Happy Native American Heritage Month #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/CTfxayT2tC
— Joe D. Horse Capture (@NativeCurator) November 7, 2016
Speaking of, Alysa Landry has an excellent article up at ICTMN, about spending the last forty-five weeks writing about all the U.S. presidents, and their impact on Indigenous peoples: Indians Are Invisible: What I Learned Researching US Presidents. Highly recommended reading. The whitewash goes deeper than anyone thought.
All images courtesy the artist.
When plastic material sits in our ocean for long enough it starts to degrade into nano plastics, a type of microplastic material that can traverse cell walls into fat and muscle tissue. This is a dynamic that Dutch designer Thijs Biersteker recently explored in his latest installation Plastic Reflectic, an interactive mirror that uses motion tracking technology to turn the spectator’s reflection into a silhouette made from hundreds pieces of real trash. “Turning us…slowly into plastic,” the artist explains.
Known for his psychedelic cloud installations and cancer punching bags, Biersteker constructed his new project on a horizontal pixel grid that houses 601 real pieces of plastic trash sourced from all over the world. Each piece of trash acts as a float and is pulled on and off the surface grid by 601 mini waterproof engines hidden under a pool of black biobased water.
An early voting location in Greensboro, NC. CREDIT: AP Photo/Skip Foreman.
North Carolina, almost making nDakota look good. The NC GOP has been working hard on voter suppression, and they are getting a result, an unfortunate one.
After Republican leaders mounted a concerted and illegal effort to make it harder for African Americans to vote in North Carolina, the party apparatus celebrated on Monday that fewer African Americans have voted in North Carolina this year.
In July, a federal appeals court struck down an “omnibus” election law, passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory (R), writing that it was “hard not to come away with the conclusion that North Carolina’s lawmakers wanted to get caught engaging in unlawfully racial discrimination.” The court found that the GOP legislature had “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices,” and then “enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.” In an unsuccessfulappeal, the state actually claimed that its efforts would instead increase minority turnout.
After that failed, North Carolina Republicans used their two-to-one edge on electoral boards to slash early voting options and force long lines at the few early voting locations in urban centers like Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, and Winston-Salem. Unsurprisingly, almost 9 percent fewer African Americans took advantage of early voting than had in 2012.
Full story here.
In other bad shenanigans news, a Colorado amendment would take power away from voters:
A state constitutional amendment on Tuesday’s ballot will give Coloradans an opportunity to make it much harder for voters to change their laws.
Amendment 71 — known as “Raise the Bar” — would mean that in order to get an amendment on future ballots, 2 percent of voters in each of the state’s 35 senate districts would have to sign a petition. In addition, it would increase the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment from 50 percent to 55 percent.
The amendment is being backed primarily by business interests, including a massive cash infusion from the oil and gas industry.
Opponents say that passing Raise the Bar will make it nearly impossible for citizen-led initiatives to get on the ballot. Colorado is characterized by widely divergent districts. A policy popular in deeply red Colorado Springs would have trouble gaining 2 percent of voters’ signatures in liberal Boulder, for instance, and vice-versa.
“One part of the state could hold veto power over the rest of the state,” said Jessica Goad, communications director for Conservation Colorado. “There are so many issues where this could really stymie changes.”
One of those issues is oil and gas regulation.
A pair of proposed amendments that would have restricted oil and gas development in the state narrowly missed garnering enough signatures to appear on the ballot this year. Under the rules proposed by Amendment 71, they would be virtually impossible to mount.
We have all been bought and sold, tossed about as disposable pawns in corporate gaming. Oh yay. Full story here.
We’re at the Red Line. If you can come to Standing Rock, now is the time. Please, if you can make it, please, please come. If you can come, please pledge. We need you.
Our last day. In the 8th photo, you can see the construction equipment, and the lights which are shone down on the camp every night now. The last four shots, going through cop land on the way home. It’s unnerving. Click for full size.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Yeah, I know, everyone is tired of cops. So are we, but they aren’t going away. Towards the end, some people drove up with a truck full of wood, and people were busy grabbing pieces and throwing it into the river, if not to build another bridge that day, to block the cops. The last shots are facing towards camp, as a lot of us were returning to rest and recoup. Click for full size.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Back to work, must get the horses quilted.
© C. Ford.
Iconic musicians Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt,will perform a benefit concert along with Native performers on November 27 for the Water Protectors on the front line at Standing Rock. Courtesy Photos Jackson Browne / Bonnie Raitt.
Iconic musicians Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, along with performers Joel Rafael, and Bad Dog, will perform a benefit concert on Sunday, November 27 for the Water Protectors on the front line at Standing Rock. Storyteller Ladonna Brave Bull Allard, founder of the Standing Rock Sioux Camp at Sacred Stone, will speak at the concert. Other performers will be announced as they are confirmed.
The concert will be on Sunday, November 27, 2016 at 6:30 pm at the Prairie Knights Pavilion in Fort Yates, ND, which is seven miles from the Oceti Sakowin Camp. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Saturday at 10 am central; The link to purchase tickets is HERE.
“Just as we give thanks for our good fortune and the bounty of our lives as Americans, let us thank the Native people who are gathered here at Standing Rock to protect the natural world and defend our place in it,” said Jackson Browne in a statement submitted to ICTMN.
Bonnie Raitt also expressed solidarity with Standing Rock in the statement.
