What do you think?
Rate this book
Tawennawetah Teyoswathe – the Morning Star: It Is Bright
The structure of this book and the stories in it are an attempt to connect my personal ordeal and awakenings with the enlarged collective transformative experience, and ultimately to clarify the workings of the imagination and the intentions behind creative action. The traditional understanding of duty and responsibility which is always communal, is shown to be a recoverable quality of personal identity in the modern world. By recounting in a profoundly reflective and interpretive way the patterns of my personal ancestral migrations forwarded into the present, the conceptualization and design of the ceremonies and ceremonial grounds which are the culmination of my work, demonstrate the power of memory as a source of imagination and vision. The compassionate and equanimous inspiration for the renewal of the responsibilities inherent in ancient indigenous greeting ceremonies is shown to be a deep form of reconciliation among the first peoples of a land and subsequent visitors. Walking respectfully between my two worlds, ancestrally British and and indeed among many other worlds, is shown to be fundamental to carrying out such responsibilities in the contemporary realm. The design of the architectonic setting and ritual structure for A Beacon to the Ancestors are my reflections of this journey, inhabited by so many wise Elders and peers who have taught me. Indeed my acts of creative imagination become my prayer, my offering, to be worthy of such a duty.
210 pages, Paperback
Published May 6, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
Read
January 30, 2026The back cover of the book reads:
"The structure of this book and the stories in it are an attempt to connect my personal ordeal and awakenings with the enlarged collective transformative experience, and ulimately to clarify the workings of the imagination and intentions behind creative action. The traditional understanding of duty and responsibility, which is always communal, is shown to be a recoverable quality of personal identity in the modern world. By recounting in a profoundly reflective and interpretative way the patterns of my personal ancestral migrations[...]demonstrate the power of memory as a source of imagination and wisdom."
Raweno:kwas (William Woodworth) was my mentor for only a few years before his death, and what he offered me, as a student and those near him (searching for deeper connections to cultural responsibilities) was his story.
I am not going to sugarcoat this book, which I've read 3 or 4 times - it is very difficult to read. However, the reasons for that are not difficult to understand at all. Bill's book is filled with his life, his story, his work, and his reconnection to his Indigenous identity as a homosexual Mohawk man over 30 years of engagement. To understand this story, required ultimately years of hearing his stories and integrating the whole of it into a picture of this gentle and deeply caring man.
Bill passed away in June 2025, and as he left my life, a deep silence entered.
Over the last months, I've deepened my relationship to this silence as a sobering way to foster an internal state that is able to live through times of grief in generative ways. Silence was often a form of hospitality that Bill offered in sharing his own personal teachings. In my minds eye, I see him offering a personal anecdote attached to a teaching - then simply sitting silently for a time while it sank in for all of us. This kind of reverie shared between the personal, collective, and the cosmos infused his teachings, and if I understand anything of what he shared, I undersand that I do not face the sorrows of this world in isolation, but am part of a wider world that reflects back the cosmos within myself.
The apprenticeship, for me, as it is for him within his book, is rooted in an extended sense of kinship with the surrounding watersheds, the trees and their root structures, the elders that guide each of us, and the star clusters that shape us. He would often gesture to remembering that if we can realize that we are the filaments of the relationships all around us, then we are fortified and potent enough to turn toward a world of confusion and keep going. The apprenticeship, as we read in his stories, is simply about the shaping of elders - or the ones who are capable of meeting the pain and suffering of the world with a dignified and profound (as Bill would say) bearing.
As you read his stories, what you'lll find is years of walking alongside grief, working with difficult cargo, and learning how one's purpose can be reshaped by this companionship. The result is you can learn how to hold more of what life brings to you with spiritual spaciousness capable of holding it all - the beauty and the loss, the despair and the yearning, the fear and the love. Nothing in life is uncomplicated, nor is it shallow. Bill often said, "If you find Indigneous knowledge glib and shallow, you're simply not going deep enough."
My experiences with the author are a vast composite of contradictions: he was fierce in his opinions and yet deeply forgiving, joyful and melancholy, intense and spacious, solitary and communal. His seasons were marked by a long fidelity to beauty, love, and loss. He never shied away from accepting life on life's terms, and teaching others how to gradually relinquish the fight to have life fit our own expectations without a careful attention to our duties and responsibilities. Bill was never perfect at his cultural duties, but that didn't create a barrier for him, because he also knew how to make peace with the imperfections inherent in community belonging in the context of historical trauma. The wounds and losses he encountered he patiently shaped into a life of meaning, humour, joy, depth, and beauty. It was Bill's acceptance of the world as it is, and his community as it was, that freed him ultimately to radically recieve every encounter as part of the stunning elegance of the world. His stories were riddled with meaninful exchanges with grocery clerks, hospital staff, and insurance salespeople he'd chat with on the phone. Every person that entered a shared space with him ultimately became another carrier of shared living memories and wisdom he'd impart impartially.
He was also an educator and a voice that rose on the behalf of the common searcher - at times firey, at times beseeching, simultaneously deeply connected to his cultural teachings and its greatest protector and also an outsider to his community who could not recognize him. Undeterred by years of rejection, he became a wily dispenser of love and generosity, offering a resounding affirmation of beauty and belonging to the younger generations he taught as a professor in the school of Architecture.
