On Tuesday I stood in line early to watch the celebration of the Lunar New Year at Lan Su Chinese Garden. The long wait was worth it, despite cold feet and a mounting worry that my parking might expire before I got to visit the garden in full.
A kindly gentleman with a nifty beard contraption kept us in good spirits – he distributed red envelopes with lucky coins in them – Hongbao – to children and adults alike. This is a traditional custom ensuring that generosity is remembered and rewarded.
Then the lion dancers arrived at the plaza in front of the garden. Quick change in attire – it does get hot in those costumes.
Plenty of opportunity for the press to take pictures, and then the dance began.
Each lion had two hidden actors, some quite young, all very athletic as well as expressive. They happily “ate” the dollar bills offered to them by an enthusiastic crowd, kids transfixed.
The musicians were impressive as well, even though I feared I would go deaf standing right next to them, camera in hand and thus unable to plug my ears…..
Finally the gates to the garden opened. Dancers, musicians and public rushed in, making the rounds through the various pathways, performing some more on the terrace.
The garden was beautifully decorated with small, tasteful ornaments on some of the trees, horse graphics in the windows, and colorful sculptures in the ponds.
The combination of Horse (the 7th of the 12 Chinese zodiac signs) and Fire (one of the 5 rotating elements) reoccurs only every 60 years and is believed to be particularly powerful. The sign is associated with energetic, determined, resilient personalities with an entrepreneurial drive. It is also burdened with superstition: in some Asian cultures it was believed that women born under this sign were likely to overpower potential husbands and thus not a good match. Consequently, birth rates declined in those years to avoid exposing daughters to an uncertain fate.
It never ceases to amaze me how cultural mythology actually shapes our behavior.
Astrologers also claim that years of the Fire Horse are associated with important political and social events. Can we find that to be true of 1966, the last time the Fire Horse appeared?
Spoiler Alert: yes we can; and no, I did not check 1965 or 1967 just to confirm my hunch that important things happened then as well, as they do every year….
I will, however, remark on where we are 60 years later.
1966 saw the start of the Cultural Revolution in China on May 14, initiated by Mao Zedong. This socio-political movement aimed to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. Bloodbath, but also initially making huge inroads to combat inequality, both in land holdings and educational access.
Where are we in 2026? China’s Xi Jing Ping is certainly not as despotic as Mao, but also not as open to relative freedoms as his own father was, choosing a middle path. One can look at repression under his leadership and the fraught issue of Taiwan, but also at long-term planning that takes into account scientific knowledge, climate change and so on, securing economic stability for billions of people.
Other major shifts in governments abroad: Indira Ghandi was elected as Prime Minister in 1966. Tough maneuvers to get into and then stay in power, with a focus on nationalism as well as leftist politics of redistribution of wealth. In 2026 we have Narendra Modi whose right-wing leadership has led to a resurgence in Hindu nationalism, taking away the autonomy of Kashmir in 2019, and relentless democratic backsliding in the following years.
Closer to home: 1966 saw an increased engagement in the Vietnam war and concomitant protests. It also saw a variety of legislative actions benefiting Americans: Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency created significant domestic policies, including the Great Society programs aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ was published. It became a seminal text in the American civil rights movement.
Medicare was officially implemented. The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law, promoting transparency in government.
We joined the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. These covenants are key international treaties that outline fundamental human rights and freedoms, establishing standards for all nations.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded on June 30, 1966, and aimed to advocate for women’s rights and equality, addressing issues such as workplace discrimination and reproductive rights.
The Endangered Species Act was signed into law on December 28, 1966, marking a significant step in wildlife conservation efforts in the United States. This legislation aimed to protect species at risk of extinction.
And last, but not least, the Cuban Adjustment Act was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. This legislation aimed to provide a pathway for Cuban refugees to adjust their status.
2026: Measures to improve or protect the rights of women and racial minorities are actively rescinded, under the guise of DEI hostility. Reproductive rights and voting rights are under particularly vicious attacks. I had written about the SAVE act earlier, but remember, if ratified it will make it harder for married women, poor people, students and native Americans to vote. Millions of them.
We have numerous instances where healthcare is endangered through the new bills that Congress and the President established, with Medicare a likely target for further restrictions.
We are blockading Cuba (while ICE is rounding up Cubans in Florida) to the point where we are accused of human rights violations by the international community.
Can some Fire Horse please gallop in to promote significant directional change for the rest of 2026????
In the meantime there is always the natural beauty of the garden, camellias, plum blossoms and paper bush in bloom. There are also many events scheduled (see the garden’s website) including light shows and miniature horses on site to be admired by the kiddos.
Music today: Dmitri Shostakovich completed his Cello Concerto No. 2 in 1966, matching the mood of our times.
It was a cold, frosty day. As always on our drive on I 5 South to California, we looked for something new to explore.
This time we picked the small town of Yreka, known for its 19th century gold rush, preserved historic buildings and a park that promised historical mining tools and structures.
The travel brochures praise the town for its quaint main drag with many historic buildings still intact, and the beauty of the surrounding Siskiyou mountains. (They are a coastal subrange of the Klamath mountains, which get significant precipitation from the ocean and early snow. It was the land of many different tribal nations with a common language spoken, Athapaskan, also known as Dene.)
“Greenhorn” Park, criss-crossed by diverse hiking trails, offered views onto the mountains across a spacious reservoir; lots of old-growth trees and a few pieces of old mining machinery, a smithy next to a fabulous playground – clearly a good place for local and tourist families to enjoy and take a break from highway driving.
It proudly presents the history of the gold rush, starting in the 1850s, when people arrived upon the news that gold could be found here as well, not just further south.
Rush is an appropriate word – between March of 1851 when the first serious gold was discovered and May of that year, some 2000 hopeful men erected tent camps, shanties, and a few rough cabins on the flats near the Scott river. By August it was 5000, with wooden buildings starting to be constructed on what is today called Miner Street. A year later the California legislature created Siskiyou County. The town was called Yreka. Some say it was adopting the Indian name for Mt. Shasta, White Mountain. Mark Twain had a different theory: place had acquired its mysterious name ”when in its first days it much needed a name” through an accident. There was a bakeshop with a canvas sign which had not yet been put up but had been painted and stretched to dry in such a way that the word BAKERY, all but the B, showed through and was reversed. A stranger read it wrong end first, YREKA, and supposed that that was the name of the camp. The campers were satisfied with it and adopted it.
(Turns out, YrekaBakery existed at the time and advertised its palindromic name. Twain was too good a satirist, likely, to let that fact fly by unused….)
On this quiet, early Sunday morning, the town itself was deserted, but for an aimlessly wandering older woman who screamed her cold misery out into the world. Quaint bordered on somewhat run down – and that was before I read up on the history, and the current status of this hamlet of some 7000 people. The main block of businesses and shops quickly gave way to neighborhoods showing lots of signs of distress.
The statistics are one thing – crime rates are higher than in 90.6% of U.S. cities. Median household income in Yreka is 25% lower than the national average. Unemployment is 33% higher than national average. The poverty rate is 50% higher than the national average. There is no real industry, work can be found mostly in healthcare, education and retail. Poverty-adjacent drug use and houselessness are soaring. Just this year, a large encampment of over a hundred unhoused people, consolidated on a hill visible from the town center, was bulldozed, because the town- people had enough of the garbage and disorder they associated with the camp. The result? Dispersement into the adjacent forests, since no housing alternatives are offered, exponentially increasing the forest fire risks.
