Archive for category: Indigenous

Avery Wear: Could you talk a little bit about who you are? You founded the Indigenous Sovereign Nations (ISN) Employee Resource Group for San Diego County employees this year. What led you to start this?

Maria Whitehorse: I have been a San Diego County employee for 15 years. I’ve also been a union advocate for about 13 years and I’ve lived in San Diego all my life.

Having an Indigenous family and seeing the disconnection from the culture relit a fire that I’ve had for years on educating the community and bringing visibility to the culture.

I know there is an unfair history that is being taught about my ancestors that has no validity and must be corrected. By forming this group, I wanted to address this and have the community unlearn and relearn the culture the right way through the testimonies of my ancestors and just everybody who is tribal, connected tribally to a tribal affiliation, or who has Indigenous family and ancestry.

Brian Ward: The ISN joined the Orange Shirt Day, which commemorates the sufferings of Indigenous children in Indian Boarding Schools. You all asked the county to join the commemoration by lighting the downtown county building orange that night. At first they refused, but later they felt they had to do it. How did that come about?

MW: I’ll give a quick history about Orange Shirt Day, which was where the request came from. The Orange T-shirt is a memorial to the children who were stolen from their tribes and put into boarding schools to assimilate, which took away their tradition and their cultures.

They obviously endured trauma. Some of the children died of starvation and illnesses. I felt a need to give honor to these children. A lot of people think that this started in Canada (which it may have), but we also had boarding schools here in the United States, particularly here in California. The few boarding schools here in California that have been recognized led us to request a building to be lit in orange to honor these children on September 30.

We requested that the County of San Diego light the building. Unfortunately, there was a disconnect in communication regarding getting the building lit which prompted us to request a meeting with the Board of Supervisors [Chair] Nathan Fletcher. In that meeting, there was myself representing ISN and a few tribal members. We spoke about what transpired in terms of getting denied to light the building for the children.

He agreed that this needed to be honored and needed to be done. He agreed to go ahead and light the building on November 2 in honor of the children. However, we did mention that this was a little late. Had this been on September 30, it would have had more meaning.

This memorial was lit in memory of not only the children that were killed but also the survivors, because we have a lot of children that did survive these boarding schools and they’re very impacted by the trauma. Lighting the building in orange is in memory (and honor) of them because they did pay an ultimate sacrifice to their relations.

The San Diego County Administration Building, a large rectangular building, is shown beneath a partly cloudy night sky and is lit with bright neon orange lights across the building’s façade.The San Diego County Administration Building lit orange on November 2, 2022 in honor of Orange Shirt Day. Photo by Maria Whitehorse.

AW: San Diego County has the largest number of reservations of any county in the U.S. There’s a long history of Indigenous struggle in this part of the world. How do you see ISN as a new organization of county employees fitting in with this ongoing historical struggle?

MW: I believe that ISN is ready, equipped to educate, and able to give the space to do so. Visibility is important: putting on events and showing our culture. I know our culture has its struggles, but we are survivors. We were once marked for extinction. But we are still here.

It is also important to discuss how poverty and economic barriers lead some Indigenous people to leave their communities because they want a better life for their families. But leaving reservations makes them lose their culture and traditions.

The purpose of ISN was to give that safe space to reconnect those that chose to leave their culture in search of a better life. And we are not only one tribe; we are all-inclusive from the North to the South. We’re a safe space to learn from each other’s traditions and cultures. It’s just an open space to reconnect.

BW: Regarding Indigenous peoples leaving reservations and going into cities looking for different opportunities, an overwhelming majority (about 72 percent of Indigenous people) live in urban environments. Were there any organizations, or things that you saw, that inspired you to create ISN and connect to issues specifically for urban Native folks?

MW: We live in the county of San Diego, which is Kumeyaay Nation.

