Measles

The recent upsurge in measles cases in Florida and the US in general has doctors and public health officials scratching heads. Apparently, there is a big difference in infection rates when the percentage of children who receive the MMR—Measles, Mumps, Rubella—vaccinations drops from 95 % to 91%; transmission among the unvaccinated spreads more rapidly, and a few—stats say 3 %–of the vaccinated still get a mild case of the disease. That, in my understanding is in a nutshell what is happening in Florida and threatening elsewhere as measles cases in 2024 rise.

Measles vaccines are relatively new, becoming developed and widely available in the 1950s and 1960s. I had measles when I was five or six, in the 1940s. And now, with parents no longer around to ask, and without checking very old Minnesota medical records, I can’t say whether I had “measles,” or “rubella,” which is also called “German Measles.” What I can remember is that it was serious stuff, because I was kept in my parents’ darkened room for days, darkened because bad things happened to the eyes of children who did not follow a prescribed regime of darkness, hot soup and plenty of liquids. I don’t know where my parents slept when I was sick and confined to their bed. Mine was a single wide thing up a steep, narrow set of stairs on a second floor that sloped from adult head heights in the middle to the floors on the sides. Maybe they took turns sleeping, or one took the couch.

Parents had tough choices regarding childhood diseases in the 1940s, but there was general wisdom about dealing with some of the majors; with chickenpox and mumps, planned exposure was the rule. When one of them hit the school, mothers rapidly traded information and arranged “visits” of the uninfected with the infected, so as to get the disease over and done with. They—parents—had immunities from their own childhood exposures, so dutifully attended to ours. Measles—and rubella—were different, and to be avoided at all costs. Isolation in dark rooms and careful attention to blankets, towels, and tissues were, in my recollection, parents’ tools in dealing with them.

Vaccines of all kinds have been in the news—and their efficacy has become a point of political division—since the beginning of the Covid outbreak. At least two people I know—and quite possibly a handful more—died refusing the Covid vaccine; vax denier Robert Kennedy Jr. has launched a presidential campaign; and a few health professionals and politicians, like the folks in Florida, continue to mix vaccine effectiveness with parents’ choice in their statements to the public. Which means that Covid vaccine deniers have joined an old but relatively small group of vax deniers who linked the MMR vaccines to autism in children and are waging battle on the researchers and health professionals who promote any vaccines.

My bet is that the rate of deniers in American Indian country is small. I know from friends who have specific stories about family members’ reports of the 1919 flu epidemic that most tribal people take Covid seriously. And they did and do take Covid seriously. We all know now that white European diseases caused more actual deaths than wars did between Natives and settlers in the early days of European intrusion. Less well known are the stories of diseases weakening tribes and causing intertribal war as the devastated attacked neighbors to swell their depleted numbers. Diseases reduced Willamette Valley tribal populations by 30-50 percent, and had some similar effects on Plateau tribes—before they met Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark estimated 6,000 Nez Perce in 1805. Maybe there were 9,000—or 12,000!

Measles was the proximate cause of the Whitman killings in the Walla Walla valley in 1847. The missionary Whitman, who was an advertised physician, could not stop the spread of measles across the Cayuse population. Arrival of the disease has been blamed on Oregon Trail immigrants, although recent scholarship suggests that a party of Cayuse who had gone to California looking for horses and cattle had come back with measles.

Whitman could not cure them, nor could the Indians’ sweats and natural healings. Missionaries to the far north had better luck with isolation, heavy liquids, and blankets. But not Whitman, who probably did not have the personal relations with tribal members that would have bought their acceptance of such suggestions. So, Cayuse numbers were drastically reduced, the Indians passed a death warrant on Whitman, and five Cayuse Chiefs were hung after a subsequent war.

I grew up with history the story of kings and queens, emperors and presidents, generals and popes. The plague—the “Black Death”—that hit Europe in the 1300s and quickly killed 25-50 million people, got little notice in our textbooks. And the impact of European diseases on Native Americans was buried in the stories of brave European refugees seeking freedom and prosperity in the New World, of Westering migrants doing the same across the continent.

