Muhammad Ali, the Navaho and the Tibetans
[ by Charles Cameron — a knockout triple DoubleQuote from Maidu country ]
.
This:
reminds me of this:
but also of this:
**
In fact, we have three potential DoubleQuotes here:
the stytlized figures in Neil Leifer‘s celebrated photo of Muhammad Ali evokes the stylized figures of Jeff King‘s sandpainting for the Navaho war ceremonial Where the Two Came to Their Father. Jeff King‘s Navaho sandpaintings in turn easily summon memories of their Tibetan Buddhist equivalents, shown here in a photo of the Drepung Loseling monks. And the symmetries of the overhead shot of Ali and that of the Drepung monks forms yet a third pair.
**
Muhammad Ali at one point wanted “his people” to return to Africa, away from the deadly white man, and no doubt it has occurred to some Navajo from time to time to wish the white man would return to Europe — while Puebloans may on occasions have wished the Navajo had remained with their Athabaskan kin in Canada..
But then, I’m Scots by heritage, British by subsequent conquest, and have invaded the United States myself in person, with a view to finding what American poet Gary Snyder calls “a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at” here in California.
In what I understand to have been Nisenan Maidu country.
