 4,000 speakers at this time in Canada and the United States.

As funds allow, we will continue to develop this series dedicated to bringing the minds of the people of the world together in appreciation of our diversity, the natural world and the gift of life itself. We extend our thanks to our many translators and to the Haudenosaunee— the people of the Iroquois Confederacy—for preserving these words “from the beginning of time” and offering them to us at this important moment.

Tracking coyotes on the trail to Wijiji with the Tracking in the
Southwest class, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, 2008. (photo by Cary Odes)

Condolences—Elder Ray Fadden of the Mohawk Nation

We recently learned that Ray Tehanetorens Fadden, founder of the Six Nations Indian Museum, passed away on November 14, 2008 in the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory at the age of 98. Ray was a science teacher who educated and inspired generations of Mohawk children, encouraging them to be proud of themselves and to respect their culture. Through his marvelous stories and engaging style, he “advocated respect not only for Native people and their traditions, but for all people and living things in the natural world.”

I met Ray, his wife Christine, his son Kahionhes and family in 1984 when Peter Blue Cloud and Dan Rokwaho Thompson—members of the editorial team of Akwesasne Notes, a Mohawk newspaper which gained international acclaim in the 1970’s and ‘80’s—invited me to go to Onchiota. Their notion was that I could share the knowledge of tracking I had learned from the Aboriginal Australians with the youth of the Mohawk Nation. And they felt that Ray Fadden would be the person to work with.

As I began to explain to Ray that I wanted to use tracking and survival skills to share a message of natural and cultural awareness, he cut me off. “You don’t have to tell me any more,” he said. “I already know it will work. I did all that in the ’30s and ’40s and a lot of the chiefs and clan mothers you see today were my students. Let’s go.” Adirondack musician Roy Hurd has noted that Ray did influence many future Mohawk leaders, including Jake Swamp, Tommy Porter, Joyce Benedict and others.

Over the next few years, we ran a series of survival camps, using Ray and the resources of the Six Nations Indian Museum to instruct the small but steady stream of young people who came to take part. Many days were spent in bark shelters on the museum grounds or in the museum itself, listening to Ray or Kahionhes tell stories using the wampum belts that Ray had made over the years. From the list of the many gifts of the Native American people to the world to the proper etiquette for meeting a bear in the forest, Ray shared freely his immense knowledge.

In essence, these were the first indigenous camps run by The Tracking Project in North America. And though the camps ended in the late 1980s, I maintained a correspondence with Ray and his family well into the 1990s.

Ray is survived by his wife, Christine, his son and daughter-in-law, John Kahionhes and Eva Fadden, as well as John and Eva’s children, their children and many nieces and nephews. We send our condolences to Ray’s family and our blessings to Ray for all that he was able to accomplish for his people, for all Native people and for his beloved friends, the Animals.

(Thanks to Robin Caudell, staff writer for the Plattsburgh Press Republican, for her article remembering Ray.)

Working the move — Snake Seeks the Path, our Arnis workout in Aldeia Umutina,
Brazil, October 2008. (photo by Solar Law)

Your Contributions

Since 1986, we have maintained a rigorous schedule of community visits, camps and trainings, inspiring and teaching thousands and thousands of people, young and old. Many times in the past we would respond to a request from a community who had no funding for the program, and somehow we would make it work. But now, the size of our “extended family” and the number of requests we receive is simply too great.

Please help us spread the word of natural awareness, cultural respect and the need to preserve wildlife among the many individuals, organizations, tribes and communities that request our programs. Send a tax-deductible contribution... and watch the turtle work!

Wanting to donate shares of stock? Thanks to an old friend who contributed some shares to us in 2007, we opened an account with a brokerage firm. We have maintained this account in order to receive future gifts.

And look inside this newsletter at our Products pages to see more of our T-shirts, hats, posters and books. Purchasing our products is another great way to support our work.

Thanks

We send our special thanks to everyone who has pledged themselves to our work, to our many contributors, to the foundations who believe in what we do and to all our supporters—We thank you for enabling us to continue our work. For a full list of foundations and groups who provided us with grants in the last year, please see our Annual Project Report.

To all our friends and guest artists who give so generously of themselves— Betty, Anna, Geri, Erin, Nancy, Jade, Kainoa, India, Luara, Keith, Cary, Vicenta, Trish & Walt, Greg, Vicki & Dakota, Able, Solar, Ibrahim, Joel, Steven, Paul, PAZ, Rita & the Zamora family, Karen, Noland, Heidi & One Tribe Aloha, Jamie, Gale, Jeffrey, George, Ruth, Dan & Diana, John Densmore, Satara & Tai, Peter, Jenny & Don, Sarah C., Geejay, Devon & J, Rick & Melanie, Mac, Chieko, Herb, Mac & Joyce, Evan, Devon, Forrest, Noel, Sensei Debbie, Kate, Jake, Tommy, Andy & Helene, Joe & Carol, Teague, Kosma & the people at Gemini Farm, Mililani, Yuklin, Miki & Brian, Dr. Chun, Anna Lee, Kehau, Faith, Jackie, Joyce, Diane, Joyce K., Julie, Pua, Brad & Mi‘i, the ‘Ohe team, Ed at the Pagoda, Donnie, Renée, Mike M., Elizabeth, Jean-Claude, Vetea, Tihoti, Walt, Marion, Ed M., Janne, Nancy, Kaya, Odil, Vilinta & Carlos, Elsinha, Paulo, Anna Celeste, Mariana, Andreía, Vanildo, Luciano, Cleomar, Tete, Martha & Sergio, José Alexandro, Mercedes, Irene, Eloise, Isabel, Andreía, Dorothy, Carolina & Pedro Paulo, Edison Luís, Rodrigo, Oscar the Englishman, Frank M., Terri at Westwind, Ken, Manuel, Frank G., Andrew… many thanks.

Luciano and young Umutina men wait to speak, Círculo dos Saberes III, Mato Grosso, Brazil, 2008. (photo by Solar Law)

The Wizard Stones of Waikiki

Imagine a world without healing. When I first began to visit Hawai‘i, I was attracted to a group of stones on the beach at Waikiki known as the Wizard Stones. The history tells that four healers from Moaulanuiakea in Tahiti— Kapaemahu, Kahaloa, Kinohi and Kapuni—had arrived in the Hawaiian islands sometime before the 16th century and endeared themselves to the Hawaiians with their soft voices and their ability to heal by the laying on of hands. After many years, the wizards announced that they would be leaving, and they took and charged four large stones with their healing mana. These stones can be found today near the statue of Duke Kahanamoku on Kuhio Beach at Waikiki.

A Hawaiian elder, who noted my interest in Tahiti and Tahitian sites, remarked that the four Tahitians had actually brought healing to a world that knew nothing of healing. People would become sick and their helpless friends would have to watch them suffer. It was for this reason that the four healers were especially revered.

Now imagine that there is a medicine for our times. Perhaps there is no name yet for this new understanding, an understanding that will surely include love, acceptance, mutual respect and harmony. But when it arrives, this new understanding will be like a salve on a wound that smarts—a cool, refreshing sensation that will be available to all.

With these thoughts in mind, we will continue to evolve as an organization—working for the youth, the Natural World, the preservation of wildlife and the growth of understanding among all people.

JOHN STOKES, Director

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