a sacred story: LATINA

A Latina pregnant, wearing a summer dress, and looking at her belly speaks of promise and mystery. Women from Central America are flooding Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia. They are creating a hustle and a magnetizing force of maternal energies that is tied to ancient rituals and joys modern American women have been learning to minimize, ignore or neglect. Many of these women are close to the indigenous roots of their lands. The men and the women, unlike Black and White Americans, will sit upon the Earth, our Mother to rest, and fellowship with their families. It is heart-warming feeling the connections not lost to a mass of people coming to this land in the way they used to for centuries before the Anglos arrived on these shores. The Anacostia nation was alive when the Europeans arrived, and the Piscataway nation had built relationship with the Iroquois far north in and near present day Canada. Those relationships echo into the present. If one’s perceptions are clear it is easy to see Indians are coming from Central American countries making it harder to place ownership on the name America.



I have been to ceremonies in this area attended by Indians from Central America, and Mexico. Indians visited one memorable Powwow I attended in this area from Mexico who had heard through the Red Vine about the gathering and made the journey to gift us with dances. The one I remember the most was an Eagle dance led by a woman whose beauty I cannot describe, forget, or measure against the mysterious air surrounding her, and the way she interpreted Eagle. She danced with such skill. She released Eagle out of her body into the people gathered, and transported us all into the dance, and Eagle soared within our spirits! These gatherings have occurred, as I said, for centuries. Today some things have been changed by the avarice laced relationship established with the white Euro-Americans who fostered ill will, and profit from it.


Sometime in the future Black Americans and Hispanic Americans are going to grow up and hear the wombs of the mothers. The growth of the Hispanic population can produce unity between people with the same blood ties. Together Blacks, and Browns might realize what 25% of the population means in the United States of America, and will galvanize their forces, and their families, their ideas, and talents and create profound changes in this country in ways simply, and vastly different from the old guard who is consciously defending their dark historical relationships with the people's of the world they've soiled.


We need a new definition of love, and community that is not connected to the acquisition of things, the taking of things, and the protection of things. It will produce a new United States. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories