tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-116837072024-03-09T11:07:19.330-08:00TiyospayeNowjfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.comBlogger116125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-10325169879398075992022-04-05T14:30:00.004-07:002022-04-05T14:35:46.150-07:00Almost Trayvon, Remembering My Dad<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTrwkrYpm-BVU8VpIZMIADboumc__DwrgIOMYSheeG-Sj5ULBdPRSwMJnDa8ERqE_OLXA8fwx6ZgEP4hRWcRjpaQtyd1X5U5i7cvXOcJpDQkTPNdTsBp375i6L0daad8UL1zPLXyQopJMrqVsI8StsiEi69s_WB3swo-9WeiW40yd27Yb9mg/s595/12920518_10154039586718446_464560776764284376_n.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="595" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTrwkrYpm-BVU8VpIZMIADboumc__DwrgIOMYSheeG-Sj5ULBdPRSwMJnDa8ERqE_OLXA8fwx6ZgEP4hRWcRjpaQtyd1X5U5i7cvXOcJpDQkTPNdTsBp375i6L0daad8UL1zPLXyQopJMrqVsI8StsiEi69s_WB3swo-9WeiW40yd27Yb9mg/s16000/12920518_10154039586718446_464560776764284376_n.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The author's father, Charles Keeler</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;">I first published this in Indian Country Today in 2013. I've been recently thinking about my dad a lot. We lost him within a week of being diagnosed with Stage 4 Cancer. It's something I'm still processing. The anger, the feeling he was stolen from us. But he was a great dad, an extraordinary thinker, and really smart. I certainly look like him, more so than I resemble my mom. I write to understand the complexity of my familial experiences and diversity. My father's experience growing up mixed-blood (5/8ths Ihanktowan Dakota according to the government) on the Yankton Sioux Reservation left him with conflicted feelings. His own father, my grandfather Edison Keeler (3/4 Dakota, according to the government), had been brutally beaten to death in police custody when he was a teenager. My mother's experience growing up on the Navajo Nation was very different. Perhaps in many ways, more secure and protected from the overt racism my dad's people faced outnumbered on their own reservation due to allotment. So I write to understand a complicated legacy and my own experiences, which are different from those of my parents. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Almost Trayvon</h2><div>by Jacqueline Keeler</div><div><br /></div><div>When I heard of George Zimmerman's acquittal, my thoughts went not to my 10-years old son but to my dad when he was 18-years old. I avoided coverage of the trial because I knew the unrepentant Zimmerman defense would blame his victim Trayvon Martin, for his own death. I knew that listening to it would mean listening again to the same old ugliness that has plagued this country since Columbus first landed on an island in the New World he named San Salvador, "the savior." A name I imagine that may self-servingly encapsulate Zimmerman's view of himself and his volunteer work as a member of the neighborhood watch. He said, referring to the victim," These guys all get away," and after he shot the 17-year old, "I feel it was all God's plan." I say, it all sounds too familiar.</div><div><br /></div><div>And so it was after the verdict I thought of my dad when he was 18, unarmed and facing down a gun pointed at him by a white man he had known his entire life. This was during the Jim Crow era in the United States, and my dad was not Black but a mixed-blood Dakota Sioux Indian. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's funny to think that in most South Dakota border towns, even today, Zimmerman--who looks more Indian than white-- would be subject to the exact same scrutiny that he gave Trayvon Martin, that he could even be struck down under very similar circumstances. The line in the sand of "race" or "caste" is a tricky one as you move around the country; which side you fall on is an educated guess at best, but getting it right can mean the difference between life and death. </div><div><br /></div><div>My dad was raised in Lake Andes, a white town located on the Yankton Sioux reservation. His mixed-blood family occupied a strange nether world, neither white nor Indian. My dad recounts having the white folks boo him when he dribbled a basketball during a game, and then on the other side, the full-bloods would boo him, too. His dad, whose father and uncle had owned the first car dealership in that part of South Dakota (yes, Indians did things like this), was best friends with the Sheriff, and the two of them had even engaged in bootlegging together during Prohibition. My grandmother, who could pass for white (her Dakota name was "Green Eyes"), regularly had her hair done at the beauty salon on main street. I did not learn until a few years ago that most Indian people of that time were not allowed to get their hair cut in town or play snooker at the bar with the Sheriff. </div><div><br /></div><div>But despite this seeming acceptance by the white community, things began to unravel for our family. My grandfather died under suspicious circumstances; he was found drowned in the Missouri River. My mother claimed she heard from her in-laws that he had been beaten to death by white friends for his paycheck. When I asked my dad, he just shook his head, "No," he said, "It was a work accident, the dam," but his voice was shaking, and he looked like I had never seen him before: raw with grief. I can still remember as a child asking a dining room full of aunts and uncles and my grandmother, "What about grandfather? Tell me about my grandfather," and being greeted by complete silence. My dad was 15 and was sent alone to identify his father's body for the authorities. My grandfather's body had been so horribly disfigured he could only identify him by a mole on his ankle. </div><div><br /></div><div>It was only recently that he told me why he joined the Army and left his hometown for good: he had been captain of the Lake Andes High School football team (the first Indian in 25-years), Snowball King, and a straight-A student. Then, suddenly the white men in town, men like the Sheriff who had been good friends with his father, began to act as if they were afraid of him. It culminated in the Sheriff pulling his gun without cause on my dad while he was walking down the street. He had been given two choices: leave town immediately or go to jail. He joined the Army, went to college, married my mom, and raised his children proud to be Indian far away from Lake Andes. </div><div><br /></div><div>Many people look back to that time before the Civil Rights movement as a period of greater "law and order" in this country. Even my grandmother once said of that time, "everyone got along." I asked my dad, "Did everyone really get along?" A part of me wanted to believe it, preferring it to the constant threat of violence that hung over us in every generation. "She said that?" he shook his head and said dismissively, "Well, everyone got along because everyone knew their place!"</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcl_ml0phvuFUJnJS_dFB0N03tRHxtHaFA1nDaTis8igxaVvowyKkcKte2nT8acKPy_ZQ2dFHC4S6195-k1K13f5WlnKcVac7rLzpDSx94zPn5VNx32SUyEDMsv4kgkJJxKxdOGfZCYwIZEDnB5bxsFZA4LUbJm2KcrGUHcxnC9i4xI0nXzg/s1578/clip_90936125.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1578" data-original-width="1215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcl_ml0phvuFUJnJS_dFB0N03tRHxtHaFA1nDaTis8igxaVvowyKkcKte2nT8acKPy_ZQ2dFHC4S6195-k1K13f5WlnKcVac7rLzpDSx94zPn5VNx32SUyEDMsv4kgkJJxKxdOGfZCYwIZEDnB5bxsFZA4LUbJm2KcrGUHcxnC9i4xI0nXzg/s16000/clip_90936125.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Argus Leader, May 2, 1955</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And my grandmother knew better. In a news article dated May 2, 1955, in the Argus Leader titled "Dead Man's Widow Asks an Autopsy," my grandmother, identified as "the widow of a Lake Andes Indian," pleads for a second independent autopsy of my grandfather after his murder. My grandfather is described as "banging his head against .the cell bars" and 'bruised about the shoulders, legs, back, arms and face." My family says he went to the police in Yankton (a nearby White city that bears our tribe's name) to report he had been robbed, and they arrested him and beat him to death.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the Jim Crow era, African American families clung to their Green Books which told them where it was safe to stay when traveling and which town to avoid after sundown. No such book existed for Native Americans in the South. One of my dad's summer jobs was as a truck driver, and one of his deliveries took him to the Deep South. At a gas station, he was confronted with a choice of restrooms, one for White and one for Colored. My dad's hair is black, but his skin is lighter due to his mixed ancestry; baffled, he asked the white owner which he should use. The old man looked at him impatiently and waved him off, "White, of course." "But, I'm not white," my dad insisted. And with that, the old man threw up his hands and stormed off. </div><div><br /></div><div>When my dad joined the Army, he scored very high on an IQ test and was placed in an elite intelligence unit. Everyone else was older than him, and many were Ivy League graduates. They mentored him, gave him books to read, and encouraged him to go to college. By the time I knew him, the teenager driven out of his hometown by an armed adult had long ago been replaced by a confident adult, a steady and loving father, and a husband.</div><div><br /></div><div>As an engineer at a National Laboratory, my father held the highest security clearance available to civilians. This youth who had once been driven out of town by gunpoint was entrusted with our nations' secrets for his entire adult life. One day two FBI agents came to question him. The younger noted, "I see you have an arrest here. Can you explain it?"</div><div><br /></div><div>My dad said, "I'm Indian."</div><div><br /></div><div>"What do you mean?" The younger man was confused.</div><div><br /></div><div>My dad said nothing more, but the older man nodded at him and told the younger man, "We're done here." "But what about the arrest?" "We're done."</div><div><br /></div><div>He knew. Everyone did; they all knew their place. </div><div><br /></div><div>"They arrested me," he explained to me, "because the town needed young men to clear the roads of snow after a blizzard. That's just what they did in small South Dakota towns back then, they arrested all the young Indian men in town and put them to work."</div><div><br /></div><div>My dad's ethnicity rarely came up in the larger world away from the reservation. When it did, most often, like Zimmerman, people asked if he was Jewish because of his curly hair, Dakota features, and his large, round European eyes, which colored black look Middle Eastern. Ironically, shortly after 9-11, he was detained when he and my mother boarded a plane. The TSA agents asked him numerous questions about his racial identity because they thought he was an Arab terrorist. </div><div><br /></div><div>When they finally let him go, he asked where my mom was, and the flight attendant said, "Oh, you mean that Asian woman?" My mom is a full-blooded Navajo. Once, she had been refused entry into the United States from Canada (she was visiting Niagara Falls) as a college student during the Vietnam War. They thought she was a Vietnamese spy, and they called the Bureau of Indian Affairs to confirm her identity as an American Indian. Not only do we look like the enemy, but enemy-held territory is still called "Indian Country" in military circles. In the Iraq War, soldiers referred to enemy territory as "Indian Country." For example, former Marine Second Lieutenant Ilario Pantano's defense attorney explained his murder of two Iraqi captives: "This is Iraq, Indian Country is where bad guys do things." </div><div><br /></div><div>Zimmerman, the killer, is brown but has fully embraced the worldview of his white father and the protection afforded by their whiteness. The blank slate of being "blanca" upon which no profile is written provides a modicum of security in this world where the boundaries of "Indian Country" are constantly shifting. And the Trayvon Martins of the world must rely on the luck of whether the white man holding the gun chooses to shoot or not. Looking at my father's life after that incident, I have to wonder what Trayvon's life would have been like? Would he have married and raised children? We will never know. That future has been taken from him, his family, his future children never born, his partner never loved. </div><div><br /></div><div>This ruling is once again telling us to "know our place." Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." And today, in the 21st century, a generation of Black youth are admonished not to frighten decent White folk into killing them. And the White folk have been re-gifted with the cover the law for murder. How did we arrive full circle at this point? What does it mean for my son, brown-skin from his Diné grandmother and who has his grandfather's curly black French hair and Dakota features? Will he inspire fear once he is grown tall and strong like his Dakota and his father's Mohawk ancestors? What then? </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm disappointed in my country, in my generation, for not doing better for our children. We were born after the dream of the Civil Rights Movement was made real, and we have done nothing with that great inheritance but fritter it away and harbor ignorance of one another. Ignorance Juror B-37 proudly proclaimed loudly in her interview with Anderson Cooper on Monday.</div><div><br /></div><div>The funny thing is, I don't think my dad ever told me what choice he made that day in the Jim Crow South, to use the white or colored bathroom. I imagine from the disgusted tone he told the story in he chose the colored bathroom because he didn't want to have anything to do with the old white man telling him the rules of the White Supremacist game. Whatever his choice, I hope no one ever has to make again.</div></div><p></p>jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-23795690939660005122021-06-03T09:46:00.004-07:002021-06-03T09:46:33.626-07:00Selling Fraud, Monetizing Trauma and Native Quilts<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2oKsY_tnV3sJdasRSRDiLYLfGxqkz18k9W7njS6V6cKMtivY99OowoK8il1AJwwlX77uDr0Wu9JRd40PizuuOR-qiJeQrQynE5bPzditJxkyNqTPjuh6066mLCXNcXH1VDby7/s2043/Yankton-Sioux-GINA.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="2043" height="387" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2oKsY_tnV3sJdasRSRDiLYLfGxqkz18k9W7njS6V6cKMtivY99OowoK8il1AJwwlX77uDr0Wu9JRd40PizuuOR-qiJeQrQynE5bPzditJxkyNqTPjuh6066mLCXNcXH1VDby7/w640-h387/Yankton-Sioux-GINA.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />I was recently quoted in a Boston Globe article "<a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/31/arts/should-museums-verify-claims-indigenous-ancestry-fruitlands-show-postponed-over-this-profoundly-divisive-issue/" target="_blank">Should museums verify claims of Indigenous ancestry? Fruitlands show postponed over this ‘profoundly divisive’ issue</a>" about the postponement of an art installation featuring Indigenous artists at the Fruitland Museum. Gina Adams and Merritt Johnson voluntarily withdrew their work from the show due to questions about their claims to tribal identity. Full disclosure, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/im-contemporary-im-native-american-im-artist" target="_blank">Merritt Johnson</a>, who claims to be of Mohawk and Blackfoot descent, is on the list of Alleged Pretendians I have been investigating. We found she had no Native ancestry, and I covered this in a <a href="https://fb.watch/5ULJY02h1y/" target="_blank">Pollen Nation magazine podcast</a>. I compared her very white family tree to my mother-in-law's actual Mohawk Johnson family tree. My husband's family are from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario and are descendants of Molly Brant and her husband Sir William Johnson and her brother Chief Joseph Brant. My mother's father was the Mohawk Bear Clan chief at Six Nations and represented them at the first meeting of the United Nations after World War II.<p></p><p>However, since the Boston Globe article came out, Indianz.com did further reporting, "<a href="https://www.indianz.com/News/2021/06/02/museum-wont-verify-claims-of-tribal-ancestry-after-artists-withdraw-from-show/?fbclid=IwAR1gpfnSewuHj9-MA-jiJ4-j3wzrMRFL6OqIsrxaGgNs0v1nL7ET-9d8JOk" target="_blank">Museum won’t verify claims of tribal ancestry after artists withdraw from show: Native women raised alarms about exhibition in Massachusetts</a>" and some of the details were honestly shocking to me. I had not realized Gina Adams, who falsely claimed to be of Native descent and was the exhibit's co-curator, had sold her work to my own alma mater, <a href="https://studioart.dartmouth.edu/news/2018/06/gina-adams-broken-treaty-performance" target="_blank">Dartmouth College</a>. I had also been aware that she had made an extremely exploitive series of quilts featuring Tribes' treaties with the United States, including the Yankton Sioux––my father's own tribe. </p><p>Also, looking at the "<a href="https://thetrustees.org/exhibit/echoesintime/" target="_blank">Echoes in Time: New Interpretations of the Fruitlands Museum Collection</a>" webpage, I found other questionable tribal affiliations listed in artists still part of the exhibit. These include Betsey Garand (French Canadian, English, Abenaki), Brenda Garand (French Canadian, English, Abenaki), and Mimi Gellman (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe, Ashkenazi Jewish, Metis). So, I contacted researchers I work with and took a look at the family trees of the Garand sisters and Mimi Gellman. Then, I wrote an email to the Boston Globe writer with some of my findings and concerns.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>"I'm a Dartmouth alum, and Native alumni of Dartmouth are contacting the college about their acquisition of Gina Adams' work. </p><p>Also, as a Yankton Sioux, I am appalled and devastated that she sold a quilt with my dad's tribe's treaty on it. She monetized our trauma. Also, my grandmother was a star quilt maker. She never sold her work but gave it to family and donated it for good causes and raffles for the community. </p><p>Looking at the Garand sisters' family tree, they have no Abenaki connections. Their father's family is almost entirely French Canadian. There is one ancestor from New England, but she is of English descent. Her family was kidnapped by a French Canadian party when her village in Massachusetts was raided. Abenaki and Mohawks took part in the raid, but she was already married to a French Canadian man, and her family was spared death and later were not taken as captives by the tribes but allowed to live in Quebec with their in-laws.</p><p>Mimi Gellman is a 5th generation descendant of a Native woman of an unknown tribe. The rest of her mother's family tree is French Canadian. I can't verify her claims to <a href="https://sfai.org/alumni/mimi-gellman/" target="_blank">the Rattlesnake clan,</a> etc. But it seems unlikely as historians don't know her ancestor's tribe. The connection to Red River Settlement is legitimate. Her ancestor was a prominent and wealthy white man who was a stakeholder in the North West fur trading company. But his descendants appear to have married white people and not other Metis for the past 5 generations."</p></blockquote><p></p><p>I am saddened but not surprised that the claimed Native ancestry of these artists, who capitalize on the alleged tribal identity for their careers, is either non-existent or extremely remote. But, it is still very troubling. I hope museums and other institutions will do their due diligence from now on. However, I don't hold out much hope for that. Shockingly, the Fruitland Museum's managing director of art and exhibitions, Jessica May, refuses to even consider the possibility that anyone would lie about being Native American or Indigenous. Even worse, the Fruitland Museum has a Native American advisory board, but they were not even made aware the installation was in the works, much less consulted. </p><p>Systems of accountability must be developed. It is not realistic to think people won't lie to promote their own self-interest. And indeed, with the investigation into ethnic fraud I've been conducting, we have found that 96% of those we have investigated either have no Native ancestry whatsoever (81%) or have unverifiable claims (15%). Unless someone can prove that such a high percentage of "Native" people have totally white family trees and are victims of "paper genocide," our findings are evidence of widespread deceit.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-75093818672746684932020-04-21T19:57:00.000-07:002020-04-21T19:59:20.973-07:00Fundamental Laws and Navajo Voting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My latest at Sierra Magazine. Photo: Dustin Wero</td></tr>
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"Many Diné I have spoken to over the years have expressed hope that the revival of the Fundamental Law offers us a way to reconnect to the wisdom of our ancestors. Another hope is that our non-Native neighbors and fellow US citizens might find a way to learn from the example of our long-standing values. Among those lessons is the connection between right relationships among people and right relationships to place.<br />
'These lands offer a form of healing that we want people to accept so we can live in harmony together,' Willie Grayeyes once told me, expressing his hope that dominant, white culture might find 'a more harmonious approach than just hit-and-run.'"</blockquote>
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My latest article for <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/page.php?id=331037760381749&extragetparams=%7B%22__tn__%22%3A%22%2CdK-R-R%22%2C%22eid%22%3A%22ARCRNHXmOmgI4qcBFjzlX50_7_1jUUJSLEk8f1WDdDFuHX3rMrZYSd3KuG8SuZ6YSjyqBUyNiyoqgA2q%22%2C%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/SierraMagazine/?__tn__=K-R&eid=ARCRNHXmOmgI4qcBFjzlX50_7_1jUUJSLEk8f1WDdDFuHX3rMrZYSd3KuG8SuZ6YSjyqBUyNiyoqgA2q&fref=mentions&__xts__%5B0%5D=68.ARDtUiXvMh3hWNEtWed_3WYcmg8L21EGzXxmj1mVo7G1Cr13GGrgRCf9uh5fCfaFu-RNHMs-NXMc7_iJmNJacU_69wws7X3sTPBebZ09FNUg7u279uWsn4aNZ1eWp1llRSPiuNaVHO1Y8OAd0CLXpXn_JxdQ3gQeAeSmSaydRKAs5LeLoOj2_3Yhs0edmRtNCHhgE86hgxrvqRyZFw" style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration: none;">Sierra Magazine</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2020-3-may-june/feature/native-americans-helped-invent-american-democracy-are-often-prevented-from-practicing-it?fbclid=IwAR0B2lSn9qFTq_64ZtiDpmgmuaFvRxQNFnZ6tbA2YGLh9FkJ_CBQn_KhzS8">Native Americans Helped Invent American Democracy But Are Often Prevented From Practicing It</a></div>
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Check out my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/jfkeeler?fan_landing=true">Patreon page</a>, I'll be adding photos of my trip across the Navajo Nation while doing the reporting for this piece. Thank you to Sierra Magazine for supporting my work. </div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-22145023386257679302019-02-11T12:27:00.000-08:002019-05-28T12:38:23.837-07:00The Story of America: Warren’s Family Stories in an America Built on Trumpian Triumphalism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkqinIqJkh8egEOHWDu8tORNmt7DhoLqZLLtqsKGwTRTpx9BGX5tjN7FJxknycJ9EUkisvGxQAl3-eXNtkeduaA7AUtjTrFExrEb9MRcJ2r60NMrCalackLx-O5evxk034okWo/s1600/47-Family.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="608" data-original-width="898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkqinIqJkh8egEOHWDu8tORNmt7DhoLqZLLtqsKGwTRTpx9BGX5tjN7FJxknycJ9EUkisvGxQAl3-eXNtkeduaA7AUtjTrFExrEb9MRcJ2r60NMrCalackLx-O5evxk034okWo/s1600/47-Family.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Senator Warren (far right) and her family from her campaign website: FACTSQUAD</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; white-space: pre-wrap;">By Jacqueline Keeler</span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-42caa341-7fff-6d19-61fb-8e9a6ffda0c0"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Voters are divided on party lines as Republicans revel and Democrats react in disgust at President Trump’s latest tweet referencing the Cherokee Trail of Tears, a tribe from which the senator has claimed descent. Despite Warren’s punchy response that Trump will probably not even been in the 2020 race because “he won’t be even a free man,” his base has not abandoned yet. The answer is in U.S. history.</span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-42caa341-7fff-6d19-61fb-8e9a6ffda0c0"><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the night of the State of the Union, as the nation watched the fireworks between Trump and the women of Congress dressed in white. The Washington Post quietly dropped</span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/elizabeth-warren-apologizes-for-calling-herself-native-american/2019/02/05/1627df76-2962-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html?utm_term=.e1c235dbce3a" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a story</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> under the rather bland headline “Elizabeth Warren apologizes for calling herself Native American.” The most remarkable disclosure in the article wasn’t Warren’s mea culpa, but a document the Post had procured through an open records request. On her 1986 registration card for the State Bar of Texas, Warren identified herself in her handwriting as “Native American,” a discovery that could mean this issue will continue to hamper her presidential campaign, which officially launched on Feb. 9. Warren has always denied claiming Native identity to take advantage of Affirmative Action opportunities meant for Native Americans. She says she filled out the card after admission to the bar in Texas.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In what is perhaps, to most Americans, an inexplicable sideshow of identity politics which threatens to overwhelm Warren’s political aspirations as she prepares to face off against a sea of Democratic candidates for the nomination in 2020. Headlines trumpet the story every time Trump calls her “Pocahontas” to sneer at her claims to Native identity and send his base to their keyboards and phones to dredge up yet more hoary old stereotypes. Including his son, Donald Jr. who instagrammed his dad’s Trail of Tears tweet with the comment “Savage.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The President’s thinly-veiled racism makes his attacks on Warren means little to Democrats, but</span><a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-d/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">polling</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> still finds her falling behind former V. P. Joe Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker. A month after launching her “exploratory committee,” the senator was still polling in single digits—neck and neck with failed yet charismatic Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke from Texas.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whether she knew the Post’s story was about to break or was attempting to make right earlier missteps, Warren, without telling the press, privately apologized on Feb. 1 for releasing her DNA results in a phone call with Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker. News of the apology was announced by the Cherokee Nation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“While Principal Chief Baker and Senator Warren have been in contact on occasion over the past three to four years,” Amanda Clinton, Senior Advisor of Communications for the Cherokee Nation said via email, “the Cherokee Nation was not notified of Senator Warren’s intent to undergo or release a DNA test.