Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided,
I hope this column will presage many more with a spotlight on the Native American experience in the Colonial period and throughout the history of the United States. Through the present moment. It has always baffled me that there has never been the focus granted to / taken by other groups. It is particularly meaningful that Pres. Biden appointed Debra Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo people, U.S. secretary of the interior and the first Native American Cabinet member in U.S. history.
Yes Jeff. i am always amazed how quickly European settlers managed to destroy the nature while treating Native Americans as part of the fauna to be destroyed or moved around willy nilly. i recommend Braiding Sweetgrass as a start to understanding the Native American approach to nature. I always applaud the return of certain lands to Native American care as well as treating them as stakeholders in other places. And then we have the Gnome in South Dakota banned from all Native American sovereign nations there, rightfully so.
I was once on the Pine Ridge Reservation in SD and the people I met were so kind. Poverty stricken, yet too proud to beg, they sold arts and crafts to buy food for their children.
Many years ago I saw a program on PBS about the views the early European squatters had about the abundance of flora and fauna in "America." There was a diary entry or letter from one of them that worried that they'd never be able to use all of it up, or thoughts to that effect. I'd give anything to find that citation.
Yes, the "governor" of South Dakota who is always elsewhere. Even had her teeth fixed elsewhere. But she was there to shoot her dog and a goat. My husband has Lakota ancestry, so we are tuned in to South Dakota politics.
Leonard Peltier has been a political prisoner for more than 45 years falsely accused of aiding and abiding the murder of 2 FBI agents on the Pine Ridge reservation. It's all online to read. Even the prosecutor has lobbied for Leonard's release. Only Biden can pardon him now. Bill Clinton had him ready for a pardon then 400 FBI agents picketed the White House and Clinton removed the pardon. But he did pardon a tac cheat that had contributed to his campaign.
Absolutely agree! And I have said so for at least 50 years of my life. As a white descendent of the “alien invaders“ of this land, the least we can do is to appoint Native Americans and their descendants to leadership positions empowering them with authority to defend their constitutional rights and protect their native land.
Because of the nature of the job they do, one of which is preside over the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the next is management of Federal lands, which are often adjacent to the Reservations that were "granted" to the original inhabitants of this country by the Europeans who "settled" it.
From Wiki:
The United States secretary of the interior is the head of the United States Department of the Interior. The secretary and the Department of the Interior are responsible for the management and conservation of most federal land along with natural resources, leading such agencies as the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Geological Survey, Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Park Service. The secretary also serves on and appoints the private citizens on the National Park Foundation Board. The secretary is a member of the United States Cabinet and reports to the president of the United States. The function of the U.S. Department of the Interior is different from that of the interior minister designated in many other countries.
As the policies and activities of the Department of the Interior and many of its agencies have a substantial impact in the Western United States,[2] the secretary of the interior has typically come from a western state; only one secretary since 1949, Rogers Morton, was not a resident or native of a state lying west of the Mississippi River.
Let us not be too quick to judge that response, Marcia. The same question crossed my mind. Mr Posey and I may each wonder whether simply designating this or that Department for this or that segment of society addresses the underlying causes of the problems being discussed here.
It would be a shame to designate the D.o.I. as 'the Native American' agency and then congratulate ourselves for having resolved the underlying racism with a mere palliative.
Ned, I read that a couple of times and did not see that having a Native person in charge of DOI or any other agency was meant as the way to whitewash every harm done to the indigenous people of this nation. It seems it was meant as a start to setting things right and increasing Native participation in the work and progress of America. We clearly have a long way to go from where we are now.
I do not recall reading anything else by Mr Posey. If he is trolling, the judgement makes sense. If he is skeptical about the benefits of token appointment, however, then I share Mr Posey's skepticism, though I would likely support the appointment, case by case, in any and every case anyway. I am afraid that I will have to make up my own mind when more evidence emerges.
Thank you, Ally, for clarifying. Your response strikes me as quite consistent with the work that Heather shares with us regularly: to get as close to facts and clarification before we head off into opinion land. Would that such a pattern might become more common.
There was a good profile of Haaland in a recent New Yorker. Not so curiously, some refer to Interior as the Department of Everything Else, what with all of those agencies. A really complex job. Sort of nice to see someone like her in that position.
I don't see that either Sandra; you may just need to <reload> the page on your browser. If not, see > "leading such agencies as the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Geological Survey, Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Park Service."
Ally, thanks for the overview. It is amazing that people don't understand the workings of our departments and that Native people should be in charge of many of the agencies that deal with our public lands and our relations with native reservations. That should be a given.
This was a well organized, informative outline of some of the struggles of native Americans to participate in the American experience. Ken Burns recently produced a documentary entitled “The American Buffalo” which brings the treatment of native Americans out in a meaningful way. The history of the Buffalo is intertwined with the history of native Americans.
Burns’ documentary is powerful and forces one to confront the reality that “manifest destiny” required genocide for the people who lived on the land within the borders of this country long before Europeans arrived. Many parts of it are troubling. Anyone who hasn’t seen it should go to this PBS link: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo
Did we as a nation commit genocide against native Americans? Was there not that long ago a common saying "The only good Indian was a dead Indian? When were we not a racist Country? Why is racism so hard to extinguish?
I’m not sure I can think of an ethnicity that has not held an “us and them” attitude toward their own group and outsiders for at least some of the time down through the millennia that humans have existed on this planet. And the “us” is pretty much always considered better than “them,” or at least worthy of more consideration and care. We have these attitudes between races, and also within them.
It’s a “preference” for the “familiar” person that seems to be encoded in our DNA, and it’s something we have to overcome and denature, much as we have to overcome our “fight or flight” response to stressors that don’t require it … Nothing requires racism for our survival in this world.
Most people accept the concept of race as a biological certainty and it’s not.
If you study the origins of racism you’ll learn that it’s a made up concept to divide and conquer people for the benefit of those who want to hoard wealth.
White supremacy is ingrained in our individual and collective psyches and it has adversely affected
our humanity. For centuries it’s been supported by religion, laws and customs.
Us vs them based on skin color is absurd. White skin doesn’t make one superior but we’ve lived with a system that gives privilege to white skin.
I agree we don’t need racism to survive. We’d all be a lot better off without it.
Here's a thought concept that I've embraced for most of my life; I can't know if will ring with you, but I'm thinking so just now in this moment before reading further down the comments. In 'my world' racism is a made up word, much like most curse words. There is only one 'race' of humanoids, the human race. There does exist multiple ethnicities and tribes. "They and others" exist only within our fear instincts and in the hearts and minds of those who've not fully evolved, are not well or whole; a pitiful state of being. **Instincts are encoded in our DNA.
was my grandmother's reply to my question about Lamar Smith a black voter activist who was shot dead in broad daylight in Brookhaven MS 1955, and no witnesses came forward. I read about it in a Carl Rowan book in 1958.
And in 21st Century Floriduh we still don't talk about Racism or LGBT Rights or CLIMATE CHANGE by official decree of the Repugnant legislature & governor Ron DeSantis.
Good guess actually backed up by lots of research, amygdala dysfunction also affects the prefrontal cortex where ideas are held.. makes me wonder if Republicans in general may have unresolved PTSD problems among other ones - everybody breathe....
Interesting information, Robin. I know that research has shown that people are "hard wired" (brain function wise) in their decision-making functions. Some are "wired" for utilizing the prefrontal cortex, some are wired for utilizing the amygdala. One study I've read measured asked people to self-identify as liberal or conservative, and measured them when making an investment decision, basically high risk/reward vs. low risk/reward. The decision itself was not being measured (and interestingly, had nothing to do with one's self-labeling) but by the regions of the brain used to make the decision.
Robin, in the book Why We’re Polarized, in a study in which self-identified Republicans and Democrats were exposed to views that featured the opposite viewpoint, the Republicans became “substantially more conservative” and the Democrats “exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes…not statistically significant “. This would tend to indicate that even just exposure to different ideas by Republicans engendered fear and a doubling down on conservative ideas.
That is the secret to all propaganda, and the best propagandists know it. It matters not that people are stupid, which they are. It matters what buttons get pushed, how hard, and how often. Otherwise, the electorate would not be split 50/50. It would be 90/10 against the Republicans -- especially the current crowd of traitors.
I dream of a national class action suit to bankrupt the lying GOP and their wealthy puppetmasters for all the pain and suffering they've caused since 2016, call it mass PTSD. Alas, only national elections can address that. But DAMMIT there should be legal consequences for dishonesty and corruption in government on such a scale. Impeachments and removals are not enough; and we can't even get that. (Of course, they've been at it long before 2016)
That’s an interesting aspect Jeri…worldwide even I’d gander…so how many ‘tribes’ got along congenially? And then how many countries the same? That’s a definite study for better understanding/answers yet , huh? Thanks Jeri! Thanks Heather.
This whole thing in a nutshell just about gives credence to deeply rooted waring, fears, one upmanship,control..🤦♀️hmmmmm🤔😵💫
This is the most ridiculous aspect of the fears of people of color overtaking white Americans. Just as white Americans and Europeans and people all over the world have found reasons to treat each other like subhumans and fight, there is wide diversity in our non-white populations, and why would they be any more cohesively martial than the rest of us? Unless of course, they are all given the same legitimate grievances—which the MAGA crowd is intent upon doing.
The history of the animus to the other is very long. In ancient Greece everyone not Greek were barbarians. I related a story about asking my students in Sierra Leone about a certain minor tribe there and the answers were negative. I just finished a book about Eastern Europe which relates how this animus operated at times there.
Some of the American tribes got along fine. Others were vicious, trying their best to exterminate other tribes and take their land and treasure. Indians were no better or worse than Europeans--some were kind, others, butchers.
Instincts, are imprinted on our DNA dear Jeri. Like most / many of our other animal instincts, we must train them, re-train / grow them as we evolve into (hopefully_) mature adult persons. Eg., the racist, misogynist, etc. in a three piece suit 'is not' T. rex, but has much in common with and should cause recoil.
Also, it’s hard to change basic Human Nature; it’s a built-in survival mechanism to fear and distrust people who are different from ourselves. It takes real work to overcome this built-in fear. Not everyone has the inclination, time, or capability to analyze these deep rooted feelings. Much easier to hate.
Could it be that racism resides in the minds and hearts of people. To extinguish means to destroy…….. The other way would be education…..and it seems our elected’s want to eliminate that……..Are we in trouble……
Schools either are in the business of reinforcing abstractions, group categories, linear conceits, and the other fodder of the standardized testers, or they teach the opposite, humanities.
In addition to the injustices, discrimination, etc., recounted in today's newsletter, the genocide against the indigenous people throughout the Americas was astounding; take a look:
The author refers to this as the Indigenous Holocaust. The numbers are jaw-dropping. I had no idea of the scale until a friend sent me this article. Haven't read it in detail yet, but a quick look gives the gist of it.
Great question Harvey ! We were / are also "extractive" (exhaustively so). That's food for other conversations isn't it ? That is, what else we or many of us 'might be' , that badly needs reflection and addressing.
It’s an amazing eye opening documentary very well done worth seeing several times and has validity …maybe just maybe leads to ending this antiquated racist thought process ..humans 🙄..the patriarchal thing is a topper too..and as ancient also
Gary Anderson 2 hrs ago - "Burns’ documentary is powerful and forces one to confront the reality that “manifest destiny” required genocide for the people who lived on the land within the borders of this country long before Europeans arrived."
To say that it was disturbing is an understatement, our government set out a policy to destroy the food source of native Americans so that they could be forced onto reservations. The bison roamed from Florida to Alaska not just on the Great Plains, Native Americans relied on them for food, clothing, and housing. For 25,000 years, maybe more, they lived in harmony with the bison, there is much they can teach us about living in harmony with our environment, Global Warming anyone?
Thanks for the rec. on 'The American Buffalo', Gary. In my older years I have strayed into polite murder mysteries of the English country garden variety.
🤭🤫😉
Believe it or not, popular culture sometimes portrays our indigenous brothers and sisters in a sympathetic manner, if not with academic rigor.
I would second that kind recommendation Gary; Burn's docu. is so very well done. I must add though that it's intertwining reference is towards Native Americans who resided west of the Mississippi River, whose lives were very closely intertwined with the Bison. Would that be more accurate ?
That would indeed be more accurate. The story, you remember, is told through the lens of western art and the native commentators were plains and western tribes including one descendant of Quanah Parker. Incidentally any readers of HCR’s letters who are interested in western art need to see the Anschutz Collection in Denver. It is wonderful.
