Why I stayed home from the No Kings rallies again.

Congrats to the millions of Americans who turned out yesterday for No Kings rallies across America. I saw one estimate (but have not confirmed it) that 1 in 50 Americans showed up for one of the approximately 2,700 rallies held in towns big and small around the country.

Once again, I didn't go. Here's why.

Here in Santa Fe, there are two places for political protests and rallies: the State Capitol, also known as the Roundhouse, and the historic plaza downtown. The No Kings rallies and marches typically start at one and march to the other one, or else they start at the Roundhouse and make a circuit to the plaza and back. 

The problem for me is that I work at the Roundhouse. My employer is the Legislative Council Service. We are nonpartisan. We are told when we're hired that our clients are all the legislators, regardless of their political party. We're allowed to have political opinions, of course, but we're supposed to keep them out of the workplace.

Hopefully you see my dilemma. If I participate in a political rally at the Roundhouse, even outside the building on a weekend, it could cause a problem for me at work. 

This isn't the first time I've been in this situation. It may be hard to believe today, when media outlets are routinely assumed to be on one side or the other. But when I was starting out in journalism, reporters were supposed to be unbiased -- or as unbiased as it's possible for a human being to be. After all, we were supposed to cover both sides of every issue, and to be fair to both sides. Can't do that if you're taking a public stance on those issues.

Anyway, there are lots of other people who wish they could be rallying but, for one reason or another, can't be there. Luckily for us, there are other ways to be involved -- and one of them is doing what I'm doing right now: showing support on my blog and on social media.

Alert hearth/myth readers know my political proclivities by now. Y'all know I'm there with you in spirit, if not in person. 

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We know we're getting to them when they start to claim that people marching in inflatable unicorn costumes are terrorists and that yesterday's gatherings were "hate America rallies". We had some relief yesterday as they stayed mostly silent while the marches were going on, although Trump himself posted an AI-generated video of him piloting a fighter jet and dumping poop on rallygoers. But as some commenters have said, an image of Trump taking a dump on America is actually on point.

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These moments of supportive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep the pressure on! It's working!

Indigenous Peoples' Day.

So this weekend, I did a thing I have never done, even though I've lived in Santa Fe for five years and vacationed here for much longer: I checked out a couple of art studio tours. These events are organized by artists who live in a specific location, whether a city, town, or village. Artists who live there agree to open their studios, even if they're in their own homes, and invite the hoi polloi to traipse through, chat with them about their work, and (the gods willing) buy something from them.

Since I rarely do things by halves, I hit two studio tours this weekend: the one in Abiquiu on Saturday and the one in Galisteo yesterday. After I got home, it dawned on me that both Abiquiu and Galisteo were originally pueblos -- that is, they were Native American settlements -- but neither is a pueblo today. So what happened to the Indians? As the saying goes, it's complicated -- and a fitting topic for Indigenous Peoples' Day. 

Let's talk about Galisteo first. This sign is right on State Road 41.

Lynne Cantwell 2025

Here's the gist of the text, with some amplification by me: When the Spanish conquistadores showed up in 1540 in what later became New Mexico, they found a bunch of Tano-speaking settlements in the Galisteo Basin, which is about 25 miles south of Santa Fe. The Spanish called the settlements "pueblos", the Spanish word for "village", which is how the inhabitants became known as Pueblo Indians. The sign says these folks were among the leaders of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 -- the only time when Native Americans have ever succeeded in pushing the European invaders out. The Spanish came back, though, in 1692. In 1706, 150 Tano-speaking families were resettled (the sign doesn't say by whom, but it was the Spanish) in Galisteo Pueblo, but the pueblo was abandoned by 1788. Drought, famine, disease, and Comanche raids all played a part. The sign says most of the survivors moved to Santo Domingo Pueblo.

