From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Wed Jul 29 20:18:52 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 20:18:52 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 3: A chance to reflect Message-ID: We hope you?ve found the content of the last two weeks to be complex, rich, insightful, and engaging. This week we are taking a small pause to allow more time for reflection on the last two weeks, and an opportunity to engage more deeply with sources you found especially impactful (you can find an archive of the last two posts here: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/). What knowledge did you find most impactful? What surprised you? What didn?t? We will be back again next week to continue digging into a new theme with another, longer installment. While reflecting on past themes, here are some of the readings and videos you shared with us this week engaging with the themes of geography, erasure, and persistence. To all who have emailed with thoughts, comments, and connections to related content, THANK YOU! We know that it can be hard to engage in thoughtful dialog via either listserv or Instagram, but we do want to hear from and respond to you as much as we can. Please continue to share your thoughts and experiences with us as we shape this learning journey together. *Coverage of Sierra Club?s recent statement on its history, particularly John Muir* Many news outlets reported on Sierra Club?s statement last week detailing some of its early history and relationship to John Muir. A number of the pieces we included in last week?s installment on ?Erasure from nature and the creation of wilderness? discussed Muir?s racism and how it shaped his conservation work. Thank you to those who pointed us to Darryl Fears and Steven Mufson?s extensive reporting in the Washington Post on the Sierra Club?s statement and the larger context of white supremacy and Indigenous erasure in the environmental movement. Because the Washington Post has a limit on the number of articles non-subscribers can read, we?re also including links to reporting from other publications. As Debra Utacia Krol?s reporting for the Arizona Republic explores, we also want to highlight that Indigenous groups have been pushing for many years for acknowledgement of this history and the way it continues to inform Sierra Club?s mission and work, and the organization has only now responded. This reckoning is long overdue, and we invite you to sit with the fact that it took not only the persistence and strength of these Indigenous groups, but also the strength of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to police violence, and mounting public pressure for organizations to reflect on their own roles in upholding white supremacy, for the Sierra Club to acknowledge its history. *"Liberal, progressive ? and racist? The Sierra Club faces its white-supremacist history" by Darryl Fears and Steven Mufson* https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/07/22/liberal-progressive-racist-sierra-club-faces-its-white-supremacist-history/ *"Taking Down Its 'Own Monuments,' Sierra Club Assesses The Racism Of John Muir," by Jason Slotkin* https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/22/894188718/taking-down-its-own-monuments-sierra-club-assesses-the-racism-of-john-muir *"'Being very frank about our history': As Sierra Club acknowledges racist past, Indigenous communities look for reckoning," by Debra Utacia Krol* https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2020/07/26/sierra-club-confronts-its-racist-history-tribes-see-reckoning/5494294002/ *Sierra Club?s statement, "Pulling Down Our Monuments," by Michael Brune * https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club *Examining and challenging the myth of "virgin" forests* We included @Countrygentlemancook?s video "Pristine Forests and Other Lies" (https://www.instagram.com/tv/CC6D53Dn4rq/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) in last week's installment. Thank you to those of you who highlighted this additional, terrific installment. In "Virgin Forests and Related Nonsense," Justin Robinson builds on the same themes by discussing the problematic language of virginity that is often applied to forests. Not only does the discourse of a "pristine" pre-colonial forest erase Indigenous peoples' presence and interactions with the landscape, but the concept of forest "virginity" is rooted in a metaphor that implicitly devalues women and elevates white, male, European "conquest." *"Virgin Forests and Related Nonsense," @Countrygentlemancooks Instagram video* *https://www.instagram.com/tv/CDCeMLBnbRe/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link* Thank you for joining us this week and for your continued engagement. We look forward to continuing the conversation, and will be back again next week! -- Thanks so much for following along this week! Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you'd like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you?ll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. We would like to express our continued thanks for those researching, questioning, exploring, and sharing knowledge against harmful narratives of Indigenous erasure. We would like to explicitly thank those creators whose knowledge we have shared here. Additionally, we would like to send our thanks to you! Thank you for joining us on this learning journey, and for those who shared thoughts and resources with us: we truly appreciate it. Thank you. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Wed Aug 5 12:21:32 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2020 12:21:32 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 4: Land Theft and University Wealth Message-ID: Land Theft and University Wealth Private property is so thoroughly integrated into the ways many of us live on and relate to land that we hardly take a moment to consider it. Land is owned, passed from one property owner to the next; links in a never-ending chain of possession. But this chain of possession began with dispossession: the massive theft of Native lands across the North American continent. Through coercion, manipulation, and violence, the wealth of the United States was built on stolen land. One of our primary goals for this reading group is to consider the relationship between the Yale Forest School and the nearly 11,000 acres of forestland it owns and operates for research, education, and profit. In Week 1, we used Native Land Digital?s Native Land Map to learn more about the Native peoples and Nations who have long held deep relationships with the land that the Yale Forests rest upon. This week, we?ll situate Yale?s land ownership in the context of the Morrill Act, a defining piece of legislation for the country?s institutions of higher learning. Signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the Morrill Act made millions of acres of Native land, claimed by the federal government through treaties, seizure, or cession, available to states across the country. States then allocated the land to universities to conserve and invest the principal and to provide education in ?agricultural science and mechanical arts.? In High Country News in March of this year, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone published two years of extensive research into the Morrill Act. The article is an exhaustive piece of journalism, detailing the transfer of nearly 11 million acres of land from ?nearly 250 tribes, bands and communities through over 160 violence-backed land cessions.? To the universities who received these lands, they were collectively worth half a billion dollars, raising capital for endowments that still keep these universities operating today. For this violent taking of their land, Native tribes collectively received less than $400,000 from the U.S. Government. Many received nothing at all. ?Land-grab universities: Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system? by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, published by High Country News https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities Published March 30, 2020 If you?d also like to explore this topic by listening, we recommend this episode of The Red Nation Podcast, an interview with the authors of the above High Country News piece: ?How universities benefit from stolen land w/ Tristan Ahtone & Bobby Lee? from The Red Nation Podcast https://soundcloud.com/therednationpod/how-universities-benefit-from It might surprise you to know that Yale University was one of the nation?s original land-grant colleges. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, Yale had a thriving agricultural program, housed in the Sheffield Scientific School. As a result of this curriculum, the university was eligible for state land grants, and became a recipient of Morrill Act Land. High Country News reports: ?Yale was assigned the benefit of 180,000 acres of Morrill Act scrip, eventually redeemed from the former homelands of 53 tribal nations. That land was transferred to the United States through 33 ratified and unratified treaties made between 1808 and 1858. Connecticut sold the entire lot in a block in 1863 for $135,000, raised primarily at the expense of the Ojibwe and Odawa, whose lopsided land cessions contained more than 70% of what became the state?s grant. Interest from the fund provided scholarships for in-state students until Connecticut reassigned the endowment to the University of Connecticut (then known as Storrs Agricultural College) in 1893. Yale went to court and later received a settlement for the full $135,000 plus interest, worth about $4.8 million in today?s dollars.? ?When Yale Was A Farming School? by Judith Ann Schiff, published by Yale Alumni Magazine https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/2405-when-yale-was-a-farming-school Published March/April, 2009 For us Forest Fellows, the legacy of the Morrill Act at Yale is especially direct. According to Judith Schiff writing for the Yale Alumni Magazine, Yale lost its status as the state?s land grant institution when the State Grange complained that high admissions standards were depriving the state?s farmers of the full benefits of the Morrill Act. Professors in the Sheffield Scientific School went on to organize Yale?s Forestry School. How do we reconcile the origins of Yale?s wealth and the dispossession it entailed? With an endowment built on the violent appropriation of Native land, what responsibilities do we have to correct that history, to right wrongs? Furthermore, how does the history of Morrill legislation change the way we think about university-owned property and endowments? The nearly 11,000 acres of forestland owned by Yale?s Forest School didn?t come directly from Morrill Act land grants, but it is still the result of violence-backed Native land theft. We shouldn?t have to speak in monetary terms to understand why this theft is wrong. But now that the theft has been quantified, how can we reconcile? According to High Country News: ??there are some hints. The American Indian and Indigenous Studies Department at Michigan State University, for instance, has incorporated language on the Morrill Act?s relationship to expropriation and genocide in its extended land acknowledgment . But perhaps most strikingly, the Wokini Initiative at South Dakota State University has recently redirected income from its remaining Morrill acres into programming and support for Native students hoping to attend SDSU.? We, of course, don?t have the answers here. We join the chorus of voices urging institutions to truly commit to interrogating their histories and moving forward more justly. By learning from these resources, we hope to facilitate a greater understanding of the varied mechanisms the United States government has used over the years to claim and seize Native lands. We?ll continue to examine these themes of theft and dispossession over the next few weeks, and hope to continue to engage thoughtfully and critically with this material as we move forward. Here are some questions we?re considering this week, which we encourage you to consider as well: - What is your personal relationship to lands transferred by the Morrill Act? - How has your university - or a university near you - benefited from Native land theft? How have you personally benefited from your relationships to these institutions? - How is the knowledge that these universities create -- and the power and privilege they confer -- dependent upon Native land theft? - How can we acknowledge and address land theft? To whom does the responsibility of this acknowledgement fall? How successful have we/they been? -- Thanks so much for following along this week! Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you?d like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you?ll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. We would like to express our deep gratitude for those leading the interrogation of the history and continued impacts of Native land theft. Particularly, we would like to thank the creators whose knowledge and work we shared here, with special thanks to Robert Lee and Triston Ahtone ( https://tristanahtone.net/). Thank you for assisting us in our journey to learn about and confront atrocities both past and present, in our attempt to create a better, more just future -- personally, institutionally, nationally, and globally. