Category: Gaza

We Will Always Have Been Against This

When tourists look at our wall display at the Josephy Center that tells a very brief story of the walwa ma, or Joseph, Band of the Nez. Perce Indians, they often shake their heads and say something like “It’s terrible what we did to Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.” Those who say this are mostly in their forties and older, and mostly white, and have read something of the Nez Perce War. Many go on to say that the boarding schools were terrible. Some continue, decrying the attitudes and actions of our government against Native Americans in detail. They’ve read about the killings of the Osage women, the stories of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker, Geronimo, and Captain Jack and the Modoc War. Read Rich’s Post →

Borders

The current border moving initiative in Oregon is only the latest in the historic record of border clashes, changes, and controversies. It has no real chance of success, but the issue has people talking—about land use planning, abortion, health care in general, sales tax, minimum wages, and more. When Mark Simmons, our former Oregon State Rep and onetime Speaker of the Oregon House, came to Wallowa County in the early days of the border moving movement, people talked about the traffic and sprawl on I-84 from the border to Boise, and asked about the flight of physicians, especially gynecologists, from the state. I don’t remember what he said about health care, but do remember him saying that we could maybe grandfather in some of Oregon’s land use laws.Read Rich’s Post →

Gaza and Umatilla

My friend, Diane Josephy Peavey, has made several trips to Palestine over the last 20 years. She had it in mind years ago to write a book comparing the plight of the Palestinian Arabs (her hosts were most often Christian Arabs) to that of American Indians. It would have been a way to bring her father’s work on Native American history and culture together with her own. Alvin Josephy was of course my mentor and the namesake of the Josephy Center where I still work.Read Rich’s Post →

Palestinians and American Indians

Alvin Josephy’s been gone for twenty years now, but his words are still with us, many still ringing in my head. Alvin said in many ways that the Reservation System, and how it evolved with land takeovers in broken and revised treaties and with the Allotment Act, was brutal and unjust. But—he said—it allowed at least some Indian tribes to stay attached to some ancestral lands. In fact, I think he would be pleasantly surprised by tribal pushbacks on land and land usage in the last 20 years. He’d like the story of the Yuroks in California, using California law to extend land holdings, advocating for fish, plants, and condors. (Alvin wrote about Condors, but that’s another story.)

Today’s story is the news videos from Gaza, the pictures of seas of people on the road to their homeland in North Gaza, some in cars and pickups piled high, others with donkey pulled carts, still others pushing prams and pulling wagons while walking. Most are walking, one a small boy carrying a full-grown cat! We’re told that the sea of people might be 400,000, not all, to be sure, of the million and a half who once called North Gaza home, but a sizable chunk of them.Read Rich’s Post →

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 →

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 →

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 →