Fledgling Downy Woodpecker. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Fledgling Downy Woodpecker. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Here are the materials in Dakota Access LLC v. Archambault (D.N.D.):
Via Turtle Talk.
Courtesy Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline Opposition
Police line up before protesters near the construction site of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
The controversial Dakota Access Pipeline project is back in the news. Over the weekend, tribal activists faced off against lines of police in Hunkpapa Territory near Cannon Ball as construction crews prepared to break ground for the new pipeline, while Standing Rock Sioux governmental officials resolved to broaden their legal battle to stop the project.
On July 26, 2016 the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was stunned to learn that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had given its approval for the pipeline to run within a half-mile of the reservation without proper consultation or consent. Also, the new 1,172 mile Dakota Access Pipeline will cross Lake Oahe (formed by Oahe Dam on the Missouri) and the Missouri River as well, and disturb burial grounds and sacred sites on the tribe’s ancestral Treaty lands, according to SRST officials.
Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners will build, own and operate the proposed $3.78 billion Dakota Access Pipeline and plans to transport up to 570,000 barrels of crude oil fracked from the Bakken oil fields across four states to a market hub in Illinois. The pipeline—already facing widespread opposition by a coalition of farmers, ranchers and environmental groups—will cross 209 rivers, creeks and tributaries, according to Dakota Access, LLC.
Standing Rock Sioux leaders say the pipeline will threaten the Missouri River, the tribe’s main source of drinking and irrigation water, and forever destroy burial grounds and sacred sites.
“We don’t want this black snake within our Treaty boundaries,” said Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II. “We need to stop this pipeline that threatens our water. We have said repeatedly we don’t want it here. We want the Army Corps to honor the same rights and protections that were afforded to others, rights we were never afforded when it comes to our territories. We demand the pipeline be stopped and kept off our Treaty boundaries.”
Whitehouse.gov
One of the most dramatic shifts in federal-Indian relationships occurred under the administration of Harry S. Truman. His presidency marked the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal and the beginning of the termination era.
One of the most dramatic shifts in federal-Indian relationships occurred under the administration of Harry S. Truman.
When Truman took office in 1945, Indians had unprecedented autonomy under the Indian New Deal, enacted more than a decade earlier by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Indian New Deal abolished the allotment program, allowed tribal communities to organize their own governments and ushered in an era of hope.
Under Roosevelt, Indians enjoyed a 12-year reprieve from aggressive assimilation policies. They had breathing room to regenerate tribal governments and reclaim land.
But Truman’s presidency marked the end of this New Deal and the beginning of Indian termination, a series of policies that sought—once again—to assimilate Indians. Billed as vehicles to integrate Indians into the wider nation and protect them from racial discrimination in the post-World War II era, termination policies dismantled trust relationships, relocated Indians to urban centers and stripped tribes of land and sovereignty.
“Truman parted with Roosevelt and with the philosophies of the Indian New Deal,” said Samuel Rushay, supervisory archivist at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. “He adopted the termination policy out of good intentions because he wanted to encourage racial integration.”
Truman supported termination because he saw it as a way to protect equal rights and improve Indian lives through full participation as citizens, Rushay said. It also lightened the economic burden Indian services placed on the federal government.
“It’s important to remember that Truman tended to conflate Native American rights with the rights of other minorities,” Rushay said. “He saw them as individuals who should have individual rights and freedoms, but he did not take into proper account the importance of tribal culture. He didn’t understand that tribal relationships were an integral part of culture and identity. He didn’t know that by relocating Indians to urban areas he was cutting off their support.”
Within the first decade of the termination era, policies that Truman supported terminated more than 100 tribes, severing their trust relationships with the federal government. Termination defined federal Indian policy for the next 25 years and forever altered the dynamics between tribes and the federal government.
Indian Affairs Archives.
“We know our lands have now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value; but we know that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.”
Canassatego, circa 1740
“…your money is not as good as our land, is it? The wind will blow it away; the fire will burn it; water will rot it. Nothing will destroy our land.”
Crowfoot, Siksika, 1877
Quick Story: I saw some images today of the direct action going on at the Sacred Stone Camp in Hunkpapa territory right now, where Native people are organizing against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Powerful images, powerful movement. And although I was going to write about something else, Hunkpapa made me realize how long Native people have been organizing against these dirty energy projects—choosing to turn down huge sums of money—to protect the earth from folks who would tear up our homelands. Those photos made me realize that we’ve been doing this for a long time. From Northern Cheyenne to the Blackfeet Nation to Lummi to Standing Rock, so many of our folks simply will not take a few bucks in exchange for destroying our relationship with Earth. Please look at these images—pray for these warriors on the front line right now, in real time, in Hunkpapa territory. Send some thoughts, prayers and food. Share the images; it all helps. But there is a reasonable question of why do Native people keep on fighting against what the white folks call “progress” and “economic development?”