Money isn’t solving anything OBVIOUSLY no matter which end of it ‘you ain’t’ . How much land does anyone need ..? Killing isn’t the answer either ..again OBVIOUSLY..but back into time or repeating the divide and conquer we’re heading .
What DOES work is bringing people up to good living standards, good health care/education/sufficient food, housing, and caring for the mentally ill ( includes the narcissist with psychosis ie ‘dictatorial disorders’) as every population has and decent care for the young and elderly…it’s not a tall order, it’s a caring one.
None of the wars we’ve ever ever ever had I’d venture wasn’t induced by greed because someone didn’t have ‘enough’……read on….
Enoughness is a relative value apparently so dependent on perceived circumstances, and when it comes to power and its acquisition, that's enough to have started quite a few wars. In Hebrew the word dyeinu (die-AY-noo) expresses both the enoughness of something along with gratitude for what we got and have, and a readiness to move ahead. it's in our Passover story as we express our thanks having crossed over to the new and undiscovered land - which would actually be the Sinai peninsula. btw our contingent included a whole lot of Egyptians also very ready to escape the Pharaoh. We now know who the Pharaoh is today don't we?
Back to the eloquence of ‘The Indians’ Heather 🫶 and making OUR point, Robin 🫶. The Indians ( and the Mexicans btw of Mayans ) all lived ‘here’ before the ( Europeans) came. Composted the wastes, utilized the whole carcasses ( the insolent left to rot on the plains..thanks Ken Burns for the graphic reminders) …this whole peace/piece is so obvious and yet…. the forest through the trees…comes full circle, huh😢😔
President Biden's Infrastructure bill among other things contains money for two massive water projects in California that will secure the destruction of San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River and others that feed it, such as Trinity, which flows north through Indian Reservations, to join the Klamath, through the Lewiston Dam diversion tunnel. This in turn will lead to the local extinction of salmon in the waters of California, as well as sturgeon, smelt and numerous other endangered marine species. This in turn will injure many Americans whose ways of life depend on these once bountiful fish. All to satisfy the insatiable water demands of San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts beholden to large corporate farming interests and southern California municipal water utilities.
I speak of the Sites Reservoir Project and the Delta Conveyance. The former will draw something like 600M acre feet of water per year from the dying Sacramento River to give to the Bureau of Reclamation to fulfill contractual promises it presently can not keep to supply water to San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts and because the San Joaquin River has already.been sucked dry in its upper reached and is dead. The Delta Conveyance tunnels being undertaken by the State will be needed to see that it gets there, as the present distribution system will not be able to handle the load.
Secretary Haaland is fully on board with this massive joint undertaking as is her Commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, who is also a "Native" American. .Her name I seem to recall is Camille Touton.
.....The Hoopa Tribe of northern California is not happy with these developments and is among those who are suing Deb Haaland and the State of California to put a stop to these projects. It was Reclamation who destroyed their way of life when it built the Lewiston Dam in 1955 in order to divert water from the Trinity River in to the Sacramento. And ever since the Bureau of Reclamation has been stealing water from them and from all the peoples of California further downstream by taking about twice as much as it was authorized and entitled to under the enabling legislation for the dam and associated grants of water rights from the State. It takes about 1.2 M acre feet per year. And now wants to ship it as far south as San Bernardino.
Secretary Haaland : Cancel these projects. Tear down this dam.
I have friends who just witnessed the destruction of Iron Gate dam on the Klamath River in northern California. It is one of four being removed to restore the Klamath River to its natural state.
I have been following this with interest and one day hope to visit Oregon. What is going on in Oregon should be viewed in conjunction with water use developments in California.
As not all our readers may know, The Klamath flows out of Oregon in to California and the ocean near the border. The Trinity River is a major tributary of the Klamath. It is a California river that flows north to join it very near the state line. It in turn has several branches, one coming out of the coastal range, the other, from the Sierras.
The Trinity once supported great salmon runs. Historically
it was a prime spawning ground with deep holes, low banks, flood plains and rapids. The Hoopa Tribe lived along its banks and survived by fishing.
In the early years of American settlement, illegal commercial fishing operations on the lower Klamath caused salmon runs to plummet to the point where they were abandoned. During the Gold Rush, prospectors dredged the Trinity and mined the banks of its tributaries, leaving their waste in the stream and largely destroying its main stem as spawning ground.
Wars and depressions intervened. Then in the 1950s, with the help of politicians ambitious to see California achieve greatness, Reclamation sold the locals of the northern counties and their leaders on the idea that it would be good for them if a dam were built in the middle of the east branch that would allow most of its waters to be diverted in to the Sacramento River by means of a tunnel. Rights to this 'unappropristed" water were granted by the State Water Board to Reclamation. It obtained funding from Congress. And in the late fifties it built the Lewiston Dam solely for the purpose of taking this water and shipping it downstate to users who would pay them for it. Since construction, Reclamation has taken about twice what it told Congress was planned. It is being sued and someday will need to admit to this and agree to release more back to the river. In the meantime it is hustling to build the Sites pump storage reservoir in the hills above the Sacramento.
Restoration of salmon runs on the lower Klamath would depend on what happens in California, as much as Oregon. The Lewiston Dam is already sixty years old and only has another forty or so. It should go. And the Central Valley should get by with the water it already receives.
It seems to me our wastes are the total culprit of these ‘needed’ reconstructions…
If we could approach these supposed problems from the end of WE HAVE PLENTY..and not waste the vast amounts of water, food, recycle, reuse instead of trying to revamp mom nature pretty close to perfect plan we’d be closer to solutions. Relearning : years of accepted bad wasteful behaviors is HARD. Needing to teach ‘respect for the givens’- water/air/food/earth can… DOES work .
A glutinous society? Would anyone venture who is worst ? Poisoned the water..and anything downstream. Poisoned the air pollution kills how many a year..the toll isn’t even close to reality. Bad farming practices , clear cut the forests, put 10 million people in a few square miles w/o proper management…the money making was far ahead thought process than any realistic ‘after affect’ no doubt there!
Circular recycling is just coming into acknowledgment/invention/acceptable practice…I KNOW THIS!
Back-to-the-land farming/living came close and works but ….hard work -and living ‘citified’ has a lot of improvement to better sustain itself , roof top solar/gardening/water collection…I could go on and on..but the many are far too interested in getting rich!
Oh Lord…I’m on a rant …wake up…wake up! Some ‘WOKE’…and quickly that realization/reality was ( conveniently) coined ..bad, bad, bad….🤦♀️
How’s that song go 🎶we’re on the eve of destruction..🎶
The innocents will die first …so most of us will know ..in time?…ahead of time? …well, we’d best have Congress pass the bill the phrase ‘ahh…too late ‘ isn’t acceptable anymore.
Thank you! Why oh why do we (America) think so casually (or not at all) about results of non-thinking developments. “Think it through” should be next “God save America”!
Say what you will, American history is full of ugliness, cruelty and at times glorious beauty. HCR's book, "How the South Won the Civil War," particularly the Introduction and the first chapter sums up American history better than anything else that I have read. I was born in 1940 in Uvalde, Texas, very, very poor, one of seven children. My mom told me, "Richard, you can do and be anything that you want, it's up to you." I believed that but at age 20 when I was serving in the U.S. Army, I was taken aback when I saw a white soldier and a Black soldier sharing the same dorm room at the Army Language School. I asked myself, "Richard, what are you doing?" I analyzed it and am proud to say that I recognized it as confirmation bias - I had never seen this before. I then realized that my mom was right since I was male and white, that women and minorities didn't have the advantage that I had. I have been a staunch "women's libber" and civil rights advocate ever since. And, I love Katy Perry's song, "Roar." Katy is the modern Helen Reddy. Women of America, with the right to vote now in your pocket, it is really time to ROAR and vote the American Taliban into oblivion.
It seems unfair to place the burden for rescuing democracy on the backs of the previously marginalized half of our population but, if democracy is to be saved in November, I believe credit will be due to the wise women in our population.
Richard I send you thanks for being an ally especially for so long. Our CR/consciousness raising in the late '60s and on also woke us to seeing how men were affected by our inequality, especially when they didn't recognize it themselves - all the more damaging.
Robin, I'm not saying that it was an easy process. I had to keep challenging myself over and over and over. I never doubted the ultimate truth. Experience has been extremely helpful as I've encountered so many women and minorities much smarter and more talented than I am, though I have a Ph.D. and a J.D., both from Harvard. It is a constant state of becoming. I'll probably never reach the end but I will never stop striving.
“We have found in conventional aggregate empirical testing that the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, or its level of democracy, or whether it is Islamic or not. The very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is its level of violence against women.”
~ Robin Morgan quoting Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M.
Consider not the striving so much as the enjoyment of the constant becoming 😉
I remember reading a book a generation ago on the indigenous experience in North America in which guesstimates of the death toll ranged widely, with an upper point -- if my shrinking grey matter serves me at all -- of more than fifty million killed. My mother and l were chatting on the phone and she summed up what I was reading succinctly.
The French? Perhaps the most humane since they need native hunters as partners in the furrier business.
The Spanish? They needed people, sadly as slaves, to mine the gold.
The English? They want Indians out of there one way or another.
I've just read most of the comments, and tried to affirm them, but my affirmations don't register. This has been happening lately, quite often, and it's disturbing. How can I register, communicate, about this inability to affirm my affirmations?
So many well deserved “likes”! Add mine to all the rest! Btw, I have not seen anyone mention the NYTimes story this weekend on Leonard Leo….there was even a photo of the neighborhood protesters! Thank you lin for pointing him out early on as a doer of rotten things.
No joke! Here in Mendocino County, CA, the attitude of the newly arrived "Euros" 160 years ago was, even the babies have to be killed, because "a nit turns into a louse".
Yes Phil not that far away from where I live in the southern part at the county. I'm more of a hot chocolate girl myself so no wineries but they are really a big part of our culture and economy here...
The brutality of our treatment of the indigenous people is covered in HCR's book, "How the South Won the Civil War." It was racism then just as it is racism that is now motivating the Trump MAGA movement.
Heartbreaking, Carmen, is one way to describe it. Devastating is another way. How could we have done this? How can we possibly support the policies proposed and promoted by Trump? I was writing a novel about a bi-racial slave girl at the outbreak of the Civil War and then put it on pause. I'm motivated by reading HCR's books ("How the South Won the Civil War" and "Democracy Awakening") to return to the task. Speaking further of Trump, with what he has said about immigrants, that they are vermin, I could see him authorizing and directing an "extermination program," not unlike the Holocaust.
Please leave imaginative space, Richard, to return to your manuscript.
I don't know the location you've chosen but, whatever it is, I hope you imbue it further with much, much, many, many of the landscape and weather contingencies that have so beautifully energized Larry McMurtry, Thoreau, Joan Didion, Joan Baez.
I hope you imbue it further, too, with resonances from so many other of the humanities our schools have been programmed to neglect in favor of the abstracted who yet rule at so many dastardly levels.
Today post from Steve S. In his The Warning is chilling..and a promised return if electoral goes to Trump ( the holocaust - AND MANY FEAR THIS, rightfully). Also his Steve and Clare B. video/zoom was excellent!
That’s how an awful lot of indigenous people see it anyway—and saw it then. Prof Richardson mentions the controversy in passing, as if it were over and inconsequential, but it’s not and it wasn’t.
I have lived out on the Taos mesa for the last decade. No mail delivery. No services of any kind, and some of the worst poverty in the United States. But no issues with voting per se. The big issue is a lack of say in the doings of the Town of Taos, which affect us but where we have no vote.
The members of the Pueblo have a strong community comparatively, being one of the few indigenous communities that were never displaced. The Taos Pueblo has been consistently occupied for more than a thousand years.
One thing that surprised me here: the Pueblo members think of Richard Nixon as a hero because he signed the papers that gave them back the sacred Blue Lake, high on the local mountain, that had been stolen from them many years before.
The biggest split in Taos is between the “generational Tasosenos” whether Native, Hispano, and a few Anglo, and the new comers, especially the wealthy new comers that would remake Taos in the image of Aspen.
Many of the old Taos folk live outside of the Town of Taos for voting purposes and this is a big bone of contention. But the Pueblo and its members own a great deal of land, including some of the best spots, and therein lies their power. The Taos Mountain itself is off limits to anyone not a tribal member and will never be developed.
I’d go to jail AGAIN AND AGAIN if that’s what it took to Save America.
Because this fight has always been bigger than me, Richared.
It’s about restoring power where it belongs - TO YOU THE PEOPLE - and ending the tyrannical Biden regime’s reign of terror once and for all.
