Raising Cain...

Debunking Blatchford and other anti-Native ideologues on Idle No More | rabble.ca

Okay, here's the link of the day for Raising Cain: a great Idle No More article by Harsha Walia at rabble.ca...I have also linked Blatchford's full article in the "related posts" section below the clip...

In her most recent piece, Blatchford has the audacity to refer to Chief Spence's action as "one of intimidation, if not terrorism." I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, "We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to surface the hidden tension that is already alive." Blatchford provokes further, "there is I think a genuine question as to whether there's enough of Aboriginal Culture that has survived." Wrong, Blatchford. Indigenous peoples, cultures and nations have survived and thrived despite genocide -- despite a long, shameful and racist history of residential schools, forced sterilization, small pox and germ warfare, the breaking of treaties, legislative control including through the Gradual Civilization Act and the Indian Act, forced dispossession from lands and relocation to reservations, outlawing of ceremonies such as the potlatch and traditional activities such as fishing and hunting, and much more.

via rabble.ca

Also see:

Idle No More Is a Christmas Gift to Us All (Brigitte DePape, 12/25/12)

My Ally Bill of Responsibilities (Lynn Gehl)

Related articles

Blatchford: There is no end to the stupidity bred by hunger strikes

12 ways of thinking about Idle No More

On the 150th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US history, 60 riders from South Dakota reach Reconciliation Park in Mankato, Minn.

Today, after a 300-mile ride from Crow Creek, South Dakota, 60 people -- some of whom are ancestors of 38 Dakota men who were hanged on December 26, 1862 by order of President Abraham Lincoln -- reached Reconciliation Park in Mankato, Minnesota, to hold a ceremony on the 150th anniversary of the largest mass hanging execution in US history.

I first learned about this dark piece of history a couple of days ago, Christmas Eve. I decided to watch the film made about the first ride -- Dakota 38. I was so uplifted by the story of this healing journey that I wrote about it on my In Hawk Space blog and shared it on Facebook as my 2012 Christmas greeting.

In that post, I focused on just a few thoughts that the film stirred up. Today my process with the film and the event continues to unfold. Discussion in the last teleconference call of a psychoanalytic class I'm taking this semester turned to the intergenerational trauma that all people living in North America share. I have been interested in this subject for awhile, but the idea has taken on near-passion status for me in the last year or so. It's a wonderful triple intersection of my practice of psychoanalysis, my volunteer work as a justice activist, and my interest as a spiritual student in the idea of raising Cain.

It was clear to me from the film that these Native Americans, from their own experience of oppression, know that we are all traumatized, and that the way through it is to reconnect with our own pasts and work together to find new ground so that we, both as individuals and a human family, do not keep paying the trauma forward.

I'll be sharing more on this notion of intergenerational transmission of trauma in future posts.

For more coverage of the ceremony in Mankato today see also:

Dakota Indians mark hangings of 1862 with trek on horseback (Yahoo News, 12/26/12)

150th anniversary of the Dakota 38 hanging -- Photo Gallery (Mankato Free Press, 12/26/12)

Related articles

Dakota Indians remember largest mass hanging in US history

Santee tribe to honor anniversary of executions

Dakota Indians mark hangings of 1862 with trek on horseback

Interview: Attawapiskat Chief Therese Spence asks for respect for aboriginal peoples

Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Therese Spence is now on her 16th day of a hunger strike. Spence says her strike is ultimately about respect: for treaties and for aboriginal peoples. As such she thinks she deserves a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Harper, as well as the Queen's representative in Canada. Here's an interview she gave on December 21st, 2012:

 

 

See also:

Idle No More: Indigenous-Led Protests Sweep Canada for Native Sovereignty and Environmental Justice (Democracy Now, 12/26/12)

Amid holiday feasting, Chief Spence's hunger strike stays aimed at Harper (Ottawa Citizen, 12/26/12)

Related articles

Canada's 'Idle No More' Movement Spreads Like Wildfire

Attiwapiskat chief rebuffs Patrick Brazeau as Idle No More blockade of CP Rail line heads into fourth day

Matthew Pillischer: STORYTELLING AS AN ADVOCACY TOOL: Lighting the Path to Racial Justice with the film Broken On All Sides

This is a speech at Earlham College from visiting artist Matt Pillischer, the director, producer, and editor of "Broken On All Sides: Race Mass Incarceration & New Visions for Criminal Justice in the U.S." Pillischer is an activist, an attorney, and a filmmaker. Here he discusses the educational campaign around the movie, issues of systemic racism in global capitalism and criminal justice, the importance of independent media breaking down racial stereotypes and presenting alternative narratives about crime and race, and how to organize for massive change. Learn more about the movie and project at www.brokenonallsides.com or www.facebook.com/newvisionsforcriminaljustice

 

We Can’t Fix Our Economy Without Confronting White Supremacy - COLORLINES

Worth reading and thinking about:

White supremacy is a low-level assumption about characteristics that white people allegedly have which transforms inequality between them and everyone else into something natural. It often masks itself as fairness and goes unquestioned as a result. Using this definition, our current tax code is a work of white supremacy.

The fact that we’ve arrived at this point on the watch of the country’s first black president is an irony too large to ignore. Mostly victim, partly complicit, Obama is not fully to blame. Yet, economically speaking, the stubborn fact remains that the country is at a moment of racial injustice not seen in more than a generation. In the last four years, that injustice has only expanded and calcified.

Read the full article by Imara Jones at colorlines.com

Chris Kromm: The racist roots of 'right to work' laws

Earlier this week I shared this photo on my Facebook profile:

I found this as I took several actions in support of workers and unions in protests against Gov. Rick Snyder and Michigan's "Right to Work" Law which was passed by the state legislature last week. I re-posted the MLK photo and quote partly because I was not aware that the "right to work" rhetoric had been around so long, and thought I would like to know more about it.

