The Struggle to Protect the Sacred San Francisco Peaks Continues

After years of battle, The Arizona Snowbowl recently set United States precedent by becoming the first ski resort in the country's history to make fake snow out of reclaimed wastewater. Disregarding environmental and deep social concerns, the USFS continued a long legacy of federal entities marginalizing ecosystem health and American Indian belief systems when they ok'd the plan. It seems the case was in a poor state after the final ruling, until this most recent news out of Flagstaff. This is a definitive opportunity for actualized sustainability across justicew driven grounds socially, environmentally, economically and politically. That is, if this newest lawsuit can take root, and bring the spotlight back on the foul play and further oppression facilitated by the action's of the Arizona Snowbowl.


From the AZ Daily Sun:


The Hopi Tribe can proceed with its legal bid to halt snowmaking with reclaimed wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks after the Arizona Supreme Court sided with it Tuesday. In a procedural victory, the tribe has won the right to proceed with its lawsuit against the city of Flagstaff challenging the city’s 2002 decision to sell reclaimed wastewater to the Arizona Snowbowl ski area, on assertions that the water sale works against the public’s interests. Judges at the Arizona Court of Appeals last April had overturned a 2011 ruling by former Coconino County Superior Court Judge Joe Lodge.


The city had asked the supreme court to review the appeals court ruling, but the petition was denied Tuesday. The Appeals Court ruled that the tribe can raise questions about whether making snow causes a public nuisance — or something that “interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property by an entire community or neighborhood or by a considerable number of persons,” in the eyes of the law. Further, the court found the tribe was actually a little too early in filing its lawsuit against the city of Flagstaff in 2011 (before snowmaking had started in December 2012), and that it was raising new arguments not heard before in other lawsuits intended to bar snowmaking.


“The Hopi Tribe, as well as many others, has always maintained that snowmaking with reclaimed wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks is simply wrong. Using wastewater harms the use and enjoyment of these areas and degrades the pristine nature of the Kachina Peaks Wilderness Area,” said Hopi Chairman LeRoy Shingoitewa last April.


“We look forward to presenting our environmental and public health evidence to the court.” Previous lawsuits raised questions about whether snowmaking would harm Native American religious ceremonies and whether the U.S. Forest Service had adequately weighed the environmental impacts of using reclaimed wastewater on mountains feeding two Arizona watersheds. This lawsuit seeks to persuade judges that the city of Flagstaff’s 2002 decision to sell reclaimed wastewater to Arizona Snowbowl was not in the public’s best interest. Lodge ruled in December 2011 that these issues had already been considered and that the tribe was too late in raising them.


“The plaintiff was clearly on notice in March 2002 that the city of Flagstaff intended to contract with Snowbowl to purchase reclaimed wastewater to be used for snowmaking at the Snowbowl ski area,” Lodge wrote in his 2011 ruling. Separately, the Appeals Court stated that this case shouldn’t have any bearing on another long-running legal case bearing on tribal water rights.


Retrieved at: http://azdailysun.com/news/local/court-greenlights-hopi-challenge-against-flagstaff-s-sale-of-reclaimed/article_3198671c-782d-11e3-98c9-0019bb2963f4.html

R.I.P. Nelson Mandela, Your Spirit Will Forever Live On!

In perpetual and infinite solidarity...

Gay Rights is the Civil Rights Movement of our Time!

More often than not, in the present, a majority of folks in the USA feel change is too far off. They'll say it's hard to think about a restructuring of economy, government, and that what's generally accepted in the now-for example, discrimination against people based on their sexuality-is too much to change.

To that I say look at what happened when women voiced their opinions on the matter of voting. Look at what happened leading up to the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before 1970, not one environmental rule, regulation, law or policy existed. That is exactly what's currently happening in regards to gay rights. Of course that doesn't mean everyone turned into anti-patriarchal, anti-racist activists overnight, and it certainly doesn't main justice is easily found within the present oppressive systems in place. And i certainly doesn't mean racism and sexism have been eliminated through mainstream society. But it does speak to the fact that humans have created the socially constructed systems that have largely maintained oppression, and that therefore these conditions and systems can change by "the same" hands.

