Alberta Nells, a youth leader of the Navajo Nation, does the final closing for the evening. At 19-years-old, she is the youngest member of the faculty here at Omega.
She says that she thought it would be most appropriate to do a journey song. The song, she explains, begins with a prayer for “good planning,” which corresponds with all the community organizers in the house. She promises that rain is a good sign: “For us, that mist and that fog means that our holy people, our deities are among us.”
“You’re not closing the ceremony because the ceremony will never be closed. The blessings will never stop.”

“We’ve learned from the domestic violence movement that the maximum time of danger is when a woman is escaping.
That’s where our country is.
We’re not going to put up with the same financial system, fed up with the health care system, not supporting wars, by 2012 we’ll be a majority, non-white country.
We can see that the country is escaping and also that the danger is present.
What we need is a big national movement, like MADD, that simply says no house is safe if it has a gun in it. That connects our home and our lives to the armaments everywhere.
I think we should do it big.”

There’s something particularly intense about doing a go-around where hundreds of women introduce themselves. Kudos to the Omega crew for making space for all the women here!