In college, I did come across one book, “Rats, Lice and History,” published in 1935 by biologist Hans Zinsser on the subject of typhus, a disease on which he performed significant research. Zinsser frames the book as a biography of the infectious disease, tracing its path through history. It wasn’t taught in history classes.

A similar book about measles might take its journey across the seas and to Whitman’s mission, through a vaccination phase, and now to Florida, where politicians and parents—not doctors—vie for its control and contributions to current affairs.

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Native Gains: Deb Haaland, Joe Biden, and Harry Slickpoo

It’s hard to get a handle on it. So much has happened in and for Indian Country since Biden took office and appointed Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) Secretary of the Interior. Haaland had held tribal offices, headed the New Mexico State Democratic party, and had served in the US House of Representatives before she became the first Native American to be a US Cabinet secretary. She knew the ropes, and she hit the ground running.

It was a big deal that she was the first Native cabinet secretary—and that in itself made the news. But the first big event in her tenure was Indian Boarding Schools. No sooner had the revelations about children’s graves in British Columbia hit the press than Haaland had a committee looking at US Boarding Schools, their graveyards and their impacts to the present day. The Truth and Healing Commission to examined past U.S. government efforts to eradicate the languages, identities and cultural practices of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. Haaland gave them a year to report, and the committee had discovered over 400 US Government supported boarding schools, and over 50 unmarked gravesites in that time. With Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community), she is visiting those sites and taking testimony from tribal members—not only of the relatives who died, but of the generational impact on families.

In 2021, Haaland announced a $125 million investment from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to restore the nation’s lands and waters. Although she took heat from the environmental community for negotiated settlements on oil extraction, she won applause for protecting the cultural and historic resources surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park. In our region, the jointly operated fish hatchery at the Dworshak Dam on the Clearwater River was turned over to the Nez Perce Tribe, and Haaland was there for the turnover.

More recently, the historic agreement between the government and the Northwest treaty tribes promises an allout effort at salmon restoration. The governors of Washington and Oregon and four American Indian tribal leaders gathered Friday, Feb. 23, at the White House to celebrate last year’s agreement to avoid litigation over dams in the Columbia River Basin. The agreement was announced in December after years of negotiation among the states, tribes in the region, environmental groups and federal agencies. It establishes a path to reviving the area’s salmon and steelhead populations and called for a 10-year pause in legal fighting—and promises a billion dollars for the effort! There is no guarantee that lower Snake River dams will be breeched, but tribal leaders like Nez Perce Shannon Wheeler are hopeful.

A couple of weeks ago we were hit with another stunning move on the part of the US Government, its relations and the relations of museums and collections across the country with tribes. We must make good on promises made under the American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 — commonly known as NAGPRA. The Act promised repatriation and consultation regarding human remains and funerary objects. Nonprofit investigative news outlet ProPublica brought it to a head when it reported last year that museums across America had yet to repatriate more than 110,000 Native American remains.

For decades—since 1990, museums found loopholes in the law to get around NAGPRA and have kept ancestral remains in their collections. They are now on a short leash to do the job. Major museums have closed or covered exhibits, and there is a real effort by some to involve tribal people in the disposition of objects and the mounting of new exhibits. Pro Publica might have broken the story, but Haaland’s hand—and Biden’s support—are evident in the scurry among major institutions like Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to comply with new timelines.

Back at a local level, in a simpler yet very meaningful event, Mr. Harry Slickpoo Jr., known by his Nez Perce name, tisqeˀ ˀilp’ilp, became the first Nez Perce educator and advocate for nimiipuutimpt, the Nez Perce language and culture, to receive the Idaho Educator Certification. This historic achievement occurred on International Mother Tongue Day, February 21, 2024. Since 2019, he has been serving at Northwest Indian College—Nez Perce Site. He has been instrumental in bringing together the three Nez Perce Language speaking communities of the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho, the Confederated Colville Tribes at Nespelem, Washington, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation at Mission, Oregon. And, since the beginning of the academic year 2023-2024, Mr. Slickpoo is teaching Nez Perce language and culture at Lewiston High School.

The rush to save and promote Native languages—here and across the world—has grown steadily over the last 20 or 30 years. With direction from the Nez Perce Tribe, the State of Idaho established this certification process years ago. But it is fitting that Harry, the State of Idaho, and this acknowledgement occur during the tenure of Secretary Deb Haaland at the Department of the Interior.

