Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Fela Kuti, Nigerian music legend, political insurrectionist and provocateur against the corporate and missionary sell-out of African wisdom and religion, ending up in jail and tortured…and loved by the African people. Here, Jamaican-born, Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett puts us on Fela’s life path, his wild and unstructured Afrobeat sound, the commune, the wives, and the push against the Nigerian military dictatorship.
Washington State’s move to extirpate an entire pack of wolves near the Canadian border for the infraction of killing a few alien domestic cattle grazing public lands is reprehensible. That wildlife agencies would kill any wolves to benefit the profit margin of private businesses utilizing public resources is an outrage. George Wuerthner writes how the tragedy of this slaughter of wild predators repeats itself over and over throughout the West.
The Lakota phrase, Mni Wiconi, Water is Life, has inspired a Native Nations protest against the recent approval and ongoing construction of the Dakota Access Fracked Oil Pipeline, that threatens all communities and ecosystems downstream. After military-style assaults on Native Water Protectors, construction has almost reached the Missouri River.
Tiny Houses, although lauded as a green way forward in a world covered in wasteful McMansions and debt enslaving rent payments, must overcome health, safety, and building standard regulations that still consider this form of housing either illegal or difficult to approve. Alyse Nelson charts a way through the red tape.
Cassavetes’ Shadows “improvises” Beat Generation Manhattan, where two brothers and a sister, black but inexplicably played by two white actors, careening off track to scaled-back sketches of Charles Mingus’ saxophone jazz yearnings. Black and white neon signs blink and the old Times Square looms like the otherworld, naturalistic cordial racism separating the chosen from the downtrodden, both dreaming of making it, of creating something.
Traditional Mayan healers, bone-setters, herbal curanderos, and spiritual guides or shamans, provide good physical and mental health options for poor Indigenous Guatemalans.
Max Talley’s surreal and disturbing story posits a lone traveler who stumbles into an eerie alternative universe, a quiet utopia, or a slow death trap. Read the entire story for free online at Chantwood Magazine.