In 2007, the U.N. adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (“The Declaration”), despite the United States abstaining from the vote along with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. In 2010, President Barack Obama revisited The Declaration and adopted it on behalf of the U.S. However, as recently as 2015, the Gold King Mine contaminated three million gallons of water in the Colorado River which serves as drinking water for the Navajo and Hopi downstream. The federal E.P.A. appropriated $156,000 in reparations for Gold King Mine, while the Flint, Michigan water crisis in 2014 received $80 million in federal funds.
Category Archives: nayra
Wašíču is the Lakota and Dakota word for people of Western European descent. It expresses the indigenous population’s perception of the non-natives’ relationship with the land and the indigenous population. Typically it refers to white people but does not specifically mention skin color or race.
A common folk etymology claims that wašíču originates from wašíŋ ičú “he takes fat”
Living in proximity to high levels of pollution or industrial facilities has been linked to serious short-term and long-term health impacts. In what is perhaps the most negative use of Native American lands, the federal government has used reservations for nuclear testing and nuclear waste disposal. Uranium mining, uranium conversion and enrichment, and nuclear weapons testing have all occurred on reservation lands in the past century. After creating the Nevada Test Site on Western Shoshone lands in Nevada, the federal government tested over one thousand atomic weapons on Western Shoshone land between the 1950-90s. The Western Shoshone people call themselves the “most bombed nation on the planet.” Similar activities happened on Paiute Shoshone lands as well.
“I know the sap that courses through the trees as I know the blood that flows through my veins. The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our grandfathers grandfathers.
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The wind that gave me my first breath will receive my last sigh.”
‘Other trends that Pinker invokes include the spread of literacy, which, he argues, led to an expanding “circle of empathy.”‘
Many households in India own and grow a cannabis plant to be able to offer cannabis to a passing sadhu (ascetic holy men), and during some evening devotional services it is not uncommon for cannabis to be smoked by everyone present.
At the turn of the common era, male cults devoted to a goddess that flourished throughout the broad region extending from the Mediterranean to South Asia. While galli were missionizing the Roman Empire, kalū, kurgarrū, and assinnu continued to carry out ancient rites in the temples of Mesopotamia, and the third-gender predecessors of the hijra were clearly evident. It should also be mentioned of the eunuch priests of Artemis at Ephesus; the western Semitic qedeshim, the male “temple prostitutes” known from the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic texts of the late second millennium; and the keleb, priests of Astarte at Kition and elsewhere.
“For example, we can notice how the turn to the singular engenders — and in fact requires — a limited engagement with the historical. By treating the internet as a monumental event that has shaped the entirety of the present, the post-internet, as both a discourse and a concept, gains its particular “currency.” History must be stripped of complexity, ossified and binarized, for the post-internet to function. This denuded sense of the historical is reflected in Olson’s understanding of the post-internet era, which for her “may be ahistorical insofar as it has no degree-zero.” This assertion’s appeal to generality, its belief in the total subsumption of the contemporary by the internet, refuses to countenance historical complexity, instead allowing for a subsequent assertion that “We are now in a postinternet era. Everything is always-already postinternet.” In these terms, history is rendered as a thing that happens, that has already happened, not something that can be shaped, that emerges out of economic, social, political, or cultural forces. The internet’s emergence can then be posited as a rupture, something that, by clearing away the vestiges of the past, announces a new future. In the face of this epochal shift, art exists simply to register these changes and to self-consciously comment on them from within.
No politics, no struggle, only content.
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The play […] is to desediment, to exfoliate, to renew the earthly and inseparable assembly, the habitual jam, by way of and in the differentiation of what will be neither regulated nor understood. All we got is us in this continual giving away of all.
Against the individual, Crampton is instead enfolded in a trans-generational play of influence that resolves itself into a sonic mantle that she takes on and continues. Ownership of this sound is less important than its persistence, ensuring that its legacies are respected, its attachments attended to. This is a mode of music-making for the present, one that neither shies away from history nor lets itself be overcome by it. It is a music-making that understands that history is made “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The past does not recede into obscurity here, crushed by the momentousness of the internet. Instead, it is reworked, returned to the present in a new form, giving the lie to a historical consciousness constructed according to a series of pre-s and post-s.”
Buffalo (American Bison)
“in Arapaho: bii (bison cow), henéécee (bison bull)
in Lakota: pté (bison cow), tȟatȟáŋka (bison bull)
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With a population in excess of 60 million in the late 18th century, the species was down to just 541 animals by 1889. Recovery efforts expanded in the mid-20th century, with a resurgence to roughly 31,000 wild bison today, largely restricted to a few national parks and reserves.
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Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century.
The US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. The federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons, primarily to pressure them onto the Indian reservations during times of conflict by removing their main food source. Without the bison, native people of the plains were often forced to leave the land or starve to death.
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As Crow chief Plenty Coups described it: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere.” Spiritual loss was rampant; bison were an integral part of traditional tribal societies and they would frequently take part in ceremonies for each bison they killed to honor its sacrifice. In order to boost morale during this time, Sioux and other tribes took part in the Ghost Dance, which consisted of hundreds of people dancing until 100 persons were lying unconscious.
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[The bison’s] historical range, by 9000 BC, is described as the great bison belt, a tract of rich grassland that ran from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, east to the Atlantic Seaboard (nearly to the Atlantic tidewater in some areas) as far north as New York and south to Georgia and, according to some sources, further south to Florida, with sightings in North Carolina near Buffalo Ford on the Catawba River as late as 1750.
The first thoroughfares of North America, except for the time-obliterated paths of mastodon or muskox and the routes of the mound builders, were the traces made by bison and deer in seasonal migration and between feeding grounds and salt licks. Many of these routes, hammered by countless hoofs instinctively following watersheds and the crests of ridges in avoidance of lower places’ summer muck and winter snowdrifts, were followed by the aboriginal North Americans as courses to hunting grounds and as warriors’ paths. They were invaluable to explorers and were adopted by pioneers [and went on to become many of the highways and roads we still use today].
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A white buffalo or white bison is an American bison possessing white fur, and is considered sacred or spiritually significant in several Native American religions; therefore, such buffalo are often visited for prayer and other religious rituals.
White Buffalo Calf Woman told the people that she would return in the form of a white buffalo calf and that it would be both a blessing and a warning. When the white animal shows its sacred color there will be great changes upon the earth. Arvol and many others interpret those changes to mean the current ecological crises taking place. If humanity continues to live without harmony with the earth it will be cursed, but if spiritual unity and harmony with the earth is achieved humanity will be blessed.
On May 12, 2011, a white male buffalo calf named Lightning Medicine Cloud (Wakinya Pejuta Mahpiya in Lakota) was born near Greenville, Texas during a thunderstorm on the ranch of Arby Little Soldier. In May 2012, less than year after its birth, Lightning Medicine Cloud was found dead, thought to have been butchered and skinned by an unknown individual; his mother was found dead the next day. A necropsy determined that they died of natural causes, from a bacterial infection called blackleg [or quarter evil]. In April 2012, Lightning Medicine Cloud’s father was killed by a lightning strike.”