As a traveling visitor you can’t really know all the facts. Yet there are consistent reports of law suits, including some class action ones, directed at the Sheriff, his office and the county administration, with accusations of insidious racism and persecution of minorities in the region.
Chinese miners came to Yreka early and, across the span of a century saw multiple fires devastate their parts of town. Nowadays, Asian Americans, particularly the Hmong community in Siskiyou County (who came to the U.S. as refugees after fighting alongside the U.S. military in the Vietnam War,) had to fight against ordinances that deprived thousands of them of basic water for survival, hygiene, and wildfire defense. The Sheriff’s prohibition of water trucks carrying over 100 gallons to travel to the areas where these farmers live, was eventually repealed in Court. For now, the crisis that degraded their health, resulted in the loss of livestock and gardens, left people unable to fend off wildfires, and forced many to leave their homes, has been ameliorated.
Today, the Asian American community members’ major class action lawsuit against Siskiyou County officials and the Siskiyou Sheriff’s Department for their sweeping racial persecution campaign is still pending. “In this case, Chang v. Siskiyou County, community members and their attorneys at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Asian Law Caucus, and Covington & Burling LLP detailed how county officials restrict people’s right to water and execute unlawful traffic stops, search and seizure practices, and property liens in a blatant effort to isolate residents of Asian descent and drive them out of the region.”
***
This part of Northern California is known for a movement to secede from the state and create a new one, the State of Jefferson (they are joined by parts of southern Oregon.) Folks feel not represented as rural communities and want to have independence – or, as they put it, their liberty and freedom back, currently “withheld” by the folks further South. They claim their taxes are funneled into large population centers and not used for their own needs (the reality is that Sacramento spends far more money on these rural regions than they take in.)
By their own accounts – here is a short documentary that really represents the type of people fighting for a new state – they want to go back to earlier times which they felt were better, and they stress the importance of blood and soil – their words, not mine – as a source of power.
They claim it is all about liberty and representation – but there might be something more insidious underneath: “a barely concealed desire to carve an ethnostate out of the only part of California where whites still constitute a majority, and not just a conservative strain of politic. Today, almost every county north of Sacramento has passed a resolution in favor of joining the State of Jefferson. From Mendocino to Alturas, neon Xs glow in bar windows and billboards exhort passersby to join: Jefferson, the 51st state. (Ref.) (The double x on their flag refers to being double crossed by the state governments in Sacramento, CA and Salem, OR.)
The years of Covid pandemic mask protocols and an influx of non-White workers have stoked the passions – and hardened minds against being told by outsiders who supposedly don’t share their values – faith, family, patriotism – what they can and cannot do, much of it centered around gun issues as well. According to observers, violence is now publicly threatened and representatives of the movement regularly appear on the Alex Jones podcasts and the like. There is a Cottonwood militia movement that claims to have trained over 1000 people so far, and is claimed to be linked to the newly elected, far-right Shasta County Board of Supervisors as well as several of the Sheriffs.
Legally, the creation of a new state is all but impossible. The state from whom you wish to secede has to agree, and then congress has to approve the establishment of the new one. Beyond the legality issues, though, I find it scary to contemplate the motives that lie underneath, and the networking that is going on among all of these far right, white supremacist organizations to do both, get their candidates into state offices and prepare for more violent modes of action when they deem the time has come. Militias in Shasta County are open about their association with, among others, the Proud Boys, and to the Bundy family, of fame for their radical actions in Oregon a few years ago.
Walking along the deserted Miner St. in Yreka, you wouldn’t know. Shop windows and saloons offered touristy kitsch and libations, all closed, of course, on a Sunday morning. Maybe they were all preparing for a birthday party…
We drove on, as always struck by the beauty of the American West, and the incomprehensible sentiments that lie underneath so much of what we see at the surface, divisions that fester with hatred, including the fear or despising of true equality for all humans of all races and origins
To stick with the theme (while insisting on diversity): Music today is by Bob Dylan about the Union’s Sundown….and by Fela Kuti about Independence, and about nationalist leaders by Burning Spear.
When I brought my then boyfriend back to Germany for the first time, my father lovingly created a sight-seeing itinerary for a road trip, down to the minutes between named Autobahn exits, hotel information and sites worth visiting. What feels like an eternity later, my now husband has taken up the banner, luckily restricting himself to points of interest and highway exit numbers.
This is how we found the Thompson’s Mills State Heritage Site located a few minutes off I 5 South, in Shedds, Oregon, near Corvallis, on our drive to California last week.
Oregon’s oldest water-powered grist mill is a photographer’s candy store and a historian’s treasure trove. The entire economic, social and political history of Oregon and its relation to world economies and technological development is encapsulated in the objects and machinery contained in these Rube Goldberg-like buildings. Some of it was relayed by knowledgeable and friendly docents, much of it can be found here (I will summarize also from the same author’s in-depth publication in the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Fascinating stuff.)
The six-floor mill building, with storage silos, milling machines and hydro-power plant are located on 20 acres, with a Queen Anne’s home for the mill keepers and boarders who worked at the site, outbuildings and garages, next to the mill. The adjacent Calapooia river was dammed up by the mill owners starting in 1858 until 1986, to produce the necessary power.
In the early days, with a number of changing owners, the mill flourished due to intense demand for flour from the California Gold Rush. There were obstacles – the mill burnt down in 1860, to be rebuilt again immediately, and the small town of Boston nearby completely relocated when the rail road was built further away. But the next owners, German immigrants Martin and Sophia Thompson whose family would operate the mill for three generations, benefitting from international developments and smart investment in ever new technology, kept up with changing fortunes in the trade for a long time.
The Thompsons’ arrival coincided with Oregon’s entry into the Asian Pacific Rim market – flour exports to China were wildly profitable for Oregonians who supplanted the earlier Californian trade opportunities. National politics, however, brought this to an end: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, extended by the Geary Act that same year, restricted Chinese-worker immigration to the United States for an indefinite period. China retaliated sensibly, building its own mills and by 1910, most exports to China had ended, and exports to Hong Kong dropped by 50%.
World War I changed the downturn. The Hoover administration’s food relief program required flour for starving allies. The mill produced 12 hours a day, selling directly to the U.S. Food Administration, with profit margins the highest for the entire run of the family business. I shudder to think of the working condition: the noise was infernal (a 2 minute demonstration of just one milling operation – they had many in parallel going on at the time when the mill was active – was so loud you’d want to cover your ears. Dust was pervasive at the time, despite the installation of blowers, mostly intended to prevent fires, though. Even now, I was glad to be masked, as always.)
Enter sliced bread, yes, you read that right. By 1927, the nation’s enthusiasm for store-bought sliced bread significantly dropped the demand for grocery-store flour, leaving mills to struggle economically. The Thompsons started to diversify, selling flour sacks almost at cost, which had become valuable fabrics for home sewing since the Great Depression. Eventually stopped producing flour altogether in 1942, manufacturing pellets from grass seed instead, processing oats, corn and molasses, increasingly focussed on animal feed. Eventually the mill was converted into a power-generating plant in the 1980s, selling power to Pacific Power and Light Company. By 2004 it was sold to OPRD and converted into a heritage site, with more than 3000 artifacts catalogued and staffers learning to operate the original machinery for demonstrations. By 2007, the site was opened to the public.
