#*indigeneity is a relation of a class of people to the territory and to a settler class | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

anarchblr · 2 months ago

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i've always felt uncomfortable with "all usamericans benefit from usamerican imperialism" not from the perspective of myself or such, but simply from the angle that i find myself uncomfortable stating that indigenous populations benefit from their own imperialist subjugation

i do not think i am informed enough on the topic to have a clear analysis though, is there anything you would be willing to offer thoughts on in the matter? essentially i am concerned as indigenous usamericans live in abominable conditions precisely because of the us existing and are denied self determination because of the existence of the us, and i know acquaintances to state the financials on the rez mirror that of imperialized nations in the global south, with such matters as a simple local food costing half a months wages and other such unbearable subjugation. is there information in such benefits that coexist with such subjugation, are there complexities such as passport access complicating the discussion and conveying benefits which must be acknowledged?

I get your hesitation, and usually I would feel the same way because most people who make these points mishandle their positions and spout some psuedo-maoist psuedo-third worldism which does in fact unfairly put the crux of marginalized people in themselves, but I read over the post I reblogged again, and found no such complaint to raise with it, though, of course, the language is very similar—perhaps some clarification is in order.

The very basic premise that every American citizen benefits from imperialism, minorities included is self-evidently, unfalsifiably, demonstrably true; to this, empire employs the macabre logic of a rising tide lifting all boats, in this analogy it would be appropriate to see the blood of subaltern as said tide.

You might sense here the tension, the contradiction, of class struggle; you might disavow Empire, and be for social revolution, but still remain hesitant to take this premise on its face, and maybe that's why you message me, this is all fine, do not worry. You are right in sensing this tension, to not readily embrace and defend nationalist arguments in the face of revolutionary analysis, but it seems to me that your hesitation is misguided, but not wrong, pointing towards something, but not sure where. In short, your tension comes not from recognizing that Empire benefits from the subaltern but by what Empire means: you hold onto the category of "citizen" or "citizenry" as a valid axis or venue of struggle, and idk if you recognize that.

See, the original post pointed out "USAmerican citizens", you maybe didn't see or appreciate this important category (tbf I doubt op realized it themselves but that's neither here nor there) since you didn't mention it in your ask, but it makes all the difference. "Citizen" is only a valid category in a republic, the last word of the State Socialists and of democrats; but this category exists on the precarious cliff leading into non-citizen, never in and by itself. And we know this because of the struggle around who gets to benefit from it and who gets punished by its repeal: criminals, outlaws and the uncivilized. A thing to remember here, since you brought up indigenous peoples, the rez, and their relation to the subaltern, is that the wars of colonization were fought as an explicit rejection of European —not just colonial— but rule wholesale as we read over Andrea's excellent article:

De Vitoria recognized the humanity of Indians, but still needed to find ways through which to justify the conquest of their lands and the Spanish possession of dominion over them. [..] If an Indian Nation refused the right of the Spanish to travel through their territory or refused the Spanish the right to trade with Indians, Indian Nations were acting against the Law of Nations, or ius gentium (278-284). Acting against ius gentium was to act against reason itself. This would render Indians “mad” and allow the Spanish to declare dominion over the land that Indians occupied. They could claim dominion because the Spanish were required to set up a civil society in order to teach the Indians how to be reasonable. In more direct terms, this meant that the Spanish had the right to intervene in the lives of Indians, an intervention that would result in the loss of tens of millions of lives. [..] Although de Vitoria asserted that Indians possessed reason, he then posited the possibility that “these barbarians, though not totally mad… are nevertheless so close to being mad, that they are unsuited to setting up or administering a commonwealth both legitimate and ordered in human and civil terms” (290). This would mean that [..] they lacked a basic precondition for ownership. Indians did not even have to break the law of nations, they could simply be found to be so deficient in reason that they lacked the ability to claim dominion over their land. [The Reds and the Rez: How Communists Fail Indigenous Nations]

Added to this one must also bear in mind Shoatz' own article:

[F]rom the 17th century until the abolition of slavery in the U.S., there were also Maroon communities in areas stretching from the pine barrens of New Jersey, down the east coast to Florida, and in the Appalachian mountains and later to migrate to Mexico’s northern border regions. The best known (but little studied) ones were those that occupied the dismal swamp of Virginia and North Carolina and the Seminoles of Florida [..] an ethnic group made up of Africans and Amerindians who came together to form the ethnicity: just like the Boni Maroons were formed in Suriname. [..] the descendents of the Seminoles in Mexico and the U.S. still fiercely guard their communities against the Mexican and U.S. governments: in Florida they’re recognized as a semi-autonomous tribe, and the Africans (Seminole negroes) in Oklahoma, Texas and Mexico also distinguish themselves from their neighbors – while calling Blacks in the U.S. ‘state negroes.’ According to New Afrikan nationalist cadre from the U.S. who have worked around them, the African Seminoles never considered themselves citizens of the U.S. like African-Americans do. [The Dragon and the Hydra, emphasis mine]

But this is better understood through Indigenous Action's most excellent article:

The genealogy of the Native vote is tied to boarding schools, Christian indoctrination, allotment programs, and global wars that established U.S. imperialism. U.S. assimilation policies were not designed as a benevolent form of harm reduction, they were an extension of a military strategy that couldn’t fulfill its genocidal programs. Citizenship was forced onto Indigenous Peoples as part of colonial strategy to, “Kill the Indian and save the man.” There was a time when Indigenous Peoples wanted nothing to do with U.S. citizenship and voting. [..] When the U.S. constitution was initially created, each state could determine who could be citizens at their discretion. Some states rarely granted citizenship and thereby conferred the status to select Indigenous Peoples but only if they dissolved their tribal relationships and became “civilized.” This typically meant that they renounced their tribal affiliation, paid taxes, and fully assimilated into white society. Alexandra Witkin writes in To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citizenship on Native Peoples, “Early citizenship policy rested upon the assumption that allegiance could only be given to one nation; thus peoples with an allegiance to a Native nation could not become citizens of the United States.” The preference though was not to respect and uphold Indigenous sovereignty, but to condemn it as “uncivilized” and undermine it through extreme tactics of forced assimilation. When the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1868, it granted citizenship only to men born or naturalized in the U.S., this included former slaves but was interpreted to not apply to Indigenous Peoples except for those who assimilated and paid taxes. The 15th Amendment was subsequently passed in 1870 to ensure the right of U.S. citizens to vote without discrimination of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” but was still interpreted to exclude Indigenous Peoples who did not assimilate. In some ways this was an act of disenfranchisement, but more clearly it was a condition imposed upon Indigenous Peoples facing scorched-earth military campaigns and the threat of mass death marches to concentration camps. The message was clear, “assimilate or perish.”

[..] The U.S.’s genocidal military campaigns known collectively as the “Indian Wars” supposedly came to an end in 1924. That same year U.S. Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA) which granted citizenship to Indigenous Peoples but still allowed for states to determine if they could vote. As a result, some states barred Indigenous Peoples from voting until 1957. Until passage of the ICA, which was a regulatory action approved with no hearings, Indigenous Peoples were considered “Domestic Subjects” of the U.S. Government. The Haudeneshonee Confederacy completely rejected imposition of U.S. citizenship through the IAC and called it an act of treason.

[..] Perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of assimilationist strategies regarding citizenship and voting comes from Henry S. Pancoast, one of the founders of the Christian white supremacist group, the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Pancoast stated, “Nothing [besides United States Citizenship] will so tend to assimilate the Indian and break up his narrow tribal allegiance, as making him feel that he has a distinct right and voice in the white man’s nation.” The IRA’s initial stated objective was to “bring about the complete civilization of the Indians and their admission to citizenship.” The IRA considered themselves reformists and successfully lobbied Congress to establish the boarding school system, pass the Dawes Act, reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1834. U.S. citizenship was imposed to destroy Indigenous sovereignty and facilitate mass-scale land theft. To this day, the “Native vote” is bound to assimilationist conditions that serve colonial interests.

This struggle metamorphozed under colonial rule into a twisted shadow of its former drive in its forced proximity to American society following its own internal logic, having its liberatory drive circumcised into seeking ameliorations within the system it once sought to overcome, and which in large parts still does. This is only natural of a defeated, cowed people beaten by an absolute magnimaty of power

It's not for nothing I've said before that, talking about October 7 in Palestine,

the weird thing about the pearl-clutching around civilians being attacked by an oppressed group seeking liberation is that, the category of “civilian” is already a violent one, doubly so when in the dress of a settler-colonial subject. “civilian” is not some prediscursive entity or subject that is removed from or comes anterior to State violence, it is in fact a result of State violence that then reproduces the State-violence that created it. To be a civilian is violence, violent even to the individual subject, the flesh-and-blood civilian one would talk about.

The violence done to the [..] civilians [..] [is] the direct result of the violence [done by their own] State. It is at the feet of colonialism that we must lay the blame and bodies of those hurt by decolonization.

to be a civilian is not to be “innocent”, contrary to popular opinion, nor to be dismarriaged from the violence of that position: simply to be at the forefront of where the violence against it will take place when all other alternatives have become exhausted, as we've seen in the latest developments happen in Palestine.

The category of "citizen" has been a resisted one, even in the US, by those who have always found freedom outside of it, from the maroons to every indigenous peoples; if the term "second class citizen" holds any weight, let it be recognized that it is in the State's reluctance to expand its ranks in favor of maintaining a greater pool of free [or at least cheaper] labor.

That being said, I hope you understand that I do not put the rez, for however much it's politic may or may not be assimilated, within the category of USAmerican, nor citizen, nor do I do the same with every other indigenous people born here or naturalized, such as our black brethren; I follow I deeper logic, that of decolonization.

With such a perspective, knowing history, I feel comfortable with this position, I hope this makes sense.

Pardon the late reply.

#asks #decolonization #black liberation #negative nationality

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argyrocratie · 3 months ago

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Breaking the Chains of Nationalism

"Nandita Sharma and Mahmood Mamdani, the two scholars whose interpretations most heavily influenced the previous sections of this paper, agree in large part on the necessary approach to the problems outlined there. The evil to be abolished, as Sharma describes it, is “autochthonous discourse,” characterized by “essentialist and ahistorical ideas of nation and race, both of which are then made the fundamental basis of legitimate political claims,” a corresponding claim that “National-Natives are the original and ultimate source of law and the grantors of rights,” and a demand to “transform land into nationally sovereign territory.”90 To reject these things is “to reject the postcolonial system of nation-states and build social relationships, social bodies, and practices of social reproduction able to meet liberatory demands.”91

This is not to say, of course, that Sharma in any way opposes demands for justice for Indigenous people; she unambiguously opposes the “long and infamous list of scholars trying to deny and to depoliticize the violence enacted upon those categorized as Natives and to reject their demands for liberty.” She challenges, rather, “the strategy of laying claim to national sovereignty….”92

…I join the many others who have taken “lines of flight” away from essentialist, ahistorical, and reified views of social relations and recognized that difference making is always political. Along with the mythical builders of the tower of Babel creating their own heaven on earth, I follow the many, many people who have forged solidarity across – and against – gods, empires, and nations and who have worked for a worldly place that is a home for all…. Claiming this “we-ness” is also a political decision, of course, one that, unlike nationalist autochthonies, is borne out of a shared political project, not a shared genealogy or a shared territory. This book urges us to join the many people over time and place struggling to liberate our land and our labor from expropriators and exploiters. Now, as then, a heaven on earth will only be of our making.93

The call to replace the nation-state, Sharma observes, seems to imply a “postnational state – that is, a state that merely administers its territory without setting any boundaries of state belonging, a state that merely acts as a system of redistribution and protection without demanding adherence to one or another form of identity.” But states, as such, can be problematic; the very concept of the territorial state carries historical connotations of domination.

Yet, states are much more than administrative institutions. Historically, states emerge when a ruling class is formed. In the process, land is turned into state territory upon which people’s labor is exploited. This is an aspect of each and every form of state power: monastic, monarchical, imperial, or national. It is through these sorts of relationships, ones that govern people’s sense of both time and place, that certain forms of state-mandated identities, such as “race” and nation, arise. Such identities are indeed state effects. This is to say that a world without borders, without racisms, without people being separated into categories of Natives or Migrants, is not a matter of making a slight administrative fix. It would turn the Postcolonial New World Order upside down.94

Here she appears to be calling for something more like an end to the state itself, at least of the Westphalian type that has existed for the past four hundred years. As possible models for what might take its place, she suggests the historical precedents of the builders of the Tower of Babel, who “set out to defy God’s claim to be their Lord by collectively erecting a tower to the glory of their self-produced heaven on earth,” and the Diggers, who “demanded not only a return of the commons stolen from them, but its expansion to encompass the whole of the world being taken by capitalists and colonists”; and the Ranters, who “refused distinctions of place” and called for the people of the nations to become “one people and one body.”95 This evokes something that transcends the state – something both larger than the traditional state, in that it has no boundaries, and at the same time less statelike and more administrative in the exercise of its powers.