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Photo: Salt Lake Tribune: Biden returns 2 million acres to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase

Julia Keefe and Native American Jazz

What a treat! What a performance! On Saturday, wrapping up what looks like it will become an annual “Josephy Fest,” Julia Keefe, the Nez Perce jazz singer, brought her quartet to the Josephy Center, and closed the show. She and her New York drummer, Adam Benham, U of Idaho piano player, Kate Skinner, and Mali Obomsawin, an Abenaki First Nations bass player who also plays in the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, were stunning.

The Fest is the brainchild of pianist and Josephy Center tech wizard Seth Kinzie, and in this second year, he did not disappoint. Two days of movement—yoga and dance—and music. The music, from Native cowboy country to “Afrisonics,” a Boise blend of Nigerian and world music styles. It was all good. People practiced their yoga moves, danced and sang along, stretching minds as well as bodies around the wide range of genres and sounds.

But Julia Keefe and her quartet stopped the show as they ended it on Saturday night. We applauded the riffs of the drummer and bass player; practiced pianists goggled at Ms. Skinner’s hands on the keyboard; and Julia sang beautifully and summed it up with a solo, traditional Nez Perce funereal song she learned from and for her mother.

Afterwards, I snuck up for a few words with Julia, reminded and thanked her for her help in putting together our “Nez Perce Music” exhibit a few years ago. Told her that my goal in the show was to see music as white America tried to use it to assimilate Indians, and then show how Tribal people had found ways—always—to use it in protest. And jazz was a big part of that protest.

Julia nodded, said that she had not imagined how she could find enough Native musicians for an all-indigenous big band, then had gathered talents from across the country, and learned that they each had stories from their own tribes about historic and contemporary jazz players and ensembles. The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band has more than a dozen players from tribes across the country and into Hawaii. They’ve played in Seattle and New York thus far, to rave reviews. One of her big band players, who is also enrolled Nez Perce, has an instrument passed on from the era of the Nez Percians and Lollypop Six on the Lapwai Reservation.

Those bands, and the Natives and jazz phenomenon in general dates to Boarding School days, when Indian children were taken from homes and families, stripped of hair, traditional clothing, and language, and put in band uniforms and handed trumpets and trombones. At Carlisle Indian School they marched to John Philip Sousa in New York parades. Many learned to play those instruments well—musical sounds were not new to people who had grown up with traditional drums and flutes and the natural sounds of water, wind, and the animal and bird worlds—and when they came home to the reservations, they brought their instruments, but not the uniforms and the Sousa. They’d caught some of pop, some of Black jazz. Sticking a figure to the eye of their oppressors, they donned their headdresses and moccasins, and called themselves “Nez Percians” and “Chief White and His Five Redskins.”

The Nez Percians played in the early years of Chief Joseph Days—I have a photo of them in the 1948 CJD parade. Years ago, when I first learned about them and wrote a blog post, someone sent me back a picture of the 1919 Mohave Indian Band from California: headdresses, moccasins, saxophones, and trumpets.

That day is done, that fight won, as Native languages, cultures, and natural resources are being revived. “Reservation Dogs” is a popular TV show, and Lilly Gladstone, of Piegan, Blackfeet, and European descent, is up for an Oscar for a movie about an atrocity played on the Osage Indians 100 years ago called “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

And Julia Keefe is reacquainting us to the historic place and current possibilities of Indigenous Americans in the most American of music genres, Jazz.

Google Julia Keefe; google Julia Keefe’s Indigenous Big Band, or catch her performance at the Josephy Center in Joseph, Oregon on Saturday night, February 17, 2024:

Julia Keefe–Josephy Center

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photo KNKX Public Radio

Political parties, armies, and nations change

Segregationist Southern Democrats had a grip on the party—and in some cases the country—for years. Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of Civil Rights legislation alienated Southern Democrats, and chased them into the Republican Party—which had been the party of Lincoln and abolition!