So I’m asking you to boldly and peacefully rebel against the Deep State radicals who’ve infiltrated our government by chipping in and declaring: I STAND WITH TRUMP! >
STAND WITH TRUMP
It’s no secret why the Marxists and Fascists in power are so desperate to purge our America First movement from existence.
They know that I’m this nation's last line of defense against the TOTAL DESTRUCTION.
And they’ll do ANYTHING, even burn our entire country to the ground, just to keep me out of office.
STAND WITH TRUMP
But mark my words, Richared. I WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED, BULLIED, OR JAILED INTO SILENCE. As long as YOU are by my side, I WILL NEVER SURRENDER!
As an erstwhile Republican, I can only lean on that great mid-century American philosopher, Arthur Fonzarelli (dba Fonzie): "Bull makes the world go round."
Growing up in Texas in the '40's and '50's, I was originally Libertarian, then Republican and as my political philosophy matured I became a Democrat and then a very Liberal Democrat who advocates for a system similar to that of the Scandinavian countries, pragmatic capitalism.
Yes, the Social Democrats in Europe have always been attractive to me, too. To call members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and more so the far more moderate President Biden, socialists or communists strikes me as ridiculous. I do not agree with many of the progressives' policies, but that is no reason to lie nor is it any justification for demagogy.
Thank you for posting this, Richard. I can’t say I “like” it but it’s good to know what’s out there. BTW was the misspelling of your name in the original? Proofreaders united want to know because that’s what we do.
Good catch, Katherine. Yes, the misspelling was in the original and they keep repeating the mistake. I know that the email is from the Trump camp immediately when I see the misspelling of my name.
On another topic, I've received 500 postcards from turnoutpac.org/postcards. One can order post cards from this group to be mailed to voters in swing states. They're free. One can contact the group by email at postcards@turnoutpac.org. I am taking the 500 postcards to the Lakeland Democratic Club meeting Thursday evening along with 500 stamps and will pass out 25 cards and stamps to those who want to participate. The cards come with full instructions along with suggested notes and the names and addresses of the targeted voters. And, I'll order more.
take this with a grain of salt but I have been looking at his behavior as a negative model, ie the devil, an actual reality, informing us in every possible detail how not to be. A really really really bad fairy tale....
Robin, Trump is the epitome of evil. There are no shades of gray here. His support comes from those who are xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic and racist, many of whom support the KKK goal of white Protestant supremacy. This is the 2nd episode of the American Civil War. The cancer is no longer regional for it has metastasized throughout the body politic. [My source is primarily "The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election and Why?" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920517740615
I was a teen during Watergate and a bona fide Nixon-hater. Within two years of his demise, however, I viewed President Nixon as a tragic hero brought down by a tragic flaw. Though I went on to learn not to hate anyone -- for that diminishes me spiritually -- I find Trump to be a tragic ZERO who IS a tragic flaw.
The fat, orange criminal was "good" for the billionaire classes and their legions of otherwise college-"educated," thus-neutered but well-paid lobbyists for these criminal classes.
The fat, orange criminal was also "good" for the evangelical tens of millions who got their jobs offshored to benefit the billionaires and embitter the abandoned. Same billionaires taught these evangelicals the "good" of hatreds, victimization-re-direction, violence, and continued stupidity by slogans and abstractions on social media the billionaires have long now controlled.
That's why the great middle as I'm calling it is larger than both ends put together and will have a more salient set of resolutions, because on our fringes we have people looking in the both other directions and taking time to evaluate literally our values in action.Apparently the two ends
function as outriggers do on a catamaran, where the balance is in the middle and the ends act as explorers of need and desire in seeming opposition - where they both inform the boat how to adjust itself. You could compare the sails catching the wind to the basic structures created as functionings of democracy…we need some smoother sailing.
I did not like President Nixon at all. Nevertheless, I respect him in retrospect for having enough of a regard for the rule-of-law to hand over the incriminating evidence when the Supreme Court instructed him to do so.
Revision. Justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh proved they were not fit for the Court; I felt so in the cases of the latter two before the revelations involving Ms Hill and Dr Blasey-Ford emerged.
Alito had slipped my notice as I was in Iraq at the time and was not even aware of the nomination; had I followed it, I am sure I would have felt that the guy was evasive and having a weird relationship with power, as the other two demonstrated.
That last strike worried me about how they would view the powerless and neglected in our society.
Yeah. I know what you mean, Jeri. When President Biden is re-elected, I hope he feels secure enough to up-load two more Justices to restore one-vote G.O.P.-appointed majority that should be in place. Had Judge, now Att'y General, Garland been rightfully confirmed, there would be a 5-to-4 G.O.P. majority.
EDIT: not to mention two corrupt Justices on the Court now. Justices Thomas, Alito, and (at least I thought so at the time) Kavanaugh are not fit to be on the Supreme Court.
I had thought that Taos was governed mutually by the native, Hispanic and white people who live there. I had hoped to move to my condo there but it didn't work out, but one of the many charms of the city was that it WASNT Aspen and hopefully would never be. The poverty and inequality are hard to live with.
Any idea why New Mexico is so poverty-stricken? I always thought it stunningly beautiful but am just now realizing how much poverty there is along with the mountains. Thoughts?
It is heavily Hispanic, heavily Native American, agricultural without enough water. These people are poor, and their history is mostly exploiting natural resources. There is still some oil and gas, there is still mining. And then there's Los Alamos and Sandia and Alamogordo, my customers when I was there. There's either very well educated prosperous folks, or very poor ones. It's tough in Santa Fe seeing the folks with their beemers being served by poor guys with pickup trucks held together with baling wire.
Forty years ago, I was an intern for the Republican Policy Committee in the Senate and gathering information from various committees. One was the non-standing committee on Indian Affairs and the staff Director and I were temporary buds. He asked me one day to guess the President who had done the most for Native Americans.
⚖️
Since I was a Republican altar-boy, I figured I should guess Republican. My first two guesses were Presidents Lincoln and T. Roosevelt; no dice. So I tried two from the Democratic Party: Presidents L.B. Johnson and F.D. Roosevelt; no way. I may even have thrown a hail-mary with President Eisenhower; nope-a-dope. When the gentleman told me it was President Nixon, I almost fell over in surprise. My bud went on to give much the same explanation as you did.
😯
I also recall that Carl Jung had a bit to say about the Puebloes in his memoir, 'Memories, Dreams, and Reflections'. 😇
There’s a *great* book by the Sioux political theorist and historian Vine Deloria Jr about Jung’s theories and the general theology of the Plains Indians. Jung was in Pueblo country on a lecture trip and paused to spend an afternoon with a man who was actually Hopi (and Pueblo and Hopi aren’t great friends) but better at English than the local Pueblo people so they suggested him as someone to talk with about Indian ideas. That was his whole experience of the culture, but it resonated strongly and he talked about it in letters and books for the rest of his life. Deloria admires him, though he is frank about his limitations as well. A riveting book!
Yep, my dad's best friend was a MacDonald. But I was in a store in Ontario one winter day that sold plaid scarves. I bought a Stewart one (red looks warmer) and was chatting with the lady ringing up my purchase--till she saw the name on my credit card, fell silent, set her lips in a straight line and wouldn't look at me for the rest of the transaction! I could only imagine she was a MacDonald... (But I'm sure most immigrant Campbells were serfs who got the laird's last name the way enslaved people in the South got their master's last names. Rest assured, not coming for you!)
Yeah, I first heard about all of that in Australia with a Campbell and he was recounting the feud while playing billards at a hotel in the Blue Mountains. I asked him all about it out of curiosity. Then I introduced myself as a ten year old to this gentleman in his twenties. To his credit, your distant kin blushed and apologized. How could I be upset?
💓
When we move back to Pittsburgh, the neighbour across the street was a Campbell and his herding shepherd dog would kindly escort our 'terrierist' back to our home as one gentlemanly shepherd. Mr Campbell found the apparent confusion by his dog of this terrier as a little bo-peep exceedingly humourous. The local newspaper soon had one of those little vignettes like 'Life in these United States' in "Readers' Digest" featuring this example of 'herd community' to our and their great joy. What is not to like?
🥳
Lastly, I had wanted to serve the country since I was little and, when my finance career cratered and I was stuck in D.C. feeling hopeless, it was a McCampbell, same clan I am sure, who provided the entrée for me to enter into government. Sadly that fine, refined, genteel gentleman -- a tech success who heard the call of noblesse oblige -- died young soon thereafter. It was a bitter loss for many of us. No feud with this generous dude.
😢
As a parting aside, a Scotsman whom I knew in N.Y.C. through a week-end beach house explained what he believed had occurred. Scotland had been evolving from a tribal land to a nation state. The large clans opposed it and that parturition of a new and common nation, like other miracles of birth, proved to be painful. I was grateful to him for explaining the history. I did not really have a dog in the fight, but what my bud said made sense to me.
💡
But let us remember, always, that the Mexicans paid for Hadrian's Wall. 😅
"Katie Friel and Emil Mella Pablo of the Brennan Center noted in 2022 that, for example, people who live on Nevada’s Duckwater reservation have to travel 140 miles each way to get to the closest elections office. "
Surely there is some legal ground for that to be worthy of a lawsuit. It is an unreasonable burden upon citizens government has a duty to address. A satellite office? An itinerant election office in a van? Voting is the cornerstone of the republic and it is negligent on our society's part that we have failed to make it an unalienable human right. Liberty and Justice for ALL.
Voting by mail, as all Oregonians do, would solve this issue and allow tribal members and everyone else to vote at their convenience. We can use drop boxes throughout every county or mail w/ no postage required.
Republican cheat Louis DeJoy is still postmaster. He took away mailboxes and slowed delivery. Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota is going after the post office problems there. Of course it didn’t make the major news outlets. https://youtu.be/DDqGj9Y5_lY?si=TnonpWUn_2qrXZjn
As I understand it, some members of the PO Board were set to term out and then an appointee could take their place. A Democratic majority could oust DeJoy. I wo deeed what the holdup was. DeJoy has many conflicts of interest!!!
Our Republicans believe, instead of your words, that "Voting is the cornerstone of the white racists of the republic," no?
And the majority justices of the Clarence court believe, just as importantly, that voting is the cornerstone of medieval theocrats who sanctimoniously intend to package as many women as they can into whatever packages state power can coerce them.
Ah, America. Did the native peoples not see this coming -- so many grubby illiterate to nature, so many otherwise also illiterate to human beings who never chose to be packaged by the vulgar, the biggest thieves, the most pious hypocrites for Grifter-in-Chief?
From time to time I used to see reference to studies of US "science literacy" in the news, but my impression is that they don't even report on it anymore. Literacy is a good metaphor because it refers to skills that become part of human consciousness, reading and writing; not just answering quiz-show like questions about the subject.
And should we not aim for "literacy" in all important aspects of life? Humanities, human relations, politics, history, and above all nature. Nature is sunrise and birdsong is an unspoiled wilderness. It is also the apparatus of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, that is something our species has built just as beavers build dams, though lacking the same ecological integration. We ARE nature, but we are clever enough in altering our homespace that some of us talk about "conquering nature", a pathetic and dangerous conceit. We are every bit as dependent of nature as the beaver or a fir tree, and nature is indifferent to our pretenses. Everything is nature. and nature is indifferent to our egotistical posturing; but there are inevitable consequences. WE are cutting our own roots, roots the First Nations people have respected as a way of life.
And the conceit of racism? Malignant narcissism. Pernicious excrement of bulls. Worse because it's toxic waste. We have been gifted beyond measure with our senses and intelligence and ability to feel, on a planet that can be dangerous but also abundantly nourishing to body and soul. Yet we play so many clueless and/or pernicious games as our hours upon the stage slip away.
It's four in the morning here in the mountains of Kyushu, Japan, J L.
I like lots I see here in your "From time to time" post. I hate the copulative verb you use and its labeling sweep, however, when you actually write, "Everything is nature."
No, J L, and you know the thousands of names, examples I could list in evidence to the contrary. Dark money. Republicans. Standardized testers pushing the further abstractions upon otherwise helpless youth in schools. Demagogue nationalists in countries around the world. All united by dark money, standardized testers, and hordes of Republicans, billionaires, and their allied evangelical contingents for hatred and murder.
Please, J L, do not ever again use simply the copulative "is" when you regard nature, unless you are God, and are as such authoring an early set of lines in Genesis.
Today's column is a perfect example of the value of this newsletter to readers. Dr. Richardson takes a significant anniversary and appends historical notes relevant to its subject in chronological order and lucid prose. I would never have learned about most of these matters without this newsletter. The only subjects covered with which I was even vaguely familiar were Jim Thorpe, the WW2 code talkers (I never knew there was a WW1 precedent) and the more recent struggles of indigenous people to cast votes in the face of new state restrictions.