In regard to demands for justice to the dispossessed and expropriated, Sharma distinguishes between claims to land based on possession – including customary common or other communal rights based on actual physical possession by communities – and theoretical collective title to a territory based on ethnicity. What should be restored, through landback or land reform policies, is the right of people, as people and not a People, to maintain occupancy of land – either individually or communally, including seasonal hunting grounds – of which they are and have been in physical occupancy. What is to be restored is possession, both physical and functional, by concrete communities, and not by imagined and constructed communities on the basis of ethnic identity.

Unlike demands for a return of land (and water and air) in order to liberate people from exploitative relationships such as demands for the return of the commons…, demands for territory are political claims that define the extent of the sovereign’s domain over land (and water and air) as well as the labor of the people living on it.96

Mamdani’s vision is slightly less ambitious. Rather than a new Tower of Babel or Digger commonwealth, he proposes something like the denationalized state Sharma mentioned in passing.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what this next world will look like. Decolonizing the political is nothing less than reimagining the order of the nation-state. I cannot prescribe the outcome. I do have some recommendations for getting there, though. First, to reform the national basis of the state by granting only one kind of citizenship and doing so on the basis of residence rather than identity. Second, to denationalize states through the institution of federal structures in which local autonomy allows diversity to flourish.97

As his call for local autonomy suggests, Mamdani makes it clear that abolishing the national state, as a territorial sovereignty grounded in ethnic identity, does not as such rule out some form of corporate existence for ethnic groupings within the territory of a state. For example, he proposes the continued existence of self-governing Native American communities in the United States, along with the restoration of land to them as corporate entities.

What would decolonization mean from the point of view of Indians in the United States? In the words of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “That process rightfully starts by honoring the treaties the US made with Indigenous nations, by restoring all sacred sites, starting with the Black Hills [of South Dakota] and including most federally held parks and land and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native nations.” Decolonization should also feature “extensive educational programs” and extend beyond Indians, requiring “the full support and active participation of the descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations.”

The further question, as I see it, is what exactly the participation of the settlers should look like. Dunbar-Ortiz rightly points to the payment of reparations; I would add further conditions. One is the establishment of constitutionally defined federal autonomy. This could mean statehood, building on the demand of the Five Civilized Tribes “for admission as a state of the Union.” Such a change would be impossible without the cooperation of the wider American people and their representatives in Congress. Another possibility is to end the status of wardship by granting reservations themselves representation in both houses of Congress, abolishing the BIA, and democratizing tribal governance.98

In the United States, he continues, decolonizing the political in practical terms “would involve full and equal individual rights for all citizens, whether they live within or outside Indian reservations.”

It would involve the abolition of reservations and their replacement with a constitutionally defined form of autonomy, akin to that of individual states of the Union. This autonomy would mean an end to Congressional rule by decree, and its corollary, the exclusion of autonomous Indian communities from representation in both houses of Congress. These communities would be empowered to make local laws in place of the federally sanctioned, Bureau of Indian Affairs-supervised regime of customary laws. Finally, decolonization of the political would incorporate reparations for the wrongs done over centuries, a measure of social justice for Indians and for descendants of enslaved Africans as well as for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans forcibly incorporated into the United States….99

Nevertheless, the existence of a high degree of decentralization, on the “community of communities” model which Mamdani seems to suggest, does not extend to national sovereignty of the Westphalian type. The larger territorial state is denationalized entity whose people transcend their former identities as natives and settlers, as “survivors.” “The only emancipation possible for settler and native is for both to cease to exist as political identities.”100

As an anarchist, I find the proper approach to abolishing the national state much closer to Sharma’s Tower of Babel than to Mamdani’s denationalized state with local autonomy and landback. If he seeks to free the state from the nation, we must take one step further and free governance and administration from the state. This issue will be addressed in the third and last part of this paper."

-Kevin Carson, "Landback - Abolishing Ethnonationalism and the Ethnostate: With Particular Regard to the Israel-Palestine Conflict"

#Nandita Sharma #Mahmood Mamdani.#kevin carson #decolonialism #land back

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dailyanarchistposts · 8 months ago

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New ways of well-being

The way we relate to land must be altered in a future ethical society. No longer would land be thought of a property to be exploited and hoarded. We realize that land is alive, and it is not a commodity to be divided up and bought and sold. Land will belong to those who manage and care for it, holding it communally for the benefit of all. To defend the land is to defend ourselves and it something we should undertake at all costs. We must all come together to design the lands we care for in such a way that they may heal from the centuries of capitalist degradation.

An ethical consideration of water usage will show that all communities need to be returning the water they use to the river, lake, or aquifer it came from, as clean as they found it. We all have the responsibility of cleaning and purifying the watersheds after so much pollution wreaked by capitalism. Water scarcity is a new fact of life in our changing climate, we must take water efficiency seriously when designing future systems. The ability to exist with the least amount of water possible will be advantageous. Pollution of waterways is a threat to mutual survival and should be treated as an act of aggression.

There are many natural borders on the planet but the Nation State borders we are familiar with have been used by those States to homogenize or genocide diverse cultures within it’s borders. They are mechanisms for State sponsored murder, and must be abolished. People can decide for themselves which communities they want to be a part of and how to organize those communities. This is the anarchist principle of voluntary free association. Negotiations and discussions can allow us to develop principles for free movement between such communities, as any community deserves some expectation of privacy from unwanted tourists. Any migrants should be taken care of though, whether travelers or climate refugees, basic hospitality should be extended to these vulnerable people. Between these communities, based on natural borders and watersheds, federations might pop up to coordinate actions across territories.

The need for secure housing is a human right and should be defended as such by our future society. As Malatesta pointed out, capitalism is the system in which builders go homeless because there are too many houses. Houses will belong to those who occupy and care for them, much like the land. No one has a right to more housing than what is needed for their chosen family. This does not mean one house one family, but it does mean that communities should allow for enough housing to meet the needs of every person, however they constitute themselves. We will encourage design that changes the ways people come together in public space, promoting more communal experiences when it comes to child-rearing and kinship.

The commodification of land under capitalism has led to the destruction of whole cultures, and the wholesale destruction of the planetary climate systems. Additionally, this current system has cause the 6th mass extinction, mass starvation, pollution, and the murder of the living soil and torture of non-human animals. The way we feed ourselves says a lot about our values as a society. Safe, healthy, and culturally appropriate foods should be a right under Anaculture. Making sure everyone is fed is the responsibility of all. Food shouldn’t be commodified, it should be produced by workers…for workers, not for the profit of the capitalist class. Farm land and food production facilities should be expropriated to serve this purpose. The Indigenous knowledge assembled into permaculture can inform the future design considerations of our food systems.

A topic not usually confronted by permaculture in depth is healthcare. Most written on the subject is about medicinal plants and herbs used to treat common maladies. The issues of trans rights, neurodiversity struggles, medical racism, and women’s access to birth control are rarely discussed. Under Anaculture health care would be a human right, including preventative therapies. People will determine for themselves what constitutes a healthy life, and be able to access the resources needed to achieve it. People will have the ability to freely alter their bodies for any purpose, including gender expression. The knowledge of healing will not be gate-kept by educational institutions but shared freely with communities so that they may begin to treat themselves with more autonomy. These institutions, along with hospitals, will be anarchized and the worker’s will do their best to equalize treatment for historically marginalized populations.

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 9 months ago

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The Price of “Progress.” On Development, Displacement and Dictatorship in the Amazon

José Henrique Bortoluci Explores Familial and Collective Memory of Authoritarian Rule in Brazil

What is Mine was born from an intellectual unrest and an intimate desire. The unrest: was it possible to narrate the history of a society from the trajectory of an “ordinary man”? The desire: to listen closely to my father’s stories, which had been my primary vehicle for knowing my country—Brazil—and for discovering how enormous the world and life were. At the beginning of the writing process, while my father was undergoing a harsh treatment for intestinal cancer, I interviewed him during the long periods of interaction we had in 2021, a year which brought us closer due to his health condition, amid of a horrific chapter of the pandemic, in a country governed by an authoritarian populist president.

The book is written in two literary voices: that of the narrator (the son), and that of the man whose life serves as a gateway to narrate many stories (my father). Drawing from the life history of this truck driver who traversed and helped to build a country of continental dimensions for five decades of his life, the book sketches a portrait of a society, a territory, environmental devastation, illness, class relations, and the relationships between father and son, whose lives traveled very distinct roads.

At three in the afternoon on 19 August 2019, it was no longer possible to see the sunlight in São Paulo. I was discussing The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with my students—Karl Marx’s classic essay in which he analyzes how different groups of common people and reactionary elites were mobilized by a leader, until then seen as stupid and vulgar, to establish an authoritarian government in December 1851. It’s at the start of this book that Marx presents his celebrated idea that all the events and characters in history are staged twice, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

If Marx had been with me and wished to illustrate his thesis on the repetition of history, he could have simply asked the students to look out of the window: a dark, dirty cloud was sullying the São Paulo sky. Like the Benjaminian angel of history, the grey monster was inviting us to look at the ashes of the past and our foolish insistence on restaging our catastrophe in ever more tragic ways. That somber blanket was the exaggeratedly oracular incarnation of our dismal present and our history of devastation. The result of a season of criminal fires in Amazonia and the country’s mid-west region, the cloud condensed the accelerated destruction of the forests, the socio-environmental crimes that were only becoming more common, seas of waste carrying away entire villages, mercury poisoning of indigenous Amazonian people and a presidential election that had recast tragedy as a cause for celebration.

#brazil #brazilian politics #politics #environmentalism #books #environmental justice #history #military dictatorship #amazon rainforest #what is mine #image description in alt #mod nise da silveira

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elmorinn · 1 year ago

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Sketchbook page dedicated to my OC Véronique 🌙

Meet Véronique! (ah yes the fancy french spelling, I keep calling her Veronica in my head anyway)

Alongside her on this page can be seen: a pale little boy named Somerville, a shy dark-haired lady by the nickname of Vöglein and a mysterious man with whose name I haven't yet come up...

Lore dump ahead :>

This whole story takes place in an isolated 1800s something city built on a damn huge mountain. It's freezing cold here so the only appropriate conditios are in the palace that's within the mountain, and people who live outside of it are obviously poor and miserable. Society here is divided into three classes:

the nobles, colonizers that occupied the territory and enslaved the local folk, they live in the grand palace inside the mountain;

the local folk, indigenous people to this area that lived by the mountain before being colonized. After the nobles came, most locals became slaves and were forced to work to build the palace;

people in between, slaves that gained their freedom, mixed race children, nobles that lost their status. This is the smallest class, unrecognized both by the lords and the slaves

Véronique is a noble girl, her family moved to the city when she was very little and it took its toll on her health, she has troubles walking or being on her feet in general for longer periods of time. Her father is a total jerk who kind of made her hate herself for that when he always said she wouldn't get married to a good man because of her disability. And he's also a slave owner that controls the construction of the Palace.

When Véronique was around 15, she started to sneak out into the outer part of the city and discovered her dad's business. She was terrified to see what was done to make their living, and she felt extremely sorry for the workers, but also powerless because she couldn't do much to help them. She started bringing food to the slaves (because the portions they received were practically nothing), and they had mixed feelings about her, some thought she was kind of nice, others thought (justly) that she's not much different from her jerk of a father.

Somerville was one of the workers despite being really young, as he had to care for his sick mother. Other slaves didn't all like him because there was a rumor about him being a noble man's son, essentially a bastard. Véronique was kind to him and became his only friend, whenever she came to the slaves, she would comfort him and tell him how when they're both older, she would get married and take him to her new home. Sweet poor children <,3

There's more lore which I don't feel like getting into, but in short, Véronique and Vöglein were engaged, but their marriage didn't happen because the unnamed mysterious man appeared out of nowhere and was instead wanted as Véronique's husband. Somerville grew up and escaped the city, a revolution happened (the characters I mentioned aren't directly related to it... yet, I might change some things) and the local folk regained their power over their land, happy end 🌟

Tbh this universe deserves its own novel and one day, one day I will consider it...

