Alleged Cherokee Unsettles and teaches HSU Occupy

Last thanksgiving break, the HSU Occupy was still happening and a pretty big group of people spent at least a few days there. i got there Friday (or was it Saturday?) and got a “full” experience of a certain younger man (age 43 he said) who also said he was “100 percent Cherokee”. Looked a bit Native, but full? Well, anyway….what developed was quite an interesting time into the psychology of the Occupy movement –which wants to be in solidarity with “the 99%” ideally…but, in my reckoning, flounders along lines where unorthodoxy meets old Lefty routines which may or may not have been adequately thought through.

The apparent view that survives interactions with people like the mentioned Cherokee dude, which i’ll get to in a minute, is a view that sees such people as provocateurs. Agent provacateurs. Also known as persons paid to subtract the great spirit found in organic or unorthodox, anti-establishment pursuits of sanity…

But there’s a fine line because a lot of folks are reflecting the intense symptoms of being put through a system that works to crush the spirit, and to make one off-balance.

A case in point, the Cherokee, calling himself Oklahoma. Now my notes:

After thinkin’ o’ Okie La Longwinded Homie (my endearing name for him) –flounderin’ dance Row Boat Style on Deck of the HSU/N.Humboldt Occupy . His ‘Trail of Tears’ truth reflectin’ in bits, seeping seepage, even when his alleged status took Apple Indian turns (i callin’ him out on some!). Trickle of truth heart burblin’ thru TORRENT OF “SCHIZO-AFFECTIVE DISORDER” OFF-BALANCE REFLECTION DANCE. Keepin’ us settlers-seeking-jobs-in-the-settlement UP ALL NIGHT, GOING ON FOUR NIGHTS IN A ROW–just AFTER Thanks-taking/giving holiday. In a context of little real respect of local NDNz, it seemed to me, even tho i saw a few obvious such folks in attendance (at the main free meal site put on by a number of churches and ‘vets for peace’ in Arcata, CA).

i never did reach Okiehomie “logickly”. Never, really. Oh, in Eureka (where he’d gone to after being kicked out of HSU by the cops) while i was there for an hour or so he enquired about whether the small teepee frame he set up was still up (i noted that he left a painted rock, red and black, in it, after i had gifted him the most excellent rock i’d found up north–a “heart of the river” stone, i called it). He feined (?) a hug but his overall meta depthcharge hadn’t yet soaked very deeply into me even by then so i was still mostly on my guard with him…

Lauren at the HSU Occupy claimed he is a “sex offender” and left that vague. Of course, the mere mention of that phrase today pushes most to go along with whatever the claimant says, at least openly. It’s like calling someone a Jew in the Nazi Germany times. Who’s going to defend THEM??

Me, i can imagine, what with Okiehomie’s climaxic energy the second to last night, just after one of the students there challenged him to some physicality (in the context that no one could get him to SHUT UP), that Okiehomie WAS in fact a ‘sex offender’ and his TORRENT of off-the-deep-end through0ut 4 nights (at least!) reflecting the realities of being so labeled in any institutional setting, the classicly conditioned sheeple going along. Re: his crying whimper spirit…spoken when that student pushed him up to the edge of his agro and far enough away so that some of us FINALLY got some sleep, or at least a little rest from his NOISE. (Note: this isn’t well-edited, as i’m on a severe time limit unfortunately)

Tho, as befits the Occu-pattern of Occupy in my experience, as soon as “we” finally began “to settle in” collectively, there was Okiehomie as if on cue–getting loud again, this time seeming to re-enact what he may’ve gone through unjustly (?) in prison.

Honestly, i could radical’s radically empathize with him only AFTER i was away and had enough sleep. During his “reign” (of sorts), i was with the reactionaries, knowing nothing else that could be done; that is, i tried, multiple times, but as soon as i did, well, it was like he was firing off reflections that his mother or auntie or some other authoritarian in his life leveled at him.

An example:

How about the time i got so flabbergastedly fed-up with him that i ran away yelling only in shorts, barefooted despite a chilly night, and ran around the nearest large building, on mostly rough concrete; my feet acheing and perhaps even bleeding (they FELT that pained), i made it back, heart palpatating weirdly.

Another example:

He consistently kept kicking my ass verbally about bullshit, i.e. when we’d fed local racoons (a lovely time!), he claimed i had scared ’em off. Then, when he was apparently getting a number of Owls to visit (using an interesting technique), hooting in building numbers (or was it folks camping upstairs, using bottles??), i asked him if he wanted something like a blanket or something, and immediately he chastized me, loudly, for scaring ’em all away! But his chastizing was a sometime mix of curious humor as well, as when he added that i’d probably also scare away the Mountain Lions he would be calling for the next night! Oh my!

So there was some curious manipulation going on by him. And then he’d mix it with seeming excellence. Like the time he said that every time he coughed loudly (or something equally noisy and obnoxious after awhile), that signified a thousand people dying at the hands of orthodoxy.

Another positive note: He did apparently “get away with” jumping the verbotten Eureka court house police fence when i was there for that short time (i’d also been there for a few nights up to when we all got kicked out by the cops, but that’s another story).

The bottom line to intense men like Okie La Homie? He taught us. To GALVANIZE. When we were still quite a loose group, he forced us to build up our strength and work together enough to kick his butt out!

On the other hand, i wanted to meet up with local natives and see if we might create some sort of sweatlodge for Okiehomie, and bridge with the guy. Imagine the excellence that MIGHT have been brewed up had we been oriented not to “protection via restriction” but to “protection via strategies of enrichment”!!