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Showing posts from 2018

Native Americans Scored Big Election Wins in Washington State and Beyond

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This article first appeared in In These Times  magazine in November 2018. For more on topics like this, please see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... C hester Earl and about 300 members of Washington state tribes—from Tulalip, Yakama, Lummi, Quinault, Port Gamble S'Klallam, Earl’s own Puyallup community and more—are gathered at an election night party in a Tacoma catering hall. They are singing, drumming, dancing, feasting and watching returns from around the state and country. “It’s incredible,” Earl exclaims (at center left in photo) as the big news comes in: Initiative 940, a Washington state ballot initiative that approves new police reform measures, has passed with more than 60 percent of the vote. Earl and about 15 of the attendees have just returned from a two-week reservation-to-reservation tour, N8tive Vote 2018 . The tour held rallies on the state’s 29 tribal homelands and encouraged members to get to the polls, particularly to say yes to

Digital Smoke Signals

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A version of this article appeared in Rural America In These Times in October 2018. For more on topics like this, please see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... S ilicon Valley met Indian country in Minneapolis. In a two-day early-October session, longtime software developer Deepak Puri taught tribal representatives—from Leech Lake, Red Lake, Menominee, Rosebud, Sisseton-Wahpeton, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Navajo, and more—to use cheap, fast, off-the-shelf technology to supercharge voter access to the polls in Indian country.   As Puri explained the steps, attendees dug into their cellphones and laptops and quickly created a succession of bots, videos, coded maps, and other high-tech items. The results looked to be effective weapons against the continual and extreme suppression of the Native vote, covered by In These Times and by Rural America In These Times, including here , here , here , and here . “It’s the twenty-first-century moccasin path,” said

20,000 Native Voters for North Dakota?

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A version of this article appeared in Rural America In These Times in 2018.  For more on topics like this, see my book,  American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle... . Buffalo at play on Standing Rock. A major voting hurdle for Native American voters in many states used to be thought of as a kind of force of nature, like gravity or sunshine: Indian reservations generally didn’t have named, numbered streets. And without these designations on the tribal IDs that Natives carry, they could easily be banned from voting.​ There appeared to be no way around the problem when North Dakota recently declared that was the case there—no ballot box access for Native voters unless were willing to undertake prohibitively long and costly drives and other hurdles to get an alternate ID. “It is a voter-suppression technique North Dakota targets at its Native population,” accused OJ Semans, the Rosebud Sioux co-director of Four Directions voting rights group. In September, the Eighth

Index for the book American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion

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This short video offers additional images from the book.   https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=mx1jJZkMGxU&feature=youtu.be INDEX   100Reporters, edited by Diana Schemo, 253  A Tribe Called Red, 245 Abourezk, Charles, 56 Abourezk, James, 196 Abramoff, Jack, 103 Absentee voting, see Early voting Act of 1948, 24 Act of March 2, 1899, 23 Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Native American Sentencing Issues, 157  Adakai, Frank, 34, 251  Adakai, Patrick, 31, 38, 40, 41, 251 Adoption Era, taking of Native children into adoption and foster care, 194-207 Agoyo, Herman, 227 Alaska, Alaska Native villages, tribes, members, 40, 58, 67, 79, 82, 91-95, 97, 103, 134-137, 154, 159, 161, 163, 192, 200, 208-209, 212-213, 216, 224-227, 248 Alcatraz Island, California, takeover, 13, 243 Alcohol and/or drugs, 7, 56-57, 91, 132, 146, 155, 201, 202, 203, 212-213 American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, 89, 101, 104, 164, 205, 206, 251 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, or AIRFA, 128, 194 American Indians and t