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The elaborately produced video featured geneticist Carlos Bustamante telling an excited Warren she had some genetic markers that indicate Indigenous ancestry between 6 to 10 generations back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“And it is about an apology from the heart,” Warren maintained</span><a href="https://youtu.be/oJICQqmb9mE" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">when questioned</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by reporters in the Senate hallway after the Post story broke, “An apology for not being more sensitive to tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty and for harm caused.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is evident she expected her video and proof of distant Native ancestry to silence her critics and embarrass Trump. However, her DNA testing was widely considered a mistake. The Cherokee Nation Secretary of State issued a stern rebuke. Trump dismissed the findings with “who cares?” And Kate McKinnon</span><a href="https://youtu.be/yv0friRfSaM" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">portraying the senator</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on SNL’s Weekend Update played it as a punchline revealing much about America’s relationship to a racially-troubling past:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Colin Jost: What about releasing the results of your DNA test. Do you think that will come back to haunt you? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Warren (Kate McKinnon): It came back 100% bad idea. Who knew race science was not a good PR strategy? Lost that fight.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Warren has accused those questioning her family story of Native identity of calling her “mamaw and papaw” liars. However, even if the DNA findings confirm an ancestral tie, the shame her mother’s family is hard to square with it being 6-10 generations ago. Six generations ago, Warren would have 64 great-great-great-great grandparents. Ten generations ago she would have 1,024 many-greats grandparents. When 63 or 1,023 of her ancestors in a generation were white, how would local white Oklahomans know to discriminate against her family 150 to 250 years later? Especially, if they kept it a secret and had not lived in tribal communities for several generations? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only context this has any viability is within the context of genocide. If all Europeans were extinct and anyone with minute quantities of European DNA several generations back could be understood to be say French? Native nations are not gone they are still very much in existence (there are 573 federally-recognized tribes). It is only to non-Native Americans that they are invisible and that is the result of hundreds of years of U.S. policy to disappear the political reality of Indigenous nations that pre-existed the United States and persist to this day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consumer DNA tests have been taking the heat in the media after a pair of identical twins got varying and inconsistent results from each other with several DNA kits. Despite what ads may promise, the fine print on these DNA sites confirm the accuracy cannot be guaranteed only at the continental level. Human DNA is largely similar, and the genetic markers that contain variation around the world comparatively few. Analyzing them and assigning ethnic or national identities to them is still both a science and an art. Tribes use DNA to ascertain a close family relationship like between an enrolled parent and a child. They do not accept DNA genetic markers as proof of citizenship and neither does any country in the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Despite the apology, Warren still has up on her “Facts Squad” website</span><a href="https://facts.elizabethwarren.com/story-of-an-american-family/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a page</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> titled “The Story of an American Family” that asserts her family’s claims to being of Cherokee and Delaware descent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her website also contains the statement: “She never used her family tree to get a break or get ahead.” The phrase invariable casts Affirmative Action and Native Americans who are beneficiaries of it in a negative light. By attempting to prove Trump wrong, Warren haplessly gives credence to anti-Affirmative Action biases. The statement also scuttles evidence</span><a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/09/01/did-claiming-native-american-heritage-actually-help-elizabeth-warren-get-ahead-but-complicated/wUZZcrKKEOUv5Spnb7IO0K/story.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">revealed in a Boston Globe investigation</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that Harvard postponed searching for minority women faculty for a few years and cited Warren’s hire to show they had minorities on staff. The senator says she was unaware of this.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nowhere on the “Fact Squad” site is</span><a href="http://www.pollysgranddaughter.com/2012/05/elizabeth-warrens-ancestry-part-1.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Warren’s family tree</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> compiled by Cherokee Nation genealogists David Cornsilk and Twila Barnes. The genealogy compiled by Barnes & Cornsilk is of a white family with no ties to the Cherokee or Delaware nations. Not even with cousins or second cousins of Warren’s ancestors. Typically, Native ancestors, are found to be living in at some point over the past 300 years in communities, and their neighbors or cousins have been flagged as Indian in paperwork. The Cherokee people are amongst the most documented in the world according to Cornsilk, second only to royalty. The genealogists were unable to document any ties between the Cherokee Nation through several generations of Warren’s family. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In stark contrast to Warren’s claims, when Native children are taken from Native families and nations, low “blood quantum” is often used to question if a child, even a tribal citizen, is “Indian enough” to be protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act. ICWA, a federal law passed in 1978 to prevent the wholesale removal of Native children from Native nations is under attack. Conservative think tanks like the Goldwater Institute have been seeking to overturn ICWA so more white parents, particularly Christians, can adopt and raise Native children at will. Congressional hearings conducted in the 1970s found 25-35 percent of all Native children were being removed from Native homes and placed with white families. Taking children in this way is an ethnic cleansing tactic often used against unwanted ethnic minorities and falls under the Geneva Conventions on Genocide. No nation would allow a wholesale kidnapping of their next generation of citizens. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, a federal court in Texas</span><a href="https://www.nicwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Texas-v-Zinke-Case-Summary.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ruled</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in October that the term ‘Indian” was race-based and unconstitutional. If the case makes it to the Supreme Court, it could scuttle any federal law or treaty where the term appears, leaving Native people and nations vulnerable to further depredations and erasure. Warren’s DNA announcement that same month served to validate the Goldwater Institute’s claims that to be Native American or ‘Indian' is racial, and not implying citizenship.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Warren, a one-time registered Republican in the 1990s, has become in the 21st century one of the most influential voices in the Democratic party for corporate accountability. When her supporters rail at Native Americans criticizing the senator and hold up her record on taking on Wall Street, they fail to see the connections between that fight and the fight for Indigenous sovereignty. Throughout American history, the spread of modern capitalism across this continent has been incumbent on the obliteration of Native nations. America’s origin story begun at Jamestown, an English colony in what was the Powhatan Confederacy. The Virginia Company of Adventurers funded the settlement in London, an early joint-stock company that was the forerunner of modern corporations. Both Virginia and the senator's state of Massachusetts began as entities owned by these early corporations which were given governmental powers by the English crown. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This model persists today as seen at Standing Rock when a Texas corporation was given governmental powers of eminent domain to build the Dakota Access Pipeline across unceded treaty land guaranteed to the Great Sioux Nation by the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty ratified by the Senate. Taking on bad corporate actors must include the deconstruction of self-serving mythologies that embolden such predatory institutions. Otherwise, the will to hold them accountable through regulations and laws Warren champions cannot take place. The recognition of tribal sovereignty and a full understanding of what it means is a necessary part of that process. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If Sen. Warren is serious about helping Native peoples (much less being a Native person) she cannot slide into old colonial habits of appropriation of Indigenous identity which has gone hand in hand with assuming the rights to the land and resources of those Native nations and peoples. It is also within this context that her mother’s story of Native identity must be understood. Not as a conscious lie, or one that makes her mother a liar, but one that has been passed down in European families and which is part of the DNA of colonialism in this country. It is an expression of the colonial prerogative to split the spoils of war and subjugation of Native nations and people between those of European descent, even fairly recent immigrants like the Trump family. And it is the triumphalism of that victory that Trump and his followers truly seek to embrace when they wear red MAGA hats and march in the streets chanting “you will not replace us.” Warren and Trump are on a continuum of European colonial experience.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It does not help Native people or their nations when media commentators describe expressions of preening colonial prerogative as “tribalism”—an intrinsically pejorative description of tribal identity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The recent spate of revelations of white politicians in blackface, even liberal ones, demonstrates how out of step white Americans are and how ill-equipped they are to lead a pluralistic nation of which they are only another minority group. Trump’s rise to power using the dog whistle mantra of ‘Make America Great Again’ harkens back to a pre-Civil Rights era America of a white “Father Knows Best” and a post-War period when Trump’s father built a real estate empire and enforced redlining and discrimination of non-white Americans—all underwritten by federal contracts and tax dollars. And those gains</span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/28/black-and-hispanic-families-are-making-more-money-but-they-still-lag-far-behind-whites/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b662cbf16851" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> are still reflected</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in studies that show the average accumulated wealth of white families is ten times that of black families. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Despite Warren’s struggles in those years, as recounted on her “The Story of an American Family” webpage, they as a white family benefited from the protections and cushion afforded by the system of white supremacy. She attended an all-white high school; her parents had moved to Oklahoma City for the express purpose of obtaining for her the best public education available in their state. The public education she extolls would not have been possible were her family not white. The neighborhood they lived in, the mortgage on their house, the job her mother got that saved their mortgage, even the minimum wage her mother got for that job (which would have been less if she was not white), all possible because of their white identity. Warren’s story would have been very different if her family had endured the racism and racist system a brown or black family was subjected to for the several generations they lived in the United States as white people. As a Native American family, her family’s brush with insolvency and medical issues would have most likely led to her placement in a white foster home where she would have faced the prospect of years of abuse by strangers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is not clear if in the period she was identifying as Native American while teaching law school, she has ever given back in any meaningful way to the Native American community. Until last year, in Feb. 2018 when she spoke to the National Congress of American Indians in her preparations to challenge Trump in 2020,</span><a href="https://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/141272/elizabeth-warren/74/indigenous-peoples#.XFyrUy2ZMWo" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her Senate record</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> had no evidence of support for legislation that would help Native people</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where are the initiatives to help Cherokee people that she conducted in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s? While at Harvard did she ever speak to the Native American Law Students Association or mentor Native law students? Has she ever taken or taught an Indian Federal Law class? Did she speak out in 2013, after the Supreme Court ruled against a Cherokee family in Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl and a Cherokee citizen Veronica Brown</span><a href="https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/baby-veronica-handover-prompted-a-lot-of-crying/article_6f78ccf8-9cd9-50af-8840-48df09ba7355.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was taken</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from her Cherokee family from a Cherokee Nation-owned house at by federal marshals? Cherokees have a long and noble tradition in the legal profession, and the Cherokee Nation has been arguing cases before the Supreme Court since the 1820s when they were fighting removal before Jackson’s Trail of Tears. What cases has Warren argued or done pro bono (as so many Native American attorneys do) to fight for her people? Where did she do for Cherokee or Delaware people in the years she was identifying in employment paperwork as Native American? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 2012,</span><a href="https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/noprimarytagmatch/2012/06/19/cherokee-women-travel-to-boston-to-confront-elizabeth-warren" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a delegation</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of Cherokee women traveled to Massachusetts </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; white-space: pre-wrap;">to present Warren’s genealogy to her and to discuss with her not only the senator’s (very white) family tree but the culturally-specific ways in which Cherokee people’s national identity is traditionally and legally understood. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Their hopes were dashed when a Warren spokesperson speaking to The Boston Herald labeled them an “out-of-state group … being promoted and supported by a right-wing extremist.” The Senate race between Warren and Brown, the incumbent, was close. And Brown, despite running as a moderate Republican, had no scruples about making use of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s right-wing website Breitbart’s inflammatory coverage of the visit. Brown staffers insultingly performed tomahawk chops to mock Warren. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the more than six years since Warren has never responded to the women’s inquiries to speak with her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“If you had told me this would still be going on six years later,” Twila Barnes, the genealogist who did Warren’s family tree and was a part of the delegation says, “I would never have believed you.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Warren made memes and headlines by refusing to stop speaking out against the confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General and drew a rebuke from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who complained, “Nonetheless she persisted.” This persistence represents the best of the strengths of what she has to offer America, but when utilized blindly in a fight against a political opponent that leaves Native nations vulnerable it is her greatest weakness. She persisted too long in this. The most we can hope now is for an Obama-inspired speech that drives the discussion above the slings and arrows of Trumpian sneering to a message of unity, admission of mistakes of a past that preferences some American families over others and their stories and how we can become more than that. The American family story can become one of all American families, black, immigrant, refugee and even those of dual tribal and US citizenship. Recognizing Native nations’ sovereignty is the only route open to Americans and American leaders to ever come to terms morally with an immoral past and to make a better present.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“We are at a unique time in history where the national conversation around tribal issues can be leveraged as a tool for tearing one another down, or as a tool for learning more about the First Americans,” says Cherokee Nation official Clinton, “We hope public discourse moves in the direction of the latter.”</span></div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-9830304936377226772019-01-17T09:39:00.000-08:002019-03-19T09:44:15.273-07:00Native Women Rule: The 'Town Destroyer' vs. the Clan Mother<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reps. Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo-NM) and Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk-WI) at an event celebrating their swearing-in to Congress (Creative Commons non-commercial license)</td></tr>
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Historian Colin G. Calloway, author of “<a href="https://www.powells.com/book/indian-world-of-george-washington-the-first-president-the-first-americans-the-birth-of-the-nation-9780190652166">Indian World of George Washington The First President the First Americans & the Birth of the Nation</a>,” writes, “Washington knew what history has forgotten: Indian nations still dominated large areas of the North American continent.” And consequently, “Washington’s entire Indian policy and his vision for the nation depended on the acquisition of Indian lands.” He was himself a land speculator, trained as a surveyor and “he looked on Indian lands with a surveyor’s eye for the rest of his life.”<br />
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The dismemberment of Native nations’ lands for the acquisition of resources, and the erasure of thousands of years of lived human history they once contained, is still active U.S.policy today. One of President Trump’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order reauthorizing the hard-fought Dakota Access pipeline that had brought more than ten thousand Native Americans and their allies to the northern border of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to stand off against a heavily militarized response by the state of North Dakota and the pipeline builder Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. He was declaring that Native lands and concerns would not stand in the way of money-making ventures that sought America’s “energy dominance” of the world that would “make American great again.” Trump’s obsession with rolling back hard-fought protections of Native lands won during his predecessor’s administration was once again emphasized in December 2017 when he signed another executive order reducing the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah by 85 percent. The reduction of the monument, proposed by the five tribes and meant to be co-managed with them, puts at risk over 100,000 archaeological sites documenting 10,000-years of human history on the land. These sites include cliff dwellings, kivas, graves, villages, stone towers and more.<br />
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“It's all about power, greed, and money and how much oil can we extract from Mother Earth,” said Rebecca Ortega of Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico who was in Washington DC to see the January 3 swearing-in of the very first two Native American congresswomen in U.S. history, Reps. Deb Haaland (D-NM) and Sharice Davids (D-Kansas). “And I really think that you know Pueblo women, as well as Native American women, you know we all know what we need. And we need our lands protected, we need our families to feel secure.”<br />
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In their newly minted offices crammed with Native people and in the city named for “father of his country” George Washington, it is instructive to look at the road that grew out of Washington’s decision to pursue total war against unarmed Native American women and children to secure a win in the Revolutionary War. This resulted in the deaths of thousands of defenseless Native women, children, and elders in some 40 villages whose were allied with the British and whose men were away, engaged in raids on the borders of their lands. Their alliance with the British was spurred on by the colonists themselves who had been streaming into their lands for decades, squatting on their lands to turn into private property. Washington sent several American regiments under the command of Major General Sullivan to lay waste to these villages throughout western New York destroying their foods and homes including 1,600,000 bushels of corn. Washington already had a reputation of resorting to his kind of “warfare” considered a war crime today. The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee “the people of the Longhouse,” as they called themselves, had given him the sobriquet Conotocarious or “Town Destroyer” in 1753, a name also given to his great-grandfather John Washington after the murder of five Algonquin chiefs under a flag of truce. In 1755, the future U.S. president even signed a letter to Oneida leaders (one of the six nations that comprise the Iroquois Confederacy) using the name.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An 18th c. portrait of a Mohawk woman (Getty Images)</td></tr>
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On the National Endowment for the Humanities <a href="https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/mayjune/feature/madam-sacho-how-one-iroquois-woman-survived-the-american-revolution">website</a>, historian Sarah Pearsall vividly describes a solitary Iroquois elder confronting the Continental Army laying waste to her village, “Madam Sacho must have emerged from the smoke like a ghost: startling, uncanny, and with a tale to tell.” The NEH’s website presently has a “Shutdown Notice” banner across the top warning that during the shutdown, their website will not be maintained while the president holds the government hostage for a wall that will keep out migrants and refugees from south of the border, many of whom are Indigenous people.<br />
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Madam Sacho, or as the soldiers variously called her “a very old Squaw,” “helpless, impotent wretch,” “antediluvian hag,” was utterly alone, everyone else had fled and the corn was still standing tall in the fields. The Continental Army was “taking the war home to the enemy to break their morale,” as Washington described what would today brand him as a war criminal.<br />
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The Haudenosaunee are composed of six nations (Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Tuscarora), ruled by the Great Law of Peace, and the leaders were chosen not by white men of property as would be the case in the new republic, but by clan mothers, women who were leaders of their respective clans from which descent was traced matrilineally. Perhaps this “antediluvian hag,” as the soldiers called Sacho was just such a clan mother. It seems unlikely the people would have left her behind lightly, it must have been her choice — her choice to face the town destroyers alone.<br />
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My father’s Dakota people have stories of warriors of the Kit Fox Society who would stake themselves into the ground and fight refusing to budge even onto death. And yet, she did not fight; the elder addressed the enemy, she took advantage of their dismissal of her as a "helpless, impotent wretch” and gave them false intel, misdirecting their search, and possibly gaining time for younger women and children to escape.<br />
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“Sharice [Davids] and Deb [Haaland] coming to the Congress makes me think about our past,” Wilfred Cleveland, Ho-chunk Tribal Chairman says standing next to Ho-chunk tribal member Rep. Davids’ desk, “our relationship with the Mother Earth. And how in the home, the mother is the one that keeps the home fires burning, so to speak, and that in this day and age, the way the government is — although the government is a non-Native type of governing — it's still through the years they realize that because of dealings with Mother Earth it goes back to the relationship of woman… of the woman in the home.”<br />
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In the Declaration of Independence, King George III is accused of having “excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.” Knowing Washington also engaged in this tactic the declaration can be more clearly seen as not entirely immune to the use of selective facts for propaganda purposes. The King did enforce the terms of the treaty that ended what Americans call the French and Indian War, and what in Europe is called the Seven Years’ War. A war begun by the colonists’ incursions into Indian land, and which triggers the first world war, what historians call World War Zero, doubled Britains national debt, and which the hated taxes were meant to pay for. And it was begun when a Virginia raiding party under the command of a very young George Washington led to the death of a French diplomat in western Pennsylvania. The “taxation without representation” was to pay for that debt and British force to prevent further colonists’ incursions into Indian land that could further beggar the British treasury.<br />
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Today, the U.S. maintains a military budget that dwarfs that of most of the world. And the response as seen at Standing Rock to Native nations demanding consultation on development that might harm their people’s drinking water and attempts to invoke treaties signed with the U.S. provoked a substantial military response. It is clear the land is still held by military force and to extract profit and nothing else.<br />
