Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
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.”
Skylar Wolf (Devil’s Son), Bell Tolls:
The Plateros, Without You:
Blackfire, Downfall:
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.
Women on 20s
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced on April 20 that Andrew Jackson will be replaced by Harriet Tubman on the $20 Federal Reserve Note.
Indigenous people have an interest here, to say the least. Before I get to that, the mere fact that a woman might end up on a piece of paper is apparently cause for outrage. Add to that fact it will be a black woman, and oh my, there goes the internet again, all blowed up, and you see things like this:
hey all I know is she stole property. Jackson gave Indians a new home. Tubman was a criminal.
Jackson gave NDNs a new home? There are times the stupid is utterly infuriating. I know that most people don’t know anything at all about Indigenous peoples in uStates, but this is beyond the pale. You’re on the ‘net, you know. Take five minutes out and fucking learn something. As for Tubman being a criminal? Point me to one past uStates president that hasn’t been one. Oh, but they were white, so it was okay. Ms. Tubman saved lives. Jackson was a murderer. A bit of a difference there. But for those preaching #whitegenocide, this heralds the beginning of the end. I would have preferred Chief Wilma Mankiller to be on the $20, but I’m very happy with the choice of Ms. Tubman, assuming this actually happens.
Women on 20s organized to get a woman on U.S. paper money to celebrate the centennial in 2020 of the 19th Amendment, which extended the right to vote to women. They picked Jackson as their target in furtherance of another goal in their mission statement: “Removal of symbols of hate, intolerance and inequality…”
I learned something at that point that was highly gratifying. I know Cherokees who put 20s in their wallet in a manner that avoids looking at Jackson’s face. I know Cherokees who identify as Republicans because Jackson was a Democrat and are highly offended at Democrats having annual “Jefferson-Jackson dinners.” What I did not know is that Indians generally despise Jackson almost as much as Cherokees do.
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker, released a statement reacting to the decision to replace Jackson with Tubman:
Andrew Jackson defied a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and forced the removal of our Cherokee ancestors from homelands we’d occupied in the Southeast for millennia. His actions as president resulted in a genocide of Native Americans and the death of about a quarter of our people. It remains the darkest period in the Cherokee Nation’s history. Jackson’s legacy was never one to be celebrated, and his image on our currency is a constant reminder of his crimes against Natives…
The Cherokee Nation applauds the work… to replace his image with the image of Harriet Tubman, whose legacy represents values everyone can be proud of.
Harriet Tubman to Replace Indian Killer and Slave Dealer Andrew Jackson on $20 Bill.
Back to Jackson.
Courtesy Whitehouse.gov
Andrew Jackson took office in 1829 with one goal set firmly in his mind: Indians must be moved “beyond the great river Mississippi.”
Robby Romero and Red Thunder, Makocé Wákaŋ.
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
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.
Transphobia strikes everywhere. In long ago tradition, most Indigenous nations recognized that gender was much more than binary, however, it seems that much has been lost in the colonial zeal to rip people from their roots.
Sharnell Paul.
Lake Powell Life covered this story, and Terese Mailhot at ICTMN has a column about this story.
From ICTMN:
Had Women of the Navajo calendar founders included Paul, they would have been working against historical erasure, reclaiming the stories within their own inclusive cultural roots. Their discriminatory acts speak of lateral violence within our own communities. Oppression works laterally and vertically. Their acts against Paul are acts against cultural reclamation and Indigenous sovereignty. It’s time to give our people voice. Our bodies and our stories have the right to acceptance and recognition. Women of the Navajo had the opportunity to empower culture, identity, and acts of reclamation. Granted, it would have been late to the game, but it’s better to be late than never arrive at a political occasion that is inevitable. All Indigenous bodies are sovereign, deserving of protection, respect, and recognition. What are they scared of? Whatever phobia they invite, it is no doubt the product of boarding schools, assimilation, and other genocidal acts put upon us.
[…]
The stories where I’m from are gone. There is no pre-contact narrative of people who identified as anything beyond the gender binary. There are only a few stories of sexuality and gender, let alone any that speak of gender roles. Our ceremonies and stories were forbidden. Only within the past few generations have people been able to stand and bear witness. There is something from the past that still resonates: that our stories can be erased, and our bodies forbidden. If we do not claim our people, and their identities, and their stories, and their struggles, they will be erased from the continuum, just like everything that has been stripped from us. Their beautiful faces and struggles will not thrive if we don’t lift them up now, to praise their clarity and power.
