Nakotah LaRance (Hopi/Tewa/Assiniboine) is a championship Hoop Dancer. He was recently featured in 50 Faces of Indian Country.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Nakotah LaRance (Hopi/Tewa/Assiniboine) is a championship Hoop Dancer. He was recently featured in 50 Faces of Indian Country.
John Trudell (Santee Dakota) walked on in December, 2015. His last words: My ride showed up. Celebrate love, celebrate life. I still haven’t come to terms with this entirely. John Trudell touched so many lives, he was the voice for so many people, a lot of them voiceless. He was a part of my life from childhood and the occupation of Alcatraz. I’ve listened to him throughout my life, heard his words, sang his words, read his words, his words have inhabited my heart. So, what to share? Once again, I’ve been listening to the words that have been part of my skin for many decades, how can I decide? Maybe you’ll go look for yourself, find those words that speak to you, that find their way to your heart. For me, I guess it will always come back to one of JT’s central messages, that human beings were losing their understanding of being human. So, Bone Days it is, specifically, Crazy Horse.
We Hear what you say
One Earth, one Mother
One does not sell the Earth
The people walk upon
We are the land
How do we sell our Mother ?
How do we sell the stars ?
How do we sell the air ?
Crazy Horse
We hear what you sayToo many people
Standing their ground
Standing the wrong ground
Predators face he possessed a race
Possession a war that doesn’t end
Children of God feed on children of Earth
Days people don’t care for people
These days are the hardest
Material fields, material harvest
decoration on chain that binds
Mirrors gold, the people lose their minds
Crazy Horse
We Hear what you sayOne Earth, one Mother
One does not sell the Earth
The people walk upon
We are the land.Today is now and then
Dream smokes touch the clouds
On a day when death didn’t die
Real world time tricks shadows lie
Red white perception deception
Predator tries civilising us
But the tribes will not go without return
Genetic light from the other side
A song from the heart our hearts to give
The wild days the glory days liveCrazy Horse
We Hear what you say
One Earth, one Mother
One does not sell the Earth
The people walk upon
We are the land
How do we sell our Mother
How do we sell the stars
How do we sell the airCrazy Horse
We hear what you say
Crazy Horse
We hear what you say
We are the seventh generation
We are the seventh generationJohn Trudell, Bone Days.
The REZILIENCE Indigenous Arts Experience will be an immersive, all-ages experience that focuses on modern Indigenous art processes. Artists include nationally and locally recognized entertainers, muralists, multimedia artists, poets and a contemporary Indigenous art market.
It is a grassroots effort tied into the airwaves of social media, and all generations of the entire community are welcome. Tickets can be bought for the on-campus events or just the music concert. This movement trends new generational events that compliment social gatherings like Pow Wows but are becoming their own thing in Indian Country.
The event takes place on April 30 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center near downtown Albuquerque.
Executive Director Warren Montoya said, “We aim to be inclusive, not exclusive, it is not a space for the most elite, but we are not aiming to provide all the answers either. We are building a community platform from which we can all have an opportunity to speak on the resilience of our peoples.”
“This event is a movement based in creativity. It is our creative practices that have facilitated cultural longevity, community building, knowledge growth and healing for generations. REZILIENCE will be the new model of unity for indigenous cultures worldwide.”
Makȟá. Earth. Makočé. Land. Kinship. Family. The interdependence and connectedness of all things. That there was a need to name a day Earth Day makes me hauntingly sad. Every day, life goes on, and people walk over thicknesses of concrete, asphalt, spend days inside more concrete, lock themselves in steel when they are outside. It can be easy to forget how much you are a part of the earth. It can be easy to want more, always more. More to make your life easier, convenient, what you think is better. Poverty can grind people down so much they see nothing but blackness and pain. And in it all, we are both the driving force and blind eyes that allow those who are powerful to destroy the earth which gives us life. To destroy all life which is not that of humans, and if some humans get caught up in that destruction, so what? This is a day of terrible sadness, all the more so because it’s just one of “those days” to most people. It doesn’t mean anything, just as the earth doesn’t mean anything.
Duane Yazzie, photo by Robert Esposito.
“The life of the earth is waning,” warns Duane Yazzie, president of the Shiprock Chapter of the Navajo Nation.
