Arrows to the Heart

Here’s an item from npr – National Public Radio.

“An auction of sacred Native American artifacts scheduled for auction in Paris tomorrow and it is stirring up controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Seventy Hopi “vissages and headdresses" — some more than 100 years old — will go on the block at the Neret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou auction house, which estimates the sale will bring in about $1 million, according to The New York Times.

But members of the Hopi Tribe of Arizona say the pieces should not be sold and instead should be returned to Hopi villages. They've asked U.S. officials to intervene.”

The director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office told the times that: “Sacred items like this should not have a commercial value.”

The native peoples of the southwest see themselves as one. They call themselves Diné and it means “The People.”

I agree with the Hopi elders. Return the sacred masks to the people.

Arrows to the Heart

©2013 Rolland G. Smith

The drumming hearts of The Diné

Transcends in beating pulse sublime

As cadenced rhythm does portray

A nature here, but still divine.

Shoshone, Ute and Navaho,

Proud native hearts of desert west,

Hopi, Zuñi, Arapaho

Beat sacred drums of vision quest.

From spirit masks came arrows gold

And find their set within the heart,

So stories old can then be told

As feathers’ stride ’long sacred dart.

There’s crafted shafts and fluted points,

Painted ponies and shaman's chant

Reprise the Past and then anoint

The drumming with a step courante.

When beat of heart and those of drums

Transform the time of honor due,

Ancestral rest then finally comes

And spirit heart is birthed anew.