RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Texas Law Prof Gerald Torres on Voting Rights, Affirmative Action & More

University of Texas law professor Gerald Torres in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, July 12, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
UT-Austin law prof Gerald Torres
joins us on Rag Radio

We discuss the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on voting rights and affirmative action, plus immigration reform, Atmospheric Trust litigation, Native American sovereignty, and much more.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 17, 2013

University of Texas law professor Gerald Torres was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, July 12, 2013. Torres, who holds the Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas, is an expert on environmental and agricultural law, critical race theory, and federal Indian law.

And he plays a mean harmonica!

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download this episode of Rag Radio here:


Among issues that Professor Torres discusses with us on the show are the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on voting rights and affirmative action, plus immigration reform, Atmospheric Trust litigation, and Native American sovereignty.

Gerald Torres, who was associate dean of the University of Minnesota Law School before coming to UT-Austin, has served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as counsel to then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

His book, The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press), written with Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier, was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years.”

Gerald Torres in performance!

Professor Torres is a past president of the Association of American Law Schools. He has served on the board of the Environmental Law Institute, the National Petroleum Council, and on EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute.

Torres was honored with the 2004 Legal Service Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) for his work to advance the legal rights of Latinos. He currently is Board Chair of the Advancement Project, the nation’s leading social and racial justice organization. He is also on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is Vice-Chairman of the Board of Earth Day Network.

He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale law schools.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, July 19, 2013: Sociologist, media critic, and author Todd Gitlin.
Friday, July 26, 2013: Sanford, FL-based political science prof Jay D. Jurie, on the consequences of the Trayvon Martin verdict.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Steve Russell : The Unlikely Story of Dr. Wahoo, Professor Illiniwek, and RGIII

Chief Illiniwok, the long-embattled mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was retired in 2007. Illiniwok was opposed by American Indian groups and others for perpetuating cultural stereotypes. Native American caricatures live on as mascots in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. Image from The Society Pages.
The unlikely story of Dr. Wahoo,
Professor Illiniwek, and RGIII

We Indians cut our own throats when we discourage academic ambition, but it’s time that non-Indians understand when they tolerate Indian mascots, they cut our children’s throats with imaginary tomahawks.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / February 15, 2013

Lots of things have followed me into my second retirement. Some, like continuing work with Indian graduate students, are a source of delight. Others less so. I am reminded that I failed to change the world.

The National Science Foundation just sent me the 2011 report on earned PhDs. I immediately headed for the graph that breaks down the numbers by race/ethnicity.

Like all credentials, the PhD can represent more aspiration than reality, but the aspiration is worthy by any measure. The objective of a doctoral dissertation is to add to the total store of human knowledge in a measurable way.

It’s true that some PhD granting schools are more rigorous than others, the same as undergraduate schools.

My claim is not that the credential is infallible evidence of the accomplishment it is supposed to represent. We all know better than that. But it’s also more than just the union card for the professoring trade, and the more tribal citizens with advanced degrees -- PhD, MD, JD, or others -- the more 21st century possibilities are open to the tribe, not just the individuals who get the degrees. So, yes, if my academic career has involved advancing Indians on the micro level, one student at a time, I remain highly interested in the macro level.

I remember a discussion about the minimum number of Indian lawyers it would take to form a section of the American Bar Association and realizing it would require us to literally sign up every known Indian with a law degree (at the time) to what is a voluntary and quite expensive organization (to which I currently do not belong). I remember talking with a non-Indian MD who was working off his school debts with the Indian Health Service and coming to the realization that he did not think much of Indians. I don’t like the view at the bottom of the barrel.

In the 2011 numbers, I noted that Hispanics, at 2,006 new PhDs, surpassed African-Americans, at 1,953. This has been a continuing trend because Hispanics (16.7% of the population) outnumber blacks (13.1%). American Indians, even by the expansive new definition that doubled the numbers, and even adding Native Hawaiians, are only 1.4% of the population. Number of new PhDs? 136.

Let’s review.

African-Americans are about 13.1% of the population and produced about 6.14% of the new PhDs.

Hispanics are about 16.7% of the population and produced 6.31%.

Indigenous persons are, on paper, 1.4% of the population, a number that is greatly overstated by self-reporting from the Elizabeth Warrens of the world. We produced .43% of the new PhDs.

I watched similar numbers for years involving the JD degree. We are growing in absolute numbers, and we’ll continue to get better because education is as hereditary as lack of education. I am a first generation college student and all four of my kids went to college. So, are we satisfied?

I’m not satisfied, and every time I hear a bright Indian kid accused of “thinking white” for the sin of thinking, I want to revert to savage stereotype.

When Indians do something positive, we are quick to offer cultural explanations for our superiority. It’s about time culture took some of the rap for our academic underperformance.

You want more evidence? Asians are about 5% of the population and snagged over 9% of the new PhDs. I’ve never heard of an Asian kid being accused of “thinking white” or of trying to elevate herself above her peers.

Speaking of savage stereotypes, some people would say that the problem of our lack of success in education is a problem way bigger than, say, Indian mascots.

With that painful sight of Robert Griffin III going down on his knee the wrong way, I was reminded that I care about him as an exciting rookie player from my neck of the woods while I root for the Washington team to lose, always.

RGIII played his high school ball at Copperas Cove and his college ball at Baylor. He’s one of those new wave running quarterbacks. You never know if he is going to hand it to the running back, throw it, or take off. More to the point, neither does the defense.

So why, oh why, did he have to get drafted by the Washington team?

In 2008, a refereed article appeared in the journal Basic and Applied Psychology, “Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots.” Like most science, it contains more mathematics than opinions, but I’ll skip the math and go to the money shot in the abstract:

We suggest that American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians of the limited ways others see them and, in this way, constrain how they can see themselves.

We Indians cut our own throats when we discourage academic ambition, but it’s time that non-Indians understand when they tolerate Indian mascots, they cut our children’s throats with imaginary tomahawks.

The public Indian comes in two versions, primitive relic or romantic warrior, both doomed. Historical figures, feared in the past, pitied in the present, irrelevant to the future.

When I was a professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio, they still had an affirmative action plan. It did not call for the recruitment of Indians, citing the lack of Indian PhDs in the talent pool. There was a hiring goal for Asian males, but none for Indians of any gender.

There were two Indians on the faculty. The other guy did not get tenured. I did, but I took an offer at a Research I school... where I was one of two Indians. Again, I was the only one of the two of us to get tenured, but they hired three more and we discovered another who had never before made himself known. Two of the three hires left by the time I did.

If Indian students did not get mentored by non-Indians, they would never get mentored. Not that the lack of mentors is the major problem. The major problem is that most research universities contain more dead Indians as “scientific data” than live Indians as students.

I was born in a small town in Oklahoma where the most numerous minority was Indians. Only one in my age cohort finished high school. I myself made it only to the ninth grade. We expected no more of ourselves than the public schools expected of us, and we had no educated role models.

That has not changed, and we’ve had about all the “honoring” by turning us into mascots that we can stand.

I wish RGIII all the best for a quick recovery, and for the day he plays for a team that does not disadvantage Indian children.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tony Platt : California Dreamin'

The Bloody Island Massacre of 1850 at the north end of Clear Lake, Lake County, California. Art from Manataka American Indian Council.  
California Dreamin'

California’s public history mostly erases its tragic past, turning profound injustices, such as the genocide of native peoples, into a narrative of Progress.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / July 12, 2012

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” -- Joan Didion

BERKELEY, California -- A couple of weeks ago I attended the 3rd Global Conference on Genocide in San Francisco. The conference, organized by the International Network of Genocide Scholars, covered genocides, past and present, in many parts of the world. Just about everywhere, except here. In three days of panels and presentations, I could find only one discussion of California as a site of genocide, and it was in my paper.

