Día de los Muertos Altars

by | Sep 14, 2022

I always carry my mother’s words with me, and I share them with everyone I teach about Día de Los Muertos. She said, “We all suffer three deaths. The first death is the day that we give up our last breath, the day that we die. Our second death is the day we are...

To Gather and to Grieve

by | Sep 14, 2022

  Not long before Covid-19 reached the Southwestern United States, I listened to a podcast interview with the Nigerian writer and spiritualist Bayo Akomolafe in which he spoke of grieving as ceremony, “…when we grieve, it’s not instrumental to anything but, it’s...

“I’m a fellow traveler on a religious journey”

by | Sep 14, 2022

This article engages with secularism in an attempt to create openings for teachers, students, folklorists, and researchers to think differently about how reverberations of death, loss, and remembrance are registered, and thus navigated, by people holding scriptural...

A Conversation with Nokmes (My Grandmother) in Poetry

by | Sep 14, 2022

Shishibeniyek ndebendagwes, I am enrolled Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In my Tribe, our cultural ways include honoring the seven generations before and after our time. My people have survived the cultural genocide of the present-day United States of America. Despite...

Riding with James

by | Sep 14, 2022

  Let me tell you about my cousin James. First of all, he was almost 50 years older than me and we were actually like fourth cousins, once removed. I think. Anyway, from the time my Aunt Dorothy—who is actually not my aunt, but also a distant cousin, a couple of...