Mound builders

Sometimes my posts begin writing themselves in my head when I’m still out taking pictures. In this case while I was walking in the southern portion of Great Hills Park on July 15th I began thinking about how the Clematis drummondii vines formed a botanical mound beneath the mounded cloud in the sky. That reminded me of the Mound Builder cultures in North America, and how the Latin word for ‘mound’ was cumulus, which is the name scientists have given to the kind of cloud that drifted over the Clematis. All I had to do in putting this post together later in the day was transcribe the thoughts I’d had in nature that morning. Below is a closer look at the viney mound in its own right.

 

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There’s been a push among activists to “decolonize” a lot of things in modern society and to “center” indigenous ways of interpreting the world. But what happens when indigenous people reject “woke” world-ways? Will ideologues go ahead and insist on “colonizing” the indigenous into adopting modern “woke” ways? I haven’t heard anyone ask that question. It’s a serious one but it also has its humorous side, as in this two-minute video clip that begins with Matt Walsh interviewing a Maasai man and asking “What if a man decides that his gender identity is a woman?”

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman