at Nambe trading post
Nambe Pueblo
New Mexico
© C.C. Brooks

“This is the beginning for many of you . . . We all go through life to do one thing and we go through life looking for it . . . You get a whole row of dominoes.  All mistakes you have made, you can’t start from the last one.  You have to go back to the first one to make things right.  You have to go to the beginning.”

-Isadore Zephier, Yankton Sioux tribal elder; from the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camp Oceti Sakowin, Standing Rock; as quoted in “The Year of the Heavy Moon” by Michelle Garcia

Another protester said, Zephier’s “beginning” is institutional racism, the root of which is the absence of spirit, absence of human conscience.  “This is a gathering of nations and a recognition of our humanity.”

-Susana Sandoval, as quoted in “The Year of the Heavy Moon” by Michelle Garcia

 

“At Standing Rock . . . Prayer meant deliberate thoughts and actions – the hard work of undoing our cultural norms that reward immediate answers and extreme individuality, a culture that advises us to keep an eye on the prize without much thought to the experiences we live in reaching it.”

            - Michelle Garcia from “The Year of the Heavy Moon” (Oxford American, Spring 2017)

Vincent Valdez
Source: remezcla.com

“There is a false sense that these threats are (or ever were) contained in the peripheries of society, in small towns, backwoods, in uneducated and poor communities.”

            -from the broadsheet accompanying Vincent Valdez’s exhibit 

 

This painting by Vincent Valdez “ . . . is a scene of regular, everyday people.  It is a reflection of the racism that is inherent to the American identity.”

            - Michelle Garcia from “The Year of the Heavy Moon” (Oxford American, Spring 2017)

St. Luke's AME Church
Lawrence, Kansas
(Langston Hughes's childhood church)
© C.C. Brooks

“In Austin, known as the most liberal city in Texas, I had inhabited a segregated world.  My ‘liberal-minded’ neighbors vowed support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the same neighborhoods where decades earlier city planners had shunted black and Latino families and where white gentrification was now decimating those communities.”

- Michelle Garcia from “The Year of the Heavy Moon” (Oxford American, Spring 2017)



Massachusetts Street
Lawrence, Kansas
© C.C. Brooks

“Show people our joy, our culture, the good things in our lives, they would tell me.  Without showing the good things, I later realized, I was cannibalizing their humanity.  By defining people by injustices, I made it easy to confuse them with the ugliness imposed from the outside.”

- Michelle Garcia from “The Year of the Heavy Moon” (Oxford American, Spring 2017)

Massachusetts Street
Lawrence, Kansas
© C.C. Brooks

“ ‘We are made of stars,’ said a local astronomer . . . We are stars looking back at stars, at the genesis of us.  Our nation’s stars are fixed and sewn onto a flag, I thought: the jewels of conquest.  Each represents the nation’s story of idealism and exploitation, enslavement and the promise of freedom.  From them emerges our nation’s constellation.”

- Michelle Garcia from “The Year of the Heavy Moon” (Oxford American, Spring 2017)



 

Massachusetts Street
Lawrence, Kansas
© C.C. Brooks