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“I stand with the tribes on the Chaco Canyon issue. They want a buffer around the monument,” newly sworn-in Rep. Deb Haaland told me in an interview her first full day on the job, “I will do whatever I can to stop drilling and fracking in Chaco Canyon before they sign leases with fossil fuel industries. That’s my ancestral homeland. It’s not unlike what the folks at Standing Rock did to protect their water. That’s their ancestral homeland. I hope I bring a new voice to that issue. I traveled to Bears Ears in September before my election and because I felt like I needed to be there and know what I would be fighting for. It’s apparent that in those areas there are so many treasures we do need to protect.”<br />
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-85892694342585317512018-12-22T10:35:00.000-08:002018-12-22T10:35:10.838-08:00We are Wounded by Wounded Knee: A People Remembers & Hopes for Reconciliation During Christmas <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wounded Knee Massacre, Oscar Howe (Dakota), 1960 </td></tr>
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<i>This commentary was originally published in Indian Country Today January 2, 2014, but since the reorganization of the publication, was removed from the website. I think it still has valid things to say on this time of the year for Dakota and Lakota people </i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">— </span><i>and for all Native people who have faced off against the United States. I honor and think about every Christmas holiday on how my Dakota ancestors dealt with both the Minnesota Sioux Uprising, the Dakota 38, and Wounded Knee. Also, I recommend watching <a href="https://youtu.be/AENjL7wCtHg">this video on the Dakota hymn</a> "Wakantanka taku nitawa" sung at the gallows by the Dakota 38. #RememberOurRelatives #RememberWhoYouAre</i><br />
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by Jacqueline Keeler<br />
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There are always things happening in Indian Country that never make it into the mainstream news, and we Indian people are used to it. We never expect the issues near and dear to our hearts to be covered 24 hours on CNN or to trend on Twitter or Buzzfeed. And yet, this year, I felt it more than usual. <br />
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As we entered the holiday season it felt good to see, on my Facebook and Twitter feeds, hundreds of posts, videos, and retweets hailing the Dakota 38 riders as they began their 330-mile trek on December 10th, riding on horseback down snowy roads from Lower Brule in South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota. It was here, the day after Christmas in 1862, that 38 Dakota men were executed in the largest mass hanging in U.S. History for rising up in an insurrection against the Americans who had taken their land. President Lincoln signed the orders, reducing the number to be executed from 303 to the 38 who were hung that day.<br />
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The United States had failed to fulfill their part — i.e., monetary compensation — of the treaty agreements with the Santee in exchange for the surrendering of up to 24 million acres of hunting grounds; without the ability to hunt, their children were starving. Reportedly, the money owed the Santee was reallocated by Congress to cover the costs of Mary Todd Lincoln’s redecorating the White House and sunk into years of graft by Indian agents. A trader, Andrew Myrick, refused to release any food from his stores without payment and famously said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass — or their own dung.” Myrick was the first white man killed in the uprising, and his body was found days later with grass stuffed in his mouth. General Jon Pope was dispatched to Minnesota to quell the insurgency (Pope’s assignment was in part a demotion for losing the 2nd Battle of Bull Run against the Confederacy); he wrote, “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.” <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBOPBuStTzhTqK0D-_C2N56r6dYZOLgNi0CfuKbOzBth3q_7x8sAyNRS7wIcKnZ4Mg73etXS0mjzJWX3GMQUuHBAtkwhmMhYv2MCw1vSnMIMKoFpIkC35FOlcRdWCTTOxGE4kF/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-01-03+at+11.56.35+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="522" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBOPBuStTzhTqK0D-_C2N56r6dYZOLgNi0CfuKbOzBth3q_7x8sAyNRS7wIcKnZ4Mg73etXS0mjzJWX3GMQUuHBAtkwhmMhYv2MCw1vSnMIMKoFpIkC35FOlcRdWCTTOxGE4kF/s320/Screen+Shot+2014-01-03+at+11.56.35+AM.png" width="296" /></a>Then this recent Sunday came the anniversary of the Wounded Knee massacre, just three days after the Dakota 38 riders reached Mankato bearing gifts for reconciliation for the town. A tweet by @williamcander of the image of the burial of the frozen victims’ bodies was retweeted hundreds of times with my twitter name attached to it. My Twitter stream became filled with that painful image repeated ad infinitum regarding the December 29th, 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota: “123 years ago today,150 #Lakota men/women/children were massacred by the US 7th Calvary @ #WoundedKnee H/T @jfkeeler.” Each time someone would retweet it would show up again on my timeline. And so, even though I clicked on the image only once, the long rectangular hole dug for mass burial with the bodies of Lakota people strewn in it kept reappearing before me. Over and over again, I saw those waiting frozen on the ground while white men pose, holding guns or with their hands at their hips as if for a job well done — and I am a descendant of someone who was there.<br />
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That image is filled with all those things that, as Native people, we cannot name, and remains a symbol of all the ways in which we are not allowed to be ordinary Americans simply living our lives in the most powerful nation in the world. December 29th, 1890 is the date when we became a marginalized people denied the comfort of being part of a nation that recognizes our experiences and commemorates them with us. We live out our American lives in a twilight existence where the only time other Americans, our compatriots, remember us is as we were then when we truly separate from them and each member of our own nations. Then they dress up “like us” with feathered headbands made in China and cheer for their sports teams on weekends named to “honor” us all the time, not remembering us as we are today, as our encounter with them has made us. But still, after all this time, we are different because we remember; we remember Wounded Knee, and Mankato, and The Long Walk, and every broken promise that we must, for our own good, put aside to live in our new country, the United States. It only makes it harder that they do not join us in this; it makes what we lost, the millions of acres and lives of our loved ones feel cheapened and unappreciated and forgotten and makes their present-day ignorance of us even harder to bear.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPVdRIjEIHP2zd24aRJ_DMLFeqCK44j-nk6zGfC2iLoNnKhP_TLUvz9Qh-rMWFfAlCXpi-6LoyvugA4gJP25zfn1XZHua1peEXwG-Fj9pJHC6eyJsK8FE0DXjDrVmSGcEZnEl8/s1600/redskinsfan7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPVdRIjEIHP2zd24aRJ_DMLFeqCK44j-nk6zGfC2iLoNnKhP_TLUvz9Qh-rMWFfAlCXpi-6LoyvugA4gJP25zfn1XZHua1peEXwG-Fj9pJHC6eyJsK8FE0DXjDrVmSGcEZnEl8/s320/redskinsfan7.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
So, as we Native people mourn and reflect upon these painful events in our history, we do so very much apart from the rest of the country. There is no national 24-hour news coverage of the Dakota 38 riders. No one is following their journey down icy roads and freezing temperatures except for us who look for updates on their Facebook event page and watch their YouTube interviews, creating our own piecemeal media coverage that does not exist elsewhere. Instead, on that Sunday on the 123rd anniversary of Wounded Knee, a Washington Redsk*ns football game was what was on TV. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi85EGT7HWSqcK5QP95DxlHUpPy_bTftuvPR48yYinuDw1Q9jqS_3Z37j3dhEpivaeZDcP5NqwNgdGxdwCNbjBM1ByKbc_FMSH60AQraKNX3-ueIJE6McyWlbI1V8vQKiSUlShy/s1600/img599.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="685" data-original-width="927" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi85EGT7HWSqcK5QP95DxlHUpPy_bTftuvPR48yYinuDw1Q9jqS_3Z37j3dhEpivaeZDcP5NqwNgdGxdwCNbjBM1ByKbc_FMSH60AQraKNX3-ueIJE6McyWlbI1V8vQKiSUlShy/s320/img599.jpg" width="320" /></a>Seeing photos of Redsk*ns and Chiefs’ and Braves’ fans dressed up in fake eagle feather headdresses, I think of a photograph of Owl Man, my great-grandmother’s grandfather, as he stood with a delegation of Yankton Dakota headmen at the White House in Washington, DC in 1868 to sign the Yankton treaty with the U.S. Government. A diminutive President Andrew Johnson stands in frock coat in the balcony above the Yanktons, and he is flanked by the Miami tribe’s delegation who tower over him in turbans and eagle claw necklaces. My ancestor is easily identifiable as he is the only one wearing the full eagle feather headdress. I think what he would have thought of all this. Each feather is said to have represented the confidence the people had for the leader. It was something very precious, but it came with a great deal of responsibility and accountability to the people. When the headmen returned home, the women chastised them for signing away the salt mines which they needed to preserve the meat. Even then, there were no good deals to be made in DC. The people were focused on securing their survival, to live, to protect and raise the young, and sometimes, like at Wounded Knee, even that was an impossibility. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); color: #555555; font-family: "Noto Sans"; font-size: 14px; text-align: left;">Yankton Sioux Delegation at White House, 1867</span></td></tr>
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Looking at this image of Wounded Knee I want to run — run like the Ihanktonwan man my dad used to tell us kids about at dinner. He was at Wounded Knee visiting, and despite being shot through the middle of his body, he ran all the way across the state of South Dakota to our people. We kids would pepper our dad with questions about the story, “How could he run all the way across the state with a gunshot wound in the middle of his body?” “They were just tougher back then.” “But, why did he do it?” “Because he thought our people really needed to know. It was important to the people.” I want to run like him and running, carrying the story with the pain still lodged inside of me. The worry and the doubt eating me up. And only by putting my feet to the ground and feeling the tempo of my movement, a heartbeat upon the body of my mother, <i>Maka</i>, can I shake loose the overwhelming despair of the assault on our people. I suppose a lot of Native people feel this way, and this is why we share our stories with each other on social media. Because these things are terrible and the country we are supposed to be part of cares not at all, or it cannot care without assuming guilt, and it is unwilling to do that because of Manifest Destiny. In their minds, it was all for the greater good of creating this country that our nations were buried in the snow. And so, we live in a country where Wounded Knee and the Mankato 38 does not receive the same amount of broadcast time as does a perpetually losing NFL team’s flailing weekly on the field.<br />
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And even as we mourn, publicly for the first time in a long time, on social media sites like Twitter, we are confronted by those who would tell us to “get over it.” And they refuse to see that we cannot as long as our concerns remain shunted off to the side of our daily American experience. We are mourning the dead, but also the death of our own centrality in the story of our lives. We are surrounded by stories of white men and boys overcoming obstacles and triumphing in their quests to get the woman of their dreams, to save the world, become rich on TV, in films and books. <br />
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One white guy had to respond to the tweet of the photograph of Wounded Knee by saying it was okay because Indians were not Noble Savages and did far worse to each other, so we should stop remembering. In rejecting one stereotype, he had embraced something even worse. The notion that unless Native people are better than any other people in the world they do not deserve basic human rights accorded to every other people in the world is the most dehumanizing thing anyone can say against us. Does he mean that we, having fallen off our pedestal, must endure any atrocity against us, even against unarmed women and children—even infants? In his myopic attack on the Noble Savage, he has returned full circle to the mindset that initiated the genocide on this continent. It reminded me of Col. Chivington’s words to his soldiers before the Sand Creek Massacre, “Kill them one and all, nits make lice.” I think the truth is to Americans like this gentleman; we are just an annoying reminder of the true price paid for this land, a reminder that needs to be silenced. It is so important to him that he’s willing to make his point grandstanding on top of a massacre. Something that even the Dakota 38 descendants recognize is wrong. Jim Miller, the Dakota man who had the vision for the memorial ride, has said that part of the ride’s purpose was for the Dakota to be the first to apologize for their role in the historical tragedy. Another organizer, Dakota veteran Peter Lengeek explained, “We’re trying to reconcile, unite, make peace with everyone because that’s what it means to be Dakota.”<br />
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On YouTube is a video of Redbone, the Native rock band singing in 1973, “We were all wounded at Wounded Knee for Manifest Destiny,” but I’d take it even a step further than that. As a people, a living, vibrant culture, we all died that day. Even if your tribe had no runners present to bring them the news, that was the day that, as Black Elk said, the tree was cut. Both the Minnesota Sioux Uprising and Wounded Knee affected two members of my father’s family in ways that marked them the rest of their lives. The first was Owl Man. After the Dakota fled Minnesota, they came and sought refuge amongst our people, the Yanktons, and as we were their cousins, we took them in. When the U.S. Military found out, they sent Colonel Sully who demanded we fulfill the treaty and kill them or he would return to “kill us all.” The headmen met, and, in the meeting, Owl Man was chosen to kill one of the Santee in order to fulfill the treaty. He had had a vision as a boy that he would do this when he received his powers as a medicine man. So he killed the man, and then went up on a hill and sat for four days and four nights without any weapons proclaiming that any Santee who wanted to come and kill him could if they wished. None did, and the Santee were able to remain, another massacre was averted, but it bothered my great-grandfather for the rest of his life. He claimed to be haunted by the spirit of the man until he died.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3kA-BML6zwRFbC6h5gcjK2C2C-XquqaSAHmiJSdk6x1hQaH19HgC__k1qy7wF3P0QQn0EqVgDzwCN5axgtL8jG_jZRiKGZbIhxAJCwea5cCRqmq0bmH3SGr7WoQ2XFwYwusvs/s1600/r.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="343" data-original-width="450" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3kA-BML6zwRFbC6h5gcjK2C2C-XquqaSAHmiJSdk6x1hQaH19HgC__k1qy7wF3P0QQn0EqVgDzwCN5axgtL8jG_jZRiKGZbIhxAJCwea5cCRqmq0bmH3SGr7WoQ2XFwYwusvs/s320/r.jpeg" width="320" /></a>My grandmother told me about the second relative her uncle, the Rev. Charles Cook. One day, we were in her attic, and she unrolled a large portrait-sized daguerreotype of a young, handsome Indian man. She told me he was the Episcopal minister at Wounded Knee during the massacre. It was the holidays, so the church was decorated for Christmas; desperate to save the people, he and Dr. Charles Eastman, a Dakota, turned it into a hospital for the wounded and dying. They were both young, educated Dakota men still in their 20’s, working tirelessly to save the lives of their people. I asked her what happened to him, as I had never heard of him spoken of before. She said quietly, “Oh, he died a few years later, they say, of a broken heart by what he saw that day.” Funnily enough, in the HBO movie done about Charles Eastman’s life a balding, middle-aged white man portrayed him. However, Eastman is more accurately depicted by Canadian Saulteaux actor Adam Beach.<br />
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I think of those young men, educated to be leaders in this new way of life their people were supposed to assume. And how they found themselves, instead of building this new society of churches and hospitals, patching together the bloodied bodies of their own people torn to bits by U.S. soldiers. Dr. Charles Eastman was embittered by the experience, noting the banner inside the church which read “peace and goodwill to all men.” My great-great uncle, could not reconcile the two, and even Owl Man, a seasoned warrior, was wracked with guilt by the choices he had to make to save the most people possible. I highly recommend reading a wonderful blog post written by Cutcha Rising Baldy, (On telling Native people to just "get over it" or why I teach about the Walking Dead in my Native Studies classes... *Spoiler Alert!*) where she explains why we cannot just "get past" these experiences by using The Walking Dead and survival of a zombie apocalypse. In it, she notes just how like American invaders were like a zombie swarm, and how our people were unable to get them to see our humanity. When Baldy asks how the great-grandchildren of the Walking Dead will be able to "get past" the terrible things that happened to their ancestors, all her students understand that in this fictional zombie universe that it is not possible to do so.<br />
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So as social media brings me the annoyed rantings of a white man on Twitter telling Native people to "get over it," and yet another on Facebook carrying on about the terrible hardships of giving up his enjoyment of the Washington, DC football team mascot he loves because of whiney Native people—I am reminded of these very real decisions my ancestors had to make for our survival. I remember these decisions were not made for these white men’s benefit, nor for their comfort, it was made for me, for us, their descendants. We are the reason they did these things and made these hard choices. It was for the hope that we would be alive, their descendants living today and loving life, the sun on our faces, and even the blistering snow on a long ride as we remember them. I write these things down, these family stories in an attempt to preserve the dignity of their actions because no one else will. No one in the American media cares as much as we do about these things. And ironically, it is because social media provides these communal spaces to grieve and remember and to take courage in the acts of Reconciliation that riders like the Dakota 38 do, that make me feel even more the great, yawning distance between my experience, as a Native woman and mother, and that as an American citizen. I wish the two were closer together. The distance is a part of the pain, and being told to be silent about it makes me think others know it, too.</div>
jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-37002096609611147442018-11-27T06:00:00.000-08:002018-11-27T09:20:39.309-08:00Why I Write <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Last Thursday, <a href="https://passionpassport.com/native-american-visibility/">I was featured</a> with three other Native writers by Passion Passport as part of Native American Heritage Month. I'm resharing it here because I think the interviewer did a great job capturing why I write. If you'd like to support my work on #GivingTuesday please do check out my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/jfkeeler">Patreon</a>. Also, support all Native journalists by donating to the <a href="https://www.naja.com/">Native American Journalists Association</a> (of which I am a board member) <a href="https://mailchi.mp/6d473bb24bf9/support-native-journalism-this-givingtuesday-3364677?e=4a3a662888">here</a>.</i><br />
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<b>JACQUELINE KEELER (@JFKEELER)</b><br />
DINÉ (NAVAJO) AND DAKOTA JOURNALIST<br />
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Who she is: “With a Diné mother and a Dakota father, my dual Indigenous cultural backgrounds have always provided me with an alternative way to view the world, both from a historical and a political standpoint. As I note in my piece ‘Thanksgiving and the Hidden Heart of Evil’: ‘As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some inside knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses [the Pilgrims] came to our homes.’”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfB6-cQ9ieNNz0MwLNpHFFxyyLjqpDNKBrKEcHLeY8Rkuw3nF8AnGAYO26c28ZeJ8NfI0F8dBwvZDL3aDkNcuW4PjC7sWpayxkm7qQ04_-Sjbam-bKeraH_844y_xFAHMMBzQv/s1600/IMG_1734+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfB6-cQ9ieNNz0MwLNpHFFxyyLjqpDNKBrKEcHLeY8Rkuw3nF8AnGAYO26c28ZeJ8NfI0F8dBwvZDL3aDkNcuW4PjC7sWpayxkm7qQ04_-Sjbam-bKeraH_844y_xFAHMMBzQv/s320/IMG_1734+%25281%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a>What she does: “I write, think, and lecture. In 2017, I also edited a book titled ‘Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears,’ which compiles the works of Native poets, activists, teachers, writers, students, and public officials, and shares their passionate feelings about the Bears Ears.”<br />
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Why her work is important: “Writing in mainstream media allows me to put a Native perspective on newsworthy events in front of Americans who have never considered that point of view. It also allows me to intellectually address the issues Native people face and help our people process these experiences. We do not have a media that does this for us, so every article I write is putting ideas in the public sphere that would not normally be there.”<br />
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How she thinks society at large can better support Indigenous people: “Publish the writing of Native journalists and pay attention to the issue of sovereignty. Tribes are Indigenous sovereign nations within the United States; they have a federal relationship that includes treaties, which can only be entered into by sovereign nations. We are not a race or minority group — we are citizens of nations that precede and persist through the creation of the colonial state.”</div>
jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-40821191410861071012018-11-20T15:38:00.000-08:002018-11-24T13:22:28.596-08:00My First Newsletter 'Make America Native Again' or Happy MANA!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>This is my first newsletter and it has been quite a learning experience. I have a lot to improve on next month!</i><br />
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<i>Hope you all had a wonderful time with family and friends! </i>Nizhónígo Tązhii Day! 🦃 <i>#NoThankstaking </i>Wopida!<br />
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An unusual amount of national media coverage of Native Americans surrounded the 2018 Midterms—which means it was not zero as is what we are accustomed to expect. From the North Dakota ID law to the election of the first two Native congresswomen, Native people were in the news.<br />
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Today you can read <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=f6cd26ae34&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=f6cd26ae34&e=396666a839" target="_blank">my analysis</a> on the election in <em>Truthout</em> (see below). Just so you know, my working title was <i>"In Partisan America, the Native American Vote Rules: How A Little Known Demographic Maintains the Balance of Power in Congress."</i> I know, long. You can also hear the KBOO Wednesday Talk Radio show I co-hosted on <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=049b09ccf2&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=049b09ccf2&e=396666a839" target="_blank">Native American political and ethical leadership</a> online. The show includes an interview I did with Congresswoman-elect Deb Haaland when she was in Portland. On Thanksgiving Eve, I was on a panel <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1901838590124498/">Art & Power: Centering the Voices of Native Artists</a> here at Portland State University. I closed out the evening reading aloud my take on Thanksgiving (see below).<br />
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But really, for me, the theme of this month was "Make America Native Again" or MANA for short (and you can buy the hats <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=fe251aac7f&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=fe251aac7f&e=396666a839" target="_blank">here</a>). And that began in October as more cities across the country gave up the ghost on Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day. I examined this in a piece I wrote for <em>Yes! Magazine:</em> <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=a5a7de84b0&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=a5a7de84b0&e=396666a839" target="_blank">Beyond Columbus Day: Changing the Name Is Just the First Step</a> and <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=922179dbd4&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=922179dbd4&e=396666a839" target="_blank">spoke to Klee Benally</a> on KBOO<em>.</em> He helped organize protests in Flagstaff on Indigenous Peoples' Day. <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=4d25b3d179&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=4d25b3d179&e=396666a839" target="_blank">13 are now facing misdemeanor charges</a>.<br />
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In October, I also addressed Senator Elizabeth Warren's announcement of her DNA results (see below) and shared a byline for the first time with Kelly Hayes, (Menominee) for <em>NBC News' THINK</em> (link below). Then I did it again with Terri Hansen, (Ho-Chunk) for a post-election piece for <em>Yes! Magazine</em> <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=ec0395900e&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=ec0395900e&e=396666a839" target="_blank">“We Are Still Here”: Native Americans Win a Voice in Government</a>. It was wonderful collaborating with both of these talented Native women. I would do it again in a heartbeat.<br />
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In November, <em><a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=03d0b7df4d&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=03d0b7df4d&e=396666a839" target="_blank">Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears</a>,</em> a book I edited in 2017 is also having a moment. The book is featured by Powell's City of Books for Native American Heritage Month in their store here in Portland, Oregon (see photo below) with a number of other amazing Native-authored books. The bookstore's blog published an essay I wrote <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=d86c2b47b3&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=d86c2b47b3&e=396666a839" target="_blank">"Trump vs. Bears Ears: Five Tribes Take a Stand for Their Collective Histories on the Land, and the U.S. President Dismantles It."</a> In it, I quoted from my famous (or infamous?) Thanksgiving essay <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=c77b11e644&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=c77b11e644&e=396666a839" target="_blank">"Thanksgiving and the Hidden Heart of Evil."</a> This bit of writing has been published all over the world in many different languages over the years and was <a data-cke-saved-href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=32b9e1612f&e=396666a839" href="https://blogspot.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=56af7061a83faead6620af1c5&id=32b9e1612f&e=396666a839" target="_blank">republished in The New York Times</a> last year. Words, it seems, have a life of their own.<br />
