Dimensions, Physics, Cobras
as much as kurt vonnegut's death bummed me out lastnight, this morning it helped me out a bit. everyday at this news stand where i buy coffee they have a trivia question from that day's nytimes and if you know the answer then you get a discount. today they had kurt's quote about being what you pretend to be. so mother night got me $0.10 knocked off my refill. now that he's in heaven he probably won't mind some petty opportunism at his expense.
also, i was able to wake up fucking early to come to school and do the work i should've done lastnight. i wrote a short paper comparing coverage of the same event from a mainstream and a native-controlled news source. the comparison wasn't too interesting, but the news item was. so, apparently the cherokee nation had a vote to redefine criteria of citizenship in order to dis-enroll descendants of cherokee freedmen, who were ex-slaves, some owned by the cherokees. now, there's all kinds of contextual specificities and debatable sovereignty issues to take in mind, but really, isn't that fucked up? as if tribes haven't had a hard enough time grappling with the feds over who gets to legally exist as members of their own people and the waves of government-imposed dis-enrollment as a means to usurp treaty-protected resources. this is a major step backwards and an offensive appropriation of ass-backwards american policy that should be discarded anyway. luckily, the measure was snuck through by the principal chief, who was probably acting as an ancillary tool to private interests, and voted in by a "landslide" (77% yea from only 3% of the electorate) so the decision seems not to speak for the majority of people and will probably be overturned soon.
i'm probably gonna come back to vancouver the weekend of the 21st for david's birthday so if anyone wants to shoot off some bottlerockets, drop me a line. now i'm off to my death class.
also, i was able to wake up fucking early to come to school and do the work i should've done lastnight. i wrote a short paper comparing coverage of the same event from a mainstream and a native-controlled news source. the comparison wasn't too interesting, but the news item was. so, apparently the cherokee nation had a vote to redefine criteria of citizenship in order to dis-enroll descendants of cherokee freedmen, who were ex-slaves, some owned by the cherokees. now, there's all kinds of contextual specificities and debatable sovereignty issues to take in mind, but really, isn't that fucked up? as if tribes haven't had a hard enough time grappling with the feds over who gets to legally exist as members of their own people and the waves of government-imposed dis-enrollment as a means to usurp treaty-protected resources. this is a major step backwards and an offensive appropriation of ass-backwards american policy that should be discarded anyway. luckily, the measure was snuck through by the principal chief, who was probably acting as an ancillary tool to private interests, and voted in by a "landslide" (77% yea from only 3% of the electorate) so the decision seems not to speak for the majority of people and will probably be overturned soon.
i'm probably gonna come back to vancouver the weekend of the 21st for david's birthday so if anyone wants to shoot off some bottlerockets, drop me a line. now i'm off to my death class.