It is truly worth a visit, both for the thoughts it generates about the history captured in the various exhibits, and the thoughts about what was excluded.
***
The land on which the mill stands, was part of a plot purchased in 1851 by Americus Savage, his wife and 5 children, the newest born on the pioneer trail to Oregon and named Columbus. (What do these names make you think?) The Oregon Donation Land Claim Act offered 640 acres to married couples, and Savage claimed a lot near the Calapooia river, that came with water rights, all of which he sold at a later point. The land and its rivers and watersheds had been home to the Tsankupi (“Calapooia River”) band of the Kalapuya for over 10 000 years. The 1855 Treaty of Dayton, taking away the land for promises of various services, led to the forcible removal of the Tsankupi to what are now the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations. They are now members of Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.
I did not see a land acknowledgement at the historic mill site, but I might have simply missed it.
There is, however, one to be found from The Calapooia Watershed Council which acknowledges the traditional homeland of the Kalapuya people. There are more than fifty different ways of spelling Kalapuya, including Calapooia and Call-law-puh-yea.The council is located in Brownsville, Oregon in the traditional territory of the Tsankupi (“Calapooia River”) band of the Kalapuya.
There were some allusions in the mill’s exhibits to fights over water –
“Thompson’s Mills held some of Oregon’s oldest water rights, which provided the mill 180 cubic feet per second of the Calapooia River even in water-short times. Because Oregon’s water laws are based on the principle of prior appropriation — meaning the oldest water rights on a stream are the last to be cut off in times of low flow — Thompson’s Mills was able to demand water rights regardless of the needs of users in other areas. During times of low flow, the mill was allowed to divert the river’s flow to maintain the allowed 180 cubic feet per second, leaving little or no water for upstream farmers and ranchers.” (Ref.)
This went on for decades, legal threats and fights included, as well as physical threats to the safety of the mill. Note, though, that the conflict ensued between various factions of the settlers, and, increasingly, environmentalists in the 1990s, and did not mention specifically the Native American history of protection for salmon or other spawning fish that were part of the tribal cultures. It was the tribes, who for some 14000 years had been the stewards of the Willamette Valley, with controlled burning practices helping to clear the land, deposit nutrients into the soil and guarding fish populations, making it an extraordinarily fertile place.
Water levels now, (after dam removal and increasing droughts due to climate change, as seen from inside of the mill) – on left – and then – on right,
Who decides what history is included or left out at historic sites or other history institutions?
This question loomed large for me in the context of other developments on Kalapuyan land: the recent closure of Five Oaks Museum, a history museum founded 1956, showcasing the life of pioneers with artifacts provided by their descendants. Its exhibition This Kalapuya Land, was drastically changed with new leadership and a guest curator, Steph Littlebird Fogel (Grand Ronde, Kalapuya) in 2019. The revised and critically annotated, new This IS Kalapuyan Land was a mix of historical information, contemporary Native American art, and historic artifacts, including an impressive slate of artists, offered online in 2020.
The new goal was to prompt critical thinking around representation of Indigenous history and identity in non-Indigenous institutions, and the mood of the staff, diversified Board and leadership was excited and hopeful in 2021 after the museum emerged from Covid closures.
I have no privileged information about all the factors that led to the closure, but all agree that operations funding was no longer available from previous sources. The museum, with a six figure loan liability, had to close the building and furlough the staff last December. Many of those who had previously supported the institution, in particular foundation grants and private donors, did not renew funding; some were explicitly upset over the direction the museum was taking, away from pioneer traditions towards more diversified story telling, including an online exhibition called “Gender Euphoria: Contemporary Art Beyond the Binary” (Ref.)
Any attempts to find alternative sources of funding were not seen as feasible by the Washington County Board of Commissioners (BCC) who are focused on how to shut down the operation and distribute the collection. Washington County has now resumed control of the Cultural Resources Collection.
Whose story gets told and how it gets told is more often than not dependent on who holds the purse strings, or the political power to engage in revisionism, both locally and nationally. This fact was already claimed by Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, of all people, a former congressman for the Confederacy in 1891, still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede.
On a national level, this does not just pertain to contemporary attempts to re-install confederate names, monuments, or privilege to non-inclusive sites (remember that most Confederate monuments were erected after 1890 — not to memorialize lives lost during the Civil War, but to assert white power in the Jim Crow era.) As I write this, there are also changes to exhibitions concerning slavery at the Smithsonian, and at the U.S. Holocaust Museum:
An exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that takes a critical look at the United States’ response to Nazi Germany is slated to temporarily close after Labor Day for upgrades, sparking concern among some staff over what potential changes could be made amid President Donald Trump’s sweeping review of museums and their programming, sources tell ABC News.(Ref.)
This after the New York Holocaust Museum removed Trump images from a Hate Speech exhibition after intervention from a Board Member this June. (Ref.)
Art, just as factual information, can have an impact on our perspectives of history – but only if it can be seen. The selective curation of museum contents, or the loss of museums altogether, do no favors to an American people trying to understand its history fully.
It could not have been more perfect. The light was right, the temperature warm, but not hot, there was a feeling of adventure in the air. After way too many days listlessly stuck at home with the oppressive heat, I was exploring the sandstone cliffs of Cape Kiwanda, located some 2 hours southwest of Portland at the shores of the Pacific.
The colors and configurations were breathtaking, I could have photographed all day long. Much of it reminded me of Paul Klee (and so some of today’s images are overlays of his art and nature, just to give you the idea.)
The association had probably been triggered by the fact that I had yearned to visit an exhibition that recently closed in Berlin, and was stuck with thinking around the issues it raised, without being able to travel to see it.
This photograph of a sandstone angel overlooking the bombed-out city of Dresden in 1945 was part of the show at the Bode Museum, which brought together images of angels from the Berlin museums that were damaged or burned during the Second World War.
The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin,Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years after World War II centered around Paul Klee’s most famous artwork Angelus Novus and Benjamin’s texts laying out his thoughts on the “angel of history,” as he called him. The exhibition also showed excerpts of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire(1987), a film in which two angels stand watch over a divided Berlin and in which explicit reference is made to Klee’s 1920 watercolor and Benjamin’s interpretation of the artwork.
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.[3]
The piles of debris are, of course, not restricted to the past – we see them growing skyward all around us, in the present, if we don’t close our eyes in desperation.
***
The look backwards towards the past, however, is under (re)construction – what we are allowed to see now depends on the whims of those who think they own the interpretation of the past.
President Trump’s executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” aims to review and align the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibitions and materials with his interpretation of American history, focusing on removing what he calls “improper ideology.” This initiative is part of a broader effort to ensure that national museums reflect a narrative of American exceptionalism and unity ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States. The White House
Whether it is controlling the Smithsonian, other museums or our universities, the National Park Service or the National Endowments for the Arts, Public Broadcasting or the Voice of America or shifting public to private education – it boils down to preventing people to gain knowledge and engage in independent thought – both reviled by authoritarians. (I had previously written about fascism and education in more detail here.)
While we still can, let’s look back at history not so long ago.
(My sources for today are the general education you get when visiting the site of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History, a moral history reasserting the existence of a totalitarian dictatorship in Germany, Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir, and, most importantly, Richard. J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich. It is an intellectually rich guide, written in totally accessible language and structured in ways that really cover all aspects of the German people falling for the lure of Nazism.)