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I have one more piece to finish writing that is a special request from my uncle, Sam Deloria. He takes issue with the way the word 'tribal' is being used by talking heads on tv when they are discussing the political divide in this country. The working title of my response is <em>"It’s Not Tribalism, Let’s Call It What It is: Terror."</em> And the even longer subtitle is <em>"The American Dream Has Always Been About White Affirmative Action and Terror for Everyone Else."</em><br />
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We'll see if any editor is brave enough to carry it! In any case, happy MANA!<br />
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You can read the rest of the Make America Native Again newsletter <a href="https://mailchi.mp/8ff39cb24945/make-america-native-again-month-1968021?e=[UNIQID]">here.</a> And sign up <a href="https://tiyospayenow.blogspot.com/p/newsletter.html">here</a>.<br />
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-62054869014746352762018-10-08T17:51:00.001-07:002018-10-09T09:23:00.760-07:00From Columbus to Indigenous Peoples' Day: More Than Window Dressing?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit: Junco Canché</td><td class="tr-caption"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption"><br /></td></tr>
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Today, <i>Truthout</i> published a piece I wrote called "<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-columbus-day-changing-the-name-is-just-the-first-step/" target="_blank">Beyond Columbus Day: Changing the Name Is Just the First Step</a>." I've been writing and reporting on the movement to get rid of Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day for five years. So, I thought it would be good to put some of that material in all one place.<br />
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We rightfully honor the work of so many Native activists across the country who have worked tirelessly for years to change a holiday celebrating a mass murderer, Columbus Day, to one honoring the survival of Indigenous people. But even as city after city (70-plus and counting!), changes the name and focus of the holiday, I also think it's important to listen to Indigenous people who are pushing for more and not to get complacent. In the article, I detail Diné activist Klee Benally concerns that without real change in how the Navajo Nation's largest "border town" treats Native people, Flagstaff's resolution proclaiming Indigenous Peoples' Day amounts to little more than window-dressing. The city never honored a Memo of Understanding made with the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission meant to improve race relations.<br />
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Native activists have fought to change the name of this holiday, but further acknowledgement of their communities' suffering are not even on the radar for most city governments. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IndigenousPeoplesDay2018?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IndigenousPeoplesDay2018</a> <a href="https://t.co/k1WQd4wFdy">https://t.co/k1WQd4wFdy</a> <a href="https://t.co/RMNibnXf4R">pic.twitter.com/RMNibnXf4R</a></div>
— Truthout (@truthout) <a href="https://twitter.com/truthout/status/1049411613906915330?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 8, 2018</a></blockquote>
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I also shared part of a <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-258306556/la-says-goodbye-columbus-day" target="_blank">podcast interview</a> I did last year with Los Angeles-based Diné activist Chrissie Castro after the L.A. city council voted to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day. She describes in great detail the series of meetings leading up to the vote that the city mandated between the Native and Italian American community. It's fascinating stuff. I really recommend a listen.</div>
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<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/l-a-says-goodbye-columbus-day/id1290636090?i=1000393280591&mt=2&app=podcast" style="background: url("https://linkmaker.itunes.apple.com/assets/shared/badges/en-us/podcast-lrg.svg") no-repeat; display: inline-block; height: 34px; overflow: hidden; width: 133px;"></a><br />
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However, even as L.A. celebrates its first Indigenous Peoples' Day, there are protests over a Columbus Statue the city refuses to take down. I will be interviewing local leader Joel Garcia about it on the monthly <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wednesday-talk-radio/id1160529046?mt=2" target="_blank">KBOO talk radio</a> show I co-host this Wednesday. Klee Benally will also be our guest.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William S. Parkerson inciting the mob. Harper's Weekly, March 28, 1891.</td></tr>
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And if you want a thorough history of Columbus Day, I suggest checking out my article on Medium called "<a href="https://artplusmarketing.com/goodbye-columbus-5c3f2d42eeb9" target="_blank">Goodbye Columbus</a>." I examine Columbus' diaries and atrocities and how Italians Americans created the holiday after the largest mass lynching in American history, of Italian American immigrants. They sought to put themselves in American history to protect themselves from murder and assault.<br />
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-69425938759104777082018-10-05T12:53:00.000-07:002019-05-04T12:59:26.964-07:00ICWA & Indigenous Nations’ Right to Their Children<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A demonstrator outside the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix. Photo Credit: @DefendICWA</td></tr>
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On Thursday, October 4, a U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2018/10/05/federal-judge-texas-strikes-down-indian-child-welfare-act/">declared the Indian Child Welfare Act unconstitutional</a> claiming it is a “race-based statute.” The ruling ignores hundreds of years of federal Indian law recognizing Native American tribes as nations. Judge Reed O’Connor claimed. Indigenous nations are not governments at all and not to possess national interests in children born to their tribal members. Congress passed the law in 1978 in response to a study finding 25-35 percent of Native children were taken from their homes and over 80 percent placed with non-Native families. This high rate of removal falls under the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, Section II which defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group … (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”<br />
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In <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-regarding-ruling-striking-down-the-indian-child-welfare-act-300725358.html">a joint statement</a>, leaders of the four tribes named in the suit restated their commitment to protecting children of their respective nations saying in part, “If ICWA is struck down in whole or in part, the victims will be our children and our families, Native children and Native families.”<br />
This ruling represents the culmination of years of work by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. By using the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection under the law” clause, the institute finally obtained a ruling that alleges the definition of “Indian” is illegal because it is race-based. Native attorneys I have interviewed believe the organization’s goal is to create a circuit court split and take the case to the Supreme Court. There, a very conservative court could declare unconstitutional the protections of ICWA and, by extension, make tribes, themselves, illegal. Thus, this ruling has serious implications for both the unity of Native families and the sovereignty of their respective nations. Ironically, “Indians” are not named in the 14th Amendment because when it was passed in 1868, Native Americans were not viewed as citizens of the United States by Congress, but as citizens of their Indigenous nations and thus, did not require an exemption under the amendment. Native Americans were not granted U.S. citizenship until 1924.<br />
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How ICWA does and does not work at the state court level illuminates how ignorance of the law puts Native American parents in danger of losing their children every year. Colorado is unique in that it has a state-level ICWA law on the books, two dedicated ICWA courts, and a dedicated en banc court of appeals panel for ICWA review. However, there is still a great deal of education that needs to occur. It should be noted most judges and attorneys are not required to learn Indian Federal Law in law school or to pass the bar and therefore do not know it. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor admitted she had no familiarity with Indian Federal Law before she arrived at the Supreme Court. Allegedly, the late Justice Scalia bragged about his ignorance of it to Native lawyers and claimed to be “just making it up” as he went along.<br />
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And the results of this ignorance can be devastating to Native families. In 2011, NPR in a series about Native foster care in South Dakota found 700 Native children, a disproportionate number for their percentage of the population were being placed in foster care every year. Reporters also found that ICWA, which gives preference to placement with relatives or their tribe, was not being followed.<br />
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“Cousins are disappearing; family members are disappearing.” Peter Lengkeek, a Crow Creek Tribal Council member, told NPR 33 years after the passage of ICWA. “It’s kidnapping. That’s how we see it.”<br />
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I hope more states do more to implement ICWA fully and to understand what sovereignty means to Indigenous nations.</div>
jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-54597325874937908282018-10-02T11:03:00.002-07:002018-10-15T08:59:39.513-07:00Elizabeth Warren and White Attachment to Native Identity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally in 2012. Credit Tim Pierce</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>UPDATE 10/15/2018:</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">My response to recent reports that Senator Warren has released DNA results proving she has a pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” This would make her between 1/64th and 1/512ths Native American. However, without documentation it is unclear which percentage she is. For comparison, I can prove I am 1/16th French, 1/16th English and 1/16th German. None of which I claim as my identity or "race." </span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">Here was my response:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And this response on Twitter really gets to the heart of the problem:</span><br />
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To me, it seems like if they know nothing of the person they’re related to, their culture then or now, & need a blood test because they & they’re family have lived as white for generations, they’e evidence of genocide & that fraction is an artifact of genocide not indigeneity.</div>
— Ericka Twitty (@ErickaTwitty) <a href="https://twitter.com/ErickaTwitty/status/1051844638229835776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 15, 2018</a></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">And this response from an epidemiologist about whether the DNA evidence ties her to actual documented Cherokee or Delaware citizens: </span><br />
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no, it doesn't. He didn't match her with people that claimed to be Native American. He looked at a sequenced cohorts from Latin American that had a history of admixture. She shared patterns of genetic variation (allele frequencies) with the Native American background</div>
— James Jaworski (@jaworskijim) <a href="https://twitter.com/jaworskijim/status/1051853204076429312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 15, 2018</a></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">I also edited my Facebook post (but cannot correct the tweet) because <i>The Boston Globe</i> corrected its math on her possible blood quantum from 1/512ths to 1/1024ths. Interesting tweet regarding this percentage:</span><br />
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So Elizabeth Warren is *possibly* 1/1024 (0.09%) Native American.<br /><br />Scientists say the average European-American is 0.18% Native American. (<a href="https://t.co/XU0l1JQO1L">https://t.co/XU0l1JQO1L</a>)<br /><br />That'd make Warren even less Native American than the average European-American.</div>
— Michael Ahrens (@michael_ahrens) <a href="https://twitter.com/michael_ahrens/status/1051843481013014528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 15, 2018</a></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">On September 29, 2018, </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">The New York Times</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"> reported "</span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-2020.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Elizabeth Warren Says 2020 Presidential Run Is On the Table.</span></a><span style="font-size: large;">" I've been working on a piece for a magazine about ethnic fraud and had alluded in my draft to the harm claims like Warren's alleged Native American ancestry does to Native nations. My editor claimed that Senator Warren could not really be held to the same standard because she had meant no harm by her claims. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'd like to note I was very pleased Sen. Warren appeared to take the advice I gave in my Yes! Magazine article "<a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/pocahontas-is-not-a-name-that-should-offend-you-20171201" target="_blank">Pocahontas Is Not A Name That Should Offend You</a>," addressing Trump's despicable use of Pocahontas' name to attempt to slur her. She went on stage in February and <a href="https://youtu.be/gLfqOOOpcFg" target="_blank">addressed</a> the National Congress of American Indians pledging to do just what I asked her to do, mention the name of a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women every time Trump called her 'Pocahontas'. I am very grateful for that but she went on to assert her right to claim her family's stories of Native ancestry even though they is no evidence for them. </span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">What follows is my email response to the editor on U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren's continued championing of her unverified family stories:</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 12px;">Muskogee Times Democrat, August 13, 1906,</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"I’d say Sen. Warren’s continued assertion without a shred of evidence of a single connection to anyone from the Cherokee or Delaware nations is unacceptable to the citizens of those nations. You should see the responses I get from Native people when I share on social media even the mildest mention of her. Her insistence on it, even after genealogists found zero ties in her family tree, and in light of citizens of Cherokee and Delaware nations asking her to stop doing so is harmful in that it degrades their nations' sovereign rights to determine who their citizens are and who they are not. As head of state of the sole super power in the world, or even as a US Senator, she must deal with them on a political level. And I should note, in fact, the only ties genealogists found that could be verified between members of her family tree and any Indian nation were as <a href="http://www.pollysgranddaughter.com/2018/03/elizabeth-warrens-white-great.html" target="_blank">Indian killers</a>.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">If she were to do this with to any other nation, say India, for instance? Insist on Indian ancestry, even be listed in a directory of South East Asian scholars, and even after the government of India asked her to stop, continued to insist upon it? There’s a point where it is no longer innocent but a statement of arrogance and colonial rights over another people. And it is also very poor international relations. Always take an example of Native nations and ask yourself would it be acceptable to do so with any other nation? If not, then to do so is to most likely perpetuating genocidal policies that are encoded in the socio-cultural DNA of America.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">And why wouldn't she do that to India, the country? Because they have the political boundaries and weight to demand respect and, of course, because she’d look like a kook. It is the infringement on our political status as nations that makes our identity so assumable. The two are directly related to each other. It is particular galling when it is also done under the cover of genocide perpetuated by the very same white families who benefited from it. And many did pretend to Cherokee ancestry when they thought they could make spurious land claims out of it.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-size: large;">Her need to claim this is simply not as great as the harm such claims create for Native Nations and Native people. The two are deeply tied to one another."</span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-size: large;">And in answer to those who feel Native people don't have the right to ask her to honor their sovereignty in this way and that by doing so we could bring about another Trump win, I say let's turn that question around shall we? Would Warren throw the election in this way? Why wouldn't she simply respect Native people on this matter? Would she really throw an election thumb her nose at Native Nations? And if so, what does that mean exactly? And, I will certainly ask these same questions of other potential Democratic candidates like Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-size: large;">Also, <i>The Boston Globe</i> has been doing some interesting coverage of her potential candidacy. They interviewed Harvard colleagues and found <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/09/01/what-harvard-professors-say-about-elizabeth-warren-hiring/iLiqqJezD67gPmFplGtMSN/story.html" target="_blank">zero evidence</a> Warren got her position as a Native American hire. And <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/09/20/elizabeth-warren-for-president-new-survey-shows-mass-voters-don-love-that-idea/eRMzdOVBxe2Bc0Jxk1v9nK/story.html?s_campaign=breakingnews:newsletter" target="_blank">recent polling</a> of Massachusetts voters shows support for her run for POTUS is still very weak.</span></div>
jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-14953003052386826822018-09-28T12:05:00.001-07:002018-09-28T12:05:37.751-07:00Star Quilts and Fire<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN23yzWUOWI5ZWrwB2Mr84bGNiCmnIFamdzT1XqEsef6O6_t7GOD1CgzvmtV4lUwZ_LC5SXQcx2hrkO6fJOeS-G0Q115kJHFWIIwk14WIqILGMtAVDX31S-jFNjLRmfKde5cD1/s1600/11391420_10153349438618446_1260362113191144372_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN23yzWUOWI5ZWrwB2Mr84bGNiCmnIFamdzT1XqEsef6O6_t7GOD1CgzvmtV4lUwZ_LC5SXQcx2hrkO6fJOeS-G0Q115kJHFWIIwk14WIqILGMtAVDX31S-jFNjLRmfKde5cD1/s1600/11391420_10153349438618446_1260362113191144372_n.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Both of my grandmothers: Diné and Dakota, a rug weaver and a star quilt maker (via <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jfkeeler/" target="_blank">@jfkeeler Instagram </a>)</td></tr>
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The month began with a phone call informing us our storage unit had burned down. Picking through the remnants, I found the <a href="http://www.webpanda.us/There/UOT_Starquilt.htm" target="_blank">star quilt</a> my grandmother had made for me when I graduated from high school. I had spent hours in college, wrapped in it to protect me from the cold New England forests far from our homeland in the Great Plains. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi9PeUySGitmglK8m7vfoofDv1hA5-_oUV8Rk8qzG2lZzKVsX-tunwQMzBa52eF0j9R_rOUZtCXO9WtopoI4nO2Zg7xQPpc-OafGS9Z4mSZ4bv4WrB0y9MyMoKJvFOAuS02-ub/s1600/lakota-star-quilt-patterns_68335.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi9PeUySGitmglK8m7vfoofDv1hA5-_oUV8Rk8qzG2lZzKVsX-tunwQMzBa52eF0j9R_rOUZtCXO9WtopoI4nO2Zg7xQPpc-OafGS9Z4mSZ4bv4WrB0y9MyMoKJvFOAuS02-ub/s1600/lakota-star-quilt-patterns_68335.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Star Quilt in similar colors to mine (MSU Museum)</td></tr>
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Later, when my grandmother came to my graduation, she fretted about not being able to see the horizon And so, we climbed Bartlett Tower but when we got to the top hoping to see more, the trees still owned the vistas, and all we gained from our perch was a view of the unending canopy with an occasional white spire poking through. We said nothing. I recall a bit of a catch in her breath as we gazed, the only expression of an oddly bitter disappointment we both felt. It was then that I realized we are big sky people. People of the Plains, we have long been accustomed to sending our spirits out in all the directions almost as a prayer or even, an extension of ourselves. Hemmed in by the dark green we were only able to send our spirits up to a tiny patch of blue. It felt we like we could not breathe. </div>
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But just as I prefer to remember my grandmother as she was then, still alive, her curiosity about the world a companion to my own, and, despite the story above, she was generally a cheerful person, I prefer my memories of the blanket as it was whole. Standing in that burned out unit, I found myself unwilling to take a brightly colored scrap of triangles smelling of smoke and blackened around the edges even as the man who worked there badgered us to take the things we wanted before they cleaned it out. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzNAcY_E-EBy34vig_7yJyNm2KmYvPI8AN5lj9oqF_UJYT4OpnHC8snq3FOTKrUMVcEqhjdON3RcvzT9Tjp1FWN9951JSKQav7dXnhr-0D8-S7tmrdTTgukLUnaGltFJ61UFgf/s1600/native-american-star-quilts-pattern-free-star-quilt-patterns-native-american-star-quilts-native-american-lakota-quilt-maker-iris-allrunner-has-a-great-feel-for-color-native-american-star-quilts-meanin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="364" data-original-width="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzNAcY_E-EBy34vig_7yJyNm2KmYvPI8AN5lj9oqF_UJYT4OpnHC8snq3FOTKrUMVcEqhjdON3RcvzT9Tjp1FWN9951JSKQav7dXnhr-0D8-S7tmrdTTgukLUnaGltFJ61UFgf/s1600/native-american-star-quilts-pattern-free-star-quilt-patterns-native-american-star-quilts-native-american-lakota-quilt-maker-iris-allrunner-has-a-great-feel-for-color-native-american-star-quilts-meanin.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lakota grandmother hand quilting a star quilt. (Co-nnect.Me)</td></tr>
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As a child, one of my earliest memories is of climbing the steep stairs to her workroom where she kept a large wooden frame she used to stretch out her quilts and hand stitch them. As a child as I emerged at the top of the stairs which smelled strongly of the hard industrial rubber that covered it to prevent slipping and combined with the smells of my grandmother's cooking wafting up from the kitchen below, I wobbled amazed at my discovery of this magical place. A place that in my childish mind was one of mystery and power with star quilts in many colors draped and in various states of completion. </div>
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But I know fire can be purifying and can carry our prayers. When I was executive director of the California Indian Basketweavers Association, I learned how the tribes there used to burn the forest to keep it healthy and giving the roots and shoots necessary for basketweaving a chance to grow. So, I felt inclined to give up these material possessions to the fire and hope for new shoots. </div>
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In my heart, the blanket is with my <i>kuŋ´ŝi </i>now in heaven where her laughter can be heard over the camp circle of our ancestors' tipis enjoying a sly joke with her relatives. My mother used to describe her mother-in-law’s laughter sounding like the “tinkling of bells.” So I find myself when I think of the bit of star quilt left in this world, stopping and listening for her laughter and feeling fortunate to be her granddaughter.</div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-32292755124817267512018-09-17T10:39:00.002-07:002018-09-17T10:39:14.453-07:00Constitution Day: George Washington, World War Zero & "Taxation Without Representation"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For Constitution Day, September 17, 2018, an Indigenous Reading of History:</h4>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVa784RiipGY4X_JXfETAx_-c6KGFjiGIT_M5BKPgfmXqgOBvLiVJz4rvKBfufEn8mAMH6znHG7DB4ovPZeKXUYvCiva_iBg2gTGSrvRtQs2_uEHw0ObdHxqRdIcMNueW1W4pP/s1600/1200-15433250-boston-tea-party.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="822" data-original-width="1200" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVa784RiipGY4X_JXfETAx_-c6KGFjiGIT_M5BKPgfmXqgOBvLiVJz4rvKBfufEn8mAMH6znHG7DB4ovPZeKXUYvCiva_iBg2gTGSrvRtQs2_uEHw0ObdHxqRdIcMNueW1W4pP/s640/1200-15433250-boston-tea-party.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span>Some history behind the Revolutionary War phrase "taxation without representation." Britain taxed the colonies to pay for the wars they were starting on the frontiers trying to take Indian land. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">A young George Washington.</span></td></tr>
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This was the impetus for the Seven Years' War (known in US history books as the French and Indian War) that was actually begun by a young Virginia officer named George Washington who signed an admission in French (which he couldn't read) after being defeated by the French in an engagement that said he executed a French diplomat. This began the first World War and spread far beyond western Pennsylvania to the Caribbean, Europe and even Southeast Asia. </div>
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Historians often call it World War Zero. It doubled the British national debt (and laid the foundations for the British Empire</div>
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica;">—</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif;">Washington was the father of two great nations), hence the tax on the colonialists. It was due to their own land lust. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1aLRp_SC_I9MATYX7HIidLx84yqXDwjE8_K0elj3Mpl2hbPl6j72PyI5A_DSCAxVtQovvKmn8o8hojSmpcXTB_n45nBnJIFtcAq1kpCQNBtzftp49U2CDlH4nwiImAU2qAU8h/s1600/mercilss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="195" data-original-width="170" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1aLRp_SC_I9MATYX7HIidLx84yqXDwjE8_K0elj3Mpl2hbPl6j72PyI5A_DSCAxVtQovvKmn8o8hojSmpcXTB_n45nBnJIFtcAq1kpCQNBtzftp49U2CDlH4nwiImAU2qAU8h/s400/mercilss.jpg" width="347" /></a></div>
