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Whitopia

Fri Nov 24th 2017 by abagond

Whitopia (by 2007) is that place in the US where White people move to be among their own kind. Not the Rust Belt or the Farm Belt, but places like exurban Atlanta or the Idaho panhandle, places where White people of means move. Of the 3,142 counties in the US, 284 are Whitopian, all but 17 of them red.

Benjamin among the natives, late 2000s.

Rich Benjamin, a Black New Yorker and think tank thinker, travelled the land in his red pickup truck from 2007 to 2009 and lived among the Whitopians. He approached it in an anthropological spirit, living among the natives in one Whitopian county for three or four months and then moving to another. He wrote about it in a book, “Searching for Whitopia” (2009). Not a satire! This post is based on his findings.

Three Whitopian places where Benjamin lived.

Whitopia:

  • Activities: golfing, fishing, boating, poker, anti-immigration protests, zoning board hearings, parties, Aryan Nation religious retreats, White-on-White gentrification, displaying the Confederate flag (even in Idaho).
  • Places: megachurches, gated communities, shooting ranges, the great outdoors.
  • Values: merit, freedom, individualism, privatism (more on privatism below).
  • Political issues: closing the Mexican border, tax cuts, small government.
  • Catchphrase: “take our country back”.

Trump is right on their wavelength. He got 67% of their votes in 2016.

White flight – or why they move to Whitopia:

  • push: They want to get away from “illegals”, “crowded neighbourhoods”, “government interference”, “minorities”, “density”, “social welfare abuse”, “high taxes”, “crowded schools”.
  • pull: They want to live in a place that has good property values, friendliness, orderliness, safety, that support their values of merit, freedom, individualism, and privatism.

Thus their description of what is, in effect, White flight.

At the personal level, one-on-one, Whitopians are nice people. They are friendly, not openly racist – not even the skinheads. They are way nicer than White people in Jim Crow times.

But at the institutional level, community-to-community, they support racist policies, even if they try to dress it up with colour-blind, dog-whistly language, like about “safety” (one of Trump’s own dog whistles, by the way).

Privatism: They want low taxes and a small public sector. Even if it means, say, bad public schools and millions without good health care. It goes beyond mere selfishness, of not wanting to pay taxes. There is a racist edge to it too. They see government spending as mainly helping Blacks and Mexicans. That is why they are so against Obamacare, for example: it would give more Black and Mexican people health care.

“Racism without racists” is what Benjamin calls it, in White Liberal fashion. I call it “racism with racists who want to pretend they are not racist.” They are White segregationists, plain and simple.

The Browning of the US, 1990-2040.

2042: The backdrop to all this, whatever you call it, is 2042. That is the year when non-Hispanic Whites are set to become less than half of the US. The Whitopians are in effect withdrawing from the US, not just their bodies but as much of their tax money as they can. It is their attempt to make their little corners of a Browning nation into White utopias.

– Abagond, 2017.

See also:

572

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Gnadenhutten

Wed Nov 22nd 2017 by abagond

Gnadenhutten (1772-82), the Huts of Grace, was a settlement of Delaware Indians in Ohio Country. They were peaceful Moravian Christians who worked hard and had nice things. In the US War of Independence (1775-83) they refused to fight or take sides.

By 1780 nearly all of the Delaware had turned against the US, the Long Knives. But not the Delaware Moravians. They remained neutral.

Detail of a statue of Buckongahelas.

In April 1781, Buckongahelas, a Delaware military commander who was fighting against the US conquest of Ohio (1777-94), came to take them to safety:

“Friends, listen to what I have to say to you:

“I am myself come to bid you rise and go with me to a secure place! Do not my friends, covet the land you now hold under cultivation. I will conduct you to a country equally good”

He reminded them:

“Look back at the murders committed by the Long Knives on many of our relations who lived peaceably as neighbors to them on the Ohio. Did not they kill them without the least provocation? Are they now, do you think, better men than they were?”

But not ALL White people:

“I admit that there are good white men, but they bear no proportion to the bad; the bad must be the strongest, for they rule. They do what they please.

“They enslave those who are not of their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who created them. They would make slaves of us, if they could; but as they cannot do it, they kill us.

“There is no faith to be placed in their words. They are not like the Indians, who are only enemies while at war, and are friends in peace. They will say to an Indian, ‘My friend; my brother!’ They will take him by the hand, and at the same moment, destroy him.

“And so you will also be treated by them before long. Remember that this day, I have warned you to beware of such friends as these.

“I know the Long Knives. They are not to be trusted.”

The Delaware Christians said they trusted the Long Knives and chose to stay.

In March 1782, a year later on a winter’s day, the Long Knives arrived, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson. He saw their

“clothes, children’s caps, tea-kettles, pots, cups and saucers, etc., saws, axes, chisels, pewter basins, porringers, etc.”

