Elizabeth Peratrovich Day

Civil Rights Leader

Elizabeth Peratrovich

1911-1958

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is remembered as the great civil rights movement leader during the 1960s. Elizabeth Jean Wanamaker Peratrovich is remembered as Alaska's great equal rights campaign leader for Alaska Natives in the 1940s. Elizabeth's moving and dramatic presentation before the Alaska Territorial Legislature on February 8, 1945, was responsible for changing the views of biased senators on the "Equal Rights" bill. The bill passed and immediately became law, thus beginning a new era in Alaska's racial relations.

Forty-seven years ago, Elizabeth Peratrovich championed the cause of civil rights in Alaska and silenced the voices of prejudice and discrimination.

It was February, 1945. The Territorial Senate met as a Committee of the Whole to discuss the equal rights issue and a bill prohibiting racial discrimination in Alaska.

The bill was assailed as a "lawyer's dream" which would create hard feelings between Natives and whites. Many senators stood in turn to speak against equal rights. Their arguments are, by now, familiar ones in this country.

-- They said the bill would aggravate the already hard feelings between Natives and whites.

-- They said the bill was unnecessary -- that Natives had made great progress in the 10 centuries since contact with white civilization.

-- They said the real answer was in the separation of the races.

Those are the ideas we have come to recognize in the last 20 years as the public face of private injustice. The opponents of racial equality have always refused to recognize the problem. Refused to recognize the injury done. Refused to recognize the jobs lost, the poverty incurred, the blows to self-esteem sustained every day by those who have done nothing to merit such injury.

Those voices of prejudice were reduced to a whisper, 47 years ago, by a woman who spoke from the heart.

According to the legislative custom of the time, an opportunity was offered to anyone present who wished to speak on the bill. Elizabeth Peratrovich was the final speaker on that day in 1945. After the long speeches and logical arguments were over, Elizabeth rose to tell the truth about prejudice.

"I would not have expected," she said "that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights."

She talked about herself, her friends, her children, and the cruel treatment that consigned Alaska Natives to a second class existence.

She described to the Senate what it means to be unable to buy a house in a decent neighborhood because Natives aren't allowed to live there.

She described how children feel when they are refused entrance into movie theaters, or see signs in shop windows that read "No dogs or Natives allowed."

She closed her testimony with a biting condemnation of the "Super race" attitude responsible for such cruelty. Following her speech, there was a wild burst of applause from the Gallery, and the Senate proceeded to pass the Alaska Civil Rights Act by a vote of 11–5.

On that day in 1945, Elizabeth Peratrovich represented her people as the Grand President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood. She was a champion of Alaska Natives and of all people who suffered from discrimination.

In the years since Alaska statehood, we have had too few women and minorities elected to office. But their presence has been felt, just as Elizabeth Peratrovich's presence was felt that day in 1945. In naming Gallery B for Elizabeth, we honor her today for her vision, her wisdom, and her courage in speaking out for what she believed to be right. She symbolizes the role the gallery plays in the legislature and the importance of public opinion in the legislative process. She reminds us that a single person, speaking from the heart, can affect the future of all.

with thanks to university of alaska anchorage

floating

The one close to me now,

even my own body -

these too

will soon become clouds,

floating in different directions.

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

translations by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

perhaps

Placido Domingo and John Denver

for the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen

Back then, what did I know?

The names of subway lines, buses.

How long it took to walk twenty blocks.

Uptown and downtown.

Not north, not south, not you.

When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,

you were gray-green, incomprehensible, old.

What you clung to, hung from: old.

Trees looking half-dead, stones.

Marriage of fungi and algae,

chemists of air,

changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones

who kept painting, shaping, engraving

unseen, unread, unremembered.

Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,

ash-of-the-woods.

Transformers unvalued, uncounted.

Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

A land not mine

A land not mine, still

forever memorable,

the waters of its ocean

chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,

and the air drunk, like wine,

late sun lays bare

the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:

I cannot tell if the day

is ending, or the world, or if

the secret of secrets is inside me again.

~ Anna Akhmatova, 
(1889-1966), 

born in Odessa, grew up in Tsarkoye Selo, 
the imperial retreat outside St. Petersburg.  
Unhappily married to Nikolai Gumilev, the well known poet.

scattering

A string of jewels

from a broken necklace,

scattering -

more difficult to keep hold of

even than these in one's life.

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

sleep

I love to lie down weary

under the stalk of sleep

growing slowly out of my head,

the dark leaves meshing.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

art Rembrandt

the waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me, so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

~ Theodore Roethke

~ Kurt Elling

overly bold

When people become overly bold,

then disaster will soon arrive.

Do not meddle with people's livelihoods;

if you respect them, they will in turn respect you.

Therefore, the Master knows herself but is 

not arrogant.

She loves herself but also loves others.

This is how she is able to make appropriate choices.

~ Lao Tzu

from the Tao Te Ching

translation by j.h.mcdonald

a one-man revolution

I bid you to a one-man revolution -

The only revolution that is coming.