Concerning the latter, the Roberts Court will live in infamy for the sheer number of decisions it has issued that have produced calamitous effects on our country. The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy. The Roberts Court's neutering of the 1965 voting rights act (the 2013 Holder and 2021 Brnovich decisions) is a travesty based on specious reasoning that is being disproven before our eyes. The imposition by states of significant restrictions on the opportunity to vote, specifically targeted at minority populations, gives the lie to the "improvement" cited by Justice Roberts eleven years ago. All you need to know about Brnovich is that Alito wrote it, so you know it's legal sophistry based on factoids of dubious provenance.
The Bill of Rights has seldom been a part of our Constitution that a ruling class seemed to recognize when they took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Assaults on our First Amendment now seem under attack by people who should be regarded as enemies, "both domestic AND foreign."
I love seeing this history of native people struggling for rights from those who seized, stole their land.
And these settlers -- all illegal, none securing permission from original inhabitants -- how well do they acknowledge even their own laws? Take a court in Washington, D. C., which some call supreme.
How well does this court honor its own highest laws? -- such as its Article 14, section three, which clearly, plainly rules unfit for office any who, having pledged allegiance to that supreme set of laws, might have risen in insurrection against it?
How well does that court honor its own highest law, or set of laws?
What amazes me about the Native Americans I have met and tutored is how kind they are and forgiving. Only one one occasion did I ever have an issue with a Native American and I chalk it off to his being very drunk.
I love going to pow-wows and have been fortunate to attend pow-wows from several tribes.
I tutored Native American children for 4 years when I was in college and I hate to say it, but I think I learn more from the children than they did from me.
I doubt that there is a single treaty the Federal and State governments haven't broken.
Good to see your up-close-&-personal involvements, Gary.
How long has it been that our federal and state governments have been serving our commercial, abstracted, bribing, predatory classes?
These classes, organized to new depths of perfidies since the far-right foundations of the Powell memo in 1971, since then staffed with ranks and files of the standardized tested, the biz school glassy-eyed, and Supreme Court bribed and perjured, have all united further under their fat, greasy, sleazy, smelly-diapered criminal-in-chief.
But look, Gary: we somehow yet have remnants of a democracy who, come November, can vote.
Yup, racism and discrimination are still very much alive and kicking. And the orange convict even made it “salonfähig” again… Talking about “immigrants should be deported”, and “we were here first”, when are the American Natives starting to deport the white Americans of European ancestry?
America was settled via racism and discrimination. The Northern Europeans who came to the New World were predatory. Their descendants ate still predatory.
Jenn, two of my grandparents came here 120 years ago, early 1900s, from Hungary.
They're outside your "predatory" adjective for ones who came from northern Europe.
But I've parallel ancestors who did come from northern Europe, before 1776. Scotch-Irish, they were poor. They'd suffered under the English before they left the old world, came to the new. And in America they scoffed at the royal crown's command not to cross the Appalachians. Cross instead they did, before 1776.
So many around the world suffer and need to move. It's with them I sympathize -- so many desperate who at great risk have to cross borders, dangerous seas.
Original inhabitants? Can't we with them sympathize, too?
Why can't our schools have as goal to teach all to see "others" as individuals, all in fraught, complicated narratives? Or have we so abandoned humanities that we've surrendered to the masters of making money only, with their glib labels, group abstractions?
I live just across those Appalachians in deep-red WV, who will likely go all Trumpian again . I strive to educate which is acknowledged mostly by trolls , upside down or TFG flags . It would be slightly past a miracle to see it flip or recognize the error of their ways! Sad.
That is a big leap - to assume that "their descendants" are predatory. Lumping people together is not helpful. SOME Europeans who came here were predatory. My impression is that SOME people of every nationality, ethnicity, and religion are predatory.
Jenn, that seems harsh, and incomplete. Harsh in the sense that some who settled here did so to escape persecution at home (in much the same way that waves of immigrants from Central and South America are doing now) and I don't believe that descendants are predatory.
Incomplete, in the sense that, while I'm no scholar of world history, I do recall from my education that (North) America wasn't the only continent to be colonized, nor were her aboriginal peoples the only ones to be "converted", subjugated, forced to assimilate, or annihilated. European powers were responsible for worldwide inhumanity in their rapacious quest for treasure and land. And Africa even today provides plenty of horrific examples of intracontinental mass murder on a genocidal level, rape and displacement of people caused by "tribal" warfare within the Black race.
Check this map to see how voter suppression on tribal lands takes place. The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in America and spans almost 16,000 square miles across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. It has a poverty rate of 38% - twice that of the rest of Arizona.
The Navajo Nation has just twenty six post offices and postal provider offices. Scottsdale which is tiny in comparison in size has twelve post offices. This difference in access to postal services makes it much easier for urban voters and penalizes Native Americans from voting by mail.
I'm in Utah now where voting has been by mail for a long time. Navajo on the reservation had a difficult time voting for many years because most do not have a house number (the housing is not in neat little rows but spread out over many miles). but that was addressed in the last presidential election. Our county elected two Democratic Navajo out of three commissioners, and I noticed last week that the local paper profiled three white Republican candidates for commissioner but not the Navajo candidate. These weren't labeled editorials, just "the news."
I should have explained that in the 2020 election, the rules were changed to allow voters to use a post office box or a chapter house on the reservation, and two Navajo candidates were elected. I assume they are not running again, but there is a Navajo woman on the ballot, and she was omitted by the county newspaper. There are a lot of her yard signs in our community near the rez, but not so much nearer the county seat. It's a huge county, larger than some states, and there's a lot of local resentment against public lands, which Native peoples are involved in protecting.
It continues to amaze me what lengths some will go to make some animals more equal than others, to reference Orwell’s Animal Farm. Apparently, some people will always need an “other”…
I have long had questions about the rights of our Indigenous population and many of them were answered by your piece today. Our treatment of this population has been so shameful. Thanks for shining the light for me.
The fear of change seems to be a constant and that is a very deep subject having implications for a whole way of life including one's own body, certainly values, and all the actions that humans are capable of, especially speech these days. When we call speech free what do we actually mean? A big reminder that speech. itself. is. an. action.
We spend so much time suggesting how the rest of the world can improve behaviour yet so rarely take time to mourn our own appalling actions towards so many.
Good idea for a start, but a more extensive project, namely Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s History of the United States, would provide a broader, deeper, understanding of the catastrophe perpetrated by the US government against the indigenous inhabitants of its part of North America.
Terrific essay today. I absolutely LOVE the Elizabeth Peratrovich story! I hope Alaska will highlight & honor her in all the ways possible. Being sure each time to commemorate her savage nature.
We here in Alaska celebrate Elizabeth Petrovich Day on February 16. It is part of the school curriculum to tell her story. Here is a link to more information:
I encourage every US citizen, or anyone else also, to read the US Constitution's amendments. No other reading is possible that we are a nation of bigots (I have better words than this) who deny rights of others not like ourselves. (See why additional amendments are always necessary, but still not adequate.) There is no other conclusion regarding establishing equal rights under the law, which in US history always has its caveats.
Matt, it's a nice thought but sentencings and court proceedings generally are not open to public comments. In any criminal case the 'victims' are allowed to speak and generally all voters are victims, but I am skeptical your letters get heard. Suggestion: Contact a voting or public interest group that has lawyers and ask them to file an Amicus Brief that contains your letters. Amicus Briefs are when interested persons not a party to the lawsuit wish to express an opinion in the litigation and thus petition the court for permission to file an Amicus Brief which means 'friend of the court'.
I hope this column will presage many more with a spotlight on the Native American experience in the Colonial period and throughout the history of the United States. Through the present moment. It has always baffled me that there has never been the focus granted to / taken by other groups. It is particularly meaningful that Pres. Biden appointed Debra Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo people, U.S. secretary of the interior and the first Native American Cabinet member in U.S. history.
Every Secretary of the Interior should be Native from here on out.
Perhaps 23,000 years of living on the land without destroying it, may give some insight into how to best preserve the land. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/10/07/how-human-history-is-being-rewritten-by-footprints-in-new-mexico/71043675007/
Yes Jeff. i am always amazed how quickly European settlers managed to destroy the nature while treating Native Americans as part of the fauna to be destroyed or moved around willy nilly. i recommend Braiding Sweetgrass as a start to understanding the Native American approach to nature. I always applaud the return of certain lands to Native American care as well as treating them as stakeholders in other places. And then we have the Gnome in South Dakota banned from all Native American sovereign nations there, rightfully so.
I was once on the Pine Ridge Reservation in SD and the people I met were so kind. Poverty stricken, yet too proud to beg, they sold arts and crafts to buy food for their children.
Many years ago I saw a program on PBS about the views the early European squatters had about the abundance of flora and fauna in "America." There was a diary entry or letter from one of them that worried that they'd never be able to use all of it up, or thoughts to that effect. I'd give anything to find that citation.
In a relative short amount of time, they were able to make sure some species became extinct and acted like everything they saw was a commodity.
Who/what is the Gnome?
I believe it refers to SD Governor Christie Noem, pronounced "gnome."
What, you mean, like "guh-nome"?
Kristy Noem
Yes, the "governor" of South Dakota who is always elsewhere. Even had her teeth fixed elsewhere. But she was there to shoot her dog and a goat. My husband has Lakota ancestry, so we are tuned in to South Dakota politics.
Of course! Should have realized! ;-)
Leonard Peltier has been a political prisoner for more than 45 years falsely accused of aiding and abiding the murder of 2 FBI agents on the Pine Ridge reservation. It's all online to read. Even the prosecutor has lobbied for Leonard's release. Only Biden can pardon him now. Bill Clinton had him ready for a pardon then 400 FBI agents picketed the White House and Clinton removed the pardon. But he did pardon a tac cheat that had contributed to his campaign.
My song: "Mr. President, Please Par5don Leonard Peltier." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ell2BLzNA
I wish Heather would take up this cause. I tried putting people together to have a major concert in DC but there was little interest.
Absolutely agree! And I have said so for at least 50 years of my life. As a white descendent of the “alien invaders“ of this land, the least we can do is to appoint Native Americans and their descendants to leadership positions empowering them with authority to defend their constitutional rights and protect their native land.
Why?
Because of the nature of the job they do, one of which is preside over the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the next is management of Federal lands, which are often adjacent to the Reservations that were "granted" to the original inhabitants of this country by the Europeans who "settled" it.
From Wiki:
The United States secretary of the interior is the head of the United States Department of the Interior. The secretary and the Department of the Interior are responsible for the management and conservation of most federal land along with natural resources, leading such agencies as the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Geological Survey, Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Park Service. The secretary also serves on and appoints the private citizens on the National Park Foundation Board. The secretary is a member of the United States Cabinet and reports to the president of the United States. The function of the U.S. Department of the Interior is different from that of the interior minister designated in many other countries.
As the policies and activities of the Department of the Interior and many of its agencies have a substantial impact in the Western United States,[2] the secretary of the interior has typically come from a western state; only one secretary since 1949, Rogers Morton, was not a resident or native of a state lying west of the Mississippi River.
Thank you for graciously answering what I immediately took to be an offensive, ignorant question.
Let us not be too quick to judge that response, Marcia. The same question crossed my mind. Mr Posey and I may each wonder whether simply designating this or that Department for this or that segment of society addresses the underlying causes of the problems being discussed here.
It would be a shame to designate the D.o.I. as 'the Native American' agency and then congratulate ourselves for having resolved the underlying racism with a mere palliative.
Ned, I read that a couple of times and did not see that having a Native person in charge of DOI or any other agency was meant as the way to whitewash every harm done to the indigenous people of this nation. It seems it was meant as a start to setting things right and increasing Native participation in the work and progress of America. We clearly have a long way to go from where we are now.
It is an offensive, ignorant question, like most of that asshole's posts here.
I do not recall reading anything else by Mr Posey. If he is trolling, the judgement makes sense. If he is skeptical about the benefits of token appointment, however, then I share Mr Posey's skepticism, though I would likely support the appointment, case by case, in any and every case anyway. I am afraid that I will have to make up my own mind when more evidence emerges.
Thank you, Ally, for clarifying. Your response strikes me as quite consistent with the work that Heather shares with us regularly: to get as close to facts and clarification before we head off into opinion land. Would that such a pattern might become more common.
Thank you; I try to add what I can to conversations. I seem to have put a bee in the bonnet of one fellow Reader, however.