California can hold its own with other regions of the world regarding human-made tragedies -- genocide, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, lynching, racial segregation, eugenics, imprisonment without trial, and torture. We know this from the accounts of witnesses and survivors, and from richly descriptive social histories written during the last 30 years.

Yet, California’s public history mostly erases its tragic past, turning profound injustices, such as the genocide of native peoples, into a narrative of Progress. The upbeat version of The California Story as a place of entrepreneurial ingenuity and cutting-edge modernity has served as a cultural firewall, numbing and cutting us off from the state’s bloody history.

It is rare to find in our textbooks, classrooms, and public places a reckoning with our nineteenth century catastrophe: dispossession and massacres of native communities; break up of native families, including a commercial trade in women and children; organized efforts to erase thousands of years of cultural experience; and systematic looting of native graves and artifacts to the benefit of collectors, museums, and universities.

It is even more rare to find accounts of local native resistance, from guerilla warfare during the Gold Rush to battles over land and repatriation in the twentieth century. Crude and racist representations of acquiescent native peoples dominated public space in California for over a century, making it easier to frame their near extermination in the imagery of natural history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as a result of human intervention -- a genocide.

Eugenic legacies persist today in the state’s 4th grade curriculum that transforms the colonial, racist imperatives of the Spanish mission system into a romantic origins story of uplift and civilization. And in the 7th grade, when The Diary of Anne Frank is typically taught, it is the rare teacher who makes a connection to California’s catastrophe.

There are so few public acknowledgements of California’s history of atrocities against native peoples that I can list them here:

• In 2005, the state erected a historical marker on Highway 20 in recognition of a massacre by soldiers of Pomo women and children on Bloody Island in 1850.
• In 2006, Eureka City Council returned 60 acres of Indian Island (the site of another massacre) to the Wiyot Tribe as a gesture of reparations.
• In 2007, Bishop Francis A. Quinn in a public speech acknowledged the “past mistakes and serious misdeeds” of the Catholic Church during the Mission period. “The Church apologizes for trying to take Indian out of the Indian. Let the Miwok be Miwok.”

California does not have any monumental, officially endorsed, civic memorials to victims of mass injustice, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, Memory Park in Buenos Aires, or the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York. Nor do we have any educational and cultural institutions devoted to learning about the motivation, psychology, and organization of perpetrators, such as the Topography of Terror in Berlin or Nazi Documentation Center in Nuremberg.

There is nothing in California comparable to the federal memorial on Bainbridge Island, Washington, that commemorates how the first town under Roosevelt’s 1942 order removed all citizens of Japanese origins; or to Reconciliation Park in Tacoma, an ongoing private-public initiative to remember how the port city ethnically cleansed hundreds of Chinese in 1885.

Due to lack of public funding, California also has a weak public arts presence in memorial culture. By contrast, Berlin's artistic projects are so embedded in daily life that you literally bump into reminders of Nazism at the top of subway exits, or walk past them on the way to work, or see them next to ads in neighborhoods, or stumble over them on the way into a café. For example, hovering in the shadows of the gigantic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in a nearby park is a kiosk that seductively invites you to look through a peephole at two men or two women kissing, and to imagine their fate under the Nazis.

I understand the political importance of creating large-scale monuments in publicly visible sites, but personally I appreciate memorials that catch you off guard, make you figure out something for yourself, and are part of the everyday landscape. Smaller is not necessarily better than bigger, but often has a wider impact and may last longer.

Coming to terms with this region’s long record of social injustices is necessary in order to chip away at chauvinist notions of the United States as destined by providence and militarism to lead the world, and of the mythic Golden State as a model of multiculturalism. Addressing our history in all its contradictions helps us to guard against hubris and to recognize our modest place in an interdependent world.

We’ll know we’re making progress when we teach the Mission system as part of colonial history, when the genocide of native peoples in the northwest is taught alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, and when a genocide conference held in San Francisco pays serious attention to the region’s sorrowful past.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. Platt taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). He is a Visiting Professor in Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. His publications have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. His latest book -- Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past -- was recently published by Heyday. He lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California, and serves as secretary of the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyuweg (Big Lagoon). He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo. Find more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tony Platt : Justice for the Living Dead

A graduate student at an anthropology museum at Berkeley uses a craniometer to measure an ancient Indian skull. This collection alone contained more than 10,000 Indian skeletons. Photo from Life magazine, October 25, 1948. Image from The Buffalo Post.
Death's double standard:
Justice for the living dead

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2012

It’s good news that the United Nations has authorized University of Arizona professor James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to carry out its first investigation into the status of Native Americans in the United States, with a particular focus on American compliance with standards embodied in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the U.S. became a signatory in 2010.

The focus of Anaya’s scrutiny no doubt will be on today’s inequalities and injustices that deeply impact 2.7 million Native Americans throughout the country. But let’s not forget the inequities of death.

Despite popular images of tribal members getting rich from gaming pay-offs, the overwhelming majority of Native Americans remain mired in poverty, the victims of structural unemployment and racial exclusion, compounded by devastating rates of diabetes, suicide, infant mortality, and cardiovascular and alcohol-related diseases.

There is a long way to go before, in the words of the Declaration, “indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples” entitled to the right to “self-determination” and to “be free from discrimination of any kind.”

Inequality is a problem for the dead as well as the living. According to Article 12 of the UN Declaration, native peoples have a right to “the use and control of their ceremonial objects, and the repatriation of their human remains.” Repatriation as a central demand of Native American movements in the United States speaks to the long history of plunder of native artifacts and bodies.

Over a period of some two hundred years, from Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of a Native American barrow near his home in Virginia, to passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, several hundred thousand native grave sites -- maybe as many as one million -- were dug up in the name of science, recreation, and commerce.

There was a brisk trade in native body parts and funerary artifacts, propelled by the popularity of commercial and recreational “collecting,” scientific curiosity, and the heritage industry. The artifacts removed from graves ended up in private collections and public display cases around the world, including the Smithsonian, Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and museums in Prague, Zurich, Vienna, and Moscow.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists in universities and museums engaged in a frenzy of acquisition in the hope that native bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, it was believed, had been frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to “secrets of human origins,” as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and native degeneracy.

This science made it easier to frame the near extermination of native peoples in the imagery of natural rather than social history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of human intervention and -- in the case of California -- genocide.

In widely read treatises -- such as Samuel Morton’s Crania America (1839), Ales Hrdlicka’s Directions for Collecting Information and Specimens for Physical Anthropology (1904), and Edward Gifford’s Californian Anthropometry (1926) -- the measurement of brain cavities, nostrils, and degree of slope in foreheads generated all kinds of scientific quackery to justify the civilizational superiority of white Europeans and innate inferiority of native peoples.

Aside from the racist assumptions that guided research on native bodies, the science was also flawed because documentation of provenience of bones and artifacts found in graves was often nonexistent. Moreover, scientists harvested far more corpses than they could ever study. Tens of thousands of native dead were stashed in boxes, cellars, and personal collections, only to be resurrected for display in cabinets of curiosities, museums, schools, and international expositions.

A skull collected on Santa Rosa Island was included in the U.S. exhibition at the Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid in 1892. In the 1920s and 1930s, a self-styled amateur archaeologist dug up hundreds of dead Tongva Indians and used their bones to decorate his Catalina Museum of Island Indians. To this day, the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, proudly displays native artifacts looted from graves.

With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the practice of widespread grave looting was officially stopped. Moreover, NAGPRA requires federally funded institutions to publish their holdings of native body parts, as well as artifacts taken from graves, and to facilitate their return to tribes that are able to make a case for genealogical or cultural connection.

NAGPRA was as significant a piece of legislation for Native Americans as the Civil Rights Act was for African Americans. And, similarly, it represents an unfinished revolution. The pace of repatriating human remains is glacially slow: by 2009, less than five percent nationwide had been returned to tribes. By 2010, the University of California at Berkeley had repatriated only 179 of its 10,000 native body parts.


