Dedicated supporters staged a 15 hour sit-in until the early this morning, when the Alaska Senate passed the measure on an 18-2 vote.
Source: www.ktoo.org
For the win!
Native Americans
VIDEO – A THUNDER-BEING NATION – The Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
The journey of the Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, from their origins through to their contemporary life. The most comprehensive look at an Indian Reservation in a documentary made over 13 years by international award winning film-maker Steven Lewis Simpson director of Rez Bomb.
Click through to Rent or Buy movie.
Source: vimeo.com
How The Washington Football Team Creates A Hostile Environment For Native American Students
WASHINGTON — Much of the debate over whether to keep the Washington football team’s name has centered around whether it’s actually offensive to Native Americans. Owner Dan Snyder has searched high and low to find American Indians who aren’t put off by the term “Redskins” as justification for keeping it.
But according to Erik Stegman, an author of a new report on Native mascots and team names, that discussion misses the point.
“This entire debate is being spun in the wrong direction, and it doesn’t really matter whether or not one Native person you talk to supports or doesn’t,” Stegman said in an interview with The Huffington Post. “When you have kids in schools who are getting harassed, who are feeling a lack of self-worth because they themselves have become a mascot for someone else, I think that’s really what the point is all about. We need to stop having this debate over which Native people are offended because it’s a ridiculous debate.”
Stegman is associate director of the Half in Ten Education Fund at the progressive Center for American Progress. Previously, he served as majority staff counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. He and Victoria Phillips, a professor at American University Washington College of Law, argue in a report published Tuesday that derogatory team names create an “unwelcome and hostile learning environment” for Native students that “directly results in lower self-esteem and mental health” for these adolescents and young adults.
– Click through to read more –
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
8 Big Lies History Books Tell About Natives
Do history books written by white folks tell the truth about Native Americans? We think not. Here are just some of the lies they tell.
This is a Stereotype: Support Cannupa Hanska’s film
“Last year at Santa Fe Indian Market, I had the pleasure of seeing Cannupa Hanska’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art. I wandered around his exhibit, and was beyond excited by the pieces–I remarked to my friend that it was “like my blog in art form!” His exhibition was a series of handmade ceramic boomboxes, each representing a stereotypical trope of Native peoples–such as the plastic shaman, the Indian princess, the Barrymore (pictured at the top of this post, and based off this image of Drew Barrymore). The detail that went into each piece was incredible, and there were also didactic panels that went along with each trope to describe the origins and contemporary examples. Here are a few of the other (poor quality, sorry!) cell phone pictures I took”
See on nativeappropriations.com
Thirty Seven: Life Expectancy for Onkwehón:we in Toronto
“I was interested in what their life was like,” Shah says. So in addition to the quantitative chart, they also did a qualitative analysis interviewing 20 people close to the deceased.
“I went to a residential school and the things that happened there – I can’t even talk about…that’s why I drank so much. I just couldn’t be a father,” said one of the people interviewed about what a deceased said.
“I really think it’s like a broken heart syndrome. It was [the deceased’s] loneliness for his true identity, like not knowing anything about who his people are because his family and his parents and his traditions were all lost,” said another.
The report shows much of the causes lie in the history of colonization, marginalization, discrimination and racism. Shah adds everything from treaties to the Indian Act result in losing cultures, languages and a way of living. Many of the deceased had a lack of housing, education and stable employment. This manifests in different ways such as finding happiness elsewhere such as drugs and alcohol.
“I call this a delayed tsunami effect,” says Shah. He suggests the only way to solve the problem is with an upstream approach of more housing and employment opportunities. “People have to have a sense of identity and empowerment.”
The report also suggests an increase in partnerships with the Aboriginal community and cultural competency training.
He says our policies are “screwed up” because most of us non-Aboriginals don’t know anything about Aboriginal issues and as a result there is no empathy. A lot of people don’t understand how some people can’t get a job or rent an apartment and this creates an empathy gap.“
Community Village‘s insight:
Decolonizing the Mind: Healing Through Neurodecolonization and Mindfulness
“Decolonizing the Mind: Healing Through Neurodecolonization and Mindfulness –
Author, educator, medical social worker and citizen of the Arikara (Sahnish) and Hidatsa Nations in North Dakota, Michael Yellow Bird, MSW, Ph.D. works with indigenous communities, teaching about healing the trauma of colonialism.
On January 24, 2014 he spoke about his experiences at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, sharing his ideas about how to go about doing this through techniques of mindfulness, thought and behavior which he refers to as neurodecolonization. ”
How Children’s Books Fuel Mascot Stereotypes – COLORLINES
“This brings me to the issue of how we frame diversity. I want to ask you whether you think it’s helpful to refer to Natives as people of color—or if this ultimately obscures political status.
It absolutely works against our best interest to be placed in the framework of people of color. White children’s authors, for example, write about American Indians and civil rights. And my response is that it’s not about civil rights, it’s about treaty rights. And that’s an encapsulation of what goes wrong when you use a civil rights framework. To start with, people don’t know that we’re sovereign nations, that we have a political status in the United States, as opposed to a racial, cultural or ethnic one. So it’s easy to see why people fall into that multicultural framework. But it’s really not culture—it’s really politics. When people in education start developing these frameworks and chart out the ways that people of color have a history in the United States, they’ll slot us in there, too. But that collapses, erases and obscures our distinct political designation in the United States.”
See on colorlines.com
Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in the upcoming Pan perpetuates stereotypes, underrepresentation of Native Americans
“On March 12, Variety.com announced that actress Rooney Mara has been cast as Tiger Lily from the Peter Pan story in Joe Wright’s retelling called Panset by Warner Bros. to come out July 2015.
The trouble is that Tiger Lily is explicitly stated in the novel and play as being a Native American. Rooney Mara is clearly white and pale-skinned. As far as sources such as Flavorwire, Imdb, and Entertainment Weekly can tell, there has been no change to Tiger Lily’s identity as Native American.
…”
Community Village‘s insight:
Click through for whole article.
“Manhattan was sold for $24”
““Manhattan was sold for $24″ worth of “trinkets” or “glass beads” by Native Americans to the Dutch. It is something taught to most American schoolchildren by age eight. That was true in 1911, in 1949 and in 2009. The $24 is never adjusted for inflation.”
Community Village‘s insight:
Click through to read the whole article by Abagond, based on “Teaching What Really Happened” (2010) by James Loewen, “The Island at the Center of the World” (2004) by Russell Shorto,newnetherlandinstitute.org (2013), Wikipedia (2014)
See on abagond.wordpress.com