Censored News Snapshots 2009

Censored News snapshots 2009: Photo 1: Keith Secola at the Havasupai Gathering to Halt Uranium Mining in the Grand Canyon (Photo 2) Louise Benally and Earthcycles producer Govinda (Photo 3) Preparing fry bread for O'odham Solidarity Event in Tucson (Photo 4) Acoma Pueblo Poet and Author Simon Ortiz at the Indigenous Peoples Uranium Summit at Acoma Pueblo, N.M. Photos by Brenda Norrell.

Censored article from Tucson reporter Gabriel Schivone on the O'odham Solidarity Event

Famed Writer Speaks on 'Stolen Land' of the Americas

By Gabriel Schivone

Censored News

http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/

TUCSON -- Prolific American Indian writer, scholar and activist Ward Churchill visited Tucson on Friday night, bringing with him a new meaning to the word “occupation.”
Delivering a talk entitled “Apartheid in America: Surviving Occupation in O'odham Lands,”
Professor Churchill Spoke to a full hall at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson about the U.S. government's history of conquest, genocide and occupation of traditional Indian territory.
As a sort of ominous beginning to his talk, Mr. Churchill opened his remarks by saying, “It's an honor to be here; it's always an honor to be anywhere in North America, on Native land.”
Churchill discussed the legitimacy of the “claimed territory” of the United States as “the difference between a 'claim' and a 'reality',” which, he said, are not the same thing. “The United States 'claims' many things,” Churchill said. “Those things have to be interrogated because a 'claim' is not the same as the reality. The United States claims indigenous land as its own, over which it asserts jurisdiction, enforces its own rules -- on everyone.”
Professor Churchill recalled watching on TV a public address in 1990 by former U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. “(Bush) actually gave a very accurate assessment of international legal obligation, Churchill said. “'Illegally occupied territory,' (Bush) said, 'must be restored to its rightful owners; legitimate governments,' (Bush) said, 'must be re-established in place (of) those that had been usurped; and those who engage in lawless aggression in the occupation of other people's property and assert their authority over them by armed force had to be put back in line with law using any means necessary.'”
Churchill said he jumped up and started cheering at Bush's remarks, which struck him as an ironic rationale laid out by a modern American head of state for why the U.S. must give back the lands it took by force; the lands, Churchill said, which it continues to occupy illegally.
Throughout much of his talk Mr. Churchill made connections between the South African Apartheid regime (1948-1994), the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian lands (1948-present), and Nazi Germany's conquest of Western Europe before and during World War Two. He relentlessly tied back all of them as each following the U.S. example of its own conquest of the Americas and extermination of the indigenous populations over the past several hundred years.
A representative of the traditional O'odham ceremony leaders and the founder of the O'odham VOICE Against the Wall, Ofelia Rivas shared the stage with Professor Churchill, speaking about, in her view, one of the main problems with settler relations with indigenous people in America: “Since the very beginning of the intrusion of our people we haven't had any dialogue. “We weren't at that table when (the U.S.) made that international border. We were not considered to be human. I have to go back to that point because that's the point where we begin as O'odham people. When we begin to remember those things, then maybe we can begin to understand what it means to O'odham people.”
“When you start to feel that kind of compassion for human beings – not because they are different and because they have the same mindset as you and because they support the same ideas as you – then maybe we can change things.”

Ward Churchill has written over twenty books on Native human rights, American foreign policy, and the repression of political dissent in America. According to the website of the University of Colorado at Boulder's department of Ethnic Studies, of which Churchill is a former Chair, Churchill served as a delegate to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (as a Justice/Rapporteur for the 1993 International People's Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous, an advocate/prosecutor of the First Nations International Tribunal for the Chiefs of Ontario, and is the recipient of various writing awards. It also states he is a member of the Colorado chapter Governing Council of the American Indian Movement (AIM).


Churchill's and Rivas's talk was sponsored by Dry River Radical Resource Center and the Earth First! Journal.