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<span style="caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif;"> And if you read the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson lists amongst the colonists' grievances King George III's siding with the tribes ("merciless Indian Savages") and his protection of their lands through the Proclamation of 1763 which forbade colonists settling west of the Appalachian mountains.</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-79052753972276231022018-09-11T08:40:00.000-07:002018-09-11T10:39:17.585-07:00Yellowstone: Taylor Sheridan's Western of Nietzschean Supermen<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kevin Costner and his branded cowboys (Courtesy of Paramount Network)</td></tr>
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Mini-review of <a href="http://www.paramountnetwork.com/shows/yellowstone" target="_blank"><i>Yellowstone</i></a> and answers to questions put to me by radio show:</h4>
<span style="font-size: large;">Dear Radio Host:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"> Well, I watched a bit of the series. Wow. It was pretty bad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> I understand this series, although it only has a 51% Rotten Tomato score, was a hit with the Trump crowd. Not surprised. The series really reminded me of that Sidney Sheldon book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_Game_(novel)" target="_blank"><i>Master of the Game</i></a> about a wealthy and similarly crazy white family in South Africa dealing with Bantu uprisings (they made their money off of diamond mines) and the Boer War and maintaining a 20th-century power base. Some tv critic compared it to <i>The Godfather</i> but that is about ethnic marginalization in a white, Protestant supremacist nation of which this Yellowstone family are the obvious beneficiaries of.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Answers to your questions:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">Which cultures lived in the Yellowstone area?</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Although the tribe is fictional, I found the name of the reservation offensive. Was it Broken Stone or Broken Rock? An obvious reference to Standing Rock but diminishing the strength that lies in our traditional homeland communities by adding the descriptor “broken”. However, the casino is called the Apsaalooke, which is what the Crow people call themselves. The Crow are the traditional enemies of the Lakota and fought on the side of Custer during the Battle of Greasy Grass. And when Gil Birmingham’s character is being “crowned” is his incredibly offensive “coronation” scene in his office his headdress clearly has the distinctive blue and pink beadwork that Crow people use.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">Is there an environmental significance of Grandmother Earth in that area?</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Of course, but that wasn’t the point of the show, was it? It was about the right of white Nietzschean Supermen (Costner and his sons) to rule unimpeded the landscape because they are really the best suited no matter their methods.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">What is our perspective on the invasion of the white man into this particular area surrounding the super volcano in Yellowstone?</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I think the perspective of occupation and colonization is always negative and the statistical outcomes of most Native people are a testament to that (highest suicide rates, highest rape and murder rates, highest death by police rates bar none). But the tv show <i>Yellowstone</i> is largely about what a white man, Taylor Sheridan thinks about the world. And it’s a mishmash of white male Ubermenschism and a very limited and awkwardly-introduced knowledge of Native sovereignty and issues.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">How much horrific dirt must John Dutton's family have done to acquire all of that land in Yellowstone?</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The same that took and continues to militarily occupy this land.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">UPDATED:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">So, Radio Show doesn't want to talk about Kevin Costner but about Yellowstone volcano sacredness and Native cultures around there? My response:</span></h4>
<span style="font-size: large;"> Sure, but I don’t want to give <i>Yellowstone</i> publicity (and viewership) solely focused on content it does not provide and, indeed, subverts. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> I am willing to look at the characters but <i>Yellowstone</i> the tv show exists largely in a fictional landscape. Real white cities in Montana are mentioned like Bozeman and Helena but most of the Native references are clichéd and not worthy of saddling any actual tribe in the area with.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> I can provide a distinction between the reservation as envisioned by Taylor Sheridan and the actual realities he misrepresents. But I do think the white men who have access to millions to stage this misrepresentation should be named and taken to task. Otherwise, more white folks will do the same and think that because they have more access to our spiritual traditions and such they are not actually doing the same thing. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> The issue is White Supremacy and how it structurally creates this misunderstanding. I’ve seen plenty of white folks write whole books on our histories and participate in our ceremonies then turn around and think they can supplant us or be us. Pretendianism arises out of the centering of the experience White Supremacy provides white people in this country—no matter where they reside on the political spectrum. It was a problem at Standing Rock and is the central problem posed by Yellowstone. Taylor Sheridan is a filmmaker who ostensibly has received a great deal of education, both political and personal, about Native issues and from Native people and he is well-meaning. Yet, he still gets it wrong. More historical knowledge is good but White Supremacy is an algorithm that will always garble the result towards the centering of people who perceive themselves as white. That’s what’s going on here. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> That’s the lesson of Yellowstone.</span><br />
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-75084980988245371552018-07-13T09:30:00.000-07:002018-10-06T13:48:53.260-07:00‘I Was Born Free’ - Red Fawn and State-Sponsored Sexual Assault of Native Women at Standing Rock<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By Jacqueline Keeler</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3Zt8rc2TiLos3GWu5CwiFHqkquSqwBhGU7-9i27cUUJSX9nI7X3OClMPFSykEdZe9-rCUz6xqhnMY76SgA6dBV244wVfjO3CiEN0akYXISkSC1hE4k8nmyjYPmKmMRLtSDAd3/s1600/Red+Fawn+Screen+closeup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="1020" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3Zt8rc2TiLos3GWu5CwiFHqkquSqwBhGU7-9i27cUUJSX9nI7X3OClMPFSykEdZe9-rCUz6xqhnMY76SgA6dBV244wVfjO3CiEN0akYXISkSC1hE4k8nmyjYPmKmMRLtSDAd3/s640/Red+Fawn+Screen+closeup.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Red Fawn Fallis behind screen at her sentencing on July 11, 2018<br />
Photo : Cempoalli Twenny Facebook page</td></tr>
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On Wednesday July 11, Red Fawn Fallis, 39, Lakota and the most high profile water protector charged with a felony at Standing Rock was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison with 18 months for time served. Her legal team will have 14 days to appeal.</div>
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Fallis was found guilty of one count of civil disorder and one count of possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon. In <a href="https://youtu.be/yGce35IJ8HA" target="_blank">the video</a> of her arrest on October 27, 2016, Fallis, a medic at the camp, can be seen arriving on an ATV where a line of police in riot gear are faced off with water protectors. The wall of men parts and a deputy tackles her saying he heard her shouting “water is life”.<br />
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Behind the line of armored law enforcement, five men pile on top of her. As they pin her arm behind her back and with their knees hold her legs down, the gun which is not visible in the video because of all the men on top of her can be heard discharging three times, apparently into the ground.<br />
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It was revealed in leaked documents reported by <a href="http://(adopted in the traditional Lakota way)" target="_blank">The Intercept</a> in December, her boyfriend Heath Harmon, 46, from the Fort Berthold reservation was an informant working for the FBI and that the gun Fallis allegedly fired during her arrest belonged to him. </div>
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According to a Motion to Compel Discovery filed by her defense attorneys Harmon “seduced Ms. Fallis and initiated an intimate, albeit duplicitous relationship with her. He spent the majority of the 48-hour period prior to Ms. Fallis’s arrest with her and had access to her and her belongings… He used their romantic relationship to rely upon her as an unwitting source of information for informant activities.” </div>
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Family members of Red Fawn told me the FBI plant literally “jacketed” her by putting his jacket with the gun in it on her right before her arrest and planting items in her backpack. In leaked police drone footage shared by <i>The Intercept</i>, Harmon can be seen leaving on her ATV just 20 seconds after his purported girlfriend’s arrest. Seconds later, he spoke to a Dakota water protector (who asked not to be identified) and did not mention Red Fawn’s violent arrest. In his leaked interview with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms he claims he immediately returned to camp to collect all of her possessions and return them to her family on Standing Rock. This after his girlfriend was tackled by several large men for free speech in front of him.</div>
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After giving false and contradictory testimony to law enforcement regarding the gun, he continued the pretense of being her boyfriend even after she was arrested. In leaked audio of their phone calls, Fallis can be heard tearfully confiding, unknowingly, to him, a paid infiltrator, her fears and desire not to serve time for something she did not do. </div>
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In 2012, it was revealed that in Britain London’s Metropolitan police was running a top secret decades-long infiltration program, the Special Demonstration Squad, of progressive groups that led to long-term sexual relationships with women being spied upon. Some of these women gave birth to children by undercover police officers who never revealed their true identities. One of those women identified as ‘Jacqui’ later settled with the Metropolitan police for £425,000 or about $560,000. She described the experience to <i>The Guardian</i> as being “raped by the state” and was deeply traumatized after discovering the truth.</div>
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“I had a spy who was being paid by the government to spy on me,” Jacqui told the press, ” to the extent that he watched me give birth, so he saw every intimate part of me.”</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Arrest of Red Fawn Fallis at Standing Rock, October 27, 2016</td></tr>
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Native American women have long been the target of violence both by the United States government though total wars waged against their nations to gain access to homelands and through structural violence in the resulting colonial society that marginalizes them. </div>
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A widely quoted <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249736.pdf" target="_blank">2010 Department of Justice report </a>found Native women experienced rape and murder at rates nearly 2 and half times that of other American women. In some counties, the murder rate is 9 times. Criminal database statistics find that 70 percent of Native women’s reported attackers are men not of their race—most being white men. Most American women are primarily assaulted by men of their own race. More data is needed to address the vulnerable picture this paints of Native women in America.</div>
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At the hearing, Red Dawn Foster, Lakota/Diné candidate running for the South Dakota state senate and a <i>hunka</i> sister (adopted in the traditional Lakota way) of Red Fawn recounted to the judge Fallis’ history of abusive relationships that made her susceptible to manipulation by someone like Harmon.</div>
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U.S. District of North Dakota Chief Judge Hovland granted Fallis permission to wear civilian clothing at the nearly 6-hour hearing. She appeared shackled and wearing a traditional ribbon dress. </div>
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It was however, partly Hovland’s refusal to allow for further discovery into Harmon’s role in the defendant’s arrest (and of pipeline owner Energy Transfer Partners' security contractors like TigerSwan who he determined were not part of the prosecution) that forced the defense to agree to a non-cooperating plea deal in late January. Under the deal, the most serious charge against her of firing an weapon at law enforcement was dropped. That charge could have put her in prison for 30 years. He also refused to allow any defense based on treaties that were violated by the building of the pipeline.</div>
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At the prayer after her sentencing was postponed in June, friends, family, attorneys and supporters of Red Fawn gathered for prayer in a Bismarck hotel meeting room. Her <i>hunka</i> uncle and University of Colorado professor Glenn Morris and attorney, spoke to those gathered telling them that he had spoken to his niece that morning. She has already been in custody for more than 20 months. </div>
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“She told me,” he said, “‘I’m a wild Oglala. I was born free, I will live free and I will die free. And I know what day this is.’”</div>
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That day was the 142nd anniversary of what the Lakota call “Victory Day”, the Battle of Greasy Grass, or as the Americans call it the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In 1874, it was in search of gold that Custer led 1,000 men into the Black Hills in violation of the Fort Laramie treaty. Since then mines on Lakota land have produced according to some estimates nearly 10 percent of the world’s gold. In 2016, the battle was the transportation of heavy crude from the Bakken through unceded Lakota treaty lands which potentially endangered Lakota communities and millions of Americans downriver that precipitated the Dakota Access pipeline protests at Standing Rock.</div>
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It would seem with Fallis and several other Standing Rock “water protectors” (as protestors preferred to be called) still facing felony charges the battle has never really ended between the Lakota, their allies, and the American government.</div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-75658394576420337842018-04-11T06:24:00.001-07:002018-04-11T06:24:38.675-07:00What to Read After Sherman Alexie's #MeToo Revelations? <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Author Sherman Alexie. Photo: Tulane Public Relations, Creative Commons Attribution</td></tr>
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A lot of folks have been asking me what Native American authors they should read or even what books to teach since <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/03/05/589909379/it-just-felt-very-wrong-sherman-alexies-accusers-go-on-the-record" target="_blank">#MeToo accusations</a> of sexual harassment against Sherman Alexie came to light this past March. I wrote about it at Yes! Magazine here: <a href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/why-reading-sherman-alexie-was-never-enough-20180312" target="_blank">Why Reading Sherman Alexie Was Never Enough</a>: <a href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/why-reading-sherman-alexie-was-never-enough-20180312" target="_blank">As the #MeToo spotlight moves to Indian Country, epidemic violence against Native women meets tokenism in publishing.</a> I will also be interviewed today on Oregon Public Radio's <a href="https://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud" target="_blank">Think Out Loud show</a> today about my article.<br />
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My daughter also asked me to prepare a list for her English teacher and I thought I'd share the initial, sometimes personal list, I put together for her. I don't teach Native American literature so this list simply represents books that I have enjoyed over the years with a few that I understand to be standards. It is by no means comprehensive and I will continue to develop it. Especially, since Multnomah County Libraries has asked me to put together a list for them to share on their blog. That list will be more comprehensive than this one for <a href="https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/p/best-books.html" target="_blank">American Indians in Children's Literature's Best Books page</a> for recommendations on YA and Children's literature. But for an initial stab, written for my daughter, here is a list ... well, my list, anyway:<br />
sure. I'd also recommend checking out<br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Native American Recommended Books</span></b></span></h2>
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by Jacqueline Keeler (Diné-Dakota)</div>
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<span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Personal Favorites</span></span></h4>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Indians-Ella-Deloria/dp/0803266146/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;">Speaking of Indians</a></span></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"> by <b>Ella Cara Deloria</b>, Yankton Dakota Sioux, published in 1944. Aunt Ella as she was known in my family was my grandmothers’ aunt and an ethnologist who worked with Columbia University. I have a personal connection to her work. I urge everyone to read her work. Also, highly recommend her ethnographic novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Waterlily-Ella-Cara-Deloria/dp/0803265794/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Waterlily</span></a>. </span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bighorse-Warrior-Tiana/dp/0816514445"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Bighorse the Warrior</span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"> by <b>Tiana Bighorse</b>, Navajo, published in 1994 and written by my great aunt about my great-great-grandfather. A must-read to hear stories as told within Navajo families about how we survived the assaults of the Americans against us.</span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Storyteller-Leslie-Marmon-Silko/dp/0143121286/ref=sr_1_sc_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388230&sr=1-3-spell&keywords=silkko"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Storyteller</span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"> by <b>Leslie Marmon Silko</b>, Laguna Pueblo, 1981. A book of poetry I turn to again and again for inspiration. Silko is also well-known for her novels <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ceremony-Classics-Leslie-Marmon-Silko/dp/0143104918/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0143104918&pd_rd_r=KRT3RJVESSJDD0FWMQX7&pd_rd_w=FwbrG&pd_rd_wg=kwTVd&psc=1&refRID=KRT3RJVESSJDD0FWMQX7"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Ceremony</span></a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Almanac-Dead-Leslie-Marmon-Silko/dp/0140173196/ref=pd_sim_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0140173196&pd_rd_r=MFWKJRZ652C8BX88GNKV&pd_rd_w=HB2Zs&pd_rd_wg=xin8G&psc=1&refRID=MFWKJRZ652C8BX88GNKV"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Almanac of the Dead</span></a>.</span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Hoop-Recovering-Feminine-Traditions/dp/0807046175/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions</span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"> by <b>Paula Gunn Allen</b>, Laguna Pueblo, published in 1986, is a collection of critical essays and a cornerstone in the study of American Indian culture and gender. It has inspired me over and over again. Also well-known for her novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Who-Owned-Shadows-ebook/dp/B01N9OCV5T/ref=la_B000AP7R10_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388144&sr=1-2"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">The Woman Who Owned the Shadows</span></a> and her non-fiction book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pocahontas-Medicine-Woman-Entrepreneur-Diplomat/dp/0060730609/ref=la_B000AP7R10_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388144&sr=1-5"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat</span></a>, which received a Pulitzer Prize nomination are also worth a read.</span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Round-House-Novel-Louise-Erdrich-ebook/dp/B007HC3UF6/ref=pd_sim_351_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=GMJWGS1D6F7AV7KGD829"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">The Round House</span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"> by <b>Louise Erdrich</b>, Ojibway, published in 2012 and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction that year. A prolific and talented novelist other books of hers to consider are <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Plague-Doves-Deluxe-Modern-Classic-ebook/dp/B0013TTJNQ/ref=pd_sim_351_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=FWS4CDE73GXR2AYVXVMY"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">The Plague of Doves</span></a>, which a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Love-Medicine-Louise-Erdrich-ebook/dp/B01CKEIS1G/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388332&sr=1-5&keywords=erdrich"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Love Medicine</span></a> won the National Book Critics Circle Award.</span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/She-Had-Some-Horses-Poems-ebook/dp/B0089MQ2AS/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388397&sr=1-10&keywords=harjo"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">She Had Some Horses: Poems</span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: inherit;"> by <b>Joy Harjo</b>, Muscogee Creek. A classic and seminal book of poems. Two that stay with me are the title poem “She Had Some Horses” and “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”. Also, highly recommend an anthology she co-edited with Gloria Bird <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Enemys-Language-Contemporary-Writings/dp/0393318281/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388397&sr=1-7&keywords=harjo"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America</span></a>.</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.2px;">Classics & Must-Reads of Native American Literature</span></h4>
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<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Way-Rainy-Mountain-Scott-Momaday/dp/0826304362/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0826304362&pd_rd_r=JPQQ8NYFXFG43HJ0FXM2&pd_rd_w=LpIaQ&pd_rd_wg=OcdDl&psc=1&refRID=JPQQ8NYFXFG43HJ0FXM2"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">The Way to Rainy Mountain</span></a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"> by <b>N. Scott Momaday</b>, Kiowa ancestors. Also, shouldn’t miss <a href="https://www.amazon.com/House-Made-Dawn-Scott-Momaday/dp/0061859974/ref=pd_bxgy_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0061859974&pd_rd_r=DFTGW7E507QR746T6DKG&pd_rd_w=O3dD1&pd_rd_wg=yEQke&psc=1&refRID=DFTGW7E507QR746T6DKG"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">House Made of Dawn</span></a> his novel which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Blood-James-Welch-ebook/dp/B00PFZQ2AW/ref=la_B000AQ3N58_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388495&sr=1-2"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Winter in the Blood</span></a></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> by <b>James Welch</b>, Blackfeet, published in 1978. It was made into a film of the same name in 2012. Also, recommended are his historical novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Crow-Contemporary-American-Fiction-ebook/dp/B001QWFYBG/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388464&sr=1-3&keywords=james+welsh&dpID=51oisDrj7dL&preST=_SY445_QL70_&dpSrc=srch"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Fools Crow</span></a> which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the American Book Award. I also recommend <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Lawyer-Novel-James-Welch/dp/0393329380/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Indian Lawyer</span></a> to show the challenges contemporary professional Native Americans have working in the white world. Welch’s work has large following overseas and is the only Native writer to be awarded the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters) by the French Cultural Ministry.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jailing-Cecelia-Capture-Janet-Campbell-ebook/dp/B00LTAHI28/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388598&sr=1-1&keywords=janet+campbell+hale"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">The Jailing of Cecelia Capture</span></a></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> by <b>Janet Campbell Hale</b>,<b> </b>Couer d’Alene<b>, </b>which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1985.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 8px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Custer-Died-Your-Sins-Manifesto/dp/0806121297/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388637&sr=1-1&keywords=custer+died+for+your+sins&dpID=51ygFVYTVFL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto</span></a></span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> by Vine Deloria, Jr, Dakota. Another relative (my grandmother’s cousin). This book is a classic that emerged at the same time the Red Power movement was bringing Native issues into the news again. Also recommend <a href="https://www.amazon.com/God-Red-Native-Religion-Anniversary/dp/1555914985/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1555914985&pd_rd_r=7HWSDJJTTNXVCNQ3P523&pd_rd_w=wAMAG&pd_rd_wg=j9AtQ&psc=1&refRID=7HWSDJJTTNXVCNQ3P523"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">God Is Red: A Native View of Religion</span></a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-Earth-White-Lies-Scientific/dp/1555913881/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523388821&sr=1-1&keywords=red+earth+white+lies&dpID=51RQv%252BNVSpL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: black; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Red Earth, White Lies</span></a>.</span></span></li>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a very preliminary list. So much more add!</span></span></div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-42839293332866880392017-12-31T17:38:00.000-08:002018-01-02T11:53:40.393-08:00My Strange, Strange Holidays Arguing with Cher, yes, THAT Cher<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My tweet that started it all.</td></tr>
