Original Peoples

Rapacious. “They got theirs, so I better get mine. Yes, things change, and, sure this sleepy town is about to boom but that’s the way of the world…. Might as well be part of the winning team – that money making side of things. That’s all you can do.”
I just finished talking to white guy in his late forties, gassing up excavators and huge dump trucks. We’re near the Estacada High School, and he tells me the scrapping is to make room for more ball fields. The school already has fields and a football stadium. This is a town with 3,000.

As Trump’s dangerous move on Iran’s nuclear deal and his provocative reaction to North Korea undercut diplomacy, tension is rising for World War III. Discord in the international community has been amplified in conflicts of identity politics across America. Greed and power-seeking leaders’ ambition for profits never end.

1. Abstract The Indian part of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (Revised Statutes Canada 1985, Appendix II, No. 1) consolidates previously established British North American common law. For constitutional law purposes, the proclamation recognizes and affirms two territorial jurisdictions, pursuant to the British Crown’s claim of continental sovereignty. First, is the continuity of the territorial jurisdiction of the “several Nations or Tribes.” Under the proclamation, all land presumptively is occupied and claimed by them.

Aotearoa (New Zealand) has a lot of serious problems. Neoliberal reforms have been imposed against the will of the people here and it is only our pride and our racially informed sense of kinship with imperial power that keeps us from recognising that we are a neocolony – a privileged neocolony perhaps, but a neocolony nonetheless.

They say 9-11 changed everything.  Although the U.S.

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed.
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, 2002.

On August 1, the Palestinian Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb was destroyed for the 116th time. As soon as Israeli bulldozers finished their ugly deed and soldiers began evacuating the premises, the village resident immediately began rebuilding their homes.
Twenty-two families, or about 101 residents, are estimated to live here. By now, they are all familiar with the painful routine, considering the first round of destruction took place in July 2010.

Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.
— Max Horkheimer, from the essay “The Jews and Europe”, December 1939

Human Evolution of the Mind Is Like a Hind Teat on a Texas Bull…

About 8500 years ago, hunting/gathering humans, living in the most fertile river valleys on earth, simultaneously discovered agriculture.  And so modern civilization was born.  As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz brilliantly reported in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of The United States, there were seven fertile cradles from which the advent of plant domestication would sow the seeds of great cities, pyramids, temples, a surplus of food and, in some locations, a societal caste system.  Two in Ch