So, I was really excited to find Chris Kromm's article on Facing South that not only outlined some historical origins of right to work laws, but their racist roots. Here's an excerpt...I recommend reading the whole article and checking out some of its links:

While Michigan's momentous decision has received widespread media attention, little has been said about the origins of "right-to-work" laws, which find their roots in extreme pro-segregationist and anti-communist elements in the 1940s South.

Read more at www.southernstudies.org

I found the paper by Mark Dixon (linked in Kromm's article) interesting as well:

Limiting Labor: Business Political Mobilization and Union Setback in the States (375 KB)

Related articles

Michigan legislature approves 'right-to-work' law in 58-51 vote

Granholm: GOP punishing Democratic voters with 'Orwellian' right-to-work law

Fight over Michignan right to work law reaching fever pitch

The School-to-Prison Pipeline Gets Its First-Ever Airing in the Senate | Common Dreams

I was really glad to see that this hearing got at least some media coverage. Perhaps the DOJ's action in the Meridian case in Mississippi got things stirred up enough to shine a Senate spotlight on the pipeline? I hope the dialogue continues:

Wednesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing was a milestone for a movement that has fought to raise awareness about these kinds of policies in schools around the country. The issue sits squarely at the intersection of race, educational equity and criminal justice. The committee heard testimony from Obama administration officials, a former Chicago Public Schools student, reform advocates and criminal justice leaders who sought to answer some basic questions: What good has the rise of zero-tolerance school discipline policies, now responsible for three million suspensions a year, done for the students they were supposed to protect? And just as pressing: What justifiable explanations are there for the deep disparities that zero-tolerance school discipline so reliably produces?

“For many young people schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system,” said Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin, who chairs the Judiciary Committee. “A schoolyard fight that used to warrant a trip to the principal’s office,” he said, is increasingly landing kids in booking stations such that “this school-to-prison pipeline has moved scores of young people from classrooms to courtrooms.”

Read the whole article.

Related articles

The School-to-Prison Pipeline Gets Its First-Ever Airing in the Senate

The Shocking Details of a Mississippi School-to-Prison Pipeline

School-to-Prison Pipeline: Senate Hears Testimony

David Palumbo-Liu: The need for the other narrative in Gaza

I keep a framed print in my office: It depicts a cat just sitting peacefully (I can't remember the artist). The caption is: "What people need is a good listening to."

I have proven this true time and again -- at least for myself -- not only in my healing practice but in the practice of peace work and justice activism out in the troubled world beyond my quiet holler here in Tennessee. Thus, I was happy to find an amazing OpEd by David Palumbo-Liu at truthout.org yesterday.

Since then, I've spent quite some time deciding where to share it. The thoughts and feelings that have prevented a quicker sharing relate to an indepth (and ongoing) contemplation of the fractured communities, the violence, anger and hate that currently blinds us as a human collective to our essential oneness, our peaceful, loving and cooperative nature.

I think a lot about how we can ever heal all the wounds that keep us from a reunion with the Self and the Source that we as a human race abandoned so long ago. I think we will figure it out. Social healing is a complex process, but I am confident that one of the skills we'll all need is an ability to listen through the heart first, and only then let the words pass on to the head through that powerful field of compassion that allows us to hold extremes simultaneously in one center.

Palumbo-Liu's article offers an opportunity to practice such a thing and to learn more about it, I think. He speaks here about young people in Gaza, but it's clear to me that we could take such an invitation to deep listening anywhere on Earth right now and move ourselves toward something better:

Believing their story is never allowed to be heard, Palestinians have a feeling of dispossession described most eloquently by the late Edward Saidi.  Now Gazan youth are pleading for the world to listen to their rage, sorrow and frustration, and their commitment to a cultural and political project that will endow them with rights and possibilities for life.

via truth-out.org

I discovered more great posts at David Palumbo-Liu's website. He also has a Twitter feed @palumboliu. When I get a minute, I'll add his website URL to Raising Cain's News and Blogroll in the sidebar.

 

Henry A. Giroux | Hurricane Sandy in the Age of Disposability and Neoliberal Terror

Interesting article on environmental disasters, community dislocation and how those impacted can become invisible...

Hurricane Sandy not only failed to arouse a heightened sense of moral outrage and call for justice, it has quickly, if not seamlessly, been woven into a narrative that denied those larger economic and political forces, mechanisms and technologies by which certain populations when exposed to a natural catastrophe are rendered human waste. One reason for this case of historical amnesia and ethical indifference may lie in the emerging vicissitudes of an era eager to accommodate rather than challenge global warming, an era in which freakish weather events have become such commonplace occurrences that they encourage the denial of planetary destruction. These days Americans are quickly fatigued by natural catastrophe. Major natural disasters and their consequences are now relegated to the airborne vocabulary of either fate or the unyielding circumstance of personal tragedy, conveniently allowing an ethically cleansed American public to ignore the sordid violence and suffering they produce for those populations caught in the grip of poverty, deprivation and hardship. It gets worse. Catastrophes have not only been normalized, they have been reduced to the spectacle of titillating TV. Rather than analyzed within broader social categories such as power, politics, poverty, race and class, the violence produced by natural disasters is now highly individualized, limited to human interest stories about loss and individual suffering. Questions concerning how the violence of Hurricane Sandy impacted differently those groups marginalized by race, age, sickness and class, particularly among poor minorities, were either downplayed or ignored.

via truth-out.org