Ask a lesbian women, gay man and/or member of the transgender community what it was like to live in the 1950's, 60's, 70's and so on. That reality is changing today, and while nothing is perfect, many states are now realizing how archaic and ill informed their previous stances on the issue have been, much like states did once the tide turned for other movements of human civil rights in the past.

 Don't wait to follow the leader, be one.

All it takes is one person, state or country to lead the way for everyone else. Let's keep supporting LGBT community members in this struggle! The more action and solidarity that's taken, the more the groundswell of change for the betterment of all living things will come. 

Further reading and headlines: 

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/hawaii-gay-marriage-weddings-100522.html 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/12/03/248217871/how-2013-became-the-greatest-year-in-gay-rights-history

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/12/bar_mitzvah_speech_by_portland.html 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/12/slide-show-first-days-of-gay-marriage.html#slide_ss_0=1
 

The Thanksgiving Myth

Give Thanks Everyday! 

By: popularresistance.org

Above: “Enlightened and Christian Warfare in the 19th Century–Massacre of Indian Women and Children in Idaho” published in “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated,” August 1868. 

The Defining and Enabling Experience of Our “Civilization” 

As we again plan to celebrate what US “Americans”call Thanksgiving, let us pause for a moment of reflection. Let us recognize that accounts of the first Thanksgiving are mythological, and that the holiday is actually a grotesque celebration of our arrogant ethnocentrism built on genocide.

Native Americans in the Caribbean greeted their 1492 European invaders with warm hospitality. They were so innocent that Genoan Cristoforo Colombo wrote in his log, They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They do not bear arms . . . They would make fine servants . . . They could easily be made Christians . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. This meeting set in motion a 500+-year plunder of the Western Hemisphere, which then spread to the remainder of the globe. And it has not stopped!

Historian Hans Köning concludes that what sets the West apart is its persistence, its capacity to stop at nothing. Cultural historian Lewis Mumford declared, Wherever Western man went, slavery, land robbery, lawlessness, culture-wrecking, and the outright extermination of both wild beasts and tame men went with him.

Jump 129 years to 1621, year of the supposed “first Thanksgiving.” There is not much documentation of that event, apparently a three-day feast, but surviving Indians do not trust the myth. Natives were already dying like flies thanks to European-borne diseases. The Pequot tribe in today’s Connecticut reportedly numbered 8,000 when the Pilgrims arrived, but disease had reduced their population to 1,500 by 1637, when the first, officially proclaimed, all-Pilgrim “Thanksgiving” took place. At that feast, the whites of New England celebrated their massacre of the Pequots in the Connecticut Valley where the Mystic River meets the sea. The Indians were in fact celebrating their annual green corn dance ceremony. But it was to be their last.

William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers of the supposed 1621 feast, was on hand for the unspeakable massacre of 1637. He described it thus in his History of the Plymouth Plantation (@1647): Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory.

The rest of the white folks thought so, too. This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots, read Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop’s proclamation. The authentic proclaimed Thanksgiving Day was born. Few Pequots survived.

Read the rest of the story here: 
http://www.popularresistance.org/genocide-and-the-thanksgiving-myth/  

Educate yourself, educate others and believe in a better world for all species and the earth!
 

This Day Never Was, and Will Never Be a Holiday: Why Columbus Day Celebrates Colonization and Genocide

This is a repost from the same day two years ago. It is as relevant now as when it was written in 1991 because put simply, today is not a holiday.

Original post: I'm reposting this article, which I believe does a very good job of explaining why this day is not, and will never be a holiday.

From: http://www.dickshovel.com/colum.html

Why Autonomous AIM Opposes Columbus Day and Columbus Day Parades © by Glenn Morris and Russell Means

When Taino Indians saved Christopher Columbus from certain death on the fateful morning of Oct. 12, 1492, a glorious opportunity presented itself. The cultures Europe of and the Americas could have merged and the beauty of both races could have flourished. Unfortunately, what occurred was neither beautiful nor heroic. Just as Columbus could not, and did not, "discover" a hemisphere that was already inhabited by nearly 100 million people, his arrival cannot, and will not, be recognized as a heroic and celebratory event by indigenous peoples.