Yes, it is. One piece at a time.
Robby Romero and Red Thunder, Makocé Wákaŋ.
Tennessee’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill” has gone down the drain again — and it will apparently stay there for at least a year.
In March, a legislative committee had delayed action on the bill by sending it to a summer study session, but the committee, under pressure from the far-right Family Action Council of Tennessee, revived it in early April. Today, though, its sponsor in the House of Representatives, Susan Lynn, said she would withdraw the bill until next year, reports Nashville paper The Tennessean. Full Story Here.
“We must take a stand against prejudice,” says a statement on the band’s website.
The members of Pearl Jam say North Carolina would be a better place without its new anti-LGBT law, so they’re canceling this week’s concert there and asking fans to support a repeal of the measure.
“It is with deep consideration and much regret that we must cancel the Raleigh show in North Carolina on April 20th,” says a statement posted by the band on its website Monday. Full Story Here.
The iconic classic rock band announced today that it is refusing to play any shows in North Carolina in protest of an anti-LGBT law.
Boston, known for classic ’70s hits such as “More Than a Feeling,” has canceled three shows scheduled for May in North Carolina in protest of House Bill 2.
Tom Scholz, the founder of Boston, apologized to fans who bought tickets in a statement posted on Facebook. “The removal of the shows from our schedule is a major disappointment. It has always been my wish to inspire people with BOSTON’s music,” Scholz wrote. Full Story Here.
Skye Thomson was supposed to meet with Pat McCrory before he signed House Bill 2. The confab never took place, but the trans ninth-grader still has something to say to the governor.
While Thomson, a trans boy attending high school in eastern North Carolina, spoke to two of McCrory’s staff members, a promised meeting with the governor never took place.
In light of HB 2’s passage, Thomson wrote an open letter to the governor, pleading with him to actually sit down and meet with him and other trans youth. Read the message below, via the National Center for Transgender Equality.
Dear Governor McCrory:
My name is Skye Thomson. I am 15 years old, I live in Eastern North Carolina, and I am a transgender boy. That means I was born a female and identify as a male.
I was in Raleigh for the debate on House Bill 2 on March 23. I was the only transgender student who got a chance to speak out against HB2, the so called “bathroom bill” that is supposed to keep everyone safe in bathrooms. But it doesn’t keep everyone safe, especially people like me. Imagine yourself in my shoes, being a boy walking into a ladies room. It’s awkward and embarrassing and can actually be dangerous. By putting this law in place you’re putting kids like me in danger.
The largest mass execution in American history occurred under Abraham Lincoln’s watch. On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota warriors were publicly hanged after being convicted of war crimes, including needlessly killing civilians, murdering prisoners, defiling dead bodies and raping captured women and girls. The charges, originally brought against 393 Dakotas, stemmed from their attack of farmers and villagers in Minnesota earlier that year. Although all of the trials were shams and many of the convictions were unfair, it is significant to note that Lincoln reviewed the cases at all.
Abraham Lincoln: First President to See Natives as Equals.
The largest mass execution in American history occurred under Abraham Lincoln’s watch.
On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota warriors were publicly hanged after being convicted of war crimes, including needlessly killing civilians, murdering prisoners, defiling dead bodies and raping captured women and girls. The charges, originally brought against 393 Dakotas, stemmed from their attack of farmers and villagers in Minnesota earlier that year.
Known as the Dakota Uprising or the Sioux War, the one-month skirmish came after the Santee Sioux of Minnesota ceded their land to the U.S. and agreed to live on reservations. Then, as the federal government turned its attention to the Civil War, corrupt Indian agents failed to provide food and white settlers stole horses and timber. “The Dakota were literally starving,” said Paul Finkelman, a historian and professor of human rights law at the University of Saskatchewan. “They had no food and people who traded with them refused to give them money.”
[…]
Under Gov. Alexander Ramsey, Minnesota held military trials, convicting 323 Dakotas of war crimes and sentencing 303 to death. But the trials—even those for legitimate crimes—were corrupt and “completely absurd,” Finkelman said. “The Dakota didn’t speak English and they didn’t have lawyers,” he said. “The trials were totally unfair.”