Of course, Ally. We ALL have bonnets and bees are ubiquitous. That is why dialogue despite that dynamic is so valuable. Like this one, for instance.
¡Hear, here!
Bravo Al.
There was a good profile of Haaland in a recent New Yorker. Not so curiously, some refer to Interior as the Department of Everything Else, what with all of those agencies. A really complex job. Sort of nice to see someone like her in that position.
Thank you, Ally, as always, for your informative and helpful response. ✌️
Missing, Ally, the last part of your Comment from "Bureau of Indian Affairs and "
I don't see that either Sandra; you may just need to <reload> the page on your browser. If not, see > "leading such agencies as the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Geological Survey, Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Park Service."
I don't see that....
Nor do I.
If you turn the phone sideways Ally I found you can see the whole post! I didn't think of trying that!
Ally, thanks for the overview. It is amazing that people don't understand the workings of our departments and that Native people should be in charge of many of the agencies that deal with our public lands and our relations with native reservations. That should be a given.
I agree 👍!!!
#PublicHealthHaiku Stewards of the land / Live in harmony with nature / Victimized by racism.
This was a well organized, informative outline of some of the struggles of native Americans to participate in the American experience. Ken Burns recently produced a documentary entitled “The American Buffalo” which brings the treatment of native Americans out in a meaningful way. The history of the Buffalo is intertwined with the history of native Americans.
Burns’ documentary is powerful and forces one to confront the reality that “manifest destiny” required genocide for the people who lived on the land within the borders of this country long before Europeans arrived. Many parts of it are troubling. Anyone who hasn’t seen it should go to this PBS link: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo
Did we as a nation commit genocide against native Americans? Was there not that long ago a common saying "The only good Indian was a dead Indian? When were we not a racist Country? Why is racism so hard to extinguish?
In answer to your questions; yes, yes, yes, and the difficulty is rooted in denial of the existence of racism.
Isn't it interesting that racists deny being racist and all the while supporting policies that are blatantly racist?
I’m not sure I can think of an ethnicity that has not held an “us and them” attitude toward their own group and outsiders for at least some of the time down through the millennia that humans have existed on this planet. And the “us” is pretty much always considered better than “them,” or at least worthy of more consideration and care. We have these attitudes between races, and also within them.
It’s a “preference” for the “familiar” person that seems to be encoded in our DNA, and it’s something we have to overcome and denature, much as we have to overcome our “fight or flight” response to stressors that don’t require it … Nothing requires racism for our survival in this world.
Most people accept the concept of race as a biological certainty and it’s not.
If you study the origins of racism you’ll learn that it’s a made up concept to divide and conquer people for the benefit of those who want to hoard wealth.
White supremacy is ingrained in our individual and collective psyches and it has adversely affected
our humanity. For centuries it’s been supported by religion, laws and customs.
Us vs them based on skin color is absurd. White skin doesn’t make one superior but we’ve lived with a system that gives privilege to white skin.
I agree we don’t need racism to survive. We’d all be a lot better off without it.
I’m in near violent agreement with your last sentence!
Your last sentence is one of the most beautiful and succinct I believe I have ever read.
It should be emblazoned upon tshirts and merchandise, with profits used to better mankind.
Here's a thought concept that I've embraced for most of my life; I can't know if will ring with you, but I'm thinking so just now in this moment before reading further down the comments. In 'my world' racism is a made up word, much like most curse words. There is only one 'race' of humanoids, the human race. There does exist multiple ethnicities and tribes. "They and others" exist only within our fear instincts and in the hearts and minds of those who've not fully evolved, are not well or whole; a pitiful state of being. **Instincts are encoded in our DNA.
"We don't talk much about that here"
was my grandmother's reply to my question about Lamar Smith a black voter activist who was shot dead in broad daylight in Brookhaven MS 1955, and no witnesses came forward. I read about it in a Carl Rowan book in 1958.
And in 21st Century Floriduh we still don't talk about Racism or LGBT Rights or CLIMATE CHANGE by official decree of the Repugnant legislature & governor Ron DeSantis.
“This one thing is not like the other.” Tribe against tribe. Fear comes from the amygdala, not empathy. Just a guess.
Good guess actually backed up by lots of research, amygdala dysfunction also affects the prefrontal cortex where ideas are held.. makes me wonder if Republicans in general may have unresolved PTSD problems among other ones - everybody breathe....
Interesting information, Robin. I know that research has shown that people are "hard wired" (brain function wise) in their decision-making functions. Some are "wired" for utilizing the prefrontal cortex, some are wired for utilizing the amygdala. One study I've read measured asked people to self-identify as liberal or conservative, and measured them when making an investment decision, basically high risk/reward vs. low risk/reward. The decision itself was not being measured (and interestingly, had nothing to do with one's self-labeling) but by the regions of the brain used to make the decision.
Robin, in the book Why We’re Polarized, in a study in which self-identified Republicans and Democrats were exposed to views that featured the opposite viewpoint, the Republicans became “substantially more conservative” and the Democrats “exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes…not statistically significant “. This would tend to indicate that even just exposure to different ideas by Republicans engendered fear and a doubling down on conservative ideas.
That is the secret to all propaganda, and the best propagandists know it. It matters not that people are stupid, which they are. It matters what buttons get pushed, how hard, and how often. Otherwise, the electorate would not be split 50/50. It would be 90/10 against the Republicans -- especially the current crowd of traitors.
It occurs to me to call Rs 'fraidybrains' 🥶
Repubs can cause PTSD
I dream of a national class action suit to bankrupt the lying GOP and their wealthy puppetmasters for all the pain and suffering they've caused since 2016, call it mass PTSD. Alas, only national elections can address that. But DAMMIT there should be legal consequences for dishonesty and corruption in government on such a scale. Impeachments and removals are not enough; and we can't even get that. (Of course, they've been at it long before 2016)
That’s an interesting aspect Jeri…worldwide even I’d gander…so how many ‘tribes’ got along congenially? And then how many countries the same? That’s a definite study for better understanding/answers yet , huh? Thanks Jeri! Thanks Heather.
This whole thing in a nutshell just about gives credence to deeply rooted waring, fears, one upmanship,control..🤦♀️hmmmmm🤔😵💫
This is the most ridiculous aspect of the fears of people of color overtaking white Americans. Just as white Americans and Europeans and people all over the world have found reasons to treat each other like subhumans and fight, there is wide diversity in our non-white populations, and why would they be any more cohesively martial than the rest of us? Unless of course, they are all given the same legitimate grievances—which the MAGA crowd is intent upon doing.
There is no evidence that indigenous American nations treated others as subhumans.
The history of the animus to the other is very long. In ancient Greece everyone not Greek were barbarians. I related a story about asking my students in Sierra Leone about a certain minor tribe there and the answers were negative. I just finished a book about Eastern Europe which relates how this animus operated at times there.
Some of the American tribes got along fine. Others were vicious, trying their best to exterminate other tribes and take their land and treasure. Indians were no better or worse than Europeans--some were kind, others, butchers.
Jeri, you’re right! But we can train ourselves to like people who are not in our restrictive tribe.
Instincts, are imprinted on our DNA dear Jeri. Like most / many of our other animal instincts, we must train them, re-train / grow them as we evolve into (hopefully_) mature adult persons. Eg., the racist, misogynist, etc. in a three piece suit 'is not' T. rex, but has much in common with and should cause recoil.
Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street?
We can and I have for all of my adult life.
As wonderful as our country is and as grateful I am to be an American, it is parts of our history such as this that make me feel so ashamed....
For me the better descriptor is “remorse” but both words are a fair distance from pride.
Also, it’s hard to change basic Human Nature; it’s a built-in survival mechanism to fear and distrust people who are different from ourselves. It takes real work to overcome this built-in fear. Not everyone has the inclination, time, or capability to analyze these deep rooted feelings. Much easier to hate.
Could it be that racism resides in the minds and hearts of people. To extinguish means to destroy…….. The other way would be education…..and it seems our elected’s want to eliminate that……..Are we in trouble……
It's an abstraction, Harvey -- racism.
Schools either are in the business of reinforcing abstractions, group categories, linear conceits, and the other fodder of the standardized testers, or they teach the opposite, humanities.
In addition to the injustices, discrimination, etc., recounted in today's newsletter, the genocide against the indigenous people throughout the Americas was astounding; take a look:
https://www.se.edu/native-american/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2019/09/A-NAS-2017-Proceedings-Smith.pdf
The author refers to this as the Indigenous Holocaust. The numbers are jaw-dropping. I had no idea of the scale until a friend sent me this article. Haven't read it in detail yet, but a quick look gives the gist of it.
Great question Harvey ! We were / are also "extractive" (exhaustively so). That's food for other conversations isn't it ? That is, what else we or many of us 'might be' , that badly needs reflection and addressing.
Thank you for providing the link to American Buffalo.
It’s an amazing eye opening documentary very well done worth seeing several times and has validity …maybe just maybe leads to ending this antiquated racist thought process ..humans 🙄..the patriarchal thing is a topper too..and as ancient also
Not to be confused with David Mamet’s play of the same name. (The American buffalo in the play is a buffalo-head nickel.)
Numismatic correction: Indian Head, Buffalo Tail nickel.
Gary Anderson 2 hrs ago - "Burns’ documentary is powerful and forces one to confront the reality that “manifest destiny” required genocide for the people who lived on the land within the borders of this country long before Europeans arrived."
And long before that:
"𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑢𝑠. 𝐻𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎. 𝐻𝑒 𝑔𝑜𝑡 𝑜𝑓𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒. 𝐿𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑡."
https://www.facebook.com/reel/931718722082799
Thanks for the link.
To say that it was disturbing is an understatement, our government set out a policy to destroy the food source of native Americans so that they could be forced onto reservations. The bison roamed from Florida to Alaska not just on the Great Plains, Native Americans relied on them for food, clothing, and housing. For 25,000 years, maybe more, they lived in harmony with the bison, there is much they can teach us about living in harmony with our environment, Global Warming anyone?
Dick, You are right, it was an understatement. And I agree with everything you wrote in that reply. Cheers!
Thank you for the link, Gary.
Thanks for the rec. on 'The American Buffalo', Gary. In my older years I have strayed into polite murder mysteries of the English country garden variety.
🤭🤫😉
Believe it or not, popular culture sometimes portrays our indigenous brothers and sisters in a sympathetic manner, if not with academic rigor.
I would second that kind recommendation Gary; Burn's docu. is so very well done. I must add though that it's intertwining reference is towards Native Americans who resided west of the Mississippi River, whose lives were very closely intertwined with the Bison. Would that be more accurate ?
That would indeed be more accurate. The story, you remember, is told through the lens of western art and the native commentators were plains and western tribes including one descendant of Quanah Parker. Incidentally any readers of HCR’s letters who are interested in western art need to see the Anschutz Collection in Denver. It is wonderful.
Double 'like' clicked here !
Consider that the government still owes the Sioux billions but they reject the money. They want the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Sioux_Nation_of_Indians
Value is where you see it. Whatever you value speaks of your soul. The earth is beyond the petty coin of the realm.
Unfortunately, many refuse to register and vote.
Support Katrina Christiansen in North Dakota. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk7ojHyN7sc
Lordy, they have more to lose than the rest of us
Money isn’t solving anything OBVIOUSLY no matter which end of it ‘you ain’t’ . How much land does anyone need ..? Killing isn’t the answer either ..again OBVIOUSLY..but back into time or repeating the divide and conquer we’re heading .
What DOES work is bringing people up to good living standards, good health care/education/sufficient food, housing, and caring for the mentally ill ( includes the narcissist with psychosis ie ‘dictatorial disorders’) as every population has and decent care for the young and elderly…it’s not a tall order, it’s a caring one.
None of the wars we’ve ever ever ever had I’d venture wasn’t induced by greed because someone didn’t have ‘enough’……read on….
I’VE HAD ENOUGH…how about you?
Enoughness is a relative value apparently so dependent on perceived circumstances, and when it comes to power and its acquisition, that's enough to have started quite a few wars. In Hebrew the word dyeinu (die-AY-noo) expresses both the enoughness of something along with gratitude for what we got and have, and a readiness to move ahead. it's in our Passover story as we express our thanks having crossed over to the new and undiscovered land - which would actually be the Sinai peninsula. btw our contingent included a whole lot of Egyptians also very ready to escape the Pharaoh. We now know who the Pharaoh is today don't we?
Love this !