Unlike the Western tradition, which presumes some absolute concept of objective truth, and consequently, one "factual" depiction of history, the indigenous view recognizes that there exist many truths in the world and many legitimate recollections of any given historical event, depending on one's perspective and experiences.

From an indigenous vantage point, Columbus' arrival was a disaster from the beginning. Although his own diaries indicated that he was greeted by the Taino Indians with the most generous hospitality he had ever known, he immediately began the enslavement and slaughter of the Indian peoples of the Caribbean islands. As the eminent Columbus biographer Samuel Eliot Morison admits in his book, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Columbus was personally responsible for enslavement and murder of indigenous peoples. He was personally responsible for the design and operation of the encomienda system that tied Indians as slaves to the lands stolen from them by the European invaders.

As detailed in the American Heritage Magazine (October,1976), Columbus personally oversaw the genocide of the Taino Indian nation of what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Consequently, this murderer, despite his historical notoriety, deserves no recognition or accolades as a hero; he deserves no respect as a visionary; and he is not worthy of a state or national holiday in his honor. Defenders of Columbus and his holiday argue that indigenous peoples unfairly judge Columbus, a 15th century actor, by the moral and legal standards of the late 20th century. Such a defense implies that no moral or legal constraints applied to individuals such as Columbus, or countries, in 1492. As Roger Williams details in his book, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, not only were there European moral and legal principles in 1492, but they largely favored the rights of indigenous peoples to be free from unjustified invasion and pillage by Europeans.

Unfortunately, the issue of Columbus and Columbus Day is not easily resolvable with a disposition of Columbus, the man. Columbus Day as a national, and international, phenomenon reflects a much larger dynamic that promotes myriad myths and historical lies that have been used through the ages to dehumanize Indians, justifying the theft of our lands, the attempted destruction of our nations, and the genocide against our people. Since the 15th Century, the myth of Columbus' discovery has been used in the development of laws and policies that reek of Orwell's doublespeak: theft equals the righteous spread of civilization, genocide is God's deliverance of the wilderness from the savages, and the destruction of Indian societies implies the superiority of European values and institutions over indigenous ones. Columbus Day is a perpetuation of racist assumptions that the Western Hemisphere was a wasteland cluttered with savages awaiting the blessings of Western "civilization."

Throughout the hemisphere, educational systems perpetuate these myths - suggesting that indigenous peoples have contributed nothing to the world, and, consequently, should be grateful for their colonization and their microwave ovens. As Alfred Crosby, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Jack Weatherford have illustrated in their books, not only was the Western Hemisphere a virtual ecological and health paradise prior to 1492, but the Indians of the Americas have been responsible for such revolutionary global contributions as the model for U.S. constitutional government, agricultural advances that currently provide 60 percent of the world's daily diet, and hundreds of medical and medicinal techniques still in use today.

If you find it difficult to believe that Indians had developed highly complex and sophisticated societies, then you have been victimized by an educational and social system that has given you a retarded, distorted view of history. The operation of this view has also enabled every country in this hemisphere, including the U.S., to continue its destruction of Indian peoples. From the jungles of Brazil to the highlands of Guatemala, from the Chaco of Paraguay to the Supreme Court of the United States, Indian people remain in a perpetual state of danger from the systems that Christopher Columbus began in 1492. Throughout the Americas, Indian people remain at the bottom of every socioeconomic indicator, we are under continuing physical attack, and are afforded the least access to economic, political, or legal redress.

Despite these constant and unbridled assaults, we have resisted, we have survived, and we refuse to surrender any more of our homeland or to disappear into the romantic sunset. To dignify Columbus and his legacy with parades, holidays and other celebrations is intolerable to us. As the original peoples of this land, we cannot, and will not, countenance social and political festivities that celebrate our genocide. We are embarking on a two- pronged campaign in the quincentenary year to confront the continuing racism against Indian people.

First, we are advocating that the divisive Columbus Day holiday should be replaced by a celebration that is much more inclusive and more accurately reflective of the cultural and racial richness of the Americas. Such a holiday will provide respect and acknowledgement to every group and individual of the importance and value of their heritage, and will allow a more honest and accurate portrayal of the evolution of the hemisphere. It will also provide an opportunity for greater understanding and respect as our societies move ahead into the next 500 years.

