Handsome Lake
construction
A personal site for Haudenosaunee Ongwe'hon:weh.Shekon, Oki and Osiyo! Greetings, thanks and love for all our relatives. Whom my parents and grandpreants and all our ancestors share with us here, along with 500 Great Nations of the Americas. For those interested, the general content for Handsome Lake is taken from a study of numerous online resources, and in particular "The Code of Handsome Lake", by Arthur C. Parker. Arthur's hard bound book features wonderfully detailed accounts of friendly relations within our American cultures. There is very vague mention of human problems, emanating from Imperial colonization. Not a call to blind faith, but perhaps a necessary ommision. For everywhere that these external problems are glossed over, there is a guided assumption of active suffering, and innocent American lives are at risk.
Arthur's contents float in an invisible reality, for those of good fortune, and for those who practice indifference. We are considering introducing our online version of Arthur's work with accounting herein of harsh realities aimed at all Americans. We offer a brief outline of our culture's physical and moral dimensions, as American Resident vs. Caucasian Visitor: without limiting ourselves in immature distractions of 'good and evil' which inundate primitive faith that is forced upon us during bouts of genocide. So here and now, offered in just perspective, for due consideration, just as faith establishes human understanding, Handsome Lake's teachings seek better human understanding. By examining the moral causes of the breakdown of faith. Arthur, in context recounting Americans social gatherings, only alludes to this breakdown, and where his account lacks content, we will very breifly provide the human context. This is not to exclude the Visitor, who for obvious reasons is generally incabapable of inclusion.
This site is under construction. This draft, Handsome Lake Draft 1, explores the dynamic dimensions of cultural conflict in the Americas, the driving force behind "The Code of Handsome Lake". Also, we must assemble typographic resources perhaps more suited to Handsome Lake than raw system fonts. However, Riverleaf typography is naturally a direction to be followed by those who take this path of American self-discovery. Though we my seem far from a completely independent American language. Fonts from and for American peoples, for now living under Caucasian occupation. Two quick notes: first, the use of the term psychotic does not indicate a dangerous lunatic needing to be locked up, as psychosis is simlply a reference to human capacity and behavior signaling a need for control and assistance; second, if and only if your Ancestors have lived on Turtle island for the last 10,000 years you are indeed American, and if it fails you, shove the racist "indian" label back in their faces. Stomp out the psychotic noise claiming it is "american". Sharing who we are. Greetings, thanks and love.
Forword
American Typography
My parents brought our history and origins to us as children, with stories of Creation. Looking up, father would always point out bear's Great Spirit in the river we call Sky, explaining that our respect of bear brings us stories of Bear: our stories living there for us, in the Great River of time and space as we know it to be.
At night, falling to sleep, mother would tells us stories of Sky woman, who journeyed from the origins of this universe to this very place, bringing Life for the Spirit we call Mother Turtle: the island in oceans of water and lava that modern science calls the Americas, North her shell, South her tail. Above, Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Moon, and Creation's River of stars. Our great river, born like all universes, something left behind: a single crumb, dropped by Beings beyond our understanding. The nature given to us all by Sky Woman, the Spirit who created our solar system, sister Earth and her close neighbors. Here on Mother Turtle and throughout our planet and universe, wherever Life is left behind, for us to respect and care for with the good mind.
Our faith involves prayer, communion and communication... Prayer that includes our Great sprits of Life, those beyond our lives in this universe: Wind, Water, Sun, Stars and others, to whom with respect we send our greetings. Communion with the Spirits of sacred animals who share Earth and life with us: Turtle, Bear, Wolf, Deer, Beaver, Heron, Eagle and many others, with whom we share thanks. Communication with our Ancestors and the People, for whom we offer love... You see, life inexorably moves in this way, where behind us rests that path we follow, as we move forward. Ancesotor sprits honor us with their presence, when we are in need. Our Elders have our unconditional support, if they wish or need our support. For our children, and all our People we share greetings, thanks and love. From prayer, communion and communication flow greetings, thanks and love. For all matter that we can find contains the spirit of some form of life. Life is love, and both this physical life and our social love provide us with respect... if we do not abuse life, if we respect love, we avoid confusion, pain and hate that plague the bad mind. This is the universe that contains our American faith. This is faith's path to the good mind.
Connection to universe, beyond a normal scope of human existence. Faith, human faith, Handsome Lake is the part of our faith that deals with attaching our presence to presence of others. Americans are sensitive to the presence of the faiths of the visitors to the Americas. Sadly, that presence involves assault by Visitors against all the People of Turtle Island: Including our rural tribes of seasonal gatherers in the North, our larger cities in the South, and hundreds of thousands of villages between.