Why can’t Native people just take the money and run?
From Rick, more beautiful swarf (weld spatter) and lovely rocks. Thanks, Rick!
From Marcus, resin-metal (stainless and nickel steel) wondrousness! (Yes, one of them is upside down, because it’s for adult eyes only.) They need a bit of polishing with steel wool, which is being lovingly done by Rick. The Buddha was first, and now has a place of honour on my desk shelves, because he just makes me happy. Thank you, Marcus!
I have received wondrous things! First, from Kestrel, an absolutely amazing amount of DMC Perle 3. I don’t use a lot of perle, because it’s more expensive, and what I do have is 5, which is considerably smaller. So, next major project will need to be Perle 3 based, I think. I have not yet pulled them all out, counted, sorted, or anything else. I’m still a bit busy picking my jaw up here. Thank you so much, Kestrel!
Black-capped Chickadee. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Carol Everett (Photo: The Heidi Group).
In the not enough facepalm in the universe category, Texas legislature has designated 1.65 million dollars to a non-medical based, anti-abortion group, on the basis of aborted fetuses flooding the sewers, and somehow or another, causing the general water supply to be contaminated with STDs or HIV, because that’s just oh so realistic. Honestly, this is so goddamned embarrassing.
Carol Everett is the founder and CEO of The Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization that gives women health “advice,” but is not a medical provider and can’t perform any health care services.
Earlier this month, Everett testified at a hearing at the Austin, Texas statehouse on a proposed requirement that women either bury or cremate the remains of an aborted fetus. According to The Austin Chronicle, Everett testified about her concerns of an impending public health disaster if fetuses were flushed down toilets. She argued that the general public could be afflicted with STDs or even HIV due to fetuses flooding the sewer systems.
“What if one day something horrible escaped into the sewer system?” she said, as the audience snickered.
Everett’s claims are scientifically impossible.
Just days later, the Texas legislature awarded The Heidi Group $1.65 million in taxpayer money for the organization’s “health care services.” Their organization doesn’t provide health care services.
While the group’s website advertises “Helping Texas Women,” further examination reveals their claims to have “programs” lists merely a phone number, the page that offers to help women with pregnancy/infant loss says “Page Coming Soon” and if a woman needs a pregnancy test they have a list of links to crisis pregnancy centers, that counsel women against abortion.
“The Heidi Group exists to ensure that all Texas women have access to quality health care by coordinating services in a statewide network of full-service medical providers,” the website says. It doesn’t explain how this is different from a Google search.
The grant comes out of funding that previously went to Planned Parenthood before Texas politicians kicked them out of the program in 2012.
In an interview with the Texas Observer, Everett admitted that she’ll be forking over a lot of the money to crisis pregnancy centers, which an investigation showed lie to women about the realities of their reproductive health. She assures the Observer that the taxpayer funds will not go to administrative costs at The Heidi Group or the organization’s rent, but it will go to nurses and doctors in rural Texas that urge women against abortions.
“My goal is to reach that little girl in a small county with no hope of having anybody explain her birth control options or have her blood pressure checked,” she said.
The local CVS pharmacy and Walmart often have machines where people can have their blood pressure taken for free. Crisis pregnancy centers in Texas have been caught counseling women to use abstinence only as a birth control method and refusing to dispense contraception.
Full Story Here.
Courtesy Mikkel Winther Pedersen
Looking south through what was once the “ice-free corridor” in present-day Canada. A new study suggests that humans couldn’t have traversed through the corridor until about 12,600 years ago, thus bringing about the end of the Bering Strait Theory.
Indians of all Nations have long looked askance at the Bering Strait Theory, but as usual, most people haven’t been terribly interested in what Indians have to say about anything, if they are aware of Indians saying anything in the first place.
Two new studies have now, finally, put an end to the long-held theory that the Americas were populated by ancient peoples who walked across the Bering Strait land-bridge from Asia approximately 15,000 years ago. Because much of Canada was then under a sheet of ice, it had long been hypothesised that an “ice-free corridor” might have allowed small groups through from Beringia, some of which was ice-free. One study published in the journal Nature, entitled “Postglacial Viability and Colonization in North America’s Ice-Free Corridor” found that the corridor was incapable of sustaining human life until about 12,600 years ago, or well after the continent had already been settled.
An international team of researchers “obtained radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and metagenomic DNA from lake sediment cores” from nine former lake beds in British Columbia, where the Laurentide and Cordellian ice sheets split apart. Using a technique called “shotgun sequencing,” the team had to sequence every bit of DNA in a clump of organic matter in order to distinguish between the jumbled strands of DNA. They then matched the results to a database of known genomes to differentiate the organisms. Using this data they reconstructed how and when different flora and fauna emerged from the once ice-covered landscape. According to Mikkel Pedersen, a Ph.D. student at the Center for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen, in the deepest layers, from 13,000 years ago, “the land was completely naked and barren.”