He accused them of having killed Whites to get these things and sentenced them to death. To save on ammunition, he had them all clubbed to death as they prayed: 29 men, 27 women, and 34 children. And then carted off their stuff, pewter basins and all.

Only two boys escaped alive.

Who was the “heathen”? Who was the “savage”?

an 1855 picture of the massacre.

Tecumseh in 1810:

“You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?”

A 2009 photo of the mass grave of those killed in the Gnadenhutten Massacre.

– Abagond, 2017.

Sources: Google Images; ICMN; Britannica; Tecumseh’s 1810 speech; Native Sun News; American Rhetoric; “The Delaware: A History” (1972) by C.A. Weslag; “Facing East from Indian Country” (2001) by Daniel K. Richter. 

See also:

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The Delaware Indians – where are they now?

Mon Nov 20th 2017 by abagond

Delaware Nation Princess 2016, Sariah Taylor Pemberton, left, and the Princess Program Manager Melanie Watkins-Quiver, pose outside the Pocono Cinema in East Stroudsburg, in a part of Pennsylvania where the Delaware used to live. “Pocono” is a Delaware place name. PHOTO BY MEG McGUIRE. Via delawarecurrents.org.

Note: This is a work in progress, a collection of notes.

The Delaware or Lenape (leh-NAH-pay) Indians are the Native Americans native to metropolitan New York City, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and eastern Delaware state in the north-eastern US. In Anglo American lore they are the ones who “sold Manhattan for $24.”

So what became of them? Did they disappear? Are they still walking the earth somewhere?

In the main, those who were not killed off by war or disease, sold into slavery, or who became part of White society, were driven west off their land. Most wound up in Oklahoma, some in Wisconsin. And some fled the US altogether and wound up in Ontario, Canada. In Ontario they found themselves among the Iroquois, in Oklahoma mostly among the Cherokee.

Lenapehoking, their homeland circa 1600.

Their migrations, 1600-1900.

The nitty-gritty, showing intermediate homelands. Their present reservations in 2017 are marked in red. The dotted line is the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

That is what history tells us. So far as I know there is not (yet) any sort of  genetic analysis.

In 1600 the Delaware numbered maybe 30,000 to 85,000, still living in their homeland.

In 2017 they number about 16,000.

Delaware tribes recognized by the US or Canadian government:

  • US: 13,505 enrolled members
  • Canada: 1,877

The last live on two different parts of an Iroquois reserve (the same one where Robbie Robertson learned to play guitar).

Note that not everyone necessarily lives on a reservation. In the case of the Six Nations reserve, for example, only about 38% of the Delaware do.

There is one more tribe, one that is recognized by a US state:

The Nanticoke are not Delaware Indians, but were a neighbouring people who lived to the south-west, in the Chesapeake Bay region.

There are other Delaware tribes, unrecognized by any government. It is hard to tell which are real and which are fake. Fake Indians are a real thing – if that makes sense.

In addition, there are countless individuals who simply melted into the White melting pot over the years, culturally and genetically. The Delaware, unlike other Natives, generally did not marry Blacks.

Religion: Christianity. Their Native religion died out in the 1940s or so. And with it went much of the old Delaware culture. Powwows and peyotism, which some take part in, are pan-Indian practices, not something that comes down to the Delaware strictly from their own culture.

Languages: English, Munsee, Unami.

  • Unami: on August 31st 2002 the last native speaker of Unami died: Edward Thompson of the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
  • Munsee: in 2009 there were still six natives speakers, all were over 70, all were living at Moraviantown in Ontario.

Race: Some can pass for White, some even have blue eyes, while others look markedly Indian. Their skin is lighter on average than in the 1600s, when it was sometimes almost black.

The Executive Committee of the Delaware Nation (Anadarko, Oklahoma), June 30th 2017.

– Abagond, 2017.

See also:

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Robbie Robertson: Peyote Healing

Sun Nov 19th 2017 by abagond

Remarks:

The lyrics are in Lakota Sioux, the music provided by Robbie Robertson & the Red Road Ensemble, and the pictures in the video are mainly from the #NoDAPL protests in 2016. Peyote songs are a genre in their own right. The Native American Church uses peyote as a sacrament in their religion.

This song was on Robertson’s 1998 album “Contact from the Underworld Of Redboy”. He received a Nammy Award for Lifetime Achievement that same year.

Robertson is a Canadian rock musician best known as a lead guitarist and songwriter with The Band.  I mainly know him, though, for “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” (1987). His mother was Iroquois (Cayuga and Mohawk), his father Jewish. He learned to play guitar on her reservation in Ontario, Canada. In the middle of the night he listened to blues music on the radio coming out of Tennessee.