There is nothing inherently wrong with using the dead to reconstruct the past. With the help of new developments in chemistry, DNA analysis and dating methods, we can learn a great deal from human remains about how our ancestors lived, worked, and died. Respectful collaboration between community groups, advocacy organizations, politicians, and scientists in New York in the 1990s, for example, made it possible to excavate what had been the Negros Buriel Ground, resulting in a detailed portrait of the daily lives of Africans in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A similar collaboration between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, archaeologists, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company -- following the inadvertent exposure of native burials in Santa Clara, California, in 2008 -- produced a great deal of information about the lives and deaths of Ohlone neophytes buried in the mission at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

For most twentieth century archaeology, however, the decision to excavate and exhume native remains was typically made unilaterally and imposed by fiat. The problem is not with the search for knowledge, but rather the unequal relations of power between investigator and subject, collector and collected; the lack of consultation and permission, the arrogance run wild; and how the products of knowledge are misused.

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult. Remembrance and treatment of the dead is a highly selective political project. Some of our collective dead are respected, others humiliated. Consider some examples:

• The priests who worked at Mission Carmel in California from 1771 to 1833 are buried in solid tombs and named in headstones. Junipero Serra, architect of the mission system, is interred in an ornate crypt. The thousands of Ohlones, whose slave labor built and ran the mission, are buried anonymously in mass pits. When I visited Mission Carmel in February with Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, she picked up several items from the ground. “Look,” she showed me, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked the authorities to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.”


• In the second half of the 19th century, while scientists and collectors raided native cemeteries for booty and bodies, the nation made amends for the Civil War by creating a system of national cemeteries and making a conscientious effort to preserve the names and identities of those killed. Today, a Defense Department unit with an annual budget of $55 million searches the world for unaccounted soldiers killed in the line of duty. No comparable effort is put into retrieving thousands of native remains unceremoniously stored in university, military, and museum basements.


• An expensive effort, led by the FBI, is currently under way to find the remains of a six-year old boy killed in New York more than 30 years ago. Recently, a national scandal erupted when it was revealed that the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware dumped in a landfill the body parts of some victims of the September 11, 2001, tragedy. Similarly, the Pentagon expressed strong condemnation of the Los Angeles Times for publishing photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan insurgents. No such objections were made when museums and newspapers throughout most of the 20th century displayed native skeletons as objects of curiosity and entertainment.


• A debate is under way today about the propriety of excavating the wreck of the Titanic when it may contain corpses that, say Federal officials, should be accorded the respect of a graveyard and shielded from “looters and artifact hunters.” In contrast, the University of California, Berkeley, is closing the Hearst Museum for two years in order to “renovate and transform its public spaces.” There are no plans, apparently, to give 10,000 native remains stacked in a dank basement a respectful burial or commemorate their theft from native graveyards.

Federal policies of repatriation are a step in the right direction. But most native remains are unclaimed or unknown. What should be a national ritual of remembrance and mourning has become a technical, bureaucratic process. In addition to tribal claims for the return of their dead, there is also a need for public commemoration that speaks to a national tragedy.

Throughout much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to the victims of world wars and now, as it continues to make efforts to account for every person missing from the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of native bones and skulls have been stored anonymously in basements and boxes, and their burial goods displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or as freak show curiosities.

However much we have tried to assiduously forget this sorrowful history, the past continues to reverberate in the here and now. It is time to do justice to our living dead.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. Platt taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). He is a Visiting Professor in Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. His publications have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. His latest book -- Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past -- was recently published by Heyday. He lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California, and serves as secretary of the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyuweg (Big Lagoon). He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo. Find more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Steve Russell : 'Chief' Was Born on Death Row

The North Block entrance to Condemned Row at San Quentin. Image from Strong as an Ox.
'Chief' Stankewitz:
Born on death row

Just as you can’t discuss federal Indian policy without recourse to history, it’s hard to understand Douglas Stankewitz and his crimes outside of his historical context, which includes the spectacular destruction of California Indians.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / October 13, 2011

Capital punishment, the saying goes, means that those without the capital get the punishment, and over 35 years of labor in criminal law has yet to show me a case that disproves it.

Capital cases are usually defended by court-appointed lawyers, because prosecutors do not typically choose to seek the death penalty against defendants who can afford the stratospheric legal fees of a capital defense. The only capital case I defended in private practice was one of the very few I’ve seen where the lawyers were hired rather than appointed, and we won -- victory being defined in that instance as the government was not allowed to kill our client.

Death row, like most poor neighborhoods, has a disproportionate number of minority residents. Those of us who come from poor neighborhoods know that there are mean people there, and plenty of conditions that make even good people mean. We also know that the vast majority of poor people survive those conditions without becoming mean.

Good or mean, the hearty survival rate of poor people justifies in the minds of some what they call “putting down the mad dogs,” in spite of the fact that it is much more expensive to kill sociopaths than it is to lock them up without the possibility of parole. Those are the two choices for dealing with the people who have become too dangerous to live among us, and such people do exist -- in all my years of practice, I have had contact with three of them; three out of the thousands of criminal defendants with whom I have dealt.

Based on my many years in the legal system, I do not trust it to pick those three sociopaths out of a crowd. Sociopaths, you see, are not always poor people -- some of them are even white. Back in the days (within my lifetime) when we had the death penalty for rape, those executed were most often dark-skinned men accused of raping white women, and thanks to DNA exonerations we now understand that cross-racial identification is highly unreliable.

Even utterly certain eyewitnesses make mistakes, and confessions are so notoriously unreliable that everyone understands why police investigators withhold some details of every crime that makes the newspaper. The more publicity the crime gets, the more disturbed people will line up to confess.

Making things even more confusing is that confessions by persons actually involved in a crime are often given to shift blame, leading to the perverse outcome in some capital cases that the more experienced criminal is able to make a deal to escape the death penalty by testifying against a less savvy co-defendant, without regard to which defendant was more culpable.

Since eyewitness identifications and confessions can be unreliable, it’s easy to see why there are very few trials where everybody agrees on what happened. What may appear crystal clear in the newspapers can only be seen in the courtroom as through a glass, darkly.

A lawyer’s first duty in a capital case is to tell the best story that can be told with the facts as they stand. If you are a juror in such a case, you have buckets of messy facts brought into the courtroom and must listen to lawyers who assemble stories from those facts -- often without regard to what they may believe to be the truth.

A lawyer’s second duty in a capital case, should the first not be discharged successfully, is to make absolutely sure that the jury fully understands the life they are being asked to end. Jurors are introduced to a man by way of the worst thing he’s done in his life, a circumstance that would be a mighty challenge to any of us, even if the task were less vital than to befriend 12 strangers who have nothing in common but their sworn willingness to kill you if the government gives them a good enough reason.

Douglas Ray 'Chief' Stankewitz is the longest tenured inmate on California’s death row. Image from freechief.org.

Douglas Ray 'Chief' Stankewitz

All this brings me to an Indian I want you to know better than his jury did -- Douglas Ray Stankewitz, the longest tenured inmate on California’s death row. Like most Indians who find themselves in a group of non-Indians, he is currently known as “Chief,” but unlike many Indians, he is proud of the nickname.

The government wants to kill Chief because Theresa Greybeal was shot dead in the course of a robbery by a group of people high on heroin, and there is no question that Chief was one of them. There is a serious question about who pulled the trigger, and juries are reluctant to kill individuals who did not pull the trigger. But as far as his jury knew, Douglas Stankewitz pulled the trigger, and he might have, but we will never know, based on his trial.

Just as you can’t discuss federal Indian policy without recourse to history, it’s hard to understand Douglas Stankewitz and his crimes outside of his historical context, which includes the spectacular destruction of California Indians.