The decimation of our culture due to greed inspired violence of Empire, provides all humans of good mind a clear perception of the ignorance of the Visitor, disposed against the gentle humanity of Americans. The Visitors' irrational destruction of environment clashes, in that global perception, with our purposed connection with nature. The human civilization of the Americas must integrate Americans with Empire's barbaric Caucasian invaders to some extent, to control and calm the chaos ruining humanity. At the same time, the disarray of Caucasians' ongoing violent criminal assault, spills into global violence, challenging our American faith community with unwanted association. Handsome Lake's interpretation of this cultural extortion issues from the ancient Haudenosaunee practice of exclusion of those who oppose. Humanity cannot be healthy, pulled in many directions at once. Chaos is a poor choice for social planning. Chaos is the tool used by criminals, to try and conceal their human disgrace. The Visitor is excluded.
The people of the Great Lakes, understanding life and each other, realize that exclusion will not make the criminals go away: so we are told everyday that "mighty america," the Caucasian colonial military apperatchik squatting on our lands, is maintaining morality. We are told that "americans" have great plans. All we see the "mighty" war camp doing is murdering and stealing. Others with the peaceful intentions of good mind, including our people, work to improve community. But all those "helpers" who were born to and live on the Visitors' river, contaminate everythnig they touch with whispers of praise for all that is "mighty". Handsome Lake spoke also of this treachery, which includes also drafting into the war camps of chaos.
Today we know that across 10's and 100's of eons, we are the children of these demented people, who them selves are the children of parents many thousands of eons older, who they also attack and abuse as they abuse us here. Surely, they must have a faith that corrects them. A connection with their mothers that heals them? No. They have risen from a more primitive time in our modern human evolution. Our peace will never live in their hearts. Like their now extinct counterparts from eons past in Africa, they will vanish. They are excluded by Earth, and will some day leave us for good. This compliments and governs our exclusion of the Caucasian on our lands. Exclusion is something that Caucsians do not understand. They are unable to live in peace on their river, and leave the people of other rivers alone.
With our good mind, recognizing that we each live on separate rivers, and respecting those rivers as forever apart, we appreciate their primitive nature, respect their primitive faith, and out of necessity oppose their criminal confusion. As long as the Visitor remains squatting on our lands, we must continue to manage the Visitor, whose primitive faith and chaotic criminal culture renders even basic communication of ideas very difficult to achieve.
Below, we must try to explain the conditions to which Handsome Lake's teachings are applied. Both assault and repression must be fully understood to reconcile each: together or in isolation, each assault on faith responds with a journey to find prayer, communion and communication relevant to just faith. Though we grow tired of picking ourselves up in this way, it is something we do very well. As we explain below, we are very good at adaptation.
Now, Writing is a sophisticated direction of resource specifically directed at sharing ideas. Just as faith builds healthy, forgiving space between people, fonts build space around ideas. Fonts should be appropriate to the ideas expressed.
Fontography for the Americas is required for Handsome Lake. We, the Haudenosaunee favor oral traditions over written records, so we must borrrow phonetic characters from other Americans to share Handsome Lake online. Further south, in our modern and ancient cities, Americans have written language. That language is not a shared language on the Internet. Like all else American, our languages are assaulted, their makers beaten into submission. Afterwards, colonial scholars close in gawking, to begin secretive hording they fancy is useful. Unable to implement their very own understanding that language is always changing, what they horde is increasingly usless as our minds move on. Rather than hording, they should go back where they came from and allow our thousands in waiting simple peace. There is a young Hopi woman, I forget her name, who shared with me her revision of some writen ideas: a beautiful language is always emerging in our minds, and when they are left alone to rebuild their cities, amazing things will emerge.
Today, halfway from Haudenosaunee Territories to our great cities, my grandfather's people, the Tsalagi use fonts called syllabarys, to write what they speak using font symbols. Fontographers use several typefaces to display Cherokee syllabary: for example, ~ ᏳᏇᎩ ~ spoken as "Osiyo", meaning welcome. The first letter, looking like a "G" is not pronounced as such: its distinctive appearance is associated with the "O" sound. And so on. I asked one of our Elders, "Why not use Hopi text, or even something from Mexico?" His reply was quick and bitter. "Because WE never invaded OUR lands." Time now for some reflection on physical and moral impacts of Caucasia's assault on Americans.
About syllabary and Other Appearances
Let's shift focus now, and explain our choices of fonts (in the contexts of physical and moral culture explored above). Choices are challenged by the Visitor's reluctance to share online (digital) letters outside of the Visitor's Colony friends. With good mind, we have sought to offer various information that allowed 'friends' to 'share' purchased fonts, but our purchases were not 'supported'. Stolen when useful, but never supplying paid-for font display service.
