28. Standing Rock Sioux

I learned today, listening to the funeral service for the amazing John Lewis, that he did not refer to the 1953-73 period as the “Civil Rights Era,” but the “Non-Violent Era.”

I was reminded this morning, after yesterday’s post about Lewis and the difficulty of non-violent action, that the Indians at Standing Rock have been non-violent—and patient—for years in protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. They have been non-violent in the face of dogs, horses, pepper spray, bulldozers and water, sometimes in freezing temperatures. Their fight started before the pipeline was built, continued as it was being built, was completed, and as it began to move crude oil.

And then, on July 6, US District Judge James Boasberg found that the US Army Corps of Engineers had violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it gave the pipeline company permission to build under Lake Oahe. The court gave the operators until August 5 to empty the pipeline and stop all oil shipments. After years of legal work and the non-violent protests of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its friends, they won a big battle.

But apparent victory has been snatched away before—the Obama Administration paused construction in 2016, and the Trump Administration reversed the ruling and the pipeline was completed—and there will probably be appeals to this ruling now.

* * *

In Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis, he reminded us that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 seemed like a complete victory—no more poll taxes, no more counting the jelly beans in a jar or reciting from the Constitution—but states and localities have suppressed votes by limiting poling places and making registration hard. Obama suggested a new John Lewis Voting Act that would make voting day a national holiday and voting a cornerstone of a revived democracy.

* * *

Let’s do that. And let’s not forget the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, or let their victory slip away.

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27. A Call for Non-Violence

I know that a huge majority of Portland protestors are peaceful people—although I can imagine that some pro-Black Lives marchers are tossing bottles and firecrackers. And I am sure that provocateurs from the right have instigated and/or participated in some of Portland’s destructive events.

I also know that the federal presence has heightened tensions and contributed its own violence—innocent protestors have been shot and jailed; food and medical tents have been disturbed.

That said, I believe the day calls for non-violence, the kind of non-violence that Martin Luther King, John Lewis, thousands of Freedom Riders, Selma Marchers, and Birmingham students used to confront Alabama State Police; angry, screaming, spitting white bystanders; and Bull Conner and his dogs. Their weapon was their cause.

Non-violence is not easy. From Gandhi’s marchers to King’s, non-violent people have risked—and sometimes given—their lives for their cause. John Lewis thought he was dead; Martin Luther King was. But their cause was not, and the most significant Civil Rights legislation since the fourteenth amendment passed because of it.

And yes, just like the bungled reconstruction period after the Civil War led to decades of Jim Crow in the South and segregation in the North, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is under assault. And although Black Lives Matter has brought attention to police abuses, there is not resolution.

And the President is determined to continue the assault and excuse the abuses.

But wait, yesterday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius called Portland his “dream come true… We’ve watched the Portland movie before… The idealistic protesters in the streets overplay their hand, tolerate violent provocateurs in their midst and eventually get crushed. The good guys lose; the bad guys win.”

He’s seen it in Cairo and Hong Kong.

Today, Governor Kate Brown has provided an opening, negotiated at least some Federal withdrawal. Now it’s time for disciplined non-violence, the kind that will take a baton to the head and spray in the eyes, and hunker down to be arrested. The kind that will honor the cause.

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26. Waiting for the shoe...

to drop.

Wallowa County is a large and until recently remote area: two million acres in the far northeast corner of Oregon; the population hovers at 7,000, with fewer in winter when snowbirds go south; many more in summer with hiking trails, fishing streams, a beautiful lake, rodeo, powwow, car shows.

We are now officially a tourist destination, with fishers, hunters, riders, hikers, painters, photographers, coming to the place where grandpa shot elk and great aunt Lucie had a cabin, where dad went to Boy Scout camp and mom rode her horse in the Chief Joseph Days parade. In recent years we’ve added art galleries and bronze foundries, and now, even in Pandemic times, people with license plates that read Kansas, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada come to see what the Tourism Department has dubbed one of the “Seven Wonders of Oregon.”

We’ve been blessed, lucky, or both on the Covid-19 score—as of today we have had just 18 people test positive and only one death. We’ve followed Governor Brown’s guidelines pretty well, staying away from crowded indoor spaces, wearing masks, taking our exercise, meals, and beers outside.

A local preacher-lawyer took the state to court and a judge in Baker City stood with him and others to keep churches open. The Oregon Supreme Court told the judge to reconsider; he wouldn’t, and about that time a large church in nearby Island City defied the state and spread 200 cases in the wink of an eye. No new words from the preachers.