Germany’s radical Nazi government gained power in fewer than twenty years, was defeated, and went from genocidal rampage to conversion to Western democracy in a few years; Japan’s Imperial aggression transformed itself into a Western leaning and anti-militaristic state.

In Iraq, our country pursued a different policy, not allowing bureaucrats and officers to serve in a post-Saddam Hussein government. The lack of basic governing skills led to chaos, rampant corruption, and the deaths of many Iraqis and Americans.

It’s taken time, but decades and centuries of declaring American Indians inferior, of demonizing their cultures, religions, and resource practices, the American Public and most of the general population is tripping over ourselves to acknowledge our errors, honor cultures, and emulate natural resource practices of indigenous Americans. In California, where genocide was practiced and Indian tribes demolished by the Spanish, the priests, and the Americans who paid bounties for Indian body parts, the state works with the Yuroks and other tribes to restore ecosystems.

Most conversions happen over time—although usually not the amount of time it has taken for the government and wider society here to embrace Native Americans—and one could argue that they are rarely complete. There are neo-Nazis and right-wing parties in Europe, and white supremacists and even paramilitary and anti-government groups in our own country. Maintaining balances between freedom and stability, free expression and incendiary speech, ethnic pride and pluralism is always difficult. But crucial to maintaining moral and social order.

Netanyahu claims that Hamas must be utterly destroyed, and that members of Hamas have no future in governance of Gaza. In fact, at this point he rejects the idea of a self-governing Palestinian state. But thinking that one group, one ideology, can be completely destroyed seems a dangerous illusion. And positing a Palestinian state that would not be self-governing, or would not be able to use people from Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, who have at least some experience in governance, is wrongheaded and flies in the face of a transition from terrorist organization to civilian government that occurred in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own country at its founding, in 1948.

Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Jewish right-wing underground movement in Palestine, was founded in 1931, and operated until independence in 1948. The organization committed acts of terrorism against the British—most famously in the bombing of the King David Hotel—whom it regarded as illegal occupiers, and against Arabs. The Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, the British, and United States governments.

Menachem Begin was Irgun commander from 1943-48, when it transformed itself into the Herut (freedom) party in the new nation. Begin then served in the Knesset, eventually became Prime Minister, and in 1978, as a result of peacemaking efforts, he and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

Is there a Menachem Begin in Hamas? Or will the ghost of Begin hover over Netanyahu and show him the way to peace?

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Northwest Fisheries: 50 years of Boldt!

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday—and a fine game it was. Congrats to the Chiefs! Today is Abe Lincoln’s birthday, which we celebrated separately until we bundled him with Washington and made it Presidents’ Day.

Today is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision, made in Federal District Court, which upheld Northwest Indians’ treaty rights to fish off reservation in their “usual and accustomed places.” When Northwest salmon and steelhead were abundant, this was no big deal. But as dams came to the rivers, development destroyed spawning habitat, and the numbers of commercial and sport fishers grew, the states of Oregon and Washington declared that tribal members needed to follow the same rules as their white neighbors. Alvin Josephy chronicled it all in “The Great Northwest Fishing War,”a chapter in Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, (Marc Jaffe and I included it in our Josephy Reader, The Longest Trail.)

In the 1960s and 70s, borrowing tactics from the Civil Rights Movement, Tribal fishers rebelled at the states’ restrictions, casting their nets in usual and accustomed places outside of white authorities’ seasons. They were beaten, harassed, and arrested—Billy Frank, Jr. in Washington 50 times. Real wars broke out in Oregon and Washington waterways. The national press stepped in when actor Marlon Brando joined them in the boats to get arrested!

Josephy tells the long story, which begins with the Isaac Stevens treaties of the 1850s, and wends its way through treaties made and broken, reservation lands gobbled up, and Indians persistent attempts in state and federal courts to Judge George Boldt. Boldt asked his law clerks to check the dictionaries and usages of “in common with” in the 1850s, the Stevens treaty period. The treaties all said that tribal fishing and hunting rights were to be exercised “in common with the citizenry.” The clerks came back with “shared equally,” and Boldt awarded the Tribes half the catch!

The backlash was severe. There were effigy hangings, refusals to sell Indians supplies and gas for their boats. Individual Indians were harassed and spit on. It was a trying time as the case gradually made its way to the Supreme Court; in 1979 the Supreme Court upheld Boldt.