We also have an array of other tribal people that come from around South America. From what I’ve seen, the people from Oaxaca suffer tremendously, as well. First, because the government says they are illegal when this is their land. There’s a saying: “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” They don’t live on a reservation. They’re urban Indigenous people. They live in town with us. And not only Oaxacans. There are other people who I have met who belong to tribes that have been detribalized. They’re not recognized because the government has unrecognized their tribes going back to the sixties and fifties. So they have no reservation or recognition, but they live in urban areas. The goal is to reconnect them and help them come back to their roots.

“There are many that come as a savior, but the people don’t want that.” They don’t want that savior. It’s gotta come from within them, inside the reservation.

It’s much too easy to say, “I’m going to leave my reservation because I want a better life.” But they have sacrificed their traditions and culture to do that; to live here in an urban area as a Native. I want to bring out that Native in them because there are many who don’t recognize that they’re Native because they weren’t raised like that, because their parents were ashamed or because of the stigma that comes with it.

I want to take ISN to help urban Natives, too. I know we have lots of them in San Diego and I’m hoping that they will reach out so that we can come together in our relations and help others.

I met a woman who was from the Pine Ridge Reservation. If I’m not mistaken, they’re one of the poorest reservations out there. They’re the ones that I believe are being punished for the killings and the history done to them. When we discussed Pine Ridge, she said, “There are many that come as a savior, but the people don’t want that.” They don’t want that savior. It’s gotta come from within them, inside the reservation. But maybe I can extend the education here on what that reservation is going through; maybe send some kind of message or some kind of help. Not being a savior but allowing them to be self-sufficient, because it’s got to come from within. And unfortunately, they’re very oppressed because of everything that’s gone on with them and the way the government has Pine Ridge situated.

This discussion with that young lady that was from Pine Ridge was one of the sparks that lit a fire in me. She lives here in Oceanside. She is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe as well. However, she also sought a better life and is living over here in California.

To hear her experience and perspective as someone who was born there, you see things in a different light. That’s what I mean when I say, “unlearn to relearn.” I want people to “unlearn” in order to “relearn” the right way.

BW: You and several other ISN members are also union activists. How has your union background shaped your approach to ISN’s work?

MW: I think being an advocate is in my DNA: to be able to organize and create those groups that are safe spaces to discuss, share and make sure everybody has a voice in this march and in this struggle together.

Union ideas align with what I envision for Indigenous Sovereign Nations and what our group can do for our Indigenous community. For me, advocacy comes naturally. And most of my members or board members are all advocates themselves and I think it runs in their DNA, as well. So, I think our group is composed of phenomenal people that will help to bring this group to light in order to help the Indigenous community.

AW: How do you see ISN fitting in with other fights for social justice, including the workers movement?

MW: The ISN aligns with other fights because what I envision for Indigenous people is that everyone deserves economic equality, political and social rights, and opportunities. Indigenous people and their communities have suffered from being left behind.

I believe that ISN can be that safe space where we can give that visibility to the community, Indigenous communities and peoples, so that they can be put in the front.

Maria Whitehorse stands beside three other activists in front of a giant statue of a woman holding an olla in front of the San Diego County Administration Building. Credit: Maria Whitehorse.Maria Whitehorse (right) stands next to members of the Indigenous Sovereign Nations (ISN) Employee Resource Group outside the San Diego County Administration Building. Photo by Maria Whitehorse.

BW: What are your visions for society in the long run? Do you see a connection or relationship between ideas of Indigenous liberation and socialism?

MW: Mine is to change the mindset of colonialism. That is my main target.

The Indigenous people were marked for extinction, but we are still here. So our aim is to make our ancestors proud. Some of them paid the ultimate sacrifice (if not all) from the colonizations of the Americas to today. Indigenous people faced and continue to experience oppression, disenfranchisement, discrimination, and some of them even violence at the hands governments, institutions, racism, and colonialism.

Indigenous people have been silenced and have encountered institutional barriers with far-reaching impacts on education, economy, justice, and the environment. What I want this group to do is the work of addressing historical, generational trauma. It can only begin to heal if the harm and the abuses are understood.

