. This blog began in late 2008 to recount my yearlong nationwide travels through Indian Country with documentary photographer Julia Dean. Those travels themselves were inspired by my publication earlier that year of “Aboriginal Sin,” in Tikkun. The article (scroll down for an image link on the right) presented an overview of the historic assault […]
“Special” Rights and the Accomplices to Discrimination That Are Those Who Call Them So
In a recent Indian Country Today essay, Peter d’Errico, the eminent Native American rights advocate, argued that “we need to be careful with the phrase ‘special rights.’ Perhaps we shouldn’t even use it.” In this instance, I think d’Errico is too moderate in his judgment. d’Errico was writing about the term specifically in its application […]
Time to Renounce the Doctrine of Discovery
Not much reason amid all the attention on reaching a debt deal that most people, including in the media, would have paid any attention to a meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Not much reason ever, by normal lights. Still, the happy advent of Gay marriage in New York managed to catch […]
The Navajo Concentration Camp at Bosque Redondo
The premise from which I write about American Indian issues is that while some Americans are ignorant, callous, and self-justifying about the nation’s history with Native America – and sometimes, still, clearly racist – most people are ignorant in the innocent sense of simply lacking knowledge. Most Americans, one can learn merely from raising the […]
Native America in the Courts of the Conqueror
Image via Wikipedia A common sense of the matter among those little knowledgeable or arrogantly unreflective about the Native conquest in what became the United States is that it took the form, simply, of ages old civilizational conflicts, in which one expanding and militarily superior culture historically and amorally superseded another. Like the Persian Empire […]