...

We're too unseparate.  And going home

From company means coming to our senses.

~ Robert Frost

from Building Soil

art by Frida Kahlo

should I

Should I leave this burning house

of ceaseless thought

and taste the pure rain's

single truth

falling upon my skin?

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

translations by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

art by kristine wyler

quiet and secret

Keep quiet and secret with your soul-work.

Don’t worry so much about your body.

God sewed that robe. Leave it as it is.

Be more deeply courageous.

Change your soul.

~ Attar of Nishapur (1145-1221)

translated by Coleman Barks

photo by eliot porter

Attar's Tomb - photo by Nik Pendaar

what things want

You have to let things

Occupy their own space.

This room is small,

But the green settee

Likes to be here.

The big marsh reeds,

Crowding out the slough,

Find the world good.

You have to let things

Be as they are.

Who knows which of us

Deserves the world more?

~ Robert Bly
photo by Shreve Stockton

not the flower

As I dig for wild orchids

in the autumn fields,

it is the deeply-bedded root

that I desire,

not the flower.

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

man born in tao

Fishes are born in water

Man is born in Tao.

If fishes, born in water,

Seek the deep shadow

Of pond and pool,

All their needs 

Are satisfied.

If man, born in Tao,

Sinks into the deep shadow

Of non-action

To forget aggression and concern,

He lacks nothing

His life is secure.

Moral: "All the fish needs

Is to get lost in water.

All man needs is to get lost

In Tao."

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton

art by Bada Shanren 
who lived during the beginning of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)

the sorrel filly

The songs of small birds fade away

into the bushes after sundown,

the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.

Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters

flare in the dusk.  The aged voices

of a few crickets thread the silence.

It is a quiet I love, though my life

too often drives me through it deaf,

Busy with cost and losses, I waste

the time I have to be here - a time

blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,

if only I would keep aware.  The leaves

rest in the air, perfectly still,

I would like them to rest in my mind

as still, as simply spaced.  As I approach,

the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,

poised there, light on the slope

as a young apple tree.  A week ago

I took her away to sell, and failed

to get my price, and brought her home 

again.  Now in the quiet I stand

and look at her a long time, glad

to have recovered what is lost

in the exchange of something for money.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

photo from hopes creek ranch

some like poetry

Some--

that means not all.

Not even the majority of all but the minority.

Not counting the schools, where one must,

and the poets themselves, there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like--

but one also likes chicken noodle soup,

one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf,

one likes to prove one's point,

one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry--

but what sort of thing is poetry?

More than one shaky answer

has been given to this question.

But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,

as to a saving bannister.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

with thanks to parabola

Original painting by

Caspar David Friedrich

Digital adaption by 

Simon Max Bannister 2012

the yellow dot

God does what she wants. She has very large

Tractors. She lives at night in the sewing room

Doing stitchery. Then chunks of land at mid-

Sea disappear. The husband knows that his wife

Is still breathing. God has arranged the open

Grave. The grave is not what we want,

But to God it's a tiny hole, and he has 

The needle, draws thread through it, and soon

A nice pattern appears. The husband cries,

"Don't let her die!" But God says, "I

Need a yellow dot here, near the mailbox."

The husband is angry. But the turbulent ocean

Is like a chicken scratching for seeds. It doesn't

Mean anything, and the chicken's claws will tear

A Rembrandt drawing if you put it down.

~ Robert Bly

in memory of Jane Kenyon-

from Morning Poems

art by georgia o'keeffe

to know the dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming - A Handbook

feasts of wisdom

I was seeking a cure for my trouble;

My trouble became my cure.

I was seeking a proof of my origin;

My origin became my proof.

I was looking to the right and the left

So that I could see the face of the Beloved.

I was searching outside,

But the Soul was within that very soul.

~  Niyazi Misri (1616 - 1694)

translation by Walter Feldman

temporal affections

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. 

There is no greater obstacle to God than time: 

and not only time but temporalities, 

not only temporal things but temporal affections, 

not only temporal affections 

but the very taint and smell of time. 

~  Meister Eckhart

with thanks to blue mountain center of meditation

art by dali

grandsons, unborn

Georg Trakl 

3 February 1887 - 3 November 1914 

Birth

These mountains: blackness, silence, and snow. 

The red hunter climbs down from the forest; 

Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.

The peace of the mother: under black firs 

The sleeping hands open by themselves 

When the cold moon seems ready to fall.

The birth of man. Each night

Blue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;

The fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,

Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room. 

The eyes 

Of the stony old woman shine, two moons.

The cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles 

The boy’s sleep with black wings, 

With snow, which falls with ease out of the purple 

clouds 

His language was simple and clear, even in translation, resembling the work of Hoelderlin, with strong and precise imagery, darkly brooding sensitivity, and an adept feeling for color. He wrote about death, decay, and doom, hiding himself in lyrical metaphor and the ambiguity of his images. Trakl saw the world collapsing around him and taking him with it; and while his poetry is overwhelmingly negative, critics find in it a gesture of affirmation.

