Moon Phase Bedtime Stories

Travel back in time, someone one hundred fifty years ago or so in North America, when a large swath of virgin territory existed in much the same condition as it had been for tens of thousands of years. Imagine a land still in a state of ecological harmony where the only human inhabitants for thousands of years had been the "original people," the aboriginal or indigenous Native American Indians. For the most part at that time there were no fences, no telephone poles or powerlines, railroad tracks, paved roads, or the effects of metropolitan city sprawl, which had largely been the condition of much of the North American continent up until the middle of the nineteenth century.During that time, nearly half of the North American continent had been relatively free of domestication from foreign invasion; although, immigration efforts had been well underway into select territories.This had also been a time when the existing United States' states struggled to unify and establish a unified sovereign identity, epitomized by the Civil War (12 April 1861 - 9 April 1865). The four-year War nearly bankrupted the United States government, both the Northern (Union) and Southern (Confederate) States and its peoples, as all had exhausted their resources, human and financial, in an attempt to defend and preserve each's political values.Now, imagine that at this precise moment in history when the United States had been consumed by internal strife, a prime opportunity presented itself for the indigenous peoples of North America to somehow unite and defend what had been left of their homelands. Envision what North America would look like today had Native American tribes survived, unified, and formed their own government to include a military, which could have effectively stopped U.S. immigration incursions. Thus, imagine, as I did, the formation of a nation called The United Native American Indian Nation (UNAIN).This struggle for a national identity for both the Native Americans and the United States Americans is epitomized in the Moon Phase Bedtime Stories - stories that describe the challenges of a Native American Indian boy from a Pacific Northwest Nez Percé tribe caught between two evolving countries. The boy's journey exemplifies the challenges the indigenous peoples faced to maintain their true identity and allegiance for ancestral and cultural, spiritual, social, and economic values, while threatened by a progressive invasion of foreign interests and imposed by an authoritarian oligarchy.