What Have We Learned: Israel’s Genocide and Palestine’s Resistance, One Year On

Indigenous for Palestine put together these reflections: Revolutionary Acts of Love by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson indigenousforpalestine.org/2024/10/07/rev…

Oppenheimer was a bad film, embellished propaganda and boring. The only truth is the villain Strauss calling Oppenheimer what he is: a narcissist who wanted the fame of creating genocidal weapons but tried morally absolve himself of the monstrosity he created. It’s a typical US exceptional narrative: good intentions (of building weapons of mass destruction) gone wrong.

Federal courts think white high school football coaches have more rights to prayer than Apache people do to their place of prayer. Or it could be that profit has more sanctity than Indigenous people. nativenewsonline.net/environment/u-… For reference: usnews.com/news/national-…

Today is the 47th anniversary of the shootout at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Two FBI agents and Joe Stuntz, a young member of AIM, were killed. Leonard Peltier, who maintains his innocence, was convicted of killing the two agents. Youth runners remember Stuntz. Peltier’s co-defendants, Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, were found not guilty by reason of self-defense. Peltier was tried separately. False testimony that was later recanted led to his extradition from Canada and ultimate conviction by a jury and sentencing to two life sentences.

Today is National Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls Awareness Day.

Let's remember the life and legacy of Northern Paiute anti-rape activist Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891). She saw rape and violence against Native women as a tool of conquest. (Thread) Winnemucca's 1883 autobiography, Life Among the Piutes, describes the early invasion of her homelands and was the first nonfiction book published by a Native woman in the United States. She recounts how policies like the 1862 Homestead Act brought predation and war to her people.

We’re at the Burdick federal courthouse in Fargo, ND for #RiseUpforPeltier. @Ruth4Nd @TraceyLWilkie2 Chairman of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Delbert Hopkins Jr. and Chairman of the Spirit Lake Nation Douglass Yankton Sr. Gave powerful testimony about the support Leonard Peltier has from Tribal Nations. @Ruth4Nd organized the rally today for #RiseUpforPeltier

Here’s what I read in 2021—partial list. We lost @MaracleLee this year. She had a complex legacy, didn’t alway get things right, but left us with a revolutionary legacy as an Indigenous feminist and communist. Her book Memory Serves: Oratories is a collection of her speeches.

Thanksgiving epitomizes a make-believe nation’s fake history of cordial Native-colonizer relations as its founding. We are thus compelled every year to counter a Disneyland story erasing European invasion, land theft, and Indigenous genocide. #NationalDayOfMourning The cynicism of the so-called “culture wars” over national holidays and fake histories is that they gloss over how billions of acres of territory was annexed to make the USA. That’s imperialism. European invasion introduced a class system, sexism, racism, and bigotry.

I’ve only seen Dances with Wolves once. That ends tonight. Podcast homework. Every Native actor from the 90s is in this film.

In an act of solidarity, the Bolivarian revolution filled up my family’s heating tank on the reservation in the middle of winter. It wasn’t that act alone that convinced me of Hugo Chavez. But it showed he’s for the revolution that keeps us warm and feeds the children. Venezuela offers heating aid to tribes (2007)

rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/ven…

Zitkala-Sa is one of the most misunderstood Oceti Sakowin activists. She believed in Native independence and national American Indian unity; she opposed the capitalist plunder of Native lands; and she wanted to abolish the BIA. She also was for US citizenship and against peyote. Too often is Zitkala-Sa cast as just literary figure. She pushed the Society of American Indians to seek international recognition at the League of Nations and saw American Indians in the company of other colonized people around the world. Her vision exceeded the US.

“I call you 'comrades' rather than 'brothers and sisters' because if we are brothers and sisters it's not from choice, it's no commitment, but if you are my comrades I am your comrade too and that's a commitment and a responsibility.” “We would like to salute all anti-colonialist people in this country, regardless of their tendencies or origins. In politics one has to be realistic... and we think it is essential that people wishing to act in solidarity with a movement such as ours should be united.”

I’m trusting my friends on this website who actually fight fascists. Some observations: 1/6 was well coordinated and effective. Criminalization has historically been weaponized against the left and racialized people. Fascists know liberals are paper tigers. Biden indicated he’s going to beef up federal policing and not undo harsh charges for protestors last summer. Fascism doesn’t need Trump nor the GOP—1/6 proved it. Media won’t call fascists fascists to everyone’s detriment. There were 1/6 actions at many state capitols.

The selection of Deb Haaland for DOI is the result of Indigenous movements. It also comes with the recognition that Haaland is from a state that ranks fifth in the nation for oil and gas production, largely from fracking on Indigenous lands claimed by federal and state gov’ts. NM has some of the highest rates of MMIWG. The movement has only begun. And her appointment puts NM at the center of the land back movement — that is, returning public lands back to Indigenous people as the first step for any kind of sound environmental policy.

This is a peculiar time of year for Native people. Colonial holidays & massacres go hand-in-hand with consumerism. Two old white imperialists colonized the first two weeks of #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth. Here are Indigenous political projects you should check & support (thread): @The_Red_Nation Podcast is nearly finished with our first run of #NativeReads, centering Oceti Sakowin (D/N/Lakota) authors. Check out the study guides, buy the books, & support Oak Lake Writers Society: oaklakewriterssociety.com/nativereads-po…

The CIA has more Indigenous blood on its hands than Custer... Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia...

https://twitter.com/CIA/status/1328009514004705281

Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, as well...

I’ve seen sooo many US Indigenous “get out the vote” campaigns — “Indigenize the vote” “voting is sacred” — but zero solidarity from those same campaigns and politicians with Indigenous Bolivians voting today. Is a vote only “sacred” when it’s for empire? The US backed the right wing military coup to depose of Evo Morales, the Indigenous president, and MAS, a movement with many Indigenous people. None of the elected US Indigenous politicians opposed the coup. Not a single one.

The veneration of a jurist who used the racist legal fiction of the Discovery Doctrine to describe *all* American Indians is appalling. Her thinking was that we’re still too incompetent to manage our own lands, and we need the US to do it for us, like wildlife... No religion should determine law, whether it’s abortion or Indigenous rights. Yet, RBG upheld a fifteenth century papal bull that said Indians barely possess faculties that distinguish them from animals.

I was a research assistant at an oral history center, when my boss showed us the 2007 video, "Collateral Murder." Apache helicopter pilots radio a second chopper, "Crazy Horse One-Eight," before gunning down six Iraqis. "Look at those dead bastards," one says. I had long opposed the Iraq war. The idea that Indigenous names, Crazy Horse and the Apache people, those who had died fighting US imperialism, however, had become military codewords in the bloody massacre of Iraqi civilians made me throw up. It is the never-ending Indian war.

“The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, & the family & the autonomy of the individual substituted. The allotment of land in severalty, the establishment of local courts & police... & the universal adoption of the English language are means to an end.” — Thomas Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1889)

I can’t speak on whites pretending to be Black in the academy. But I see similarities with how whites have adopted a Native identity in the academy. Yes, there’s a question of resources. What’s not often spoke about is the politics of injury tied to these make-believe identities. The cunning of trauma politics is that it turns actual people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity.