Native americans

Tuesday

Aaron Gwyn

Killers of the Flower Moon captures the singular sensation of outside-ness

In the summers my grandmother would drive us south of town to where the black oaks thinned out and the world opened into pasture land and sky: prairie grass as far as you could see. Here, on their tribal land, the Seminole People would hold an annual powwow. Folks congregated to visit and eat frybread tacos, and I would skateboard with my Muskogee friends, Mike and Bobby Harjo on the cement basketball court, or along sections of sidewalk outside the aluminum-sided lodge. Around sundown, when the whippoorwills began to call from the sparse stands of blackjack and the fireflies winked on and off, the sound of drums started to pound the earth. You could feel them coming up through the soles of your shoes.

killers of the flower moon

Wednesday

Cockburn

Coca-Cola’s ‘Indigiqueer’ Pride workshops for kids

Coca-Cola is kicking off Pride Month by sponsoring events for preteens that are taught by Native American "Indigiqueer" and two-spirit artists. On the first day of Pride Month, Coca-Cola is partnering with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to bring workshops from “across the Western Hemisphere working towards equity and social justice for Indigenous peoples” to middle- and high-school students. “Fashion is often used to confirm identities, challenge social structures and display personalities,” the event description reads. “Discover the joy of fashion in our conversation celebrating PRIDE month.” There are four panelists.

coca-cola

Tuesday

John Ehrett

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an ecoterrorist heist movie

How to Blow Up a Pipeline begins with a land acknowledgement.  For those unfamiliar, this is a lengthy paragraph — often found at progressive meetings or on classroom syllabi — stating that the land upon which an activity is occurring was never formally ceded by the Native American tribe to which it once “belonged.” (Never mind that firstly many Native concepts of land management didn’t track what twenty-first-century Westerners mean by “ownership” and secondly the individuals making such acknowledgements clearly have no intention of actually returning the land they supposedly illicitly occupy.

A still from How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Neon)

Wednesday

Birdie Hall

Going native: is ancestral eating the answer to our dietary woes?

The question of what to eat has plagued Americans since the first conquistadors hit the shores and started rounding up and eliminating the only people who actually knew what was meant to grow and be eaten here. Historical accounts show the first colonists living in abject terror of the foreign foods of Native Americans, believing that if they began eating the strange corn, squash and beans around them then they would literally turn into Indians. As a result, many of them starved trying to grow their old-world crops in America. Now, hundreds of years later, the colonizers’ descendants are looking to the past in search of a solution to the countless health problems that plague consumers of American food. They’re calling it the ancestral diet.

ancestral

Monday

Teresa Mull

Meet the Navajo who wants Native Americans to vote Republican

How well Republicans fared this time around with Native American voters is hazy. Brookings reports that Native Americans “remained solidly Democratic in their voting preferences in 2022, though slightly lower than we observed in 2020.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that support from Democrats’ “diverse voter base… slipped across the board,” and “a majority of voters who are American Indian or Alaska Native favored Republicans this year.” Regardless, Native American voters have always been a tough demographic for Republicans to crack.

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

The tricky debate over fossil fuels on Native American land

The Biden administration has found itself between a rock and a hard seam of coal. A cohort of Native American tribes have realized just how sacred — and lucrative — their lands really are, and they’re not trusting the promises of an old white man this time. “When the administration says, ‘We're going to create all these millions of jobs if we just switched over [to renewable energy] today,’ they haven't shown us the fine print that says where those jobs are coming, which region, doing what,” Daniel Cardenas, chairman of the National Tribal Energy Association and member of the Pit River Tribe, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "When you start questioning them there, then they start getting defensive.

Wednesday

Cockburn

The Washington Redskins have a new name

Normally Cockburn isn't much of a sports fan, notwithstanding the occasional boozy tailgate for his local kickball team (which was disbanded years ago). But even he couldn't help but blow his whistle this morning when he learned that the Washington Football Team, formerly the Washington Redskins, had changed its name to the Washington Commanders. At first blush, the Commanders isn't such a bad choice. The franchise, after all, is based in the very seat of our military-industrial complex. Certainly it's a better choice than, say, the Washington Corporals (too low-rank) or the Washington Raytheon Lobbyists (too on the nose). And Commanders does have a distinctly DC oomph to it.

Monday

Timothy H. Ives

Are New England’s stone heaps Native Americans’ sacred ruins?

Brightman Hill lies deep in the forests of Hopkinton, Rhode Island. It is named for the Brightmans, one of the families who farmed it, and evidence of its agricultural past is, to most observers, unambiguous: old building foundations, a nineteenth-century burial ground, an extensive network of stone walls and hundreds of stone heaps, the results of field clearing. But in 2019, a federally-funded survey of Brightman Hill shattered these traditional interpretations. The surveyors, Ceremonial Landscapes Research, LLC, are a small group of antiquarians led by Alexandra Martin, a registered professional archaeologist who recently earned her doctorate in anthropology. Instead of stone heaps and walls, the surveyors reported “linear stone groupings” on Brightman Hill.

stone

Sunday

Bridget Phetasy

A matter of life and death

The ice on my right breast is a painful reminder of the limbo I currently find myself in: the anxiety-provoking space between a biopsy and the results. The time when you try to think positively — as if your magical thinking could change the results, the nature of whatever cells the needle procured. I’m simultaneously telling myself ‘worry is praying to the wrong God’ and repeating the word ‘benign’ over and over and over again. But the knot in my stomach is wondering if I’m about to enter a nightmare. You do your best to stay present but work falls through the cracks. You explain it away by apologizing and vaguely mentioning that you have some ‘health stuff’ you’re dealing with: nothing serious, just annoying.