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 17:03:05 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:03:05 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 5: Land Theft & King Philip's War Message-ID: *Land Theft & King Philip's War* In Week 5 of the reading group, we continue to explore the themes of erasure and land theft through the violent history of King Philip's War. This war, fought between 1675 and 1676, is known as the biggest and deadliest conflict between Native peoples and English colonizers in New England. It is also known as the final major attempt by Natives to stop colonizers from Western expansion and land theft in the years following English occupation after the Mayflower's arrival. This week, while we cannot cover this history in its entirety, we will present aspects of this war and the people and places that were involved. In today's historical accounts of the war, August 12th marks the anniversary of King Philip's death and the end of the war in 1676. However, as Lisa Brooks writes in Our Beloved Kin: Remapping a New History of King Philip's War, the war "did not come to a definitive end, as has been represented by traditional historical accounts. Rather, the threads of relationality and conflict that shaped the wartime era continued to weave through the lives of people in the Northeast." If you're from New England, or have lived here, we ask: How familiar are you with the history of tension and conflict between Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Pocumtuck, and Narragansett peoples and colonizers in the Indigenous territories we now know as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut? How much do you know about the violence colonizers inflicted upon Natives in order to occupy their land?with hungry eyes on the most fertile and cultivated areas?and to fracture and erase Native relationships, ties of kinships, and traditions with one another and their homelands? >From what point of view have you learned this history and the history of the land you occupy? How can you commit to reshaping the way that these histories are told in the future? Join us as we explore aspects of this war, its geographies, its peoples, and its legacies through varied points of view of Native peoples and their accounts. Who was King Philip and what was his war? No, King Philip was not a European monarch. He was Metacom, Wampanoag sachem (male leader) and son of Massasoit, the sachem known for negotiating with the first English colonizers who disembarked the Mayflower, offering them diplomacy and peace. Metacom's English name reflects the Wampanoags' initial relationship with the English, one that dissolved with the colonizers' relentless expansion and occupation outside of Plymouth. Increased tension led to the killing of three Wampanoags, setting off a war led by the Wampanoags and their Native allies against colonial advancement on their homelands. The history of Massasoit, Metacom, and the ensuing war against the colonizers is captured in the PBS American Experience docuseries "We Shall Remain: Episode 1, After the Mayflower." Master's student Tiana Wilson-Blindman brought this series to the Yale School of the Environment through her project "Beyond the Land Acknowledgement." Tiana pulled Indigenous histories to the forefront of our environmental studies and educated fellow students about the land that we live, work, and study on and the Native peoples who have long relationships with that land. Resource 1: We Shall Remain: Episode 1, After the Mayflower https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/weshallremain/ Where, and by whom, was King Philip's War fought? King Philip's War was fought in Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Pocumtuck, and Narragansett territories, in what were referred to as the United Colonies of New England (Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut) by English settlers. Metacom was not the sole leader of King Philip's War. Lisa Brooks, an Abenaki writer, scholar, and Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, re-examined the history of King Philip's War in her book Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War. To do this work, she drew from Native sources and navigated the landscape by canoe to reclaim the places where the war took place and demonstrate Native resistance. She writes: "These stories reserve the narrative of absence and reveal the persistence of Indigenous adaptation and survival." We encourage you to meander with us through Brooks' digital companion to her book, which sheds light on the obscured history of the war through Native stories of both people and place. In the Abenaki perspective, she writes, these sources "are part of a cycling or spiraling of ?jmow?gan (history), which refers to a process of telling a collective story, an ongoing activity in which we are engaged." This resource contains a vast amount of information, and we hope that you will take some time to explore it on your own. As an introduction, we'll spend the next few sections highlighting several people and aspects of the war, with a focus on Nipmuc territory and areas near Yale-Myers Forest. Resource 2: ?Our Beloved Kin: Remapping A New History of King Philip?s War? https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index Weetamoo and the erasure of Native women Weetamoo was Metacom's sister-in-law and a central leader in the resistance. Along with other women, she is generally erased from history because of the patriarchal culture of the colonizers. Weetamoo, a saunkskwa (female leader) was devoted to the collective rights and survival of the tribes of the Kteticut River basin, especially through distributing food and resources. Weetamoo cultivated the connections, negotiations, and kinship of families using trails, canoe routes, and the contours of the land itself. English colonizers disregarded the labor of Wampanoag women in cultivating gardens to feed the tribes. At the same time they sought to divide this land into private parcels and turn gardens into cattle pasture. According to Brooks' research, Weetamoo?fearing the oppression of white men?used the tools of the colonizer to draft land deeds and boundaries, which she had a Native man present in her stead. The first ambushes against the colonizers occurred in her homeland of the peninsulas of the Narragansett Bay. From there, she headed south to Narragansett territory for safety, and then on to Nipmuc territory, a key Native area of the southern front. Here are two of the pages about Weetamoo, and how she has been misrepresented in colonial histories, in "Our Beloved Kin": https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/writing-weetamoo-to-death?path=pocasset https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/re-placing-the-narrative?path=pocasset Nipmuc "Praying Villages" and Involvement in the War Yale-Myers Forest, the school-owned forest we Forest Fellows manage and engage with most, is located on Nipmuc territory. Nipmuc (meaning "freshwater") territory was known for its corn fields, fruit orchards, and meadows, as well as the intersections of essential trails such as the Nipmuc Path and Connecticut Path. At the time of the war, colonizers claimed this area as part of the Massachusetts Colony. They had already established "praying villages" or "praying towns," which were small reservations where Nipmucs were assimilated to English customs under colonial law and converted to Christianity by Harvard Divinity reverends. One of the major "praying villages" was Webquasset (or Wabaquasset; Woodstock, CT), which is the town directly east of Yale-Myers Forest Camp. Nipmuc leaders of these communities signed agreements and alliances with the colonizers rather than join Metacom's forces, but other leaders like Weetamoo opposed these reservations, seeing them as suppression of women. Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, also opposed this colonization adjacent to Mohegan territory. Colonizers consolidated and enforced stricter rules on the villages as the war went on. Those Nipmuc who opposed the English and captured by them were put in internment camps or sold into slavery in the West Indies. Menimesit (New Braintree, MA) in Nipmuc territory served as a key refuge for Nipmuc, Wampanoag, and Narragansett leaders, including Weetamoo. An island within marshes and riverways, Menimesit was a sanctuary, only invaded by colonizers with the help of Indian scouts. Here is one of the pages about praying towns, as well as an interactive map, from "Our Beloved Kin": https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/hassanamesit https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/praying-towns-map End of War, Continuance, and Further Learning The end of the war is commonly marked by the capture and killing of Metacom on August 12, 1676 in Mount Hope (Rhode Island). However, Brooks writes "King Philip's War did not come to a definitive end" because this legacy of conflict continues to mark the lives Native peoples. She also calls us "to learn more about the continuance of Native nations in New England." Find her recommendations for further learning here: https://www.ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/continuance?path=navigate-by-path If you are interested in engaging more with Lisa Brooks and her work, we recommend registering for her upcoming virtual talk "The Connecticut River Valley as Native Space." This event is the first in the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding?s series Erasure and Restoration: An Understanding of Past and Present in the Kwinitekw Valley's Indigenous Communities. The talk is next Wednesday, August 19, at 5pm Eastern, and you can register here: https://www.karunacenter.org/erasure-and-restoration/ In addition to the resources mentioned here and those recommended by Lisa Brooks, there are numerous other sources for learning about King Philip's War and Indigenous communities in the Northeast. In addition to "We Shall Remain" and Our Beloved Kin, we drew upon and recommend the following resources: - "Re-thinking King Philip's War" https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2018/4-2018/re-thinking-king-philip-s-war - Native Northeast Research Collaborative (formerly The Yale Indian Papers Project) for Native primary sources https://www.thenativenortheast.org/ - Nolumbeka Project: Honoring Northeast Tribal Heritage https://nolumbekaproject.org/ - Memory Lands by Christine M. DeLucia https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300201178/memory-lands -- Thanks so much for following along this week! Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you'd like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you'll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. We would like to express our deep gratitude for those leading the interrogation of the history and continued impacts of Native land theft and violence against Native peoples. We are deeply grateful to learn and benefit from the work shared here, especially Lisa Brooks' re-examination of King Philip's War. We are exceptionally thankful for Tiana Wilson-Blindman's efforts to center Native voices in our school, and for both Tiana and Meghanlata Gupta for sharing resources with us. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Thu Aug 20 09:49:23 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2020 09:49:23 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 6: Tribal Sovereignty & Land Message-ID: *Tribal Sovereignty & Land* In recent weeks, we've focused on land theft and the ways it has been used as a violent tool of oppression by colonizers against Native peoples. Over the past two installments of the reading group, we learned about the Morrill Act and King Philip's War, which both involved violent dispossession and land theft from Indigenous communities. This week, we're focusing on tribal sovereignty and continuing to learn about the Native peoples whose land we are on in the area surrounding Yale-Myers Forest. In the coming weeks, we'll learn about legal mechanisms for land theft in the centuries after King Philip's War, situating them within the context of tribal sovereignty and self-determination. Part 1: What is tribal sovereignty? Tribal sovereignty is a critical aspect of understanding the history and present of Indigenous peoples in North America. This week, we're highlighting several resources we've been learning from about this crucial topic. Put simply, tribal sovereignty is the inherent right of a tribal Nation to govern itself and to determine its own future. The United States operates with three types of sovereigns - federal, state, and tribal governments. In Indian Country Today, Shaawano Chad Uran points out that a power inherent in a sovereign nation is conducting relationships with other sovereign nations: "Tribes have sovereignty that is obviously older than the US Constitution. Tribes had their own form of government, and many had legal codes written into their own documents, their own stories, their own practices, and their own memories. Tribal sovereignty is derived from the people, the land, and their relationships; tribal sovereignty was not a gift from any external government." "Professor Breaks Down Sovereignty and Explains its Significance" by Shaawano Chad Uran, Indian Country Today, January 2014 https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/professor-breaks-down-sovereignty-and-explains-its-significance-B8tl2DAAREa05ACzie58hw To further understand tribal sovereignty, we're listening to J. K?haulani Kauanui's "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond" podcast. The two-part episodes we're highlighting today are a recording of a 2010 panel on tribal sovereignty held at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. In her introduction to the panel, Kauanui stresses that tribal sovereignty and governance are issues separate from civil rights, and cautions against conflating race and Indigeneity. Too often, she says, "the question of tribal sovereignty is misread through a twisted notion of racial equality that denies both colonialism and racial oppression and domination." Let's start with Part I, in which panelists John Echohawk (co-founder and Executive Director of the Native American Rights Fund) and J. Cedric Woods (Director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass Boston) offer legal and cultural context for understanding tribal sovereignty. Echohawk, who describes modeling the Native American Rights Fund after the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1970, further explains the distinction between civil rights and tribal sovereignty: "even though we got our start in the civil rights movement, we were not about equality, we were about treaty rights." Woods closes out the episode by discussing the particular challenges that eastern tribes face in defending and asserting their inherent sovereignty, given the region's long history of occupation. Although political and legal sovereignty are most talked about, he says, economic and cultural sovereignty are just as important. Culture is a process, not a set of actions, and cultural sovereignty can be seen in the ways that communities work to reclaim their native languages, take control of how their children are educated, and maintain connections to traditional lands, among other examples. "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond" Podcast, hosted by J. K?haulani Kauanui. Episode 5, 2010: Tribal Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights, Part I: Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation http://www.indigenouspolitics.com/2010-2/ Part 2: Tribal Sovereignty, Governance, & Land: the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation To begin to understand tribal governance in the context of sovereignty, we'll start by listening to Part II of the "Indigenous Politics" podcast panel we began above. This episode features three panelists intimately involved in navigating issues of tribal sovereignty: Betsy Conway, then an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and subsequently its General Counsel; James T. Jackson, then Tribal Council Treasurer for the Mashantucket Pequot; and the late Jackson T. King, Jr., who was then the General Counsel for the Mashantucket Pequot. An overarching theme here is the lack of knowledge about tribal sovereignty on the part of state and federal judges, and other non-Native government officials. To better understand the stories and information presented in the podcast, we're also reading through the website of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, which is one of two federally recognized tribes in Connecticut. The Tribe gained recognition in 1983 as a result of a land claims case started in 1976, which sought to return land to the Tribe that had been illegally sold by the state of Connecticut in 1856. Federal and state recognition is an important topic that we'll focus on more in the coming weeks, but for now we encourage you to notice the inherent relationships between sovereignty and land. Outright land theft is one way for a colonial state to attack Indigenous sovereignty, but seemingly smaller actions also have large impacts. In the podcast, James T. Jackson describes the damage done when Mashantucket was assigned the same zip code as another jurisdiction (the town of Ledyard, CT) in 1963. It wasn't granted its own zip code until 2002, and the effects are still felt today -- a process that Jackson likens to recovering from identity theft. "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond" Podcast, hosted by J. K?haulani Kauanui. Episode 6, 2010: Tribal Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights, Part II: Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation http://www.indigenouspolitics.com/2010-2/ Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation website https://www.mptn-nsn.gov/Default.aspx Part 3: Upholding and strengthening tribal sovereignty What role does land play in tribal sovereignty? How can remedying land theft uphold sovereignty? This summer, we saw examples of Native peoples in the United States asserting their sovereignty and pushing back against the settler state. In particular, there have been two major wins, which you might be familiar with, that can provide some context. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe were victorious in their lawsuit against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The court found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to ensure that there was an environmental impact review for the pipeline and therefore ordered the pipeline to be shut down and emptied. Read more about the long-time grassroots level fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline here: "Celebrating a Win for the Sovereignty of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes" on Indigenous Environmental Network https://www.ienearth.org/celebrating-a-win-for-the-sovereignty-of-the-standing-rock-and-cheyenne-river-sioux-tribes/ The second recent case is the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that much of eastern Oklahoma is indeed reservation land, specifically that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation remained such even after Oklahoma became a state. This means that only tribal and federal courts have jurisdiction on this land in Oklahoma. As Justice Neil Gorsuch states in the majority opinion: "Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word." The ruling is especially powerful because the Muscogee people were promised a reservation on the other end of the Trail of Tears. In fact, this ruling may also extend to all of what are known as the Five Tribes - the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations - who were forcibly removed from their homelands in the U.S. South and walked the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Read more about this ruling here: "Supreme Court ruling 'reaffirmed' sovereignty" by Kolby Kickingwoman for Indian Country Today, July 9, 2020. https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/supreme-court-ruling-reaffirmed-sovereignty-4KQXSMEtlUW4lpBGSw6pzA "How the Supreme Court upended a century of federal Indian law" by Graham Lee Brewer & Cary Aspinwall for High Country News, August 4, 2020. https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-justice-how-the-supreme-court-upended-a-century-of-federal-indian-law These are just two critical moments that have been making news headlines. However, these moments are part of much greater Indigenous movements as tribes continue to call for honoring Indigenous sovereignty and for the return of their lands. "Land Back" is a Native movement for upholding and strengthening sovereignty via the return of land to tribal nations. It calls for North American lands to be returned to Native peoples, who have lived on and stewarded the land since long before colonization, violent dispossession, and the formation of the settler state. To begin to understand what this process can look like, we've been learning from this informative lesson by Corinne Rice and Andrew Perera: Corinne Rice @misscorinne86 instagram posts: "Land Back: A Guide to Returning Stolen Land to Your Indigenous Community" Part 1: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDJgUcWl_Uu/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Part 2: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDJgexIFhqy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Part 3: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDJgnxalWm9/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link -- Thanks so much for following along this week! Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you?d like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you?ll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. We would like to express our deep gratitude for those who have shared their work related to tribal sovereignty, governance, and land rights. In particular, we are thankful to those creators whose work we've shared here today. We recognize the responsibility that we have as Forest Fellows and non-Native people engaging in this learning to do our part to ensure that tribal sovereignty is recognized and respected by our institutions. As always, thank you for following along and learning with us. Please be in touch with any comments, questions, critiques, or recommendations for further resources. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karamsheban1991 at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 09:42:29 2020 From: karamsheban1991 at gmail.com (Karam Sheban) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:42:29 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 7: Guardianship, Land Allotments, and the Dawes Act Message-ID: Week 7: Guardianship, Land Allotments, and the Dawes Act Part 1: Guardianship, Land Allotments, and the Nipmuc Nation This week, we continue our exploration of the long, violent history of Native land theft and displacement in New England and across North America. Following last week's focus on Tribal Sovereignty, we want to learn more about some of the specific mechanisms of theft that colonizers have employed against Native Nations. In the previous installment about King Philip's War, we learned about the history of "praying towns," such as Webquasset (Woodstock, CT), where colonists converted Native people to English customs and Christianity. Following the war, colonizers turned to other methods of control and assimilation, and introduced "guardianship" as a way to regulate how Indigenous people and communities could interact with the land. As described in Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine: "Toward the end of the 18th century, English settlers developed a guardianship system ostensibly to prevent the abuse of Native Americans during land negotiations, but in reality only furthering the fraud, abuse, and corruption. Guardians were paid by the tribes, but often the tribes' only sources of income were from sales of land or resources." Many of the guardians ? colonists claiming to represent the interests of a tribe or individual ? siphoned off funds for personal use, and Indigenous people were then forced to sell land to pay debts, taxes, and more. This only added to the immense land loss they had already experienced. This article highlights a panel discussion at Suffolk University that featured tribal leaders from the Nipmuc Nation and Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc Indians, the Chappaquiddick Wampanoag Tribe, and the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe. This panel convened to discuss the legal and social mechanisms of state-sanctioned land theft that left the Indigenous population landless within a century after King Philip's War. The discussion points to colonial concepts of land tenure, the abuses of guardianship policies, and a foreign tax system that all interplayed to dispossess land from Native people. Despite the loss of land that broke apart their communities and the abuses of power that forced them to sell acreage, tribes in the region maintain a cultural connection to their ancestral lands and continue to rebuild their communities. Of the Nipmuc Nation, the Cultural Survival Quarterly article states: "Today, only three acres remain of the original Hassanamesit reservation in Grafton. Although no Nipmuc people live on their traditional lands, they continue to congregate for cultural events that serve as an important connection to their ancestors." Sanctioned Theft: Tribal Land Loss in Massachusetts - by CS Staff - Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, June 2014 https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/sanctioned-theft-tribal-land-loss-massachusetts Guardians were often employed when the colonizers divided land into individual allotments, privatizing land that was formerly shared by Native bands, tribes, and nations. Land was divided into allotments on a large scale with the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, but colonial, state, and federal governments also employed the allotment system much earlier. In her 2012 blog post "Hassanimisco Indians," Cheryll Toney Holley, chief of the Nipmuc Nation and Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc Indians, writes that "Native people throughout Massachusetts could not sell their land or spend even the interest on their money without asking their guardians to petition the legislature until 1869." She traces the history of one land allotment (the