Back to the eloquence of ‘The Indians’ Heather 🫶 and making OUR point, Robin 🫶. The Indians ( and the Mexicans btw of Mayans ) all lived ‘here’ before the ( Europeans) came. Composted the wastes, utilized the whole carcasses ( the insolent left to rot on the plains..thanks Ken Burns for the graphic reminders) …this whole peace/piece is so obvious and yet…. the forest through the trees…comes full circle, huh😢😔
The orange man is mentally il! I stated so his first week as pres. Thank you for noting the obvious.
Me too Victoria. YW🫶
President Biden's Infrastructure bill among other things contains money for two massive water projects in California that will secure the destruction of San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River and others that feed it, such as Trinity, which flows north through Indian Reservations, to join the Klamath, through the Lewiston Dam diversion tunnel. This in turn will lead to the local extinction of salmon in the waters of California, as well as sturgeon, smelt and numerous other endangered marine species. This in turn will injure many Americans whose ways of life depend on these once bountiful fish. All to satisfy the insatiable water demands of San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts beholden to large corporate farming interests and southern California municipal water utilities.
I speak of the Sites Reservoir Project and the Delta Conveyance. The former will draw something like 600M acre feet of water per year from the dying Sacramento River to give to the Bureau of Reclamation to fulfill contractual promises it presently can not keep to supply water to San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts and because the San Joaquin River has already.been sucked dry in its upper reached and is dead. The Delta Conveyance tunnels being undertaken by the State will be needed to see that it gets there, as the present distribution system will not be able to handle the load.
Secretary Haaland is fully on board with this massive joint undertaking as is her Commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, who is also a "Native" American. .Her name I seem to recall is Camille Touton.
.....The Hoopa Tribe of northern California is not happy with these developments and is among those who are suing Deb Haaland and the State of California to put a stop to these projects. It was Reclamation who destroyed their way of life when it built the Lewiston Dam in 1955 in order to divert water from the Trinity River in to the Sacramento. And ever since the Bureau of Reclamation has been stealing water from them and from all the peoples of California further downstream by taking about twice as much as it was authorized and entitled to under the enabling legislation for the dam and associated grants of water rights from the State. It takes about 1.2 M acre feet per year. And now wants to ship it as far south as San Bernardino.
Secretary Haaland : Cancel these projects. Tear down this dam.
Sincerely yours. A California native
I have friends who just witnessed the destruction of Iron Gate dam on the Klamath River in northern California. It is one of four being removed to restore the Klamath River to its natural state.
I have been following this with interest and one day hope to visit Oregon. What is going on in Oregon should be viewed in conjunction with water use developments in California.
As not all our readers may know, The Klamath flows out of Oregon in to California and the ocean near the border. The Trinity River is a major tributary of the Klamath. It is a California river that flows north to join it very near the state line. It in turn has several branches, one coming out of the coastal range, the other, from the Sierras.
The Trinity once supported great salmon runs. Historically
it was a prime spawning ground with deep holes, low banks, flood plains and rapids. The Hoopa Tribe lived along its banks and survived by fishing.
In the early years of American settlement, illegal commercial fishing operations on the lower Klamath caused salmon runs to plummet to the point where they were abandoned. During the Gold Rush, prospectors dredged the Trinity and mined the banks of its tributaries, leaving their waste in the stream and largely destroying its main stem as spawning ground.
Wars and depressions intervened. Then in the 1950s, with the help of politicians ambitious to see California achieve greatness, Reclamation sold the locals of the northern counties and their leaders on the idea that it would be good for them if a dam were built in the middle of the east branch that would allow most of its waters to be diverted in to the Sacramento River by means of a tunnel. Rights to this 'unappropristed" water were granted by the State Water Board to Reclamation. It obtained funding from Congress. And in the late fifties it built the Lewiston Dam solely for the purpose of taking this water and shipping it downstate to users who would pay them for it. Since construction, Reclamation has taken about twice what it told Congress was planned. It is being sued and someday will need to admit to this and agree to release more back to the river. In the meantime it is hustling to build the Sites pump storage reservoir in the hills above the Sacramento.
Restoration of salmon runs on the lower Klamath would depend on what happens in California, as much as Oregon. The Lewiston Dam is already sixty years old and only has another forty or so. It should go. And the Central Valley should get by with the water it already receives.
Thank you for the details here, Tyler.
I have driven through this area, and saw its amazing beauty, but not known anything of its history.
Here's an article that coveres what Tyler is talking about, including the damage to the San Francisco Bay:
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/08/sites-reservoir-dam-project-water/
It seems to me our wastes are the total culprit of these ‘needed’ reconstructions…
If we could approach these supposed problems from the end of WE HAVE PLENTY..and not waste the vast amounts of water, food, recycle, reuse instead of trying to revamp mom nature pretty close to perfect plan we’d be closer to solutions. Relearning : years of accepted bad wasteful behaviors is HARD. Needing to teach ‘respect for the givens’- water/air/food/earth can… DOES work .
A glutinous society? Would anyone venture who is worst ? Poisoned the water..and anything downstream. Poisoned the air pollution kills how many a year..the toll isn’t even close to reality. Bad farming practices , clear cut the forests, put 10 million people in a few square miles w/o proper management…the money making was far ahead thought process than any realistic ‘after affect’ no doubt there!
Circular recycling is just coming into acknowledgment/invention/acceptable practice…I KNOW THIS!
Back-to-the-land farming/living came close and works but ….hard work -and living ‘citified’ has a lot of improvement to better sustain itself , roof top solar/gardening/water collection…I could go on and on..but the many are far too interested in getting rich!
Oh Lord…I’m on a rant …wake up…wake up! Some ‘WOKE’…and quickly that realization/reality was ( conveniently) coined ..bad, bad, bad….🤦♀️
How’s that song go 🎶we’re on the eve of destruction..🎶
The innocents will die first …so most of us will know ..in time?…ahead of time? …well, we’d best have Congress pass the bill the phrase ‘ahh…too late ‘ isn’t acceptable anymore.
💙💙VOTE BLUE, STOP THE COUP, THE COMPLICIT TOO💙💙
Here, Patricia, Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction":
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=barry+mdguire+eve+of+destruction&mid=0D758AB7202DB594F34F0D758AB7202DB594F34F&FORM=VIRE
With beautiful accompaniment of marchers, copter gunships, and faces of kids.
Why do I get the feeling that this is not the whole story?
This is the story. Your feeling that it isn’t required interrogation.
Hoover Dam is near defunct also.
Tyler,
Thank you! Why oh why do we (America) think so casually (or not at all) about results of non-thinking developments. “Think it through” should be next “God save America”!
Say what you will, American history is full of ugliness, cruelty and at times glorious beauty. HCR's book, "How the South Won the Civil War," particularly the Introduction and the first chapter sums up American history better than anything else that I have read. I was born in 1940 in Uvalde, Texas, very, very poor, one of seven children. My mom told me, "Richard, you can do and be anything that you want, it's up to you." I believed that but at age 20 when I was serving in the U.S. Army, I was taken aback when I saw a white soldier and a Black soldier sharing the same dorm room at the Army Language School. I asked myself, "Richard, what are you doing?" I analyzed it and am proud to say that I recognized it as confirmation bias - I had never seen this before. I then realized that my mom was right since I was male and white, that women and minorities didn't have the advantage that I had. I have been a staunch "women's libber" and civil rights advocate ever since. And, I love Katy Perry's song, "Roar." Katy is the modern Helen Reddy. Women of America, with the right to vote now in your pocket, it is really time to ROAR and vote the American Taliban into oblivion.
It seems unfair to place the burden for rescuing democracy on the backs of the previously marginalized half of our population but, if democracy is to be saved in November, I believe credit will be due to the wise women in our population.
Gary, the burden is on all of us to preserve our democracy and human rights, it is just that females have more to lose if we fail.
Absolutely agree it’s on all of us but without a majority of the intelligent women in our midst, we can’t get it done.
Richard I send you thanks for being an ally especially for so long. Our CR/consciousness raising in the late '60s and on also woke us to seeing how men were affected by our inequality, especially when they didn't recognize it themselves - all the more damaging.
Robin, I'm not saying that it was an easy process. I had to keep challenging myself over and over and over. I never doubted the ultimate truth. Experience has been extremely helpful as I've encountered so many women and minorities much smarter and more talented than I am, though I have a Ph.D. and a J.D., both from Harvard. It is a constant state of becoming. I'll probably never reach the end but I will never stop striving.
“We have found in conventional aggregate empirical testing that the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, or its level of democracy, or whether it is Islamic or not. The very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is its level of violence against women.”
~ Robin Morgan quoting Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M.
Consider not the striving so much as the enjoyment of the constant becoming 😉
I remember reading a book a generation ago on the indigenous experience in North America in which guesstimates of the death toll ranged widely, with an upper point -- if my shrinking grey matter serves me at all -- of more than fifty million killed. My mother and l were chatting on the phone and she summed up what I was reading succinctly.
The French? Perhaps the most humane since they need native hunters as partners in the furrier business.
The Spanish? They needed people, sadly as slaves, to mine the gold.
The English? They want Indians out of there one way or another.
I've just read most of the comments, and tried to affirm them, but my affirmations don't register. This has been happening lately, quite often, and it's disturbing. How can I register, communicate, about this inability to affirm my affirmations?
So many well deserved “likes”! Add mine to all the rest! Btw, I have not seen anyone mention the NYTimes story this weekend on Leonard Leo….there was even a photo of the neighborhood protesters! Thank you lin for pointing him out early on as a doer of rotten things.
The absurdity of the immigrant nation offering citizenship to the native nation is stunning!
We are a nation of stunning contradictions, evil and otherwise….
And also, Jeri, worthy humanities to match.
It sounds like a joke. Indigenous people treated like fauna.
No joke! Here in Mendocino County, CA, the attitude of the newly arrived "Euros" 160 years ago was, even the babies have to be killed, because "a nit turns into a louse".
We have a lot of good reconnecting going on here in Sonoma county with the Federated
tribes:
https://gratonrancheria.com
Sonoma county, Robin?
You may be very close to some of the activities of my son, the chef Nick, over in Point Reyes, Petaluma, and other wineries and restaurants nearby.
Yes Phil not that far away from where I live in the southern part at the county. I'm more of a hot chocolate girl myself so no wineries but they are really a big part of our culture and economy here...
Harvey, and such fauna has also been systematically eradicated.
The brutality of our treatment of the indigenous people is covered in HCR's book, "How the South Won the Civil War." It was racism then just as it is racism that is now motivating the Trump MAGA movement.
Reading it now. HCR also covers it in West from Appomatox. Heartbreaking that such could be part of the American legacy. But it is.
Heartbreaking, Carmen, is one way to describe it. Devastating is another way. How could we have done this? How can we possibly support the policies proposed and promoted by Trump? I was writing a novel about a bi-racial slave girl at the outbreak of the Civil War and then put it on pause. I'm motivated by reading HCR's books ("How the South Won the Civil War" and "Democracy Awakening") to return to the task. Speaking further of Trump, with what he has said about immigrants, that they are vermin, I could see him authorizing and directing an "extermination program," not unlike the Holocaust.
Please leave imaginative space, Richard, to return to your manuscript.
I don't know the location you've chosen but, whatever it is, I hope you imbue it further with much, much, many, many of the landscape and weather contingencies that have so beautifully energized Larry McMurtry, Thoreau, Joan Didion, Joan Baez.
I hope you imbue it further, too, with resonances from so many other of the humanities our schools have been programmed to neglect in favor of the abstracted who yet rule at so many dastardly levels.
Today post from Steve S. In his The Warning is chilling..and a promised return if electoral goes to Trump ( the holocaust - AND MANY FEAR THIS, rightfully). Also his Steve and Clare B. video/zoom was excellent!
Well stated!
That’s how an awful lot of indigenous people see it anyway—and saw it then. Prof Richardson mentions the controversy in passing, as if it were over and inconsequential, but it’s not and it wasn’t.
Poignantly ironic. Thank you.
Well, we are "exceptional".
Excellent statement!!
I have lived out on the Taos mesa for the last decade. No mail delivery. No services of any kind, and some of the worst poverty in the United States. But no issues with voting per se. The big issue is a lack of say in the doings of the Town of Taos, which affect us but where we have no vote.
The members of the Pueblo have a strong community comparatively, being one of the few indigenous communities that were never displaced. The Taos Pueblo has been consistently occupied for more than a thousand years.
One thing that surprised me here: the Pueblo members think of Richard Nixon as a hero because he signed the papers that gave them back the sacred Blue Lake, high on the local mountain, that had been stolen from them many years before.
The biggest split in Taos is between the “generational Tasosenos” whether Native, Hispano, and a few Anglo, and the new comers, especially the wealthy new comers that would remake Taos in the image of Aspen.