If we unlearn what’s been taught and reteach it the way our ancestors survived it, through their eyes, we can address and dispel all of it.

The hope is to bring honor to our ancestors through hard work, dedication, keeping sovereignty, culture, health, and wellbeing for our future generations.

Featured Image credit: Photo from The Province of British Columbia via Flikr; modified by Tempest.

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Indigenous activists march outside The White House protesting climate action (10/11/2021)Indigenous activists outside of the White House in 2021.

REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

  • For many Americans, Thanksgiving is about food, family, and saying what you’re grateful for.
  • However, for Indigenous Peoples, it’s a day to gather to reflect on their heritage and past treatment of ancestors.
  • Recognized as The National Day of Mourning, the event has been held every November since 1970.

Right now, as families across the country have gathered to cook, catch up, and remember what they’re thankful for, members from the Indigenous community have gathered by the statue of Wampanoag chief Massasoit Ousamequin, across the street from Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts ,to commemorate the 53rd National Day of Mourning. 

Observed on the fourth Thursday of November each year, the National Day of Mourning is held by the United Americans Indians of New England (UAINE) so that members of the Indigenous community can reflect on their heritage and educate the masses about how their ancestors were slaughtered by foreigners who first arrived in the United States in the 1600s. The murders they speak about took place at the Pequot Indigenous Nation’s annual Corn Festival in 1637, where Pilgrims entered the festival and massacred hundreds of men, women, and children from the Pequot tribe, took their food, and called it a Thanksgiving.

The first National Day of Mourning demonstration was held in 1970 after the then-leader of the Wampagnoag tribe Frank “Wamsutta” James’ speaking invitation was rescinded from a Massachusetts Thanksgiving Day celebration after he refused to be silent about the past treatment of his people. Instead, James delivered a speech on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts next to Ousamequin’s statue, where he described Indigenous peoples’ perspectives on the holiday. 

This year, the event began with a prayer service at 12:00pm, followed by speeches from members of the Indigenous community and a march, according to a report by Maine Public Radio. Kisha James, a member of the community who to Boston’s public radio station WBUR-FM  in 2020, said that many Indigenous people also fast from sundown the night before to sundown the day-of to remember the hardship and genocide their ancestors faced.

“Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures,” the UAINE said in a statement on their website about this year’s event. “It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.”

In addition to the physical gathering, there is a livestream via YouTube and Facebook so that interested viewers around the country can tune in.

Read the original article on Business Insider
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Guest nickestes

Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about Thanksgiving and his book “Our History Is the Future,” and the historic fight against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

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Decolonization — the act of rejecting colonial oppression — requires the abolition of that which is harmful. Decolonization is not reform nor recuperation. It involves concrete material actions, such as rematriation of lands and getting rid of oppressive colonial structures and creating something else from (or despite) the ashes of what needs to be destroyed for Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, disabled, and all “othered” life to regenerate.

Ashes are complicated. Depending on what was burned and how, ashes can be sacred, healing, clarifying and protecting. Fire is a strong part of many Indigenous cultures and land relations. Fire can be care and responsibility. Some ashes can act as fertilizers, while others are toxic and deadly. The life-threatening impacts of burning toxins reminds us that some things, such as fossil fuels, should have been left in the ground or never been used in the first place. The possibility of regeneration from the ashes really depends upon the character and quality of what was burned. This is a caution that reforms and repurposes can continue to emit the same toxicity they seek to address.

Given the genocidal origins of Thanksgiving, it is common for Indigenous folks to refer to it as “Thanks-Taking” or “No Thanks Day,” and many of us feel that the only way to decolonize this holiday is to abolish it.

Thanksgiving is based on a collage of colonial origin stories, religious mythology, regional approaches, commercial marketing and family traditions. The mosaic nature of its formation in our social worlds and interpersonal lives makes it a difficult thing to define and taboo to criticize. People tend to take critiques of the historical and legal facts of the holiday personally, even if no personal attack occurs.

Over the last few decades, the commercial sphere has moved away from overtly racist representations of the holiday — such as fake Indian head dresses, paper Indian decorations and offensive caricatures of Indigenous peoples.

These things have been replaced by cultural and ecological appropriations of Indigenous foods, spirituality and Indigenous life-ways that serve to link settlers to the lands they occupy. The holiday has been commercially and spiritually recuperated into a sanitized focus on community, family, nature and gratitude exemplified by cute little pumpkins and cornucopia baskets reminding us to be “grateful” in an attempt to unmoor the holiday from its colonial past.

This spiritual and ecological appropriation leaves no room for Indigenous critique or provocations such as refusal, abolition and decolonization. It also silences critiques of the capitalist exploitation that intensifies on this holiday, as essential and service workers are excluded from time off and brutalized by the consumerism of Black Friday, while being told not to organize because they won’t get others’ support for workers’ rights demands that would “ruin” a middle-class holiday.

Thanksgiving is horror because it is an awkward real-life representation of the unrepresentable: that settlers are glad — in fact, grateful — that Indigenous peoples are dead.

The sanitization of the holiday also suppresses critiques from Indigenous peoples who are shamed for expressing rage and horror about repackaged versions of Thanksgiving and cast as “Debbie Downers” raining on a holiday that most claim isn’t about our oppression anymore, but is instead supposed to be about concepts dear to Indigenous spiritualities, such as community, traditional foods and gratitude.

Thanksgiving Is Inextricable From the Grammar of Colonial Violence

Surviving the genocide of colonial conquest is the common grammar shared across many Indigenous, Black and Brown communities, and an annual scene revealing these structures of feeling is the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Grammar is the structural constraints of what can be written or said, the laws of what can be expressed and how. Cultures create grammars of obvious and hidden rules about what can be talked about and how, defining what is acceptable and what is considered rude or ridiculous. How people negotiate national holidays — these annual occasions on which many (but not all) people are given time off from work — reveals the grammar behind the social fabric that a nation tries to weave.

Thanksgiving is woven explicitly with the grammar of colonialism and genocide, even if most of us want to avoid that historical design of the holiday. Sitting in that feeling of avoidance raises the question of whether it’s possible to decolonize Thanksgiving.

The social media discourse on Thanksgiving is very narrow in scope. Today some will share exposés of the disturbing historical and legal origins of the holiday, which was nationalized by Abraham Lincoln to unite forces fighting over slavery during the Civil War at the same time he was leading a war against the Sioux peoples. Some will share strategies for dealing with or holding boundaries against being forced to sit at a table with toxic relatives and in-laws. Some will share entertainment guides for sports and gangster movie marathons, while others share suggestions for recuperation of the holiday by disassociating it from its gruesome roots. Others will urge each other to resist consumerism by giving back, or engaging in acts of charity or solidarity. And some will share reminders that many Indigenous people do not celebrate the holiday and, in fact, find it offensive. Alternative activities for Indigenous peoples include National Day of Mourning vigils, intertribal gatherings, resistance ceremonies, and just being home with loved ones and elders for a day because many have the day off from work. But there is very little space to question whether we should be engaging the horror of this holiday at all.

Your Gratitude Is Terrorizing

Horror movies that use the trope of the vengeful Indigenous dead have long asked if this country’s colonial legacy has built nothing more than a haunted house waiting to explode. But the genre also offers us more nuanced lenses to question the world around us.

Thanksgiving makes the contextual anxiety of colonial and racial terror visible via never-ending, inescapable microaggressions and gaslighting.

The threat of sudden catastrophe is terrifying, but nothing is more horrific than everyday, bucolic terror. The terror that you cannot name because it is so common, so mundane, so uneventful. The genre of found-footage horror, exemplified by films like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, excels in the mixture of documentary reality articulated to creative narratives that blur the lines between fact and fiction, giving us the sense of witnessing and becoming part of a true story. Good horror works the mind over till we question and fear the darkness around us. Dystopian science fiction and fantasy functions in a similar way, showing us the horror of a world that we are already in or heading toward.

