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Major General Donald Jackson. Mary Annette Pember.
As with most issues between Indian country and the federal government, the important bits are steeped in legalese and long numerical references to laws and regulations. The very stuff of life and its protection, however, is referenced and hidden within these dryly-worded documents.
A set of regulations created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) called Appendix C is one such example, and it may determine the future of the Dakota Access Pipeline project as well as other projects for which the Army Corps is responsible for issuing federal permits.
It turns out that tribes have been complaining about the legality of Appendix C for a very long time, and with good reason. Appendix C spells out how the Corps will meet its obligation to fulfill Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), created to protect places of historic, architectural and/or cultural significance.
Part of the NPHA’s Section 106 requires that agencies carry out the process in consultation with Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPO) and identify and assess impacts to properties of traditional religious and cultural significance to tribes. Although all federal agencies are allowed to create their own means by which they fulfill the requirements of Section 106, the Army Corps chose to streamline the process by creating its own regulations that tribes and other federal agencies argue not only fail to meet the requirement of the NHPA’s Section 106, but are also in direct conflict with the law.
The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) is an independent federal agency charged by Congress with overseeing implementation of the NHPA. The Corps contradicts several of ACHP’s regulations through use of its own process spelled out under Appendix C.
The differences between Section 106 regulations and Appendix C are substantial. Chief among these differences includes the Corps’ decision in the Standing Rock case to review each river crossing of the Dakota Access pipeline as a separate project rather than consider the entire pipeline as one project.
“This allows the Corps to dismiss the potential for effects to historic properties that may be located within the broader project area of an undertaking,” according to an August 2, 2016 letter from the ACHP to the Corps.
While there is endless, pointless arguing here in uStates over whether or not some people are people enough to use a public lav, and whether or not it’s okey dokey to try and scope out whether or not someone has an approved set of genitals, with regressive assholes intent on doing damage, and making everyone feel unsafe, squabbling like fucking four year olds over who gets to be the dominant one, Japan get its oh so right. I’m ready to run away from home.
What does Japan care about? Utility, of course, but also comfort, design, and the sheer artistry that can be a public lav. The Japanese government awards a highly coveted Toilet of the Year award to spaces deemed worthy. And boy, do they have a whole lot of worthy.
After all, the government estimates that in our lifetime we spend up to 11 months in a bathroom. So why shouldn’t they be spaces that are clean, soothing and relaxing?
So, officials created a pamphlet (PDF) of public toilets they deemed exemplary, and distributed it earlier this year in hopes of elevating the entire public toilet industry. Here are a selection of government-approved public toilets.
And there are a lot of them! You’ll need to click over to Spoon & Tamago to see and read about them all, or hit the pdf. Here are some examples, and it sure would be nice if uStates could grow up and start focusing on what really matters, like grown up Japan:
Gallery Toto at Narita Airport Terminal 2 (Chiba)
At Narita Airport, Japan’s gateway to the world, an art installation-like lineup of toilets greet travelers. Here you’ll find iconic toilet-maker Toto’s latest toilet technology, which is of course available for public usage. We wrote about this project here.
Haneda Airport International Terminal (Tokyo)
At Haneda you’ll find a public bathroom that’s been specifically designed to aid and assist disabled travelers. Universal signage, wide passageways and even a toilet for service dogs makes this bathroom user-friendly for absolutely anyone.
Neopasa Shimizu Service Area (Tomei Expressway, Shizuoka)
Highway service areas usually have the grossest toilets. But not at Neopasa, where an oasis of clean and beautiful toilets await tired drivers and passengers. There are more than twice as many stalls in the ladies’ room, compared to the men’s, to combat longer lines. And a large monitor screen at the entrance even tells you which stalls are unoccupied.
Neopasa Surugawan Numazu Service Area (Tomei Expressway, Shizuoka)
This is the only service area along the Tomei Expressway that has views of the sea. So the operator decided to build their bathroom on the 2nd floor near the terrace and create a space where people want to go, not just because they have to go.
Via Spoon & Tamago, go look! Maybe we can all plan to run away together. I want to live in Hokkaido, though.
Measuring, marking, cutting. Bleagh.
© C. Ford.
A youthful supporter of the campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. cool revolution via Flickr.
Chris Clarke has an excellent article at ICTMN, covering the broad scope of how Indigenous people pay when energy enters the picture. To be truly mindful, you need to understand the big picture, and you also need to be able to see and understand when cleaner and greener energy is as much of a problem as the dirty type.