Muckamaug Allotment) beginning in 1728, when the Hassanamesit praying town was divided. Of the 8,000 total acres at Hassanamesit, only 1,200 were distributed to 7 Nipmuc families. Her 2015 post, "Unraveling Six Generations of Nipmuc Sarahs," focuses on the same allotment and follows the lineage of Nipmuc women who passed this land down through generations. "Hassanamisco Indians" and "Unraveling Six Generations of Nipmuc Sarahs," For All My Relations, Cheryll Toney Holley http://forallmyrelations.blogspot.com/2012/08/hassanamisco-indians.html http://forallmyrelations.blogspot.com/2014/04/unraveling-six-generations-of-nipmuc.html For further reading, we recommend the dissertation of Dr. Rae Gould, a member of the Nipmuc Nation and Associate Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Dr. Gould's doctoral research traces how a 3-acre remnant of an allotment of land to Nipmuc Moses Printer in 1727 eventually became the present day Hassanamisco Reservation, and highlights the role of women leaders in protecting and preserving this land. Her work follows the transformation of the Nipmuc settlement of Hassanamesit, "the place of small stones", to the 17th century Hassanamesit praying village, to eventually become present day Grafton, Massachusetts, where the reservation serves as a symbol of resilience and "of the continued presence of the Nipmuc people in southern New England." Contested Places: The history and meaning of Hassanamisco - Dr. Rae Gould https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47869343_Contested_places_The_history_and_meaning_of_Hassanamisco#read Part 2: The General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act) Over the past few weeks, we have explored the many mechanisms by which land was violently stolen and systematically dispossessed from Native people by colonizers, and how this land loss is connected to the erasure of Native people from the landscape. One of the most devastating policies to Indigenous land ownership as colonizers expanded westward was the General Allotment Act of 1887 ? often referred to as the Dawes Act, after the Senator and Yale alum, Henry Laurens Dawes, a major proponent of the legislation ? which resulted in the loss of ownership of over 90 million acres of Native landholdings to colonial settlers. The policy was designed to partition communal Indigenous lands into individual parcels of 40, 80, or 160 acres. The most productive lands from reservations were identified as "surplus to Indian needs" and sold to colonizers to exploit for natural resources. Under the allotment policies, colonial settlers could purchase and own land outright, but Natives that were deemed "incompetent" by the federal government had to wait 25 years to gain the legal title and rights to sell the land. In addition to the land grab, the act aimed to "civilize" and assimilate Indigenous people in order to dissolve their connections to their traditional land, culture, and identity. Today, tribes continue to address the fractionated ownership and management of land from the original allottees. Episode 5 of This Land podcast explores how 90 million acres of land were lost to "bureaucracy and corruption," and the repercussions that continue to be seen today. In this conversation, host Rebecca Nagle and John Ross, David Cornsilk, Marilyn Vann, Elena Kagan, and Sheila Bird reframe the common story "about how tribes lost land with arrows and guns." Depending on who tells the story, they say, The Dawes Act was either "a story of good intentions" to safeguard Native land ownership or "or one of outright theft." The Land Grab - This Land Podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagle https://crooked.com/podcast/this-land-episode-5-the-land-grab/ The first article in a three-part series by Gale Courey Toensing in Indian Country Today describes the Dawes Act for what it was - legalized warfare - and a "land-grab on a massive, almost unimaginable scale." This article describes how the Dawes Act gave the President authority to "dissolve" reservations and subsequently allot the land to individual Native people, based on a western understanding of gender and family structures (for example, married women couldn't receive allotments). Additionally, "The allotments would be held in 'trust' by the federal government for 25 years, and then turned over to the individual allotment holder, who would hold the title free and clear, but would now have to pay taxes on the land." Many could not afford those taxes and therefore lost the land. Toensing articulates the devastating impact of this policy on Indigenous communities across the continent: "The Dawes Act was one of the most effective implementations of the colonial and imperialist strategy against Indigenous Peoples of divide-and-conquer ? a strategy that combines political, military and economic tactics to gain power over another power by breaking it up into individual units that are powerless to resist domination. It was also an act of lawfare ? a relatively new term for an old phenomenon: warfare by legal means." The Dawes Act Started the U.S. Land-Grab of Native Territory by Gale Courey Toensing in Indian Country Today (Part 1) https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/the-dawes-act-started-the-u-s-land-grab-of-native-territory-hv3s4QgVpkCrSHO77YvZjg For additional reading, we recommend the other articles in the series. Part 3 explores the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act ? which gave the Secretary of the Interior authority to "restore and acquire lands for Indian Nations" ? and the 2009 Carcieri ruling, which Mashpee Wampanoag Chairman Cedric Cromwell calls "the modern-day Dawes Act." In Carcieri v. Salazar, the Supreme Court ruled that "the Secretary of the Interior does not have the authority to take land into trust for tribes that were not 'now under federal jurisdiction' when the IRA was enacted" in 1934. The Mashpee Wampanoag were some of the first to experience Dawes' theory of private property ownership, when state legislation in 1842 divided Mashpee Wampanoag land into 60-acre allotments. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe only recently received federal recognition in 2007, and their once-vast lands throughout New England now comprise just over 300 acres of reservation land in the Massachusetts towns of Mashpee and Taunton. The Tribe is now in the midst of a battle to retain their lands, following a 2018 decision by the Department of the Interior that because the Tribe was not federally recognized in 1934, it does not qualify for land-in-trust status under Carcieri. On March 27, 2020, the Department ordered the Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation to be disbanded and the land taken out of trust, an action that the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. struck down in June. Interior is now appealing that ruling. The Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation Reaffirmation Act/HR312, which would prevent disestablishment of the reservation, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in May (it hasn't yet been taken up by the Senate). In the Indian Country Today piece (written before the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's current legal battle began), Cromwell articulates the importance of land to Tribes, and articulates how land is fundamental to sovereignty: "We have always been, and today continue to be, land based cultures ? communities inextricably connected to the soil, water, and air around us, to the plants and animals that ensure our survival, and to the places we call home. In our view, our lands hold much more than mere economic value but rather have great cultural, religious, and?in the modern era, especially?political significance. Our lands are where we live, where we gather together, and where we exercise our inherent sovereign rights as pre-Constitutional peoples." The Dawes Act Started the U.S. Land-Grab of Native Territory by Gale Courey Toensing in Indian Country Today (Part 3) https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/part-3-the-dawes-act-started-the-u-s-land-grab-of-indian-territory-bKhupD7gEUmwaRcriA_7Mw To learn more about the ongoing legal battle surrounding Mashpee Wampanoag lands and tribal sovereignty: Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe: #StandWithMashpee https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/standwithmashpee https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/news/2020/6/5/message-from-chairman-cromwell-court-rules-in-favor-of-tribe and other news pieces on the Tribe's website "Secretary Of Interior Orders Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation 'Disestablished,' Tribe Says," WBUR, March 28, 2020 https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/03/28/mashpee-wampanoag-reservation-secretary-interior-land-trust "Interior Department appeals June ruling over Wampanoag land" by Beth Treffeisen for the Cape Cod Times, August 1, 2020 https://www.capecodtimes.com/news/20200801/interior-department-appeals-june-ruling-over-wampanoag-land To learn more about organizations that are working to return land to Native ownership take a look at the work of The Indian Land Tenure Foundation. The Indian Land Tenure Foundation https://iltf.org/ Questions 1. How do allotments continue to influence how land is managed today? 2. For those who don't live on reservation land, are you aware of reservation land near you? How have you interacted with the land and people who live with it? Knowing more about violent land dispossession policies, how does this influence how you view and interact with Native land? 3. Were you already familiar with this history of land dispossession? What has been new to you in this history? 4. As we have strived to cover some main events and methods of land dispossession since European contact to today, what other major events and methods have you learned about in New England or other areas that would help tell this story? 5. What are other examples of land dispossession and marginalization you have noticed? Acknowledgments Each week, we are in awe of the Native accounts and stories we are reading and listening to. We are thankful to the people and platforms we have explored this week for digging deep into the history of land dispossession - and their continued efforts to educate and advocate for returning land to Native ownership. We are exceptionally thankful for and privileged to read the words of Cheryll Toney Holley, chief of the Nipmuc Nation and Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc Indians, and Dr. Rae Gould, Nipmuc Nation member and associate director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University, who have shared stories of the Nipmuc people that we have learned from and bettered our understanding. As a continued action from this learning, we encourage you to continue to follow and support the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's fight to preserve their reservation land (#StandWithMashpee), as well as to learn about (and join in opposition to) other attacks on tribal sovereignty in your area. -- Thanks so much for following along this week! Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you?d like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you?ll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Fri Sep 4 16:50:35 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2020 16:50:35 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 8: Black Lives Matter and Intersectionality Message-ID: Black Lives Matter and Intersectionality Introduction This week marks the end of our summer learning series before we transition into a new form for autumn, and we want to circle back to when this reading group began: in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and the upwelling of resistance that followed. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery -- among others -- galvanized the world, stoked the flames of resistance, and prompted increased scrutiny of so many systems of oppression, including racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and settler colonialism. At the Yale Forests, we had started to examine what a meaningful land acknowledgement would look like as students and practitioners of stewardship in the Northeast, a process that led us to form this reading group. Rather than simply acknowledge the Native peoples whose land we work and study on at the Yale Forests, we wanted to turn that reflective statement into acts of practice. Like so many around the world, we were inspired to actualize the reading group portion of this work on the heels of the Black Lives Matter movement's call to action. This reading group is dedicated to recentering Native life and experience in the Northeast and beyond, and cannot fully do so without also exploring the intersections with Black lives and experiences, as well as acknowledging the social context in which we began this work. This week, we will explore the intertwining histories of Black and Native Americans, highlighting the intersections of Black and Native resistance. We have had the privilege of collaborating with and receiving guidance from Meghanlata Gupta on this week's content. In the following paragraph, Meghan explains in her own words the intersectionality of Native and Black lives: In the United States, the early settler-colonial project operated differently for Native Americans and Black Americans. In seeking the total genocide of Indigenous peoples and cultures and full assimilation into white society, the United States used structures of blood quantum, boarding schools, urban relocation, and forced Christianization, among others. In seeking to continue the oppressive practices of slavery and Black disenfranchisement, and thus continue denying Black communities civil rights and resources, the US enacted Jim Crow laws and promoted policing, racial capitalism, and incarceration. In this way, we see the colonial project working in different and somewhat opposite ways?so while Native and Black peoples have shared lived experiences, it is necessary to note that there are distinct ways in which anti-Blackness pervades ALL non-Black spaces, especially as we discuss Native American involvement with African enslavement. Additionally, it is equally important that we adopt a transnational understanding of Indigeneity when we speak about Black and Indigenous relationships in the United States. Many Black communities in the United States are descended from displaced Indigenous peoples who were taken from their own homes to further the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slave-labor plantations. Today, Black tribal citizens have shared their stories of what it means to be Black and Indigenous through a series from Indian Country Today. It is absolutely essential that we both hold ourselves accountable for the ways in which we have perpetuated anti-Blackness, continue to educate ourselves, and work to center Black voices and organizing efforts in all that we do. Part 1: A complex history Black and Native peoples have shared space on the continent for hundreds of years, along with the white colonizers who forcibly brought them together. The stories of these two communities and their interconnectedness are rich, complex, and always in progress. This week, we'll touch on this history of intersection and consider how stories of the past are part of an unbroken line to the present moment's collective resistance to white supremacy. To start, we're listening to a story told by Dr. Rae Gould, whom we referenced last week. Dr. Gould is a member of the Nipmuc Nation of Massachusetts and currently the Associate Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University. In 2012, she gave a talk with Ramona Peters of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard, Connecticut as part of a traveling exhibit put on by the Smithsonian Institution. The exhibit was titled IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas. Dr. Gould describes growing up in Northeast Connecticut, in a family that was both Native and African American. It wasn't something that struck her as unusual, until she decided to start her own family and an in-law asked, "is your mother white?" As a scholar, Dr. Gould takes this experience and looks backward through the lens of perceived authenticity. She asks, "Who determines what a real Indian is? What they should look like? What they should act like?" John Milton Earle, Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was tasked with answering these questions in the mid-1800s. He was commissioned to produce a comprehensive report of all the Native American tribes in the state. In his words, he was looking for members of "a race, naturally inclined to a roving and unsettled life." Of those who self-identified as Native, Earle described that "some of them still possessed the lank, glossy black hair; the high cheekbones; the dark, bright eye, and other features peculiar to the race." He also notes that some Native Americans had intermarried with whites, "losing their distinct identity as a distinct class." He laments, "this would have been a fortunate thing for all the tribes if it would have been so with all of them." When Earle's report was published in 1861, the government was gearing up to "enfranchise" Native Americans, a process epitomized by the Dawes Act that we discussed last week. The government performed this census on regional tribal groups in order to determine how to break up communally-held Native land. As Dr. Gould describes, Earle's process was to catalog the Native groups of Massachusetts in order to "make them go away as Indians." Far from being lost in the annals of history, Earle's report is the document that the Bureau of Indian Affairs refers back to to resolve questions of federal recognition. Dr. Gould cites the example of Mary Curliss Vickers, a Pegan Nipmuc whom Earle categorized as "miscellaneous" Indian despite the fact that she could document her entire family history going back generations. Earle categorized Native people this way when he could not place them into a particular tribe, either due to inadequate information or simply because they did not fit the stereotypes he expected to see. This categorization was used in the 2000s by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to deny recognition of Nipmuc membership to all of Mary Curliss Vickers' descendents -- nearly half of the Tribe, including Dr. Rae Gould. Vickers didn't dress in full Native regalia, and critically -- as Dr. Gould points out -- was also African American. In other words, she didn't meet Earle's standard of what he believed a Native American should look and act like. By relying on Earle's report to decide tribal affiliation, the BIA continues to racially stereotype. As Dr. Gould put it, "they're not saying it's about skin color, but yet it's there, it's a constant subtext." Another example is the Cisco family, who lived on the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Reservation for generations. Earle categorized Samuel Cisco, a man with both African American and Narragansett ancestry who married into a Nipmuc family, as simply a "colored foreigner," despite the family's central role in tribal life on the reservation. This categorization would affect his descendents for generations. You can listen to the full story recorded as a podcast, and we're resharing a resource from last week, Dr. Rae Gould's dissertation, where much of the story is recorded. Images from "Contested places: The history and meaning of Hassanamisco" by Dr. Rae Gould Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond podcast: Episode 1, 2012: "African-Native American Lives in Massachusetts" http://www.indigenouspolitics.com/2012-2/ Contested Places: The history and meaning of Hassanamisco - Dr. Rae Gould https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47869343_Contested_places_The_history_and_meaning_of_Hassanamisco#read Dr. Gould's story is one among many considered in the Smithsonian exhibit. The exhibit examines and grapples with these immensely complex relationships: relationships between Native and Black Americans, and the relationships between both groups and colonizers. "Native peoples experienced slavery?and saw enslaved Africans?differently at different times and places. Early in the colonial period, Native Americans were sometimes enslaved alongside African Americans. They intermarried and lived through common struggles. Some even coordinated armed resistance to white encroachment. Later, Native tribes sometimes took in and harbored runaway slaves, accepting them into their communities and blending in their cultural expressions. But members of some Native nations, particularly the southeastern tribes that emulated white society, themselves kept African American slaves." IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas https://americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible/index.html While there are many, many stories of collective Black and Indigenous resistance throughout history, there has also been conflict. Even as regiments of Buffalo Soldiers fought Native peoples on behalf of the U.S. government, some Native American tribes held African slaves, often as a way to fit into a mold forced on them by colonizers. Rather than shy away from this complicated history, there are those, such as Rebecca Nagle of the Cherokee Nation, who confront it head on. Nagle describes how the Cherokee Nation has a long history of intermarrying with both Blacks and whites. "By 1850" she writes, "an estimated half of all Cherokee citizens were of mixed race." In the aftermath of the Dawes Act, which we explored last week, "the lines of citizenship hardened." This increasingly obsessive identity accounting reached its maximum expression in the establishment of "blood quantum" laws for Native Americans. This accounting system -- still used today by both the federal government and some Native tribes -- assigns a percentage of "Indian blood" based on ancestry recorded in rolls such as John Milton Earle's 1861 report. Yet, as explored earlier, being assigned full Native blood in those early registries was often based on seemingly irrelevant factors such as skin color and style of dress. Elizabeth Rule -- a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and a doctoral candidate at Brown University who specializes in Native American studies -- explained the racialized nature of using a "blood quantum" to NPR in 2019: "[A] great example for how to understand this problem in real life is that there is a history of freedmen who are black individuals who were living as fully incorporated members of Indian tribes. And when these original roles were taken, oftentimes these freedmen were not included, even though those individuals may be of mixed heritage: black and Indian. Because of their black appearance, they were listed on a separate roll. And today, the ramification is that they do not have that original enrollee [in their past]. They do not have enough blood quantum, and therefore oftentimes cannot be extended tribal membership." These histories show the ways in which the framework of race -- a white construct -- has been used at times to force Black and Native Americans into opposition with one another rather than into allyship. Nagle highlights this when acknowledging that many within the Cherokee Nation held people as slaves themselves, and that, despite this fact and the extent of intermarrying and relationships between Native and Black Americans, by 1983 the Cherokee Nation was denying the right to vote to descendants of people whose names were listed on freedmen registries. After a protracted court battle, in 2017 "the nation restored the inherent Cherokee citizenship rights of the freedmen descendants." So What Exactly Is 'Blood Quantum'? https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/02/09/583987261/so-what-exactly-is-blood-quantum Cherokee Nation adopted racism from Europeans. It's time to reject it. https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-race-and-racism-cherokee-nation-adopted-racism-from-europeans-its-time-to-reject-it Katrina Phillips, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and an assistant professor of history at Macalester College, looks at a single physical place, called Bdote (Twin Cities, Minnesota) by the Dakota people, to explore the complex, intertwined stories of Native and Black Americans. This is a site where colonizers would build a military fort, called Fort Snelling, and where the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis would be incorporated. In a blog post for the National Museum of American History, Phillips connects the pre-colonial history and colonial legacy of this sacred place to the murder of George Floyd this past May. In 1805, colonists "purchased" the land at Bdote from the Dakota for "$200 worth of presents," and began constructing Fort Snelling in 1820. While the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in the Northwest Territory, and "the Missouri Compromise of 1820 also banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36?30' parallel," a number of colonists living at the fort -- including Josiah Snelling, the Fort's namesake -- owned enslaved Africans. In fact, "Lawrence Taliaferro, who served as the Indian Agent at the fort from 1820 to 1839, was the biggest local slaveholder in the region," importing enslaved people from Virginia and using the fort as a staging area to buy and sell human beings. Phillips chronicles how a number of these enslaved Africans held at Fort Snelling sued -- some successfully -- for their freedom, including a slave named Dred Scott. Scott's case would eventually go to the Supreme Court in 1857, and become the basis for the infamous ruling that enslaved people were not included under the word "citizens" in the constitution. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court "compared enslaved people to American Indians, arguing that the situation of enslaved people was 'altogether unlike that of the Indian race.' Even though Native nations 'were uncivilized, they were yet a free and independent people?governed by their own laws.'" Fort Snelling was an important site in the Dakota Wars, a conflict which resulted in the death, imprisonment, and exile of thousands of Dakota. It also served as the headquarters for regiments of all-Black military units, who came to be known as "Buffalo Soldiers." A central task given to these soldiers was to control American Indians on the Great Plains. Phillips notes that the legacy of these soldiers is complicated, "particularly in terms of reconciling pride in military service with the regiments' role in the violence against and displacement of Native people." Collective Black and Native activism has pushed the fort to embrace this complex history, rather than try to forget it. Phillips writes: Fort Snelling was decommissioned in 1946. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and it reopened as Historic Fort Snelling in 1970. Its initial interpretations centered on life at the fort in 1827, so visitors never learned about enslaved people, the U.S.-Dakota War and its aftermath, or buffalo soldiers. However, local Black and Native community members, activists, and organizations have encouraged the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) to offer more inclusive and comprehensive interpretations and programming. In 2019, for instance, MNHS updated some signage to read "Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote." Continued activism has helped lead to a plan to revitalize the fort and increase the number of stories that will be told, including perspectives from Native nations, soldiers, enslaved and free African Americans, and Japanese Americans during World War II." "Where Two Waters Come Together": The Confluence of Black and Indigenous History at Bdote https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/where-two-waters The effects of colonization and national culture imbued with white supremacy have left behind a complex legacy, which is reflected in the identities of all whom they've touched. We recommend this short video by the New York Times titled A Conversation With Native Americans on Race which includes perspectives from those identifying as Black as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siMal6QVblE Additional Resources Albert B. Southwick's indignant column defending Earle: https://www.telegram.com/article/20070218/COLUMN21/702180533 Analysis of "I-hya Talu-tsa (River Cane Basket)" by EC Mingo https://ygsna.sites.yale.edu/news/students-offer-object-analyses-place-nations-generations-beings "Beyond Blood Quantum" from the podcast All My Relations https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com/podcast/episode/49fcb76f/ep-10-beyond-blood-quantum Part 2: Connected in the Past, Present, & Future Despite its complexities, the historical relationship between Black and Native peoples has been one of resistance. As noted in the online archive of the IndiVisible exhibit: "Throughout their shared history, African American and Native peoples have risen up together to fight against oppression. At times, the two communities came together in solidarity but kept themselves separate. At other times, however, the people blended through these struggles, forming irrevocable bonds of kinship. Escaped African American slaves who were adopted into Native communities defended tribal homelands against invasion as a way to preserve their own freedom and that of their allies. When enslaved together, Native and African American captives attempted to overthrow those who claimed to own them. These compatriots were sometimes executed together in retaliation for defying the racial order." Arguably, Native and Black resistance have never been stronger than in the last decade. Major protests such as Standing Rock and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2013 through to the present have captivated public attention, won legal victories, and shifted the national conversation on race and justice. This has been accomplished, in part, through solidarity between the movements. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson -- a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist -- wrote in 2014 (in the aftermath of the jury decision not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown): "I was reminded over and over this week that black and indigenous communities of struggle are deeply connected through our experiences with colonialism, oppression, and white supremacy. Indigenous and black people are disproportionately attacked and targeted by the state, and, in fact, policing in Turtle Island was born of the need to suppress and oppress black and indigenous resistance to colonialism and slavery. Indigenous and black women are consistently decentered from our communities and targeted by four centuries of gendered violence, while black queer and indigenous Two-Spirit communities are targets of multiple sites of oppression, violence, and erasure. Black and indigenous children have been stolen from their families throughout colonial history through the institutions of slavery, and in Canada the residential schools and the child welfare system. We are interconnected through systems of oppression that would prefer us not to exist unless it can exploit us as commodities for labor." An Indigenous View on #BlackLivesMatter https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2014/12/06/indigenous-view-black-lives-matter-leanne-simpson/ This solidarity has been on display all around the country. Writing for High Country News, Brian Bull -- a journalist and member of the Nez Perce Tribe -- tells the story of joint activism efforts in the city of Eugene, Oregon. As dubious statues and monuments are being taken down all around the country, activists in Eugene focused in on The Pioneer. The statue was erected in 1919 to white supremacist fanfare, with speeches made about the greatness of the "white race." For years Black and Native activists have worked together in Eugene, and a group pulled the statue down this summer, dragging it to the steps of the administration building of the University of Oregon. Bull points out that this is only the latest expression of joint activism. "Long before this summer of protest, Black and Native American activists have supported each other's efforts to reexamine the white-centric, widespread, and woefully inaccurate history of this country, while also urging American society as a whole to recognize systemic racism and inequality?and to do something about them. Toppling statues of Christopher Columbus, Confederate soldiers, The Pioneer?they are all part of a legacy of oppression, displacement and slavery." Indigenous and Black Lives Matter activists join forces in Oregon https://www.hcn.org/articles/race-and-racism-native-americans-and-black-lives-matter-activists-join-forces-in-oregon This model of solidarity is inspiring; it's a powerful challenge to the damage of the past and the oppression of the present. In his piece for the The Nation, photographer Josu? Rivas -- affiliated with the Mexica and Otomi people -- describes the supportive role he took in recent BLM protests in Portland, Oregon, and what it means to work as an ally. Rivas says: "Ultimately, our sovereignty as Indigenous peoples is interwoven with Black liberation. When their image is honored, we are all honored." Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty Are Interconnected https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/black-liberation-indigenous-sovereignty/ Additional Resources February 2020 Issue of Indigenizing the News: Happy Black History Month! https://mailchi.mp/88f522fa8dee/february-2020-happy-black-history-month June 2020 Issue of Indigenizing the News: #BLM for the Anniversary Issue https://mailchi.mp/ae926f220faf/june-2020-blm-for-the-anniversary-issue July 2020 Issue of Indigenizing the News: BLM, Prise, Mascots, McGirt, and more. https://mailchi.mp/3febf02864c1/july-2020-where-we-are-where-we-are-going -- Thanks so much for following along this week. Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you'd like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you'll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. We who are learning from these resources are so immensely fortunate; we strive to hold a similarly immense amount of gratitude. The resources we've learned from throughout the summer have shown the inextricable connection of past, present, and future; how innumerable lives have fought against the horrors of oppression. To those past lives, if they will receive it, we humbly express our utmost sincere gratitude. We would also like to express tremendous thanks to those presently leading against oppression and erasure of Black and Indigenous peoples: Black and Indigenous activists. Thank you to the organizers, protesters, researchers, writers, and all those who have brought us a worldview of justice. Particularly, we would like to sincerely thank all those of the Black Lives Matter movement for their resounding call to action that helped foster tremendous momentum of social justice. We would also like to particularly thank the researchers, authors, and activists whose work we have shared: Dr. Rae Gould, Rebecca Nagle, Elizabeth Rule, Katrina Phillips, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Brian Bull, and Josu? Rivas. Thank you for your incredible work and for sharing your knowledge. We would also like to express our continued gratitude towards Meghanlata Gupta, founder and editor-in-chief of Indigenizing the News, for her collaboration. You can subscribe to Indigenizing the News here . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Tue Sep 15 19:46:07 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:46:07 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Summer Wrap Up: Transitioning Message-ID: Transitioning Thank you so much for joining us on our learning journey this summer. The resources we learned from taught us so much about Indigenous erasure, perseverance, land theft, war, greed, sovereignty, resistance, and activism. Without a doubt, we have a renewed understanding that Indigenous peoples are not absent from this landscape, as we have clearly witnessed Native survivance, continuance, and resistance through alternative history storytelling and by listening to our own community. We are so fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from those who shared their knowledge, and we hope that you also encountered knowledge and histories that challenged your worldview. This week marks the transition of our summer reading series into the fall semester. We're taking a break from posting here this month while we step back and plan the next phase of this learning group. We encourage everyone to take this time to revisit past resources that you may have missed or that you may now understand more deeply (all past resources are hosted in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/ ). Going forward, we will be changing the frequency of our reading group posts from weekly to monthly. This will not only allow us to continue to give each topic the depth and detail it deserves, but will also open up time and space to incorporate other methods of learning, such as longer-format resources. We hope you'll stay engaged and active -- we're looking forward to continuing to learn with you, through this reading group and related opportunities that may develop! As we delve into the planning process, we'd really like to hear any feedback you have about your experience with the reading group so far. Were there particular topics or resources you preferred, or any you found less accessible? What would you like to see more of? Any particular themes, resource types, or resources themselves that you'd like us to include? How did you find the resource load and pacing of the group? You can email us at yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.ed u with your feedback or submit it anonymously here: https://forms.gle/NvbsvFA9odHXoCJR6. As the summer closes, we again express our immense gratitude. The resources we've shared over the summer are the result of incredible work by Indigenous activists, scholars, and more. To all those whose knowledge we've shared, we express our deepest thanks. We would also like to thank everyone we've had the immense fortune of collaborating with over the summer; thank you for your patience, guidance, enthusiasm, friendship, insightfulness, and kindness. And finally, thank you for choosing to learn with us. It is our great hope to use the knowledge we've gained over the summer to help us build a better future, together. It will be our great joy to do so beside you. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Mon Sep 21 14:42:16 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2020 14:42:16 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Tomorrow the 22nd: "We Are the Story, We Are the Land" In-Reply-To: References: <3b27960f1ff606f579f7a8f1e.2c98d7d1b4.20200918182348.64890e3cad.14f3b882@mail162.suw121.mcdlv.net> Message-ID: Fellow Yale Forests Reading Group members, We hope you've been well over the past few weeks! Thanks to those who have taken the time to send us feedback regarding the summer's content. The Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, who helped organize the terrific event with Dr. Lisa Brooks, Margaret Bruchac, and Cheryl Savageaux in August titled "The Connecticut River Valley as Native Space," has helped organize another event tomorrow with Larry Spotted Crow Mann: "We Are the Story, We Are the Land." Please find more information below for what looks to be another wonderful event. Wishing you well, Reid and all the Yale Forests Reading Group organizers ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Karuna Center for Peacebuilding Date: Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 2:23 PM Subject: ? Tues 9/22 on zoom: "We Are the Story, We Are the Land" To: Join Larry Spotted Crow Mann for this event in "Erasure & Restoration: Understanding Past & Present in the Kwinitekw Valley's Indigenous Communities" View this email in your browser *Erasure and Restoration: * *An Exploration of Past and Present in the Kwinitekw Valley?s Indigenous Communities* Dear Friends, We'd just like to remind you that this Tuesday, September 22, we're excited to hold the second event in the ?