But Umatilla County is close-by, and its Wal-Mart Distribution Center and processing plants are statewide hot spots. The numbers in Bend, Oregon and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, both bigger and more posh tourism area than ours, are up. We watched while Sun Valley had an early spike—skiers brought it from California, they said.  Oregon overall, quiet and seemingly safe for months, now regularly tops 400 new cases in a day.

The Main Street of Joseph and the shores of Wallowa Lake are crowded with tourists.

We wait for the shoe to drop.

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25. Non-violence

E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland, Ore., branch of the NAACP, wrote in the New York Times this week: “What is happening in Portland is the fuse of a great, racist backlash that the Trump administration is baiting us to light.”

Mondainé is worried that the white protestors—even the “wall of moms”—are focusing attention on whites, taking public attention away from Black Lives Matter, and providing it to Trumps’ law and order agenda.

The coverage of Congressman John Lewis’s death and lifework strikes an entirely different note. I tear up when I see the old film of Lewis taking hits to the head at the bridge in Selma, or when he’s  tearfully accepting a National Book Award for a graphic autobiography as he explains that the librarian in his Alabama town did not allow Black children to have books.

Some from that time carry the image of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I carry the image of Joan Baez, then 22 years old, leading that same huge, non-violent 1963 crowd in “We Shall Overcome.” Baez captured my young heart with her voice and non-violent stands for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War.

In 1968, weeks before King was killed, as Washington D.C. was readying for the Poor People’s Campaign, I went to a workshop on non-violence put on by the Quakers. “No jewelry: earrings and ears can be ripped, fingers broken; hunker in a fetal position with head covered if they come to pick you up or beat on you.”

I don’t know when I’ve ever felt stronger.

And I hunger now for a new John Lewis, a Joan Baez, Jessie Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, an MLK to remind us to cut the angry outbursts of violence and keep our “eyes on the prize”—the health, welfare, and fair treatment of all people, based on the “content of their character,” and not the “color of their skin.”

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24. Pain and Patience

My first visit to a dentist—at least that I can remember—was to a second floor walk-up office in Fosston Minnesota. I must have been six or seven, so it would have been 1948 or 49.

The chair was high and the drill—a cabled affair that looked like something out a horror movie—was loud. There was no Novocain, no laughing gas, just hang onto the dental chair arms as tight as you can and endure the sound and pain of the drilling and filling. (“You’ll brush your teeth now!” the lesson.)

I remember the sting of iodine on cuts, ice on sprains, and, as a teenage athlete, a kind of satisfaction in giving or taking a strong football hit or blocking the plate at home, taking a cleats up slide with my body.

Patience was what mother’s preached. Dinner would be ready in a half hour. It takes time to cook the Thanksgiving Turkey. We don’t open the Christmas presents until the dishes are done.

The system supported mothers. The store wouldn’t be open until Monday. You counted the days until the promised cereal box-top premiums and birthday cards came back slowly in the mail.

We waited in lines to get into ball games and theaters, even back into the classroom after fire drill. We waited—and watched—in a line for school shots. Some of those in front fainted or cried, and the big needles were sterilized between kids for us to see.

* * *

We’re not much for pain or patience anymore. Pain pills are ubiquitous—leaving their own legacy of addiction. Most of us get by with ibuprofen and massage.

Stores and the Internet are open 24/7. We order anytime, get expedited one-day delivery, play video games till dawn, and get a Big Mac in the middle of the night.

Don’t expect us to stay home or keep our masks on until we get a handle on Covid-19!

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23. Covid-BLM lens on Women

Some men friends will object, but this Covid-BLM lens has, for me, shown brightly on the way we—White men—have kept women down, at least in the life of this Republic. We haven’t lynched them or kept them as slaves, and the beatings and rapes we’ve inflicted are seen as aberrations, punishable under the law if properly reported and subjected to judicial scrutiny.

We have not cracked their heads open with police batons as we did John Lewis’s. Bull Conner didn’t turn dogs loose on them because they were women. Our police have not used chokeholds or kneeled on a woman’s neck in front of Apple phone cams.

But unarmed Breonna Taylor was shot at least eight times by police in her Louisville apartment, and a Black woman died in a Texas jail, arrested for failing to use her turn signal! There’s a Black #SayHerName movement—quieter than BLM, but growing, which was started by three Black women.

And reports are that Covid-19 has all women doing more of the housework and home schooling, and giving up or reducing their online hours more than their male partners. It should not surprise.

From the beginning, our forbearers were making a country for the convenience of, and to be ruled by White—Anglo White—men. The Declaration declared that “all men are created equal,” and it meant men. It actually meant White men who owned property. White did not include Italians, Slavs, and the Irish, because they were not part of the founding cabal.