Many of the old Taos folk live outside of the Town of Taos for voting purposes and this is a big bone of contention. But the Pueblo and its members own a great deal of land, including some of the best spots, and therein lies their power. The Taos Mountain itself is off limits to anyone not a tribal member and will never be developed.
This makes Taos an anomaly.
Thank you for this interesting addition to the discussion.
fascinating. I want to know and learn more. It does sound like Taos is an anomaly. As an old white woman, I feel that I have so much to learn.
You aren't the only one! (smile)
Starting to think we could form our own cult: Old White Women or OWW !!!
I got a laugh out of that! (smile)
We men have one already: old light dodderers, or 'OLD'. 👎😳🥳
🙌
Thank you for sharing this information. Amazing how much there still is to make America what we believe it to be.
Wow, Nixon a hero. Boy has tunnel vision changed the view. How to merge the old and the new. The eternal question.
Nixon looks like a breath of clean air compared to DT.
What a yardstick.
Susan, this is the latest email to me from TFFG:
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! >
BIDEN’S SOVIET TACTICS DON’T SCARE ME!
I’d go to jail AGAIN AND AGAIN if that’s what it took to Save America.
Because this fight has always been bigger than me, Richared.
It’s about restoring power where it belongs - TO YOU THE PEOPLE - and ending the tyrannical Biden regime’s reign of terror once and for all.
So I’m asking you to boldly and peacefully rebel against the Deep State radicals who’ve infiltrated our government by chipping in and declaring: I STAND WITH TRUMP! >
STAND WITH TRUMP
It’s no secret why the Marxists and Fascists in power are so desperate to purge our America First movement from existence.
They know that I’m this nation's last line of defense against the TOTAL DESTRUCTION.
And they’ll do ANYTHING, even burn our entire country to the ground, just to keep me out of office.
STAND WITH TRUMP
But mark my words, Richared. I WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED, BULLIED, OR JAILED INTO SILENCE. As long as YOU are by my side, I WILL NEVER SURRENDER!
As an erstwhile Republican, I can only lean on that great mid-century American philosopher, Arthur Fonzarelli (dba Fonzie): "Bull makes the world go round."
🤔🙂😊😅😉
Growing up in Texas in the '40's and '50's, I was originally Libertarian, then Republican and as my political philosophy matured I became a Democrat and then a very Liberal Democrat who advocates for a system similar to that of the Scandinavian countries, pragmatic capitalism.
Yes, the Social Democrats in Europe have always been attractive to me, too. To call members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and more so the far more moderate President Biden, socialists or communists strikes me as ridiculous. I do not agree with many of the progressives' policies, but that is no reason to lie nor is it any justification for demagogy.
OMG, and the magat cretins just bow down.
Thank you for posting this, Richard. I can’t say I “like” it but it’s good to know what’s out there. BTW was the misspelling of your name in the original? Proofreaders united want to know because that’s what we do.
Good catch, Katherine. Yes, the misspelling was in the original and they keep repeating the mistake. I know that the email is from the Trump camp immediately when I see the misspelling of my name.
On another topic, I've received 500 postcards from turnoutpac.org/postcards. One can order post cards from this group to be mailed to voters in swing states. They're free. One can contact the group by email at postcards@turnoutpac.org. I am taking the 500 postcards to the Lakeland Democratic Club meeting Thursday evening along with 500 stamps and will pass out 25 cards and stamps to those who want to participate. The cards come with full instructions along with suggested notes and the names and addresses of the targeted voters. And, I'll order more.
Pres. Nixon was responsible for the EPA. Now, let's try to find one iota of good in Trump. I don't think that it is possible.
take this with a grain of salt but I have been looking at his behavior as a negative model, ie the devil, an actual reality, informing us in every possible detail how not to be. A really really really bad fairy tale....
Robin, Trump is the epitome of evil. There are no shades of gray here. His support comes from those who are xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic and racist, many of whom support the KKK goal of white Protestant supremacy. This is the 2nd episode of the American Civil War. The cancer is no longer regional for it has metastasized throughout the body politic. [My source is primarily "The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election and Why?" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920517740615
I was a teen during Watergate and a bona fide Nixon-hater. Within two years of his demise, however, I viewed President Nixon as a tragic hero brought down by a tragic flaw. Though I went on to learn not to hate anyone -- for that diminishes me spiritually -- I find Trump to be a tragic ZERO who IS a tragic flaw.
"Good," Richard, depends.
The fat, orange criminal was "good" for the billionaire classes and their legions of otherwise college-"educated," thus-neutered but well-paid lobbyists for these criminal classes.
The fat, orange criminal was also "good" for the evangelical tens of millions who got their jobs offshored to benefit the billionaires and embitter the abandoned. Same billionaires taught these evangelicals the "good" of hatreds, victimization-re-direction, violence, and continued stupidity by slogans and abstractions on social media the billionaires have long now controlled.
That's why the great middle as I'm calling it is larger than both ends put together and will have a more salient set of resolutions, because on our fringes we have people looking in the both other directions and taking time to evaluate literally our values in action.Apparently the two ends
function as outriggers do on a catamaran, where the balance is in the middle and the ends act as explorers of need and desire in seeming opposition - where they both inform the boat how to adjust itself. You could compare the sails catching the wind to the basic structures created as functionings of democracy…we need some smoother sailing.
The bell curve tells the tale
Nixon was also an environmental hero, and made the first gestures in the direction of a sane approach to the Chinese superpower.
He wasn’t bat-Schitt crazy, just a narcissist who knew something about politics
I did not like President Nixon at all. Nevertheless, I respect him in retrospect for having enough of a regard for the rule-of-law to hand over the incriminating evidence when the Supreme Court instructed him to do so.
If we had the current SC...
Revision. Justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh proved they were not fit for the Court; I felt so in the cases of the latter two before the revelations involving Ms Hill and Dr Blasey-Ford emerged.
Alito had slipped my notice as I was in Iraq at the time and was not even aware of the nomination; had I followed it, I am sure I would have felt that the guy was evasive and having a weird relationship with power, as the other two demonstrated.
That last strike worried me about how they would view the powerless and neglected in our society.
Yeah. I know what you mean, Jeri. When President Biden is re-elected, I hope he feels secure enough to up-load two more Justices to restore one-vote G.O.P.-appointed majority that should be in place. Had Judge, now Att'y General, Garland been rightfully confirmed, there would be a 5-to-4 G.O.P. majority.
EDIT: not to mention two corrupt Justices on the Court now. Justices Thomas, Alito, and (at least I thought so at the time) Kavanaugh are not fit to be on the Supreme Court.
I had thought that Taos was governed mutually by the native, Hispanic and white people who live there. I had hoped to move to my condo there but it didn't work out, but one of the many charms of the city was that it WASNT Aspen and hopefully would never be. The poverty and inequality are hard to live with.
Thank you for this.
Any idea why New Mexico is so poverty-stricken? I always thought it stunningly beautiful but am just now realizing how much poverty there is along with the mountains. Thoughts?
It is heavily Hispanic, heavily Native American, agricultural without enough water. These people are poor, and their history is mostly exploiting natural resources. There is still some oil and gas, there is still mining. And then there's Los Alamos and Sandia and Alamogordo, my customers when I was there. There's either very well educated prosperous folks, or very poor ones. It's tough in Santa Fe seeing the folks with their beemers being served by poor guys with pickup trucks held together with baling wire.
Thanks for this, Jen, much appreciated. I need to go visit the state sometime and see for myself.
It's beautiful. See Taos. And the four corners area is pretty amazing,and you get Mesa verde with that.
Thank you for explaining this.
Wonderful tale of treasure, Annabel.
💓
Forty years ago, I was an intern for the Republican Policy Committee in the Senate and gathering information from various committees. One was the non-standing committee on Indian Affairs and the staff Director and I were temporary buds. He asked me one day to guess the President who had done the most for Native Americans.
⚖️
Since I was a Republican altar-boy, I figured I should guess Republican. My first two guesses were Presidents Lincoln and T. Roosevelt; no dice. So I tried two from the Democratic Party: Presidents L.B. Johnson and F.D. Roosevelt; no way. I may even have thrown a hail-mary with President Eisenhower; nope-a-dope. When the gentleman told me it was President Nixon, I almost fell over in surprise. My bud went on to give much the same explanation as you did.
😯
I also recall that Carl Jung had a bit to say about the Puebloes in his memoir, 'Memories, Dreams, and Reflections'. 😇
There’s a *great* book by the Sioux political theorist and historian Vine Deloria Jr about Jung’s theories and the general theology of the Plains Indians. Jung was in Pueblo country on a lecture trip and paused to spend an afternoon with a man who was actually Hopi (and Pueblo and Hopi aren’t great friends) but better at English than the local Pueblo people so they suggested him as someone to talk with about Indian ideas. That was his whole experience of the culture, but it resonated strongly and he talked about it in letters and books for the rest of his life. Deloria admires him, though he is frank about his limitations as well. A riveting book!
Thank you for the tip, Mary. In the cart now. Short book, thank G-D!
See, who says McDonnells / MacDonalds, etc. and Campbells do not get along? 😉
Yep, my dad's best friend was a MacDonald. But I was in a store in Ontario one winter day that sold plaid scarves. I bought a Stewart one (red looks warmer) and was chatting with the lady ringing up my purchase--till she saw the name on my credit card, fell silent, set her lips in a straight line and wouldn't look at me for the rest of the transaction! I could only imagine she was a MacDonald... (But I'm sure most immigrant Campbells were serfs who got the laird's last name the way enslaved people in the South got their master's last names. Rest assured, not coming for you!)
Yeah, I first heard about all of that in Australia with a Campbell and he was recounting the feud while playing billards at a hotel in the Blue Mountains. I asked him all about it out of curiosity. Then I introduced myself as a ten year old to this gentleman in his twenties. To his credit, your distant kin blushed and apologized. How could I be upset?
💓
When we move back to Pittsburgh, the neighbour across the street was a Campbell and his herding shepherd dog would kindly escort our 'terrierist' back to our home as one gentlemanly shepherd. Mr Campbell found the apparent confusion by his dog of this terrier as a little bo-peep exceedingly humourous. The local newspaper soon had one of those little vignettes like 'Life in these United States' in "Readers' Digest" featuring this example of 'herd community' to our and their great joy. What is not to like?
🥳
Lastly, I had wanted to serve the country since I was little and, when my finance career cratered and I was stuck in D.C. feeling hopeless, it was a McCampbell, same clan I am sure, who provided the entrée for me to enter into government. Sadly that fine, refined, genteel gentleman -- a tech success who heard the call of noblesse oblige -- died young soon thereafter. It was a bitter loss for many of us. No feud with this generous dude.
😢
As a parting aside, a Scotsman whom I knew in N.Y.C. through a week-end beach house explained what he believed had occurred. Scotland had been evolving from a tribal land to a nation state. The large clans opposed it and that parturition of a new and common nation, like other miracles of birth, proved to be painful. I was grateful to him for explaining the history. I did not really have a dog in the fight, but what my bud said made sense to me.
💡
But let us remember, always, that the Mexicans paid for Hadrian's Wall. 😅
"Katie Friel and Emil Mella Pablo of the Brennan Center noted in 2022 that, for example, people who live on Nevada’s Duckwater reservation have to travel 140 miles each way to get to the closest elections office. "
Surely there is some legal ground for that to be worthy of a lawsuit. It is an unreasonable burden upon citizens government has a duty to address. A satellite office? An itinerant election office in a van? Voting is the cornerstone of the republic and it is negligent on our society's part that we have failed to make it an unalienable human right. Liberty and Justice for ALL.
Voting by mail, as all Oregonians do, would solve this issue and allow tribal members and everyone else to vote at their convenience. We can use drop boxes throughout every county or mail w/ no postage required.
Republican cheat Louis DeJoy is still postmaster. He took away mailboxes and slowed delivery. Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota is going after the post office problems there. Of course it didn’t make the major news outlets. https://youtu.be/DDqGj9Y5_lY?si=TnonpWUn_2qrXZjn
Gigi, thanks for that link. Every <Democrat?> Senator should do likewise. Yay for Tina!
As I understand it, some members of the PO Board were set to term out and then an appointee could take their place. A Democratic majority could oust DeJoy. I wo deeed what the holdup was. DeJoy has many conflicts of interest!!!
Mail delivery is often unreliable and sporadic in such remote areas. And as Gigi points out DeJoy is still at the USPS helm.
You left out a few words, J L.
Our Republicans believe, instead of your words, that "Voting is the cornerstone of the white racists of the republic," no?