Under U.S law, however, death sentences could not be carried out unless the President signed the orders. In an unprecedented move, Lincoln ordered a complete review of every charge, and ultimately confirmed only 39 of the sentences (one prisoner was granted a reprieve).
“Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I caused a careful examination of the records of trials to be made,” Lincoln wrote in a message to the Senate in December 1862. The Army executed 38 prisoners by public hanging on the day after Christmas.
[…]
The centerpiece of Lincoln’s presidency was the Civil War, but he also contended with Indian conflicts and genocide in the Midwest and Western frontiers, including the Sioux Uprising, the Sand Creek Massacre and wars with the Indians of the Southwest. Focused primarily on winning the war, Lincoln allowed army generals to dictate Indian policy.
In 1862, Gen. James Carleton began a war against Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico, where gold had been discovered on Indian land. Carleton told Col. Kit Carson that “All Indian men … are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them.”
[…]
In his third annual message to Congress, in December 1863, Lincoln urged Indians to reject tribal culture and embrace civilization, which included principles of Christianity.
“Sound policy and our imperative duty to these wards of the government demand our anxious and constant attention to their material well-being, to their progress in the arts of civilization, and, above all, to that moral training which under the blessing of Divine Providence will confer upon them the elevated and sanctifying influences, the hopes and consolations, of the Christian faith,” he said.
Dwayne Doc Wanna at the Mankato Memorial, 150th anniversary, 2012. Jackson Forderer for MPR. http://www.mprnews.org/story/2012/12/26/social-issue/dakota-war-commemoration
So much of the news regarding transgender people is all bigotry, all hate, all the time. For a change, a couple of positive stories. I wish the article about Mumbai used transgender people, rather than transgenders, which reads all kinds of wrong to me.
Jennifer Pritzker, right, and Brenda Cossman of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, was in town recently to receive an award for her contributions to the field of sexual diversity education. Vince Talotta / Toronto Star.
Jennifer Pritzker is a retired U.S. Army colonel and a businesswoman. She is also thought to be the only openly transgender billionaire in the world.
The Pritzker family founded the Hyatt hotel chain and, according to Forbes magazine, is one of the 400 wealthiest broods in America. Forbes estimates that Pritzker alone is worth $1.76 billion.
But if money doesn’t buy happiness, it also doesn’t buy tolerance. This is why Pritzker, who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1974, didn’t come out publicly as transgender until 2013.
[…]
Fortunately, Pritzker says, a lot has changed since 1974. Not enough, but a lot.
Determined to help foster that change, the military veteran and philanthropist recently donated $2 million to the University of Victoria to establish a chair of transgender studies at the school — the first of its kind in the world.
“Knowledge dispels fear,” she says (a motto she picked up from the British Royal Air Force.) “It helps people dispel fear of the unknown, of (for instance) jumping out of an airplane in flight.”
If you can train people to do something as inherently terrifying as jumping out of airplanes, Pritzker believes, it’s reasonable to assume that you can also convince prejudiced lawmakers and American citizens to accept their transgender peers.
[…]
“There’s still work to be done,” says Pritzker. But those who support transgender rights can take some solace in the fact that big business is beginning to understand the bottom line.
“Productivity and profitability will not suffer by virtue of inclusion,” Pritzker says. “I’m as much a capitalist as I am anything else. And capitalism doesn’t have to be a zero sum game.”
Participants holding a rainbow flag pass through a junction during a gay pride parade, which is promoting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights, in Mumbai, January 31, 2015. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui (INDIA – Tags: SOCIETY) – RTR4NPD8
Mumbai: With an aim to make transgender community self-dependent, a national-level ‘Trans Empowerment Mela’ will be organised in suburban Borivali here allowing over 500 community members to showcase their entrepreneurial ideas.
The Mela, to be held on Tuesday, is being organised by Anam Prem, an NGO, with the objective of “making the transgender community self-dependent through dignified modes of income generation”.
“This mela gives a platform to the hundreds of transgenders across the country and will make everyone aware of their entrepreneurial potential. It would also remove the long-held (negative) societal perceptions about the community,” said Manisha Parab, a volunteer from the group.
