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I travel to Minneapolis, mostly to see if I can reconnect a broken friendship. And it seems we do. I visit Louise Ehrlich’s bookshop, mostly an art gallery filled with books about Indigenous Americans. We are NOT a nation of immigrants. On the morning of my departure I attend an Indigenous Peoples’ Day sunrise ceremony.

The Red Path awaits its visitors in silence, welcoming those who tread upon it. The visit to the Mohawk Cultural Center is both ordinary and amazing. There is that absolutely incredible emblematic Wolf Belt that depicts a treaty between the French and the Mohawks. The seven purple lines signify the seven nations, white the peace paths guarded at each end by sachems of the Wolf clan, symbolized by the purple animal figures. 

“The first night I was ever completely alone in the forest I was already a grandmother. Later that night the heavens opened and the earth and the rooted ones drank the waters and I stepped out of my tent into the rain and mud barefooted and did my spinning jiggle dance. May that which I felt in those moments be with you in mind and in spirit on your travels among the living and the dead. May you be as one on your way with our blessing. Walk in beauty.” Author unknown.

I depart on my next voyage September 30, 2023, my mother’s 110^th birthday. My plans are to go to a powwow on the land of the Massachusett people that day, and then proceed to the land of the Western Abenaki in Vermont, where I will visit friends and memories. Next Akwesasne, Minneapolis, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, the Black Hills, Calgary, Banff, Vancouver, Orcas Island, Bainbridge, Seattle, Portland, Petrolia, San Francisco. I must get to Calgary by 20 October where I will rendezvous with my good friend Joy. I plan to be in SF by 11/10.  “Where before we locked the gates, help us now to keep them open.”