Whitefeather Peace Community
Whitefeather Peace Community was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2005 in the spirit of nonviolence, in the spirit of Dorothy Day, in the spirit of Larry Cloud Morgan—Whitefeather of the Ojibwe—and in the spirit of resistance to war, militarism and injustice. We are a vegetarian, non-smoking, alcohol-free activist community. When possible, we open our doors and offer overnight hospitality to traveling nonviolent resisters. We offer Roundtables in the Catholic Worker tradition—a meal followed by focused discussion. We help organize nonviolent resistance to war, injustice and militarism. We are hoping for your involvement.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
After a bit of a break, some rearranging of furniture and an energy infusion by our youngest member, five year old Alexa, we're ready to begin a new series of Roundtables this month!
All events shown below are held at Whitefeather House unless otherwise indicated. We are in North Portland, Oregon at 3315 North Russet Street, which is one mile west of I-5 and one block north of North Lombard, behind Sterling Savings Bank. Event details on next page, "Whitefeather News." (Click link at sidebar)
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September 2010:
September 9th: "Steps on the Path: How Friendship and Remembrance Could Help Save the World" with Linda Richards, a grassroots anti nuclear activist
since the cross country 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear
Disarmament, is a PhD student in the History of Science at Oregon
State University studying nuclear history.
This August she attended the official 65th commemorations in Japan of
the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She retraced some of
the steps of Ava Helen and Linus Pauling (Portland native and two-time
Nobel laureate) in Japan when they participated at the official
Hiroshima Commemorations in 1959. She also met with today’s leaders of
the disarmament movement including several Hibakusha (Japanese
survivors of the bombings), Atsushi Fujioka, Director of the Kyoto
Peace Museum, the Mayor of Hiroshima and founder of the Mayors for
Peace, Mayor Akiba, and Manual Pino of the Acoma Pueblo who attended
the commemorations in Japan to raise awareness of the disproportionate
exposure of indigenous people to the nuclear fuel chain.
Richards then traveled to the Navajo Nation, the origin of some of the
uranium used to produce the weapons, and met with indigenous leader
Perry Charley of the Navajo Nation and Diné College. She would like to
share her insights from the trip with the Whitefeather Peace House
community as well as her hope that the often underestimated power of
friendship and remembrance will help achieve global nuclear weapons
disarmament in our lifetime.
We will share a vegetarian potluck at 6 p.m., then hear Linda Richards
and engage in a Roundtable discussion with her about her journey and
the implications of what she learned.
August 2010:
August 12th: CASE, Communities for Alternatives to Starbase Education (no2starbase.org), will present the history and current status of the Starbase program in the Portland Public Schools and what steps CASE has taken to inform the parents of its more subtle use as a recruitment tool for DoD. Even if you don't have children, or ever plan to, this is a window into the future. Militarism and violence are on the rise in our culture, and this is yet one more mechanism to help continue that trend.
This talk will follow a vegetarian potluck at 6pm.
July 2010:
July 22nd: Gandhian nonviolence and the theory and practice of conflict resolution.
May 2010:
May 13th: VOZ Worker's Rights Outreach. This night we welcome a speaker with VOZ to share the latest from this worker-led organization that empowers immigrants and day laborers to gain control over their working conditions. We will see the film "Jornaleros". It's a film that widens one's perspective about who joraleros are. It also touches upon immigration issues through the lens of artists, who also happen to be jornaleros.The talk will follow a vegetarian potluck that begins at 6pm.
Further Notes on Whitefeather, also known as Larry Cloud-Morgan, can be found at the link to this website from Allen Aslan Heart / White Eagle Soaring of the Little Shell Pembina Band, a Treaty Tribe of the Ojibwe Nation: http://www.real-dream-catchers.com/prophecy-protest-principle/larry_cloud-silo_pruning_hooks.htm
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A Eulogy to Whitefeather (Larry Cloud-Morgan):
Cloud-Morgan, Catholic Activist, Buried with His Peace Pipe --
Native American playwright and activist Larry Cloud-Morgan
by Patricia Lefevere
I'm told they buried Larry Cloud-Morgan in his ribbon shirt, beaded medallion and new beaded moccasins, even though he'd lost a foot and some toes to diabetes. The mourners wrapped him in his Four Direction Pendleton blanket holding his carved walking stick.