From its very beginnings, the National Socialist regime of Germany tried to shape cultural displays and production, trying to force German culture into the frame of the preferred ideology. Art that did not conform to the Nazi norms was declared degenerate, confiscated and/or destroyed, Paul Klee’s works among them (and he was fired from his position as a professor at a prestigious art school). Work was sold on the international market to enrich the regime and pay for war preparations. This was, of course, just one facet of societal control.
If we look at the larger picture, the goal was to amass absolute power right off the bat – handily provided by the Enabling Act which got passed in 1933. It allowed Hitler to pass laws without the consent of the Reichstag, basically eliminating all power for our parliament. If you look at power consolidation here, now, you will not have to venture far from the text of Project 2025, or, for that matter, the Supreme Court decisions of late.
One of the Nazi regime’s early undertakings was to identify minorities who could be dehumanized, labeled as them to create an us, both through rhetoric and through punitive actions of cleaning the streets of subhumans (Untermenschen) and later people with disabilities – we know what ultimately followed. (Rounding up the homeless in Washington, D.C. anyone? Putting immigrants or political opponents on trial or in deportation camps?)
Parallel to that, there were purges of the civil service, firing all who were deemed illegal or simply disloyal from professional institutions. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service from 1933 allowed the immediate removal of Jews and political opponents. (Just peruse the jobless numbers in Washington D.C. right now. Or look at the state of the Veterans’ Administration.)
At the same time, Hitler confronted military leaders and started to shape the military as his own power tool. Here is a link to the historical time line of submission of the military, documented in the encyclopedia of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. (As of this writing, military personnel from numerous states have been deployed in Washington, D.C. Armed, no less.)
In addition to the military, the Nazi regime established the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo. They wanted a centralized political police force that would be directly reporting to Nazi leadership, undermining state and local police. It took but three years, to 1936, to form such a force; that summer it was combined with the criminal police (what would here be the feds) under SS leader Himmler and his deputy Heydrich. The Gestapo’s mission was to “investigate and combat all attempts to threaten the state.” It could arrest, try and send those who criticized the regime to camps, under the 1934 law that made it illegal to criticize the Nazi Party. It could monitor individual behavior, and even send people directly to camps, under a mechanism called protective custody. They were allowed arbitrary warrantless searches and surveillance on mail and telephone calls. (Here is a smart piece on why it is risky to form analogies between ICE and the Gestapo, yet commonly seen these days.)
Note that the vast majority of Aryan Germans did not encounter or even expect to encounter the Gestapo during the 1930s. But the Gestapo was a constant threat for political opponents, religious dissenters, homosexuals, people of color and Jews. In fact, both Klee and Benjamin had to flee their country. Paul Klee left for Switzerland in 1935 and got very ill very fast. He died in June 1940, after 5 painful and increasingly debilitating years, from an autoimmune disorder triggered by stress as one factor, a disease that destroyed his body; his friend, admirer and collector Walter Benjamin took his own life but three months later, stranded in Spain while trying to escape the Nazis.
***
Exhibitions like the one in Berlin allow us to look back at the horrors brought upon human kind and the environment by a fascistic regime. They bear witness to the death, the loss, the damage wrought by war, and make us think about the reach this suffering had for subsequent generations. It is this kind of honest assessment about the ravages of historical events that many fear will be suppressed by the administration’s executive orders and institutions bending the knees.
What I don’t understand, though, is that we seem to be oblivious to this history even while we are still able to look at it, read about it, being taught about it. How can we so blindly follow the play book that brought us darkness once and is likely to bring it again in one form or another? A play book, step by step mirrored by the one now catapulted into use under the guidance of the Federalist society? Amassing absolute power, destroying democratic norms, ignoring the rule of law, marginalizing and demonizing scape goats to speak to the baser instincts of people who feel powerless, has plunged the world into catastrophe. What prevents us from learning from this? Honest question, not a rhetorical one.
Richard J. Evans, citing journalist Sebastian Haffner who interviewed contemporary witnesses, provides some hint at how the process of voluntary subjugation psychologically unfolds:
“Lawyer Raimund Pretzel asked himself what had happened to the 56 per cent of Germans who had voted against the Nazis in the elections of 5 March 1933. How was it, he wondered, that this majority had caved in so rapidly? Why had virtually every social, political and economic institution in Germany fallen into the hands of the Nazis with such apparent ease? ‘The simplest, and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason’, he concluded, ‘was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses.’ Many, he also thought, had felt betrayed by the weakness of their political leaders, from Braun and Severing to Hugenberg and Hindenburg, and they joined the Nazis in a perverse act of revenge. Some were impressed by the fact that everything the Nazis had predicted seemed to be coming true. ‘There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a member, even now shift its direction. Then of course many jumped on the bandwagon, wanted to be part of a perceived success.’ In the circumstances of the Depression, when times were hard and jobs were scarce, people clung to the mechanical routine ofdaily life as the only form of security: not to have gone along with the Nazis would have meant risking one’s livelihood and prospects, to have resisted could mean risking one’s life. “( Haffner, S. Defying Hitler pg. 111-114.)
***
So the angel of history looks at piles of debris. Sandstone is also a pile of debris, generally speaking. It is made out of fragments of other minerals or rocks, grains from quartz and feldspar flying through the air and accumulation for eons, then cemented by silica, calcite, and iron oxide, which contribute to the color the we see. Silica and calcite are general very light in color or even colorless, iron oxide, however, is rust-red and often stains the sandstone that way.
The cliffs at Cape Kiwanda are made of some 18-million-year-old particles, and the fact that these formations still stand has to do with their position relative to a haystack rock in front of them – it breaks up the wave action, sheltering the walls from the ever eroding surf, although erosion is not stopped completely.
Bits and pieces are constantly worn away, and sometimes massive sections drop off into the ocean. Two years ago, two large sinkhole appeared with months of each other on top of the cliffs, forcing a costly re-fencing to protect the public wandering around there.
Climate change makes it all worse. More frequent storms whipping the waves, longer periods of rain, heavier rainfall in general during climate patterns like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which is brought about by rising temperatures, create more and more damage. Of course, whether we will learn about climate change or support science to combat it, is another question that warrants looking at historical precedents. Doesn’t look too good. The Angel of History is at this point probably better off flying around with the pelicans to distract him/herself rather than be glued in horror to the views of wreckage accumulating around them…..
Then again, Robert Reich reminds us: “Remember: If we allow ourselves to fall into fatalism, or wallow in disappointment, or become resigned to what is rather than what should be, we will lose the long game. The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed.”
What he says.
Music today are George Crumb compositions reacting to some of Klee’s paintings. Here, an here.
You have probably seen the two DHS postings below. Or you are at least familiar with the painting on the right from your history books (it was often used as an illustration in chapters about Americans’ concept of Manifest Destiny.)
Both images were posted by Kristi Noem’s US Department of Homeland Security; the left image was provided with a caption asking us to remember our Homeland’s Heritage. The artist, Morgan Weistling, protested the use of the image, saying it violated copyrighted material and had been done without his consent.
“Weistling appears to have an ongoing partnership with conservative evangelical nonprofit Focus on the Family—which has been one of the longest and most aggressive opponents of abortion access and LGBTQIA+ rights—to sell prints of his paintings through Focus’s online store. One of the prints on offer is a reproduction of the painting posted by DHS. There it is titled A Prayer for a New Life, with the text noting that it “celebrates the value of life despite the many hazards a young family would have faced on their journey through the pioneer west.” (Ref.)