Here are more details from galisteo.nmarchaeology.org:

Early Spanish documents frequently mention Pueblo Galisteo, which has been tentatively identified as Pueblo Ximena, which was still occupied in 1540 when visited by Coronado. Castaño de Sosa saw the village in 1590 and called it San Lucas. [Don Juan de] Oñate visited the pueblo in 1598 and renamed it Santa Ana, but the name was changed to Santa Cruz de Galisteo. The pueblo participated in the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and was abandoned when the populace, fearing reprisals, moved to Santa Fe, where they stayed until 1693, yielding the city to Don Diego de Vargas after a bitter fight. Many were killed or sold into slavery by de Vargas. In 1706 Governor Cuevo y Valdes collected the remnants, then living at Tesuque, and reestablished the pueblo under the name of Santa María de Galisteo. Ninety Tano Indians were moved at that time. In 1782 there were 52 families, but by 1794, smallpox and Comanche raids forced its inhabitants to move to Santo Domingo Pueblo.

I trust you noticed the part about some of them being sold into slavery? I've written here before that slavery worked differently here than it did in the American South. After a period of time, the slaves here were released. But they had lost their tribal identities and had been Catholicized and taught Spanish, so they created their own culture. They became known as genízaros, and they formed communities around northern New Mexico. Here's a link to an NPR story from a few years back about the genízaros in Abiquiu. "Genízaro" is the Spanish word for janissary; NPR says janissaries were war captives in Spain who were conscripted to fight against the Ottoman Sultan, and that some of genízaros in New Mexico gained their freedom by helping to protect their settlements against Indian raids. In the beginning, the word was used as a racial slur, but it has become more of a descriptor now.

Like I said: complicated. The histories of modern Native Americans are as varied as their languages and cultures.

Happy Indigenous People's Day.

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These moments of historical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

I was dyeing today.

As in dyeing yarn. Don't get any weird ideas.

This weekend was the annual Harvest Festival at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, and I volunteered today at the dye shed. It's only the third or fourth time I've worked out there, and every time I do it, I don't know why I don't do it more often because it's a ton of fun.

Anyway, here are some photos from the day.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

My usual volunteer spot is in the weaving rooms, which are pretty close to the entrance. The dye shed is requires a longer walk. 

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

But it's a pretty walk, so it's hard to complain.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

The shed is a sort of lean-to constructed mostly of wood with a stone hearth on one side. I took this photo from inside the dye shed. We had five pots of all-natural dyes going today, the first four in enameled or stainless steel pots: 

• cochineal, a tiny bug that grows on prickly pear cacti. It takes 70,000 bugs, ground up, to make a pound of dye. It makes a brilliant red color -- but it was pricey and had to be imported from Mexico, so it was used sparingly. Today we added lime juice and got some pretty pinks out of it.
• indigo, made from the fermented leaves of the indigo plant. It makes a deep blue. We learned today that several plants around the world can be used to make indigo dye. Alas, none of them grow locally, so this dye also had to be imported.
• madder root, which does grow locally and gave us a lovely orange today. Depending on the mordant (dye fixer) used, you can also get a decent red; it was used for military uniforms for the troops who weren't officers and couldn't afford cochineal red.
• chamisa, a bush that's blooming right now around here. The flowers make a yellow dye. In fact, most growing things make yellow. You'd think they'd make green, but no -- once the chlorophyll is boiled off, only the yellow remains. We get green typically by dyeing the yarn first with chamisa or something else that makes yellow, then overdyeing it with indigo.
• a second pot of chamisa, this one in the cast iron cauldron on the right side of the photo just above. The iron in the pot interacts with the chamisa; today it gave us a very pretty moss green. So that's another way to get a green dye.

I mentioned overdyeing. That's where you dye the yarn (or fabric) with one color, then dye it again with another color. We made purple yarn today by overdyeing some of our pink with indigo. 

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

We hang the dyed yarn over the fence to dry. As you can see, the runoff from the yarn dyes the fence, too.

Lynne Cantwell | October 2025

With the fires going all day to keep the dye baths hot, my clothes were redolent of smoke -- which Tigs thoroughly appreciated after I got home. 

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These moments of colorful blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Pan-Native-American spirituality is not a thing.

I could do another post about the ongoing horror show that is the Trump administration this week. But I'm inclined instead to write about something that comes up occasionally in Pagan, and especially New Age, circles.