And the majority justices of the Clarence court believe, just as importantly, that voting is the cornerstone of medieval theocrats who sanctimoniously intend to package as many women as they can into whatever packages state power can coerce them.
Ah, America. Did the native peoples not see this coming -- so many grubby illiterate to nature, so many otherwise also illiterate to human beings who never chose to be packaged by the vulgar, the biggest thieves, the most pious hypocrites for Grifter-in-Chief?
From time to time I used to see reference to studies of US "science literacy" in the news, but my impression is that they don't even report on it anymore. Literacy is a good metaphor because it refers to skills that become part of human consciousness, reading and writing; not just answering quiz-show like questions about the subject.
And should we not aim for "literacy" in all important aspects of life? Humanities, human relations, politics, history, and above all nature. Nature is sunrise and birdsong is an unspoiled wilderness. It is also the apparatus of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, that is something our species has built just as beavers build dams, though lacking the same ecological integration. We ARE nature, but we are clever enough in altering our homespace that some of us talk about "conquering nature", a pathetic and dangerous conceit. We are every bit as dependent of nature as the beaver or a fir tree, and nature is indifferent to our pretenses. Everything is nature. and nature is indifferent to our egotistical posturing; but there are inevitable consequences. WE are cutting our own roots, roots the First Nations people have respected as a way of life.
And the conceit of racism? Malignant narcissism. Pernicious excrement of bulls. Worse because it's toxic waste. We have been gifted beyond measure with our senses and intelligence and ability to feel, on a planet that can be dangerous but also abundantly nourishing to body and soul. Yet we play so many clueless and/or pernicious games as our hours upon the stage slip away.
"Now it seems to me some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can't get"
It's four in the morning here in the mountains of Kyushu, Japan, J L.
I like lots I see here in your "From time to time" post. I hate the copulative verb you use and its labeling sweep, however, when you actually write, "Everything is nature."
No, J L, and you know the thousands of names, examples I could list in evidence to the contrary. Dark money. Republicans. Standardized testers pushing the further abstractions upon otherwise helpless youth in schools. Demagogue nationalists in countries around the world. All united by dark money, standardized testers, and hordes of Republicans, billionaires, and their allied evangelical contingents for hatred and murder.
Please, J L, do not ever again use simply the copulative "is" when you regard nature, unless you are God, and are as such authoring an early set of lines in Genesis.
Again, I would use the Rural Utah Project as a model .
Today's column is a perfect example of the value of this newsletter to readers. Dr. Richardson takes a significant anniversary and appends historical notes relevant to its subject in chronological order and lucid prose. I would never have learned about most of these matters without this newsletter. The only subjects covered with which I was even vaguely familiar were Jim Thorpe, the WW2 code talkers (I never knew there was a WW1 precedent) and the more recent struggles of indigenous people to cast votes in the face of new state restrictions.
Concerning the latter, the Roberts Court will live in infamy for the sheer number of decisions it has issued that have produced calamitous effects on our country. The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy. The Roberts Court's neutering of the 1965 voting rights act (the 2013 Holder and 2021 Brnovich decisions) is a travesty based on specious reasoning that is being disproven before our eyes. The imposition by states of significant restrictions on the opportunity to vote, specifically targeted at minority populations, gives the lie to the "improvement" cited by Justice Roberts eleven years ago. All you need to know about Brnovich is that Alito wrote it, so you know it's legal sophistry based on factoids of dubious provenance.
The Bill of Rights has seldom been a part of our Constitution that a ruling class seemed to recognize when they took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Assaults on our First Amendment now seem under attack by people who should be regarded as enemies, "both domestic AND foreign."
Well said , James 🫶
I love seeing this history of native people struggling for rights from those who seized, stole their land.
And these settlers -- all illegal, none securing permission from original inhabitants -- how well do they acknowledge even their own laws? Take a court in Washington, D. C., which some call supreme.
How well does this court honor its own highest laws? -- such as its Article 14, section three, which clearly, plainly rules unfit for office any who, having pledged allegiance to that supreme set of laws, might have risen in insurrection against it?
How well does that court honor its own highest law, or set of laws?
What amazes me about the Native Americans I have met and tutored is how kind they are and forgiving. Only one one occasion did I ever have an issue with a Native American and I chalk it off to his being very drunk.
I love going to pow-wows and have been fortunate to attend pow-wows from several tribes.
I tutored Native American children for 4 years when I was in college and I hate to say it, but I think I learn more from the children than they did from me.
I doubt that there is a single treaty the Federal and State governments haven't broken.
Good to see your up-close-&-personal involvements, Gary.
How long has it been that our federal and state governments have been serving our commercial, abstracted, bribing, predatory classes?
These classes, organized to new depths of perfidies since the far-right foundations of the Powell memo in 1971, since then staffed with ranks and files of the standardized tested, the biz school glassy-eyed, and Supreme Court bribed and perjured, have all united further under their fat, greasy, sleazy, smelly-diapered criminal-in-chief.
But look, Gary: we somehow yet have remnants of a democracy who, come November, can vote.
Yup, racism and discrimination are still very much alive and kicking. And the orange convict even made it “salonfähig” again… Talking about “immigrants should be deported”, and “we were here first”, when are the American Natives starting to deport the white Americans of European ancestry?
Nine tribes barred Kristy Noem from their lands for cause. You could call that a good start.
Huzzah!
America was settled via racism and discrimination. The Northern Europeans who came to the New World were predatory. Their descendants ate still predatory.
Jenn, two of my grandparents came here 120 years ago, early 1900s, from Hungary.
They're outside your "predatory" adjective for ones who came from northern Europe.
But I've parallel ancestors who did come from northern Europe, before 1776. Scotch-Irish, they were poor. They'd suffered under the English before they left the old world, came to the new. And in America they scoffed at the royal crown's command not to cross the Appalachians. Cross instead they did, before 1776.
So many around the world suffer and need to move. It's with them I sympathize -- so many desperate who at great risk have to cross borders, dangerous seas.
Original inhabitants? Can't we with them sympathize, too?
Why can't our schools have as goal to teach all to see "others" as individuals, all in fraught, complicated narratives? Or have we so abandoned humanities that we've surrendered to the masters of making money only, with their glib labels, group abstractions?
I live just across those Appalachians in deep-red WV, who will likely go all Trumpian again . I strive to educate which is acknowledged mostly by trolls , upside down or TFG flags . It would be slightly past a miracle to see it flip or recognize the error of their ways! Sad.
Bingo, Phil😔
That is a big leap - to assume that "their descendants" are predatory. Lumping people together is not helpful. SOME Europeans who came here were predatory. My impression is that SOME people of every nationality, ethnicity, and religion are predatory.
The history of the United States in my lifetime (I’m 70) had been quite predatory—internally and externally.
OVERTHROW ( book) very good.
Autocorrect turned “has been” to “had been.”
Jenn, that seems harsh, and incomplete. Harsh in the sense that some who settled here did so to escape persecution at home (in much the same way that waves of immigrants from Central and South America are doing now) and I don't believe that descendants are predatory.
Incomplete, in the sense that, while I'm no scholar of world history, I do recall from my education that (North) America wasn't the only continent to be colonized, nor were her aboriginal peoples the only ones to be "converted", subjugated, forced to assimilate, or annihilated. European powers were responsible for worldwide inhumanity in their rapacious quest for treasure and land. And Africa even today provides plenty of horrific examples of intracontinental mass murder on a genocidal level, rape and displacement of people caused by "tribal" warfare within the Black race.
It's all man's inhumanity to our fellow man.
thank you for that corrective. History is a lot more complex than perhaps some of our emotions...
You could certainly say that. Learned nothing from history, then...
Thanks Mike, for a new word!
Yes. I had to look it up.
You got it!!
Check this map to see how voter suppression on tribal lands takes place. The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in America and spans almost 16,000 square miles across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. It has a poverty rate of 38% - twice that of the rest of Arizona.
The Navajo Nation has just twenty six post offices and postal provider offices. Scottsdale which is tiny in comparison in size has twelve post offices. This difference in access to postal services makes it much easier for urban voters and penalizes Native Americans from voting by mail.
https://thedemlabs.org/2020/09/12/mail-in-ballots-suppress-native-american-votes/
I'm in Utah now where voting has been by mail for a long time. Navajo on the reservation had a difficult time voting for many years because most do not have a house number (the housing is not in neat little rows but spread out over many miles). but that was addressed in the last presidential election. Our county elected two Democratic Navajo out of three commissioners, and I noticed last week that the local paper profiled three white Republican candidates for commissioner but not the Navajo candidate. These weren't labeled editorials, just "the news."
As usual these days, a thumb on the scales of justice. There is so little time left before the election. I hope you get this fixed, progwoman. 🤨❤️💙
I should have explained that in the 2020 election, the rules were changed to allow voters to use a post office box or a chapter house on the reservation, and two Navajo candidates were elected. I assume they are not running again, but there is a Navajo woman on the ballot, and she was omitted by the county newspaper. There are a lot of her yard signs in our community near the rez, but not so much nearer the county seat. It's a huge county, larger than some states, and there's a lot of local resentment against public lands, which Native peoples are involved in protecting.
And the beat goes on…
Utah is a red state and I imagine those who own the papers want to keep it so.
True. But I had always thought that the San Juan Record followed basic journalistic conventions, but maybe they're nervous.
But of course they did...
It continues to amaze me what lengths some will go to make some animals more equal than others, to reference Orwell’s Animal Farm. Apparently, some people will always need an “other”…
Some seem to think (or at least want us to believe) that "freedom" means free to bully.
And these christian nationalists believe in the Golden Rule: those with the gold make the rules. :-(
They worship mammon.
Thank you Heather,
I have long had questions about the rights of our Indigenous population and many of them were answered by your piece today. Our treatment of this population has been so shameful. Thanks for shining the light for me.
Thank you Heather.
What the hell is it with us and our penchant for othering others? What are we so afraid of?
The other tribe
The fear of change seems to be a constant and that is a very deep subject having implications for a whole way of life including one's own body, certainly values, and all the actions that humans are capable of, especially speech these days. When we call speech free what do we actually mean? A big reminder that speech. itself. is. an. action.
We spend so much time suggesting how the rest of the world can improve behaviour yet so rarely take time to mourn our own appalling actions towards so many.
Ain ‘t that the truth. And repubs will do their best to deny any appalling actions. Wipe that history clean, it might make some sensitive souls sad.
Excellent Heather.
To all:
Google 'Trail of Tears' and let's chat about it shall we?
Yes, the "Trail of Tears" or "Death March of the Cherokee" enabled by the great American president Andrew "white supremacist" Jackson.
How about his unsanctioned war on the Seminoles. Without any authority, he waged a war of genocide in hopes to wipe out the native peoples of Florida.
Good idea for a start, but a more extensive project, namely Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s History of the United States, would provide a broader, deeper, understanding of the catastrophe perpetrated by the US government against the indigenous inhabitants of its part of North America.
https://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-P1164.aspx
Terrific essay today. I absolutely LOVE the Elizabeth Peratrovich story! I hope Alaska will highlight & honor her in all the ways possible. Being sure each time to commemorate her savage nature.
We here in Alaska celebrate Elizabeth Petrovich Day on February 16. It is part of the school curriculum to tell her story. Here is a link to more information:
https://www.asdk12.org/cms/lib/AK02207157/Centricity/ModuleInstance/15204/Celebrate%20Elizabeth%20Peratrovich%20Day-2024.pdf
Looking forward to watching Molly, hopefully on my telly rather than my little phone screen. Thank you for link.
Agreed!
EVERYONE should write letters to Judge Merchan to respectfully urge him to sentence liar fraud con CONVICTED FELON Trump to serve time in prison!
Please do your part to make this happen!
Send them to Bragg, for filing, so they become part of Trump's record.
I encourage every US citizen, or anyone else also, to read the US Constitution's amendments. No other reading is possible that we are a nation of bigots (I have better words than this) who deny rights of others not like ourselves. (See why additional amendments are always necessary, but still not adequate.) There is no other conclusion regarding establishing equal rights under the law, which in US history always has its caveats.
Matt, it's a nice thought but sentencings and court proceedings generally are not open to public comments. In any criminal case the 'victims' are allowed to speak and generally all voters are victims, but I am skeptical your letters get heard. Suggestion: Contact a voting or public interest group that has lawyers and ask them to file an Amicus Brief that contains your letters. Amicus Briefs are when interested persons not a party to the lawsuit wish to express an opinion in the litigation and thus petition the court for permission to file an Amicus Brief which means 'friend of the court'.