“What nobody has looked at is when the corridor became biologically viable,” noted study co-author, Professor Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the Centre for GeoGenetics and also the Department of Zoology, the University of Cambridge. “The bottom line is that even though the physical corridor was open by 13,000 years ago, it was several hundred years before it was possible to use it.” In Willerslev’s view, “that means that the first people entering what is now the U.S., Central and South America must have taken a different route.”
A second study, “Bison Phylogeography Constrains Dispersal and Viability of the Ice Free Corridor in Western Canada,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined ancient mitochondrial DNA from bison fossils to “determine the chronology for when the corridor was open and viable for biotic dispersals” and found that the corridor was potentially a viable route for bison to travel through about 13,000 years ago, or slightly earlier than the Nature study.
Geologists had long known that the towering icecaps were a formidable barrier to migration from Asia to the Americas between 26,000 to 10,000 years ago. Thus the discovery in 1932 of the Clovis spear points, believed at that time to be about 10,000 years old, presented a problem, given the overwhelming presumption of the day that the ancient Indians had walked over from Asia about that time. In 1933, the Canadian geologist William Alfred Johnston proposed that when the glaciers began melting, they broke into two massive sheets long before completely disappearing, and between these two ice sheets people might have been able to walk through, an idea dubbed the “ice-free corridor” by Swedish-American geologist Ernst Antevs two years later.
Archaeologists then seized on the idea of a passageway to uphold the tenuous notion that Indians had arrived to the continent relatively recently, until such belief became a matter of faith. Given the recent discoveries that place Indians in the Americas at least 14,000 years ago, both studies now finally lay to rest the ice-free corridor theory. As Willerslev points out, “The school book story that most of us are used to doesn’t seem to be supported.” The new school book story is that the Indians migrated in boats down along the Pacific coast around 15,000 years ago. How long that theory will hold up remains to be seen.
Alex Ewen’s article is at ICTMN. Alex Ewen has an in-depth, six part series about this, started in 2014. Excellent reading for everyone, especially as the only people who are giving this coverage, let alone front page coverage, are Indian publications. It would be nice to see this as a non-buried story in msm publications.
Rainbow Bridge Border Crossing.
A common discrepancy between passport nationality and license plate origin got Akwesasne District Chief Akwesasne District Chief Steven Thomas turned away at the Canadian border last month, and the Mohawk Akwesasne are concerned.
En route to an Assembly of First Nations (AFN) meeting in Niagara Falls, Ontario, on July 10, Thomas was stopped at the Rainbow Bridge crossing and refused entry. The reason? While he presented a Canadian passport, his car has New York State license plates. Thomas lives in the Ontario section of the Akwesasne reserve, which straddles the boundaries of Ontario, Quebec and New York.
“I worked in the United States for 37 years and have always owned an American-plated vehicle,” he said, adding that even when occasionally stopped, “I have never had any issues in crossing at any of the New York-Canada borders in the past and have done so hundreds of times.”
It is not that rare for Indians who are not Canadian citizens to occasionally be denied entry, Akwesasne Grand Chief Abram Benedict told Indian Country Today Media Network.
“It happens a few times a year,” he said.
[…]
There have been rare cases like Thomas’s, in which the CBSA demands that the person go through the process of importing the vehicle, Benedict said. However, Thomas’s incident highlights a broader problem, he added.
“The fact is CBSA doesn’t broadly recognize aboriginal rights when it comes to border crossings, and that’s clearly what this case has demonstrated,” Benedict told the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.
Thomas cited the Jay Treaty of 1794, which has a clause confirming Indians’ free border-crossing rights. However, Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled that the treaty does not apply because Parliament didn’t ratify it—it was struck between Great Britain and the U.S.—and because in any case the War of 1812 would have abrogated it. The Treaty of Ghent, which ended that war, included a promise to restore Indian rights and a commitment to “engage” to do so “forthwith.” But the court found it was not definitive enough in its wording to compel Canada on the matter.
In June, Canada’s Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples issued a report, Border Crossing Issues and the Jay Treaty, acknowledging that border crossing protocol must be clarified.
“Means must be implemented to facilitate legitimate travel for day-to-day activities by First Nations people,” the report said, recommending that “the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs appoint a special representative to explore further solutions to address Canada-U.S. border crossing challenges faced by First Nations communities across Canada.”
As for Thomas, he entered Canada the next day by way of the Cornwall border crossing, without difficulty, and drove to the AFN meeting.
“The ironic part of this denial was, I was on my way to attend the Assembly of First Nations for a border crossing presentation!” he said.
Another day, another broken treaty. Another day, another government disrespecting the rights of a First Nation. The Canadian government needs to get their Canada Nice on.
Via ICTMN.
