Recent Posts
Blessed Images: The Religious Photography of Cristina García Rodero
IF CRISTINA GARCÍA RODERO has a motto for her 47-year-long career in photography, it may be something akin to what she told B&W Magazine in a 2017 interview about returning to her native Spain: “We roam the world and very often we don’t know our […]
The English vegetable picked by candle light
A notoriously fickle vegetable to harvest, Yorkshire forced rhubarb is anything but easy to grow. It thrives in the county’s cold winters, but if the soil is too wet, it can’t be planted. If the temperature is too hot, it won’t grow; and 10 or […]
A Thing
A Thing First, it has to be a useful tool It is a biological human being, but it is not a political human being an economical human being the fact is a slave is acknowledged legally and socially is as a thing An ancient Greek […]
Shrimp fishing on horseback in Oostduinkerke
At dawn the beach of Oostduinkerke is abandoned, the seas calm. There is little wind, but the air is cool. The only sounds are the soft, distant creak of wagon wheels and the gentle lapping of the ocean. The shrimp fishermen are perched with slipshod ease, riding across the sand on the edge of […]
With No Museum, Thousands Of Mexican Instruments Pile Into This Apartment
There’s a place in Mexico City that’s filled with thousands of musical instruments from all over Latin America — some of them more than 100 years old. It’s not a museum or music school. It’s an apartment. Actually, the collection’s grown so much, it now […]
Bastard Children Of A Slaughtering Empire
I woke into world the bastard child of a slaughtering Empire. I woke into world in an old Shawnee town, but I am not Shawnee, and the town is their ghost.
The town, in Shawnee, is called Chalawgatha, which is also the name of the band of Shawnee who lived there. Wherever they settled, they settled in Chalawgatha, because they were the Chalawgatha, and so Chalawgatha was their town.
What is the ghost of their town is a sprawl of mid-western pavement called Chillicothe, Ohio.
Chillicothe sits alongside a dirtied river on the last plainslands before the land roils upward into the ancient soft-green Appalachian mountains. Chalawgatha was a small settlement upon that same river with much smaller, hand-built mounts rising from the earth. Once the Algonquin ancestors of the Shawnee traveled those time-worn mountains and buried their dead beneath raised hills. The hearts of those mountains are coal; the hearts of those mounds are bone.
It’s doubtful the Chalagawtha Shawnee suspected that one day both mount and mound would be laid low.