Bill was a humble brag. An ordinary extraordinary. A man tempered between the heat of loss and the weight of loving the world. As I look back over a year of reading and re-reading his work in conversation with him week by week, until his voice left the conversation, I find myself preparing for my own disappearance. It is difficult to pick up the threads he left and hold them in my hands knowing we are all fated to leave this world, slip off our elegant coats of skin, and release stories into the wind as our bodies return to the earth and waterways of our home. Saying goodbye hasn't been easy. How do you say goodbye? How do you acknowledge all that has held beauty and value in your life - those you've loved, those who touched your life with kindness, those whose shelter allowed you to extend yourself into this world of sorrow? I don't have the answer.
I know I also need to let go of sunsets, making love, sneaking treats, and walks along a shore of slow rivers. And maybe then, it'll be under the light of a bright morning star I'll find the medicine of what it has meant to be used well by the world it shines upon. There is no rating I can give that will comprehend or represent what it means to accompany these teachings in my own life as long as it lasts.
"The structure of this book and the stories in it are an attempt to connect my personal ordeal and awakenings with the enlarged collective transformative experience, and ulimately to clarify the workings of the imagination and intentions behind creative action. The traditional understanding of duty and responsibility, which is always communal, is shown to be a recoverable quality of personal identity in the modern world. By recounting in a profoundly reflective and interpretative way the patterns of my personal ancestral migrations[...]demonstrate the power of memory as a source of imagination and wisdom."
Raweno:kwas (William Woodworth) was my mentor for only a few years before his death, and what he offered me, as a student and those near him (searching for deeper connections to cultural responsibilities) was his story.
I am not going to sugarcoat this book, which I've read 3 or 4 times - it is very difficult to read. However, the reasons for that are not difficult to understand at all. Bill's book is filled with his life, his story, his work, and his reconnection to his Indigenous identity as a homosexual Mohawk man over 30 years of engagement. To understand this story, required ultimately years of hearing his stories and integrating the whole of it into a picture of this gentle and deeply caring man.
Bill passed away in June 2025, and as he left my life, a deep silence entered.
Over the last months, I've deepened my relationship to this silence as a sobering way to foster an internal state that is able to live through times of grief in generative ways. Silence was often a form of hospitality that Bill offered in sharing his own personal teachings. In my minds eye, I see him offering a personal anecdote attached to a teaching - then simply sitting silently for a time while it sank in for all of us. This kind of reverie shared between the personal, collective, and the cosmos infused his teachings, and if I understand anything of what he shared, I undersand that I do not face the sorrows of this world in isolation, but am part of a wider world that reflects back the cosmos within myself.
The apprenticeship, for me, as it is for him within his book, is rooted in an extended sense of kinship with the surrounding watersheds, the trees and their root structures, the elders that guide each of us, and the star clusters that shape us. He would often gesture to remembering that if we can realize that we are the filaments of the relationships all around us, then we are fortified and potent enough to turn toward a world of confusion and keep going. The apprenticeship, as we read in his stories, is simply about the shaping of elders - or the ones who are capable of meeting the pain and suffering of the world with a dignified and profound (as Bill would say) bearing.
As you read his stories, what you'lll find is years of walking alongside grief, working with difficult cargo, and learning how one's purpose can be reshaped by this companionship. The result is you can learn how to hold more of what life brings to you with spiritual spaciousness capable of holding it all - the beauty and the loss, the despair and the yearning, the fear and the love. Nothing in life is uncomplicated, nor is it shallow. Bill often said, "If you find Indigneous knowledge glib and shallow, you're simply not going deep enough."
My experiences with the author are a vast composite of contradictions: he was fierce in his opinions and yet deeply forgiving, joyful and melancholy, intense and spacious, solitary and communal. His seasons were marked by a long fidelity to beauty, love, and loss. He never shied away from accepting life on life's terms, and teaching others how to gradually relinquish the fight to have life fit our own expectations without a careful attention to our duties and responsibilities. Bill was never perfect at his cultural duties, but that didn't create a barrier for him, because he also knew how to make peace with the imperfections inherent in community belonging in the context of historical trauma. The wounds and losses he encountered he patiently shaped into a life of meaning, humour, joy, depth, and beauty. It was Bill's acceptance of the world as it is, and his community as it was, that freed him ultimately to radically recieve every encounter as part of the stunning elegance of the world. His stories were riddled with meaninful exchanges with grocery clerks, hospital staff, and insurance salespeople he'd chat with on the phone. Every person that entered a shared space with him ultimately became another carrier of shared living memories and wisdom he'd impart impartially.
He was also an educator and a voice that rose on the behalf of the common searcher - at times firey, at times beseeching, simultaneously deeply connected to his cultural teachings and its greatest protector and also an outsider to his community who could not recognize him. Undeterred by years of rejection, he became a wily dispenser of love and generosity, offering a resounding affirmation of beauty and belonging to the younger generations he taught as a professor in the school of Architecture.
Bill was a humble brag. An ordinary extraordinary. A man tempered between the heat of loss and the weight of loving the world. As I look back over a year of reading and re-reading his work in conversation with him week by week, until his voice left the conversation, I find myself preparing for my own disappearance. It is difficult to pick up the threads he left and hold them in my hands knowing we are all fated to leave this world, slip off our elegant coats of skin, and release stories into the wind as our bodies return to the earth and waterways of our home. Saying goodbye hasn't been easy. How do you say goodbye? How do you acknowledge all that has held beauty and value in your life - those you've loved, those who touched your life with kindness, those whose shelter allowed you to extend yourself into this world of sorrow? I don't have the answer.
I know I also need to let go of sunsets, making love, sneaking treats, and walks along a shore of slow rivers. And maybe then, it'll be under the light of a bright morning star I'll find the medicine of what it has meant to be used well by the world it shines upon. There is no rating I can give that will comprehend or represent what it means to accompany these teachings in my own life as long as it lasts.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review