#artists on tumblr #original character #oc art #sketchbook art #pencil drawing #my ocs #sketchbook #traditional drawing #traditional art

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tamamatango · 7 months ago

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To Chase a Butterfly Chapter 11 Release

I don't have a funny image this time I am too tired after crunching for this chapter.

As pledged, the second part of the big ol’ chapter I split in half arrives not too long after! Hoo nelly did I need that extra time. Anyway, if you missed KuruDoro stuff last chapter, don’t worry—this one’s got it in spades. Some questions will be answered, but others will arise. Enjoy the ride…

…and once you’re done with that, come on back to this post for some pretty disorganized RESEARCH NOTES!! In my attempt to be somewhat historically and geographically accurate to the real world with certain parts of this story, I have been doing a little extra homework. Some of this was present back in Chapter 7, but I feel it’s particularly helpful here. None of this is absolutely necessary to understand the plot on the reader end, but I think it’s interesting and also provides context to some of the details!

Obviously, spoilers for the chapter below.

Layout of Vanavara: As Kururu says in the chapter, in the early 20th century at the time of the Tunguska event, Vanavara was a trading post area where both Russian settler families and indigenous Evenki (more on them next) lived, but there weren’t that many people there permanently. According to the Krasnoyarsk archival agency, the “faktoriya” (or “factory” as Kururu reads, which is kind of a false friend as it actually means “trading station”) was founded back in 1899. (Fun fact: I am much like Kururu here in that I don’t know Russian but I did have to memorize the Cyrillic alphabet to read loan words for a class I took when I was doing my linguistics degree!) There aren’t really pictures of the area at this time, at least not that I could find, so I imagined it containing both izba and Evenki-styled chums. I modeled the faktoriya building on the picture in the VK post from 1932, though where Kururu and Dororo are warped to is a bit earlier (I didn’t decide an exact year, but let’s say it’s somewhere between two and five years following Tunguska, so solidly pre-Soviet, and also before Tunguska researchers like Leonard Kulik found their way there). This is getting more into Chapter 7 territory, but Vanavara’s highlights look more like this today (actually this webpage is closer to the time it is in the present for this story—2008—than it is to 2024). The area really only became famous after Tunguska, since it was the closest named population center at the time, and most documentation on it is Tunguska-related. Here’s a short article about what you might find there now (also includes good mentions of the Evenki). Though I did not use any names of real people that were in Vanavara/the surrounding area at the time, parts of this segment were also informed by this paper documenting Evenki viewpoints of the Tunguska event and its aftermath; Vanavara is mentioned here a few times. (Ironically there is an Anton cited in the article but not an original resident and it's a coincidence I pinky promise I had that name decided forever ago :V)

The Evenki people: I’ve already mentioned them a few times now since they were even closer to the Tunguska event than the Russians at the time, but this bullet I feel is really important to include, especially since I decided to keep in line with the anime by making the characters directly connected to Tsukeke Russians, who are technically settlers on indigenous land even though in Vanavara specifically settler and indigenous relations were apparently peaceful. The use of the Cyrillic alphabet in 229 itself does imply that it was a Russian fighting the Quietite, because Evenki is its own language, but it didn’t have a writing system until the 1920s, which was created based on the dialect spoken around Tunguska. I’ve been considering this since all the way back in Chapter 7, but I couldn’t fit any mentions in there without it sounding kinda out of place in an unbelievable way, as in it would sound even more like my mouthpiece than something the characters would say in context. (Although Dororo would absolutely support land back and indigenous rights, don’t tell me I’m wrong)

So yeah, Evenki are said to be originally from southern Siberia, though there are groups in China and Mongolia too. In fact, they were formerly called “Tungus” by Russians, though that is not their self-determined name, and Tungusic now describes the language family. (Yes yes I know citing Wikipedia is a meme but like you can always click the sources) As with many, many indigenous peoples the world over, Evenki are still around today, but have faced historical social challenges on account of forced assimilation by Russians (especially starting in the Soviet era, when many were forcibly reorganized) and continued marginalization/cultural erasure by colonialist power. Rather than try to narrate this topic myself I’m gonna put some relevant links here to check out:

Details on the history of the Evenki population in Siberia

History of Evenki reindeer herding (I am not sure if reindeer were kept in Vanavara itself despite my reference to farming in the chapter, but many of the nomadic tribes in the area were reindeer herders)

Academic paper: “Indigenous People and Political Agenda: the Issue of Social and Ecological Change of the Nomadic Siberian, the Evenki, in Russia”

Russian name diminutives: This is relevant to the names I gave Anton’s family. In Russian, first names can be shortened based on intimacy, and diminutive forms are used with family, close friends, etc. So the actual name of Sasha is Aleksandr and Gelya’s is Angelina. Similarly, they call Anton “Antosha”. Tsukeke would likely also have called him that but not in narration to Kururu and Dororo which is why he didn't use it earlier. Also yeah I went with alliterative naming look I know it sounds lame but the main human cast in this series are all named after either seasons or directions it’s not that out of place. (And I do have a reason for going with Anton at least but I'll reveal it later prob.) Here is an explainer on how Russian first names work. And two Reddit posts that helped me out a bit as well. As far as I can tell I don’t think any of the names I picked are really anachronistic, even if they might’ve gotten more or less popular over time. (Also if anyone here speaks Russian and wants to give a contribution or correction please do)

Okay that’s it! Am I putting way too much thought into this tangential plot point in a Keroro Gunso fanfiction, maybe! They don’t call me Pedantikirb for nothing! (Nobody has actually called me that) But I try to do my due diligence both in terms of series canon and real life stuff, especially when a) marginalized groups come into play, and b) the series is at its core either a satire or a pastiche of WWII-era Japanese imperialism depending on how you look at it, so I wanna make myself clear as to where I stand in real life. Write responsibly everyone, you never know who your fiction will impact!

#keroro gunso #sgt frog #fanfic #kurudoro #keroro platoon #tcab #I think I spent more time doing research and writing these research notes than I spent actually writing the damn scene

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rewritingtrauma · 1 year ago

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The Oxford Real Farming Conference 2024 (ORFC24)

I have a sort of love-hate relationship with conferences. On the one hand, I always get swept away by the initial rush of excitement: a gathering of people, coming to exchange knowledge around a field we are all passionate about. On the other hand, for someone like me, the reality of conferences tends to be strange, isolating experiences dominated by academic, white, middle-class, cis people who speak a different language, with different values, and operate in a different world to me. Though I enter them full of excitement and curiosity, I usually leave feeling somewhat untethered, overwhelmed by theory and findings but bereft of community and thirsting for actionable, solutions-based approaches. I was delighted, therefore, when ORFC24 opened with a plenary of 10 speakers, all of them landworkers, from around the world, all of whom were extolling - in their own words and ways - action; solidarity; active hope; and calls for food, land, and sea sovereignty. It was clear from the outset this wasn’t going to be the ‘usual’ kind of conference (an abstract exploration of ideas and record of projects past) but a gathering of an international, multilingual, grassroots movement, rooted in an ethics of care and equality; working directly with the land on fairer systems of food and farming.

During the opening Plenary, Charlotte Dufour from Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) invited us all - speakers, volunteers, and delegates, in Oxford and online - to take a moment to connect with the land, with one another, and to set an intention for the conference mindfully. In a busy programme of 45 sessions, featuring over 150 speakers and a busy stream of projects, opportunities, and conversations inundating social media, this invitation felt like a precious opportunity to gather focus, mitigate overwhelm, and ground ourselves. Sat at my kitchen table, some 330 miles away from Oxford, I set my intention: to seek out and learn from those at the frontlines of the struggle for Land, Food, and Environmental Justice. It didn’t take long for my intentions to be realised…

In the Thursday lunchtime session Colonised and Coloniser Transforming Relationships through Food and Land Stories Loa Niumeitolu, a displaced Indigenous Tongan, now living and working on Lisjan Ohlone Territory, California and Jessica Milgroom, a descendant of settler families, who grew up on Ojibwe reservation land in Northern Minnesota, held a conversation that aimed to “...break down hierarchies…to ask how we relate… how can we walk forwards together healing the wound of colonisation through food...” (JM). The conversation was one of honouring, compassion and bearing witness. As a white person living in the UK, for me it was also one of humility and unlearning: of coming to understand how our Western food systems are designed, founded and run on the violent displacement of indigenous people; the erasure of indigenous food systems; the severing of indigenous identity and everybody’s connections to the land. In some of her closing remarks Loa Niumeitolu invited the attendees to think differently about our identities and interconnectedness: “The sacred site IS the land… the land is an extension of our bodies… and we are all from indigenous people… we all have great great great grandparents who cared for, and stewarded, and loved the lands that we’re on…”. The session left me thinking about how it is people like myself can find our way back to our indigenous selves, to our ecological identities, and to the essential interbeing with the lands we live on. This conversation, conducted across the divide of coloniser and colonised, offered hope for how stories, conversations, and gatherings may start to unravel the systems of oppression and exploitation that industrial agriculture (aka the food arm of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) extends around the world.

On the Friday morning session Building a Global Peasants Movement: 10 Years of Land Workers’ Alliance (LWA) and 30 Years of La Via Campesina (LVC) we heard from Jyoti Fernandes, Morgan Ody, Chukki Nanjundaswamy, and Paula Gioia themselves all land workers, farmers, peasants and indigenous peoples from around the world working both at the grassroots and international levels to oppose the neoliberal programme of WTO whilst also building international food sovereignty and land justice movements. It was a moving and eye-opening session led by women who - though it was never named - are all doing the vital repair work of rematriation.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy (Executive Chairperson of the Karnataka State Farmers Movement and co-coordinator of the All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements) traced the history of La Via Campesina (aka “Our Way” in Spanish) from its origins to the movement today which branches almost 100 countries and hundreds of local and national organizations “...fighting all kinds of imperialist and capitalist forces… for the right to food sovereignty”. She described how LVC is organised from the bottom up, constantly learning and evolving from the experiences of its members and other allies including the decision to ensure men and women were represented equally and at all levels of the movement. “LVC is not just about denouncing what we don’t want but also about building hope…across all sectors of society”.

Jyoti Fernandes (Campaigns and Policy Coordinator for the Landworkers’ Alliance) described “the family” of LWA, itself a member of LVC, and her reasons for co-founding LWA in the context of the UK where inequality and access to land have been yolked since the time of the enclosures. She explored the organic origins of the movement from pro-nature, anti-GM protests; to creative expressions of hope, solidarity and resistance; a shared belief in rights for natural home building, self and community sufficiency, and a collective realisation that “...there was this huge network of unorganised people… the neo peasantry returning to the land… and smallholder farmers… all facing evictions … and struggling to survive in the face of the neo-liberal paradigm the UK government was pushing onto farming…”. She described, with infectious joy, how LWA now regularly consult with DEFRA who recognise that LWA’s impetus of “Matching food production with biodiversity and looking after the climate…” is in everybody’s interests.

Paula Gioia (Facilitator of the Smallholder Farmers Constituency in the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism - CSIPM) talked about the intersectional work members of LVC had to undertake to develop a movement of radical change “… to fight against Capitalism and to fight against Patriarchy…this begins with self-reflection: how we reproduce Patriarchy in our daily lives… and this self-reflection begins with space… ” They described the women’s strike at of 1996 in Tlaxcala, Mexico during the 2nd International Conference of LVC in, which challenged the dominance of men, patriarchal ideas and attitudes in the movement whilst demanding; acknowledgement of the role women play in agriculture, farming, and society; 50 - 50 representation of men and women at all levels of LVC; a campaign highlighting and fighting violence against women and; the creation of spaces - now women’s assemblies - necessary for women’s ideas and voices to be supported by, and come forth through the movement.

Morgan Ody (General Coordinator of La Via Campesina, member of Confédération Paysanne and of the coordinating committee of ECVC) wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh around her shoulders spoke with clarity and passion about LVC's global accomplishments:

“… it is still illegal to crop GM crops in Europe, we fought for that… In Columbia, LVC is one of the main guarantors of the Peace Agreement… We have been the first to call for food sovereignty and now everybody is calling for food sovereignty…We have been pioneers of peasant feminism and now peasant feminism is growing everywhere… We have been able to negotiate the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other people working in rural areas (UNDROP)...” But Morgan’s talk didn’t end in the past, she spoke about how, in the face of multiple overlapping global crises, LVC offers alternative ways of being, of hope, of solidarity now and going forward “...Peasants…and all who are taking care of Mother Earth are the future...”.