Douglas Ray “Chief” Stankewitz is a citizen of the Big Sandy Rancheria, as they call reservations in California. He was born on May 31, 1958, to Marion Sample Stankewitz, the sixth of her eleven children. She was the fifth of seven children. Her father, Sam Jack Sample, was Mono and Chukchansi, and her mother was Mono. She met Douglas’s father, a truck driver of Polish descent, when she was picking grapes and he was her supervisor. They were both practicing drunks.

Douglas was born the year the Big Sandy Rancheria was terminated as part of the national policy to force Indians to assimilate. In other words, for most of the time that the young Douglas was being let down by the adults around him, the Big Sandy Rancheria did not exist in the eyes of the federal government.

His mother had also been raised on the Big Sandy Rancheria, a place until recently blighted by poverty, alcohol abuse, and hopelessness. Marion drank beer by the case while pregnant, and when Douglas was born his father was in jail for beating his mother. His mother had no prenatal care -- she first saw a doctor regarding her pregnancy when she was in labor.

Douglas was beaten regularly by both of his parents and was taken to the emergency room three times before his first birthday. At age six, he was found injured and wandering on the streets. The police took him home, where his mother admitted to having beaten him. The police did not remove him from the home, apparently because they decided that the process would have been too complicated. There were nine children in the home at the time, and Douglas’s father was in jail.

Less than three months later, Douglas was brought to the police station by a neighbor who found the boy on his doorstep, again injured. This time, all the children were taken away and Marion was jailed.

After two unsuccessful foster home placements -- the foster parents were unable to deal with Douglas’s violent emotional eruptions -- the seven-year-old was committed to Napa State Psychiatric Hospital for 90 days. While he received no treatment there (beyond being diagnosed with a severe emotional disturbance), this placement was extended twice, for a total of nine months. This child trapped in an adult institution became easy prey for sexual assault, and that became an unfortunate part of his “education.”

He was then placed in a foster home, where he stayed for nearly four years, the second longest stay at one address he has had in his life. The longest was in is his current address: San Quentin’s death row. He received no visits from his natural family during that placement with the foster family. His foster mother had to make a personal plea to get Douglas into the third grade:

The day I went to pick him up, I'll never forget. He went down on all fours in a corner, growling and snorting at me. On the way home, he jumped over into the back seat and clawed all the stuffing out of the upholstery. When we walked into the kitchen of my home, he shuffled over to the dish rack, full of dry dishes, and threw the whole thing across the room.

I had been told not to physically restrain or punish him because he would go berserk if touched, but I figured he was already berserk, so being as big as I am, I just grabbed him from behind, wrapped my whole self around him, down we went and I just held on for dear life until he calmed down.

It's taken me all this time to tame him. I've taught him to talk instead of grunt, to use the toilet, to dress himself, to use silverware, to take care of animals without hurting them, to ask instead of grab... He's been begging me to teach him to read and write and do numbers like the other foster kids, so I think he's ready for school… Will you take him in your class? If he's any trouble, just call and I'll come pick him up.

It is unclear how this foster placement ended, and Chief is in no position to know because of his age at the time. Apparently, the state was motivated by a bureaucratic imperative to keep families together when possible, regardless of the circumstances. What is clear is that from 1970 until his first commitment to the California Youth Authority in 1972, Douglas had at least 13 placements. The longest was for five months. The first was back with his mother, where he learned to sniff paint.

For a short period, he was placed with an aunt back on the reservation, where he lived until her children were taken away because of her drunkenness. The aunt said that before Douglas came to live with her, “a lot of times there was no food in the house. Sometimes we'd save our oatmeal for [the children] because they had nothing.” While Douglas was living with his aunt, his mother was sent to prison for manslaughter.

At age 13, Douglas got his first criminal referral to juvenile court. His earlier visits to juvenile court had been as what the state called a “child in need of supervision.” Douglas had apparently been running with some adults, and when they showed up too late to get fed at a Fresno soup kitchen one day, the adults decided to rob someone to get money for food. Douglas involved himself in this crime by going though the victim’s pockets.

Between 1972 and 1977, Douglas spent all but eight months in either Youth Authority lockups or the Sacramento County Jail. In a little over two months from the time he was released until the arrest that landed him on death row, Douglas Stankewitz consumed (according to the individuals around him) massive quantities of marijuana, alcohol, methamphetamine, and heroin. At the time of the killing that brought him to death row, he had not slept for at least two days.

End of the line: Sleek new death chamber at San Quentin. Image from Inland News Today.

The fearsome responsibility

Chief has now spent 33 years of his life on California’s death row, but virtually all of his life before arriving there was spent under the “supervision” of the state of California in one guise or another. We don’t know what the jury on his trial would have made of this, but we do know that Chief’s American Indian identity made their decision to kill him inevitable. That statement may seem shocking, but so are the actions of Douglas Stankewitz’s court-appointed lawyer, the ex-judge Hugh Goodwin.

Since I am a retired judge and know something of the work, I was prepared to think an ex-judge from a criminal court might make a good defense attorney in a capital case, if he had the stomach for it. The problem is that Goodwin became an ex-judge because of his predilection for sentencing criminal defendants to go to church. He was convinced that his job as a judge was to bring people to Jesus. It is clear from reviewing the Stankewitz case that he saw his duty as a criminal defense lawyer the same way.

The fearsome responsibility of a capital defense can keep a lawyer awake at night, but Mr. Goodwin’s sleep was apparently less troubled than mine, because he took the attitude that his client’s life was in God’s hands rather than his own.

Because there was no question that his client was involved in the killing -- only whether he pulled the trigger -- Mr. Goodwin had ample notice that the main business of this trial would be in the penalty phase. There was much that the jury should have been told in the penalty phase, but Mr. Goodwin did not deem it important to inform them that his client had been born with fetal alcohol syndrome, beaten, starved, sexually assaulted, and deprived of any loving relationship with an adult.

Instead, he called to the stand a jailer and an assistant district attorney to give their opinions that anybody can reform if they allow the Christian God to come into their life. Predictably, the cross-examination of these witnesses bored in on whether they had any reason to believe Douglas Stankewitz had invited God into his life. They did not.

Errors by a lawyer do not require reversal if the lawyer had a tactical reason for making the errors. Hugh Goodwin swore to this statement about his tactics in that trial:

I have never believed in the separation of church and state, as I made clear when I was a judge. I recognize that this is a controversial view which is not widely shared. When I presented the testimony of a Deputy District Attorney and the Fresno County Jail chaplain that they believed people could be transformed by the power of God if they let God into their lives, I knew that it was likely that on cross-examination they would state that there was no evidence that Mr. Stankewitz would let God into his life. Nonetheless, I believed that by presenting this testimony, God’s will would be done, and accordingly I did so.

As idiotic as the “power of God” defense was in a capital murder case, it would have had a prayer of swaying a jury against death if there were a shred of evidence that Douglas Stankewitz had a Christian bone in his body. But Douglas “Chief” Stankewitz is a Mono Indian, born on the Big Sandy Rancheria, raised by the State of California in a parade of incompetent foster homes, mental hospitals and juvenile facilities. His grandfather, Sam Jack Sample, was a ceremonial singer and medicine man who died singing in the roundhouse when Douglas was a small boy. Goodwin might as well have entrusted his client’s life to Zoroaster for all the chance his client had of grabbing hold of that lifeline.

The defense in a capital case must compel the jury to understand the life they are being asked to end. In this case, the jury was told that goodness is linked to being Christian, and the defense lawyer might as well have said plainly that the only good Indians he ever saw were dead.

At this writing, the Big Sandy Rancheria has regained federal recognition and has opened a casino. Using those casino funds, they finally have an office to enforce the Indian Child Welfare Act; they also have a Head Start program.

In another case of poor timing, the name of Sam Jack Sample, Douglas’s grandfather, has turned up on the list of persons for whom the Department of the Interior is holding property in trust. Since Stankewitz’s mother is deceased, he may actually inherit that property, thereby acquiring the funds to pay for his funeral—if he had anyone to attend it.