The Heritage and Homeland references again come up in a more recent posting of the painting American Progress, a 19th century work by John Gast that was first published in handbills and brochures encouraging people to move westward and take part in the colonization of those parts of America.
We see a depiction of Columbia, the predecessor of Lady Liberty, a large white woman clad in a white robe, the star of empire in her hair, carrying a book and telegraph wires, symbols of knowledge dissemination and modern, speedy communication. She moves from the light filled East to the dark West, driving bison and Native Americans out of the picture; we see them fleeing while various stages of “civilization” are depicted, from horse drawn wagons, to stage coach, to trains bringing goods from Eastern harbors.
Everyone is white, except for those indigenous people disappeared. The painting, made by a white German immigrant in 1872, resides these days in L.A.’s Autry Museum of the American West.
“It was purchased after being a part of a controversial 1991 exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Art that sought to reinterpret art of the American West with fresh context on conquest and colonization. Several lawmakers criticized the exhibit as overtly political, and threatened to defund the Washington, D.C., cultural institution in retaliation. Critics and patrons felt the exhibition unnecessarily villainized America’s history — a sharp contrast to the shining beam of progress depicted in Gast’s piece.” (Ref.)
At the Autry, it is usually surrounded by art from indigenous artists, both Native American and Mexican in origin and discussed as a form of romanticizing the Manifest Destiny concept, including one of the core ideas, looming larger than life here quite literally, that white women needed to be protected, brought civilization as well as Christianity, and ensured racially pure progeny. Never mind that at the time, Mexican women had more rights than American women in the East, and Native women had participatory power in tribal councils for millennia.
(Photographs today out of the dirty car windows with an iPhone, driving I5 South to L.A. The way the West looks now…)
Of course it was not white women who physically uprooted, enslaved and killed indigenous people at the time, just as it is not primarily white women who currently physically harm brown immigrants. (Screenshots from media below.)
Screenshot
But the idea of Manifest Destiny, the idea of an ordained group of people not only permitted but required to eradicate other groups of people, to decide who belongs and who doesn’t, is likely shared by Christian Nationalists of all genders. What we are asked by DHS to honor here, is a conception of a duty and a blessing to conquer the land even if it meant killing its inhabitants, and, historically, move slavery westward, (or alternatively use Chinese contract labor for the railroads until no longer needed (quick: Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882.) (I wrote about enslavement of Native Americans in California previously here.)
The DHS caption under the John Gast image says: A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.
Why do we want to look proudly on a period of violence and genocide, of settler colonialism, a dark chapter in our history, if anything? Why does this matter? Because the fight over birthright citizenship begins here and there are currently attempts to challenge the 14th Amendment that seemed to guarantee belonging to all who are born here’s established in 1868. Except in 1870, 92% of the Native American population – more Indians lived in 5 states and 10 territories than settlers – were still not included as citizen. The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act tried to remedy some of it, but they still could not vote; in 1948 you could find numerous state laws that barred them from voting. Only the Civil Rights Act in 1965 changed that.
When you listen to Christian Nationalists or read their publications you find two kinds of arguments. One is, that Christian, White, anglo-saxon protestant people who came to this land were not immigrants but settlers. And land belongs to those who settle it (a philosophy supported by John Locke, of all people, who claimed that any “savages” hunting, or roaming, or gathering, leading a semi-nomadic existence, had no property rights. Only those who build on land and cultivate it, were legally owners, and could claim dominion.) The only ones truly belonging, claiming their Homeland and their Christian heritage, were the settlers and now their descendants. (Which reminds me: we now have new administration policies that not only allow but encourage people to proselytize at the workplace, and churches can now endorse political candidates – you can just intuit the amount of dark money that can flow in this way…)
The tweet, by the way, that accompanies American Progress contains 14 words and each “H” is capitalized. Lots of people have pointed out that neo-Nazis interpreted this (who are we to judge if correctly?) as both an allusion to the German greeting of the Führer, and a Nazi code for the “14 words” white-supremacist mantra by David Eden Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, … because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.”
It is no secret that the Aryan Nations drew on frontier ideology and iconography to promote a secessionist and segregationist White homeland. DHS seems to be willing to share the idea. Here is something they published in June. Note, that this was shared from a Whitelandia social media account that is “transparently pro-Nazi and antisemitic. It has mocked remembrance of the Holocaust, shared a post from the “Aryan Defense League” featuring a Nazi soldier that calls on people to “Embrace your race,” and argued that only three flags should be allowed in the United States: The Stars and Stripes, the Confederate flag, and the Nazi swastika.” (Ref.)
Where is the firewall? You tell me….
Then again, we could be looking at the DHS cosplay Barbie’s selfie postings about evolving threats.
Music today is Neill Young’s take on Western expansionism.
Walk with me, before the heat sets in, very early morning. I know, it has been a long time, longer than anticipated. Had a bit of a rough stretch here, paralyzed by what is unfolding in our world, unable to face it with my usual determination. Then again, resignation is a luxury. Particularly when blessed with a position of privilege. So, shall we dive back into it, the rumination on where we are and perhaps what can be done about it? I vote yes, with hopes of not getting overwhelmed quite so soon again. Nature walks to the rescue….
Heron at his/her morning toilette
I think what got to me was the opening of more camps here and the forced abduction of humans, without legal recourse, to prisons abroad, sanctioned by a Supreme Court who knows that torture and slave labor are awaiting at those sites. What is here they call migrant tent camps or detention centers. You could also call them concentration camps for long term American residents who have not been convicted of any crime and face deportations to countries they’ve never set foot in. (A reminder: Mere unlawful presence in our country is not a crime. It is a violation of federal immigration law to remain in the country without legal authorization, but this violation is punishable by civil penalties, not criminal.)
Concentration camps hold a special place in the imagination of people like me growing up in post-war Germany. I’ll write about that history and the emergence of a secret police which paved the way, a bit later. Today, walking in this amazing landscape, I am reminded that we don’t have to look to Europe for these kinds of atrocities. Our very own history contains plenty applicable examples – all based on the Merriam-Webster definition of concentration camp:
“A concentration camp is a facility where large numbers of people, often political prisoners or members of ethnic or religious minorities, are detained in small spaces under armed guard without fair trial or legal process. These camps are typically associated with harsh conditions.”
The recent history is probably remembered by most of us: the 1942 interment of Japanese-Americans in camps, most of them US citizens, no less. But there were other, earlier examples.
Take 1927, for example, when the Mississippi river flooded, with extensive damage to Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and put in camps, segregated by race, since this was during Jim Crow. Black camps quickly turned to labor camps, run by the National Guard, forcing refugees to work on white-owned plantations or doing repairs, rebuilding the levees, unloading supplies from ships, all as unpaid labor. Black evacuees were, in contrast to Whites, not allowed to leave and go North by decree of the Governor. People trying to escape or refusing labor were beaten or killed by National Guard troops. 300 000 Black Americans, interned in 154 camps, sleeping on the wet ground, provided with scant food.
All this on the heels of the Tulsa Massacres in 1921, where 6000 Black Americans were put into an internment camp with forced labor requirement.
