Immigrants destroy cultures

Ironically, as U.S. politicians debate whether, or how, to reform immigration law, a federal Web site provides a historical backdrop that seems long forgotten.

The Library of Congress paints a vivid picture of the "first immigrants" -- European settlers -- who wiped out Native American cultures.

Here's the link: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/native_american.html

Flickr photo-booth in San Francisco bar

A trendy new bar in the Mission in San Francisco has a "Flickr photo booth" where patrons can have their photos taken and automatically uploaded to a Flickr stream for the bar:
The photo booth at Shine, at 1337 Mission St., takes four photos and automatically posts them in the traditional vertical strip mode to the popular Flickr photo sharing Web site, which is owned by Yahoo.
"We were looking for something interactive at 5 a.m. on a construction night," Brian Walsh, a Shine investor and the creator of the photo booth, told CNET News.com. "We asked, 'What can go in this corner?' I said, 'What about a photo booth?'"

Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shinesf/

Thanks BoingBoing

Thankful for Just Surviving 500 years

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986
William S. Burroughs

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out
through wholesome American guts —

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies
shine through —

thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for
decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —

thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes,

thanks for all the memories... all right, let's see your arms... you always
were a headache and you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human
dreams.

Thanks Eve L. Incarnata

American Indians in Advertising

Native Americans in Early 20th-Century Advertising
One thing that interests me about early 20th-century advertising in the U.S. is how ideas and imagery of Native Americans are used to inscribe authenticity and legitimacy in products. Take this 1915 ad for Seneca cameras I found at an antique store:

When Seneca meets Seneca
This Seneca Indian Chief, Wy-ten-ac (Quick Eye), with his years of training, cannot get as accurate an impression of the things he sees as can any Boy Scout with the Seneca Scout Camera.

Indian Identity Gets New Face

"Current definitions and identifications of being Native American must be challenged and reevaluated before a genuine contemporary and meaningful identity can emerge. The infrastructure of this self description must use an honest portrayal of our contemporary human condition and reliance on traditional philosophical cultural knowledge as a guiding reference." -- Bob Haozous

An exhibition at the Institute of American Indian Arts is challenging definitions of what it means to be Indian in North America.

Link

Columbus, who?

Animikwaan gets a little rowdy, but she has a good point:

"With the aid of the agricultural engineering of the Western Hemisphere's Indigenous peoples, like the cultivation of maize among other indigenous fruits and vegetables (e.g. tomatoes, potatoes, squash, cocoa, bananas, a variety of beans, etc.) as well as lifestyles, the survival of the continual waves of European settlers for over a century afterwards was enabled. So, today's spirited subject heading is a toast to the bitter drink of cynicism regarding the whitewashing of North American history.

"...But if you do not do this or if you maliciously delay in doing it, I certify to you that with the help of God we shall forcefully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods and shall do to you all the harm and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours, or of these soldiers who come with us. And that we have said this to you and made this Requerimiento we request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that they should be witnesses of this Requerimiento."

Link » Thanks Animikwaan

Roast Pilgrim? Kids Asked to Choose Who Comes to Thanksgiving Dinner

Kids in Los Angeles recently were asked to choose whether their Thanksgiving dinner guests would be Pilgrim or Indian.

In the Los Angeles Times' "Kids Reading Room," the youngsters chose Pilgrims by a 5-4 vote. The kids agreed that Indians were smarter, but the Pilgrims knew how to cook, or so they say.

More »

Preserve in reserve

Porcupine caribou herd females and calves along Jago River in coastal plain area proposed for oil drilling, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Photos by Pam Miller, Arctic Connections.

After many years, it was a sweet victory earlier this month when the Gwich'in Steering Committee saw Congress agree not to drill for oil in lands many Native people in Alaska consider sacred and ancestral.

But, committee organizer Luci Beach says the victory may be short-lived. Beach is headed back to Washington this month to continue to push for more permanent protections of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other lands.

More »

Truth or Dare?

A new group in New Mexico is challenging a bronze statue said to honor the Spanish conquistadores who tried to destroy much of the Pueblo culture that remains today.

But, in its challenge, comes an insidious threat against "Chicanos and non-indigenous people."

Maurus Chino, founder of the Indigenous Truth Alliance, writes that those of mixed race who claim to be supporting indigenous human-rights causes should be eyed with suspicion:

"We have a serious issue with indigenous people being represented by Chicanos and non-indigenous people. In response to the Chicano claim to indigenousness, we must consider what Indigenous means here in the Americas. Indigenous means the original inhabitants of North, Central and South America who continue to exist as a tribal community with a land base. Existing as a tribal community includes language, tribal government, and recognition as Indigenous People by other indigenous people and non-indigenous people."

Chino says that even those "Chicanos" who sympathize with "Indigenous" peoples must have an underlying motive predicated on their ancestors' "land-grant" claims. In other words, Chicano ancestors must have been paid off by the Spaniards, and thus their children remain indebted to opposing indigenous claims.

Chino's narrow views are a grim reminder that the ethnic struggles found elsewhere in the world today, from China to Sri Lanka to Afghanistan to South India, can still be found in our own back yard among our own people.

More ...