We do not use Cherokee entities (American syllabary) for Handsome Lake, as the Kanien'keha:ka nation and all Haudensaunee have for now resisted attachment of our more flexible languages to perceived rigidity of written language, and aversion to Caucasian culture which frequently attaches murder and mayhem to its written expression. Tsalgi nation syllabary, the various Cherokee fonts are chosen because, like the Eaglefeather font, they include stated research into the language cultures of the American peoples. To be honest, though we have no way of verifying claims of American association in design, we assume such and verify authenticity through Cherokee Nation Language Schools, and other online resources. In the case of the Eaglefeather font, one self proclaimed designer of the font on realizing our American hertiage, quickly retreated from original american native to Northern European, with a healthy appreciation of Eagle's peaceful Spirit. Still a vast improvement over Microsoft dot mil Calibri, and so on.
Other fonts are prepared. These include large Comfortaa, subtle Josefin sans, and plain Arcitects Daughter. All three from Google Web Fonts, are certan fallbacks where our other provisions fail. Google's are old (unhinted) True Type files, with modern 'virtual' browser adaptations that supposedly replace Open Type features (somewhat, sort of). We also use fonts from artisits who are supported by Adobe and Monotype, where our only recourse is modern-browser-only webkit fonts, using HTML5/CSS3 @fontface technology. From Monotype, we have Graphite and Tekton Pro, for example (though Adobe and Google from time-to-time also provide these fonts). Google, Adobe, Monotype and others sources may be manually adapted to webkit formats where said provider is having problems servicing supply to Americans. Indecision and exclusion aside, Riverleaf will try to provide those fonts that it has purchased for this personal view into American faith during Caucasian occupation.
Perhaps working together, Americanized (syllabary), beside 'other' fonts with aesthetic attachment to Architecture, will help us all to orient the destabilizing criminal class to 'who is who' and 'where we all are'... today. Wherever possible we try to purchase fonts from the font's original designers, as font design is tedious, slow, pain-staking work that affords little income. Naturally, the effort to design fonts for American languages is rewarded. Our culture offers its own rewards...
Grandmother Moon sees all of us together on Turtle Island. Americans must always push harder at being... who we are. Which is a big part of real, human and Earthly American peace: freedom to associate and communicate in manners less barbaric. So this path we have chosen together, here is our journey... We will reflect on our journey, each of us apart, in our own ways. In our choice of spiritual association. We see this work as association by effort, by growing and developing our good mind, the humble path to faith. Together, we build a house of words. More than that, awaken ideas in our mighty River. Written language, by design flowing from one idea to the next. Becoming... Architicture is the fine art of housing the ideas of people... So it is that here we came to be, as being finds shelter... to use fonts that house Americans. As far as we can. Americans are constantly at work, improving syllabarys. Though none of us knows what the future holds. We may all end up writing Hopi or Aztec. Our language symbols from the great American cities, placed to grow where climate can naturally maintain millions with plentiful food resources. From a time before Caucasian genocide decimated our populations, language returning. Who knows? So it is that this house we build is made of the words of Hansome Lake.
Note that the telephone advice from Adobe Typekit is identical to the telephone advice from Monotype Fonts, both Caucasian failures. Their advice, "we simply are unable to make subscriptions to our font services work for Americans, such as you". And this has gone on for a decade. So except for Google, which mainly pimps for Typekit and Fonts linking but not providing those finer fonts... well, aside from Google modest collection of free online fonts, we are stuck with good old fashioned webfont kits (which are slow and fouty). Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
Collection
We use
Phoreus Cherokee font
~ ᏳᏇᎩ ~
and Plantagenet Cherokee font
~ ᏳᏇᎩ ~
Though their distribution varies, both use HTML entities Ᏻ Ꮗ Ꭹ
These fonts look similar, being both serif. However, one serif is flourished, while the other is not. Naturally, the english characters we use here are not Cherokee symbols. However, the font
Phoreus Cherokee is more pleasant than your default every old day system font. most importaantly, it is morally contiguous (or tends to be so) with American faith.
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Fonts are collected and organized as follows
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American content
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Eaglefeather
distribution:
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Eaglefeather
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Sample Typography
Gai'wiio is the record of the teachings of Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet. Ongwe'onweka of Haudenosaunee proclaim Gai'wiio on Nisko'wukni, the mid-winter, and also at the end of summer. Three days are used to proclaim Gai'wiio, with sacred sede:tsia (early mornings), the Sun Song. Gai'wiio is a balance against bad mind, against colonial incursion. Gai'wiio does not deny but supports development of the People, mending the broken mind. Through the individuals' dreams and desires in life, Gai'wiio returns the good mind to the broken hearts of those who have done wrong, and seek better for all People. Handsome Lake was born in the Visitors' calendar at 1735, lived in Cold Spring, and passed from this time in the Visitors' calendar at 1815.
Titles use typeface 'P22 Eaglefeather'. Someday, we may use Eaglefeather Small Caps, 'p22-fllw-eaglefeather-sc', from Adobe Typekit.
