Hello from deep south Mississippi

I wanted to go to the Choctaw Indian Fair, held in Philadelphia Mississippi every July. But it's too darn hot. I bought some lightweight cotton shirts and some shorts and filled up the car with gas etc. Went outside and wilted. We're in the grip of a record breaking heat wave, the worst in a century. Oh well. Maybe next year.

"Our" Choctaw Indians were forest people and mound builders. They had no stone to build monuments like the Maya or Inca--they used what they had--soil--to build these amazing memorials. It saddens me to see the ancestors of the mound builders at the Fair doing dances borrowed from the Hopi and western Indians, which have no relativity to them.

In prehistory they had their own arts and pottery patterns and dances and rituals, but so much was lost when white settlers tried their damndest to wipe them off the face of the Earth. So so much lost. My ancestral blood weeps for what was lost--yet prideful of the stubborn spirit that kept those remnants of a lost civilization alive.

susil