Commentary: An energy company plans a project that would destroy land Native people hold as sacred. Despite Native protests, neither state nor federal agencies intervene to protect those cultural sites. The project proceeds. The land is forever altered. Hundreds of Native people and their supporters converge on the site to protest and to grieve their loss.
Given recent news, not to mention the choice of photo at the top of this story, you could be forgiven for assuming I’m describing current events at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. That’s where the company Energy Transfer Partners is trying to push the new Dakota Access Pipeline through burial grounds and medicine wheels sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project has already destroyed important sacred sites, and threatens to pollute the Missouri River and local groundwater if it’s built and the inevitable spills ensue.
But I’m actually describing a gathering four years ago in the southernmost parts of the California desert. There, near the little desert town of Ocotillo, hundreds of Native people from across the southwestern United States gathered on June 24, 2014. They were there to mark the destruction of ancient cremation sites, ceremonial locations and other important cultural resources by Pattern Energy, which built the Ocotillo Express wind power facility in Imperial County.
Click on over to ICTMN to read the full story.
Nineteen cities stand in solidarity with Standing Rock Sioux in opposing the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
Although more than 300 tribes have rallied in support of the Standing Rock Sioux’s stance against the routing of the Dakota Access oil pipeline under the Missouri River near their reservation, the support has not all been Native.
Nineteen U.S. city governments have passed resolutions or written letters opposing construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said in a statement on October 13.
From Seattle to Saint Paul and Minneapolis, to Cleveland, to Portland, Oregon, and all over Turtle Island, the resolutions have been streaming in for weeks. In California the cities of Berkeley, Santa Barbara and Oakland have sent in resolutions. So have Asheville, North Carolina; Sitka, Alaska, and Urbana, Illinois, the latter one of the four states that the pipeline will pass through.
The myriad resolutions being passed by city and municipal councils around the United States express solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux and Indigenous Peoples in general. They reference everything from treaty rights and broken promises, to the common need for drinking water and the burgeoning of distrust in oil companies’ ability to ensure the safety of their pipelines.
This is good news, and I’m thankful to have such allies. Full story at ICTMN.
Amy Goodman.
Just a few posts ago, I mentioned how embarrassing Ndakota has been lately. Apparently, the state I live in isn’t finished in the quest to scrape the bottom of the barrel, when it comes to stupid, ignorant, embarrassing, cringe-worthy, asshole antics. I do not take any pride in being surrounded by ignorant assholes who proudly wallow in bigotry and willful ignorance.
Bismarck, North Dakota–October 15, 2016 — A North Dakota state prosecutor has sought to charge award-winning journalist Amy Goodman with participating in a “riot” for filming an attack on Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters. The new charge comes after the prosecutor dropped criminal trespassing charges.
State’s Attorney Ladd R Erickson filed the new charges on Friday before District Judge John Grinsteiner who will decide on Monday (October 17) whether probable cause exists for the riot charge.
Goodman has travelled to North Dakota to face the charges and will appear at Morton County court on Monday at 1:30 pm local time (CDT) if the charges are approved.
“I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting, ” said Goodman. “I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters.”
In an e-mail to Goodman’s attorney Tom Dickson on October 12, State’s Attorney Erickson admitted that there were “legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute.” In an earlier email on October 12, Erickson wrote that Goodman “was not acting as a journalist,” despite that fact that the state’s criminal complaint recognized that, “Amy Goodman can be seen on the video …interviewing protesters.” In that email Erikson justified his quote in the Bismarck Tribune in which he had said that “She’s [Amy Goodman] a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.” The First Amendment, of course, applies irrespective of the content of a reporter’s story.
The charge in State of North Dakota v. Amy Goodman, stems from Democracy Now!’s coverage of the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. On Saturday, September 3, Democracy Now! filmed security guards working for the pipeline company attacking protesters. The report showed guards unleashing dogs and using pepper spray and featured people with bite injuries and a dog with blood dripping from its mouth and nose.
Well, Mr. Erickson, thanks ever for helping to paint a picture of my state as one full of shit-for-brains bigots. Christ, I feel like I should just find a cave to hide in.
Via Democracy Now.
Garate looks at cave paintings representing horses in the Atxurra cave, above. Researchers will continue to explore Atxurra over the next few years, and the cave will remain closed to the public in hopes to preserve the findings.
Rock paintings dating back 14,000 years have been found in a cave in a Spanish seaside resort town.
Around 50 paintings depicting horses, bisons and lions were found in a cave located under a building in the centre of Lekeitio, a village in the Basque country.