See also:

Lyrics:

Lakota (English):

Wani wachiyelo Ate omakiyayo (Father help me I want to live)
Wani wachiyelo Ate omakiyayo (Father help me I want to live)
Wani wachiyelo Ate omakiyayo (Father help me I want to live)
Atay nimichikun (Father you have done this)
Oshiya chichiyelo (Humbly have pity on me)
Wani wachiyelo Atay omakiyayo (Father help me I want to live)
Wani wachiyelo Atay omakiyayo (Father help me I want to live)
Wani wachiyelo Atay (Father I want to live)

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Indian miseducation

Sat Nov 18th 2017 by abagond

Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1885, the model for Indian boarding schools. Click to enlarge.

Indian miseducation (1830s- ) began in the US with Christian missionaries in the 1830s. In the 1870s the government started opening its infamous Indian boarding schools. They have nearly all been closed, but miseducation proceeds apace.

Catchphrase: Kill the Indian and save the man.

Native Americans had no trouble educating their children. For thousands of years they had been passing down the knowledge and values needed to live in North America and keep their societies going. They had no need of White education.

Deficit theory model: But Whites discovered their need for White education: Natives were “heathens” and “savages”!

Colonizing mission: Natives had a much better claim to the land than Whites, so Whites broke them militarily, spiritually and culturally. They broke them first with the US Army and then with schools:

Indian boarding schools: To destroy their cultures, Natives were often sent to faraway schools – to make their Native education next to impossible and to put a White education in its place. Those who refused to send their children to an Indian boarding school were thrown in jail. Canada and Australia were doing much the same thing.

Sun Elk, a Taos Pueblo Indian, went to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s:

“We all wore white man’s clothes and ate white man’s food and went to white man’s churches and spoke white man’s talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances.”

Chiricahua Apache children in November 1886 (top), and four months later at Carlisle. Via gmu.edu.

Christianity was forced on them, even in government schools. Natives did not have religious freedom under law till 1978.

English was almost literally beaten into them: you got a beating if you were caught speaking your Native tongue. That is why Native languages are now dying out. Wichita died just last year (2016).

Intergenerational trauma: boarding schools featured not just beatings, but child abuse and sexual abuse too. The damage has been intergenerational and lasts down to this day.

Assimilation: despite all this, their forced assimilation into Anglo-Protestant culture failed: it did not end the racism against them. In fact, that racism was built right in, adding a layer of internalized racism to their souls.

The Hampton model of industrial education, which Booker T. Washington championed and W.E.B. Du Bois argued against, was applied to Indian boarding schools. It kept Natives at the low end of the labour market. Skull measurements in the 1800s and IQ tests in the 1900s proved to Whites that Blacks and Natives were not capable of much more.

In the 1970s most boarding school were closed. The few that remained opened were reformed.

In 1990 Congress passed NALA, the Native American Languages Act, but has not put much money behind it. Those taught in a Native language do better at school than those taught in English.

Today many Natives, like many Blacks, go to schools which are underfunded, underperforming, segregated, and Eurocentric. Tribes still do not control their own schools.

– Abagond, 2017.

Sources: Google Images; “For Indigenous Eyes Only” (2005) edited by Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird; “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” (2014) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; culturalsurvival.org (2012).

See also:

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How to study the Whites

Thu Nov 16th 2017 by abagond

How to study the Whites (Second Nations) of North America:

Native lens – only Native American writers and scholars can be trusted to be objective, know the facts, and have a good understanding of the Whites. White universities and professors are the blind leading the blind. White film, news and television cannot be trusted either since they are sunk in self-serving stereotypes, myths and lies.

ethnocentrism – dismiss the history that Whites tell as myth, their religion as superstition, their medicine as half quackery, their lifestyle as a huge waste of resources. Opportunists, of course, will try to paint their religion as “ancient wisdom” or something “spiritual”, but they are just out to make money. They are not accredited scholars.

deficiency model – the Whites are different because something is wrong with them. For example, they take, take, take. They cannot control their children. They are disrespectful. They are cruel to Natives for no apparent reason.

ethnographic gaze – send trained anthropologists to live among the Whites and write up their findings.

documentaries – human zoos are out, but you can still film documentaries of their everyday lives so people can see how they live. A good documentary about the Whites will show things like:

  • a house, both inside and out;
  • the mother engaged in food preparation;
  • the father at work or (for more drama) confronting a neighbour;
  • smiling children;
  • the grandmother (hopefully wrinkled with missing teeth) rambling incoherently (with subtitles) about the lost past (you may need to insert a two-sentence summary of White history);
  • the photogenic teenage daughter getting ready for a dress-up event (like a dance or a religious ceremony);
  • the event itself (so we can see the White culture in action in all its glory);

race and culture – mix the two up, like this post is doing.

museums – have archaeologists and anthropologists gather artefacts made by White people and put them in museums for further study. Broken pots are the best, the older the better. Good too are traditional costumes, like those worn by brides, priests or circus clowns. So are hunting weapons, spent shell casings, lost golf balls, human remains, and stolen artwork. All shown by region, and maybe ethnic group, but without historical context.

static past – study the Pilgrim Fathers more than the present-day Whites.

nation of immigrants – the US is best understood as a nation of immigrants, of people who came to the US from all over the world to make a better life for their families. The immigrants in turn are best understood through:

  • multiculturalism – study their cultures: food, dress, customs, etc. No need to understand their boring history or politics.
  • cameos – study their men and women who are important in Native history.
  • contributions – like penicillin and pizza.