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.
James Buchanan took office in 1857, and viewed Indians as collateral damage. Whitehouse.gov
Uniform federal Indian policy was almost nonexistent when James Buchanan took office in 1857.
The country was on the brink of the Civil War, and the federal government had abandoned any pretense of Indian policy, leaving the “Indian system” to the mercy of dishonest and greedy Indian agents who largely earned their positions as rewards for political service. Corruption penetrated the federal government, funneling illegally obtained money to officials at many levels.
As the South threatened to secede from the Union, the only cohesive Indian policy Buchanan entertained was the belief that they needed to be quarantined on reservations, said Jean Baker, a history professor at Goucher College and author of the 2004 biography, “James Buchanan.”
In April 1858, the Yankton Sioux ceded 11 million acres in southeastern South Dakota. Chief Struck-by-the-Ree, whose name appears on the treaty, warned his people that they had little choice but to abandon their land. (Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum)
Buchanan oversaw 11 treaties with Indian nations, acquiring millions of acres of land in New York, the Dakotas and Kansas, and sending Indians to live on reservations. In April 1858, the Yankton Sioux ceded 11 million acres in southeastern South Dakota. Chief Struck-by-the-Ree, whose name appears on the treaty, warned his people that they had little choice but to abandon their land.
“The white men are coming in like maggots,” he said. “It is useless to resist them. They are many more than we are. We could not hope to stop them. Many of our brave warriors would be killed, our women and children left in sorrow, and still we would not stop them. We must accept it, get the best terms we can get and try to adopt their ways.”
Valentine’s Day has become the official day for Native women to recognize and memorialize the missing and murdered women and girls whom they believe government leaders in the United States and Canada too often ignore.
© Jolene Yazzie. https://rewire.news/article/2016/04/05/sing-our-rivers-red-march-casts-light-intergenerational-crisis/
‘Sing Our Rivers Red’ March Casts New Light on Intergenerational Crisis is the first article about the ongoing effort to see justice done when it comes to Indigenous women being assaulted and murdered. There continues to be great difficulty in this, because very few people care when indigenous women go missing, or have been raped, or end up as a corpse, tossed away like a bit of trash.
Valentine’s Day has become the official day for Native women to recognize and memorialize the missing and murdered women and girls whom they believe government leaders in the United States and Canada too often ignore. They began holding an annual march in 1992, after an Indigenous woman was found murdered and dismembered in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood.
For Native communities, the border between the United States and Canada is nonexistent; many tribal communities, including Blackfeet, Ojibwe, and Mohawk, straddle the border and have members in both the United States and Canada. They are asking why only Canadian officials have begun exploring violence against Native women.
Canadian Indigenous women’s groups began calling attention to the high rates of missing and murdered women and girls in the 1990s, when Indigenous women and girls started going missing along the now-dubbed Highway of Tears, a 450-mile length of the Yellowhead Highway 16 in British Columbia. Between 1989 and 2006, nine women were found murdered or went missing along the highway, which passes through and near about a dozen small First Nations communities.
Many Indigenous people believe that the number is actually much higher: Indigenous people often resort to hitchhiking along the remote highway that has little public transportation.
Mary Annette Pember
Supporters in the Sing Our Rivers Red march carry signs as they walk under the Veterans Bridge along the Red River in Fargo, North Dakota. The bridge underpass has been the site of several sexual assaults of indigenous women.
The second installment on this story is Sorrow Like a River: Forcing the World to Listen.
Most advocates for missing and murdered indigenous women are motivated by the loss of family member or friend as well as ongoing stories of loss in their communities.
When Makoons Miller Tanner works on her volunteer blog, she often thinks of her grandmother, who passed away in the 1940s, long before she was born. “She was in her 20s when she was killed. The authorities declared her death to be the result of her hitting her head on a rock after a seizure. This for a woman with no history of a seizure disorder,” Miller Tanner said. “She hit her head on that rock nearly 75 times.”
Her family still speaks of the hurt and anger over the injustice surrounding her grandmother’s death. After hearing the story repeated many times, she grew determined to contribute somehow to helping others find justice for their loved ones.
There’s no excuse for the lack of interest. There’s no excuse for the lack of investigation. There’s no excuse for the lack of advocates. This is a blight of shame on those who turn their backs, on those who avert their eyes.