She expressed grief and horror at the genocide happening in Palestine and the complicity of governments: “This is not acceptable and as La Via Campesina, we stand against this barbary, we stand for human values, we stand for human dignities, of whoever, of women, of non-binary people, of people whatever their religion or the colour of their skin. We are equal and we are equal in dignity...” This was a powerful reminder that land and environmental justice are inextricably intertwined with social justice and that we are all responsible for decolonising ourselves, for calling out and resisting imperial violence and oppression, wherever it happens in the world. But this session also spoke to how we are all responsible, not just for fighting the old, but also for cultivating the new: through solidarity, active hope, compassion, and creativity. As Morgan said in her closing comments “We are all responsible...for building a culture based on human rights and equality, intentionality, solidarity, and cooperation.”

The session was bookended with calls of “Viva La Via Campesina! Viva!”

In reflecting on these sessions of ORFC24, I started to think that healing is not the same as forgetting, but equally, it is not about flagellating ourselves or one another with past and current traumas - healing comes when we slow down, take time to sit with the pain and discomfort, to listen, learn, notice, and accept. This applies to ourselves, to those we have harmed, and to everyone (humans, land and more than humans alike). What both these sessions taught me is that when we share space and stories, when we listen deeply to one another and bear witness with compassion and empathy, we slowly start to arrive at a new understanding and to do the slow, gentle work of cultivating regenerative cultures based on reciprocity, healing and solidarity.

What I didn’t expect to happen as a consequence of volunteering at ORFC24 was that I would go away from the conference knowing more about myself…As someone who grew up in the English countryside but with no rights to access (we were a poor/working-class family living on a former miner’s terrace, surrounded by Grouse Moors and a large, tenanted estate) my relationship with the land was schismatic: though I felt a deep connection with the fells, moors, and rivers, I was also - according to the farmers, landowners and agents - an outsider. Worse, I was an illegal trespasser. I was surrounded by land which felt like home, like an extension of myself, only greater, deeper, older, more complex, more loving than I could comprehend. And yet, if caught swimming in the tarn, making dens on the fells, walking on the moors, or trudging through the heather, I would - at the very least - be shouted at and oftentimes, be warned away by the crack of shotgun fire. What ORFC24 and the incredible speakers made me realise is something that has taken me 30 years of unlearning to only start to understand: the necessary return to the land, the rediscovery of land-based life, something that I always yearned for but could never allow myself to imagine is not just a fantasy, it is a right. Listening to speakers on colonized lands, to those displaced by colonization and capitalism, to the LWA and LVC, I started to understand the violent inequality at the heart of our UK land and food systems. These speakers helped me see that I have the right to be on and with the land. Because there is no separation between us. I have always known, since I was a child, that myself and the land are one and the same, it was just educated out of me by our systems of inequality, land ownership and education. What the speakers at ORFC have helped me see is that my healing, and the healing of the land, are not separate but wholly, inextricably intertwined.

So now, to begin again, with gratitude and humility… The work of reconnecting and healing all our wounds…

Viva La Via Campesina!

Viva!

Iris Aspinall Priest, Tyne Valley

10.01.23

Word Count: 1985

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inoppositionflorien · 2 days ago

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My thinking is that colonialism in the americas and oceania isn't really comparable to colonialism in the old world, not in a way that's broadly useful anyway.

In one case the local populations were essentially obliterated on impact by disease, often even before the invasion started well over half the population was dead already. There is no state in the US, no state in Australia, One region of New Zealand (kind of) and two territories in Canada where a majority of the population is considered indigenous, and notably the ones which have a majority or the closest to it in those places (Northern Territory Australia, Northern Territory Canada, Gisborne New Zealand, Nunavut, and Alaska) all have very low total populations and generally have inhospitable environments across much of their area.

Unlike in, say, Africa and South Asia, there's no large local population being dominated by a small outside ruling class, there's instead a minority group being discriminated against, and while this is a product of conquest, I don't think it can really be fought with the same procedures as the old-world colonialism generally was, for a large number of reasons.

Also importantly, New Zealand in particular saw comparatively good relations during the conquest (good enough that the local indigenous population got to do a genocide of their own and get support of the government while doing it and that it didn't join Australia about it because Australia had notedly terrible relations with its own native population. In addition to not wanting Australia's tolerant immigration laws of course. That too was a major sticking point) is a sparsely populated place in general, and still only about 20% of the population are considered indigenous.

The parts of the old world that managed to win independence through some level of decolonial nationalism with the largest colonizer population are Ukraine (about 20% russian before 2014 and the more recent escalation of that war, and for a long time after independence it wasn't really out from under Russia) Ireland (maybe about 5-10% english outside of Northern Ireland? Northern Ireland is still part of the UK so we can't really count what's there as independent) and South Africa (debatable how decolonial that nationalism was initially, considering apartheid happened pretty soon after, but about 10% non-african). The parts that did not end up independent are mostly in Russia's east (most of europe got cut up into nation-states following world war I, and again with the fall of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) and even the more thoroughly Russified of them still usually have somewhat more than 20% of the population being the ethnic group considered indigenous, and this is despite Russia and later the Soviet Union being one of the most overtly, actively genocidal colonial powers! China's holding onto Tibet and Xinjiang, Indonesia seems to be holding on to West Paupa, Israel's holding onto the bits its' grabbed, but still most of those areas have the people it got grabbed from (or who are currently having it grabbed) as a large minority population, if not an outright majority.

Like it's pretty clear by these numbers Old World Colonialism and modern attempts at colonialism in Eurasia-and-Africa set up a very different environment long-term to "nearly everyone died of every plague around hitting at once and then came the invasion and now a new population is the vast majority", one more conducive to independence. The anti-colonial struggles, alleged to be the same, are going to have to be lot more different than is often given credit, and independence isn't actually on the table in most cases, pretty much everywhere that could get independence that particular way seems to have got it already.

#the florien gets political

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waywongggg · 30 days ago

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blog week 8

1) Respond to 1619 in a way you find most useful to yourself. In what way does this text resonate with you, or relate to your own experience? What do you think?

I think that "1619" resonates with my identity and the experiences I’ve had.

As a student from Hong Kong, I studied Liberal Studies and Chinese History back in secondary school. Learning these two subjects gave me a deeper understanding of both my cultural roots and the world around me.

Chinese History gave me a sense of identity and connection to the past. I remember learning about political events like the Lushan Rebellion and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom across different dynasties. However, I often felt that the syllabus focused too much on events and not enough on how people felt or how those historical moments relate to issues we face today.

On the other hand, Citizenship and Social Development Studies (CS) encouraged me to think critically about current events and social issues. It taught me to look at different perspectives and analyze problems thoughtfully. While reading "1619," I was reminded how important it is to question what’s missing in the stories we’re taught. It showed me why we need to study history honestly—so we can better understand the roots of today’s inequalities. It encourages me to learn in a way that reveals the full picture.

For example, when I studied the topic of Obamacare, I focused on ideas like social justice, equality, and the role of government in meeting public needs. Learning about Obamacare helped me understand how public policies can deeply affect people’s lives. It also pushed me to think critically about how governments should balance fairness, freedom, and responsibility. This made me reflect on how different systems operate, especially compared to my hometown, and helped me better understand what it means to be an informed and engaged citizen.

2) Respond likewise to "The Settler Colonial Situation." Be creative.

After reading The Settler Colonial Situation, I realized that colonialism is not just about taking resources—it’s also about replacing a place’s culture, traditions, and language. It’s about erasure and rewriting. This reminds me of the discussions we had in class about Israel and Palestine. Colonialism doesn't just change borders—it reshapes identities and can leave long-lasting trauma. People who originally lived in a place may face cultural shock or even lose their homes and sense of self.

Settler colonialism feels even more violent because it doesn't stop at domination; it aims to replace. Settlers become "native" by overwhelming and outnumbering Indigenous people, until the original population is seen as the minority—or worse, is forgotten entirely. That made me rethink what words like freedom, democracy, and nation-building really mean. Are they sometimes used to justify designing a world where the original people no longer exist? That thought is honestly disturbing.

This reading pushed me to rethink how we define colonialism and how we study it. It reminded me that we need to look deeper—not just at the surface of history, but also at what's deliberately left out. It's a call to recognize hidden structures and question comfortable narratives.

3. What is your relationship to Native Maps? Do you see any surprises? What do you see that's particularly interesting? Do you think there's anything missing in this global map?

I was surprised that the Native Map didn’t include Hong Kong or Macau as colonized areas. Growing up, I learned that Hong Kong was colonized by the British beginning in 1841. That year, Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Nanking. Later, in 1860, the Kowloon Peninsula was ceded under the Convention of Peking. Finally, in 1898, the New Territories were leased to Britain, making Hong Kong fully colonized until its return to China on July 1st, 1997.

I wonder why this important part of history was not reflected on the map. I’d love to share more—believe it or not, Hong Kong’s colonial past is truly fascinating! I think it’s important that global maps like this include all regions with colonial histories, especially those that continue to shape people’s identities and politics today.

4. Fun fact, there is a place named Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong which was not colonised or ruled by the Chinese government. It is a small, lawless Chinese enclave within British Hong Kong and it is extremely dense and chaotic. Here's a picture of it:

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lmenvs3000f24 · 9 months ago

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ENVS 3000

What role does privilege play in nature interpretation?

My idea of privilege can be described as a group obtaining some type of special advantage over others. Privilege can be inherent through birth or gained through social position. Privilege and diversity of backgrounds are influential factors throughout an individuals experience with nature. The ideas which an individual will form relating to nature are correlated with the life experiences and level of privilege one has experienced throughout their lifetime.

Privilege is a connecting link to accessing nature. Although the outdoors can accommodate a series of affordable hobbies, there are many limiting factors to one’s ability to enjoy nature. Socioeconomic class, race and geographic location are all restricting factors to one’s ability to enjoy the wilderness. People who live in urban areas supporting low-income populations are less likely to experience the opportunities to explore the natural world compared to those of higher income. This is a very unfortunate reality because stress reducing activities, like fishing, hiking or camping, are all excellent ways to keep youth busy with productive and healthy activities. While creating this blog, I reflect on the privileges I have been blessed with relating to nature. I grew up near forest and ponds full of fish, prime areas for exploration. I was lucky enough to have parents who supported my adventures and provided me with basic fishing equipment, shoes, clothes and a full stomach to venture out and find myself. At the time, I was most definitely not taking the time to dissect the immense privilege I had, but through this activity, it is made clear that the things we don’t take time to appreciate are very important when it comes to nature interpretation.

To look at privilege and nature interpretation through a different scope, I relate this to policy making on and around Indigenous lands. Within the content of an Indigenous course, I took last semester here at the University, we learned about an indigenous tribe who had to go through heightened legal battles as their traditional territories were at risk of being overtaken to build a golf course. The opposing sides of this land claim are subject to very different levels of privilege and understand land and nature very differently. Indigenous peoples are the most connected to the land, as they have lived here harmoniously with the land and the animals for thousands of years, free from European destruction. The land developers have a contrasting relationship with land, one which is rooted in profit and greed.

Privilege plays an influential role within nature interpretation. Through education, understanding and addressing these discrepancies can create nature interpretation to be an inclusive, equitable and valuable field

Liam McFadden

#envs3000f24

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facesofcsl · 1 year ago

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Bonita Bohnet- Bachelor of Arts, Faculty of Native Studies

Bonita Bohnet (she/her) is Métis and is completing her Bachelor of Arts in the Faculty of Native Studies. She is in her fifth year and final term at the University of Alberta. Bonita has been an intern in the Humanities 101 Program (HUM) within CSL for three years.

Can you trace your involvement with CSL?

When I first became involved with CSL, I participated in the Humanities 101 class in 2019. The Humanities 101 Program offers free, non-credit university education to people who face barriers to post-secondary education by valuing their lived experiences and knowledge. From there, I became a university student. After my first year of university, I interned for Humanities 101 and have been with the program for three years. So, it’s been wonderful being able to do that. Besides my involvement with HUM, I’ve also taken CSL courses within my studies.

Why did you decide to take your first CSL course?

I took my first CSL course by accident! So, I’m also in the Indigenous Governance and Partnership Certificate, embedded in the Faculty of Native Studies. I took a mandatory course, Colonization and Decolonization, to fulfill the certificate requirements. I was informed that there was a CSL component only once I started the class. It was my first CSL class, and it was great!

What CSL placements have you completed?