Gai'wiio is the record of the teachings of Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet. Ongwe'onweka of Haudenosaunee proclaim Gaiwiio on Nisko'wukni, the mid-winter, and also at the end of summer. Three days are used to proclaim Gai'wiio, with sacred sede:tsia (early mornings), the Sun Song. Gai'wiio is a balance against bad mind, against colonial incursion. Gai'wiio does not deny but supports development of the People, mending the broken mind. Through the individual's dreams and desires in life, Gai'wiio returns the good mind to the broken hearts of those who have done wrong, and seek better for all People. Handsome Lake was born in the Visitors' calendar at 1735, lived in Cold Spring, and passed from this time in the Visitors' calendar at 1815.
Texts use typeface 'Phoreus Cherokee'. Someday, this text may use the Phoreus Cherokee, 'phoreuscherokee', from Adobe Typekit.
Gai'wiio is the record of the teachings of Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet. Ongwe'onweka of Haudenosaunee proclaim Gaiwiio on Nisko'wukni, the mid-winter, and also at the end of summer. Three days are used to proclaim Gai'wiio, with sacred sede:tsia (early mornings), the Sun Song. Gai'wiio is a balance against bad mind, against colonial incursion. Gai'wiio does not deny but supports development of the People, mending the broken mind. Through the individuals' dreams and desires in life, Gai'wiio returns the good mind to the broken hearts of those who have done wrong, and seek better for all People. Handsome Lake was born in the Visitors' calendar at 1735, lived in Cold Spring, and passed from this time in the Visitors' calendar at 1815.
Formalities use typeface 'Plantagenet Cherokee'.
Gai'wiio is the record of the teachings of Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet. Ongwe'onweka of Haudenosaunee proclaim Gaiwiio on Nisko'wukni, the mid-winter, and also at the end of summer. Three days are used to proclaim Gai'wiio, with sacred sede:tsia (early mornings), the Sun Song. Gai'wiio is a balance against bad mind, against colonial incursion. Gai'wiio does not deny but supports development of the People, mending the broken mind. Through the individual's dreams and desires in life, Gai'wiio returns the good mind to the broken hearts of those who have done wrong, and seek better for all People. Handsome Lake was born in the Visitors' calendar at 1735, lived in Cold Spring, and passed from this time in the Visitors' calendar at 1815.
Title notes use typeface 'Graphite'. Someday, this text may use the Graphite Standard, 'graphite-std', from Adobe Typekit.
Gai'wiio is the record of the teachings of Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet. Ongwe'onweka of Haudenosaunee proclaim Gaiwiio on Nisko'wukni, the mid-winter, and also at the end of summer. Three days are used to proclaim Gai'wiio, with sacred sede:tsia (early mornings), the Sun Song. Gai'wiio is a balance against bad mind, against colonial incursion. Gai'wiio does not deny but supports development of the People, mending the broken mind. Through the individuals' dreams and desires in life, Gai'wiio returns the good mind to the broken hearts of those who have done wrong, and seek better for all People. Handsome Lake was born in the Visitors' calendar at 1735, lived in Cold Spring, and passed from this time in the Visitors' calendar at 1815.
Notes use typeface 'Tekton Pro'. Someday, this text may use the Tekton Pro font 'tekton-pro', from Adobe Typekit.
Gai'wiio is the record of the teachings of Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet. Ongwe'onweka of Haudenosaunee proclaim Gaiwiio on Nisko'wukni, the mid-winter, and also at the end of summer. Three days are used to proclaim Gai'wiio, with sacred sede:tsia (early mornings), the Sun Song. Gai'wiio is a balance against bad mind, against colonial incursion. Gai'wiio does not deny but supports development of the People, mending the broken mind. Through the individual's dreams and desires in life, Gai'wiio returns the good mind to the broken hearts of those who have done wrong, and seek better for all People. Handsome Lake was born in the Visitors' calendar at 1735, lived in Cold Spring, and passed from this time in the Visitors' calendar at 1815.
Informal titles use typeface 'Comfortaa'.
Gai'wiio is the record of the teachings of Handsome Lake, Seneca prophet. Ongwe'onweka of Haudenosaunee proclaim Gaiwiio on Nisko'wukni, the mid-winter, and also at the end of summer. Three days are used to proclaim Gai'wiio, with sacred sede:tsia (early mornings), the Sun Song. Gai'wiio is a balance against bad mind, against colonial incursion. Gai'wiio does not deny but supports development of the People, mending the broken mind. Through the individuals' dreams and desires in life, Gai'wiio returns the good mind to the broken hearts of those who have done wrong, and seek better for all People. Handsome Lake was born in the Visitors' calendar at 1735, lived in Cold Spring, and passed from this time in the Visitors' calendar at 1815.
Informal texts use typeface 'Architects Daughter'.