The kayakers were able to get in and out quickly, avoiding the cops while dropping supplies to those on the front line, such as bottles of apple cider vinegar, to help counter the near constant clouds of pepper spray. They never stopped spraying, just took a break from it now and then. The irony may have been lost on the cops, but it certainly wasn’t lost on the protectors when cops started carting water down the hill, and it was being passed out among the cops. There were more than a few offers to replace that water with cans of oil. Many of the cops happily took a break, sucking down clean water, chatting, telling jokes, and laughing. Then it was back to gassing and shooting unarmed people. Click for full size.
We’re back home, and safe. As always happens when we’re back to camp, we wish we could simply dig in and stay. In the first two shots, you can see where the fire was set. (That night, the constant air surveillance mysteriously stopped about two hours prior, and no one responded to the numerous 911 calls about the fire.) There are always infiltrators in the camp, you can’t keep them all out, and then there are people like the man in a truck full of weapons, who wanted to put up a confederate flag. Security has tightened up within the camp, and at least one infiltrator was found and being detained as we were on our way to the action on Turtle Island. There were many new semi-permanent structures up, and many more in the process of going up. Lots of yurts popped up all over camp, too.
Back to the beginning. We loaded up with firewood and supplies, and took off. Things were mostly normal for about half the trip, then we started seeing cops everywhere. Right about when we hit the town of Solen, which is still many miles away from camp, we saw cops pull over a large U-haul truck, that was full of supplies and donations for the camps. Cops were pulling them over and making them take everything out of the trucks. When we got to the Cannonball pit stop, there was another large U-haul truck, many more trucks and vans, several large dumpsters, and piles of good all over the place. At the time, we didn’t know what that was all about. We had to pass through several large masses of cops and finally made it to camp. We headed straight for the main kitchen, to offload the firewood, but it was gone. We found a spot to stay in Oglala camp, then wandered off to try and figure out wtf. Calls were going out for the elderly and women with children to get to the Cannonball School across the river. Then there were calls to get out to Turtle Island, for the action there. (In the 5th photo, you can see the cops massing on top of the hill). We took off on the long walk (in the 8th photo, you can see where it starts – all the way to the left, there’s cops on the hill, and in the boat almost directly down). Warriors race by on horseback, going full speed with messages and information. Cars were driving on the small road non-stop, and foot traffic was thick.
A bridge had been built, and subsequently destroyed by cops. On the other side of the hill, DAPL was working, and once again, DA and ETP failed to report finding sacred sites and artifacts. Up on the hill, where the cops are, right by the tree, are the graves Alma Perkin and Matilda Gain. People wanted to protect this area. Cops showed up, in increasing numbers, armed to the teeth, saying they were asked by ACE to keep the land clear. A cop at the top of the hill kept shouting through a megaphone for everyone to take the protest back across the river, then they would leave. Right. You’ve seen some of those photos, there will be more to come. As always, surveillance was constant. There were three planes and two helicopters that day.
Later that day, we made it back into camp, and settled into the council fire area to hear the latest. Rick was working on more walking sticks, and I had the horse quilt with me. 500 ministers had descended, from all over the states, and burnt a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery in an act of ceremony and solidarity. We spoke with one minister, Vicki, from California, who was active in Indigenous affairs and actions local to her, and was still a bit blown away and dazed at being in the camp. There were visitors to the camp representing Amazon Indigenous peoples, and it was very moving, listening to them talk, through translators, about their own troubles with extractive industries, and the importance of unity in the fight to protect our earth. About that time, the wind was whipping up, so I retreated to the van to continue working on the quilt. I could still hear what was going on at council fire. There was an announcement that there would be trucks coming in, including a Veterans for Peace van, with all the stuff from the Cannonball pit stop. When the cops finished destroying the 1851 Treaty Camp, and arresting and/or injuring everyone there, apparently, they tossed everything they could find into four dumpsters and just left them at the pit stop. Volunteers had been out there for a couple of days, going through the dumpsters, and retrieving peoples’ goods, and many sacred items. Everything was being brought into the camp to be sorted, and to start the process of trying to return things to their rightful owners, especially all the sacred items which had been treated so disrespectfully by cops. Head over to the Sacred Stone Blog to read more about the 1851 Treaty Camp and what happened there. ICTMN has more on the police action which took place on Wednesday and Thursday. We’ll be going back out again next week, so things might be very slow on Affinity for a while.
Oh, it has been reported that two cops have turned in their badges over what they have been made to do lately. Here’s hoping more of them find their conscience.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Driving by back home to pick up more firewood. We arrived at camp in time to hear a call for all women with children and the elderly to get to the school across the Cannonball River, word was the camp (Oceti Sakowin) was going to be raided. It wasn’t, but that’s because they were busy a bit to the northeast of camp, what was being called Turtle Island by all those at camp. More on this later, when I have more time. The unnecessary, cowardly actions taken by cops was very ugly to see. Protectors were being gassed and shot by cops who were mere feet away from them. (Rubber bullets, but one young man has already been hospitalized with bleeding from the lungs, thanks to one of those harmless bullets). It was a terrible shock to hear and see one of the cops raise his gun and fire into the protectors. Over one hundred cops were there, including snipers. Okay, off again, back home tomorrow. Click photos for full size.
All photos © C. Ford, all rights reserved.
We’re headed back to Sacred Stone and the No Dapl camps, be back on Friday. Sorry, Affinity will be closed until then. I won’t be live blogging, because we aren’t taking much beside firewood and supplies, and support, of course. I also don’t have a spare computer in case I run into cops, so it will stay safe at home. Will be taking the camera though.
If any pests show up, please ask PZ nicely to deal with them. Thanks. See you all in a few days.