Thistle, chamomile, a house finch in an elderberry bush, bindweed, mallow and mystery flower…
Further back, the bloodshed proceeded unimpeded. Andrew Jackson proposed that
“emigration depots”were introduced as an integral part of official US Indian removal policy. Tens of thousands of Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Ponca, Winnebago and other indigenous peoples were forced from their homes at gunpoint and marched to prison camps in Alabama and Tennessee. Overcrowding and a lack of sanitation led to outbreaks of measles, cholera, whooping cough, dysentery and typhus, while insufficient food and water, along with exposure to the elements, caused tremendous death and suffering.
Thousands of men, women and children died of cold, hunger and illness in camps and during death marches, including the infamous Trail of Tears, of hundreds and sometimes even a thousand miles (1,600 km). This genocidal relocation was pursued, Jackson explained, as the “benevolent policy” of the US government, and because Native Americans “have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits nor the desire of improvement” required to live in peace and freedom. “Established in the midst of a… superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority… they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and long disappear,” the man who Donald Trump has called his favorite president said in his 1833 State of the Union address.” (Ref.)
Red-winged blackbird, a kingfisher diving and a purple martin.
American history – soon to be deleted from a curriculum near you. One can see that as sort of a lie, a criminal lie: the erasure of what we should remember, our very own atrocities.
“The lie of active forgetting. While humans are doomed to forget and be forgotten, that is a passive process. Instead I am referring to active forgetting. Erasure comes when a society takes active steps to forget the horrors it has committed. These steps often include developing a counter mythology to help erase the truth. Think of your typical mid-20th century American Western. Myths about savage Indians harassing “innocent” settlers, particularly white women and children, requiring the cavalry ride to the rescue. This is just one of many examples of how American society actively erased the truth about settler genocide of Indigenous societies. Not savage Indians, but Indigenous civilizations whose only “crime” was thousands of years of occupation and use of American land and resources. Scores (if not more) of ethnic cleansing and genocide campaigns repackaged as “civilization” rightfully replacing bloodthirsty, ignorant “me talk dumb ug-um Indian” savagery.And all of this in turn allows a society to actively forget, or erase, the atrocities it has committed.” (Read Akim Reinhardt’s full, thoughtful essay on suppression of historical knowledge here.)
Babies!!!
Egret and heron were spooked when I walked up.
There are obviously a number of reasons why public education is currently under relentless and brutal attack. But erasing the knowledge of painfully violent and unjust history is surely one of them.
Deer jumping across the path in front of me
We walk here on land of the Atfalati [aˈtɸalati], also known as the Tualatin or Wapato Lake Indians, a tribe of the Kalapuya Native Americans who originally inhabited villages on the Tualatin Plains in the northwest part of the U.S. state of Oregon. In 1856, the tribe was removed to Grand Ronde Reservation, some sixty miles southwest of their original homeland. Another forced relocation – a story for another day.
Bunnies at breakfast.
This turtle was on the path nowhere near water. Must have made a wrong turn. Just like this country.
Music today by Walter Zanetti. Might have poste before. Beautiful enough to repeat endlessly….
By all reports, it used to be a happy place. A house right next to a “Tunnel of Many Vistas”, an engineering marvel from 1915 on the original 73-mile route of the Columbia River Highway, the first major paved highway in the Pacific Northwest and the first scenic highway constructed in the United States. By the 1930s, that building became a roadhouse, a service station, a restaurant and a bunch of rental cabins for overnighters who drove their cars out to Hood River, admiring the tunnel along the way. Much dancing, fueled by moonshine, gregarious company and fun throughout the Prohibition.
The original Mitchell Point Tunnel was closed in 1953, no longer safe, and no longer able to accommodate increased numbers of ever larger cars. It was ultimately destroyed and filled with rocks in 1966 to widen I-84. (The basalt that constitutes the surrounding mountain and delivered those rocks, is in itself a thing of beauty – just look at the coloration!)
Want to join me for a short walk? The tunnel is now rebuilt and connected to the Historic Highway State Trail through a steep mountain at Mitchell Point, open for hikers (and eventual bikers) only. (You can reach it by car, but parking is extremely limited (fewer than 20 spaces with no off-rad alternative available. So choose timing wisely.) The State Trail hopes to connect The Dalles with Troutdale once again, a stretch of 68 miles or so.
The choice to visit this place, opened to the public less than two months ago, was the perfect antidote to the feelings incited by this week’s news. For me it was the mix of assaults against individual people or groups combined with attacks on ideas and values, never mind the law, that registered as such heavy burden. To name just a few: a brain-dead Georgia woman kept alive on tubes to serve as an incubator to her unborn baby due to new restrictive abortion laws, with her family having to foot the bill for the next many months, never mind not facing a form of closure. Birthing machines, even in death.
The passage of the “big beautiful bill,” that will deprive millions of kids and people living with disability of food, and kick over 13 million people off health insurance.
A bill that will lead to the closure of over 150 rural hospitals, not only making timely health care accessibility close to impossible in those areas, but also kicking 1000s of people off impossible to replace – jobs.
A bill that deprives young and adult trans people alike of HRT or surgical treatment compensation.
A bill that has hidden clauses like: “no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.”
And, in one of its most authoritarian passages, a bill that order judicial silencing in Sec. 80121(h): “No court shall have jurisdiction to review any action taken by the Secretary, the EPA Administrator, a State or municipal agency, or any other Federal agency […] to issue a lease, permit, biological opinion, or other approval.” In other words, if the government approves drilling, mining, or development, even illegally, you can’t sue. – It applies retroactively, killing lawsuits already in progress. – Tribes, environmental groups, citizens, even states, lose the right to challenge these approvals in court.
A bill that contains provisions (sec. 70302) that would block federal courts from enforcing contempt charges against government officials who violate court orders, unless a judge required a monetary bond when issuing the original injunction (which is rarely done.) This would clearly undermine the already tenuous balance of power between our branches of government.
On the disaster preparedness front, the news was equally worrying. The Trump administration canceled 33 million in funding to help prepare and protect Californians from earthquake damage. And FEMA announced that it canceled its Four-Year strategic Plan ahead of Hurricane season, with no replacement given. This came a week after the announcement that FEMA is ending Door-to-Door canvassing in disaster areas to provide aid.
Tunnel as antidote to all this? Yes! Not only is there light at the end of the tunnel. The new tunnel mirrors the historic tunnel with re-constructed arched windows with views of the Columbia River, letting light in continuously along the way. Such a prominent reminder that not all is dark – there are islands of hope, of openness, of change and restoration (like this very tunnel), as well as resilience.
And speaking of which, the wildflowers clinging to the steep cliffs surrounding this site, were in bloom or in brightest green of emergent leaves, on the scarcest of soil. The delicate poppies swayed with the sharp wind, not defeated. Nature’s will and strength to survive on full view. Turned out to be a happy place, indeed.
Count me among them. At least during the stretch when I was 9 or 10 years old, devouring books about Africa, and clueless about the indoctrination I received. Why my parents, serious liberals, did not discuss these books that I got from the (postwar!) library – familial and frequent German literature from the beginning of the 20th century for the young set – is a mystery to me. It all came back when I saw the rhinos recently, flooded with memories about the vicarious excitement of a white rhinoceros hunt where the white colonialists managed to kill them, when the Africans did not want to engage in the slaughter.