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<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="no" height="750" src="//storify.com/jfkeeler/why-is-cher-arguing-with-native-twitter/embed?border=false" width="100%"></iframe><script src="//storify.com/jfkeeler/why-is-cher-arguing-with-native-twitter.js?border=false"></script><noscript>[<a href="//storify.com/jfkeeler/why-is-cher-arguing-with-native-twitter" target="_blank">View the story "Why Is Cher Arguing with Native Twitter?" on Storify</a>]</noscript></div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-42886082849103658972017-05-17T21:12:00.000-07:002020-05-28T12:00:05.311-07:00The 'Land of Oz' on the 10th Anniversary of UNDRIP<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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by Jacqueline Keeler<br />
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In 2015, I had the honor of interviewing Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation for <a href="https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/oren_lyons_onondaga" target="_blank">Earth Island Journal</a> about his work at the United Nations and role in the creation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and something he told me remained on my mind when I had the opportunity to go the UN for the first time.<br />
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“In the UN, you have a number of nations and everyone has their own agenda. And part of that agenda is land and indigenous people are a problem because we have prior rights to the land. We thought we were going to a place where justice was prevailing. I call it the ‘Land of Oz’. We went to see the wizard and we were very much like Dorothy thinking that there was truth and equity and justice and we ran into the very same people as we had come from.”<br />
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Even on this, the 10th anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a landmark document representing the work of leaders like Oren Lyons since the 1970’s to articulate the international status of Indigenous peoples and to protect our communities and cultures, I went to the UN wondering if this was indeed the land Oz and me, Dorothy, or was this really a place where real progress was possible to protect our people?<br />
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My first day at the meetings I spoke via phone to Doug George, Mohawk Nation, who had attended the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII) the week before I was there and he told me how shocked he was that testimony given by Indigenous peoples that their attempts to assert their rights under UNDRIP, had led to retaliation and violence against their communities. It was, apparently, not an entirely foreseen outcome by those like Mr. George, who had participated in creating the declaration.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;">Mr. Leonard Gorman</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;">Exec. Dir. of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission</span></td></tr>
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However, the testimony that struck me was that of a representative of my own nation, the Navajo Nation, Mr. Leonard Gorman, executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission who noted:<br />
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“As a representative from the Navajo Nation, I am unable to participate in this PFII session under the credentials of the Navajo Nation. I'm here with an identification card says NGO and my name is on it. I'm hopeful that sometime in the near future I would also hold here a card that says Navajo Nation under its own credentials.“<br />
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Being discussed was the zero draft resolution of the General Assembly “On Enabling the Participation of Indigenous Peoples’ Representatives and Institutions in Meetings of Relevant United Nations Bodies on Issues Affecting Them.” This resolution once finalized and passed would finally allow a representative from an Indigenous Nation like Mr. Gorman to finally attend meetings at the UN credentialed by the Navajo Nation and not by a Non-Governmental Organization.<br />
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I was stunned that the representatives of my nation would not be allowed to attend as representatives of the Navajo Nation. It made me wonder how far we had come? I remembered how my husband’s grandfather was denied entry to the first UN meeting in San Francisco in 1945. He was the chief of the Mohawk Bear Clan of the Iroquois Nation. He and other Iroquois chiefs had traveled from Six Nations in Ontario, Canada on their own dime to attend this important international meeting. After they were denied entry and told there was no “Iroquois Nation” on the list they met out in front of the Fairmont Hotel and discussed what to do. They decided to try once again since they had come so far and the second time they were admitted. However, the man had thought they were from the Iraqi Nation and so the elected representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy, once one of the most powerful on the Eastern seaboard, entered the UN by mistake.<br />
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Later, I heard Frank Ettawageshik, a former tribal chairman of Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians attending as representative of the National Congress of American Indians and the United Tribes Michigan speak to the same issue:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;">Frank Ettawageshik, former tribal chairman </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;">Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians</span></td></tr>
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“For 14 years I served as the elected head of state for my nation and that's the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. During this time I did not attend United Nations meetings because as my colleague Mr. Gorman from the Navajo Nation spoke, I did not want to be here as the elected head of state with an NGO certification and I felt that that was not proper protocol and I couldn't attend. It was only after I left office as an elected official that I engaged strongly in this process because I believe that we should work to try to change that.<br />
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My nation has engaged internationally for thousands of years. We have treaties with other Indigenous nations—both in the United States, all across North America and around the world—we have treaties with European governments and with the United States. These treaties remain in force today. It would, therefore, be completely unacceptable for our nation to participate in a process that would not provide the right for participation as an individual Indigenous nation (emphasis mine).”<br />
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I had no idea that our nations had so little representation at the UN. And make no mistake about it, our “tribes” are nations. The U.S. Senate does not ratify treaties with anyone but sovereign nations and under international law, you cannot treaty away your sovereignty. We still exist, albeit militarily oppressed by the most powerful country in the world. We are nations and the UN should recognize that as does the United States by the act of treaty-ing with us.<br />
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I was particularly appalled when Mr. Ettawageshik mentioned that even Chairman Archambault of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, in the midst of the Dakota Access Pipeline standoff on the Great Sioux Nation’s unceded treaty land almost did not get to speak when he came to the UN regarding this international dispute. He had to wait in line with NGO representatives and would not have gotten to speak at all during this conflict which garnered international outrage if 6 speakers ahead of him had not given up their spots for him. I was stunned.<br />
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By ignoring and refusing to acknowledge our Native Nations, even those with treaties with the United States, the UN participates in the denigration of our nations. Even the zero draft does not guarantee access to the General Assembly or allow more than a potential observer status that does not recognize our nations in any meaningful way as nations.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;">Ta'Kaiya Blaney (Tla A'min Nation) on right</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;">with Rachel Marco-Havens</span></td></tr>
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“Agrees that the selection of Indigenous Peoples’ representative institutions to attend and participate in the United Nations in accordance with the principles and criteria set herein does not imply recognition of those institutions under international and domestic law or policy for any purpose other than participation in meetings relevant United Nations bodies on issues affecting them.”<br />
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I wonder if the UN can be a body that recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ in any meaningful way when it cannot recognize our Native Nations which clearly have been accorded nationhood recognition through international legal documents like our treaties with the United States.<br />
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What gave me hope, however, was hearing the voices of the youth. From fellow Wittenberg Center attendee Ta'Kaiya Blaney (Tla A'min Nation) to Lianna Rice, Inuit from Nunatsiavut, Canada.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;">Lianna Rice, Inuit from Nunatsiavut, Canada</span></td></tr>
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Rice poignantly reminded the UN PFII chairs about the real price our youth pay for having their identity marginalized and displaced.<br />
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She told me in an interview after her testimony, “within my land claims area Nunatsiavut the most at-risk population are young male Inuit between the ages of 16 and 24. They actually experience suicide at a rate 40 times the national average of Canada… I, myself, have attempted suicide a couple of years ago and nine months ago my brother passed by suicide.”<br />
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And what is killing our youth? Why do Indigenous youth in the United States and Canada have such greater rates of suicide than other youth in these countries? I believe it is tied to the erasure of their peoples, their nations. The UN could help these youth by recognizing their nations and not by scuttling the issue as they have done since its founding 72 years ago. We can and should do better for the next seven generations to come.<br />
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-1219299061374656202017-04-14T00:12:00.000-07:002017-09-26T00:44:15.242-07:00America is Still a Colony and the Reemergence of Native Nations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>On April 30th, I will be delivering my first ever keynote at the 2017 White Privilege conference. Below is the text and some of the slides I will be sharing. Enjoy!</i></div>
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<i>- Jacqueline Keeler</i></div>
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My Keynote at the 2017 White Privilege Conference</h2>
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Kansas City, Missouri</h3>
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How Standing Rock Made the Military Occupation of Native Nations Visible</h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQqmyr82wJalxZZHl1m-7QnvSxV0t0sEcQruLOgArdd3OF0ADkByVG3xs5mHvSJqdsdxfFacgYr8Vt3E4gxdxUKhwKW_gvpixbQv1CR48HN0PgWiO-VD-hYYzU2-qFBnv6jw4q/s1600/IMG_6869.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1026" data-original-width="1600" height="409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQqmyr82wJalxZZHl1m-7QnvSxV0t0sEcQruLOgArdd3OF0ADkByVG3xs5mHvSJqdsdxfFacgYr8Vt3E4gxdxUKhwKW_gvpixbQv1CR48HN0PgWiO-VD-hYYzU2-qFBnv6jw4q/s640/IMG_6869.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oceti Sakowin Camp, October 2016 <i>photo credit: Jacqueline Keeler</i> </td></tr>
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<br />
Good morning!<br />
<br />
Yá’át’ééh<br />
Shik’éí dóó shidine’é<br />
Shí éí Jacqueline Keeler yinishyé—My name is Jacqueline Keeler.<br />
<br />
My preferred pronouns are she, her, hers.<br />
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In the Navajo way, we introduce ourselves through our clans. I am a member of the Navajo Nation (also known as the Diné people) through my mother and I am Yankton Sioux (which are called in the Dakota/Lakota language Ihanktonwan Dakota).<br />
<br />
Kin Ya’áanii nishłį́<br />
Ihanktonwan Dakota bashishchiin<br />
Hashk'ąą hadzohi dashicheii<br />
Ihanktonwan Dakota dashinalí<br />
Ákót’éego diné asdzáán nishłį́<br />
<br />
I am a citizen of the Navajo Nation, the largest Native Nation within the United States which boasts a landmass the size of Ireland and 350,000 citizens—close to the population of Iceland. The Navajo Nation is also larger than 20 members states of the United Nations.<br />
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I would like to thank Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. for inviting me here to speak to you all today. I’d also like to thank Dr. Cornel Pewewardy, a Kiowa professor of Native American Studies at Portland State University and much-beloved community leader in the Portland, Oregon Native community where I live for suggesting I attend this conference. This is my first (and hopefully not my last!) time at WPC.<br />
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Out of curiosity, before I begin my main topic, I’d like a show of hands as to know how many of you have close Native American friends?<br />
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Great! You can’t believe how many people tell me I’m the first Native American person they’ve ever met. We are 1 percent of the population. One in a hundred, literally of people you could meet. That always astounds me that so few Americans believe they have never even met a Native person.<br />
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How many of you have been to a Native American community? A reservation?<br />
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How many of you know whose lands we meet on today?<br />
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Yes, we are on Osage lands today. The Osage’s language is classified by linguists as Siouan which is interesting considering we are discussing the re-emergence of the Great Sioux Nation.<br />
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In addition to recognizing the Osage Nation oyate (nation), I’d also like to recognize the Missouri River. I crossed it yesterday driving from the airport to this hotel. The Missouri—or Mni Sosa, as we call it in the Dakota/Lakota language—begins far north of here in Montana. It is the longest river in America. <br />
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And the events I will discuss took place along the shores of this river as did the lives of many of my Dakota and Lakota ancestors. I’d like to take a moment of silence to honor their lives, the movement to protect the water and the gifts the river gave our people.<br />
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[Moment of Silence]<br />
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You know, when I was a kid my traditional Navajo grandparents used to come and visit us. We lived in suburbia, I guess we were your typical Native American family in suburbia. And we crossed rivers every day to get to school, to work, to shop. And yet we knew little about those rivers. We were not living in our own homelands, but in those of other Indigenous nations, other oyate. But when my grandfather, my shi cheii (as we say grandfather in the Navajo or Diné language) came to visit, he insisted we pray and address these rivers before crossing them as is our Navajo tradition.<br />
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My grandfather and my grandmother (my shimá sání) did not speak English, they spoke only Navajo. They spent their lives running a ranch near the south rim of the Grand Canyon where they raised horses, cattle, sheep and goats. They both dressed traditionally in turquoise and silver and my grandmother wore her hair in a traditional bun (called a tsiiyeel) and wove Navajo rugs to sell at the trading post in Cameron from the wool of the sheep they raised.<br />
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I don’t know how many of you have grandparents like that—elders in your family who come from another culture, who you cannot even speak to in the same language but yet, they teach you so much simply by their actions, their demeanor and their self-confidence based in a culture very different from this one we live in here in “America”.<br />
<br />
So, he made us stop and stand by the river under the bridge. We were visible to all the cars streaming past us on the busy road above us as he led us in offering tádídíín (corn pollen) to the river. He prayed in Navajo and formally asked the river’s permission for us to cross it and for it protect our family in our journeys as we went about our daily lives.<br />
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It was this demonstration of respect and an expectation that part of living in the world was to build relationships with the natural environment, itself, that my grandfather taught me purely by example. And he brought this into the modern context of suburbia for us without self-consciousness (although, I wonder to this day what folks who saw us from the road thought!).<br />
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He took a stand for another way of life, another way of relating—the only way that seemed true to him. And it was an indigenous worldview and me and my siblings stood with him and learned by the side of that road speaking to the river.<br />
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Standing Rock</div>
</h3>
<br />
In a time when more and more interaction occurs over social media (and there are many Native American elders who are on Facebook—maybe you are friends or relatives of some of them!) the media is filled with warnings that a life of isolation, a lonely life will be had by looking at a screen will become be the norm. Yet, conversely, this greater connection to others via a digital format, this sharing our deepest (and maybe not so deep) thoughts, ideas, convictions, memes, and videos has lead to some of the largest stands, we have taken together, collectively, as a people.<br />
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Recent examples include marches like the Climate March, held just yesterday in Washington, DC and all concurrently all over the country, and the Women’s March—for which an estimated 2.9 million turning out across the country and is believed to be the largest march in US history.<br />
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And for me as a Diné and Dakota woman the most profound such gathering took place just on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation this past year.<br />
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The fight against the Dakota Access pipeline and for the water and for the sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation united not only our Dakota and Lakota people but all of you as well. As the camp, called Oceti Sakowin Camp—Oceti Sakowin is our name for ourselves (Sioux is derived from a name our enemies once called us). It refers to the Seven Council Fires that make up our Oyate, our nation. I am Ihanktonwan, one of the seven council fires.<br />
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As I mentioned earlier, the camp was located just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The Standing Rock Sioux reservation is one of many islands of land left of the Great Sioux Nation. Here you see the original boundaries agreed upon by treaty [see map below].<br />
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If you look at this map (see below), you will see that the Oceti Sakowin camp is clearly located within the unceded treaty territory of the Great Sioux Nation. What is unceded treaty territory? It is territory we never ceded under treaty. As you can see in this map, this land actually encompasses a good chunk of the state of North Dakota and all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills where Mount Rushmore is. Yes, Mount Rushmore that international symbol of the United States’ exceptionalism is on unceded land.<br />
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<br />
So before I discuss, what unceded treaty land is maybe I should discuss what are treaties? [See slide below]<br />
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First of all, Tribes are nations. Native Americans are not merely another “race” nor are we simply another ethnic group within the United States. We are citizens of nations that pre-existed the creation of the United States and continue to persist politically to this day. The U.S. has pursued a policy of attempting to destroy, disappear and absorb us but yet we are still here are in 2017. I’m here to tell you we still exist as nations within this country and treaties are merely legal proof of our sovereignty and status as nations.<br />
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As you know, treaties are not a special realm of law that exists only between tribes and the United States. Treaties are international legal agreements entered into between sovereign nations—not by a government and its citizens or with random collections of ethnic groups. The Senate does not ratify treaties with anyone but other sovereign nations. By ratifying these treaties with the Great Sioux Nation the United States recognized the sovereignty of the Oceti Sakowin internationally.<br />
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Unceded treaty territory is territory that the Great Sioux Nation never actually ceded and is held in violation of international law by the United States. It is, in fact, held illegally through military force. It is a military occupation of our lands and remains so to…this…day. What I am proposing to you all today is that the heavily militarized on the Dakota Access Pipeline (which is their right by treaty and as a sovereign nation with concerns about their people and their territory) made that ongoing (for 149 years) military occupation visible to all Americans and to the world. This was not just a generic response by the state of North Dakota (and by extension, the United States government) against the fight for climate justice. That response looks very different as was seen in the strikingly less violent response to anti-DAPL protests in Iowa led by mostly non-Native U.S. citizens. Anti-DAPL demonstrations in Iowa did not face then extreme levels of militarized violence that Lakota/Dakota people and their allies did. No, the heavily militarized response at Standing Rock was directly tied to the threat to the sovereignty of the United States posed by a tribe asserting its treaty rights to land wrongfully taken and occupied by the United States.<br />
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And this gets me to the title of this keynote. Does the United States have a homeland? Is it truly a nation? Or is it still a colony that exists to exploit the lands of others?<br />
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***</h3>
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Colonies</h3>
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If the United States is still a colony, it is a colony without portfolio—without a homeland. It broke with its homeland, Great Britain, during the Revolutionary War and now occupies the homelands of other nations, our nations—Native Nations.<br />
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How can you tell if something is a colony—or if it never stopped being one despite rebadging? Well, I think looking at how a colony operates can be instructive. What does a colony do? It extracts resources and wealth from other nations and sends the profits back to the elite of its home country, its 1%. In a colony without portfolio (a homeland) that 1%, the ruling elite, are corporations.<br />
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And this should come as no surprise when you remember that the United States was founded by corporations. The first modern corporations. The Hudson Bay Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Virginia Company, among others. These joint stock companies were formed to meet the financial demands of exploration and of colonization that even the Crown, the monarch, could not meet. In exchange for this capitalization of colonial aspirations, these early corporations were given rights not only to lands and markets but they were given governmental powers. In India, of course, the East India Company evolved from trading, to ruling large parts of India which then evolved into British rule of India.<br />
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With DAPL and other pipelines crossing this country, many Americans are outraged and shocked when they discover that a corporation was given governmental powers of eminent domain. Farmers and ranchers face the hard choice between giving in to these corporations and fighting a legal battle with the pipeline they will most likely lose. All the while, wracking up huge legal bills which they have to pay even after they lose their land to eminent domain. And yet, history shows this blending of corporate and governmental power goes back to the very origins of this country. It is how “Manifest Destiny” was funded.<br />
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I just put up a map of the 13 original colonies (see above). And you can see the western boundary for the colonies is a great deal further east than it is today for the present-day states of Pennsylvania, New York and Georgia, among others. In the north that boundary was held by the Iroquois Confederacy. In the south by the Cherokee and the other so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”.<br />
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My husband is Iroquois, they call themselves the Haudenosaunee, the people of the Longhouse. They are composed of an ancient confederacy originally of five nations, the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, and the Oneida. Later, the Tuscarora joined and they became the Six Nations. And in the years before the Revolutionary War, one of their key leaders, the Tadadaho, gave speeches to the colonists urging them to unite as the Iroquois had under the Great Law of Peace. He demonstrated the strength of unity by showing how a bundle of arrows could not be broken as easily as a single arrow. His speeches were translated and published by Benjamin Franklin (who owned a printing press and this became his first bestseller) and were widely read in the colonies before the Revolutionary War. Today, the 13 arrows can be seen on American money clutched in the claws of an eagle.<br />
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After the French and Indian War, King George III negotiated a treaty that guaranteed Indian rights to lands west of what was called the Proclamation Line of 1763. This outraged the colonists because they coveted these lands. And this, (in addition to what we all learned in school about taxation without representation) was one of the motivating factors leading to the Revolutionary War—the right of the colonists to have access to more Native Nations’ lands. In this case, the Ohio Valley, in particular.<br />