Those attending Cloud-Morgan's wake at the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocesan Office of Indian Ministry reported that his peace pipe lay next to his right arm. In addition, his casket held an Indian doll, a china plate with a picture of a horse, various medicine bundles and a stuffed black bear cub, representing the mother bear and cubs that so delighted him at his Ball Club Reservation cabin in Northern Minnesota.
When I first met Cloud-Morgan in November 1984 in the Jackson County jail in Kansas City, Mo., it was just days after he and Oblate Frs. Paul and Carl Kabot, along with Helen Woodson, had symbolically spilled their blood and hammered on a missile silo in Missouri.
For someone destined to spend the next few years in federal prisons, Cloud-Morgan appeared as at home in jail as I found him years later at a summer picnic or Sunday Mass in Minneapolis.
The hundreds who bade farewell in June to this social justice activist, poet, playwright, artist, liturgist, translator, peacemaker and spiritual leader did so with ceremony and a Native American Catholic ritual, scripted and horeographed by Cloud-Morgan. The mourners included white, red and black Americans, street people, a U.S. senator, an Orthodox rabbi, and clergy from every denomination who serve the Indian community.
In his days at Marquette University in Milwaukee and later at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., Cloud-Morgan was encouraged to become a priest, an invitation he rejected, friends said, because he felt it would take him away from his Native American people and make him an official spokesman on "Indian" affairs.
He asked to be laid in a casket without a cover on it. He wanted it placed in the middle of the room on a bed of cedar. Chairs were arranged around it to form a natural talking circle so that no one could ignore the others and all would be in community.
The circle of diverse friends was symbolic of Cloud-Morgan's life, said mourner Catherine Mamer of Minneapolis, who had known him through 15 years of social activism and spiritual ministering to the poor. Mamer had also appeared in his plays, attended his sweatlodge and was one of the group of friends and family surrounding his hospital bed when he died June 10 at age 61.
Fr. James Notebaart, director of Indian Ministry in the archdiocese, officiated at Cloud-Morgan's wake and transported his body to the funeral in Cass Lake, Minn., stopping en route at Larry's favorite Dairy Queen. Notebaart, a friend for 10 years, is fluent in Ojibway, the language that Cloud-Morgan spoke in his home and helped preserve on recorded tapes at Harvard.
The priest recalled Cloud-Morgan earlier this decade as he led a grass-roots reform movement against corruption and nepotism at his own White Earth Reservation. His protests led to the indictment and ouster of tribal officers.
He also led demonstrations on behalf of tribal fishing rights, and he opposed Indian casinos. "Larry had a soft presence; he was not an activist in an accusatory way, nor one with invective. He stood by what he believed. He stayed by the fire at White Earth, talking to the people, praying with them," Notebaart said.
This son of a pietistic Catholic father and an Episcopalian mother -- who had her mouth taped shut by nuns for speaking Ojibway in public -- grew up loving Joan of Arc. The adolescent French warrior was Cloud-Morgan's first heroine, and he read her story, the first book he'd ever received, over and over again to his dog, said scholar Chris Vecsey.
Many other Catholic heroes followed: Thomas Merton, the Berrigan brothers and Matthew Fox, his roommate at St. John's. Vecsey, who directs humanities at Colgate University, has included Cloud-Morgan in Volumes 2 and 3 of his trilogy on the history of Native American Catholicism from 1492 to the present.
Vecsey told NCR that Cloud-Morgan will live on in Native American and Catholic history. "Larry looked beyond his own community to the universe. He stands apart by his devotion to other movements and his activist spirituality," he said. Vecsey regretted that his translation of the Catholic liturgy into Ojibway remains incomplete.
Cloud-Morgan's spirituality "didn't acknowledge the boundaries that most of us see," said Michael McNally, who teaches religion at Eastern Michigan University in Yipsilanti and who met him at Harvard during McNally's graduate studies. "Larry could go into the spaces where people feel most under siege and he could articulate the mystery and beauty of the Catholic tradition so that it could serve as a resource to people," he said.
McNally found Cloud-Morgan's greatest gift to be his ability to be present in the moment with people. He had equal rapport with a Harvard anthropologist or an abused woman, with a wealthy hostess or her Hispanic maid, McNally noted. It was just such a band of admirers who placed the items in his coffin, told stories and sang hymns for Cloud-Morgan's journey to his ancestors in Ishpeming (Ojibway for "heaven").
1999 National Catholic Reporter