I completed my placement with Métis Crossing while I was enrolled in the Colonization and Decolonization course. We were placed in groups and tasked with creating an interactive activity that could teach people about the different aspects of the Métis Nation of Alberta Constitution. As part of my group, we developed a Geocaching activity, where people can learn about various aspects of the Constitution and Metis history while exploring. Geocaching is like a scavenger hunt. It’s a worldwide activity with an app attached to it. While people are out in nature, they can hide little notes or trinkets and upload the location coordinates to the free app. This included an official kit from Geocaching that included tags and other materials that Métis Crossing could put in their vicinity. People participating in Geocaching can go there and engage with it and feel like, “Oh, there’s something we can customize!” So, that was a fun one, and I enjoyed it.

Last spring of 2023, I was in the course CSL 370: Special Topics and Community Engagement, Uprooting and Embedding Knowledge. This one was really great, too! We went to various community organizations, from Boyle Street to Kindred House. We also met with Elders, and a lot of our experience was outdoors. It was really about getting to know people and building relationships with those who access and are involved in the services, so it was more relational. We did a lot of gardening, which was related back to the land. For instance, we made seed bombs, planted seeds, walked in the forest, and explored urban gardens.

I am currently in my third CSL course, a capstone course for my certificate in Indigenous Governance in Partnership, and currently completing a placement with the Keewatin Tribal Council in Northern Manitoba. The Tribal Council represents multiple First Nations communities, and they are in the process of starting their land claims and negotiations with the government. We are working with them to form a partnership. They wanted to know about different First Nations governments, the scope of their law-making power, the kinds of government models used, and fiscal relationships. I’m analyzing the Tlicho Nation from the Northwest Territories, in which they are the first First Nations to have a land claim and government settlement. I analyze many documents and articles and prepare briefing notes for them, supporting them to know what other governments have done and what works and doesn’t so that they can better understand the next steps forward.

What was your favorite CSL placement, and why?

My favorite placement was with the CSL 370 course. Even though we didn’t go to one specific place, I do a lot of relational work, so I liked how it was very community-engaged and outdoors, which recognizes the knowledge gained from working with the earth. I think relational work is significant because the knowledge and creation of collective and community engagement is often forgotten in traditional academia, which tends to focus more on just writing papers. So, I find myself doing a lot of relational work and enjoy it! We visited many places, met many people, and learned their stories. It was great to share knowledge. I really enjoyed this one!

Did CSL change your ways of thinking about certain things, and how?

My first exposure to CSL, taking the Humanities 101 class in the community, was about the value of one’s lived experiences, collective and collaborative learning, and the opportunity to come and participate without specific prerequisites. That’s what really made me feel like, you know what, even though I don’t have a high school diploma, I do have a lot of knowledge, and I can attend university as well. So, coming to university and being in the Humanities 101 Program and seeing the diversity, lived experiences, and knowledge of so many people has taught me so much. People come to learn from what we facilitate, but I’ve learned so much from them because they have so much knowledge, which is great! That’s really changed how I think about academia. I’ve reflected on questions like whose knowledge is valued? Who is valued? What’s considered knowledge, and how do we get knowledge?

What was the most important/memorable lesson you learned?

I learned a lot from the people who participated in the Humanities 101 program. They have a wealth of knowledge, and that’s the most memorable lesson I’ve learned. People participating in the Humanities 101 Program are often excluded, ignored, and dismissed by society. They have so much knowledge to offer, and it’s about relationship-building and learning from others.

How has CSL impacted your academic and/or personal life?

CSL has impacted me academically in terms of what I see as valuable. It's not about being in class and having someone tell you things to memorize. It’s about learning and thinking critically, questioning and challenging things. How I see and engage with the university as a whole has changed. I’ve learned that it’s very exclusive and institutional, which I wasn’t aware of before. When I started working with the Humanities 101 Program and with communities, I got a voice to say that the exclusive nature of traditional academia isn’t serving people, and we need to work toward change.

Within the Humanities 101 Program, is there an experience or story that stood out to you?

For someone who didn’t have a high school diploma and had barriers and challenges to getting a post-secondary education, going from a participant from HUM to becoming an intern at one level and then switching to a high-level intern, where my experiences and knowledge are valued, gave me a sense of self-worth and inspiration. Somebody once told me that a person from the class remembered me! I was like, what do you mean? They said I was remembered because I was a critical thinker and challenged people. Because of what I was questioning and engaging with people, I became memorable to them.

How would you sum up your experience with CSL in one sentence?

CSL has given me the opportunity to learn something new every day.

#csl #ualberta #yeg #facesofcsl #uofa #edmonton #ualbertacsl #community service-learning #students #growth #get involved #getinspired #highlights #features #popularblog

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dailyanarchistposts · 7 months ago

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The Beaver Wars, which were Not Only about the Fur Trade

“I take thee by the arm to lead thee away. Thou knowest, thou huron, that formerly we comprised but one Cabin and one country. I know not by what accident we became separated. It is time to unite again. I have twice before come to seek thee,—Once at Montreal, speaking to the French In thy absence; the 2nd time, at Quebec. It is for the third time that I now come.” 1656 [57]

Bookchin rarely examines the Rotinonshón:ni polity, and the few times he addresses it in print, he is dismissive. In the course of his dismissals he often repeats the common academic myth that the conflicts of the 17th century, misnamed “the Beaver Wars,” were fought over economic control of the fur trade. While it is true that the primary European interest in the conflict was to secure access to large quantities of low-cost beaver fur (in exchange for goods produced solely for indigenous consumption), there were other, potentially more important, reasons for the Rotinonshón:ni involvement in those conflicts.

“Warfare was endemic among our prehistoric ancestors and in later native communities, notwithstanding the high, almost cultic status enjoyed by ostensibly peaceful “ecological aborigines” among white middle-class Euro-Americans today. When foraging groups overhunted the game in their accustomed territory, as often happened, they were usually more than willing to invade the area of a neighboring group and claim its resources for their own. Commonly, after the rise of warrior sodalities, warfare acquired cultural as well as economic attributes, so victors no longer merely defeated their real or chosen “enemies” but virtually exterminated them, as witness the near-genocidal destruction of the Huron Indians by their linguistically and culturally related Iroquois cousins.” Bookchin [58]

As pointed out earlier, the Rotinonshón:ni were not primarily a foraging society. The majority of their food came from horticulture, so they faced no need to relocate into territory held by others due to overhunting. In the early years of European colonization, disease greatly reduced indigenous populations before the settlers arrived in large numbers. During the Beaver Wars, there was actually much more available land per capita, due to this population reduction, than there had been before the arrival of the Europeans. While warfare did take on cultural and economic attributes, understanding the Beaver Wars only in terms of the fur trade and the role of warfare in culture is far too simplistic. Bookchin is right about the linguistic and cultural similarities between the Wendat and Rotinonshón:ni, and that itself is the key to understanding the determination with which the Rotinonshón:ni prosecuted their wars with the Wendat, Kakwa:ko, Erielhonan (Erie), Tionontati (Petun), Wenrohronon (Wenro), and Susquehannock nations.

Bookchin mentions the rise of “cultural attributes” of warfare. One such attribute practiced by the northern Iroquois-speaking peoples, not only the Rotinonshón:ni, was the mourning war. When people died in the Iroquois communities, the grieving relatives expected the dead to be symbolically replaced as soon as possible. Quite unlike the European settlers’ notion total war, a mourning war was ultimately ritualistic, and was not aimed at the eradication of an enemy or seizure of their territory. Rather, the goal was to take captives, who would replace the dead. Losses among warriors involved in the mourning wars could also be called on to be replaced. Large-scale casualties were rare, and when they did occur, they were considered great tragedies. Since disease was regarded as a hostile attack by unknown agents, those who died from sickness had to be replaced by mourning war. This process of replacing the dead by assigning their names and responsibilities to others is referred to as requickening.

Mourning war had at one time often involved cannibalism and torture, but these practices had completely died out of Rotinonshón:ni society by the 18th century. Central to the Rotinonshón:ni polity was the ceremony of condolence. Tekanawí:ta gave this ceremony to Aiewáhtha, to help with his grief so that peace would be possible between them and Thatotáhrho. Condolence would allow for blood feuds to end, and for people within a nation to be requickened, with the use of wampum, into new titles to replace the dead. Condolence has been seen as a replacement for the mourning wars. Some critics argue the Rotinonshón:ni polity simply caused the nations of the confederation to redirect their blood fueds outward.

Map by Rebecca Wilson

The warfare among Iroquois-speaking nations had begun long before European contact added fuel to the fire, with its contributions of epidemic disease, firearms, and other metal weapons. The Rotinonshón:ni emerged out of a period of war, but it is noteworthy that not all Iroquois-speaking nations of the Great Lakes joined the great peace. Despite being close relatives to the Five Nations, the Susquehannocks did not join the Rotinonshón:ni. In the late 1500s, they moved their villages south to the river that still bears their name. [59] Linguistic similarities between Susquehannocks and Cayuga suggest that some Susquehannock were adopted into the Cayuga nation, while most of them headed south. [60]

Darren Bonaparte cites an old oral tradition about the Kaniatarowanénhne (later known as the St. Lawrence river): “[T]here was once a great confederacy that had villages on the St. Lawrence River. After a shooting star destroyed one of their villages on the St. Lawrence, the confederacy broke down, leaving two or three smaller confederacies in their wake who eventually became hostile to each other. The Huron Confederacy, north of Lake Ontario, and the Iroquois Confederacy were two of those; a third would be the people archaeologists refer to as the “St. Lawrence Iroquoians.” [61]

When Jacques Cartier first explored the Kaniatarowanénhne in 1535, he encountered Iroquois-speaking communities all along the river between major settlements of Stadacona (near Quebec City) and Hochelaga (Montreal). When Samuel de Champlain came to the river in 1603, those Iroquois-speaking communities were gone. By the early 17th century, “[t]he Jefferson County Iroquoians had disappeared, probably absorbed by the Iroquois. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians had been incorporated into the Huron confederacy, as had people from other clusters around modern Toronto, the Trent River valley, and elsewhere just north of Lake Ontario,” [62] although some may have also joined the Kanien’kehá:ka. [63]

The first published account of contact between Europeans and the Rotinonshón:ni is Champlain’s. In 1609, he and his Algonquian allies encountered a group of Kanien’kehá:ka near Crown Point. Champlain introduced the Rotinonshón:ni to the use of firearms by killing fifty of them including three Kanien’kehá:ka roiá:ner, one of whom carried the name Aiewáhtha.[64] This was a huge defeat by the standards of the mourning wars. The French continued to ally themselves with the Algonquian and the Wendat, and the Rotinonshón:ni began trading with the Dutch by 1614. In 1615, Champlain led Wendat and Andastes in an attack on the Rotinonshón:ni at an Ononta’kehá:ka village, killing many, including another roiá:ner. In the central nation of the Great Longhouse, the Ononta’kehá:ka village was the council fire and symbolic heart of the Rotinonshón:ni. [65] Firearms and forged blades were now part of warfare between Iroquois-speaking peoples. [66] From the perspective of the Rotinonshón:ni, access to guns and metal became a priority, driving their trade with the Dutch, who were willing to trade these for beaver pelts. It became necessary to secure a stable supply of pelts, and to deprive their enemies of the same.

In 1634, a plague of smallpox hit the Rotinonshón:ni, halving their population [67] and forcing relocations for the entire five nations as they fled diseased villages. While already engaged in wars with multiple indigenous nations and the French, and with changes to their economy and material technology, it must have seemed an apocalyptic scenario. The Wendat and other nations were similarly affected by epidemic diseases. There were unprecedented calamites for Rotinonshón:ni and Wendat societies, and the cultural tradition of mourning war called for replacement of all the dead through warfare.