White History Month – study White history one month a year, mainly through cameos and contributions, maybe throw in a documentary or museum trip. The same goes for Black, Asian and Latino history. The other five months of the school year are needed for studying Native history.

– Abagond, 2017.

See also:

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The Trumpification of the US

Wed Nov 15th 2017 by abagond

Climate Change

Climate change affects every corner of the American continent. It is making droughts drier and longer, floods more dangerous and hurricanes more severe.

The glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park are melting so quickly, they”re expected to disappear in the next two decades. Rising seas are consuming the world’s first wildlife refuge – Florida’s Pelican Island – which President Teddy Roosevelt set aside in 1903.

At t The U.S. Department of the Interior, we manages one-fifth of the land in the country United States, 35,000 miles of coastline, and 1.76 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf. We The Department also upholds the federal government’s trust responsibilities to 562567 Indian tribes; conserve fish, wildlife and their habitats; manages water supplies for more than 30 million people; and protects the icons of our national heritage America’s natural treasures.

The impacts of climate change are forcing us to change how we manage these have led the Department to focus on how we manage our nation’s public lands and resources. Climate change may dramatically affect water supplies in certain watersheds, impact coastal wetlands and barrier islands, cause relocation of and stress on wildlife, increase wildland fires, further spread invasive species, and more.  The Department of the Interior contributes sound scientific research to address this and other environmental challenges. 

We at Interior are taking the lead in protecting our nation”s resources from these impacts and in managing our public lands to mitigate the effects of climate change. On Sept. 14, 2009, then-Secretary Salazar launched our first-ever coordinated strategy to address current and future impacts of climate change on America’s land, water, wildlife, cultural-heritage and tribal resources. Secretary Jewell has made climate change a priority.

The framework through which our bureaus coordinate climate-change science and resource-management strategies includes: 

  • A Climate Change Response Council — Under the leadership of secretary, deputy secretary and counselor, this council coordinates our response to the impacts of climate change within and among our bureaus. It also works to improve the sharing and communication of climate- change impact science, including through www.data.gov.
  • Eight DOI Regional Climate Science Centers — Serving Alaska, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest, the Midwest, the West, Northwest, and Pacific regions, these centers synthesize existing climate-change-impact data and management strategies, help resource managers put them into action on the ground, and engage the public through education initiatives.CSCs are regional entities that extend from the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center (NCCWSC), located at USGS headquarters. The NCCWSC was established by Congress in 2008 to help deliver scientific and technical information to help resource managers cope with a changing climate. Working in partnership with resource managers and scientists at national, regional, and landscape levels, the NCCWSC:
    • Forecasts fish and wildlife population and habitat changes in response to climate change.
    • Assesses the vulnerability and risk of species and habitats to climate change.
    • Links models of physical climate change (such as temperature and precipitation) with models that predict ecological, habitat, and population responses.
    • Develops standardized approaches to monitoring and help link existing monitoring efforts to climate and ecological or biological response models.
  • A Network of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives — These cooperatives engage Interior and other and federal agencies, local and state partners, and the public to craft practical, landscape-level strategies for managing climate-change impacts within the eight regions. They focus on impacts such as the effects of climate change on wildlife migration patterns, wildfire risk, drought, or invasive species that typically extend beyond the borders of any single National Wildlife Refuge, Bureau of Land Management unit, or national park.

Resources:

Thus the changes to the US Department of Interior’s home page on climate change since a year ago, November 15th 2016. The picture and red text are new, the crossed out text is gone. 

– Abagond, 2017.

Update (December 16th): The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) was told by the Trump Administration that in their budget documents they can no longer use these seven words: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, science-based. Axios.

See also:

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Uranium One

Tue Nov 14th 2017 by abagond

Uranium One (2005- ) was a South African company bought by a Canadian uranium mining company in 2007. It has holdings in South Africa, Australia, Canada, the US, and Kazakhstan. Its holdings in the US are mainly in Wyoming and Utah. In 2014 it produced 11% of the uranium in the US.

In 2009 Rosatom, the Russian government’s nuclear energy company, bought 17% of Uranium One. In 2010 it had 51%, and in 2013 it had 100%.