Thanksgiving marks a moment of horror-film-made-reality when genocide’s afterlife manifests through disquieting scenes of everyday habits and interactions. For the victims of settler colonialism and enslavement, the normalization of celebrating genocide masks a profound terror lurking underneath the joyously grateful exterior promoted by mainstream society.

The feeling of terror separates one from their surroundings; it moves you out of an imagined reality and into a place where what is real is not what it seems. Horror is an othering experience.

In a society founded upon genocide and slavery, where much of the structure of violent racism, heteropatriarchy and environmental extraction has not shifted, everyday real life is terror for many Black, Indigenous and Brown people. Holidays such as Thanksgiving or Columbus Day, where colonial conquest formed by slavery and genocide are overtly celebrated, are moments that reveal this often invisibilized experience of unease and lack of safety.

Thanksgiving is horror because it is an awkward real-life representation of the unrepresentable: that settlers are glad — in fact, grateful — that Indigenous peoples are dead. It is reinforced by the real-life terror of racist police brutality, the epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women and Two-Spirit relatives, and violence against Black lives, migrant children stolen and locked in cages, and the existential fear many Black, Indigenous, and people of color feel on a daily basis for doing things as basic as eating a hamburger or going to Walmart.

It is impossible to escape the feelings of ultimate dread the holiday creates as it normalizes settler gratitude. Horror is the mode of thinking and feeling through fear, anxiety, shock, disgust and trauma. The genre of horror is popular in part because it’s a space where the connections between heart, mind and body are often most clear — we can feel how fear and dread viscerally change our physiology, how we think and feel through our bodies when a cold chill runs through our spine, our hairs stand on end, our pulse races and the pit of our stomach drops. Horror also attunes us to our intuition and sixth senses, to what we know and feel but have been gaslit for insisting is real.

For a lot of Indigenous, Black and Brown folks, Thanksgiving makes the contextual anxiety of colonial and racial terror visible via never-ending, inescapable microaggressions and gaslighting. Thanksgiving, especially as it becomes more and more centered on tropes of gratitude that silence dissent, is a unique form of cultural horror that feels like walking through a Jordan Peele movie every year and functions to silence justified rage and radical possibilities in multiple ways.

Thanksgiving is loaded with assumptions of settler innocence that works to absolve colonial society from both historical responsibility and accountability for prevention of future genocide. The deeply emotional and personalized reaction some people have against critiquing the holiday is a manifestation of how the trope of settler innocence has been internalized. For those of us who question celebrating genocide, there is a constant dread of that awkward and cringing moment when someone will respond that “they don’t really get into the whole pilgrim and Indian thing,” or “our holiday is not really about that,” and gaslight us while ignoring that there is a very clear reason why the government and your job give you two days off in November, because this is neither a national shopping day nor a national park hiking day. It is Thanksgiving, and that does have historical significance.

It doesn’t matter that your own Thanksgiving actions are focused on something else — football, shopping, watching Godfather marathons, hiking, thanking your friends and family, praying over food, trying to connect with land, getting drunk and eating pie, etc.

By doing anything at all that could be co-opted into the larger framework of Thanksgiving on the dates set aside by state and capital to do so, we end up unfortunately participating in it.

The terrorizing tension between gratitude, togetherness and historical death bound together through the framing of this holiday reminds us of how the horrors of our historical past were legalized, accepted and legitimized by people who were probably considered to be very nice, normal and spiritual by their friends and families. By doing anything at all that could be co-opted into the larger framework of Thanksgiving on the dates set aside by state and capital to do so, we end up unfortunately participating in it.

All of us, regardless of background, should be horrified by genocide, as much as we would be of other facts that we don’t shut down discourse on through self-indulgent projections of innocence, like the world being round despite the fact that some insist is not so. We should all be enraged.