Natoway combines a number of oral traditions, historical, and archeological research with his narrative of “The Great Epic.” In it, he relates that differences in wealth developed among the Wendat, based on the Jesuit policy of only trading with those Wendat who converted to Christanity. Jesuits and Christanity were also blamed for the disease within the community, and some traditional Wendat voluntarily joined with the Kanien’kehá:ka and Shotinontowane’á:ka to attack Wendat converts to Christianity, even going so far as to lead them in battle. [68] Graeber notes the changes in economic structure of the Wendat, but not the Rotinonshón:ni: “Delage argues that among the Huron, new regimes of property and the possibility of personal accumulation, really emerged only among converts to Christianity; among the Five Nations, they do not seem to have emerged at all.” [69]

Snow has claimed that during the final Rotinonshón:ni campaign against the Wendat in 1648, more than a thousand Wendat fled their villages, and seven hundred were taken prisoner or killed. In the following fall, the Kanien’kehá:ka-Shotinontowane’á:ka army numbered over a thousand men, including adopted Wendat who had been “fully integrated” into Rotinonshón:ni society. By 1651, another group of five hundred Wendat were brought into the Shotinontowane’á:ka nation, but were given autonomous control of their village. [70]

The Beaver Wars continued. The Erielhonan, with Kakwa:ko and Wendat refugees among them, were dispersed westward or absorbed into the Shotinontowane’á:ka, Ononta’kehá:ka, and other Rotinonshón:ni nations. [71] By 1657, the Rotinonshón:ni had defeated their Iroquois-speaking enemies to the north and west. Kanien’kehá:ka and Shotinontowane’á:ka went to Quebec to convince Wendat refugees to return with them. According to Snow: “A village of perhaps 570 Hurons was built near the three Mohawk villages that existed there at the time… [A] decade later Jesuit missionaries would note that two-thirds of the Mohawk village of Caughnawaga was made up of Huron and Algonquian captives and adoptees.” [72] Tionontati and Wenrohronon were also attacked, dispersed, and absorbed by the Rotinonshón:ni.

The post-dispersal history of the five nations of the Wendat, as described by John Steckley, holds that the Ataronchronnon (Bog) disappeared, the Atahontaenrat (Deer) joined the Shotinontowane’á:ka in an independent community, Arendaeronnon (Rock) joined the Ononta’kehá:ka, and the Atinniawenten (Bear) joined the Kanien’kehá:ka. The Atingeennonniahak (Cord) remained as the sole Wendat nation. [73]

In his military history of the Rotinonshón:ni, Daniel P. Barr compares accounts of the conflict and determines that:

“Between 1631–1663, the Iroquois attacked the Hurons at least 73 times. More than 500 Huron people are recorded as having been killed during these raids, with an astonishing 2,000—one-fifth of their post epidemic population—captured and deported to Iroquoia. These numbers are likely low-end estimates…. [T]he number of captives taken by the Iroquois during the Beaver Wars was on average two to three times greater than the number of enemies they killed. Both scenarios illustrate that the acquisition of enemy captives to replace Iroquois population losses was the primary factor in the Beaver Wars, which were not a series of conflicts designed to impose Iroquois control over the fur trade, but rather an Iroquois fight for survival, one vast, prolonged mourning war.” [74]

The descendents of captured Wendat adoptees were fully integrated into Rotinonshón:ni society and treated as equals. One notable example is Joseph Brant, Thaientané:ken, who was descended from Wendat captives adopted by the Kanien’kehá:ka both on his father and mother’s side. [75] Thaientané:ken went on to become a Ohnkaneto:ten, and led war parties against the United States during the Revolutionary War. His efforts helped establish the community at Ohswé:ken, the Six Nations reserve along the Grand River. The town of Brantford is named for him, as is the Tyendinaga Mohawk Community at the Bay of Quinte. It should be noted again that various versions of the Kaianere’kó:wa hold that Tekanawí:ta originated from the Wendat nation, that the iakoiá:ner Tsikónhsase came from the Kakwa:ko nation, and even that Aiewáhtha was from the Ononta’kehaka nation, was adopted by the Kanien’kehá:ka, and became a roiá:ner there. From the perspective of many Iroquois speakers, they were the same people; membership among the warring nations could be quite fluid.

Warfare with the Susquehannock continued. Over time, more of them were adopted into the Rotinonshón:ni, often into the Oneniote’á:ka nation. The last Susquehannocks were not adopted, but were massacred by English settlers from Maryland. “By spring of 1669, a permanent village of Indian Christians had grown up around Raffeix’s Saint Francois Xavier des Pres mission. The first settlers were a diverse group of ‘free Iroquois’ and Erie, Huron and Susquehannock adoptees of the Oneidas.” [76] They were later joined by many Kanien’kehá:ka, and eventually this community moved to Kahnawà:ke.

The Wendat-Kanien’kehá:ka Peace Belt [77]

In 1713, most of the Iroquois-speaking Tehatiskaró:ros (Tuscarora) nation, which had been warring with North Carolina settlers, relocated to live among the Rotinonshón:ni. By 1722–1723, they were incorporated as the Sixth Nation of the Rotinonshón:ni, living autonomously from the others. They were not invited to have roiá:ner in the council, but would be represented by the Oneniote’á:ka and Kaion’kehá:ka. [78]

While there may have been economical and cultural motivations for Rotinonshón:ni participation and prosecution of the Beaver Wars, the result was far from genocide of their opponents—rather, it was the political unification of most northern Iroquois-speaking peoples under the Kaianere’kó:wa. It bears emphasizing that, according to Wallace, “[a]doption was so frequent during the bloody centuries of the beaver wars and the colonial wars that some Iroquois villages were preponderantly composed of formally adopted war captives.” [79] Adoption was as much a form of political unification of other Iroquois-speaking peoples, who already shared cultural traits, as it was cultural assimilation. Autonomous villages were common. The Beaver Wars might best be seen as bloody civil war among Iroquois-speaking people in the context of a larger series of devastating tragedies, not a genocidal conflict based on resource acquisition. Increasingly, the Beaver Wars are being referred to as the Iroquois Wars—which seems far more appropriate since the majority of the participants were Iroquois-speakers. Further context is provided by considering that the Beaver Wars were contemporary with the Thirty Years’ War on the European continent, and with the English Civil War. All three were fought with similar weapons. In his “Great Epic,” Natoway depicts the Beaver Wars as a usurpation of authority by the ohnkanetoten and war captains, leading the longhouse of the Rotinonshón:ni to fracture, and finally to crumble during the American Revolution. [80]

On August 27, 1999, the four surviving nations of Wendat came together in a “tree of brotherhood” under the unity proposed by the Peacemaker of “peace, power, and righteousness” with leaders who have skins “seven span thick”. It seems that the message of the Kaianere’kó:wa was finally received by all of the Wendat.

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art3354finalproject · 1 year ago

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Introduction

Welcome to my account! This blog is a final project for my Introduction to Indigenous Arts class, where I will be posting a timeline of artworks compiled from precolonial contact, during contact, and post-contact modern/contemporary art for the Métis community. Below the cut is a brief introduction to the Métis and their style of arts. I am beyond excited to share my findings with you. :)

The term "Métis" originally referred to individuals of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry, particularly those of French and Indigenous descent in the Red River area (present-day Manitoba). Over time, the Métis developed a distinct culture, blending elements of Indigenous, French, and later, English, traditions.

European contact in Canada began in the early 1600s, as a result of rising fur trades and exports becoming more prevalent as Canada was considered uncharted territory for sailing Europeans. At the start, many European men and Indigenous women had begun establishing romantic relations and developing families. By the 1700s, they (the Métis) began to branch off into a new group of people, as opposed to becoming one part of their ethnicity or the other. These communities would soon establish themselves along the Red River area as mentioned earlier, as well as around the Great Lakes area (present-day Ontario.) According to the MNO (Métis Nation Organization):

“Métis in these areas are no longer seen as and do not see themselves as extensions of their maternal (First Nations) or paternal (European) relations, and begin to identify as a separate group.” - Metis Nation Organization

One of the most significant events in Métis history is the Red River Resistance of 1869-1870 led by Louis Riel - a former Canadian politician, a known Métis, and the founder of Manitoba. This resistance was a response to the Canadian government's efforts to assert control over the Métis homeland in the Red River Valley. The resistance led to the negotiation of the Manitoba Act, which established Manitoba as a province and recognized Métis land rights. Unfortunately, Riel was accused of high treason due to his rebellion against the government, and was hanged for his misdeeds in 1884. However, this did not stop the fight for Métis rights.

Throughout the 20th century, Métis communities faced ongoing challenges, including discrimination, marginalization, and loss of land and culture. However, Métis organizations such as the Métis National Council have worked to promote Métis rights, culture, and self-governance. They were officially recognized as an Indigenous group by the government in 1982, one of three legally, politically, and culturally distinct Indigenous peoples of Canada, recognized by s. 35 (2) of the Constitution Act. Currently, they reside in provinces such as Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, and their native tongue is known as Michif.

The Métis people have a rich artistic tradition that predates European contact, drawing from their Indigenous roots and cultural influences. Métis arts encompass a diverse range of practices, including visual arts, music, dance, and storytelling, all of which were integral to their way of life.

I will go more into detail in regards to their arts as I post about each work I have chosen. Overall, I have curated a nuanced timeline, detailing artworks and practices that start as early as first contact, going down the years until we reach modern day contemporary art.

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foodsovereignty1 · 1 year ago

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Food sovereignty is important to Indigenous communities and tribes in the United States. Native American tribes and people have treaty rights that give them the right to self-determination and foods that are a part of their way of being. Treaty rights as we know are not always upheld by the United States government, and tribes are working to make sure they resist violations of their treaty rights especially when it threatens their right to self-determination over their food systems and the ways they care for and harvest plants and animals. It is important to consider and acknowledge the ways in which the United States government has historically targeted and destroyed Native American and Indigenous food systems as a part of their genocidal practices to remove and displace them from the land so that they could settle and claim it as their own. For Native American and Indigenous people there is deep connection to the land and the plants and animals. There are four R’s that related to the ways in which Indigenous peoples care for and understand their relationship to the land and all its inhabitants. In class we discussed and learned about the four R’s which are: Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Redistribution. All four R’s are obligations that Indigenous people understand and respect in terms of relationships with each other and the land and nature. Relationship is the obligation to kinship, and how we understand we are related to each other and all things, and therefore must include and consider all our relatives when making decisions and make sure that they also contribute to the collective. Responsibility is the obligation Indigenous people have to care for all our relatives such as each other, plants, animals, and nature. We have a responsibility to foster and maintain healthy relationships with our relatives so that we continue to uphold our responsibility of caring for them too. Reciprocity is the obligation to understand the cycles of our relationships, and how we understand our responsibilities to receiving and giving from our relatives. We must understand the ways in which our relatives care for us and how we then must care for them so that we are in a cycle of care, respect, and responsibility. The last R is redistribution, and this is the obligation to maintain a balance in the ways in which we receive and give back. Redistribution creates Indigenous peoples understanding of sharing and keeping balance in our practices of receiving and giving. We must keep everything in circulation and not be greedy and over receive. These practices of the four R’s resist colonialism and capitalism, and that is why we must continue to teach and practice them to keep our communities healthy and in balance with each other, nature, and all our relatives. This is something that I personally had to unlearn to embrace and understand my own obligations within my role as a Native American, and community member.

Settler colonialism is when colonizers come into a territory and do not leave, they “settle” in the land, and for that to be successful they must remove the original peoples of that land by means of violence or displacement. This process of settler colonialism is called destroy to replace. The Indigenous people of the United States were destroyed by means of genocide, displacement, and even starvation due to the attack on their food systems. Once the Indigenous peoples are removed, they can then be replaced by the people of the settler population. Although most people recognize the historical genocide that took place against Indigenous people, they fail to see the present-day ways in which they are still being murdered, displaced, and in a sense “starved” from their food systems and treaty rights to hunting, gathering, and fishing. For example, plains Native Americans have a close connection to buffalo, and this kinship is respected and revered within those tribes. The Native American word for buffalo is tatanka which translates to brother further solidifying our understanding of just how close these tribes felt to the buffalo. The buffalo took care of our people and provided them with nutrition, warmth, and materials necessary to thrive, and tribes understood their responsibility to care for and reciprocate this relationship and respect for the buffalo. Settlers attacked the buffalo population because they knew that by attacking and eliminating the buffalo it would in turn weaken and kill the Native Americans as well. Indigenous people were forced to live on reservations, and they were given food from the government that is over processed and unhealthy. This is how frybread came to be, and food such as this was not a part of our original diets. These over processed foods have created health problems in Indigenous communities and removed our relationship and understanding of our obligation to our land and relatives such as the buffalo. Food sovereignty is much more than having the right to grow your own food for Native tribes, it is culturally and spiritually a part of their life and ways of knowing and being. Indigenous people are closely tied to the natural world and by removing their food systems and replacing it with a food system such as commodities from the government you are severing their ties to their knowledge, obligations, land, ancestors, and relatives.

