Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights

March 30, 2019

Colorado -- Blue Skies, Sunshine and Snow -- Longest Walk Photos by Bad Bear 2019

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Now, Saturday afternoon, walkers are at Monarch Pass in the Rocky Mountains.
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LONGEST WALK 2019
Photos by Longwalker Carl Bad Bear Sampson, Western Shoshone, March 29 and 30, 2019.

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All articles, photos, videos and audios on Censored News are copyrighted by each of the authors, photographers, videographers and radio producers.
Censored News contents can not be used without permission. The copyright applies to books, dissertations, videos, films, radio and television broadcasts and all other works.
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The copyright applies to all Censored News work, beginning in 2006 and continuing through the present.
Brenda Norrell, publisher, Censored News

Mohawk Nation News 'We've Been Framed'

Those absurd rants about closing the border. Good luck with that.


Longhorn Grill near Arizona Border photo Brenda Norrell

By Brenda Norrell
Censored News

I've been trying to come up with a funny cartoon about Trump's rants about closing the border. Most of the border looks like just another clump of sagebrush, creosote, rock or sand. I know because I foolishly decided to drive the 1,954 mile US Mexico  border.
It started out poorly, with wildfires chasing me out of southern California, east of San Diego. Well it didn't matter, I couldn't find the border there anyway.
The fastest moving fire I've ever seen was licking at my hubcaps. I had to look behind me to see if the flames touched the bumper.
"Santa Ana winds," folks moaned.
Anyway, it wasn't just the wildfires.
I tried again at Mexicali. I had once taken a bus through Calexico, on the Mexico side, with a busload of Mexican military with very long poles. It was hard to sleep on the bus, wondering about those poles. What were they used for?
"Measuring the ocean," they said when the bus rolled into Baja.
Anyway, in Mexicali, I drove right up to a little lonely stretch of the border, and began contemplating the border.
I know it was the border, because a US Border Patrol agent came and chased me away, asking me if I was some sort of criminal.
So then I decided to investigate the plight of the Pronghorn on the Arizona border, after deciding the Yuma border was just too scary to hang around alone, too much military aircraft and too many prisons.
Arizona officials didn't seem too concerned that the migration of the Pronghorns would be disturbed or blocked by a border wall.
Before a few yawns and clocking out for the day, they pointed out that the Pronghorns were already dodging bombs in the Goldwater bombing range.
And there was a scraggly fence in the Pronghorns way anyway, somewhere on the border.
I turned my attention to jaguars, but they cross further to the east in Arizona, in rocky canyons. Jaguars are very shy.
So then I went down to the loneliest of all border crossings, the Sasabe border crossing.
That's the fancy one, in the middle of nowhere, as they say, where US Border Patrol agents like to run drugs. Militia like  to set up camp here and take pictures of themselves with their guns.
Not much happening, so I contemplate the border, and the old store, remembering six cent soda pops and chocolate moon pies at other old stores that sell shovels, canned food and horse ropes, until people start looking at me like maybe I'm some sort of a criminal.
Well, back in Tucson, one of my friends took me down to Arivaca. Her car was a heat magnet and it was 116 degrees. We wrapped ourselves in wet towels to keep from passing out.
We watched US Border Patrol agents buy munchies over at Three Points store, talk on their cellphones and throw munchy trash on the ground.
Walking along a secluded trail, we must have tripped a wire over by Arivaca, two menacing men with hunting rifles and a hunting dog drove up fast, dashed toward us and on into the scraggly bushes.
One had a Las Vegas looking haircut and slick town car. The other drove an old pickup truck. He sported scraggly hair and the hunting dog.
My friend and I were also doing a serious probe into the first border spy towers, which, as it turned out, didn't work. Otherwise our smiling faces would have been on the laptop screens.
I could have told Boeing that Wi-Fi wouldn't work in the desert mountains, but they didn't ask. One billion dollars wasted.
With too much time on my hands after being censored out of the news business, I kept going.
Well, next was New Mexico, well not really.
Years earlier I had crossed into Mexico at a very lonely border crossing. There was a little jail in a lonely town where the prisoners didn't get food unless family brought it to them. The image of that one tiny, creepy cell (with possibly me inside looking hungry) led me to skip the New Mexico border.
On to Texas.
In El Paso and Juarez, once again I contemplated the border. Mostly I just ate street tacos, dried beef with green chiles, and looked for green corn tamales and cheap hotels where I might not be killed in the night.
After driving from El Paso to the tip of Texas, and trying not to die from boredom,  I began driving the border, or trying to.
Where was it?
I tried to find it, but was never really sure where it was.
After a few days of the dullest drives in the history of dull drives, I gave up. All I saw was a lot of dull colored shrubs.
I didn't even see a bird.
So after my long, fruitless and totally failed attempts to drive the border, I now wonder if Trump realizes how absurd it is to rant about closing the border.
Good luck finding it.

March 29, 2019

Walking Colorado -- Longest Walk Photos by Bad Bear 2019

















Longest Walk Photos by Carl Bad Bear Sampson, Western Shoshone. Walkers are between Grand Junction and Delta, Colorado, this morning, headed to Pueblo, Colorado, and on to DC, walking for Indigenous rights. Walking in from Utah, walkers are now in beautiful Western Colorado.

March 29, 2019

March 28, 2019

What I learned from the Zapatistas, Generosity and Grace

What I learned from the Zapatistas - - Generosity and Grace


In the Spirit of Autonomy, Dignity and Self-Reliance

By Brenda Norrell
Censored News

It was not so much from their words, but from being with them. And it wasn't from just the Zapatistas in Chiapas, but from the others who came as well, from Indian Nations, Europe and around the world.
It wasn't from their words, because my Spanish was so bad, I knew little of what was being said, or where we were headed.
Still there was this gift, the gift of being present.
There was a glimpse, a glimpse of what was possible, a glimpse of a better world possible.
It taught me of the power of the absolute, the absolute power of knowing, of certitude.
But as we dashed from town to town in Mexico on our journeys, there was silence, there was laughter, there was song, the songs of resistance.
Courage would be too simple of a word, the force was one of magnitude.
I didn't know what was being said, but it didn't matter then. I like it better now, just having been there, and having been  present with your horses in the river, on those hot days near the Guatemala border.
On one of these journeys, I could not find the words to write about it. We seemed to be on a different plane of existence.
It was all raw, without precedent, and today much of it remains a mystery.
Words vanished in the state of Guerrero, where death and oppression of the people stung the air like wasps, sucked the oxygen from the lungs.
Time has preserved its essence, distilled it into a few words.
The words come now my friends. I remember your generosity and grace, and I'm thankful for the gift of being with you, of being present in those rivers, mountains and that great jungle where corn was life and all things were possible.

Peabody Coal 'A History of Mistrust' -- Dirty Coal's Dirty 'Ethnic Cleansing Act' on the Navajo Nation





By Dine' CARE

Black Mesa -- Peabody Energy Company was responsible for laws passed, enabling it to steal land on Black Mesa, to produce coal-fed electricity for faraway cities. After decades of heartbreak and relocation for Dine', now Peabody does not want to clean up its mess.
Watch this four minute video from Dine' CARE on how corruption in the United States produced a trail of heartbreak and loss for Dine'. -- Brenda, Censored News


March 25, 2019

'52 Miles to the Colorado Border' Longest Walk Photos by Bad Bear

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Photos by Carl Bad Bear Sampson, Western Shoshone Long Walker. Bad Bear said walkers were 52 miles from the Colorado border on Monday morning, March 25, 2019, as they walked through Utah.