Texts.
Thoughts on fantasy and reality.
When my mom describes growing up along the Little Colorado River in Cameron, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation, she describes the abundance of the plants they grew and the animals they raised: melons near Shadow Mountain and orchards of peaches and apricots along the Little Colorado. She’d help drive large herds of cattle from the river’s north side toward Gray Mountain to the south.
"Certainly, for Native Americans with dreams of acting and filmmaking, this includes participating in the Oscars. Also known as the Academy Awards, staged annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and broadcast to millions from Los Angeles, California, in recognition of excellence in film. "
"I had planned in this second SubStack post to humanize the parents of Sacheen Littlefeather. After speaking to her sisters, I wanted to make her father something more than the stock character of the negative and grotesque American Indian stereotype of the drunk, violent Apache man."
“We go over to Warm Springs to clean graves a couple of times a year,” Shirod Younker, a Coquille/Miluk Coos/Umpqua artist and educator, tells me. “Going with my father-in-law to his family’s plot, he’d always make sure to take us to one area with the oldest family and point out this grave that had no marker.”
"In 2018, the US Senate approved a resolution designating May 5 as the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. During this year’s week of events for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, two-spirits, and transgender people taking place across the country, Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision was leaked."
Native people are continually forced to explain the need to preserve sacred lands—take the fight over the recently restored Bears Ears National Monument in Utah or the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North and South Dakota. But the members of the 1870 expedition who had seen the terrain, though indifferent to the people who already inhabited it, understood its power.
“Oregon statehood began here,” Gov. Kate Brown said, standing on the site of the former Blue Heron Paper Mill in 2015. “The falls are the true end of the Oregon Trail. John McLoughlin made his home here.
"Does the United States have a homeland? Is it truly a nation? Or is it still just a colony that exists to exploit the homelands of other peoples? The federal government presently recognizes 537 tribes within its claimed territory."
"My ancestor Sunka Isnala, Lone Dog, is said to have been born in Yellowstone in 1802, in the vicinity of what became designated, 70 years later, Montana’s Yellowstone National Park. His father, Tawapah’a, Red Warbonnet, was Sisseton Dakota but joined his wife's Sicangu Lakota band, the Tis’aoti, Red Lodges, because their tipis were painted red at the top."
"I was recently quoted in a Boston Globe article "Should museums verify claims of Indigenous ancestry? Fruitlands show postponed over this ‘profoundly divisive’ issue" 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."
"WILLIE GRAYEYES WAS BORN IN 1946 in San Juan County, Utah, in a small, isolated community not far from the base of Navajo Mountain. A striking dome of igneous rock rising 10,348 feet above sea level, Navajo Mountain is the highest point within the Navajo Nation, which sprawls across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and, at some 27,000 square miles, is roughly the size of Ireland."
The town of Lake Andes on the Yankton Sioux reservation in southeastern South Dakota has been underwater since the bomb cyclone hit the area in March.
“It’s like we live in a third world country and we are forgotten,” says Lauren Crowe, Yankton Sioux, a resident of Lake Andes. “No one cares.”
"By now you have probably seen the disturbing viral video of the January 18 confrontation in which students from a Catholic high school—many wearing Make American Great Again hats—can be seen mocking a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, as he performs a prayer chant on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial."
"In Chiapas, Mexico, I first considered the difference between the kind of society that builds monumental architecture in stone and the kind that nurtures great people in buffalo-hide tipis."
"It had been more than a 100 years since the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) people launched a carved canoe in eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Lake. And now in this place, beloved by Chief Joseph and his people, crews from several tribal canoes had gathered and joined in song—songs sung in their language and not heard on that water in generations."
"According to Sheridan, the film is “inspired by true events” and the “thousands of actual stories just like it,” involving the sexual assault of Native American women on reservations across the country. Yet Native families seldom get such dramatic closure or swift justice."
"After #MeToo, we can honestly say we live in an altered world. The hidden monstrous natures of the men who create some of our most prized cultural furniture have been made plain."
"Uranium, it’s now part of Navajo DNA. With over 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation, people living near these mines are exposed daily to radiation exposure at a rate several times higher than normal background radiation."
"I see, in the First Thanksgiving story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism."
"Sinema’s victory points to a larger pattern shaping elections: In counties with Native American-majority populations in North Dakota, Montana and Arizona (all states that had closely contested Senate races this year), Democrats won upwards of 80 percent of the vote."
"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."
"We live in an era of Trump, whose denial of climate science brings to mind a quote attributed to Louis XV: “After me, the Deluge.” The disdain of the Ancien Régime for change brought about the French Revolution and the end of their world."
"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 armed militia occupation of Native land in Oregon reveals the living history of genocide and land theft against Native Americans."
“I’ve been a long-time supporter of the Change the Name campaign,” said Simon Tam of Asian-American band The Slants, fresh off a major legal victory in his fight to trademark his group’s name. Tam is referring to various grass-roots efforts to change the racist name of the Washington football team, a cause that may be negatively impacted by the same ruling that benefited Tam.
"I am a Cleveland Indian.
No — I’m not referring to that grotesque caricature, “Chief Wahoo,” the Cleveland Indians baseball team uses as its mascot. What I mean is that I was born in Cleveland — a child of U.S. Relocation and Termination policies meant to make native American tribes disappear."
"The Washington Post did a grave disservice by utterly ignoring studies that clearly demonstrate the harm mascotting causes."
"As a Native American, I find Bundy’s late-nineteenth-century claims of “ancestral rights” presumptuous, since by law all remaining pre-emptive rights in Nevada belong not to late arrivals like the Bundy family but to tribes that have lived in the region for thousands of years."
"It was my mother, a woman of the Diné (Navajo) nation, who helped me comprehend what Christopher Columbus really meant to us as Indigenous people."
In the Capobianco’s view, Veronica, 3, being allowed to stay with her biological father (who she has been living with since December 2011) was akin to her being kidnapped by Indian relatives, much like Audrey Hepburn’s adopted Kiowa girl in the original 1960 version of the movie, “The Unforgiven.” Although the title of that movie referred to a white family that had stolen an Indian child after slaughtering her family, I can’t help but feel that the role has now been reversed -- we, the Indians, are the Unforgiven, simply by virtue of being Indian.
"I begin to realize more and more how out of step I am with the majority of Native Americans. The thin veneer of Native American activist, liberal, or educated Indigenous folk, like myself, have done much to promote the idea of an enlightened Indigenous tradition that was lost to U.S. imperialism."