Biopsy

Tuesday

Galen O’Hanlon

A colonial adventure in Mohawk Valley

You should never camp in a ravine. Look for higher ground, and a windbreak — a fallen tree is fine, but rocks are the best. Gather balsam wood for bedding, and use your tomahawk to cut firewood from a dead tree. Make two fires. Set the bigger one against the rocks for warmth, and spread the ashes of the smaller one over the ground you wish to sleep on — they will stop it being so cold and damp. Catch fish from the river, but keep an eye out for Indians moving silently through the forest on moccasined feet. This much I have learnt from Ronald Welch’s Mohawk Valley. I just wish I had read it as a boy, for it would have furnished my bivouacking trips in the woods with a far greater level of detail.

Wednesday

Godfrey Elfwick

Smirking, the infamous facial expression of the far-right

The students of Covington High School, Ky., were the subject of a recent viral video which shocked me to my very core. Everything about this encounter triggered me. Their obvious disrespect of a proud Native American as he bravely made his way towards this group of vile, contemptuous MAGA hat-wearing teenage boys, banging his Ceremonial Drum of Peace and chanting a mystical tribal incantation (presumably in order to ward off the sickening Aura of Trumpism) disturbed me so greatly that I actually did a small vomiting. The final straw came when the courageous Native American Vietnam veteran came to a stop and peacefully hammered on his drum directly into a young boy’s disgustingly smug face. What did this hateful Apostle of Trump do?

godfrey elfwick smirk

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

How the Covington kids gave us our latest lesson on the ills of public shaming

It’s always darkest before the dawn, or so the optimists would have us believe. The darkness this past week came, as so often, in fast and furious character assassinations on Twitter. A short video clip showed a confrontation between white Catholic MAGA-hat-wearing teenagers and a Native American elder. The Twittersphere leapt to condemn the Covington students, and to exalt Nathan Phillips, the Native American elder who was beating a drum inches away from Nick Sandmann’s face. Sandmann, a junior at Covington had a face that many were quick to characterize as smug. His smirk framed the way critics responded to the clip. As with most things, however, the interaction between Phillips and the Covington boys was not as clear cut as it first seemed.

nathan phillips covington
nathan phillips
Cockburn

Who is the real Nathan Phillips?

The Native American man with the drum who – now so infamously – approached a group of high schoolers from Covington, Ky., on Friday has been widely identified as a Vietnam veteran. But he isn’t one. The man is called Nathan Phillips, and he identifies with the American Indian Movement, an extremist separatist organization tied to at least one murder. He was singing their song when he approached the kids. He told the Washington Post that he was ‘blocked’ by the students, though later video evidence suggests that that was an exaggeration, to put it mildly. Phillips remains adamant that the boys should be punished for what they did to him, and has refused to meet with them.

catholic private schools
Michael Warren Davis

The progressive war on Catholic private schools

I spent my formative years at an all-boys’ Catholic prep school in rural New England. It was a magical, Bridesheadian sorts of place, where everyone’s only pretending to be gay (probably) and women exist as a kind of theory or abstraction – like Persians, as Maistre would say. Our library was endowed by, and named for, John J. Studzinski: the distinguished-looking gentleman you see seated behind Donald Trump (and in front of Maria Bartiromo) at the infamous 2016 Al Smith Dinner. Other alumni include comedian Bo Burnham, who is, predictably, a prick. So, with more than a little skin in the game, I must ask: why do progressives have it in for Catholic prep schools? First it was Georgetown Prep, which is both Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch’s alma mater.

Tuesday

Alexander Waugh

Teepee or not teepee? That is the question

It has long been fashionable for Americans to claim descent from Rebecca Rolfe (née Pocahontas) the heroical daughter of Chief Powhatan of Virginia. Woodrow Wilson’s wife was one, the actor, Glenn Strange, another. Then people started claiming any family connection whatsoever to Mrs Rolfe’s descendants, as the Bushes now do. Soon the great contagion spread to the point where everyone in the State of Virginia was descended from Mrs Rolfe, and then all the smart-sets from all the other states joined the rush for Native American blood of their own.

elizabeth warren campaign cherokee

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Will Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results help her claim Trump’s scalp?

Geronimo! Elizabeth Warren, whom President Trump has repeatedly mocked as ‘Pocahontas,’ has now issued the results of a DNA test indicating that she does indeed have Native American ancestry going back some 6-10 generations. A video released by Warren shows her receiving the news from one Carlos Bustamante, a professor of genetics at Stanford University. According to Bustamante, ‘The facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree.’ Trump has been fixated with Warren’s heritage.This was supposed to be his new ‘birther’ issue. In Iowa last week, he observed that he would like to ‘finally get down to the fact as to whether or not she has Indian blood.’ Why this was the case he did not indicate.

elizabeth warren