Chief Stankewitz has no execution date set and the litigation to get him a new trial continues. Until he does get a fair trial, we won’t have any basis to say whether he is among the worst of the worst who deserve the death penalty or whether he is just another man without the capital getting the punishment.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the Sixties and Seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve is also a columnist for Indian Country Today, where a version of this article has also appeared. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jonah Raskin : The Last Great California Hunter

Wild boar photographed on Cottontail Creek Road in the hills behind Cayucos, California. Photo from goingslo's photostream / Flickr.
Tooch Colombo:
The last great California hunter

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2011

Tooch Colombo isn’t like you, me, most of our friends and family members. When he wants to eat meat he doesn’t go to Central Market, Whole Foods, or Safeway. He goes for his guns and heads for the wilds of California where his ancestors hunted for thousands of years.

He’s been hunting his whole life -- including a stint as a professional hunter -- and when he stops hunting, a way of life will die with him. He’s the last of the great hunters in California; most of the men with whom he hunted are dead, and the plentiful game they once hunted has long since been annihilated.

Colombo is one of a kind, a survivor of a way of life that as recently as the 1970s in California was also a way of making a decent living. Hunting in the wilds just doesn’t pay anymore, though Colombo still thrills to the excitement of the hunt.

Most men half his age have given up hunting, though they still remember week-long jaunts in the mountains where they shot deer, pigs, antelope, and bear, slept under the stars, told stories, and cooked and ate over an open fire what they had killed.

Colombo is unusual in more than just one way. He does almost everything himself, or nearly so. He’s not only a hunter, he’s also a butcher, a cook, and, of course, an eater with a ravenous appetite. “I eat everything that I kill,” he told me when I first met him at the offices of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a tribe in which he’s a leading member. He adds, “I’m the complete cycle.”

Colombo’s hair is white and his face is ruddy. He wears battered cowboy boots and well-worn jeans. He is intense and funny and very serious about hunting for wild game and about the centuries-long hunting of Indians by white men that nearly exterminated all of the Indians.

Before he goes hunting, Colombo says a prayer to the “Grandfather in the Sky,” as he calls the Great Spirit. “Let me find game,” he says. “Let me be merciful and let the animal die with one shot.” After he kills a deer or a pig he gives thanks and he means it, too.

Tooch Colombo’s ancestors lived on the coast of California for thousands of years, though he didn’t know anything about them until he was an adult. No one, not even his mother who was born a Miwok, told him that he was an Indian when he was a boy growing up not far from the Pacific Ocean, where his forefathers also fished.

“In those days it was a disgrace to be a Indian,” he told me. “You didn’t advertise the fact.”

On his father’s side, his ancestors were Italians, as the family name Colombo attests. The mixture of Indian and Italian has made for a lifetime of exciting cooking and eating and for an appreciation of the sacredness of food and of life itself.

For Colombo, the authentic life starts with hunting in the rugged terrain of California, where he’s roamed ever since the 1940s. When he was a younger man he worked 9-to-5 as a butcher for Safeway, Lucky, and other supermarkets, but he always took a month off for hunting, which meant that he always had to find another job at the end of hunting season. No one was willing to rehire a butcher who took off for a whole month to stalk, track, and hunt.

At the age of 75, he still goes out for deer in August and for pig all year long, as hunting rules allow. He loves racing up and down steep inclines, his heart pumping. He’s no lonely hunter, either. He goes into the wilds with his buddy, Euell Baker, who is 78, and with three or four dogs that are indispensable for the hunt.

“The dogs are able to track and then to stop a pig long enough for me to get close and to shoot it behind the ears,” he tells me on an afternoon when he remembers a lifetime of hunting stories that would make Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner proud.

In the field, he skins and guts the animal he kills, and at home he cuts it up into chops and roasts. Sometimes he ages the meat; since he can’t cook and eat everything he kills all at once he freezes a lot of it and thaws it out when he needs it.

If he has both venison and pork on hand in his kitchen he mixes the two together and makes his own version of Italian sausage. He won’t tell me the whole recipe, and he insists that, “Italians will go to their grave rather than give away the secret ingredients,” but he does say that he uses “lots of wine and lots of garlic.” After all, he’s half Italian and he lives up to his roots on both sides of his family.

Occasionally, he also forages for plants that Indians, including his mother, used for cooking and for medicinal purposes.

Colombo has always been a meat eater and he always will be. Years ago, he turned his wife, who was a vegetarian, into a meat eater, too. He started with abalone that she loved and then he made a dish he calls “Pork a la Toochi” that persuaded her to eat the wild pig he hunted and killed.

Still, he doesn’t insist that meat is for everyone. “If you want to eat snow peas for the rest of your life go ahead,” he says. He’s well aware of the impact of hunting on the environment and on wild animals, and he tells me, “there are too many people looking for too few resources.”

There will always be wild pig in the West, he believes, but he has noticed that deer are becoming scarcer, even in rural areas. “My Indian grandmother remembered elk and grisly bears,” he explains. “She also said that the grass was so high after the rains that a man on horse could hardly see over it.”

For a time, he served as the chairman of the California Fish and Wild Life Advisory Board, and tried to implement rules about the protection of fish and game. “I was a voice crying in the wilderness,” he says. “I was hunting in the hills and I could see that the limits had been reached, but I couldn’t persuade others to see them, too.”

Hunting is in Colombo’s blood, and he’s as proud of his skills as a hunter as he is about his identity as an Indian. He’s also not the same hunter at 75 that he was at 13 when he killed his first deer with a rifle his father bought for him.

“Hunting has been a way of life for me,” he says. “It has put food on the table, and it still keeps me in shape. These days, I don’t kill as much as I used to. I’ve learned how precious life is, and how much we need to protect it.”

[Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Steve Russell : In Memory of Jay Spotted Elk

In memory of Jay Spotted Elk

It became possible to prove that Jay Spotted Elk’s last night on earth was not unusual in the history of Sheridan County, Nebraska.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2010

In my time as a trial judge, I’ve learned that often when a litigant says it’s not about the money it is in fact about the money. You can’t tell at the beginning of a case but you can tell at the end. In this case, it was not about the money.

An Indian hanging himself in the drunk tank is seldom big news in Indian country except to his relatives. When Jay Spotted Elk hung himself while facing misdemeanor charges in Sheridan County, Nebraska, his mother decided not to stand for it. Arlyn Eastman/Broken Nose sued the county and several individuals who might have been able to prevent the suicide if they had been properly trained and motivated.

Any lawsuit is difficult, and this one much more so. In the wake of the civil rights movement, there was a time when the courts seemed generally sympathetic to claims by the powerless against the powerful. As a result, the Republican Party took on the reorientation of the federal courts as a project that continues to this day.

This year saw the racial attacks on Sonia Sotomayor and the recent hearing on the appointment of Elena Kagan that left the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee praising Kagan’s qualifications and personality while still resolved to vote against her (excepting Lindsey Graham, who seems to find good government more important than party discipline).

In all GOP administrations since Nixon, most nominees have been very young and very conservative. Young because federal judgeships are lifetime appointments and conservative to get the law back into what they choose to call the mainstream, where you can tell the winners largely by race and by class.

At this time, as at the beginning of the Clinton administration, there are no American Indians serving on federal courts, which is where Indian interests are normally adjudicated. As bad, the influx of judges with a political agenda has had approximately 40 years to work its magic, since the Democrats in power during that time have been centrists who would correctly claim that stacking courts is bad government and refrain from fighting fire with fire.

I was educated in the legal landscape peopled by Thurgood Marshall (demonized in the first day of the Kagan hearings), William O. Douglas, William Brennan, and judges like Hugo Black, who wrote the words that Indian lawyers call the all-purpose Indian law dissent: “Great nations, like great men, should keep their word.” I doubt that I would have become a lawyer had Thurgood Marshall not existed and I was reluctant to wash my hand again after William O. Douglas shook it.