Rhinos can weigh up to six tons and run between 30 and 40 miles per hour – inconceivably fast. The white and the black rhino are threatened with extinction due to poaching for their desired horns. Both, by the way, are grey and differentiated really by their lip shape. The wide mouth of one, weit in Africaans, was mistranslated as white, thus the name. They are endangered due to poaching of their horns, believed to have medicinal properties, once ground into powder.
Africa has traditionally been a space for white projections, as well as a reservoir for stereotypes of Blacks. We associate the continent with untamed nature, wild animals, a place perfect for romanticized longing. That sure was the case for me, a kid bored growing up in a small village, dreaming of adventure in arid deserts and lush jungles (seemingly the only two ways African nature was presented.) Then again, the “dark” continent was also a dangerous and threatening place, defined by natural catastrophes, hunger, diseases and bloody wars. A mix, then, of fascination and aversion.
German children were educated about the needs of and justification for colonialism from the moment of its beginnings. Boys, that is. The girls were only included once the need for white brides became apparent, late in the unfolding, around 1904-1906 or so. “The stories appeared at a time when the ‘race laws’ in the colonies were becoming much stricter, and colonial policy, together with the bourgeois women’s movement, was encouraging the emigration of young, single white German women to the colonies, preferably German South West Africa, to prevent ‘mixed marriages’ between white German men and Black women.” (Ref this links to a scholarly article on the impact of colonial literature on education, a fascinating read. )
All of a sudden girls were encouraged by stories of feisty heroines who would be sent to Africa, build homes and gardens, allowed to be more independent than back home, including hunting in untamed nature, but eventually finding the love of their life in some colonial officer (often upward social mobility was hinted at as a prize), making white babies, and sending stolen treasure in form of cocoa, coffee, rubber back home, so direly needed by the fatherland. (Note, I was into rhino hunts, not nurseries…)Note also that some racist aspects of the narratives continued on into the 1960s, or even in contemporary kids’ books, long after many of the colonized nations became independent.)
Come to think of it, the expedited admission of South African white “refugees” to the US, per instructions from up on high, is not just based on lies about genocide, but also related to the desire for white babies. I hear a lot of them will be settled in Idaho, where they will find a like-minded community near the Arian Nation. But that is a topic for another day.
Typically, these stories involved white saviorism, helping the “primitive” population to survive and prosper, but also dominance: the young women had a mission to bring culture to the “savages,” the African continent conceived as having no history or culture, literally cultivating them as if they were animals or plants. Describing them as exotic (just like the surrounding fauna and flora), or stereotyping them as childlike, invited the female readers to see themselves as “educators.” The boys’ stories focussed on dominance: describing the population as lazy, amoral, bent on violence and bloodshed invited the strong hand (and if necessary gun) of the colonialist. The distortions applied to the perception of the native peoples helped solidify the identity of the rulers: privileged with knowledge, culture and power, dishing it out in benevolent or hostile ways, never doubting the god-given hierarchy of white over Black.
This is, of course, how belief systems, no matter how insidious, get transmitted from generation to generation – children’s literature seeds the stereotypes and lures you with identification with adventure, exoticism, wealth and romantic love. This is exactly why factions in the culture wars try to weed out anything that might oppose their tenets or inform about alternative interpretations. The purges of libraries right now, the shutting down of children’s TV programs that make racism, stereotyping, misogyny and/or colonialism a topic, are essential to the project of making white children believe they are a the top of the value pyramid, and entitled to submission from everyone else. As early as possible.
Here is a comprehensive overview of what is going on with public libraries, school libraries and issues of free speech. And here is an interesting review in the Los Angeles Review of Books of the ongoing purges and the effects on librarians who have to function in an ever more hostile, polarized world.
I was, of course, fortunate enough, to be provided with all kinds of literature, and higher education which eventually opened the door to critical thinking and insights about the project of colonializing Africa or any other place deemed inferior. But those old books sure stimulated fantasizing about adventures in an exotic world, immersion into unimaginably wild nature, one on one encounters with rhinos and elephants.
I blush thinking about it. Such easy fodder for the PR machine promising me I, too, could be an explorer, a pioneer, a discoverer. I made it to North Africa, but never further south. These days, I explore the zoo, but ended up thoroughly anti-racist. I guess I count that as a win.
A resolution to mark May 5th, 2025 as National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls passed the Senate on Monday. This was good news among a torrent of bad news regarding Indigenous rights. I want to introduce two voices today, who singularly inform, on an intellectual and an emotional level, respectively, about the issues involving Native Americans.
All images today by Nicole Merton.
Let’s start with the latter, a photographer and activist of Mescalero Apache descent, Nicole Merton. She focuses her photographic work on the MMIWP Movement (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & People) with cultural photography and recordings of untold stories, doing field work across the nation. Her photography depicts women who have payed tribute to memories of their lost loved ones, and their strength to stand for others who can’t. Within these photos there is a red hand print which evokes solidarity and a moment of silence for the ones lost. The symbol that has taken off internationally to point to the growing MMIW movement. It stands for all the missing women and girls whose voices are not heard. It also stands for the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis.
“For the last few decades there has been a massive attack on indigenous women of the United States as well as Canada, and parts of Mexico. These women have been taken and forced into sex trafficking, have been sexually assaulted, and some are murdered. Many have been reported missing with little to nothing being done about it. In the record breaking year of 2016 there were 5,712 missing women reported by tribal officials but only 116 where actually recorded in the United States Department of Justice, the number of missing and murdered women are still rising. A small percentage of those women who have gone missing have been girls as young as the age of 10. Native American women under the age of 35 are at a higher risk of being murdered than many other groups which makes it the third most prevalent cause of death among indigenous women. 95% of these cases never make it to the media, it is my determination to make changes and bring forth awareness, and to change lives.”
The images I am posting today come from Merton’s website, which has an amazing breadth of portraiture, but also from an exhibition where I first encountered her work, 1.5 years ago. Red Earth Gaze was shown at the Angle’s Gate Art Center in San Pedro, CA. Unfortunately I did not note the titles of the photographs, too immersed at the time in their emotional impact.
***
The other person of note is Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee), a Native American activist, writer, and public speaker. I summarize below information from her site Welcome to Native America. Her book By the Fire We Carry was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and claimed as the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year, an NPR 2024 “Books We Loved” Pick, an Esquire Best Book of the Year and a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2024.
“The author recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.”
Here is the current situation from Nagle’s reporting: Nationally, there are 4,200 unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Meanwhile, as part of the Trump admin’s purge of “DEI” information on government websites, it has taken down a federal report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. The task force behind the report was created by Congress.
Trump has unveiled a plan to close the EPA Office of Research and Development in Ada, Oklahoma. It is the nation’s only federal groundwater research lab. This will have disproportionate impacts for tribes, where the majority of drinking water systems utilize groundwater.
The Trump-proposed SAVE Act is heading to the Senate. If passed, it will disenfranchise millions of citizens, including Native voters. Under the Act, tribal IDs will be insufficient to prove citizenship and will require additional documentation and rural Native voters will need to travel hours to register to vote in person, or even to update their address or party affiliation. Check out Protect the Sacred, which registered hundreds of Indigenous voters in 2024 through the Ride to the Polls campaign.
***
I am always encouraged by the singular reach that people who passionately pursue a cause, can have. Once individual voices add up to a chorus, maybe the message will get loud enough so that it can no longer be ignored. The victims deserve it.