People take part in a candlelight vigil Attawapiskat. Photograph: Chris Wattie/Reuters
After 11 people tried to take their own lives on Saturday evening, exhausted leaders declared a state of emergency. On Monday, as officials scrambled to send crisis counsellors to the community, 20 people – including a nine-year-old – were taken to hospital after they were overheard making a suicide pact.
“We’re crying out for help,” said Attawapiskat chief Bruce Shisheesh. “Just about every night there is a suicide attempt.”
[…]
There is no single reason for the toll. In Attawapiskat, Shisheesh pointed to overcrowded houses riddled with mould, drug abuse and the lack of a recreation centre that could give youth something to do. But mostly, he said, these children have fallen victim to the deeply rooted systemic issues facing Canada’s First Nations.
Chief among those is the lingering impact of the country’s residential school system, where for decades, more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were carted off in an attempt to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian society.
“You can’t attempt cultural genocide for 140 years, for seven generations – the last of these schools closing their doors in 1996 – and not expect some very real fallout from that,” author Joseph Boyden wrote this week in Maclean’s. “Attawapiskat is a brutal example.”
Rife with abuse, the schools aimed to “kill the Indian in the child”, as documented by a recent truth commission. Thousands of children died at these schools – the absence of dietary standards in the schools left many undernourished and vulnerable to diseases such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis – with hundreds of them hastily buried in unmarked graves next to the institutions. In nearly a third of the deaths, the government and schools did not even record the names of the students who had died.
The legacy of these schools sits silently under the surface of much of First Nations life in Canada, often combining with deplorable living conditions to produce deadly results. Last month, after six suicides in some three months and more than 140 attempts in a two-week span, another remote community – the Pimicikamak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba – also declared a state of emergency.
Ny Richardson.
It looks like the insanity currently infecting uStates is spreading, all the way across the pond. Naturally, there’s a whole lot of denial going on, nothing new there, and there’s been quite the effort to blame the victim. Full Story Here.
Ny Richardson, a 16-year-old from Yorkshire, England, claims she was kicked out of her local McDonald’s after using the bathroom because the staff thought her gender didn’t match the facilities she used.
“I ordered my food and left it with my girlfriend as I went to the toilet,” Ny told Yahoo News. “When I was in there, someone told me to get out and when I sat back down, the manager came over and told me that I needed to leave because I have been in the girls’ toilet.”
Richardson protested and the manager asked the teenager to show her ID to prove her gender [Ed. note: C’mon, guys]. When she failed to produce any ID, the manager told her to leave and called the police.
Richardson says she was humiliated by the experience and calls the manager’s attitude towards her “disgusting.”
“I’m still angry about it now,” she added.
© Daniel Arzola.
Out: What prompted you to create the “No Soy Tu Chiste” campaign?
Daniel Arzola: Since I was a teenager I had been creating art with a purpose, with a social voice, a cry in a universal language. I started with poems, then photography, and finally illustration. For me art has always been a social expression. I called it “Artivism.” But, my story is not very different than the stories of so many gay and trans Venezuelan people. I had a difficult adolescence where I was constantly chased and bothered. When I was about 15 years old, neighbors tied me to an electrical post, took off my shoes and tried to burn me alive. They destroyed all my drawings.
I escaped. But, so many people don’t have the chance to escape from something like that. There was one guy who couldn’t run away—he was gay—his name was Angelo Prado. I saw it on the news. What struck me was that, even in this century, when you turn on the TV in Venezuela, if they talk about LGBT people, there is mockery. They are laughing about the pain of others. Making us a joke.
Birch Bark Biting poem by Denise Lajimodiere from her book of poems “Dragonfly Dance.” (Mary Annette Pember)
“I see the design through my eye teeth,” said Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe.
“I keep my eyes closed when I work because I see the design in the darkness,” said Lajimodiere of her work in birch bark biting or mazinibakajige, which means “marks upon the bark.” […]
Birch bark biting was a pre-contact method of creating designs for beading or quillwork according to Lajimodiere. “Mazinibakajige died out in my tribe until I began doing it about eight years ago,” she said. […]
Lajimodiere was recently selected for a six-month Minnesota Historical Society Native Artist-in-Residence. With the award funds she plans on visiting the National Museum of the American Indian NMAI’s Archive Center in Suitland, Maryland to see the ancient mazinibakajige held there.
