by Rich Wandschneider | Aug 11, 2025 | Eisenhower, frybread, Gaza, Holocaust, Long Walk, Navajo
How can there be an argument about starvation in Gaza? If a tenth of the news account are not doctored, if a tenth of the videos of people running and stumbling—and in some cases dying—as food aid is dropped in parachuted bundles from planes are true, Gaza is a...
by Rich Wandschneider | Aug 11, 2024 | horses, Hudson’s Bay Company, infectious diseases, Lakota, Native revival, Navajo, Ned Blackhawk, Nex Perce history, Nez Perce, Nez Perce War, North American Indian, Pacific Northwest Indians
I’ve written before about Ned Blackhawk’s outstanding book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Here’s more. The title itself is revolutionary—“rediscovering” echoing and countering the decades of homage to Columbus for...
by Rich Wandschneider | Aug 7, 2020 | Audubon Magazine, Bureau of Reclamation, Colorado River, COVID-19, Four Corners, Glen Canyon Dam, Hopi, Kaiparowits, Lake Powell, Navajo, Nvajo, Southern California Edison, Southwest
I have a son living—and roasting—in an ever growing and warming Phoenix. And now there is the specter of Covid in the mix in an urban Southwest only made habitable by borrowed water and electric air conditioning. In 1971, Alvin Josephy wrote a blistering...
by Rich Wandschneider | May 14, 2020 | Code Talker, COVID-19, frybread, Kit Carson, Long Walk, Navajo, vanishing Indian
“If Navajo Nation were its own state, it would have the highest per-capita rate of confirmed positive coronavirus cases in the country, behind only New York.” (PBS News Hour) As of today—May 14, 2020, at 2:45 p.m. Pacific Time, 3,392 of its 356,890 citizens have...
by Rich Wandschneider | Jun 28, 2014 | Alvin Josephy, Chester Nez, Code Talker, Navajo, Patriot Chiefs, World War II, WW II in Pacific
The last of the original 29 World War II Navajo code-talkers, Chester Nez, passed just weeks ago at the age of 93. The cruel ironies in his story are many, but the greatest of them haunted Nez to the end: “All those years, telling you not to speak Navajo, and then to...