US Undermines Climate Talks with Bullying Tactics and Backroom Deals

Indigenous Environmental Network in Copenhagen at:
http://www.ienearth.org/


Google Breaking News: Indigenous Environmental Network:

http://news.google.com/news/search?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=Indigenous+Environmental+Network&as_qdr=m&as_drrb=q&ict=ln

US Undermines Climate Talks with Bullying Tactics and Backroom Deals
Civil Society Denounces U.S. Plan for Fast-Tracking Warming, Worsening Humanitarian Crisis, and Fueling Ecological Collapse
COPENHAGEN --- Despite President Obama's assurances of progress today at the UN Climate Talks, the negotiations continue into the early morning as civil society leaders are left out of the sessions at the Bella Center and protesters gather outside. "For the U.S., which is the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, to come to Copenhagen and try to strong arm the world into accepting a phony accord that will do nothing to prevent climate catastrophe is beyond irresponsible; it is criminal." said John Peck, Executive Director of Family Farm Defenders and member of Via Campesina. Read more at http://www.ienearth.org/

Indigenous Leaders at the Front Line of Climate Change, at the Front of the Historic Climate March in Copenhagen
Over 100,000 people marched in Copenhagen calling on world leaders to agree to a just climate policy. Leading the march was a delegation of indigenous leaders from communities on the front lines of climate change. Democracy Now!’s Anjali Kamat and Elizabeth Press speak to indigenous activists at the march and at the Danish National Museum. Read more at http://www.ienearth.org/
and watch Democracy Now! video coverage at http://www.democracynow.org/

Copenhagen Summit: 'Nopenhagen' compared to Holocaust, Obama to Satan
Copenhagen: A lesson in geopolitics
By Joanna Kakissis
Aljazeera
The Copenhagen Accord was agreed by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa
After two weeks of international deadlock and an all-night marathon negotiating session that produced a thin and toothless accord, the biggest climate talks in history devolved from "Hopenhagen" to "Nopenhagen". The Copenhagen Accord - brokered at the last minute by Barack Obama, the US president, with China, India, Brazil and South Africa - did not receive universal support from the 193 countries participating in the climate summit.
The accord, which gutted a comprehensive agreement to pay poor countries to protect their forests, since the mass cutting of trees accounts for 20 per cent of global emissions, is not binding and does not have a set date for capping carbon emissions.
It provoked reactions from fury to despair.
Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-ping, Sudan's chief negotiator, compared it to the Holocaust, while Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, referenced the sulfur of hell and suggested that Obama was Satan. Ian Fry of Tuvalu, the drowning island-nation that has become the poster country for the perils of rising sea levels, likened the accord to "being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future". But the climate fund did not win the trust of all developing countries, some of whom say the money is not nearly enough. ... Evo Morales, Bolivia's president, declared that rich countries owe poor countries billions of dollars in "climate reparations" and demanded the creation of a "climate change tribunal" for countries who do not stop polluting. Read article:
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/climatesos/2009/12/2009122064859919604.html

Tony Gonzales: Mexico City is next climate change step

By Tony Gonzales
AIM West
COPENHAGEN -- As I am making preparations to head for home to the Bay Area, I am sending you this final Declaration that came from the KlimaforumO9 in Copenhagen, from the large group of NGOs attending the UNFCCC separate from the Government representatives meeting at the Bella Center. Please post the document.
I must say that I am not pleased at all with the final outcome of the text, particularly where Indigenous peoples were inserted deep in page 6, beginning with "Our Demands."
Although I did attempt to work as close I could with the declaration team to include Indigenous Peoples somewhere after the Preamble and to insert the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples -- both to secure the rights of all Indigenous Peoples, and to gain the NGO's support for it to function as a stop gap to the continued and future destruction of Mother Earth that contributes toward the unregulated emissions and increasing temperatures -- evidently it was to no avail.
What we need is our own document and for it to stand on its own. For this to occur we will need the support from our brothers and sisters, friends, allies and supporters to join with the American Indian Movement International Conference to be held in San Francisco, California during the week of November 22-26, 2010. This should be just prior to the next COP-16 in Mexico City, November 29th until December 10, 2010.
Hopefully we will develop a more strategy plan that will effectuate the necessary systems change that will assert the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and take that to Mexico City to be adopted both by all NGO's, and Governments into their final document. I will elaborate further on this project/plan when I return to San Francisco later during this week. All is not lost, we are still hopeful, and coming into our element! Until then, to all my relations.
Tony Gonzales
AIM-WEST Director
eltonyg@earthlink.net
http://censored-news.blogspot.com/2009/12/peoples-declaration-from-copenhagen.html
or
http://www.klimaforum09.org/IMG/pdf/A_People_s_Declaration_from_Klimaforum09_-_ultimate_version.pdf