In modern times, the “liberals” are conservative appointees who were enlightened by their experiences on the court like Harry Blackmun or David Souter. The “center” has been moved by political calculation. As a result, people without power have a set of problems that go far beyond the fact that they often don’t know lawyers and that lawsuits cost a lot of money.

Should she find a lawyer to work on a “contingent fee” (no pay unless you win), Spotted Elk’s mother would have to contend with the social fact of suing a local government (the law enforcement part, no less) and with the legal fact that if there is one class of litigants that has less success than American Indians it would have to be prisoners.

The courts, since the heyday of civil rights lawsuits, have made it harder to sue local governments for damages. It’s not enough that law enforcement officers violate your rights and they work for the city or the county you want to sue. To hold the local government responsible, you must prove that they did or failed to do something in particular. Most common is a failure to properly train or supervise the officers, but this has to be a pattern. One bad outcome is not enough, even if somebody is killed.

The lawyer who took on this case, Maren Chaloupka, hit a mother lode of evidence that was good for the lawsuit but bad for the Indian community in Nebraska:

• Twelve inmates had attempted suicide in the same jail, all but one Indian.
• The inmates had attempted suicide repeatedly.
• One inmate literally killed himself the day after he told corrections officers that he no longer wanted to live.

When nothing was done in the face of all this, it was bad for the Indians who might be in the jail from time to time but it made proving that the county had failed to take suicide precautions the proverbial slam dunk.

It became possible to prove that Jay Spotted Elk’s last night on earth was not unusual in the history of Sheridan County, Nebraska. According to a report in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald, Spotted Elk threatened suicide before he even got to the jail. Yet his belt was not removed and he was not closely watched.

In these rare cases when there’s a good chance of prevailing in a trial, there comes a time when you know why the lawsuit was filed. Everybody knows that going to trial is a crapshoot, but there is something to negotiate about if the lawyer on the other side is sane. If the case settles, that’s when you learn why the case was brought.

Chaloupka, of Scottsbluff and her co-counsel, Robin Zephier of the Abourezk Law Firm in Rapid City, got $100,000 paid to Jay Spotted Elk’s estate, managed by his mother. If that was all, it would be better than not placing any cost on Indian lives, but it is unlikely that I would be writing about it. The rest of the settlement requires the county to:

• Have all employees of the sheriff and jail trained in suicide prevention.
• Make efforts to contact the tribal suicide prevention program for any Indian who expresses ideas of suicide.
• Post the contact information for suicide prevention at Pine Ridge and Rosebud at the booking desk and keep a log of calls made to those programs.
• Notify the closest tribal suicide prevention program in cases where no program can be reached for the inmate’s tribe.
• Allow a representative of the tribal suicide prevention program to speak to the inmate by telephone or in person and document the reason why any recommendation by the tribal suicide prevention program is not followed.
• Provide a written report on compliance with the agreement every year until 2015, after which Spotted Elk’s mother retains the right to inspect the records.

This is what civil rights lawyers can do now and then even when the courts are so stacked against them, and local officials would plainly not care to spend money protecting Indians if they had a choice. In this case, we won’t know exactly whose life was saved but it is safe to say that saving lives will be the result. It’s for that result we should remember the life of Jay Spotted Elk.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the Sixties and Seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve is also a columnist for Indian Country Today, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

SPORT / Chief Wahoo : The Curse of Cleveland

Image from Newspaper Rock
Most racist logo in sports:
Has Chief Wahoo again cursed Cleveland?

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2010

CLEVELAND -- Another tomahawk has sailed into the hearts of Cleveland sports fans. Is it the work of Chief Wahoo, the most racist logo in all of sports? Has the ridiculous, buck-toothed profoundly offensive caricature of a single-feathered native poked yet another hole in Cleveland's soul?

Mark Welsh, part Ho-de-no-sau-nee (Iroquois) and part Lakota (Sioux) might say so. Mark is a mainstay of the native community in Ohio's capital. For years he's joined other activists when the season opens in Cleveland. They picket in protest of a cartoon they find deeply offensive.

In response, Cleveland Indian fans throw beer at them.

It's time to reconsider.

The departure of LeBron James from the Cavaliers is a death blow. Barring a miracle, no major sports franchise in this tough, depressed lake town has even a remote shot at a league title in the near future.

Not since the glory days of the football Browns and their great running back, Jim Brown, has there been a champion in Cleveland. The Browns and Cavs have both threatened since. The Indians twice came within a run of winning the World Series. The details are too heartbreaking to recount.

How about a name change? How about dumping that logo? How about a powwow with the native community to find a new spirit and image? It's been a welcome, long overdue trend in college sports. And it'd give Cleveland something -- ANYTHING!!! -- to talk about beside LeBron's jump to the beach.

While at Syracuse, Jim Brown played Lacrosse with the great Ho-de-no-sau-nee spiritual leader Oren Lyons. Let's get him and Jim together, organize a transformation of the name, face, and soul of Cleveland baseball, and move on.

A public renaming would be a magnificent gesture at a time like this. An act of contrition, and of grace. Our nation's capital could then strip the "Redskins" off that football team, an unconscionable epithet in this day and age.

Along the way, of course, we'd like to see communities finally own the sports teams whose billionaire speculators demand free stadiums, huge tax breaks, and the right to abuse the fans who love them with reckless abandon.

But in the meantime... how about it, Cleveland?... let's bury Chief Wahoo! We can be absolutely certain that whatever comes next will be better.

Mitakuye Oyasin.

[Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States is at. www.harveywasserman.com]

Photo by Mike Simons / Getty Images.
The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Steve Russell : On Being 'Outed' as an American Indian

Tribal secrets:
Carrying the freight of being an Indian

Being outed as an American Indian changed my professional life, starting with an overnight 20 point drop in my IQ.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2010

Steve Russell will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, January 12, 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. They will discuss crime and punishment, the status of American Indians, the War in Afghanistan, and other issues facing progressives in 2010 America -- as well as Steve's experiences as a Sixties activist, a trial judge, an educator, and as a Cherokee Indian. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

What does it matter to be American Indian? I get that a lot from friends and faux friends.

Actually, when I got “outed” the reaction of my friends hurt more than the reaction of my enemies. I was an elected official, and all elected officials who do anything have enemies. Since I was an elected official to change the world rather than to have a job, I did quite a bit. So I had quite a few enemies.

I was outed when the Austin newspaper carried a story about some lobbying I had done for the Texas Indian Bar Association. Judges lobby all the time, although we seldom call it what it is. The ethical rubric is “efforts to improve the administration of justice.”

I had in the past lobbied for a probation option in petty misdemeanor theft cases, for the power to confiscate a car in subsequent offense DWI cases, against parental notification of abortions, and for any number of legislative efforts sponsored by the Texas Council on Family Violence.

In this case, I had been noticed lobbying for legislation to put dead Indians back in the ground when they get dug up, just like we do with dead white people. I fought that fight for 12 years, six legislative sessions, without success, in spite of the consistent support of then-Senator Gonzalo Barrientos.

It was a losing battle. Now, as then, there are more dead Indians on Texas campuses as “scientific data” than there are live Indians as students.

While the battle was lost, the effort did me no political harm. After all, the rap put on Indians who demand the respect other human beings take for granted is that we are anti-intellectuals. We have been explicitly called “book burners” because Indian bones, don’t you know, can be read by physical anthropologists to tell us about the human past. This is only the case with Indian bones because white people came to the Americas so recently. The fact that white people will not stand for having their dead disturbed is… coincidence.

Whatever the merits, most of our statewide officeholders are living proof that anti-intellectualism is not a political liability in Texas. Still, being outed as an American Indian changed my professional life, starting with an overnight 20 point drop in my IQ. Lawyers were suddenly explaining things to me in court you would not have to explain to a first year law student.