The need for collective rest is critical, and we should demand more time off from work to be together. But let’s also reject celebrating genocide or conflating our rare access to collective down time with racist histories. No task, no recipe for solidarity or action could absolve genocide. It is unforgivable. There is just the need to sit with the uncomfortable and awful, and the resolve to end it rather than perpetuate it. Sometimes we need to remind each other not to sit down at a table built to harm us or walk into the dark cellar alone. Take a lesson from the movies, and fight back against the zombie apocalypse. Abolish racist and violent things. Refuse Thanksgiving.

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Historically, Indigenous and Black folks have been turned against each other by colonizers and enslavers. Now, communities are learning from one another and finding solidarity in efforts to reclaim stolen lands.

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Minneapolis, MN – Over the past two years, leaders within the American Indian Movement (AIM) organized a 1,103-mile walk from “the heart of AIM” in Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. “to seek elder Leonard Peltier’s release,” according to the main organizer Rachel Thunder. The walk’s primary purpose was to raise awareness about the case of Leonard Peltier, who they say was wrongfully convicted in 1977 of killing two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Leonard Peltier, who turned 78 on September 12, is known around the world as a political prisoner. Peltier has received worldwide support for his case including from Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. He was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, however the U.S. government has repeatedly refused to grant him parole.

The day before the start of the walk, directors and leaders with AIM, along with those in solidarity, rallied on August 31, 2022, to hold ceremony, sing songs, and speak not only on Peltier’s case, but on the many injustices Indigenous communities face on turtle island. AIM chapters from across the nation and Canada were represented including Rachel Thunder of Central Texas, Suzanne Smoke of Southern Ontario, Ray Bacasegua Valdez of Northern Nevada, and Lisa Bellinger who is the national co-director of AIM along with Frank Paro.

The last of Leonard’s children, Kathy Peltier, was also present. She spoke about the one time she was able to see her father and he was able to see her. She was about two years old and attended his trial.

Kathy Peltier

Lisa Bellinger

Suzanne Smoke

Rachel Thunder

Ray Bacasegua Valdez

Central Texas AIM Director Rachel Thunder says that the inspiration to start the 1,103-mile journey started with a dream, where she was transported to Peltier’s prison cell.

“You know, we didn’t just wake up one day and say, ‘Oh, we’re going to walk for Leonard Peltier.’ There were dreams that were coming to us. The dreams that were coming to me, I would be in Leonard’s prison cell with him, locked up with him. Doing that time with him. And he’d be sitting there on his bed with his face in his hands. And he wouldn’t say anything. But in each of these dreams, I would say, ‘Your people are coming to get you, that aim is coming to get you. Your people haven’t forgotten about you. Don’t worry. We’re coming.’”

Rachel Thunder, AIM Director Central Texas

A three-year period of political violence on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation began in 1973 with the Wounded Knee occupation. The FBI supplied a group known as the Guardians of The Oglala Nation, created by then-elected tribal chairman Richard Wilson, with intelligence on AIM members and looked away as the group committed crimes.

The “GOON squad” took part in large-scale militarization, harassment, and intimidation of Native American activists with support from the FBI-backed tribal government.

In 1975, traditionalists at Pine Ridge asked AIM leaders to send members to protect against further GOON squad attacks. Among the members who responded was Leonard Peltier.

John Trudell, who served as the chairman of AIM during most of the 1970s, spoke on Leonard Peltier via Portland Oregon Public Access:

“They are not going to let him out; that has never been their intention. The government had an operative, not an informant or a snitch. An operative is someone they put amongst you to direct activities. I think there was a government operative amongst that level of AIM leadership who wasn’t necessarily a part of the AIM leadership, but had access to the AIM leadership.”

Trudell continued, “And the way that it appears to me is that I think that this operative manipulated both sides against each other on the firefight thing, as part of a larger plan. But the plan went wrong and the agents got killed.”

The U.S. Department of Justice suppressed hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that would indicate Peltier’s innocence, including ballistic evidence in the 1975 shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

The U.S. suppressed that evidence, in part, to extradite him from Canada. In 1994 an international effort to obtain Peltier’s release was launched, but the FBI issued a memorandum outline to counter that campaign.