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My husband’s ancestor, Chief Joseph Brant, as leader of the Mohawks, sided with the British and when the colonists won they and other Iroquois lost their lands in New York state and had to settle in lands given by King George III in Ontario where they live to this day. And New York state is, of course, bigger. And Ohio is now a state without any reservations—as is Pennsylvania—and the Cherokee were force marched out of Georgia and Tennessee on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.<br />
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Going back to the question of the United States still being a colony….<br />
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In this model, what responsibilities does a colony have to the 99%? I’d say, as much as is required to get their work as cheaply as possible. Sometimes, that does involve sharing the spoils of colonization—but not always.<br />
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If Americans are, in fact, colonists and the American Dream is the partaking in the division of wealth pilfered from Native Nations and currently held by/under military occupation, what would ethical colonialism look like? Is it even…possible?<br />
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“Honor the treaties” is, of course, a timeworn phrase Native Americans activists and leaders have been demanding since relations with the colonists began, and so it may have lost its meaning to many Americans but it, honoring the treaties, to stop breaking international law, is also the only way to remake this relationship into a healthy one. That means one that does not leave Native people (and, particularly, our youth) to pay the price for America’s wealth (suicide, poverty, loss of land). Native people have the highest rates of suicide, poverty, rape and murder of any group within the United States bar none. For example, young Native men have a suicide rate 9 times that over other young American men, Native men over the age of 30 have 6 times the rate of death by police of any other group of American men and Native women face rates of rape and murder that are on average, according to a 2010 Department of Justice report, 3 times that of other American women—and unlike other ethnic/racial groups, 70% of their attackers are men outside of their ethnic/racial group, they are white men.<br />
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Origin Stories</div>
</h3>
<br />
It is true that all people have origin stories and we have just spent some time examining the truths and the hidden truths of the American origin story. However, there is a distinct difference between the origin stories of a colony to that of an actual nation, the creation of a real people.<br />
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The name many Native American peoples call themselves is often some derivation of “the people” or even, “the real people.” This is what Diné—Navajo people’s word for themselves—means. My father’s people call themselves Dakota or Lakota (depending on the dialect) and this means Allies and friends. A slightly different meaning that puts emphasis on the connections that make them a people.<br />
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However, both peoples have origin stories that have similar themes. [See slide below]<br />
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As you can see in the above slide I am comparing the colonial origin story to that of “real people” that is as our Native Nations would understand it. I have this titled “Sovereign Citizen vs Sovereign Nation” because all of this is part of a larger analysis I am doing comparing the Bundy takeovers of public lands (which is part of the Sovereign Citizen movement) to Standing Rock (which is about Native nations’ sovereignty).<br />
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In the Dakota/Lakota origin stories it begins with the meeting with the White Buffalo Calf Woman (Pte Ska Win) and her giving us the canunpa, the sacred pipe and the 7 sacred ceremonies. My Lala (my grandfather) always said this is when we became Dakota. Before that we were not Dakota—we were something else.<br />
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Interestingly, when I was at Standing Rock, I interviewed some the tribal council members and they told me that the story as told by some families on their reservation was that the meeting with the White Buffalo Calf Woman happened at a site east of the reservation. This illustrates the fact, that for us, all around us, the land is sacred because it reflects a relationship we have made with it. A relationship built on respect which is the core not only of our identity as a people but of our experience of our very humanity and life, itself. This is something the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipeline builders can never understand as entities with colonial and corporate origin stories.<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
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***</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Sovereign Citizen vs Sovereign Nation</div>
</h3>
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<br />
Overall, 2016 was an interesting year in “Indian Country.” Even as 2017 is proving to be a test of the strength of the United States’ democratic institutions with the election of Trump—the events of 2016 culminated in a reawakening of Native Nations and their rightful claims to their own lands occupied by the United States.<br />
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It all began early in the year. On the second day of the new year, on a Saturday, January 2nd, 2016, Ammon Bundy, son of rogue Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy who held his own standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in 2014, led a group of protestors to occupy and takeover the Malheur Wildife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon.<br />
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I live in Oregon, on the opposite side of the state in Portland, some five hours away, on the more populous part of the state. More than half, 2.4 million of the state’s 4 million residents live in the Portland metro area. Harney County, on the other hand, is the largest county in Oregon and one of the largest counties in the entire country. It’s actually 30% bigger than New Jersey. But they have a population of only 7,000 people. A couple hundred of which are members of the Burns Paiute Tribe, the original (and, I believe, rightful) owners of the land.<br />
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When I interviewed Charlotte Roderique, the then-chairwoman of the Burns Paiute Tribe, a few days into the Bundy’s occupation of her traditional lands she was frank, “If we [the tribe] had done this—gone in and taken over the refuge with guns—law enforcement would have shot us.”<br />
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I have to admit I both believed her and yet…I was skeptical. Yes, I found it at the time hard to believe the state of Oregon would assault the tribe to that degree for taking a stand on its land—its own wrongfully taken land. Yes, I could see state and federal officials scuttling the issue of treaty rights and blithely pretending these were not relevant, simply old history, but could I see Oregon officials committing actual violence against the tribe? Obviously, these things happened in the past…but today? In the 21st century?<br />
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Why was I skeptical? Well, Oregon is a blue state. It supposed to be progressive. Sparsely populated rural counties like Harney County may be red, but the state legislature is controlled by the Democratic party and we have a Democratic governor, Kate Brown, an environmentalist and we are represented by two of the most liberal senators (Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden) in the U.S. Senate today. As white as the state is (and Portland has the distinction of being called the whitest city in America according to the U.S. Census) the phrase “that couldn’t happen here” was the refrain I heard in my mind.<br />
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And I should explain something about the Burns Paiute Tribe. The 180,000 acre Malheur Wildlife Refuge was once been part of their 1.4 million reservation,—the Malheur Indian Reservation. It was lost after the Bannock War in 1878 and the Watadika people (their own name for themselves) were force marched through foot high snow, some chained together in leg irons to the Yakama reservation in Washington State 320 miles to the north. Remember how I said Portland is 5-hour drive from Harney County? Well, the Paiute people (including children and elders) were not going by car but on foot and had to cross 2 mountain ranges and the Columbia River. Many died.<br />
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It just so happens, Ammon Bundy’s takeover of the refuge on January 2nd occurred the same month as the 137th anniversary of this tragedy. Did he know this? Yes, I think we can be sure, despite living most of his life on Paiute land which extends south into Nevada, he did not.<br />
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Several years later some survivors returned on their own, finding their way back home. There is a story on the tribe’s website of an ancestor swimming across the Columbia river holding onto the tail of a horse. When they arrived back they were landless outlaws in their own homeland until 1928 when they were given the former city dump in Burns, Oregon to make their home (and from which they derive their present name). From that tiny group that persevered the tribe has grown to about 400 today. At the beginning of the Bannock Wars their band the Wadatika numbered more than 2,000.<br />
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So, what changed my mind? What made me believe Chairwoman Roderique’s belief that state violence would be the result if a tribe took a stand to assert their rights over their homelands? State violence greater than that faced by United States citizens making similar claims? It was Standing Rock. On August 12th, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, a council member and the tribe’s chief physician were all arrested for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. They were strip searched and indicted by the Morton County Sheriff’s department and the state of North Dakota.<br />
<br />
All of this is particularly galling when you remember that Chairman Dave Archambault II is the head of state of a nation and yet, was still strip-searched and imprisoned by Morton County, North Dakota for standing up for the internationally-recognized treaty rights his nation enjoys to consultation regarding projects that impact the well-being of his tribe’s territories and people. Normally, this would be protected by diplomatic immunity.<br />
<br />
And the assaults did not end there. They continued with alarming regularity. Over Labor Day weekend, dogs were used on peaceful demonstrators—water protectors as they prefer to be called—and several were bitten. Early reports indicated a pregnant woman and a child were bitten. I was later able to verify the identity of the young woman but not the child.<br />
<br />
Photos and videos taken that day of the use of dogs on peaceful non-violent water protectors brings to mind similar photos taken during the Civil Rights era. And when the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Standing Rock a month later he told the press, “This is the ripest case of environmental racism I've seen in a long time. Bismarck residents don't want their water threatened, so why is it OK for North Dakota to react with guns and tanks when Native Americans ask for the same right?”<br />
<br />
And the hits kept coming. Three days before Halloween, on October 27, 2016 141 were arrested and temporarily housed in kennel-like enclosures and had identification numbers written on their arms. The photos that came out of the police raid on the “1851 Treaty Camp” were chillingly reminiscent of old U.S. military raids on our people. Video shared live on Facebook and Twitter showed Native people being dragged from sweat lodges, police officers in riot gear ripping open a tipi to drag out a Native woman. These images recalled for me descriptions of the 1863 Whitestone massacre in which the U.S. calvary killed or wounded 300 peaceful Dakota/Lakota including women and children. s<br />
<br />
I should note here that the next day on October 28th, brothers Ryan and Ammon Bundy and four others were acquitted of ALL federal conspiracy and weapons charges in Oregon for their armed takeover of Malheur. I know, shocking. And why was this? Because the Depression-era law they were charged under required proof of intent. Since, the Bundys and their followers ascribe to an interpretation of the Constitution that says the federal government had no authority over them and they did not actually have the intent of threatening or obstructing the work of federal employees—intent could not be proven. In this alternate “Sovereign Citizen” reality the sheriff is the ultimate authority, even above the President of the United State, and the federal government is restrained from owning more than a 10 mile square area of land and other land to build forts, etc. According to a Center for Public Integrity report, some 700 of the 3,000 sheriffs nationwide are dues-paying members of Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization that encourages officers of the peace to defy laws they believe are not constitutional and is affiliated with the Sovereign Citizen movement.<br />
<br />
The “forward camp” as the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty camp was also called, was founded on the idea, that the signatory tribes have a right to the land in question under the boundaries agreed upon under the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty by the Great Sioux Nation and ratified by the U.S. Congress.<br />
<br />
Once again, treaties are international agreements entered into only by sovereign nations. The United States does not make treaties with its citizens or random groups of people. The act of ratifying a treaty means the United States recognized the sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation and under international law, nations cannot treaty away their sovereignty. Signing a treaty does not extinguish sovereignty it’s an act of sovereignty. Here you have supporters of a nation (the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, although the camp was the act of nonprofit organizers not directly affiliated with the tribe or the Great Sioux Nation) standing on established international law to lay claim to unceded treaty lands facing immediate mass arrest and the dismantling of their camp. On the other hand, you have the Bundys and their followers, occupying a federal facility for more than a month, coming and going as they pleased unmolested, standing on an interpretation of Constitutional law largely derided by constitutional legal scholars and they got away with it.<br />
<br />
Again, on Nov. 3rd, water protectors gathered to pray at a site along the river where they claim the remains of Standing Rock Sioux tribal members who once owned Cannonball Ranch and older burials of Lakota people were threatened. The ranch, recently purchased by Energy Transfer Partners, the owners of the Dakota Access pipeline is protected by law enforcement. The nonviolent demonstrators are met with pepper spray and rubber bullets from police. A journalist (Erin Schrode of CNN) is shot with a rubber bullet, and although captured on video, police later claim it never happened. The assault lasts for hours as tens of thousands from around the world watch it all live on social media.<br />
<br />
And just when you thought shame would stop Morton County and the state of North Dakota, just days before Thanksgiving on Nov. 20th police deploy water cannons for 5 hours and tear gas on protesters in below-freezing weather. 167 protesters are injured including Sophia Wilansky, 21, a water protector and medic from Brooklyn who is in danger of having her arm amputated after being hit with a concussion grenade and Vanessa Dundon, 32, a Navajo activist who lost sight in one eye after being shot at close range by pepper spray.<br />
<br />
The next day, the New York Times’ editorial board, America’s paper of record, issued a public condemnation of the use of outrageous use force against unarmed protestors saying, “When injustice aligns with cruelty, and heavy weaponry is involved, the results can be shameful and bloody.”<br />
<br />
Every American can see that America, the United States is still a colony in function and form if not in name. When Americans realize this then they can truly begin to change the system by asking themselves the question: how can I be an ethical colonist?<br />
<br />
Thank you. Pidamaya ye. Ahéhee<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Points of Wisdom: </div>
</h3>
<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>Tribes are nations. </li>
<li>Treaties are only ratified between sovereign nations—not between a government and its citizens. </li>
<li>The state violence seen at Standing Rock is what happens when a Native Nation exerts its rights to its territory (under the Fort Laramie treaty).</li>
<li>This made the military occupation visible.</li>
<li>States cannot exist if tribes are strong.</li>
<li>A leader like Trump is the epitome of the colonial mindset—not the exception.</li>
<li>What does “freedom” mean to some Americans—the right to have total access to the stolen booty taken from Native Nations?</li>
</ol>
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-33667639581189947862017-02-03T15:41:00.003-08:002017-02-03T16:15:52.077-08:00Standing Rock & Sovereignty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeysIszeaHClJSdaj7r82MnB3p4nWmUiAHdKgr2xVYAKVkzEoCt4AIWY6KnVVxWLmcHRAjobtPaKPiW1pOYXGv1pQtqkF1mr-emjgbgdAKnCIem1O18pSa6wq3B-5vA8pTzUBa/s1600/forum+poster+%2528for+email_web%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeysIszeaHClJSdaj7r82MnB3p4nWmUiAHdKgr2xVYAKVkzEoCt4AIWY6KnVVxWLmcHRAjobtPaKPiW1pOYXGv1pQtqkF1mr-emjgbgdAKnCIem1O18pSa6wq3B-5vA8pTzUBa/s640/forum+poster+%2528for+email_web%2529.jpg" width="494" /></a></div>
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Last night, I spoke at a 350PDX panel on Standing Rock and was asked to summarize what Standing Rock means to me and what my "lessons learned" were. I recalled a statement about Standing Rock made by my friend Joleen Brown (Oglala Lakota), editor of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nativehoopmagazine" target="_blank">Native Hoop Magazine</a>: "Even after everything they did to us—how they tried to damage us to make us lesser than we were...that we can still make a stand like this? When you see the two cultures facing off, I am so proud. You can clearly see which is the better culture."<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIcl3iJxIUeS1SARZr6k_odMjidO0T9RxPEn0oWtoktJUQno0WV2z_a2Nzlhoa-EOfcaFBIlrauL6HdbpUzkaQZ8dTlRr1R0shxK0hQcF5rJrr_M51-KSHrhDRpQC5rWCHWu3c/s1600/Toxic+Leadership+Triangle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIcl3iJxIUeS1SARZr6k_odMjidO0T9RxPEn0oWtoktJUQno0WV2z_a2Nzlhoa-EOfcaFBIlrauL6HdbpUzkaQZ8dTlRr1R0shxK0hQcF5rJrr_M51-KSHrhDRpQC5rWCHWu3c/s400/Toxic+Leadership+Triangle.jpg" width="221" /></a>I called Standing Rock a pilgrimage and I truly believe this to be true. A pilgrimage of heart and mind and a form of as we Dakota say "of voting with our feet." Everyone who is going there is casting a vote for the kind of society—world, even—they want to see and be a part of.<br />
<br />
But it is also about sovereignty. And why does honoring the sovereignty matter? The sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation or as we call it, the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires) and of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe? Beyond the fact that without the sovereignty of our nations, treaties have no validity, diminishing, sidelining and/or co-opting our nation's sovereignty is no small thing.<br />
<br />
Sovereignty cannot reside in a cult of personality—it must reside in systems that are accountable and transparent to all the people. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has methods of being held accountable (see <a href="http://standingrock.org/government/" target="_blank">here</a>) but charismatic personalities do not. See the pictogram (right) for the problems with leadership vested solely in an individual and not an agreed-upon system of checks and balances clearly accountable to the people.<br />
<br />
I posted these Facebook posts that explain my take on the maligning of Standing Rock Sioux tribal chairman Dave Archambault II:<br />
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Our people were not organized as feudal societies in Europe were with an autocratic leader who enforces his will through violence against his own people. Lakota/Dakota people were organized through specific respect relationships embodied in our kinship system. This was the main government we possessed. Disrespecting, ignoring and sidelining the leadership of elders and respect relatives is simply culturally alien to our culture, it is colonial in nature.<br />
<br />
As my great-great aunt, Dakota ethnologist Ella Deloria noted in her 1944 book <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Speaking_of_Indians.html?id=BrZ1pxGGKxsC">"Speaking of Indians"</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"For the most part, then, everyone had his part to play and played it for the sake of his honor, all kinship duties, obligations, privileges, and honoring being reciprocal. One got as well as gave. Thus kinship had everybody in a fast net of interpersonal responsibility and made everybody like it, because its rewards were pleasant. There were fewer rebels against the system than you might think, since, as I have said, social standing and reputation hinged on it. <b>Only those who kept the rules consistently</b> and glad- good citizens of society, meaning persons of integrity and reliability. And that was <b>practically all the government there was</b>. It was what men lived by."</blockquote>
The use of colonial attitudes in the reemergence of the Oceti Sakowin would signal a very different nation or oyate than what we once were. Fundamentally different—in fact, not Dakota or Lakota, anymore. It would be a nation that would be some product of colonization. A change of this nature to our identity as people would have to be the result of a calm and reasoned discussion and be agreed upon by all the people of the Oceti Sakowin.<br />
<br />
Which leads us to another fundamental aspect of Lakota/Dakota culture: consensus. We are not only not led by autocrats or charismatic leadership that makes its own rules, but we are ruled by consensus, a long, difficult but culturally-relevant process. Change either of these and you have a different people—a people who are no longer Lakota or Dakota except in name.<br />
<br />
It saddens me that there is such division. Opening my email and I see a daily news brief from Grist and the lead story is about the infighting arising at Standing Rock. Once again, I turn to my great-great aunt's recollections of our kinship system to seek a remedy for this that is grounded in our culture and the strengths that it gave us a people whose leaders (who were a product of this system and utterly accountable to it) are admired and known the world over. Here she explains what she calls "the kinship appeal":<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The <b>kinship appeal</b> was always a compelling force in any situation. If two normally decent acquaintances quarreled, for instance—and of course if they were acquaintances they were social relatives outsiders were deeply concerned over it until it was straightened out. The 'good men' felt it incumbent on them to restore peace and order by appealing to the quarreling ones through kinship. Peace is implied by the very name of the people, <b>Odakota, a state or condition of peace</b>; the 'O' is a locative prefix. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'We Dakotas love peace within our borders. Peacemaking is our heritage. Even as children we settled our little fights through kinship that we might live in Odakota.' And with that, two of the most responsible and influential men would visit the unhappy ones and appeal to them to cool off their hearts for the sake of their relatives who were unhappy over their plight. And they did not go empty-handed. There must always be a token, an outward sign of great inner desire. The peacemakers went prepared to give a gift 'to cool off your heart and to show by it that we your kinsmen value your life far above mere chattel.' </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Such an appeal in kinship's name was supreme. It placed the responsibility for his relatives' peace of mind squarely on the troubled man, reminding, him that <b>no Dakota lived unto himself alone; all were bound together in kinship</b>. He might not rightly risk even his very own life needlessly, thereby bringing tears to the eyes of' his relatives especially his sisters and women cousins, to whom he owed the very highest respect and consideration. However slightly he valued himself, he must regard the relatives. And the quarreling men, unable to resist such an appeal, smoked the pipe together and were feasted before the council, and so the breach was healed. Friends, happy over the reconciliation and the restoration of peace, brought them more presents. And it was not in the least the intrinsic value of the gifts that mattered but what they symbolized: that the two were more precious to their relatives than mere things. And thus peace was restored in the camp circle to the relief of all."</blockquote>
Peace everyone. Peace and beauty (Hozho Nahasdlii'). </div>
jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-23147571618954111922017-01-20T22:30:00.002-08:002017-01-20T22:30:54.247-08:00Dakota Kinship & Trump's America of "Carnage"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ihanktonwan (Yankton) Family </td></tr>
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My 16-year old daughter was pretty unhappy today about Trump's inauguration. She was supposed to go to a rally with her friends but became overwhelmed and despondant. I realized I couldn't make her happy by simply a heart-to-heart about what Trump's election means to our Native American family. In fact, to anyone American who is not white. So, instead I decided to read her a chapter from my great-great Aunt Ella Deloria's book "<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Speaking_of_Indians.html?id=BrZ1pxGGKxsC" target="_blank">Speaking of Indians</a>." The title of the chapter is "A Scheme of Life that Worked: Kinship's Role in Dakota Life." The book was published in 1944 but I feel it still held truths that would be relevant today in 2017.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My great-great Aunt Ella Deloria</td></tr>
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My aunt opens the chapter saying, "All peoples who live communally must first find some way to get along harmoniously and with a measure of decency and order. This is a universal problem...The Dakota people found a way: it was through kinship."<br />
<br />