A truly bizarre incident stemming from that news story involved an elderly gentleman who tracked me down at the courthouse to object to the fact I held public office -- because “Indians don’t pay taxes.” While I was finally able to convince him that this Indian has paid taxes since joining the military at age 17, he was still of the opinion that the only reason I did so was that I was too damn dumb to claim my “exemption.”

I had never hidden my tribal ties but never advertised them either. My wives and girlfriends knew, and I’m pretty sure most of the people who worked with me on The Rag knew because I was always interested in coverage of Indian issues.

After my outing, even people I had known for years reevaluated my intellect. My enemies decided that I had dredged up a fake past to play the affirmative action card. This in spite of the facts that I was born in raised in Oklahoma and that I never said a word about my ethnicity to any of the schools I attended except to request a graduation notice sent to the tribal newspaper.

The reason I never brought it up is that, while I support affirmative action as policy, I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole in my own life. I did not want the stigma, but it turns out I could not escape the stigma anyway.

In both of my academic appointments during my second career, I was admonished about publishing “Indian stuff.” It was really clear that I was wanted because I was a judge, not because I was Indian.

Now I’m retired in Sun City, Texas, and all that is behind me, right? Not exactly. In the gym I need to visit every day for my health, I find a goddam cigar store Indian. The first time I saw it, I got an immediate knot in my stomach, and it’s not gotten much better since. I wanted to retire but I’m going to have to make a stink.

I can play all the stuff I am in for like a jukebox: no offense is intended, it’s just an historical artifact (in a gym?), and, anyway, I’m part Indian (which part? Obviously, not the heart). I haven’t been here a month yet and I keep stalling the opening salvos in a battle that would not happen even for a black man. Can you imagine if it were a lawn jockey?

What does it matter to be an American Indian? It does not matter at all if you are willing to hide your ethnicity, something not difficult in the Southwest. But if you are outed or you out yourself, I’ve learned that it’s not easy to carry the freight of the least successful ethnicity in politics, in education, and in life expectancy, which I guess is another way of saying that few of us live to retire and therefore I should not be shocked to find little regard for our existence in a retirement community.

You can’t retire from being who you are.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment. He recently retired as an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University. His writing has been published widely; he is a columnist for Indian Country Today and a contributor to The Rag Blog. Steve was an activist in Austin in the Sixties and Seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. He lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin.]

Also see:

• Steve Russell, Indian : Advice to Myself at 14 by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / May 28, 2009
• Steve Russell on Native Hawaiians: Got Indigenous? by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2009
• Steve Russell : Let Us Now Praise (Not) Famous Women by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2009.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Robert Jensen : How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving

"The First Thanksgiving," painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930) / Wikimedia Commons.
How I stopped hating Thanksgiving
And learned to be afraid

This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two past essays (here and here) I examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.

Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a "National Day of Mourning."

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability.

Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart -- an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.

The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?

Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).

Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.

However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises -- economic and ecological, political and cultural -- that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.

As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. His articles on The Rag Blog are here and his writing can also be found here.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Peter Matthiessen : The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier

The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier
Vs. the United States of America

...this man's life leaks away behind grim concrete walls for the unworthy purpose of saving face for the FBI and a U.S. Attorney's Office...

By Peter Matthiessen / November 11, 2009

On July 27, 2009, I drove west from New York to the old riverside town of Lewisburg in central Pennsylvania, the site of the federal penitentiary where early the next morning I would make an appeal to the parole board on behalf of the American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier in his first parole hearing in fifteen years.

On this soft summer evening, a quiet gathering of Peltier supporters from all over the country had convened in a small park near the Susquehanna River. Despite his long history of defeats in court, these Indians and whites sharing a makeshift picnic at wood tables under the trees were optimistic about a favorable outcome. Surely a new era of justice for minorities and poor people had begun with the Obama administration, and anyway, wasn't Leonard's freedom all but assured by the Parole Act of 2005, which mandated release for inmates who had spent thirty or more years in prison?

Leonard Peltier, an Ojibwa-Lakota from Turtle Mountain, North Dakota, was one of the three young Indians who were among the participants in a shoot-out with the FBI at Oglala on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation on a hot dusty day in June 1975. They were later charged with the deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams.

Ostensibly searching for a suspect in a recent robbery case, the agents had been warned by tribal police not to enter the property where the AIM Indians had their camp. Their intrusion apparently provoked a warning that led to an exchange of gunfire. Understandably outraged by the deaths of Coler and Williams and in particular by the fact that an unknown "shooter" had finished off both wounded men at point-blank range, their fellow agents would also suffer intense frustration and embarrassment when a dozen or more of the Indians involved, using a brushy culvert under a side road, escaped a tight cordon of hundreds of agents, Indian and state police, national guardsmen, and vigilantes who had the area surrounded.

More galling still, Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, two of the three AIM suspects in the killings arrested during the FBI's huge "ResMurs" (Reservation Murders) investigation, were acquitted a year later in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on a plea of self-defense, as the third and last suspect, Leonard Peltier, would certainly have been as well, had he not fled to Canada. He was arrested there in February 1976, extradited back to the US, and tried separately.

Though originally indicted with the others on identical evidence, he was barred by a hostile new judge, Paul Benson, from presenting the same argument based on self-defense that had led to Robideau and Butler's acquittal. Furiously prosecuted as the lone killer and convicted for both deaths on disputed evidence, Peltier was sentenced in February 1977 in Fargo, North Dakota, to two consecutive life terms in federal prison.

The following year, when Peltier's conviction was appealed, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Donald Ross denounced the coercion of witnesses and manipulation of evidence in his case as "a clear abuse of the investigative process by the FBI"; the US Attorney's Office, too, would be sharply criticized for withholding exculpatory evidence.

In October 1984, in an evidentiary hearing in Bismarck, North Dakota, ordered by the appellate court to review the possibility of a new trial, the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Lynn Crooks, had to concede that the FBI's own laboratory had failed to verify the claimed ballistics link between Peltier and the murder weapon that was used to nail down his conviction—a shell casing of disputed provenance that Crooks had called "perhaps the most important piece of evidence in this case." Even so, Judge Benson refused to reconsider the conviction.

The following year when the decision was appealed again, Crooks finally admitted that the identity of "the shooter" had never been proven and was in fact unknown to the prosecution even when it was twisting the evidence to ensure Peltier's conviction and make certain that its third and last suspect—by its own description, "the only one we got" -- was imprisoned for life. Yet the appellate court, while noting that so much tainted evidence had deprived the defendant of his constitutional right to due process of law, found "no compelling legal justification" for ordering a new trial.

In a TV interview after his retirement in 1989, Judge Gerald Heaney, who had signed that astonishing decision, called it "the most difficult I had to make in twenty-two years on the bench." The following year, in the National Law Journal, this troubled jurist held the FBI "equally responsible" for the deaths of its two agents; in a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, he urged commutation of Peltier's sentence.

Questioned on the same 1989 TV show about the perjured affidavits extracted by FBI agents from a frightened alcoholic, U.S. Attorney Crooks declared: "I don't really know and I don't really care if they were false. I don't agree that we did anything wrong, but I can tell you, it don't bother my conscience one whit if we did." Properly outraged by this arrogant refusal to repudiate U.S. government use of fabricated evidence, Senator Inouye, as a former U.S. attorney, called Crooks "a disgrace to the profession."

I first interviewed Leonard Peltier in Marion Penitentiary in 1981, and that same year, with his original codefendant Bob Robideau, I inspected the Jumping Bull Ranch at Oglala where the shoot-out had taken place. Later, after reading many if not most of the pertinent documents, including the FBI field reports and the transcripts of both trials, I returned to Oglala to interview local people and study the scene again.