The founders sliced and diced the numbers of Black slaves who could be counted for purposes of establishing Congressional numbers while not allowing them the vote—women too were counted but couldn’t vote.

When women got college educations, they got jobs as “fact checkers,” rarely as writers. Women did write the programs that fed the computer that made the atom bomb. Women who served in WW II were labeled civilian employees and denied the GI Bill. Rosie the Riveter went home, the boys went to college and took up programming (women were not good at math).

This week, “mothers formed a wall” against Federal agents in Portland.

# # #

22. Education is a frog in the pond

The dual hit of Black Lives and Covid-19 is shining a bright light on many things in our country, including education. In moving to online classes, primary and secondary schools are troubled by students without Internet access, and students who have relied on school meals for basic food needs. Teachers’ own health needs, skills as online communicators, and school budgets are being stretched.

Colleges and universities have special problems, because dormitory housing and athletics are big income producers. And foreign students pay premium tuitions—which schools have come to rely on. Trump Administration visa rejections for foreign students who attend online only campuses have schools scrambling.

It might be an ugly analogy, but American education seems to me like the famed frog. The education frog emerged from the ferment of early European settlement, became a full-throated croaker in the 1950s, was tossed in warm water in the 1970s, and now is roiling in the boil. 

The City of Boston founded its Latin School, a public high school offering free education to boys, rich or poor, in 1635. Harvard became the first of nine “Colonial Colleges”  in 1636. All were established by churches—Puritan, Presbyterian, etc.; seven, including Harvard and Yale, became non-sectarian members of the Ivy League.

In 1785, the Northwest Land Ordinance set aside section 16 in every township in the developing nation for public schools. By 1900, 31 states had compulsory school attendance for students from ages 8-14, and by 1918, every state required students to complete elementary school.

In 1862, the Land Grants College Act provided lands for public colleges to build on, or sell to endow. OSU, WSU, and U Idaho are all land grant colleges. (The lands were Indian lands, but that’s another issue!)  

In the 1950s—60s, when I went to school, free k-12 for all—and free or inexpensive college at state schools—was assumed. We even included African-Americans into formerly segregated state systems after Brown v. Board of Education.

Today, by the light of Covid-BLM, k-12 schools are creeping back to the churches, and “public” colleges, reliant on escalating tuitions and foreign students, are no longer easily available to men and women, “rich or poor.” The education frog is in very hot water.

# # #

21. Air Conditioning

Years ago, then U of Oregon law professor Charles Wilkinson said that Indians were smarter than to inhabit the lowlands of Arizona. They are unlivable in the summer, so the Indians would, like some early white visitors to the area, spend some wintertime in the low drylands, but would move to higher and milder climates in summer. In the last 100 years, Midwest and northern winters chased white people south, and air conditioning has made many of them year-around residents.

Recently, one of the university or state health department coronavirus wags—and now every college and health department, as well as news service and “think tank,” must have an expert—said that being outside was the safest thing to do with Covid. Masks are great, he said, but the surest way to stay away from contagion is to be in the open air and at least six feet distant from any other human being. Chances of contagion are reduced “almost to nil,” he said.

Another wag—I don’t think the same one, but I can’t keep them all straight—did say that air conditioning was a hazard and not a help to the spread of the disease.  I think that was after the Arizona church that hosted the president was showing off its air purification system.

Now I listen to the news and look at the map. The Covid hot spots are Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. And in California make that the hot, dry Los Angeles area. Our own Northwest hot spots—Umatilla County in Oregon and Yakima in Washington—say that agricultural workers are involved in the spread. I’m sure that the food processing plants have air conditioning systems that recirculate air and virus, and am pretty sure that field workers, who have the luxury of the great outdoors for 8-10 hours each day, crowd into air conditioned vans on the way back to their crowded dwellings.

# # #

20. Covid goes on...

This morning we learned that Jair Bolsonaro, President of Brazil and down-player of the seriousness of Covid-19, tested positive for the disease. Who knows when what leaders—preachers, presidents, business moguls, media lions—will join him. And who knows what the broader population will make of it. So far, those who believe it is a hoax, or a petty flu, or something that just attacks the old and infirm, have brushed aside all such disclosures. 

Yesterday there were two conflicting stories about Covid-19 in young people. The schools in Denmark and Finland have reopened with little or no impact. Reasons could be that the disease is less likely to manifest in the very young, and that transmission among this group does not seem to be so highly contagious.