Peltier was denied parole on August 31, 2009. His next available parole hearing is in 2024, when he will be 79 years old. He has been in prison since 1977.

AIM Arrives In DC

Walk to Justice leader Rachel Thunder talks about the long walk from Minneapolis, MN, to Washington, D.C. and what his freedom means for Indigenous people. https://t.co/jLqD8NVuus pic.twitter.com/FdKo0VXqTv

— Nick Estes (@nickwestes) November 13, 2022

Thanks @nickwestes = James Reynold, one for US attorneys who helped prosecute Leonard Peltier, joined the march to repudiate Peltier’s conviction. He’s calling for Leonard Peltier to be released.

BLESSINGS TO #JamesReynoldsUSatty #FreeLeonardPeltier

cc: @POTUS @JoeBiden @WHCOS https://t.co/lYUh8TWKmO

— Free Leonard Peltier (@PeltierHQ) November 13, 2022

#FreePeltier #FreeLeonardPeltier
Freedom for political prisoner Leonard Peltier!! 47 years in prison is enough!! pic.twitter.com/u9HAN8AGPg

— NisⒶfi08 (@nisafi2008) November 13, 2022

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The post Leonard Peltier AIM ‘Walk to Justice’ from MN to DC Started With a Dream appeared first on UNICORN RIOT.

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As world leaders return home from COP 27 and prepare for other meetings they must listen to native peoples and the plans they bring to the table to quell extraction from the Amazon

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The Mohawk Warrior Society: Book Launch and Screenings on Indigenous Sovereignty and Survival Join us for the launch of an unprecedented book, a public roundtable with members of the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera, an activist group of Mohawk women from Kahnawake, and film screenings in celebration of Indigenous culture and resilience. The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival, is the centrepiece of our events. Containing new oral history by key figures of the Rotisken’rhakéhte revival in the 1970s, this compilation tells the story of the Warriors’ famous flag and other art, their armed occupation of Ganienkeh in 1974, and the role of their constitution, the Great Peace. This book launch is part of a two-day series of events and film screenings that foreground Kanien’kehá:ka activism, culture, and current issues within the broader rubric of Indigenous sovereignty. Watch the second day of this series here: https://youtu.be/BC_neUgR1fU Follow this link to purchase a copy of The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=produ…0:07 — Introduction 16:03 — Round Table Discussion 1:59:02 — Video Messages 2:46:57 — Q&A

The yellow book cover features a historical drawing of a sMohawk warrior aiming a bow and arrow down.

The first collection of its kind, this anthology by members of the Mohawk Warrior Society uncovers a hidden history and paints a bold portrait of the spectacular experience of Kanien’kehá:ka survival and self-defense.

Providing extensive documentation, context, and analysis, the book features foundational writings by prolific visual artist and polemicist Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall (1918–1993) — such as his landmark 1979 pamphlet, The Warrior’s Handbook, as well as selections of his pioneering artwork. This book contains new oral history by key figures of the Rotisken’rhakéhte’s revival in the 1970s, and tells the story of the Warriors’ famous flag, their armed occupation of Ganienkeh in 1974, and the role of their constitution, the Great Peace, in guiding their commitment to freedom and independence. We hear directly the story of how the Kanien’kehá:ka Longhouse became one the most militant resistance groups in North America, gaining international attention with the Oka Crisis of 1990. This auto-history of the Rotisken’rhakéhte is complemented by a Mohawk history timeline from colonization to the present, a glossary of Mohawk political philosophy, and a new map of Iroquoia in Mohawk language. At last, the Mohawk Warriors can tell their own story with their own voices, and to serve as an example and inspiration for future generations struggling against the environmental, cultural, and social devastation cast upon the modern world. (From Between the Lines)

Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall was a prolific Kanien’kehá:a painter and writer from Kahnawake, whose work continues to inspire generations of Indigenous people today. 

The post The Mohawk Warrior Society: Round Table and Book Launch appeared first on PM Press.

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