In 2017 it is part of the latest Hillary Clinton scandal being pushed hard by Fox News – a year after she lost the presidential election! Congress is now looking into it. And Banana Republicans want the FBI to look into it too.

Trump himself brought up the Uranium One scandal back when he was running for president. On June 22nd 2016 he said:

“[Hillary Clinton’s State Department] approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.”

Trump is talking about the deal in 2010 where Rosatom bought a controlling stake in Uranium One. The US government approved the deal when Clinton was Secretary of State.

The claim comes from “Clinton Cash” (2015) by Peter Schweizer of Breitbart News.

PolitiFact rates the claim as Mostly False:

“The bottom line: While the connections between the Clinton Foundation and the Russian deal may appear fishy, there’s simply no proof of any quid pro quo.”

First, the deal would not allow Russia to export uranium from the US. Thus no real “transfer”.

Second, only one of the nine investors gave money at the time of the deal: Ian Telfer. He gave between $1.3 to $5.6 million. While Clinton would presumably look more favourably on Telfer, the decision was not in her gift because:

Third, the deal required the approval of CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States). The State Department was only one of nine government agencies on that committee. There were also the departments of:

  • Treasury (chairman),
  • Defence,
  • Justice,
  • Commerce,
  • Energy,
  • Homeland Security,

and the:

  • Office of the US Trade Representative, and the
  • Office of Science and Technology Policy.

In addition to CFIUS, the deal also had to be approved by the:

  • Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and
  • Utah’s nuclear regulator,

All 11 approved the deal.

Fourth, the person who approved it at State was Jose Fernandez, the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Business Affairs. He said that Clinton “never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter.” The Secretary of State generally does not, nor in this case is there (yet) any proof to the contrary.

Note that there might be some huge Clinton Foundation “pay to play” scandal, but so far this does not appear to be one.

Far more troubling is Trump’s Banana Republicanism. In the past US presidents did not use the power of the state to go after their defeated opponents. Obama did not go after Romney, etc. This is more like what they do in banana republics, where opposition leaders often find themselves in jail by election time.

– Abagond, 2017.

Source: mainly PolitiFact.

See also:

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Maria Tallchief

Mon Nov 13th 2017 by abagond

Maria Tallchief (1925-2013) was not just the first Native American prima ballerina, one of the top ballet dancers in the world, she was the first prima ballerina of any race from the US. Oh, and she was the muse of George Balanchine, the father of American ballet.

She was one of five Native American ballerinas that were born in Oklahoma at about the same time. The other four were Marjorie Tallchief (her sister), Rosella Hightower, Moscelyne Larkin and Yvonne Chouteau.

Maria was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma on an Osage Indian reservation. Her father was Native (Osage), her mother was White (Scots-Irish).

The Osage are the Indians in “Little House on the Prairie” (1935). By the time Tallchief was born, they had been moved to a reservation in Oklahoma and oil had been discovered!

Her father lived off the oil money. Even though he drank away much of it, he owned the town’s cinema and a pool hall and they lived in a big brick house. Her mother wanted Maria to become a concert pianist (she had perfect pitch) and her sister Marjorie to become a ballerina (she was the better dancer). She had them start ballet lessons at age three. At rodeos they did an Indian dance that Tallchief later said “wasn’t remotely authentic”. In Osage culture it is the men who dance.

In 1933 they moved to Los Angeles where there were much better teachers and opportunities in music and dance. From age 12 she studied under Bronislava Nijinska, a top ballet teacher.

In 1942, the summer after graduating high school, she took a train across the country to New York City to become a ballerina. She joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a Russian ballet company that got stuck in the US when the Second World War broke out. With luck and hard work she rose through the ranks.

Ballet Russe wanted her to change her name to Tallchieva to make it sound Russian. She refused: she was proud to be Osage and proud to be American.

In 1944 the Ballet Russe hired a new Russian choreographer: George Balanchine. He was courtly, sophisticated – St Petersburg meets New York – and a choreographic genius. He and Lincoln Kirstein started what became the New York City Ballet, which Tallchief soon joined when her contract with Ballet Russe ran out.

Tallchief and Balanchine in 1946.

In 1946 Balanchine had fallen in love with her and they got married. The marriage ended in 1952 but they continued to work together afterwards.

Balanchine made ballets just for her, most notably “Firebird” (1949). Igor Stravinsky wrote the music, Balanchine came up with the dances and she became the star. It made the City Ballet’s name.

By 1953 she was world famous. The Osage named her Princess Wa-Xthe-Thonba, Princess of Two Worlds.

In 1965 she retired: she missed her six-year-old daughter. In 1974 she started a ballet school in Chicago and from 1981 to 1987 was artistic director of the Chicago City Ballet.

In 1999 President Clinton gave her the National Medal of Arts, the US government’s highest award for the arts.