Like the FBI, I would hear all sorts of rumors about the many young Indians involved without learning which one had fired the fatal shots; however there seemed to me no doubt whatever that Leonard Peltier had been railroaded into prison.

Unfortunately my long book making that case [In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Viking, 1983)] was quickly suppressed by libel suits brought by South Dakota's attorney general, William Janklow, and an FBI agent named David Price. Eight years would pass before both suits were summarily dismissed and the book was back in circulation. Meanwhile Peltier's long fight for a fair trial had won his endorsement as a political prisoner by Amnesty International, and his thousands of supporters throughout the world included the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the great majority of his own people in the more than 250 Indian nations that had formally demanded his release.

In Peltier's first parole hearing in 1996, the examiner filed an internal recommendation in Peltier's favor. (The U.S. Parole Commission, like the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI, is under the aegis of the Justice Department: its examiner informs himself about the case, questions both sides, and appraises the new evidence, if any.) Yet in actions so belated and irregular as to raise suspicion of undue influence, the commission replaced that first examiner with one more to its liking and denied parole.

By then, the few bold lawmakers who had called for investigations had retreated or retired, and Peltier's best hope was executive clemency. To that end, I wangled my way into the Oval Office and pressed my book about the case into President Clinton's hands. In January 2001, during Clinton's last week in office, as FBI lobbyists -- the Association of Retired FBI Agents and No Parole for Peltier -- marched in front of the White House, I joined attorney Bruce Ellison and filmmaker Jon Kilik in a long meeting with the presidential and White House counsels in which we argued that granting clemency to an American Indian who could offer nothing in return was a bold symbolic step that could only enhance the President's last-minute efforts to prop up his legacy.

The lawyers seemed impressed and hopes were high, but when the clemency list appeared on the Saturday morning of Inauguration Day, Peltier's name was missing. The phone call I dreaded was put through from Leavenworth Prison in early afternoon. "They didn't give it to me," mumbled a stunned voice I scarcely recognized -- the first time in twenty years of visits, letters, and telephone conversations that Leonard Peltier's strong spirit sounded broken. With all court appeals exhausted and no hope of mercy from the incoming Republican administration, this aging prisoner was condemned to wait for his next parole hearing in 2009.

In the park in Lewisburg, people agreed that had the shoot-out victims not been "FBIs," Leonard might never have been convicted; at the very least, he would have been paroled many years before. Someone in the park recalled the fear and disruption on the reservations caused by the FBI's huge ResMurs investigation (which was widely perceived as the latest chapter in the long history of oppression and revenge against "the redskins who killed Custer" that had led up to the shoot-out).

The killing that day in June 1975 of a young member of the AIM by a marksman's bullet in the forehead had gone all but unmentioned, someone said, let alone investigated by "the Injustice Department," doubtless because "Injuns don't count." How about Bob Robideau's statement to an FBI man that he had been "the shooter"? Would the Parole Commission take that into account? And was it suspicious that Robideau had been found dead last February in Barcelona? (The official autopsy concluded that he had struck his head in a fall while suffering a seizure.)

With Peltier's attorney Eric Seitz and the two other parole advocates -- Dr. Thom White Wolf Fassett, a Seneca elder and United Methodist adviser to Congress on Indian affairs, and an Ojibwa woman named Cindy Maleterre representing Peltier's Turtle Mountain Reservation -- I went early the next morning to the prison, passing supporters waving "Free Peltier" signs at the entrance road.

In the hearing room the first to speak were the two sons of the late agent Jack Coler. After testifying to their family's great loss, they suggested that if this man facing them today were to take responsibility and express remorse for those brutal murders he so stubbornly denies having committed, the Coler family might not protest his parole. But the three FBI spokesmen and the assistant U.S. attorney who spoke next were content to repeat the same vilifications and distortions of the facts that won a conviction back in 1977. Locked long ago into their ResMurs myth, they insisted that Peltier was still a danger to the public and cited those provisions in the Parole Act specifying that parole may be denied if the subject's release might "depreciate the seriousness of the offense" or "promote disrespect for the law."

In response to the charge that Peltier has evaded his responsibility for those murders, Eric Seitz countered that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office have evaded responsibility for their own illegal tactics in his prosecution. Otherwise Seitz made no attempt to retry a long historic case in a few minutes, emphasizing instead the prisoner's exemplary behavior record, serious health problems, and other strong qualifications for parole under the commission's geriatric and medical criteria. He reminded Examiner Scott Kubic that in a few weeks, on September 12, when Peltier would turn sixty-five, he would also become eligible for home detention under the new Second Chance program for elderly inmates designed to ease overcrowding in the U.S. prisons.

Thom White Wolf testified that Peltier's incarceration for nearly thirty-three years has been viewed both nationally and internationally as a gross injustice and a major embarrassment to our country, with a negative effect on the world's view of how the U.S. government treats its native population.

When my turn came, I spoke to the points made in this article, adding how much this inmate had matured over the three decades of our acquaintance, not only as an articulate spokesman for his people but as an artist, self-taught in the prisons, whose work is admired through-out the U.S. And Cindy Maleterre assured the examiner that the prisoner's Ojibwa-Dakota people at Turtle Mountain -- including grandchildren he has never seen -- had already taken care of the parole requirements of social support, adequate housing, and steady employment (as an arts-and-crafts teacher and alcoholism counselor on the reservation), and were planning to welcome him home with a great feast.

That afternoon we left the prison with the feeling that Examiner Kubic had listened carefully and would recommend parole -- a guarded optimism we conveyed to the flag-waving supporters awaiting our report on the public road. But no one forgot how the examiner's finding in Peltier's favor fifteen years before had been aborted; in the next weeks, as so often in the past, the prisoner would have to suffer the suspense of desperate hope.

On Friday, August 20, federal inmate #89637-132 received terse notice that his petition for parole had been denied: not until his "15-year Reconsideration Hearing in July 2024," he was informed, would he become eligible to be turned down again. In the unlikely event that he lives long enough to attend that hearing, Inmate Peltier will be eighty years old.

In his angry response, Attorney Seitz accused the commission of "adopting the position of the FBI that anyone who may be implicated in the killings of its agents should never be paroled and should be left to die in prison." I entirely agree with Seitz and share his anger. For the prisoner and his supporters, the Lewisburg hearing had been hollow, with a predetermined outcome: The United States v. Leonard Peltier had always been a matter less of justice than of retribution.

Americans -- those in public office especially -- should inform themselves about this painful case and demand an unbiased investigation that might start with one simple question: If, in the thirty-three years since his trial, reputable evidence has ever emerged that Leonard Peltier was the lone killer and deserves to be in prison for life, why hasn't the Justice Department produced it?

Without public protest, Peltier will not be granted a fair hearing since his prosecutors know that in the absence of honest evidence, "the only one we got" would be set free. Instead, this man's life leaks away behind grim concrete walls for the unworthy purpose of saving face for the FBI and a U.S. Attorney's Office that together botched the famous ResMurs case and mean to see somebody pay. And who better for this fate than a "radical" AIM Indian who dared stand up to "legally constituted authority" in defense of his humiliated people, as he was doing with such tragic consequences on that long-ago June day?

In reviewing this case with an open mind, as surely he must in fulfilling his oath of office, Attorney General Eric Holder (the assistant attorney general in 2001) might reflect on his own role in the clemency bestowed by Clinton on Marc Rich, the notorious "fugitive felon." He might consider, too, Rich's consequent evasion of even a single day in prison in the harsh light of the eleven thousand days already served by a penniless American Indian who remains innocent before the law, having never been proven guilty.

[Peter Matthiessen won the 2008 National Book Award for his novel Shadow Country. His recent books include End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica and The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes (November 2009). This article first appeared in The New York Review of Books (Volume 56, Number 18, dated November 19, 2009).]

Source / New York Review of Books / Upaya Newsletter

• Go here for other Rag Blog articles about Leonard Peltier.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...