Just finished this book by Annette McGivney.  I ran across it because of a review in the Boatman's Quarterly, and got it from the local library.  It tells three parallel stories which all intersect: that of a young Japanese woman who was murdered, a young Havasupai man who killed her, and the author's story.  What brings the three stories together ( Read more... )

"Upon suffering beyond suffering; the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world. A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations. A world longing for light again. I see a time of seven generations when all the colors of mankind will will gather under the sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will ( Read more... )

Randy Blazak is a PhD from Emory University with a specialty in hate crimes. Specifically he studied racist skinheads (he doesn't say just "skin heads" because you can shave your head without being a racist). He's a professor of sociology at PSU where his intro class is opening people's minds, and a professor of criminology at OU.

His talk for ( Read more... )

 A day will come in your lifetime
when the Earth, your mother,
will beg you, with tears running,
to save her.
Ho, if you fail to help her,
you and all people will die like dogs.
Remember this.

~~Hollow Horn (Lakota), 1929,
as recounted in Black Hills, White Justice:
The Sioux Nation versus the United States,
1775 to the Present (1991)

Maher crossed a line with his joke, but that's what comedians do. It's the taboos that make jokes funny, the fact that they refer to something that is painful or secret. The US history of enslaving Africans is not secret, but it is painful. The pain is felt by many of us, perhaps not the same for those with other colors of skin, but there is no ( Read more... )

We just received a couple of Christmas gifts from our friends in Lake Oswego.  One of them was a hand made ornament, a chicken sewn out of a red and white floral patterned cloth.  On Hawaii, chickens are everywhere, especially on Kawaii where there are no natural predators for the wild chickens.  The Hawaiians do not think of them as food ( Read more... )

What Clinton's remark broadcasted is how little she thinks of conservatives in general. Her tone was so dismissive ("you name it") as to suggest that every xenophobe on the planet was unworthy of having skin. What she obviously doesn't understand is that we are all conservative at our roots, until these basic feelings are educated out of us, or ( Read more... )

I think this may be part of the reason that so many people have defaulted to supporting tRump.  At a gut level he gets it, that somehow the religion of Islam is motivating some people to kill bunches of hedonistic rich oblivious Americans.  We are The Great Satan, after all.  Our women roam around half naked.  We drink alcohol and eat so much that ( Read more... )

Don't forget: We live during the least violent time in all of recorded human history. We have done this by abandoning tribalism and embracing the, cosmically speaking, very new ideas of compassion and empathy. What we are seeing are the death throws of an old morality, where honor and vengeance and the death you could inflict were how you judged ( Read more... )

Just finished this novel last night.  I don't read a lot of novels, but I have a few on my shelf which have always come to me strongly recommended by someone I trust.  I don't remember who gave me this one.  It might have been B.  She is very much into all things native ( Read more... )