There’s another chapter to the story. If Indians were to get half the catch for their subsistence, there had to be fish! And as dams and habitat destruction reduced the runs of salmon and steelhead, the number of fish making annual migrations to spawning grounds and the number of smolts making it back to the ocean plummeted.

Today, primarily with money from the dams—through the Bonneville Power Association—Northwest Tribal fisheries are the most vigorous and skilled practitioners of freshwater ///fish biology and fisheries preservation. Even the sport and commercial fishers who once saw “half the catch” as doom now look to the Indians as their allies.

Some of you might have caught the recent The Seattle Times editorial. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Rare is the legal ruling so transformative to a state, a region, and its inhabitants. In affirming tribal fishing harvest rights, Boldt’s decision righted a long-term injustice against the state’s Indigenous people.

“The tribes would become natural resource co-managers, alongside the state, and afforded an equal share of the salmon sacred to them. They have wielded that influence to fight for the restoration of Puget Sound and wider Salish Sea, the inland marine waters of Washington and British Columbia, and the dwindling population of salmon species within it.”

Years from now, diehards will remember this Superbowl, and a few people will still mark February 12 as Abe Lincoln’s birthday. And if salmon and steelhead survive in Pacific Northwest Rivers and Streams, February 12, 1974 will be a letter day in that survival.

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Photo: Marlon Brando and Billy Frank, Jr. , HistoryLink

Blessed are the peacemakers

This history blog of mine usually focuses on Nez Perce, Native American, and American history and history telling. I like to find the missing pieces of our history—my current obsession is the under-told story of the beaver’s place in the US economy and Euro-American Westward expansion. I highlight the places where historians have found new links and chinks in old stories—in my student days, the role of disease in depopulating Indigenous America was not taught, the roles of the plague and the Little Ice Age in European expansion and emigration not seriously treated. Today they are routinely credited with major impacts on US history and world events.Read Rich’s Post →

Elders

The Kiowa writer Scott Momaday passed this week. He was 89. I met him once, when he came to Wallowa County to make the presentation of a horse by the Wood family to the walʔwá ma, or Joseph Band Nez Perce. He’d come across the story of the horse that Chief Joseph told Erskine Wood he’d like when the 14-year-old boy stayed with him at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Erskine’s father, C.E.S. Wood, who had served under General Howard in the Nez Perce War and become a friend of and advocate for Joseph after the war, told the boy to ask the Chief what he might do for him in gratitude for hosting his son. Joseph said he’d like a good pony; the boy thought that his father was a powerful man, and that the Chief should have asked for something more glamorous than a horse, so did not pass the message on to his father. He told the story, and published a diary of his Days with Chief Joseph, years later.Read Rich’s Post →

How the Holocaust resonates today

I recently watched the Ken Burns documentary on “The US and the Holocaust,” some of it for the second time. I have visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. multiple times. I had a good friend, now deceased, whose US Army Tank unit liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. The images of the Nazi genocide from these three sources haunt me. I remember the piles of glasses and shoes at the museum, collected as prisoners were loaded onto trains and into gas chambers. I remember the spiraling towers of photos of communities lost, and the videos of Josef Mengele’s experiments on prisoners—experiments with diseases, amputations, and freezing temperatures. And I can’t get the image of friend Jack recounting a scene at Buchenwald: hand scratches on a wall that prisoners, supposedly dead and hung like animals on a rail, put there on the way from gas chamber to crematorium. Jack scratched an imaginary wall with his own hand as he told the story.Read Rich’s Post →

Sea Otter–filling in the pieces

The new issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly just landed on my desk—and sent me back to the Fall 2023 edition. I am always amazed at the scholarship and the range of topics in OHQ. And sometimes kick myself for not digesting them whole as they show up. There is always something new about the old that helps me understand where we are today.Read Rich’s Post →

Migrants

My family doesn’t trace lineage to the Mayflower, played no roles in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. And I don’t remember anyone referring to our grandparents and great grandparents as “migrants”; they were “immigrants,” people from specific European places seeking new lives in America. And, in those days, roughly from the Civil War to 1900, the biggest groups of immigrants to the United States were German speaking people from war-tossed, shifting borderlands across Northern Europe. Further north, Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians joined the emigration to America, theirs an escape from family farms that had been whittled, generation by generation, to parcels unable to support families.Read Rich’s Post →