Thanks to Mary Burrell for suggesting this post.

Abagond, 2017.

Sources: “Who is Maria Tallchief?” (2002) by Catherine Gourley; New York Times (2013);  Britannica (2017); Google Images (2017).

See also:

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Kashtin: Tshinanu (Our People)

Sun Nov 12th 2017 by abagond

Remarks:

This song came out in 1989. It is sung in Innu-aimun, an Algonquian Cree language known by only about 10,000 people in Quebec and Labrador in Canada. It is a cousin of the Native languages spoken all along the Atlantic coast of North America as far south as North Carolina. Pocahontas and Squanto spoke a language like this.

Kashtin is one of the more successful First Nations bands in Canada. They have had some success even in Greenland and France. They are Innus (Montagnais) from the Maliotenam reservation near the mouth of the St Lawrence River in eastern Quebec.

See also:

Lyrics:

In Innu-aimun:

Tshinanu ui tshissentetau
Tshinanu tshinanu
Tshinanu uauatetau
Tshinanu tshmeshkananmenu

Tshinanu u… u… u…
Tshituassminut
Tshinanu u… u… u…

Tshinanu ui tshissentetau
Tshinanu tshinanu
Tshinanu uauatetau
Tshinanu tshmeshkananmenu

Tshinanu u… u… u…
Tshituassminut
Tshinanu u… u… u…

Tshinanu ui tshissentetau
Tshinanu tshinanu
Tshinanu uauatetau
Tshinanu tshmeshkananmenu

Tshinanu u… u… u…
Tshituassminut
Tshinanu u… u… u…

Tshinanu u… u…
Shtapuenanu

In English translation:

All of us
All of us
Let us look at our way of life
Our children
Our grandfathers

All of us
All of us
Let us look at our way of life
Our rivers
Our lands

This is our reason

Source; Fandom.

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Roy Moore

Sat Nov 11th 2017 by abagond

Roy Moore (1947- ), a judge from the Deep South of the US, is running for Jeff Sessions’ old Senate seat in Alabama. He is backed by Steve Bannon. The special election is on December 12th 2017.

Moore and the Ten Commandments.

In 2003 Moore refused to remove the Ten Commandments from his courthouse despite a higher court ruling. Alabama wound up removing him as a judge and then the monument of the Ten Commandments.

In 2016 he was again relieved of his duties as a judge when he blocked the US Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage.

Both times he put his religious beliefs above a higher court ruling.

A meme that appeared on Moore’s Facebook page.

Moore is against:

  • rule of law,
  • separation of church and state,
  • abortion,
  • “take a knee” protests,
  • immigration (but did not know what DACA was),
  • Muslims (should not be allowed to serve in Congress).

Beliefs:

  • White Evangelical Protestantism,
  • Birtherism,
  • creationism,
  • Islamophobia,
  • homophobia.

Confederate sympathies: In his office is a picture of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. There are also busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Confederate generals. No Confederate flags, though.

Opposes better education, despite Alabama’s terrible schools: In 2004 he led the fight against an amendment to the state constitution to uphold the “right to education or training at public expense” and to overturn these words:

“Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race.”

He won. Those words remain in the Alabama constitution.

The Senate race: In early November 2017, Moore’s lead was only about 6 points over Doug Jones, his Democratic challenger. In 2016 Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Alabama by 28 points. Moore’s huge appeal to White Evangelical Protestants (39% of Alabama) was both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

Then on November 9th scandal hit.

Two tales of four girls:

Doug Jones‘ claim to fame is that he locked up Thomas Blanton in 2001 and Bobby Cherry in 2002 – two of the Klansmen who blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four girls.

Roy Moore is now accused of sexually molesting a 14-year-old girl in 1979 when he was in his early 30s. A crime (though the statute of limitation has run out). During that same period he dated at least three other girls ages 16 to 18. Creepy.

Moore calls it “fake news”, but the Washington Post has the four women on record and 26 others who back up their story. Leigh Corfman, the 14-year-old now grown, is a Trump supporter. (Let that sink in.)

Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler defends Moore:

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became the parents of Jesus … There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.”

As Scripture says:

“The young girl, Mary, said Joseph touched her over her bra and underpants, guiding her hand to his shorts. ‘I wanted it over with — I wanted out,’ she recalled. ‘Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.'”

– Abagond, 2017.

Update (November 14th): A fifth woman, Beverly Young Nelson, a Trump supporter, has come forward. In tears she said that when she was 16 (and he was 30):

“I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping he began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head onto his crotch.”

Because he was the county prosecutor she never dreamed he would do something like that. But because he was the county prosecutor, he thought he could get away with it:

“If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you.”

Not long before that he signed her yearbook – which she still has. He dated his signature: December 22nd 1977. 

More: The Daily Beast.