Otto Dix - Sunrise (1913)

The Ravens (1913)

Over the black crevice

at noon the ravens rush with rusty cries.

Their shadows touch the deer’s back

and at times they loom in gnarled rest. 

O how they derange the brown stillness,

in the one acre itself entranced,

like a woman married to grave premonitions,

and at times you can hear them bicker 

about a corpse they sniffed-out somewhere,

and sharply they bend their flight towards north

and dwindle away like a funeral

march in the air, shivering with bliss. 

One year after Georg Trakl's poem and Otto Dix' painting, visions of the impeding disaster, both men were called to the military. World War I had begun. In July 1914, shortly before being drafted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, Georg Trakl received a large monetary gift from the then unknown philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was distributing his enormous inheritance to artists. Unfortunately, Trakl never was able to use the money. His emotional instability became worse under the strains of war and he was hospitalized numerous times as a result of depression and suicide attempts. After several bloody defeats at the hands of the Russians, Trakl was left to single handedly care for 90 wounded men in a barn near Grodek where he wrote the following poem:

Albin Egger-Lienz

 Den Namenlosen (Those Who Have Lost Their Names)

 1914

Grodek (1914)

At evening the autumn woodlands ring

With deadly weapons. Over the golden plains

And lakes of blue, the sun

More darkly rolls. The night surrounds

Warriors dying and the wild lament

Of their fragmented mouths.

Yet silently there gather in the willow combe

Red clouds inhabited by an angry god,

Shed blood, and the chill of the moon.

All roads lead to black decay.

Under golden branching of the night and stars

A sister's shadow sways through the still grove

To greet the heroes' spirits, the bloodied heads.

And softly in the reeds Autumn's dark flutes resound.

O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,

The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:

The grandsons, unborn.

Trakl could not adequately relieve the pain of his patients on his own, and he witnessed the splattered brains of one soldier who shot himself. Trakl then went outside, and after seeing some of the local Ruthenians hanging from trees, suffered a mental breakdown and threatened to shoot himself. In October, Trakl was hospitalized in Cracow, Poland, and received a visit from a friend who encouraged Trakl to send for his benefactor Wittgenstein. Unfortunately, Trakl injected himself with a fatal dose of cocaine, a probable suicide attempt, on November 3, 1914, three days before Wittgenstein arrived.

~ history and commentary from poetry foundation

a rotten and crumbling edifice

..Are we really so identified with a rotten and crumbling edifice

 that we are bound to collapse with it? 

This is where I stop. I think that if the thing collapses, and it must,

 a great deal of what we have called “Christianity” will go with it,

 and if we’re around to rub the dust out of our eyes 

we will finally see that it wasn't Christianity at all. 

Who will deliver us from this body of death?... 

I have to go along with policies that are often so inert, so blind, 

so stupid that they utterly stifle the true life of the Church 

and make it impossible for the most clear-sighted and courageous

 of her members to do anything that will further the real manifestation

 of the truth and [love] of Christ in the world … 

behind all this spurious Pentecostal wind one can hear,

 if [one] listens a little carefully, the hideous merriment of demons…

~ Thomas Merton

taken from correspondence between Merton and philosopher Leslie Dewart

in Witness to Freedom: Letters in Times of Crisis

winter dreams and butterflys

Winter

Evening. A fire

in the grate and a fire

outside, where a robin

is burning. How they both

sing, offering a friendship

unacceptable to the hand

that is as vulnerable to the one

as it is treacherous to the other.

Ah, time, enemy of their music,

reducing fuel to feathers, feathers

to ash, it was, but a moment ago,

spring in this tinder: flames

in flower that are now embers

on song's hearth.

The leaves fall

from a dark tree, brimming

with shadow, fall on one who,

as Borges suggested,

is no more perhaps than the dream God

in his loneliness is dreaming.

~ R. S. Thomas

from  Mass for Hard Times

You have wakened not out of sleep, 

but into a prior dream, 

and that dream lies within another, and so on, 

to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. 

The path that you are to take is endless, 

and you will die before you have truly awakened.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Once Chuang Tzu dreamt  he was a butterfly, 

a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, 

happy with himself and doing as he pleased. 

 He didn't know he was Chuang Tzu. 

 Suddenly he woke up and there he was, 

solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. 

 But he didn't know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, 

or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

~ Chuang Tzu

from The Complete Chuang Tzu

translated by Burton Watson

they bless me

I spend all my morning with the muses;  
- and they bless me also in my walks.

Compelled to contemplate a lasting malady, born with an ardent and lively temperament, susceptible to the diversions of society, I was obliged at an early date to isolate myself and live a life of solitude....For me there can be no recreation in human society, refined conversation, mutual exchange of thoughts and feelings; only so far as necessity compels may I give myself to society,—I must live like an exile. 

~ from the Ludwig van Beethoven journals

with thanks to Roderick Maclver

at heron dance

portrait by 

Joseph Karl Stieler