Remembering the Children in Unmarked Graves

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Some Alaska Natives who died at the boarding school or hospital in Tacoma, Wash., were buried in unmarked graves.
They were called Eskimos or Alaska Indians when they left their homes to go to the Indian school or hospital on Puyallup lands in the early 20th century.
Of the sick, many died before they arrived at the Washington reservation. If they were children, they often didn't know why they were being taken from their families.
Those that survived are now growing old and dying, and the Puyallup tribe is trying to record their stories before it's too late.
"All we have are death certificates or official correspondences, not personal views," said Amber Santiago, who works with the tribe's historic preservation department. "We just have the white people's perspective. "
Starting in the 1860s, Natives from Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana and Alaska came to Puyallup Indian Reservation to attend Cushman Indian School.. In the 1920s, the school was converted to a regional hospital that treated Natives up until the 1960s.
While students and patients came from throughout the Northwest, there is only one living member of the Puyallup tribe who went to the school or hospital. That's why Santiago is searching for anyone who can tell her more about what happened there.
"We're trying to reclaim our own history," said Santiago, whose mother was taken from Montana's Flathead Reservation at age 10 to be treated at the hospital.
All Santiago has to go on so far are some death certificates and interviews with about 20 eyewitnesses. There are many missing pieces to the story of what went on there, but none of them is bigger than what happened to the Alaskans.
"Everyone we talked about said 'the Alaskans, the Alaskans' . . . It's the only group that people mention over and over again, it's the common thread through all the interviews," Santiago said. "I really wonder about the Alaskans, since there were so many of them, what their stories are."
But so far, Santiago has yet to find a single Alaska Native to interview.
"It's the last state — the missing link," she said.
Santiago said that so far she's heard stories both good and bad about what it was like at Cushman. But for many it was a place of homesickness, confusion or illness, especially for the children that were there. One man came to the hospital to get his tonsils out as a child and ended up staying for years.
"When his parents came to pick him up he didn't know who they were," Santiago said.
Perhaps because it was a scary or lonely experience, "the majority of people haven't talked about it since they left there," Santiago said. Now that they're in their 70s, 80s or 90s, "they don't mind talking now."
In the five-story hospital, the first two floors were for tuberculosis patients. A nurse that worked there remembered about 200 to 300 patients in that ward at a time, the majority from Alaska.
Many Alaskans died on Puyallup lands. Most of the other tribal members were sent back to their families when they died, but Alaska Natives were usually buried near the hospital, unattended by friends or relatives, without a headstone to name them.
One man Santiago spoke to stayed in a hospital room overlooking the cemetery. Every week, he said, he would see "a grave-digger and a man in black (a priest), just burying, burying."
"He said it was known they were Alaskan Indians," Santiago said.

Today, the cemetery has only Puyallup tribal members and what Santiago assumes are the graves of the Alaskans who died at the hospital.
About five years ago the tribe purchased a ground-penetrating radar to find the unmarked graves. Since the buildings were demolished in 2003, the cemetery is all that is left of Cushman Indian School and Hospital.
The tribe is hoping to compile an oral record of the school in a memoir, and eventually build a museum about the history of the area.
"It's just a part of history that not a lot of people know about," Santiago said.
Santiago said that the Puyallup Tribe would like to hear from anyone who has a story about Cushman Indian School or Cushman Indian Hospital, or St. George's Indian Boarding School in the Fife/Milton area from the 1880s to 1930s. That may not be someone who attended but even their grandchild or friend.
"We want to piece together the story," Santiago said.

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Information from: The Tundra Drums, http://www.thetundradrums.com