By 1981 he had been banned from the mall in his own hometown of Gadsden because he kept hitting on teenage girls there. That is where he met two of his known victims. 

Update (November 16th): Three more women have come forward. One was pulled out of her trigonometry class when she was in high school to answer a telephone call. She thought it was her father. It was Roy Moore asking for a date.

Even Sean Hannity of Fox News is turning against him! Geraldo Rivera had patiently explained to him several days ago that Moore is a liar, but he did not see the light till Reddi-wip and others started pulling their ads.

Update (December 4th): According to a new CBS News poll, Moore is ahead by six points: “71 percent of Alabama Republicans say the allegations against Roy Moore are false, and those who believe this also overwhelmingly believe Democrats and the media are behind those allegations.” 

Update (December 4th): Trump now fully endorses Moore:

“Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama. We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more. No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!”

More: The New Yorker.

Update (December 9th): Roy Moore, when asked about when America was great, said this, in 2017:

“I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families. Our families were strong. Our country had a direction.”

Note that during slavery families were regularly torn apart. It was one of the worst features of slavery for those who lived through it.

Update (December 13th): Roy Moore loses to Doug Jones! Although Moore got 81% of the White Evangelical vote, he was defeated by a heavy Black turnout. Jones got 49.9% of the vote, Moore 48.4% with 1.7% write-ins.

See also:

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Autocracy: Rules for Survival

Thu Nov 9th 2017 by abagond

“Autocracy: Rules for Survival” (2016) was written by Masha Gessen a day after Donald Trump was elected US president. Her friends wanted her advice as someone who had lived under Putin in Russia and wrote about his rise to power, from democrat to autocrat. A year later she revisited those rules. She amended one and stands by the others.

Gessen’s rules:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. In the 1930s the New York Times assured us that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was just talk, that he would never carry through on it. He did. In a big way. As Maya Angelou said (Gessen did not quote her, but I am), “When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time.” So with Trump. For example, as we now know a year later, he was perfectly serious about the Muslim ban. It was not just some wild thing he said to get elected. He meant it.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Catastrophes like Hitler take time to unfold. People will try to reassure themselves that their little pocket of the universe, like Latvia, still seem all right. “One adjusts, until the next shocking event.” With Trump, though, there has not even been time to adjust.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. Institutions in the US in the 2010s are much stronger than in Germany in the 1930s or Russia in the 2000s. But much of their support is not written into law but depend on norms of behaviour and acting in good faith. For example, the president cannot shut down newspapers by law, but he can limit their access and frame issues. So far the press has stood up to him, but he is undermining government agencies, quietly filling the courts with like-minded judges, and has surrounded himself with generals.

Rule #4: Be outraged. People will tell you that you are overreacting, that you are being hysterical. Remain shocked. It is a good sign. The huge danger is that, as with Putin, people will grow numb and give up hope.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. It is fruitless. In 2017, though, Gessen amended this one:

“A commitment to purity is antithetical to political engagement. Yet political engagement risks or even demands a measure of normalization.

“The tension is irresolvable. This rule should be amended to read: Pay attention to the ways in which the Trump Presidency breaks the moral compass.“

Rule #6: Remember the future. Trump will not last forever. There is the post-Trump US to think about. Gessen in 2017:

“We will enter the post-Trump future with decimated federal agencies and a frayed judiciary stacked with Trump appointees. Much of the opposition, however, has been concerned less with preserving or revitalizing institutions than with devising novel means of removing Trump from office.”

That Russiagate will stop Trump is as much a fantasy as the Hamilton electors were. It is magical thinking.

Democrats have failed to present a vision for the future – a mistake they made in 2016 and continue to make.

– Abagond, 2017.

Sources: New York Review of Books (Gessen in 2016); New Yorker (Gessen in 2017); Spectacle (image).

See also:

548

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Demetria Obilor

Wed Nov 8th 2017 by abagond

Demetria Obilor (c. 1991- ), a traffic reporter in the US, appears in the morning on ABC Channel 8 in Dallas, Texas. She made the news herself when she was body-shamed on the Internet for her “ridiculous” looks.

Jan Shedd (pictured above) on Facebook:

“Has anyone seen Channel 8’s new morning traffic reporter? Her name is Demetria Obilor & she’s a size 16/18 woman in a size 6 dress and she looks ridiculous. I understand that when I watch Channel 8 I’m going to get biased reporting and political correctness, but clearly they have taken complete leave of their senses. I’m not going to watch Channel 8 anymore.”

Mother of Draggings (@fabfreshandfly) tweeted Jan Shedd’s remarks with this picture of Obilor:

and added:

“Jan is big mad. Don’t be like Jan.”

Chance the Rapper weighed in:

“BIIIIIIG MAD”

He has 6.3 million followers. It spread like wildfire on Twitter. It seems that most people supported Obilor.

