The lost boys of Colorado City | Salon Life

In a companion piece to the previous Salon post, I would like to recommend this article written about the boys who had been banished from their homes in a fundamentalist Mormon town that still practices polygamy. Basically, for any slight moral infraction a boy can be banished from his home, family, etc and left to fend for himself in the neighboring "gentile" towns in southern Utah and northern Arizona.

This fundamental sect split from mainline Mormonism when church leaders agreed to give up polygamy in order to gain statehood for Utah. There is support of this town by local politicos and, according to a former LDS Bishop-- even among the mainline Mormon leadership. Many Mormon leaders have been quoted as saying they would return to polygamy if they could as it is a main tenet of their religion. Since excess boys are not needed in this system they are sort of just abandoned. It's a pretty sad story. They don't have a real education, just a religious one, and have little knowledge of the outside world. Some fall into drugs and prostitution.

The disbeliever | Salon Books

Check this out. Salon has a great article about the role of absolutist religious ideas in creating havoc and violence in our world. Excellent article. The author, Sam Harris of the book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is an atheist who feels that even moderate religious folks bear a responsibility for the indulgence and support that extremists get. He also takes a good look at the holy books and finds them pretty scary and not viable to pluralistic and civil society's survival.

Harris is completing his PhD in neuroscience, but keeps his location and university a secret, because of death threats he has received from Christians.

I have been following the case of Lt. Watada who has refused orders to fight in Iraq because he believes that the war is illegal. He is not opposed to war and will fight in Afghanistan, because he believes we have legitimate cause to be there. I applaud his stance. The war is illegal under international law. You cannot preemptively strike another nation and there is no proof the Iraq government participated in 9-11.

Please check out this site supporting Lt. Watada: http://www.thankyoult.org/

In the present army a soldier is not supposed to question orders. However, when the world judged the Nazi's at Nuremburg, soldiers were held to international law, which requires them to disobey illegal orders. "I was just following orders", is not a sufficient defence.

This also reminds me of a family story of a conversation between my ancestor Chief White Swan and another ancestor General Alfred Sully. After Sully threatened to kill all of our tribe for harboring our cousins, the Santee after the Minnesota Sioux Uprising.

White Swan angrily came at him with a knife saying, "You monster! Come down off that horse and fight me man to man. When your men are fighting you sit on the highest hill on the fastest horse watching from binoculars and if any of your men get scared and run away you shoot them. If our warriors lose heart we figure that they will fight better another day. And when we go to battle my young men come after me saying, 'We have to make sure the old man doesn't get himself killed!' You come down here and fight me and then it will be over with."

Now this system is still in place and I think my great-great grandfather did a good job describing the plight of the soldier versus the warrior of our tribe. Sully backed off when he heard this and said that he didn't mean what he had said about killing all the men, women and children.

White Swan stood back and said, "I don't know what else you could have meant."

The Santee were allowed to stay and the Yanktons lived to tell the tale of their defiance.

I just read this article, which makes the situation even worse. Apparently before the council impeached Fire Thunder they also passed a ban that "contains a provision to banish from the reservation anyone who considers getting an abortion or helps someone else obtain one."

The article continues:

"Then the council turned to Fire Thunder. In a 14-to-1 vote, the council of 18, mostly men, suspended her, pending an impeachment hearing.

Peters, as reported by the newspaper Indian Country Today, thanked those who may have been conceived as a result of rape for attending the meeting. Later, in an interview for Women's eNews, he called for a forum where tribal members could discuss the merits of abortion.

But [Charon] Asetoyer said such a public debate is in complete opposition to the traditional practice of tribal women.
'These matters are not up for scrutiny by our male counterparts,' she said. 'This is a discussion for women to have in privacy of other women. Whoever calls for public debates has been totally converted to a colonial way of thinking.'"

I should note that Charon Asetoyer is an Oklahoma Indian married to a member of my dad's tribe, the Yankton Sioux and runs the Native American Women's Health and Education Resource Center (NAWHERC) on our reservation that has done an excellent job helping women, both in the terms of health education and in job retraining.

The council's ban is a poor response to a State law that does not allow abortions even in the case of rape and incest. Especially when you consider the fact that American Indian women are three times more likely to be the victims of rape than other American women according to U.S. Justice department.

"THE SUPREME Court on Thursday dealt the Bush administration a stinging rebuke, declaring in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that military commissions for trying terrorist suspects violate both U.S. military law and the Geneva Convention.

But the real blockbuster in the Hamdan decision is the court's holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda — a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act.

The provisions of the Geneva Convention were intended to protect noncombatants — including prisoners — in times of armed conflict. But as the administration has repeatedly noted, most of these protections apply only to conflicts between states. Because Al Qaeda is not a state, the administration argued that the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war on terror. These assertions gave the administration's arguments about the legal framework for fighting terrorism a through-the-looking-glass quality. On the one hand, the administration argued that the struggle against terrorism was a war, subject only to the law of war, not U.S. criminal or constitutional law. On the other hand, the administration said the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war with Al Qaeda, which put the war on terror in an anything-goes legal limbo."

Now, we just need the court to look at if pre-emptive war is justified . . .