The Armintxe cave is ‘extremely difficult to access’ and located under a residential building in the centre of Lekeitio in the Basque country, senior local official Andoni Iturbe said.
Cave specialists and archaeologists have examined the paintings found in May and declared them to be the most ‘spectacular and striking’ of their kind ever found in the Iberian peninsula.
The paintings measure up to 150 centimetres (60 inches), say the research team.
They also confirmed that the cave would not be opened to the public both to preserve the paintings and because it is difficult to access.
I am always in awe of artists who took the time to draw, paint, and engrave scenes from their every day life. I’m also beyond thankful, for all the artists going back into the mists of time, for making sure there would always be windows into their world.
Daily Mail has the full story, with many more images. Hat tip to rq for this one!
Oct 14, 2016 — Winter is approaching fast here in North Dakota – and we’re not going anywhere. Dakota Access may think that they can simply wait us out, but we are here for the long haul.
That being said, we need supplies and support to survive here at camp. Dakota winters are no joke! We have created an Amazon wishlist with all sorts of gear for sleeping, staying warm, lighting our camp, and organizing our group. We’re hoping for tents, lanterns, phones for communicating between groups, and more. Take a look and see if there’s anything you can purchase and send to help us out: http://amzn.to/2dLiG1G
Thank you as always for your generosity!
Anna, Bobbi, and the Oceti Sakowin Youth.
Via Change.org. I will add my thank you thank you thank you to anyone who can help out. As usual, I’ll say that you don’t need money to help – spreading the word and signal boosting is incredibly important, so if you’re a social media person, please, pass this on, with all my gratitude.
The sharp decline in Arctic sea ice area in recent decades has been matched by a harder-to-see, but equally sharp, drop in sea ice thickness. The combined result has been a warming-driven collapse in total sea ice volume — to about one quarter of its 1980 level.
I first asked creative tech guru and programming analyst Andy Lee Robinson to make this ice cube volume chart (updated below) after the record-setting sea ice melt in 2012. The European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe had just confirmed modeling by the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center that it wasn’t just ice area that had shrunk to a record low.
Robinson wanted to improve the visualization of volume collapse through 3D animation, which requires serious programming chops and computing power (more details here). Here is his most recent version of the video—with piano music composed and played by Robinson himself.
The full story is at Think Progress. I don’t have the heart to comment, we humans, so destructive, so uncaring.
Bernie Sanders (Good Morning America).
Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and four other senators on Thursday called on President Barack Obama to order a comprehensive environmental review of a pipeline project that has stirred widespread opposition from Native Americans and environmental activists.
After a U.S. appeals court on Sunday night denied a request to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the senators asked Obama to direct the Army Corps of Engineers to complete a full environmental impact statement for a contested part of the route that includes stronger tribal consultation.
“The project’s current permits should be suspended and all construction stopped until a complete environmental and cultural review has been completed for the entire project,” said the letter by Sanders and Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein, Ed Markey, Patrick Leahy and Benjamin Cardin.
In recent weeks, protests against the Dakota Access pipeline led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota drew international attention, prompting the U.S. government to temporarily block its construction on federal land.
[…]
On Tuesday, anti-pipeline activists in four states closed pipeline valves to halt the flow of crude through arteries transporting 15 percent of U.S. oil consumption..
When fully connected, the 1,100-mile (1,770 km) pipeline would be the first to carry crude directly to the U.S. Gulf from the Bakken shale, a vast oil formation in North Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada.
The $3.7 billion project is being built by the Dakota Access subsidiary of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners LP, which has vowed to complete construction.
“There must be a serious consideration of the full potential climate impacts of this pipeline prior to the Army Corps of Engineers approving any permits or easements for the Dakota Access pipeline,” the senators said.
Experts say that the full environmental review requested by the senators could take several months.
The U.S. appeal court’s ruling was the second time the federal judiciary rejected the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s request to halt construction of the pipeline. On Sept. 9, a U.S. judge rejected a similar request.
Oh, so scrutiny would take a couple of months, golly, the agony for those poor, poor billionaires. Cry me a river, oil wašichu, cry me a river of clean, untainted water. Once again, we see just how much, and how easily Indigenous concerns are brushed aside, and treaties broken, again. And again. And again. My thanks to Senators Sanders, Feinstein, Markey, Leahy, and Cardin. Please, please keep the pressure on. I think everyone should remind the President of his visit to Standing Rock two years ago. How can it possibly be, in any way, to turn away from people who keep asking for justice? How long for people to wake the fuck up to all the lies, all the crimes committed by DA and Energy Transfer Partners? Remember when they swore up and down that the oil running through this travesty of a pipeline was “sweet and light”? The only people pointing out that that was a lie were Indigenous people who live in the Dakotas. I posted about that, and heard arguments and “oh no, you’re wrong.” No, we aren’t wrong. Oil lies, and it would be great if people would wake up to that fact, and stay woke. This is a disaster waiting to happen, to all of us.