Curly & curvy: She is not thin and blonde, like zillions of women on US television, but has dark brown curly hair and a curvy figure. In my opinion she is much better looking than most women on television.

Shedd, a Tea Partier and Trump supporter, later removed her comment and put up a new one that assured us it had nothing to do with race (Shedd is White, Obilor is Black):

“I recently put up a post about the way a lady on Channel 8 dressed, who happened to be black. Frankly, I didn’t even notice that she was black. I was shocked that Channel 8 w0uld put someone on the air that dressed so provocatively. The racist mafia did not appreciate the criticism and now they are harassing me. I just blocked about 50 of them.”

This is not the first time for Obilor. Last summer someone sent an email about “Demetrie’s hair” that said:

“I can’t believe hair like that can be properly cleaned and therefore must smell bad. I have to fast forward whenever she comes on.”

Obilor’s father is Nigerian, her mother White. She studied Broadcast Journalism at the University of Kansas and became a traffic reporter in her native Kansas City. Later she was a traffic reporter in Las Vegas (KLAS-TV, CBS, Channel 8) and now Dallas (WFAA-TV, ABC, Channel 8).

Obilor:

“Black people on TV; there’s nothing wrong with that. Naturally, curly hair – I don’t care if a black woman wants to wear her hair straight or in braids, you don’t get to say what’s professional and what’s not professional based on your white standard of beauty.”

“This is the way that I’m built, this is the way I was born, I’m not going anywhere, so if you don’t like it, you have your options.”

“It’s important for young girls growing up to see different figures and shapes and colors in the news, on TV, in magazines, and in movies.”

“When you see yourself represented, you think, ‘If they can do it, I can do it.'”

“We have to embrace ourselves.”

– Abagond, 2017.

See also:

516

Posted in stuff | 21 Comments »

Devin Patrick Kelley

Tue Nov 7th 2017 by abagond

Devin Patrick Kelley (1991-2017) on Sunday morning, November 5th 2017, shot nearly everyone at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a town of 600 about an hour east of San Antonio. He shot 46 people, killing 26 or 4% of the town. He gunned down even little children.

This comes just a month after Stephen Paddock shot 604 people in Las Vegas, killing 58.

Of the five worst shootings in living memory in the US, all five took place in the past ten years, three in the past two, and two in the past six weeks. None of the five shootings was carried out by Blacks – you know, those people the police fear so much. And only one was carried out by a Muslim, another out-group that Whites fear and demonize.

I knew the gunman was White right off:

  • they did not give his race at first despite eyewitnesses;
  • they did not call it a “suspected terror attack”;
  • they said his motive was unknown.

In Western media only White people and Denzel Washington have enough psychological depth to have mysterious motives. Blacks, after all, are violent by nature – no motive required. And Muslims, as they tell it, are moved by a cartoonishly evil ideology.

Kelley is already being written off as a nutcase – as per script. That way the president and the senators do not have to stand up to the Almighty Gun Industry. In Gun we trust. And White people can preserve their overblown and undeserved sense of moral superiority.

Kelley reportedly had some issue with his mother-in-law and shot up her church when she was not there – with a Ruger AR-15. Huh?

Those sort of guns used to be banned in the US – they are not designed for hunting or home protection but for the battlefield. But in 2004 Congress, in its wisdom, allowed the US to flow with such weapons. The five worst shootings duly followed. More massacres are to come, no doubt, since all the Republicans do is offer “thoughts and prayers.”

Five days before when a Muslim American killed 8 people in New York, it was a threat to the nation! The president said, “We need to make AMERICA SAFE!” He called for immediate action. Thoughts and prayers were not enough!

Two days before the shooting, the US military killed at least 13 civilians, maybe dozens, in airstrikes in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Few in the US seem to know or care.

Kelley, right out of high school, joined the US Air Force. He was court-martialled and thrown in prison for a year for beating his wife and breaking his child’s skull – but he was not dishonourably discharged. The Air Force never told the FBI about his prison record. So when he bought guns, it did not come up in his background check. As many as 50% of all mass shooters are domestically violent.

After the shooting, Kelley was chased down by two men. One had heard the shooting and brought his gun. Kelley’s car crashed. He died with three bullets in his body.

– Abagond, 2017.

See also:

561

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Adele: Hello

Sun Nov 5th 2017 by abagond

Remarks:

This came out in 2015 and won the 2017 Grammy for Song of the Year. Adele, aka Adele Adkins, is British, from Tottenham in northern London. She sings in a soul style in English, a Germanic language. She says:

“‘Hello’ is just about reconnecting with everyone else and myself. From the other side, I couldn’t get over my guilt of leaving my kid to go and write a record and stuff like that. So getting over that— getting on the other side of that. It was just, you know, it’s in general, just hello to everyone.”

See also:

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