Then again, justice is not easy to come by. For Native women, murder is the third leading cause of death. Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average. 97% of the people who perpetrate these crimes are non-Native. Part of the problem is the legal gray zone of who is responsible for prosecuting these crimes, with diffuse criminal jurisdiction.
I am summarizing Nagle again: Tribes cannot prosecute non-Natives (the most frequent perpetrators) for most crimes. And there are legal limits for the prosecution of tribal members by tribes – even for murder you can only sentence to three years in prison. (Let us for a moment ignore the issue of abolition, ok?) The federal government can prosecute “major” crimes on tribal land, like murder, assault, kidnapping, child abuse, and robbery. The problem here is that historically the federal authorities don’t take up this power – over a third of all Indian Country cases are declined, and for some years the rate is as high as 67%, not pursuing sexual assault cases, for example.
It gets more complicated: as of a 2022 Supreme Court decision, all states have the authority to prosecute crimes where the perpetrator is non-Native, but the victim is Native. Yet only 15 states have prosecutorial power on Native land. And And finally, some tribes can prosecute some crimes (sexual assault, sex trafficking, stalking, and child abuse) committed by non-Natives on their land, but only if they meet certain criteria and seek and receive federal approval. As of 2022, 31 tribes across the U.S. had passed this hurdle – 31 out of 574. Confused yet?
And we wonder why crime rates against tribal women are excessive.
If you are interested in how contemporary poets confront the epidemic of missing indigenous women, I urge you to read this essay that will link to various poems.
Instead of music today here is a poem in audio form. I liked the way the words conjure up a powerful woman, not a victim.
She Is Spitting a Mouthful of Stars (nikâwi’s Song)
She is spitting a mouthful of stars She is laughing more than the men who beat her She is ten horses breaking open the day She is new to her bones She is holy in the dust
She is spitting a mouthful of stars She is singing louder than the men who raped her She is waking beyond the Milky Way She is new to her breath She is sacred in this breathing
She is spitting a mouthful of stars She is holding the light more than those who despised her She is folding clouds in her movement She is new to this sound She is unbroken flesh
She is spitting a mouthful of stars She is laughing more than those who shamed her She is ten horses breaking open the day She is new to these bones She is holy in their dust
As per usual, one thing led to another while I was wandering among the Victorian houses of Eureka, CA on my most recent jaunt. Struck me as sort of a ghost town (more on that in a minute).
The Louvre Cafe has clearly seen better times…
Associative jump to Victorian ghost stories, and, inevitably, Montague Rhodes James (1882 – 1936). He was a British medievalist scholar, widely respected as provost of King’s College, Cambridge and of Eton College, as well as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He also authored numerous volumes of ghost stories which had a large impact on the horror genre, partly due to their juxtaposition of humor and the supernatural.
One of his most famous stories, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1904), can be found in a collection called A Warning to the Curious. It is a clever and funny tale named after a poem by Robert Burns, filled with often ironic allusions to world literature, Shakespeare and Coleridge as well as the bible. It is about a stodgy, slightly off Professor enamored with his own rationality, who spends a week’s vacation at the sea coast, pocketing a bronze whistle he finds in an abandoned Knights Templar cemetery along the beach. Soon he feels as if he is being followed. When he inspects the whistle in his room, with weird inscriptions seeming to reference the bible, strange noises begin startling him during the night. In short order things get sketchy and the Prof will never be the same again, as you will be able to see for yourself, when watching this remarkable, brilliant short film made for the BBC in 1968, and starring Michael Hordern. Watch it for the character acting alone. Such a difference from today’s horror flics. It’ll make your day! Well, it did mine.
Although my day was already pretty good, having listened to a new music album by Paul Roland, the expert on turning Victorian murders, supernatural experiences or horror stories into the most pleasant songs. He transformed James’ stories into ballads, sung with the voice of a bard found in your nearest corner pub, publishing this enchanting collection just last week. Here is his version of Whistle and I’ll Come to You. How can you not like a song that starts with the lines “Professor Parkins was a man of few words, but all of them were long, oh so long…” or a songwriter, who manages to get the essence of a story crammed in verse form into a ballad without losing any of the essential narrative and wit.
A warning to the curious could also be found on the walking path along the bay in Eureka. The path, lined with encampments of houseless people, runs behind the large mall and a strip of motels where I stayed.
This small town has seen its share of horrors, both on the extending and the receiving end. It is a harbor town in Northern California in Humboldt County, which derived its name from the Greek motto εὕρηκα (heúrēka), which means “I have found it!” It was missed by the European explorers for the longest time, due to a combination of geographic features and weather conditions which concealed the narrow bay entrance from view, and so was settled relatively late, around 1850. It did not take that long – but 10 years, in 1860 – for settlers and gold seekers to massacre the native population, the Wiyot people, mostly women and children, at a time when the adult males were away for an annual ceremony. The remaining populations sought shelter at Fort Humboldt, but over half died of starvation, with the army withholding proper care.
Not done yet. In 1890, with recent economic downturns and a growing sinophobia and violent acts against Chinese immigrants, a group of 600 White vigilantes forcibly and permanently evicted all 480 Chinese residents of Eureka’s Chinatown.
Photographs of Victorian beauties in Eureka from the city website.
The city thrived on the lumber trade, extracting what they could from the surrounding Red Woods, as well as fishing, and these days tourist trade. The timber economy of Eureka rises and falls with boom-and-bust economic times, certainly declined after the Second World War and even more so after the 1962 Columbus Day storm that felled so many trees that there was a glut in the market. The region is also site to large earthquakes and in danger of tsunamis. After 1990, regulatory, economic, and climate change-related events led to a contraction of the local commercial fishing fleet as well. The city these days is struggling, and it is visible in many closed or for sale properties when you walk around.
It is also quite evident that people are suffering – California is currently the state with the largest number of houseless people, and Humboldt County is having an above average share of them. There are opposing forces, as we, of course, see all around the country, that differ in ways how to approach this difficult situation. There are those who want to pursue actions that criminalize the people living in tents and cars for lack of available alternatives. They are bent on preserving public space for parking lots rather than low income housing for poor people, with the general idea that their presence impedes on commercial interests in town, always regressing to the long disproven claim that the presence of the poor will attract more crime.
But not all is a horror story! The good people of Eureka soundly defeated a measure meant to exclude houseless populations from housing availability in the city center in favor of parking lots during the last election. Despite a millionaire and his buddies investing $1.6 or so million in a campaign to maintain exclusion, ballot measure F passed in favor of the vulnerable population.
The story now unfolds around efforts to increase penalties for those living outside. City Council meetings have become land wars between the factions who want to criminalize homelessness and those who want to go about the problem by other means. Emotions run high, but there is clearly a movement that tries to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
The center of the city has a lot of spiffy stores for tourists, an opera house and a terrific bookstore, Bookleggers.
Mostly, you find interesting stuff a bit further away or in the back alleys, just like in San Francisco – lots of creative murals,
and a clear proclivity for cats…
Maybe we need to turn to witch stories next….
And as this day’s news of the Pope’ death demands some acknowledgment – he prayed daily with and for the Gazans and repeatedly rebuked the Trump administration over its stance on migrants and the marginalized – here is Mozart’s Lacrima. I got the musical idea from a different source – one of my steady readers has a cool website from which I derive news about rock and metal music. They had a Lacrima of a different sort today, by a band named Ghost no less…. thank you, Fox Reviews Rock!
