‘Raise Your Voice’ Archives
Raise Your Voice: Changing horizons
By PETER MOLENAAR Peter Molenaar Those of us who have connected over the years with All My Relations Arts and Two Rivers Galleries were privileged to receive invitations to the recent opening receptions. These “Changing Horizons” events commemorated the 100th birthday of George Morrison, the Ojibwe artist who graduated from the local Minneapolis College of Art and Design, before viewing much of the world through the eyes of an abstract impressionist. To which I will add: Neighbors, these art openings offer a splendid opportunity to mingle with bright young faces who have significant lives awaiting. Some questions: Did Morrison violate his heritage, as some have suggested, by immersing himself in the modernist art movement? (Conversely, did some “modernists” violate the past when they took inspiration from Navajo sand paintings?) Moreover, how does Marxism resolve the dialectical tension between ”˜formalism”™ and [...]
Raise Your Voice: The world within us
By PETER MOLENAAR Peter Molenaar From the passenger side window of the adjacent vehicle, an elder Native man called out: “Hey! Where are you from?” At the time, I was fetching 30 Alley papers for deposit at the Native American Community Clinic, after having dropped 30 at the Ancient Traders Market. Detecting the sleight of hand humor, I quickly decided not to delineate my four original nations of northern Europe. So, I responded, “I grew up in Cannon Falls, Minn., if that”™s what you mean.” Then to clarify, “It”™s upstream from Prairie Island on the Cannon River.” In the span of about 15 seconds, the elder Ojibwe pondered the not-so-ancient conflict with the Dakota, then registered delight that a white man would place his origin relative to Native Americans. Note: The “cannon” of Cannon Falls is an English mumble of the French word for canoe. Then a Somali woman walked between us. He quipped, [...]
Mind-numbing Janjaweed
By PETER MOLENAAR Peter Molenaar On the western fringe of Alley News territory, there exists yet another progressive church. Was it more than 10 years ago that Plymouth Congregational (1900 Nicollet Ave.) hosted a sizeable public meeting in response to the Darfur Genocide? Indeed, events in this western province of Sudan, Africa had provoked the presence of such notables as Tim Walz and Keith Ellison. The genocide was carried out by the Sudanese government”™s “Arab” militias, known as the Janjaweed (translation: “devils on horseback”). The Janjaweed systematically destroyed Darfurians by looting and burning their villages, murdering, raping, and torturing”¦ and then, polluting their water supply with decomposing bodies. Over 480,000 were killed, 2.8 million displaced. Why, at the present time, would one choose to write about these things? Well, the stench of burning Janjaweed has returned now to waft among the reeds of [...]