The beauty of this way of life she recounts, this vision of how humans can—and did—live together had a healing effect on my daughter. She was laughing and smiling by the end of the chapter. (My aunt ends the chapter with a funny joke.) And I was thankful to my aunt once again. Her words remembering what we once were, 'Odakota' as she calls it, drove away the despair this society had filled my daughter with, driven as it is by division and polarizing self-interest.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsT1uZ5ZbPMumJX_iSUbXH848MnQLWiy7Xx1yKYjN605IKNwu0oyKFAWWnW0D2O8PJ7ToEoyY3rEvJ09ybBYMX7pnzYnD47Zv909AvhOkM6zu7Sh6DoIdezI8n7sg6Nr-cDqsb/s1600/Yankton-Camp-1882-a-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsT1uZ5ZbPMumJX_iSUbXH848MnQLWiy7Xx1yKYjN605IKNwu0oyKFAWWnW0D2O8PJ7ToEoyY3rEvJ09ybBYMX7pnzYnD47Zv909AvhOkM6zu7Sh6DoIdezI8n7sg6Nr-cDqsb/s320/Yankton-Camp-1882-a-1.jpg" width="257" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ihanktonwan Camp in 1882</td></tr>
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I remember asking my Uncle Vine Deloria if Aunt Ella told him everything she knew (I had heard there were things she did not share with the younger generations) and he told me that she had not. He said some of these things were just too precious to be passed on in some malformed way and losing our way of life, which our elders loved so much, was so painful that passing it on in some twisted form, well, they could not bear that. I thought about this for a long time and several years later, I came to the conclusion that our ancestors had confidence we could find our way back again. That we could rediscover this "way of life that works" for us today. Coming together, as we have at Standing Rock, bringing the bits together each of our families still have of the previous society that once filled our ancestors with such joy, is the start. And it will grow. Even under Trump. It will not be denied.</div>
jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-29347670903774612362017-01-19T11:21:00.000-08:002017-10-01T08:41:41.620-07:00On the Icy Edge of Trump's Empire: Standing Rock and Hoth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oceti Sakowin Camp on the Cannonball River north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation</td></tr>
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It’s Cannonball, North Dakota but with the temperature hovering around -25 degrees Fahrenheit with windchill factored in it feels like the planet Hoth in “The Empire Strikes Back.” The whiteness of the landscape and the intense cold brings such comparisons to mind. The NoDAPL camp, which numbered 10,000 in early December before the first blizzard, is a testament to the support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe enjoys in its fight against the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline that they say threatens their lands, water, and people.<br />
<br />
At the hill north of the Oceti Sakowin (Lakota for the Seven Council Fires) camp, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department had been shining bright lights on the camp every night. It is a constant presence as has been the helicopter that circled the camp for months at all hours. The sound of it reminded everyone at camp those in power could see them, would not stop seeing them. One water protectors (as protesters prefer to be called) told me that he estimated the gas bill for the helicopter cost the state of North Dakota $1,000 per hour. State officials have estimated total costs for this militarized response to the encampment and nonviolent demonstrations at $15 million ($10 million of it borrowed from North Dakota’s state-owned bank). The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the elders of the Oceti Sakowin (what the Americans call The Great Sioux Nation) say is a peaceful, prayerful encampment on unceded treaty lands.<br />
<br />
In stark contrast, at the foot of the hill where the police shine their lights on the camp is the “Moms Against Meth” camp run by Native American mothers who oppose the spread of meth in their communities. It is a solemn cluster of yurts, as white and serene as the snow that lays all around for miles in every direction.<br />
<br />
Just beyond this hill on the night of November 20th, at a small bridge, aptly named Backwater Bridge, thousands watched in horror in real time on Facebook as police sprayed some 400 water protectors for 5 hours straight with water cannons in subfreezing temperatures. Law enforcement fired at close range on unarmed people using rubber bullets, bean bags, pepper spray and concussion grenades against unarmed demonstrators who trapped on the bridge could not easily disperse. More than 300 were injured according to a class action suit brought by the Water Protectors Legal Collective. Those injured that night included 21-year old Sophia Wilansky from Brooklyn, New York, who is undergoing painful surgeries and rehabilitation but may still lose her arm after being directly hit by a concussion grenade, and Vanessa “Sioux Z” Dundon, a 31-year old Navajo activist from Arizona who had a tear gas canister go off in her face and has lost nearly all vision in one eye.<br />
<br />
After the Nov. 20 assault, thousands of veterans answered the call to come to Standing Rock on Dec. 5 and nonviolently place themselves between water protectors and police. On Dec. 4, as veterans arrived the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suddenly announced the DAPL’s easement had been denied, and ordering an environmental impact statement would be completed to determine the course of a new route for the pipeline.<br />
<br />
The 18 Dakota/Lakota reservations that remain in North and South Dakota, Minnesota and Nebraska are, in a very real sense, islands left in the storm of colonial expansion that engulfed the Oceti Sakowin in the 19th century. Americans, driven by a semi-religious credo of “Manifest Destiny,” a divine plan that the lands from “sea to shining sea” were meant to be under the domination of the United States. The fallout of this belief is that the nations that were already there and their legal claims to the land, even their very existence as nations with political rights, was ignored and later, clouded. If you look at a map today reservation boundaries are given a secondary status to that of states, when, in fact, tribes, as sovereign nations enjoy a higher political status than states. In the U.S. Fish and Wildlife report for the DAPL permit, reservations are not shown at all. It is a form of political gaslighting.<br />
<br />
CEO Kelcy Warren of Energy Transfer Partners owners of the DAPL (ETP has since merged with Sunoco) claimed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that the tribe had not voiced its concerns earlier. In response, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe released audio of the Sept. 2014 meeting which clearly demonstrates the tribe and its leadership firmly told the company that it did not want the pipeline crossing through its unceded treaty territory.<br />
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“Honor the treaties” is, to many Americans, a tired, plaintive phrase that Native Americans say simply to make them feel guilty. But what most Americans don’t grasp is treaties are actually international law. The U.S. Senate does not ratify treaties with anyone but sovereign nations. Also, under international law signing a treaty does not extinguish your sovereignty—it’s an act of sovereignty. The fact is the United States has been breaking international law for 150 years and did so with the hope that the Great Sioux Nation would not be around in the future to hold the federal government accountable. But what has happened, and that what Standing Rock represents, is with a growing population and a greater sense of political identity as a nation we are witnessing in the 21st century, the political re-emergence of the Oceti Sakowin.<br />
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Compare the level of violent, military-style reprisal by the police on water protectors at Standing Rock” to the lack of it faced by NoDAPL demonstrators in Iowa (who are mostly white U.S. citizens). Or even to how the Bundy family were treated when, armed to the teeth, they took over public lands in Nevada (in 2014) and in Oregon (in 2016). The violence can be seen as a reaction to the tribe’s mild assertion of its rights to its unceded territory (the tribe has only been demanding meaningful consultation on the pipeline) and the military force holding the land of the Oceti Sakowin in violation of international law becomes visible.<br />
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These unceded territories are now counties (including Morton County) of North and South Dakota. This includes the Black Hills where Mount Rushmore is carved into one of our sacred mountains. The faces of four U.S. presidents is often used as a symbol of America, itself.<br />
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Walking down “Flag Road” the wind whipping and the hundreds of rainbow-colored tribal flags wave and twist on their PVC pipe flag poles, I am struck, not for the first time, how this is not something done alone by the people of Standing Rock or a few of their allies. These flags are backed up by tribal resolutions. Even planted by heads of state like the Navajo Nation president, Russell Begaye who with his Vice President Nez and dug the hole to plant the Navajo flag representing a Native Nation of 350,000 people the size of Ireland. He wielded his shovel in a black suit and Begaye and Nez could have been mistaken for Asian businessmen except for the silver and turquoise the two men were wearing. Dakota means allies, in both a friendly and in a political sense. That what Flag Road means. Real political support and alliances. The hoop of the Dakota grows in this century.<br />
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The sound of construction goes on in camp, a builder from Vermont leading a crew to build a meetinghouse, there is the sharp chop of an ax on wood, and murmurs punctuated by singers and a drum at a community meeting where the air is so cold every breath is visible.<br />
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In a warm felt-lined yurt, I spoke to camp headsman Lewis Grassrope (Wicahpi Ksapa Peji Wikan). He and about 200 others will remain as they say until “the Horn comes down” and their elders tell them to leave. The Horn is a traditional encampment of tipis in the shape of a horn representing the seven council fires and pointed at the enemy in defiance. There, the fire still burns.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">Headsman Lewis Grassrope and Ike Weston<br />
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</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>“Well, when this movement first started it started on prayer and you know through ceremony,” Grassrope explains. “The wakening of our spirits...to knowing that we need to rethink our societies and rethink the way that we look at life and restore the old values that our ancestors carried so we actually become true human beings (Ikce Wicasa).”<br />
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When I saw “The Empire Strikes Back” as a kid and saw Han cutting up the tauntaun to shelter Luke in the warm carcass, I thought of the Dakota stories I heard as a child where a person would take shelter from the deathly cold of a Great Plains winter in the carcass of a buffalo. Our stories differed, however, in that the buffalo would come back to life with the man or woman still stuck inside. As a child, I would pester my dad with questions like, how could they breathe? Today, as an adult, my perspective has changed and I long to be gently swinging to the buffalo’s gait, to be part of such a powerful creature that is the center of Dakota/Lakota culture.<br />
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The camp feels like that center, the center of the buffalo and I understand when Grassrope says, “most of us don't want to leave after we’re done because of the feeling and the kinship and everything that was gained here.”<br />
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My son who accompanied me to the camp actually asks to wait awhile before seeing “Rogue One,” the next Star Wars installment. I agree and we wait. We wait to return to camp in the spring as the United States and American's inaugurate Donald Trump as their 45th President and to see if the miracle will happen as it did in the old stories, if our Oyate (nation), our people, and the buffalo that holds them still lives.<br />
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</div></div>jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-39229703250280251692016-12-01T07:08:00.001-08:002016-12-01T07:08:36.762-08:00 Returning to the Oceti Sakowin Tipi in Winter #NativeJournalism #StandingRock #NoDAPL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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So, I am heading back to Standing Rock next week—and bringing my husband and son, too! And yes, I'm crowdsourcing my work there. Please help in any way you can either by donating or sharing. Thanks so much to everyone who has donated so far!<br />
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Here is a link to the campaign: <a href="http://fnd.us/d1Bdhf?ref=sh_35s2c5">Fund Native Journalism! #DAPL #StandingRock</a><br />
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The latest <a href="https://fundrazr.com/stories/aBuCje?ref=tw_35s2c5">update</a> on the campaign with photos from my last visit:</div>
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It was a sunny day in October when we set up the tipi at my tribe's camp, the Ihanktonwan (Yankton Sioux) in the Oceti Sakowin camp. I had asked them what they needed and they told me tipi poles. They had a cover, but no poles. Driving through the camp, I spotted an entire set of tipi poles lying next to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe's camp. When I asked if I could purchase them, they invited me to drink coffee and eat stew with them and we talked about all sorts of things for a couple of hours. Finally, they decided it was time and four of the men loaded the poles up on a flatbed trailer and drove them over to the Yankton/Lower Brule camp. There, the Lower Brule chairman, Lewis Grassrope helped us tie the poles together.<br />
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It was a good day to put up a tipi, sunny and beautiful, but this week, seeing the snow that has blanketed the camp, I often wonder now how the tipi is doing.<br />
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When the cover went on I was surprised—I hadn't realized it was painted with the seven council fires. The sight of those seven fires blazing, the very image of the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires) that we all had gathered to see reborn from all our suffering this past 160 years. As we prayed over the prayer flags, I told a family story, an Ihanktowan story, from the time just before the Americans came. It's about a boy named Matowi (Red Bear) and a horse that could not be tamed and the last visit of the White Buffalo Calf to our people. My Lala had told it to me growing up. When he would finish telling it he would tell us that it was our family's duty to tell the story to the people, so they would not lose hope and would be able to make it through this long winter of our people. As I told the story, I hoped it would do what he said it would, and help our Dakota people today make it through this literal winter, the first in a long time we have camped together as one Oyate (nation).<br />
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I thank you all for your donations in helping me return to see this tipi. I look forward to returning next week with my son, Joneya Matoska (White Bear)—who at 13 years old is about the age the boy-hero Matowi was in the story when he did his miraculous deeds. Pidamaya ye (thank you) to all of you for helping to make this happen for myself and for all of the Oceti Sakowin.<br />
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Photos I took from the tipi-raising at the Ihanktonwan camp:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The poles being loaded at the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe's camp</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bringing in the poles.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Yankton Sioux Tribe camp laying out the canvas cover.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihM5EYxfT3jPVU6f1wtiQpa44dWc1ZDMhyphenhyphen0kxrqN0eEQzKqLhqBO56LRSBaZM6Q98RvdDcrstEgywMuL6TirvE3X4H9rWRKGJ94Gx9tnC3LCDSRJv7JNz1AN-EWPqrEcNzTeOh/s1600/fullsizeoutput_2edc.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihM5EYxfT3jPVU6f1wtiQpa44dWc1ZDMhyphenhyphen0kxrqN0eEQzKqLhqBO56LRSBaZM6Q98RvdDcrstEgywMuL6TirvE3X4H9rWRKGJ94Gx9tnC3LCDSRJv7JNz1AN-EWPqrEcNzTeOh/s640/fullsizeoutput_2edc.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lower Brule Sioux Tribal Chairman Lewis Grassrope directs us.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tying the poles tight.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tipi poles converging.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Last tipi pole</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Seven Council Fires on the canvas.<br /></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Yankton Sioux Tribe flag!<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipebiE_CarH1C-uyBt_vuiPI4gKFKRclEAoP7Ua19KQ0uFANwAEScYSqeazyzuVt-5JTDcKdwb3eUojPHDLiibVvis8u7svgjkdPxX8K4-ExZQ_WMdc5jeCOl2yA8HkjMr-k4D/s1600/fullsizeoutput_2ef2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipebiE_CarH1C-uyBt_vuiPI4gKFKRclEAoP7Ua19KQ0uFANwAEScYSqeazyzuVt-5JTDcKdwb3eUojPHDLiibVvis8u7svgjkdPxX8K4-ExZQ_WMdc5jeCOl2yA8HkjMr-k4D/s640/fullsizeoutput_2ef2.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-48132202618582276472016-11-07T08:46:00.000-08:002016-11-07T09:23:33.206-08:00Together We Rise — #NoDAPL and Expanding the Hoop<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yankton Sioux Tribe camp with 7 Council Fires Tipi (at Oceti Sakowin camp) photo by J. Keeler</td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: left;">As I watched the water protectors charge up the hill yesterday, heading up to protect the graves of the two Lakota grandmothers buried on that hill, former owners of Cannonball Ranch--recently sold by a white rancher to the Dakota Access Pipeline--a pipeline which will plow through their bodies and upon which the heavily armed police stood waiting for these souls before them ready for them with giant bottles of mace and other weaponry, I thought, what drives these amazing people up that hill?</span></div>
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Not all of them are from Standing Rock, or even Native, yet there is still that desire to charge up that hill, to stop desecration in the name of profit. And it made me think, we are still Dakota and alive and perhaps the hoop is expanding. Perhaps something has shifted in the balance of who has won the West.<br />
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<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="7" style="background: #fff; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.5) , 0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: 99.375%;">
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BMfQieFDG7t/" style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Today, water protectors were making their way to the top of this hill to pray to relatives who are buried atop the hill. Of course the Morton County militarized police showed up and in their lack of cultural sensitivity disturbed Sioux burial grounds. The militarized police presence is to protect an oil business who has dug up ground on Sioux treaty lands and who does not have a federal permit to dig under Lake Oahe but are preparing to dig downwards. #noDAPL #protectthesacred</a></div>
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A photo posted by Redstreak Girl (@redstreakgirl) on <time datetime="2016-11-07T00:13:57+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Nov 6, 2016 at 4:13pm PST</time></div>
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jfkeelerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05976798387187770375noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11683707.post-20091082326353153882016-11-04T11:39:00.001-07:002016-11-06T10:55:28.437-08:00On "More Important Things" and #NotYourMascot and #NoDAPL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andre Cramblit, EONM member protesting at a Washington NFL game in Santa Clara, CA in 2014.</td></tr>
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During my <b>Native America Calling</b> pre-interview (I was on the <a href="http://bit.ly/2evor6W">show</a> this week talking about Cleveland at the World Series) the host asked me about criticism that <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/eonaim/">EONM</a>'s success with our hashtag #NotYourMascot took away from other "more important" movements.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">#NotYourMascot trending nationally during 2014 Super Bowl</td></tr>
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I disagreed and pointed out that the fight against Native mascotry helped grow the networks (connections with each other, sophisticated use of social media, connections built with media/reporters) that are undergirding the fight against DAPL. And we were able to achieve success (sadly, #NotYourMascot is still the ONLY Native hashtag to trend nationally) because we were affecting something Americans wore on their heads (sports team caps) — something that affects them personally. I know it is a sorry thing to say that concern about Native issues has to start out of self-interest, but that is my observation. And now, we are capitalizing on those connections that were built.<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In light of that, I would like to sing the praises of EONM core members of our strategy team who are out there fighting the #NoDAPL fight:</span></b></h3>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yolonda BlueHorse protesting at the Dallas-Washington NFL game in Dallas</td></tr>
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<b>Yolonda BlueHorse</b> (Lakota) in Texas is working with Natives there to keep the #NoDAPL issue in front of Energy Transfer Partner CEO Kelcy Warren's face in his hometown. He agreed to meet with them after they cornered him at a public meeting and <a href="http://www.fox7austin.com/news/local-news/215402774-story">abstained</a> from a Texas Parks and Wildlife Commissioner vote on a pipeline because of protests.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yolonda helping coordinate protests at DAPL owner's Dallas headquarters</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvY-z6wJoi_p-HGziLyPehfrD_BozqFtIHht8ftdpe2qq8U4jWevJHBH-SWp61dcYvmD07xKJL1GFYhohaIJx3aHF1kxMrK25iGWSCac0pOaqsBK2mVufJZJK-Dzv57ChSZrcs/s1600/14291780_10154404377685309_7784922108968990582_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvY-z6wJoi_p-HGziLyPehfrD_BozqFtIHht8ftdpe2qq8U4jWevJHBH-SWp61dcYvmD07xKJL1GFYhohaIJx3aHF1kxMrK25iGWSCac0pOaqsBK2mVufJZJK-Dzv57ChSZrcs/s320/14291780_10154404377685309_7784922108968990582_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Desiree Kane at Oceti Sakowin camp in North Dakota</td></tr>
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And <b>Desiree Kane</b> (Miwok), who has been living continuously at the camp since July doing the thankless volunteer work that so many are doing who are not in front of the cameras but that is absolutely necessary to make the Oceti Sakowin camp run. Please read her recent piece, <a href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/the-standing-rock-victory-you-didnt-hear-about-20161103">"The Standing Rock Victory You Didn’t Hear About"</a> in Yes! Magazine that gives a vision of hope in the midst of all this suffering our people have endured.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nicky Parkhurst directing EONM's 2015 Super Bowl protest in Phoenix</td></tr>
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And <b>Nicky Parkhurst</b> (Diné/Lakota) whose mom's family is from Cannonball and who is fundraising to help her community deal with the fallout of the assaults by the state of North Dakota. Please support her <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/az2srst">Gofundme</a>!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Native people in the Southwest had strong feelings about being mascotted</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, there was a police presence</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nicky's husband supporting his wife</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Morning Star (on left) at prayer circle before Washington NFL team protest</td></tr>
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And <b>Morning Star Gali</b> (Pit River) who is also living at the camp and working hard to revise Executive Order 13007 that provides cultural access and protections for our people. This revision will ensure protection for all threatened sacred sites located on Federally managed lands. Here is a link to the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JmvE0PB-hFqwbfPZ1UuMkUyDKbeyuEbrfTRYTI1AnNc/edit?usp=sharing">proposal</a>. Please advocate for it!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQk7wo8mGrMHuxMDPGN5jY6MKwpm9Io7POdDeiefRkCz2GafSPLTwuHMBBHz3StGVv6U8Mb7TsUh9cXYLBetHjgx9NwY1WMZJh1p-uWx3F-N3X6nLDDiCUUpkE_pt2scWBQQXe/s1600/DSC_0205.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQk7wo8mGrMHuxMDPGN5jY6MKwpm9Io7POdDeiefRkCz2GafSPLTwuHMBBHz3StGVv6U8Mb7TsUh9cXYLBetHjgx9NwY1WMZJh1p-uWx3F-N3X6nLDDiCUUpkE_pt2scWBQQXe/s400/DSC_0205.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Morning Star (in skirt) marching outside stadium of Washington-49ers game </td></tr>
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All of these women have been central to the work of EONM. They have stuck by me when others have not. I admire them tremendously. I know they don't want to be singled out <span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 14px; text-indent: 18px;">— </span>they prefer to do the work that needs to be done and not be on camera.That is our people's way, after all. But they are amazing.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2LhlylNEq_71SZK4oayLsuVl-Un_AX9Y2MLCihy05tFG9sjGk-lMLRlQrjLkoS7yUiOvmlq3-qruiGgz9Hs1Z5M-DEw_TqOkjrS57f0Kqr2jfBzw6i9wGDqA12qv7W0eFABVn/s1600/DSC_0286.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2LhlylNEq_71SZK4oayLsuVl-Un_AX9Y2MLCihy05tFG9sjGk-lMLRlQrjLkoS7yUiOvmlq3-qruiGgz9Hs1Z5M-DEw_TqOkjrS57f0Kqr2jfBzw6i9wGDqA12qv7W0eFABVn/s640/DSC_0286.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Morning Star's mom demonstrating what a real RedSk*n is to Washington fans</td></tr>
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<i>Trolls often chide us that we should work on the "more important issues"</i> and we always say we do it all: #Simultaneously. It's not chance that these women, central to EONM, are also on the frontlines of #NoDAPL. And look at the face of Kelcy Warren, yet another billionaire these amazing Native women have helped put in the hot seat. Priceless.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfRhNlvUljSuPRDmvDwY5AQH_be61VqkdpYj0a7fQXR_O1auz3QYacbZcW_F9YXlrVaE77gmkT0QPQN-4sma9KP8saRn7DtfwATNmJOH8feeKKeR2gfPlwg__Pkl7RewcYhIE-/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-11-04+at+11.36.33+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfRhNlvUljSuPRDmvDwY5AQH_be61VqkdpYj0a7fQXR_O1auz3QYacbZcW_F9YXlrVaE77gmkT0QPQN-4sma9KP8saRn7DtfwATNmJOH8feeKKeR2gfPlwg__Pkl7RewcYhIE-/s640/Screen+Shot+2016-11-04+at+11.36.33+AM.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren under pressure</td></tr>
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Hechetu Ye (Dakota for this is the truth)<br />
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PS: Here is my latest <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/US-Revives-War-on-Native-Americans-in-North-Dakota-20161028-0014.html">article</a> at TeleSUR English about Standing Rock which is my way of contributing!<br />
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