Tribal Critical Race Theory has nine tenets that address and bring attention to the ways in which Indigenous people are a unique political entity unlike any other ethnic group in the United States due to their relationship with the United States. The fourth tenet of Tribal Critical Race Theory is the right for Indigenous people to assert tribal sovereignty, tribal autonomy, self-determination, and self-identification. This tenet addresses the ways in which tribal nations and communities can reject the oversight and restrictions of the United States when it comes to their control of their existing land bases, natural resources, and tribal boundaries. This means food sovereignty is a part of self-determination and tribal autonomy. When Indigenous people reclaim their food systems and aim to restore them, they must resist the Unites States oppression and fight to feed their people healthy, sustainable, and accessible foods that are a part of their autonomy and rights as Indigenous peoples. Indigenous people’s ancestors have prophesized about this reclamation, and this is why they still have the seeds from them to plant a future to grow and thrive as they did when their brothers the tatanka/buffalo roamed in large populations as their creator intended.

Works Cited:

Jones Brayboy, Bryan McKinley. “Toward a tribal critical race theory in Education.” Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, 28 Nov. 2022, pp. 231–246, https://doi.org/10.4324/b23210-24.

Robbins, Jim. “With Bison Herds and Ancestral Seeds, Indigenous Communities Embrace Food Sovereignty.” NPR, NPR, 9 Dec. 2023, www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/12/09/1217920232/buffalo-seed-native-american-food-diet.

Indigeneity, an Alternative Worldview: Four R’s ( …, www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/WasilewskiIndigeneity.pdf. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024.

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newyorkprelawland-blog · 1 year ago

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Oliphant v. Suquamish; Rape and Native American Women

By Kenzie Davidson, New York University Class of 2024

December 29, 2023

In 1978, the United States Supreme Court ruled on a landmark case in Indian Law: Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. Using a “curious doctrine” known as “implicit divesture” [5], the Supreme Court ruled that tribal courts had lost various components of sovereignty and ultimately “divested tribal courts of criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians" [5]. Therefore, the 1978 Oliphant decision marked the illegality of native tribes to exercise criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians when it came to criminal offenses committed within reservation territory [13]. The fact that tribal governments lost their ability to prosecute crimes enacted by non-Natives on their land undermined their sovereignty and threatened their safety in significant ways. The Oliphant v. Suquamish case is representative of a major piece of a much larger puzzle regarding tribal law as well as, more specifically, violence against Native women today.

Sarah Deer, author of “The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America,” is particularly interested and well-educated about tribal law and its relation to sexual violence, such as rape, against Native women today. Sarah Deer is a citizen of the Mvskoke (or Creek) Nation of Oklahoma [12]. As a tribal citizen who was not raised on reservation land, Deer has a profound connection to the issues facing native communities and a unique perspective to enact change. Deer has made a career as a legal scholar focused on criminal justice issues impacting tribal communities in the United States [11]. Deer has spent over 25 years working with Native survivors of violent crime, often rape, as well as with professionals working within the criminal justice system [11]. Additionally, she has worked with many Native-based organizations run by women [5], has served as Chief Justice for the Prairie Island Community Court of Appeals [11], co-authored four textbooks on tribal law [11], has been published in Gender and Law journals such as Harvard’s, Yale’s, and Columbia’s [11], has testified before Congress on four different occasions regarding violence against Native women [11], was appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder to chair a federal advisory committee about sexual violence in native communities [11], and has had her criminal justice reform efforts acknowledged with awards from the American Bar Association and the Department of Justice [11].

Sarah Deer focuses on the intersection of federal Indian law and victims’ rights, using “indigenous principles as her framework to benefit the communities she seeks to help” [11]. Initially, the discovered her interest in Indian law as she came to understand that “achieving social justice for oppressed people was a question much larger than a single rape trial” [5]. Deer explains that “[she] began to see linkages between [her] interest in justice for victims of crime and my interest in enhancing tribal self-determination" [5]. Deer’s profound interest, knowledge, and expertise is highly apparent in her book as she tells a comprehensive story of the issue of rape against Native women by discussing tribal systems, colonial interference, and the impact of the American legislative system on tribal sovereignty.

Prior to colonialism in North America, both the prevalence of sexual violence and tribal responses to rape looked very different compared to today. Native women's activists who documented the traditional responses of tribal communities to rape state that “according to the oral traditions within our tribal communities, it is understood that prior to mass Euro-American invasion and influence, violence was virtually nonexistent in traditional Indian families and communities” [5]. While tribal communities were not entirely “rape-free,” the frequency of violent crime was low “in part because of the immediate and severe consequences for disrupting balance in society” [5].

Without American legal imposition, sovereign tribal nations historically were able to exercise full jurisdiction over crimes against women. “Tribal systems provided a powerful system of social checks and balances that held offenders accountable for their behavior”–a system that has been undermined by colonialism and American legislation for over a century [5]. Some of the earliest known Mvskoke tribal laws to be written down were documented in 1825. The 35th law addressed gendered violence:

“And be it farther enacted if any person or persons should undertake to force a woman and did it by force, it shall be left to woman what punishment she should be satisfied with to whip or pay what she say it be law” [5]

The law clearly recognizes the value of the opinion and experience of women. What she say it be law reflects powerful sentiments regarding gender and victim-centered legal processes that have never been present in the American legal system. In the American legal system, “victims of violent crime have historically had no voice in the criminal justice processes” [5]. Indigenous women were “honored” and “essential to maintaining tribal cultures” [15]. One Cheyenne proverb states that “a tribal nation is ‘not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground’” [15]. This is the very reason it is so critical that we focus on the issue of rape against Native women today as it is a practice that breaks down tribal societies via harm to their women in substantial and lifelong ways.

Today, rape against Native women is an extremely prevalent issue. To grasp the gravity of the situation, the frequency of rape within Native communities is often called an epidemic. However, Deer argues that considering the history of colonialism in North America, calling the issue an epidemic is the wrong word to use. She explains that “using the word epidemic deflects responsibility because it fails to acknowledge the agency of perpetrators and those who allow the problem to continue” [5]. The word ignores the crisis’s roots in history and law. Ultimately, Deer claims that “rape in the lives of Native women is not an epidemic of recent, mysterious origin. Instead, rape is a fundamental result of colonialism, a history of violence reaching back centuries. An epidemic is a contagious disease; rape is a crime against humanity” [5].

The crisis of rape against Native women today can be traced back to the foundation of the United States as both a legal and political structure [5]. Deer explains that “the crisis of rape in tribal communities is inextricably linked to the way in which the United States developed and sustained a legal system that has usurped the sovereign authority of tribal nations” [5]. From the onset of European colonization, violence against Native women was a primary tool used for conquest and genocide [4]. “Amesty International and other organizations assert that this strategy normalized and now fuels today’s high rate of violence against and sexual abuse of Native American women, as well as the impunity enjoyed by their attackers” [15]. Deer argues that “the colonial legal system has failed Native women by supplanting women-centered societies with patriarchal, oppressive structures that condone and thrive on violence as a way to control and oppress members of marginalized communities” and that “because rape played such a significant role in past attempts to destroy indigenous nations, it is critical that tribal nations develop and strengthen their responses to rape as part of broader political work toward achieving sovereignty” [5]. She highlights that across the world, indigenous people share one experience in common: “intrusion on their lands and culture by an exterior, hostile outsider” [5]. From what Deer has seen in her decades of work, she compares the dynamic of intrusion on indigenous lands to rape victims experiencing invasion of their bodies and souls.

The issues of tribal jurisdiction and rape against Native women both have to do with sovereignty. Sarah Deer conceives of sovereignty as a “description of self-determination" [5]. She claims that “it is impossible to have a truly self-determining nation when its members have been denied self-determination over their own bodies” [5]. Deer, while working with many Native survivors of rape, has witnessed firsthand just how devastating this crisis is today. She explains how she “listened to women as they realized they represented the fifth generation of women in their family to be victims of sexual assault,” she “talked with tribal police officers who explained how rapists walked free on a regular basis, even taunting their victims and tribal officials because of legal loopholes”, that Native women talk to their daughters about “what to do when they are sexually assaulted, not if they are sexually assaulted, but when,” and reflects on how she has heard the words “I don’t know any woman in my community who has not been raped” come from Native women more than once [5]. Rape in Native communities is so prevalent that it has become normalized. “Native women who experience rape need and deserve a tribal-centric response to their experiences…a response that centers a contemporary Native woman in her unique place and time, empowering her to access the collective strength and insight that have helped her people survive” [5]. Ultimately, rape has an impact on the entire Native community. “Women play significant roles in tribal communities, culturally, spiritually, and politically, and have been referred to as the ‘backbone’ of tribal sovereignty. Sovereignty thus suffers when the women suffer” [5].

This discussion is in no way intended to further the tropes of native communities being traumatized and broken, but rather to focus on their resilience and strength to survive in the face of so much devastation. The case of rape alone is more than any group of people should ever have to endure. The data is irrefutable and states that violent crime is experienced by Native women at much higher rates than almost all other groups of people within the United States, and most experts from tribal communities have claimed that “the federal statistics represent at best a very low estimate. Actual rates of sexual assault against Native American women are actually much higher” [5]. The statistic called “an assault on our national conscience” by President Barack Obama in 2010 states that 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime [5]. Additionally, “at least 86% of perpetrators of these crimes are non-Native men” [10]. The fact that the majority of perpetrators are non-Native is critically important in this discussion and regarding legislative reform. “As a baseline, the vast majority of rapes in the United States are intraracial, meaning that victims are usually attacked by persons of their own race...the only exception to this general rule is AI/AN women, who report that the majority of assailants are non-Native” which is an anomaly in the U.S. [5]. The fact that the vast majority of crime within the United States is intraracial and the majority of violent crime experienced by Native communities is interracial is incredibly important to consider when addressing legislation that has been imposed against tribal communities and has impeded their ability to protect themselves through their own legal systems.

Over time, federal Indian law has imposed legal and practical barriers that have impacted tribal governments’ abilities to exercise criminal jurisdiction and respond effectively to rape. Overall, “federal Indian Law is the quintessential example of an oppressive American legal structure” [5]. Because of American legal imposition regarding the ability of tribes to prosecute crimes against their citizens and a long history of anti-Indian and anti-woman policies in the United States, “there is a sense that a ‘rapeability’ factor” [5] is present regarding tribal territories. “Predators may target Native women and girls precisely because they are perceived as marginalized and outside the protection of the American legal system” [5]. Deer argues that “whether the rate is 20 percent non-Native or 80 percent non-Native, tribal nations should have full authority to respond to crimes committed by all persons” [5]. Tribal governments and courts have struggled to respond to the issue of sexual violence against Native women because of how their legal systems and tribal sovereignty have been undermined and abused by American legislation which has significantly transformed tribal jurisdictional control.

Forced assimilation by the American legal system against tribal governments has dominated colonial-tribal relations throughout history. Prior to colonial influence, the Mvskoke tribe as well as most others “relied for millennia on sacred oral traditions and ceremonies both to establish and enforce legal standards” [5]. The hallowed oral tradition stemmed from the belief that “reducing laws to writing weakened their power by limiting accessibility to few and losing the value of rhythm and intonation” [5]. This sacred system was thoroughly misunderstood by European witnesses. “Seeing no judges, courtrooms, or attorneys, settlers assumed that Native people were without law. This assumption made it morally palatable to impose foreign laws upon Native people” [5]. For instance, at the same time that Mvskoke law included “what she say it be law” in its language, American law stated that married women had no legal right to deny sex to their husbands. After fifty years on constant pressure to assimilate to the legal and political structures of America, the Mvskoke rape law was revised to make no mention to gender or the victim at all. The importance of smaller changes such as this should not be understated, but there are several much more significant changes to tribal law with even more significant implications.

Over the past 150 years, there have been four major pieces of American legislation that have largely impacted tribal sovereignty and their ability to protect themselves under the law. The first major transition came with the Major Crimes Act passed by Congress in 1885. The MCA unilaterally imposed a federal prosecutorial framework over tribal nations, giving the federal government criminal authority over the vast majority of reservations [1]. By forcing the federal criminal justice system onto tribal communities, Native rape survivors were highly impacted because they were mandated to navigate an unfamiliar and hostile system in order to report rape to law enforcement [1]. “Since the efforts of the government were designed to extinguish the very existence of tribal nations, it is more likely that Congress intended to infiltrate and control the indigenous populations through increased legal authority” [5]. However, the MCA of 1885 is complex in that it “never explicitly divested tribal nations of authority over the enumerated crimes” [5]. This means that the tribes technically retained authority over all crimes, even those mentioned in the MCA, though they became subject to various limitations.

