Reznjun

i made a new scraping beam cuz the old one had it. it was out in the weather too much. this one is heavy, it is a treated telephone post so it should last. i will make one out of a hickory log  later. that will have smoother grain and will harden with time. last year some kin of mine brought me a post that was full of knots. they dont understand that could cause a hide to tear. gotta have a smooth surface.

i have an elk hide that has been soaking. i will scrape that to make some hand drums to take to fulton.  i bought 4 hand drum frames with some of the money i made off my stand at the gathering . sorta like reinvest it to make more with it. a friend of mine said we could make some frames out of hickory at his dads place. his dad has modern and old school tools. we will steam the hickory and put them in a jig to dry in a circular form. that will save me the cost of buying frames each time. i will just make my own. in business you gotta cut costs.

scraping that hide should take a good part of a day. i have to save a piece to take with me to fulton. i have to demonstrate some of my craft. so i will make a roach and string a hand drum. maybe i will get my picture taken with some touristos. i have another salted elk hide in my tool shed. thats anutha days job. i talked to some of my homeboys about saving me their deer hides to make hand drums with. they said they would. maybe i will try to tan one again. my last effort didnt turn out. i will keep at it til i get it right.

i picked half a bushel of indian beans this week. i still have more growing up my cornstalks. i have some corn left to pick. it was late and hardened. i will make kakasuwabo and lye corn with that. my dad gave me an old tool used to remove the kernels off the cob. you can only find them at antique stores or flea markets. they are real handy. beats taking kernels off by hand and saves alot of time. i am still getting tomatoes, we are canning them. almost everything else has stopped producing. just gotta harvesting what is left. then i have to till the soil under and add lime. i will be ready for next year then.

the president addressed congress the other day. while he was talking some one hollered ”liar”. the prez was cool he stopped a second then continued on. the last prez woulda accosted the man. there is no truth to the rumor that the heckler was from one of our general councils.

i read an article in the paper this past week about gaming. i wonder why they cant write just one article about gaming without trying to slam indian gaming. the article said that indian gaming killed horse and dog tracks. yeah really maybe investing so much that they couldnt get their money back had something to do with it. maybe it was management.  perhaps they should consult with indians and ask ”how do you do it’? they might learn something from indians instead of making them the adversary. or the whipping boy for their own shortcomings. the thing is our paper prints this stuff while we pay for huge fullpage ads. do they consider the money we give them for advertising. do our people bring this to their attention?

gotta start scraping a hide……