I started writing blog posts to carry on the work of my mentor, Alvin Josephy, who said
that the true story of Native American history, and Native Americans in American history, needs to be told. Further, he wanted Indians to be telling it!

That is happening, and I have tried to let people know what Ned Blackhawk, David Treuer, Philip Deloria, Deb Haaland, and other Native truth-tellers are writing. Locally, in the Northwest, we celebrate the work of Bobbie Conner and Tamastsklikt on the Umatilla Reservation, of the new Interpretive Center featuring Nez Perce voices at the Nez Perce National Historical Park in Spalding, Idaho, and of the now Native led board of the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland in Wallowa. Sometimes I pass on words from Native News Online and other sources of Native American news. And words from Native authors Louise Erdrich, who uses fiction to explore the Native past and present, and the lesser-known Marcie Rendon, the Chippewa writer from the White Earth Reservation near my Minnesota birthplace whose mysteries deal with Indians in foster care, dead and missing Indian women, and human trafficking.

With all of this, I cannot help but keep one eye on what is going on in the larger world, and when the parallels with American Indian history hit me in the face, I have to say something. Gaza is such a parallel place, and current events mirror the experiences of generations of Native Americans. Hitler used the example of America’s displacement and treatment of its Natives to justify his treatment of Jews; and early Zionists ironically used the story of this displacement to justify their displacement of Natives in Palestine. The right-wing government of Israel today is poised for full occupation of the West Bank and of Gaza. The Arab Christians, Moslems, and non-religious might then be confined to small areas, “reservations” in American parlance.

The Israel-Gaza drama gets more troubling and disagreeable—no, disgusting, by the day. This week, it is reports of torture of many of the 2000 Palestinian prisoners released in the recent cease fire agreement. And we learn again that large numbers of Palestinian prisoners are held for six months of detention without charges—and that the six months can be and often is extended without notification of the prisoner or his/her lawyer.

Although Israeli citizens are treated as minors until age 18, it is 16 for Palestinians, and reporting on the Public Television News have had stories of minors much younger arrested. The charges are mostly throwing rocks or homemade gas bombs at soldiers or West Bank settlers. The settlers, or course, have been doing similar things and illegally displacing Palestinians on the West Band for years.

This week, before agreeing to observe the ceasefire once again, Israel dropped multiple bombs on the few remaining standing buildings in Gaza, and killed another 100 people, some 40 of them children. Apparently, this was in reprisal for the killing of an Israeli soldier—1-100. What is it about war crimes and proportionality?

Of course we cannot know things in Gaza for sure, because, even after the cease fire agreement, foreign journalists are not allowed in Gaza. And we learn today that “Save the Children,” a venerable non-religious organization working across the world to save children from hunger, disease, and poverty for over 100 years, and in Palestine for 70, is being asked to leave Gaza. Well, at least their “foreign” workers.

How can all of this go on? It goes on because of old guilt from the way we treated European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust (the Biden post WW II crew), fears of being labeled “anti-semitic” (the Trump crew), and indifference in a world full of horrors (what about Sudan and Ukraine and Yemen and…).

Likewise, American Indians have lived and died with persecution, land thefts, prejudice and indifference for centuries. But we—you and I and many at all levels government, in agencies that look after trees and fish, in environmental organizations that care about trees and fish, and in people and institutions dedicated to justice—know more now, and in many ways, in concert with Native leaders, are acting on this “new” knowledge.

Confession. I have an old school friend we called “Injun” in those long ago 1950s. Sixty years later, I had the courage to ask him about his real Indian past. His mother’s family were old California tribal people, but she did not enroll her children. Indian was the bottom of the California barrel in the 1950s. Better to pass as Mexican.

We don’t have a half-century to right old wrongs in Palestine. We must begin now to listen to Palestinian voices and to an international community that is trying to serve “justice.” We must remind our Israeli friends that the evils done to them in the past do not justify the evils they are visiting on Gaza today.

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