Via Raw Story.
KOLO TV
After a confrontation with some of the 40 demonstrators rallying in downtown Reno to protest against Columbus Day and the Dakota Access oil pipeline, the driver of a white pickup truck plowed into the crowd, injuring five and sending one to the hospital.
A pickup truck plowed into a crowd of mostly Native demonstrators in Reno, Nevada on Monday October 10, injuring five and sending one to the hospital. Participants in the demonstration, organized by the American Indian Movement of Northern Nevada (AIMNN), were gathered under the city’s Reno Arch downtown to draw attention to the real meaning of Columbus Day. They were also there to educate passersby about the conflict surrounding the Dakota Access oil pipeline being routed near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Suddenly, witnesses said, a white Nissan pickup truck drove by, its occupants hurling slurs. Then it circled back, and stopped. Some of the demonstrators walked up to the vehicle and had words with the occupants. Suddenly the engines revved, and the truck plowed into the group, sending people flying.
Cameras were already rolling to document the demonstration, and they streamed the entire horrifying incident on Facebook. Police said in a statement that the incident occurred at 6:41 p.m., according to the Reno Gazette-Journal.
One witness recounted how two men “drove into marchers after first being seen at the rally start point, driving by once shouting slurs, and then doubling back around to get in front of the protesters before driving into them,” wrote Diana Heideman, owner of Wallflower Botanicals, in a Facebook post. “One elder, a grandmother there with her grandchildren, was hospitalized with injuries to her legs, a broken tailbone, and further tests pending. She is stable and in good spirits. She was planning to depart for #StandingRock tomorrow.”
Several protesters were posing for a photo under the arch when the pickup pulled up for the second time, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. Police told KOLO TV that the driver called in from a few blocks away to give his own side of the story, and that police had interviewed him and are cooperating with authorities. That was not enough for one of the rally’s organizers, though.
“This is a hate crime,” Quanah Brightman, executive director of United Native Americans Inc. told the Reno Gazette-Journal, adding that the driver had been “stalking” the group of demonstrators. “It’s still brutal to see this kind of racism in America. That man deserves life [in prison] for what he did.”
Via ICTMN.
Mending tears with Japanese paper. Photos courtesy of Alvarez Fine Arts Services unless otherwise noted.
While conservators in a museum setting work towards exhibitions that are scheduled years in advance, private practitioners often have to work at a much faster clip, while still upholding the required methodological and ethical standards. “More and more, our schedule is governed by auction dates and major art fairs around the world,” notes Jason Marquis, the studio manager at Alvarez Fine Arts Services, a New York-based private paper conservation studio founded by Antonio Alvarez and Scott Krawitz in 1984. With Art Basel less than two months away, the Alvarez team, which includes four full-time conservators, is gearing up for a busy season.
On the plus side, those intensive turnaround times—along with a diverse client base—make for a rich variety of projects. In addition to taking on work for smaller museums that do not have an in-house paper conservation staff, the Alvarez studio primarily does business with auction houses, art dealers, and collectors, who are looking to treat artworks before they are exhibited or sold. Meanwhile, some projects are brought to them because of their personal, rather than cultural, importance—like letters and diplomas. “But we don’t think about value when things come through here,” explains Marquis. “We treat everything as though it’s priceless, whether it’s a sentimental drawing from someone’s grandmother, or a million-dollar work.”
Antique fishing lure boxes. Photo by the author.
“According to the collector,” says Skura, “the boxes are worth even more than the objects.” And while the client was hoping to have the labels removed, cleaned, then put back on, Skura is instead recommending a less aggressive approach that will leave the labels as is, and extract the dirt with dry sponges. “What is technically possible isn’t always ethically sound,” says Marquis—a magic phrase he often has to use with clients. “It’s like going to the doctor and asking for a treatment, and the doctor has to explain why it’s not such a good idea,” adds Skura.
I collect old medicines, and have many amazingly beautiful boxes full of various herbs, and yes, the boxes are so very important. The artwork, the information, there’s so much richness and history there. I had never even thought about having these restored. The full article is excellent, and there’s more to see at The Creators Project.