This illustration is one example of it. We are going to discuss how very wrong it is. And then we're going to talk about some other weird ideas white people have about Native Americans, particularly their spirituality. 

Nearbirds | Deposit Photos

So what's wrong with the illustration? For starters, tipis were used only by the various Plains Indians tribes. A tipi is easy to put up and take down, making it perfect housing for people with a nomadic lifestyle. But the decorations on this one are sanitized to the point of being meaningless. Here is a photo of some actual Kiowa tipis. See the difference? 

Wikipedia | Public Domain

Bison, an elk smoking a pipe, water monsters -- you get the idea.

Let's turn now to that totem pole. Totem poles are carved by Native Americans who live in western Canada and along the Pacific coast of the US. They are made of cedar -- a tree that doesn't grow on the Great Plains -- and while they can be as short as four feet, they are sometimes as tall as 100 feet. 

Tipis are between four and eight feet tall, generally speaking. So the perspective in the illustration is off -- a real totem pole would probably tower over the tipi. But why would a tipi dweller want to haul around a totem pole? And why would a Pacific Northwest Indian want to live in a tipi when cedar trees were plentiful in their area? The traditional housing for totem-pole-carving tribes was the longhouse, made of cedar planks. Big ones housed multiple families that each had their own area inside the building.

The Ute Indians lived in both tipis and wickiups, depending on the time of year. Members of the Five Civilized Tribes in the northeastern US and eastern Canada lived in longhouses. Southeastern tribes like the Seminole lived in chickees, with thatched roofs but open sides. Pueblo Indian homes were made of adobe, and the Navajo lived in hogans, built of logs and mud. (If you ever get the chance to go inside a hogan, look up; the logs forming the roof are interlaced. Just beautiful.)

Different tribes, different climates, different types of homes. Different languages from different language families, too; here in New Mexico, we have 19 Pueblos still in existence, and depending on the pueblo, their ancestors may have spoken Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Keresan, Zunian, or Uto-Aztecan, and they are not mutually intelligible tongues. The Navajo language is from the Athabaskan language family, as are the languages spoken by Apache tribes and a bunch of tribes in western Canada.

Given all that, why on earth would anyone think that every tribe followed the same ancient religion?

And yet I keep coming across memes on social media that start with, "O, Great Spirit" and purport to be Native American wisdom. Here's one: 

Stolen from a Facebook page

Lovely sentiments, right? 

Which tribe is it from?

You can't tell, can you?

I am going to hazard a guess and say that some white person wrote it and is trying to pass it off as Native. 

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Most Native Americans today are Christian; their ancestors, like those of us with European pagan ancestors, were converted by Christian invaders at swordpoint. They may still practice their traditions, but thanks to Christian missionaries determined to "civilize the savages", a whole lot of their languages and cultural practices are being lost.

There's a scene from a Sherman Alexie novel that keeps coming back to me. I think it might have been in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The main character of the novel, Junior, is a teenager who lives on the dirt-poor Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. The scene is one in which several white women show up on the reservation and say they want to become Indians because Native beliefs are so pure and so on. Junior (assuming I've got the right book) and his friends let the women tag along with them for the day, and they even party together. But once everybody is high, the teens turn on the women, telling them how dumb their romanticized view of Native life is -- and then they send the women packing.

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I get the desire to make life simpler by adopting the beliefs of people who had a closer relationship with the land and all that. But please don't fall for the idea that all Native Americans believed the same stuff and followed the same god. A lot of tribes (most, I think) were polytheistic before the coming of the white man. This idea of a "Great Spirit" was likely introduced by the missionaries and adopted by the Indians -- sometimes right along with their original pantheon, to the missionaries' chagrin. The Natives were simply doing the same kind of syncretism that the Romans did, adopting the worship of other cultures' gods as they met them along the way, but in the Natives' case, the practice didn't play well with monotheism.

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Do me a favor, would you? If you see something posted online that claims to be a "Native American" spiritual something-or-other, ask the poster which tribe it's from. If they can't tell you... well, there's your answer.

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These moments of spiritual blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!