Marc Jaffe

I just got a brief and beautiful note from Vivienne Jaffe that her husband, Marc Jaffe, had passed on December 31 at the age of 102. Images of Marc, walking in from his morning horseback rides to breakfast at Fishtrap, addressing the Fishtrap audience to tell them about the special place and literature they were part of, driving me from Alvin Josephy’s house in Greenwich Ct to his place in Williamstown, Massachussettes in our last real visit, come flooding back.Read Rich’s Post →

A Good Wallowa County New Year’s Story

About twenty years ago, a group of us started swimming at the foot of Wallowa Lake in June. We swam almost every day, some with wet suits, some bare-skinned. I was always the slowest swimmer in the group, and my distances didn’t match those of my friends. But I was relentless, and soon gave up the wobbly wet suit and still get in over 60 days of summer swims each year!Read Rich’s Post →

Eurocentrism in America and Palestine

In the introduction to America In 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus, a book of essays Alvin Josephy edited and published on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean, he wrote that:

“Commencing with Columbus’s arrival among them, Spanish, French, and English invaders, colonizers, pirates, and imperial explorers all but exterminated them [indigenous people], slaughtering Caribs wholesale with fire, steel, European tortures, and savage dogs, working thousands of them to death as slaves, and wiping out their settlements with the pox, measles, dIphtheria, and other white men’s diseases to which the Indians had no resistance…Read Rich’s Post →

War’s sidekicks and allies

In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Ned Blackhawk argues that

”the most traumatic development in American history [is] the loss of indigenous life due to European diseases. Epidemics tore apart numerous communities and set in motion large-scale migrations and transformations. North America’s total population nearly halved from 1492 to 1776: from approximately 7 or 8 million to 4 million.”Read Rich’s Post →

Heroes

My recent scrape with death—for those who hadn’t heard, I rolled my car in the Wallowa River canyon on Sunday on the way back from a fine Portland Thanksgiving—and the crazy recess in the war in Israel/Gaza have me thinking about fortune and history, about being in a certain place in a specific time, about the people and events that create our life stories. About my heroes.Read Rich’s Post →

The Last Indian War—Horses and Technology

Elliot West’s “The Last Indian War” was published in 2009, so it has been around. I’d not read it, but it was handy and I needed to check a date or name, so picked it up. And read a page or two. And decided I should read it. Read it because what West does is put the Nez Perce War in context of the Westward movement and US history.

We know that the War parties—Nez Perce and pursuing armies—moved through Yellowstone National Park. Some writers even tell us that it—Yellowstone—was a first, and that tourists were encountered and captured. But West tells us that yes, Yellowstone was the first National Park, and that it “reflected three powerful forces creating and defining the West.”Read Rich’s Post →

Intolerable

David Remnick of the “New Yorker” calls it “intolerable.” The last few weeks in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank have stretched us for words to describe the awful goings on. We mostly agree that the initial Hamas invasion of Israel and killing of innocents was barbaric—and that Israel’s response is horrific. We can’t see what happens next. Can history tell us?Read Rich’s Post →

All is not good in Indian Country

A few days ago, I wrote that we might look to what is happening in Indian Country in the US as a model for what might happen in Gaza-Israel today. How we could retrieve old history, acknowledge past errors, and learn from those we had not listened to in the past going into the future. I praised Deb Haaland and President Biden for their efforts on behalf of tribal lands, people, and culture.

I stand by that, but there is a caveat. Read Rich’s Post →

An American Indian solution in Palestine?

When I am talking with non-Native audiences, and even when talking with Tribal friends, I sometimes say that I feel like I am body-surfing on a wave of pro-Indian sentiment in the country. I say that a big part of this is based on recognition of non-Native—read mostly white male—failures in dealing with the natural world. We haven’t been so smart about fire, fish, and water, and grope now, trying to play catch up with preemptive burns and reintroduction of beaver and bison.Read Rich’s Post →