If MLK were Red, His Name Would've Been Vine

Remembering Vine Deloria Jr.
'The Pope of Native America' leaves a rich legacy


----------------
By Ben Winton
Scholar Vine Deloria Jr.'s death on Sunday, Nov. 13, rekindled memories of American Indian activists who took his 1969 manifesto “Custer Died for Your Sins” to heart.
“Vine Deloria was a wonderfully gifted Lakota man who quite possibly saved Indian people from extinction,” said Rick Williams, president of the American Indian College Fund. “It is an understatement to contend that his political awareness and savvy leadership changed American people's perception of Indian people irrevocably.”
Deloria, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation, died of an aneurysm Sunday in Golden, Colo., not far from his academic home at the University of Colorado, where he taught until retiring in 2000.
Deloria, trained as both a lawyer and seminarian, helped win major human rights advances for American Indians, from getting anthropologists to return human remains and artifacts to getting the U.S. government to acknowledge tribal sovereignty. His book in 1969 entitled "Custer Died for Your Sins" was perhaps his most seminal work, according to many, who today say they are still inspired by it.
The American Indian Movement became one of the most radical, sometimes outspoken, advocates for many of the things Deloria pushed. On Wednesday, it posted a statement on its Web site crediting Deloria for many of the gains of American Indian people.
"It is safe to say that without the example provided by the writing and the thinking of Vine Deloria, Jr., there likely would have been no American Indian Movement, there would be no international indigenous peoples' movement as it exists today, and there would be little hope for the future of indigenous peoples in the Americas," said the statement.
Former students also vowed to carry forward Deloria's work.
“As future Indian leaders and modern warriors we must now take the reins handed to us, and carry on in his honor and those that came before us,” said Heidi McCann, a Yavapai-Apache, who was a student in one of Deloria’s religious studies classes in Boulder, Colo. “His memory and work will live forever. We must follow the example he set for us and respectfully bring it into the future with as much meaning, perhaps more.” A descendant of Sitting Bull and of legendary Yankton medicine man Saswe, and son of a Christian minister, Deloria was born in Martin, S.D., in 1933. He served in the U.S. Marines and graduated from Iowa State University and the Lutheran School of Theology, and later received a law degree from the University of Colorado.
He served as director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1964 to 1967. Under his guidance, the NCAI became a strong presence in Washington, D.C. His 1965 editorial "Now Is the Time" helped establish tribal autonomy and installed Deloria as "our Martin Luther King," in the words of Indian-rights attorney Charles Wilkinson.
Deloria published "Custer Died for Your Sins" and its 1970 sequel, "We Talk, You Listen," at the apex of the Indian-rights movement, which culminated that same decade with the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of activists demanded many of the things he advocated in his books. Indeed, a version of the Custer slogan remains scrawled on a wall at Alcatraz. It reads, "Custer Had It Coming." Wilma Mankiller, former principal chief of Cherokee Nation, called Deloria's books the clearest articulation of "the unspoken emotions, dreams and lifeways of our people."
Even today, former students continue to carry on the work of Deloria. Luci Beach is one of those students. She is a leader of the Gwich’in Steering Committee in Alaska, which has fought for years to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which also is home to sacred sites and ancestral lands of Native people. The committee won a reprieve this month when Congress decided not to drill for oil. She calls that reprieve temporary, as she headed back to Washington on Wednesday for more talks with politicians. She was a student during the time that Deloria also taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“Having Vine Deloria Jr. as a professor was not easy,” Beach said on Wednesday. “As a teacher he was quite demanding and required his students to really think and question. It was not all archives and papers. Occasionally, Vine would invite students to a lively interchange after class at local campus cafes. He was a brilliant historian and had quite the humorous view of the world. One would leave his class or gatherings knowing you had been challenged and enriched.”
Reaction to "Custer Died for Your Sins" instigated the American Anthropological Association's first ethics panel on tribes and sacred artifacts, and inspired the wry Floyd Red Crow Westerman song "Here Come the Anthros," from the 1970 album named after Deloria's book.
Deloria challenged anthropologists’ claims that American Indians might be descendants of Asians who migrated across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, forcing scholars to look more critically at historical and physical evidence about the emergence of the first peoples in the Western Hemisphere.
Simultaneously, while at odds with anthropology, Deloria used his writing to advocate for the rights of American Indian people. For that, he won numerous awards, including the 2002 Wallace Stegner Award, the 1999 Woodcraft Circle Writer of the Year and other honors he accepted with humility.
In his speech for the 2005 American Indian Visionary Award, Deloria suggested others, including Westerman, as more appropriate honorees.
"I think you just jump back and forth between the poles of radical and moderate," he once said, explaining his philosophy of using humor and candor to advance his causes. "You can bring up very radical things by using a moderate style."
University of Nebraska communications professor Bruce Johansen, who specializes in American Indian studies, called Deloria "the pope" of Native America. "If Native America had a Pope – of course, it doesn’t – it would have been Deloria," Johansen said Wednesday.
"While some scholars debate whether Native Americans really had a religious ethic that viewed the earth as mother, contemporary Native American religious and intellectual leaders continue to use the image with a frequency that evokes the rhetoric of Tecumseh and Black Elk. Deloria, who is arguably the father of the late twentieth century's intellectual renaissance in Native America, has been arguing ecological views of history for more than three decades with a rising sense of urgency as environmental crises intensify around the world. The stakes, in Deloria's analysis, include the future of humanity (as well as other animals) as viable species on an increasingly sullied earth.
Survivors include his wife, Barbara Deloria, of Golden; sons Phil Deloria of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Daniel Deloria of Moore, Okla.; daughter Jeanne Deloria of Tucson; brother Philip Samuel Deloria of Albuquerque; sister Barbara Sanchez of Tucson; and seven grandchildren.
Deloria's son, Phil, said a memorial service is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 18, at the Mount Vernon Event Center in Golden. (Address and map at http://www.mtvernoneventcenter.com/)
Includes information from news services.