Opponents to this suggestion react as though this proposal is an attack on ancient time-honored holiday, but Columbus Day has been a national holiday only since 1971 - and in 1991, hopefully, we can correct the errors of the past, moving forward in an atmosphere of mutual respect and inclusiveness. 

Second, and related to the first, is the advancement of an active militant campaign to demand that federal, state, and local authorities begin the removal of anti-Indian icons throughout the country. Beginning with Columbus, we are insisting on the removal of statues, street names, public parks, and any other public object that seeks to celebrate or honor devastators of Indian peoples. We will take an active role of opposition to public displays, parades, and celebrations that champion Indian haters. We encourage others, in every community in the land, to educate themselves and to take responsibility for the removal of anti-Indian vestiges among them.

 For people of goodwill, there is no better time for the re-examination of the past, and a rectification of the historical record for future generations, than the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival. There is no better place for this re-examination to begin than in Colorado, the birthplace of the Columbus Day holiday.

Russell Means and Glenn Morris wrote this position statement in 1991 on behalf of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, 1574 South Pennsylvania St., Denver, CO
 

With the U.S. Government Shutdown, is the Empire No More?

Not by a long shot, but in terms of Hegemony? How many people/nations are literally laughing at the U.S. right now? It's a mockery to have the Imperial "leader" of the "free" world in disarray due to bipartisan political differences.

This is why anyone who feels strongly about either dualistic side of the U.S. system needs to check their belief systems. Two sides of the same coin shutting down the government over a heath care bill-one that mind you, does take a great step forward in providing care to those who are least likely to access/afford it, but certainly does not ensure that all people will have affordable access to health care.

That said, if you're thinking with a reformist mentality it most certainly does something positive, but for the republican party to be able to shut down the government as a result, to try and sneak a measure on the recent budget appropriations bill to strike down the health care bill, which was made law well over a year ago, is not only disgusting it's laughable.

Perhaps this is a good thing for people around the world to see that there are many, many issues "at home" where houseless people continue to go without places of shelter, folks are hungry, education is increasingly offered at bourgeois prices, the surplus of food harvested does not reach all individuals or families, and health care is at such an ideological difference that hard working people can get hurt or sick and be stuck paying bills, in debt, for the rest of their lives. The fact is "Obamacare" is not enough. Check this out for further knowledge: 

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/7/is_obamacare_enough_without_single_payer

although truthfully until all people that are located in the U.S. know they can get medical attention when they need it at truly "affordable" to them prices, the system will never serve the merits of justice. The U.S. puts its nose in everyone's business.

Thankfully the country is not at war with Syria-although allegations of military action in Libya and Somalia are being reported today-but maybe, just maybe a shift will take place and redirect energy to domestic issues of health across social, environmental, economic and political factions so that sustainment might be able to take place and be reached before meddling in foreign affairs across the globe. A pipe-dream it might be, but until then, with the government shut down, all eyes are on the next step.

What do you think is just?

Continued imperialism thrown in the face of every nation across the planet? Or taking care of your own at home first? Especially something as important as health?
 

Will the U.S. Back President Obama's Push for War on Syria?

This is a time when democrats that feel they're "progressive" by simply backing the democratic party need to check in with themselves. What's being proposed by President Obama concerning Syria has nothing to do with "leading" a democratic society.

What does is listening to Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio from Oregon. On Thursday he tweeted-"Tally from constituents calling my office, emailing, and writing about #Syria: 1135 opposed to U.S. action, 18 for." Oregon is not the only state or entity completely opposed to this neocolonial act.

We know Russia has interests in the region from billions in business to their only military base in the Mediterranean. But what are the U.S. interests in the region? Is it to flex muscles? Because of ties to Israel? With so many claiming injustice, with the great understanding that even motioning for war in this manner is against means of sustainability and peace, what are the "real" motives for war?

The clock's ticking...a vote from Congress could come as soon as Monday. What do you think? How does this motion make you feel about the current administration and country?