But almost simultaneously—at least on National Public Radio, because that is what I was listening to yesterday—there was testimony by a reputable doctor that even in asymptomatic people who test positive, chest x-rays reveal damaged lung cells. And who knows, she asks, what the long-term effects of this damage will be.

Meanwhile the disease marches on; Dr. Fauci and a growing chorus predict the 50,000 new cases each day will climb upward, maybe to 100,000, maybe more. And states hardest hit, even states with Republican governors, are stepping back re-openings. Florida, Texas, and Arizona—the R-3—stand beside D-California in the big numbers game. 

Deaths—even in those states, are not racing ahead like they did in the early days in New York and New Jersey, but hospitalizations are, and Houston is afraid that it will run out of space and medical personnel in about two weeks. 

No one yesterday, in my hearing, brought up the vaccine and how soon it would arrive. But from Arizona to Brazil to Copenhagen, many must be quietly praying for it.

# # #

19. Visible Indians: Mount Rushmore and Five Presidents

Amidst coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, President Trump has done what the news media and the public couldn’t seem to get to—bring attention to American Indians. Concocting something with the Republican governor of South Dakota, Trump engineered a Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore, site of the mountain carvings of presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. There’s been a ten-year lapse since the last such celebration due to fire danger.

The mountain carvings were completed in 1941 on land that had been left to the Sioux twice with treaties in the 19th century. In a familiar series of events, gold was found, miners rushed in, and Custer stumbled in to “make it safe” for the white invaders. The mountain had been sacred to the Sioux before the carving, before Custer.

Trump didn’t check with the Indians before planning the extravaganza. Sioux President Julian Bear Runner said that Mr. Trump's attendance is “an insult to Native Americans on whose stolen land it was built… lands on which that mountain is carved and the lands he’s about to visit belong to the Great Sioux nation, and I have to tell him he doesn’t have permission from its original sovereign owners to enter the territory at this time.” He also cited health concerns, important, as Governor Kristi Noem confirmed that attendees are not required to practice social distancing or wear masks.

It had never occurred to me—and we visited often when I was young—that the presidents on Rushmore are all an insult to the Sioux:

Washington did want to treat “justly” with Indians, but he also wanted their land, by sale and treaty if possible, war if not.

Jefferson’s vision for America was sea to shining sea with white yeoman farmers, built on land occupied by “savages"; in the Declaration of Independence he wrote of “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862, allowing for white settlers to people the West on Indian lands. And he hung 38 Sioux, part of an uprising of Indians suffering from diminished lands and broken promises, at Mankato, Minnesota in the same year.

Teddy Roosevelt apparently softened towards Indians in old age, but never thought them equal, and told photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, who had learned the true history, that the real story of Custer should not reach the American public; Custer, Roosevelt said, should remain a hero.

Trump stands tall among them.

# # #

18. Indians—still invisible; Equality—not yet

The Navajo Nation now has its own line on the worldometers coronavirus site: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/. I’ve been following it, and trying to get information on other tribes, because I know from Indian friends that there is generational memory of pandemics. Although the coverage is poor, there is occasionally a story. The news isn’t good.

Yesterday I stumbled on a UCLA American Indian Studies Center site. The information was dated—June 5 the latest numbers—but profound. In a bar graph with Indian reservations and American states lined up by cases of coronavirus per 100,000, five reservations, including the Navajo, are in front of New York and New Jersey.

On June 5, when New York showed 1,800 cases per 100,000, the White Mountain Apache were at 6,000 +; Pueblos of Zia and San Felipe at 3,000 +, and the Navajo Nation just slightly more than New York State. But, you say, the Apache reservation is so small, only 15,500 members. Yes, and on that June date, 1009 cases and 11 deaths. Think La Grande—or halve the numbers for Wallowa County: 505 cases; 5 deaths.

I can’t find stats for today—Indians are still largely invisible. Maybe because they are scattered on over 500 reservations and in urban pockets across the land; maybe because there just aren’t as many Indians as there are Blacks and Latinx. Maybe because many Americans don’t think of Indians at all; they are a part of our past, not our present.

But today, the Navajo Nation, with its 174,000 members and 369 Covid-19 deaths, lands on the worldometers national graph. And today New York shows 2155 per 100,000; the Navajo Nation over 4000! Today New York’s 32,000 deaths compute to 165 per 100,000; the Navajos are at 212.

The Covid-19 toll among all Americans is becoming grimmer by the day, and the toll among Blacks, Latinx, and American Indians reminds us that there is a road to travel in realizing the equality clauses in our founding documents.

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