The second legislative transition occurred when Congress passed Public Law 280 (PL 280) in 1953. This law marked the transfer of federal jurisdiction over criminal matters, as established in the MCA, over to a number of state governments [3]. The law was intended to force Native people to assimilate to the mainstream U.S. population; as Sarah Deer explains, “PL 280 was part of a larger mid-twentieth-century effort to ultimately ‘terminate’ recognition of tribal nations” [5]. This law complicated American legal imposition further because neither the states nor the tribes consented to the arrangement implemented by PL 280. Additionally, “states were not provided with any additional resources with which to enforce crimes in Indian country...PL 280 has led to widespread criminal justice dysfunction in those states” [5].

After the MCA and PL 280 came the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Indian Civil Rights Act, or ICRA, had several major impacts. First, the ICRA forces tribal governments to “enforce legal norms as enshrined in the language of the Bill of Rights,” an ideological framework not historically shared by Native people [5]. This act built on the intentions of PL 280 in that when federal lawmakers realized that tribal governments were not at the mercy of the U.S. constitution, they wanted to enforce further assimilation and hegemony [6]. Additionally, ICRA places a cap on the sentencing authority of tribes. For example, when the Act was initially implemented, “incarceration was limited to six months and fines were limited to five hundred dollars” [5]. Compared to American law standards, this means that tribes were limited to sentencing only misdemeanor crimes. The implications of the ICRA are highly relevant when it comes to the issue of rape; under American law, nearly all sex crimes are felonies. While the MCA did not divest tribal felony jurisdiction initially, the sentencing cap that the IRCA placed ensured that tribal governments could not appropriately exercise authority over crimes such as rape.

Each of these legislative changes led up to the landmark case Oliphant v. Suquamish in 1978. A White settler by the name of Mark David Oliphant assaulted a tribal officer on the Port Madison Indian Reservation, a sovereign property of the Suquamish people. Oliphant was then placed under arrest by the Suquamish Indian Provisional Court [8]. Oliphant later submitted a writ of habeus corpus, alleging that he could not be arrested by the Court because the Court did not have criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians [8]. This case was ultimately taken to the Supreme Court. In a 6-2 decision favoring Oliphant, tribal governments were stripped of power to prosecute and punish non-Indians for crimes committed in Indian country [9]. One reason provided by the court regarding their holding was that “Congress’ actions during the 19th century reflected that body’s belief that Indian tribes do not have inherent criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians" [14]. The “actions” of Congress considered by the Supreme Court include the MCA, PL 280, and the ICRA. The official case ruling, in an effort to reduce the argument against tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians, said that “few Indian tribes maintained any semblance of a formal court system” and that “there was little reason to be concerned with assertions of tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians because of the absence of formal tribal judicial systems” [14]. This came from settlers disrespecting and not viewing tribal systems as legitimate. They believed their “formal” judicial system was the only proper system, even though their proper system is the one failing to prosecute criminals harming native people today. By stripping tribes of their jurisdictional power, this case targeted the interracial nature of violent crimes against Native women and took the power to obtain justice out of tribal hands, perpetuating the significant issue of rape against Native women. “From a survivor’s perspective, the Oliphant decision means that non-Native men who rape Native women on tribal lands completely escape tribal criminal sanctions” [5]. Further, data analyzed after the Oliphant decision demonstrated that the implications of the case ruling have created serious gaps in law enforcement on reservations with non-Indian populations. “Because most reservations have ceased all criminal enforcement against non-Indians and no other agency has assumed responsibility for these crimes, unregulated non-Indian crime has increased” [13]. It is said that Oliphant created a crisis situation in tribal communities as “violent people are attracted to Indian country as they perceive it as a location in which crimes can be committed with impunity” [5]. Deer explains that “Pedophiles and sexual predators also commit crimes within Indian country because of the vulnerability of the citizens and the jurisdictional gaps” [5]. Federal officials of all kinds have not been upholding their duties to protect Native people, especially Native women; however, there are also numerous accounts of federal officials who have committed heinous sex crimes against Native women and girls themselves. Oliphant threatened the safety of Native women, and the federal officials that women are forced to turn to for protection have also proven to be a danger.

In terms of social and legislative reform to these overlooked issues, there have been some small improvements since Oliphant v. Suquamish. Due in large part to the efforts of Native women, the Tribal Law and Order Act (TLOA) of 2010 and revisions to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) have been implemented, representing significant shifts in federal policy. The TLOA slightly raised the sentencing cap imposed by the ICRA. “Tribal courts, if certain requirements are met, can now punish a rapist by sentencing him to jail for a maximum of three to nine years and fining him up to $15,000” [5]. The 2013 amendments to VAWA have become known as part of the quest for an Oliphant fix. The amendments have been labeled a “partial Oliphant fix” because they “restored tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit acts of domestic violence on tribal lands,” a decision that significantly alters the Oliphant ruling [5]. However, it is only a partial fix because the jurisdictional reform implemented by VAWA “is explicitly limited...to violence committed by spouses, former spouses, or dating partners” [5].

Though things have been improved, “it is evident that the federal and state systems will not serve as the ultimate foundation for liberating tribal nations from the legacy of rape” [5]. There are many things to consider in order to begin to restore the sovereignty of tribal nations as well as remedy the relationship between the U.S. federal system and tribal courts. Sarah Deer wholeheartedly believes that “people who are violently assaulted should be the central focus of our justice system” [5]. She argues that the current tribal system has been deeply damaged by the failure to include tribal perspectives, and that in considering their voices, substantial reform can occur. One way legislation can help to benefit survivors of sexual violence is to end the practice of placing legal distinctions between different “types” of rape. Some legal scholars have advocated for a distinction between violent rape and nonconsensual sex. While this argument does have merit, the baseline determination of rape is that it is nonconsensual sex. Whether or not the act was additionally violent does not change the fact that any rape has profound lasting psychological and spiritual effects. If the justice system were to adopt the distinction between the two “types” of rape in law, that would put a burden of proof on survivors to demonstrate harm or violence done to them. Women, especially Native women, struggle to feel remotely safe enough to report the assault after it occurs, and the notion that she would be forced to come forward quickly in order to prove substantial injuries so that her rapist would be put to justice appropriately is harmful to all women. Also, data gathering in Native communities needs to improve as they are a largely overlooked demographic and are notoriously difficult to obtain data from. More information needs to be collected because “advocates and survivors are a critical part of this painful conversation…survivors are the experts in how the laws have or have not protected them” [5]. Deer argues that “maximizing sovereign authority by establishing a variety of legal remedies for rape will ideally provide victims of rape with a much wider array of options for achieving justice” [5].

When it comes to reform, Sarah Deer highlights the interesting fact that in many ways, “tribal governments have the capacity to draft and implement the most progressive and comprehensive laws in the world, in part because they are not necessarily limited by the precedent and the incremental reform that is usually required at the state and federal level” [5]. In her time working at the Tribal Law and Policy Institute, Sarah Deer worked to develop plans for tribes seeking to reform their legislation regarding gendered violence [5]. Using insight from tribal communities to consider what laws they truly needed, Deer and others created workbooks applicable to every tribal government. She explains that “even survivors who choose not to engage with the criminal justice system can benefit from a clear directive in tribal law that defines their experience as a crime. It can be validating for a woman to know that the harm she has experienced is considered to be criminal behavior” [5]. Additionally, she argues that “while we are reforming federal law we also have to reform tribal law so that we can put the control back into the hands of the tribal governments in a very practical way. If jurisdiction is restored to tribal governments, tribes must be able to effectively prosecute those crimes, or very little changes for the lives of the victims” [5].

Additionally, it is important to discuss legal punishments to such violence. Deer makes an effort to seek a balance between historical tribal punishments that didn’t include incarceration and American incarceration systems that disproportionally imprison people of color as well as represent the abusive power dynamic that tribal communities have endured since the beginning of colonialism. Sarah Deer acknowledges that incarceration is a controversial argument in terms of punishing offenders, but she advocates for more punitive measures to punish offenders than those traditionally used by tribal communities: “If people are not truly held accountable through some kind of punitive system, it sends a strong message to future generations that the penalty for behaving in sexually abusive ways is counseling and ceremony. Survivors will be reluctant to come forward if the system does not seem to be sending a strong message that sexual abuse will be treated as a serious violation of the law” [5]. Since the U.S. prison system is a very sensitive topic in relation to tribal communities, Deer suggests that “if incarceration is not a long-term solution, it may still be worth considering as a short-term solution for particularly dangerous offenders” [5]. In the meantime, it is important to consider that U.S. jails may not be the appropriate places to serve their time in the future. “Ideally, tribal jails could be reformed in such a way that they provide safety for communities, as well as accountability and rehabilitation for offenders” [5]. Deer explains that since “tribal governments have only entered into the prison-industrial complex in the past few decades...there may still be time to rethink how containment can provide both safety and accountability” [5].

Overall, it is critically important that more people understand the issues that are plaguing Native communities today and where exactly they come from. In this case, the American judicial system has played an overwhelming role in undermining the safety and sovereignty of Native nations. In order to achieve justice, survivors of sexual violence frequently have to navigate a maze of tribal, state and federal law. The US federal government has created a complex interrelation between these three jurisdictions that undermines equality before the law and often allows perpetrators to evade justice” [7]. Today, federal and state governments should be mandated to cooperate with Indigenous nations, specifically with women, in order to implement plans and systems that can help to stop the violence enacted against their communities at such a high rate [7]. Then, it is of the utmost importance that prosecutors vigorously prosecute offenders and that systems are supplied with sufficient resources to ensure that women get justice with appropriate attention and without undue delay. Tribal law and U.S. law are both complex frameworks that only become more complicated as they become involved with each other. The imposition of the American legal system over native governments led to a profound and severe issue of rape against Native women that continues today, but we have the means to restore sovereignty and safety to these communities if we continue in the right direction.

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[1] “679. the Major Crimes Act-18 U.S.C. § 1153.” Justice Manual | 679. The Major Crimes Act-18 U.S.C. § 1153 | United States Department of Justice, 22 Jan. 2020, www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-679-major-crimes-act-18-usc-1153.

[2] “687. Tribal Court Jurisdiction.” Justice Manual | 687. Tribal Court Jurisdiction | United States Department of Justice, 22 Jan. 2020, www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-687-tribal-court-jurisdiction.

[3] “American Indians and Alaska Natives - Public Law 280 Tribes.” The Administration for Children and Families, www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/fact-sheet/american-indians-and-alaska-natives-public-law-280-tribes#:~:text=In%201953%2C%20Congress%20enacted%20Public,be%20handled%20by%20state%20courts. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.

[4] “The Colonial Roots of Violence Against Native American Women.” Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, 16 Mar. 2023, www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/colonial-roots-violence-against-native-american-women.

[5] Deer, Sarah. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

[6] “Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 - California Courts.” Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, California Courts, courts.ca.gov/documents/Indian-Civil-Rights-Act-of-1968.pdf. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.

[7] “Maze of Injustice - Amnesty International.” Maze of Injustice, Amnesty International , 2007, www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AMR510352007ENGLISH.pdf.

[8] “Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women.” OLIPHANT V. SUQUAMISH TRIBE (1978), American University, edspace.american.edu/mmiwlawsandlegacies/jubilee/. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.

[9] “Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe.” Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/1977/76-5729. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.

[10] “Rape of Native Women.” Rape of Native Women Comments, Amnesty USA, 6 Oct. 2020, bidenhumanrightspriorities.amnestyusa.org/rape-of-native-women/#:~:text=Native%20women%20are%202.5%20times,crimes%20are%20non%2DNative%20men.

[11] Sarah Deer, www.sarahdeer.com/. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.

[12] “Sarah Deer.” Kansas University School of Law, law.ku.edu/people/sarah-deer#:~:text=Biography%20%E2%80%94,at%20the%20University%20of%20Kansas. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.

[13] Skibine, A T, and M B Oliviero. “Law Enforcement on Indian Reservations after Oliphant v Suquamish Indian Tribe - an Identification of the Problems and Recommendations for Remedies.” U.S. Department of Justice; Office of Justice Programs, 1980, www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/law-enforcement-indian-reservations-after-oliphant-v-suquamish.

[14] “U.S. Reports: Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978).” The Library of Congress, 1977, www.loc.gov/item/usrep435191/.

[15] Whyatt, Robin. “Violence against Native Women Has Colonial Roots.” The Progressive Magazine, 2 Mar. 2023, progressive.org/magazine/violence-against-native-women-has-colonial-roots-whyatt/#:~:text=In%20addition%20to%20sexual%20abuse,sustain%20the%20tribes%20through%20childbearing.

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