*Erasure and Restoration: An Exploration of Past and Present in the Kwinitekw River Valley?s Indigenous Communities* ? series. Through events facilitated by Indigenous people and non-Indigenous allies, these workshops and dialogues will consider who the narrators of Indigenous history are, make space for a strengths-based retelling, and analyze the meaning and matter of relationship-building, reconciliation, land caretaking, memory, and inclusive curricula that explore Indigenous histories, cultures, and lived experiences. *Though the series will largely examine the narratives of communities local to the Kwinitekw/Connecticut River Valley, we encourage all to attend as the impacts of colonization are not limited to this area.* *WE ARE THE STORY, WE ARE THE LAND* *With Larry Spotted Crow Mann* *Tuesday, September 22, 2020 5:30-7:00pm Eastern US Time* *The event is free and open to the public, but Zoom registration is required.* Register for 9/22 Event *Please note:* Our colleagues at Nolumbeka Project are holding a separate *We Are the Story, We Are the Land *event on September 19 . These two events build upon one another and are similar but not identical. (Registering for one does not register you for the other.) *ABOUT THIS EVENT - Sept. 22* Join *Larry Spotted Crow Mann* for an engaging talk that will focus on the spiritual, cultural and social significance of ?Place and the Art of Story? on the Indigenous peoples of New England. This event will highlight how a colonial narrative has harmfully impacted both Native people and non-Native people through a conversation that centers on the personal journey of the survival and perseverance of Nipmuc People and their continued efforts to share their story, while also shaping new ones for the coming generations. The event will close with a discussion on the many varied walks of life that all humans come from and how those ?different stories? have been used to incite fear throughout history. In Larry?s words, ?We must, as human beings, find ourselves in each other?s story and reconcile that bond with unity, love and respect.? RESOURCE DIGEST Each month of this series, we aim to share with you a ?Monthly Digest? of engaging and interactive resources?from books to videos to podcasts?that provide some base knowledge for the themes to be unraveled through our public events during that month. These resources are available on our website and serve to highlight non-traditional narratives and expand our minds beyond the textbooks many of us grew up with. Check out our resource list for this event! We hope you enjoy reading, watching, and learning from our collections and we always invite suggestions for future digests. *ABOUT OUR EVENT SERIES* ?Erasure and Restoration? is a lecture, workshop, and dialogue series that explores both historical and current narratives around local Indigenous presence, as well as the ongoing settler mindset that has contributed to the threat and myth of erasure. Through events facilitated by Indigenous people and non-Indigenous allies, the series will consider who the narrators of Indigenous history are, make space for a strengths-based retelling, and analyze the meaning and matter of relationship-building, reconciliation, land caretaking, memory, and inclusive curricula that explore Indigenous histories, cultures, and lived experiences. The series, guided by an Advisory Committee of Indigenous people and non-Indigenous allies, features educators and activists including: - *Dr. Lisa Brooks (Leading our event on August 19th with Margaret Bruchac and Cheryl Savageaux**)*, Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College and author of two books on Indigenous history in the Northeast, ?Our Beloved Kin? and ?The Common Pot.? - *Larry Spotted Crow Mann (Leading the series' upcoming event on Sept. 22)*, Award Winning Writer, Poet, Native American Cultural Educator, Traditional Nipmuc Story Teller, Tribal Drummer/Dancer, Motivational Speaker -Consultant on Indigenous Pedagogy - *Stephanie Morningstar*, Co-director of the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust and herbalist and earth worker at Sky World Apothecary & Farm . - *Dr. Ron Welburn*, UMass Amherst Professor Emeritus of 19th and 20th century American Literatures, Native literatures, Critical Writing, and Am?ricas Fictions; co-founder of the Umass Amherst Certificate Program in Native American Indian Studies. - *Dr. James Young*, Presenter, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English and Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at UMass Amherst; Founding Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst. - *Peter Forbes*, founder of First Light Learning Journeys, an ongoing collaborative effort between Maine conservation organizations and Wabanaki Tribes to expand Wabanaki access and stewardship of land. - *Dr. Jessica Dolan*, Adjunct Faculty at University of Guelph, Grant Writer at Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, Cultural Anthropologist and Ethnobiologist, with a specialization in Indigenous and Environmental Studies. - *Dr. Mishy Lesser*, Director for the Upstander Project and author of the twelve-lesson Dawnland Teacher's Guide. - And others! THANK YOU TO THIS SERIES' SUPPORTERS: *This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities , which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding for this event series is provided by the Ellis L. Phillips Foundation . All of our work is made possible by Karuna Center's donor community. Thank you.* Donate to Karuna Center Share Tweet Forward *Follow Karuna Center:* *Copyright ? 2020 Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, All rights reserved.* You are receiving this email because you signed up for our mailing list through a local event, on our website, or on a donor pledge card. *Our mailing address is:* Karuna Center for Peacebuilding 447 West Street Amherst, MA 01002 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Mon Oct 12 16:40:35 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:40:35 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day Message-ID: Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day! We hope this email finds you healthy, well, and celebrating this Indigenous Peoples' Day. Please join us in checking out Yale Native American Cultural Center's celebratory video here: https://youtu.be/Y4CSHSvj3e0 You can learn more about the Yale Native American Cultural Center at their website: https://nacc.yalecollege.yale.edu/ as well as their Instagram account @YaleNatives: https://www.instagram.com/yalenatives/?hl=en >From all of us here at the Yale Forests Reading Group, happy Indigenous Peoples' Day! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reidhlewis91 at gmail.com Thu Oct 22 19:50:12 2020 From: reidhlewis91 at gmail.com (Reid L) Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 19:50:12 -0400 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] October: Understanding Federal and State Recognition of Native Nations Message-ID: Understanding Federal and State Recognition of Native Nations We hope you are doing as well as possible and enjoying the change of seasons; the fall foliage is wonderful around Yale-Myers Forest and starting to turn in New Haven. In this post we're focusing on the consequences, processes, and difficulties of government-to-government legal recognition of Native nations by the federal and state governments of the United States. We'll start by exploring federal and state recognition generally, and Connecticut specifically, and then take a closer look at the complexity and difficulty of legal recognition of the Nipmuc Nation by the United States. As we look at these topics, it's important to keep in mind that recognition is not definition. Recognition of a Native nation by the United States government is a legal pathway to certain opportunities and responsibilities between the Native nation and the United States; it has no influence on the existence and identity of the Native nation itself. How a Native nation is defined is a power that rests solely with that nation, not with any external government. Federal Recognition Federal recognition is the process by which the federal government of the United States acknowledges the legal legitimacy of Native nations, according to the federal government's terms and definitions. With federal recognition, Native nations can establish formal reservations, open casinos and pursue other economic development, apply for federal grants to provide tribal members with essential services, and pursue other forms of economic development. Native nations can gain federal recognition in one of four ways: 1. Formal recognition at the time of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (also called the Wheeler?Howard Act) 2. Through a formal appeal through the Bureau of Indian Affairs 3. Through a decision by a United States Court 4. Through an act of Congress The majority of federally recognized Native nations in the United States achieved recognition through the first pathway. The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was passed in 1934 by John Collier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) from 1933 to 1945. The spirit of the legislation was to reverse the forced assimilation of Native people into the structures of American society, and to provide tribes greater legal autonomy and room for self-governance. The Act "allowed tribes to purchase land, repealed the ban on tribal languages and customs, and allowed tribes to write constitutions" ( https://www.ndstudies.gov/gr8/content/unit-iv-modern-north-dakota-1921-present/lesson-4-alliances-and-conflicts/topic-1-indian-citizenship-and-indian-reorganization-act/section-2-indian-reorganization-act). While the IRA represented a positive step forward in U.S.-Tribal relationships, the legislation was controversial; some tribes saw the constitutions and majority-rules voting as attempts to end tribal leadership. Furthermore, the IRA locked in recognition for tribes often based on rolls conducted nearly a century prior. These rolls, such as the Earle Report--which we discussed in Week 8 of our reading group--used highly questionable methods to determine who "counted" as Native and who did not. This distinction often came down to physical appearance and style of dress. Thus, for Native nations that didn't achieve federal recognition in 1934, the IRA had the effect of further disenfranchisement by denying them formal recognition and the benefits that came with it. For these Native nations, achieving federal recognition would have to happen another way. Another pathway to recognition is appealing to the BIA. According to the website of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), "[t]he Office of Federal Acknowledgment (OFA) within the Office of the Assistant Secretary - Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior (Department) implements Part 83 of Title 25 of the Code of Federal Regulations (25 CFR Part 83), Procedures for Federal Acknowledgment of Indian Tribes." If that sounds bureaucratic, that's because it is. And for Native nations struggling to achieve federal recognition, the process can be tedious and painful. Writing for Bridge Michigan, reading group team member Meghanlata Gupta describes the process of applying for federal recognition as "long, expensive?and often futile" ( https://www.bridgemi.com/quality-life/despite-legal-battle-michigan-tribe-remains-hopeful-recognition). Meghan writes that a Native nation "must hire a historian, genealogist and an attorney to provide proof of their historic and contemporary existence." This appeal process often results in legal action, on the part of the Native nation or the United States government. As a result, United States Courts have the authority to rule on federal recognition with a Native nation, which is the third pathway for recognition to occur. Finally, Native nations can gain federal recognition through an Act of Congress. After over 100 years of petitioning for federal recognition, the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe in Montana was granted recognition through a law passed by Congress in 2019. Spearheaded by tribal leaders in partnership with Montana's senators, recognition for the Tribe was attached as a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law by President Trump in December 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/us/little-shell-montana-tribe.html). Despite achieving recognition themselves, citizens of the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe described the process for winning federal recognition as "broken." And for Native nations still being denied recognition and everything that comes with it, the denial can be seen as a continuation of a long history of dispossession and marginalization. State Recognition In addition to the federal government of the United States engaging in official affirmation of relationships with Native nations, a number of state governments also have processes of affirming these relationships through state recognition. Who is recognized by the federal and Connecticut state governments? The State of Connecticut recognizes 5 Native nations, two of which also have federal recognition, and has established state-level Tribal reservations. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and the Mohegan Tribe of Indians of Connecticut are officially recognized by both the federal and Connecticut governments. Connecticut also recognizes the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, The Golden Hill Paugussett, and the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, though they are not officially recognized by the federal government. The Nipmuc Nation is not recognized by Connecticut or the federal government, but is recognized by Massachusetts. Citation: (not recommended reading) https://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribal-institute/list-of-federal-and-state-recognized-tribes.aspx#State ) What does state recognition mean? According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), state recognition: - Acknowledges the histories and cultures of tribal nations in a particular state - Is usually determined by state legislature - Creates tribal-state relationships - Does not automatically grant federal recognition, the primary route of recognition - Does not guarantee funding or benefits from state or federal governments, unless required under federal law like the Native American's Protection Act (NAPA) - Can qualify a Native nation for specific support from federal and state government agencies, like the U.S. departments of 1) Housing and Urban Development, 2) Labor, 3) Education, and 4) Health and Human Services - Is not necessarily ensured by federal recognition - Exists in 11 of 50 states. These 11 states have granted state recognition to a total of 63 Native nations Citation: (not recommended reading) https://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribal-institute/state-recognition-of-american-indian-tribes.aspx Connecticut's Recognition of Native Nations While Connecticut is one of eleven states that recognize Native nations on the state level, recognition law is complicated. According to Senior Attorney David L. Keff in his summary of Indian Tribal Sovereignty in Connecticut from 1994: "The applicability of tribal sovereignty concepts to Connecticut's nonfederally recognized tribes has been a matter of much controversy and has never been finally resolved [our emphasis]. In a case involving the state's authority to control logging on a reservation and seek recovery of the value of lost timber the Connecticut Supreme Court held that the state may lack jurisdiction due to the tribe's inherent sovereignty or because of federal preemption (Schaghticoke Indians of Kent, Connecticut, Inc v. Potter, 217 Conn. 612 (1991))." Reading: https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS94/rpt/olr/htm/94-R-0170.htm David L. Keff, Senior Attorney, August 24, 1994, The Connecticut General Assembly In this Connecticut example, the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, recognized by Connecticut and granted a reservation in 1736, was asked by the state government to demonstrate that it is a Native nation as defined as a distinct and ethnic group with self-government and weighed against the BIA's recognition criteria. Beyond this, the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation was asked to define its territory as "Indian country" -- which, in 1994, the Nation could not do, as it was not federally recognized until 2004. Since, the Nation has made claims regarding historical logging and land use by settlers on their traditional territory of Northwest Connecticut. The Schaghticoke Tribal Nation argued that the state owed the tribe $600 million for its illegal seizure of 2,000 out of 2,400 acres of reservation land between the years 1801 and 1918, citing resolutions from 1736 and 1752 that granted the Schaghiticoke people continued use of this land, including cutting wood. The Supreme Court of Connecticut threw out the case, stating that the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation does not own mortgages, or property rights, to the land. Reading: https://www.norwichbulletin.com/news/20190523/judge-dismisses-schaghticoke-tribal-nations-lawsuit-in-land-seizure-dispute Nipmuc Nation At Yale-Myers Forest, we are on Nipmuc land, which stretches across the colonial boundaries of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The Nipmuc Nation is state-recognized by Massachusetts but currently does not have federal recognition, despite a 40-year effort in the federal recognition process. After first filing a letter of intent to seek federal recognition in 1980, the Hassanamisco and Chaubunagungamaug Bands of the Nipmuc Nation eventually received a denial of recognition in 2004 that was upheld in 2018. The BIA found that the Nipmuc Nation didn't meet four of the seven criteria for federal recognition: "[1] The petitioning group has been identified as an American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900; [2] a predominate portion of the petitioning group comprises a distinct community from historical time until present; [3] the petitioning group has maintained tribal political influence or authority over its members as an autonomous entity throughout history; and [4] the petitioning group's membership consists of individuals who descend from historical tribes which combined and functioned as a single autonomous entity." (citation: https://narf.org/nill/bulletins/federal/documents/nipmuc_nation_v_zinke.html ) What does it mean for the federal government to determine the political standing of entire nations, giving more weight to biased outsider accounts from the past than to Native identities themselves, past or present? We've learned from Dr. Rae Gould in past installments of the reading group, and we turn to her again now to contextualize the BIA's denial of recognition to the Nipmuc Nation within the impacts of the Earle Report and the "discourse of erasure" that is still present today in the federal acknowledgement process. You may recall that John Milton Earle's 1861 report about the Native population of Massachusetts relied heavily on stereotypes and misinformation and is still used as a basis for determining federal recognition to this day (the denial of Nipmuc recognition hinged largely on Earle's categorization of Mary Curliss Vickers as "miscellaneous" despite multiple sources attesting to her Nipmuc and Narragansett identity). Here, Gould frames these stories within who gets to determine identity and history: "Why do historical documents written by outsiders in the past and interpreted by outsiders in the present continue to influence the rewriting of tribal history? [our emphasis] What courses of redress to indigenous groups have following processes that clearly lack integrity and seek to deny their authenticity? And most important, the inaccurate perceptions created by flawed processes (such as the U.S. federal acknowledgement process) must be corrected by indigenous people reappropriating and redefining our past." "The Nipmuc Nation, Federal Acknowledgement, and a Case of Mistaken Identity," Rae Gould (book chapter in Recognition, Sovereignty, Struggles, & Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook, edited by Amy E. Den & Jean M. O'Brien, 2013) https://www.academia.edu/34020264/The_Nipmuc_Nation_Federal_Acknowledgement_and_a_Case_of_Mistaken_Identity_pdf For another optional reading after the book chapter above, look at the opinion in Nipmuc Nation v. Zinke, the most recent BIA decision that denied federal recognition to the Nipmuc Nation in 2018. What do you notice about the history presented in this opinion, in the context of what you've just learned from the Gould chapter? Whose accounts are prevalent in the facts of the case, as presented by the BIA? In particular, notice the BIA's justifications for denying recognition based on the four criteria outlined above. Nipmuc Nation v. Zinke, 3/30/2018 https://narf.org/nill/bulletins/federal/documents/nipmuc_nation_v_zinke.html Further Resources If you're looking to engage further with this material, we recommend these two books: In the Courts of the Conqueror: 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided, Walter Echo-Hawk, 2010 Recognition, Sovereignty, Struggles, & Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook edited by Amy E. Den & Jean M. O'Brien, 2013 https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44092 Questions Which tribes are recognized by the state and/or federal government in your home state? Check here: https://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribal-institute/list-of-federal-and-state-recognized-tribes.aspx#State An Evolving Issue We encourage you to learn about the rapidly evolving crisis of violence by commercial fishermen against the Mi'kmaq on Canada's Atlantic coastline: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/world/canada/nova-scotia-lobster-war.html These acts can only be described as racial terrorism. Our well wishes for safety and justice go out to the Mi'kmaq community. If you would like to support the Sipekne'katik First Nation, the members of the Mi'kmaq people who have been terrorized, we encourage you to consider a donation here: http://sipeknekatik.ca/moderate-living-fishery-fleet/ -- Thanks so much for joining us. Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you'd like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you'll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. We would like to express our gratitude for those whose knowledge and experiences we have shared. We would especially like to express our gratitude to Dr. Rae Gould; her insightful work continues to provide critical perspectives in understanding the far-reaching, unjust impacts of non-Indigenous attempts at categorization of Indigenous people. We would also like to thank you for your willingness to learn about this complicated, dense, critical issue. Thank you for learning with us. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karamsheban1991 at gmail.com Wed Nov 25 11:28:03 2020 From: karamsheban1991 at gmail.com (Karam Sheban) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 11:28:03 -0500 Subject: [Yale-forests-reading-group] Yale Forests Reading Group: November 2020 Food Sovereignty Message-ID: Yale Forests Reading Group, November 2020 Food Sovereignty This month in the Yale Forests Reading Group, we are reading, watching, and listening to resources about Indigenous food sovereignty here in the Northeast. Andi Murphy's award-winning Toasted Sister Podcast is an incredible resource for learning about Indigenous food and foodways in North America. We recommend listening to any and every episode that you can, but to introduce today's topic, we're going way back in the Toasted Sister feed and listening to Episode 6: Food Sovereignty with Dr. Elizabeth Hoover, which first aired on March 16, 2017. Dr. Hoover is Mohawk and Mi'kmaq and an Associate Professor of American Studies at Brown University. Recommended Listening: Toasted Sister Podcast Episode 6: Food Sovereignty with Dr. Elizabeth Hoover https://toastedsisterpodcast.com/2017/03/16/e6-dr-elizabeth-hoover-food-sovereignty/ Dr. Hoover has traveled to Native communities across the continent to learn how people define and approach food sovereignty. She shares the official definition of food sovereignty developed by La Via Campesina beginning in the mid-1990s: food sovereignty is "the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems." Dr. Hoover explains that being food sovereign does not necessarily mean producing all of your own food yourself: "there was probably never a time when each individual tribe only worked within its own population. People have been trading among each other for eons in every part of the world?. Food sovereignty is also about to what extent do you have control over where that food comes from that you're willingly trading for, that you're acquiring from other places." As Murphy points out in this interview, for thousands of years prior to colonization, Native peoples on this continent simply were food sovereign. Dr. Hoover outlines some of the mechanisms that have attempted to destroy Native food sovereignty over the course of the settler colonial process of the U.S. These have included scorched earth battle tactics employed by the French and American colonial governments, which destroyed millions of acres of Haudenosaunee crops in the 17th and 18th centuries; tribal relocations and land allotments that separated Native people from their land and shrunk the land base that remained, dividing people from their traditional ways of cultivating and gathering food; and new and damaging relationships to food imposed on Native children in the boarding school era. The common thread running through all of these attacks on Indigenous food sovereignty is the importance of land, and of relationships with traditional plants and animals, to Native food systems. "Traditional foods have this cultural context and meaning that's important to maintain. So it's not just, are you getting enough of a certain nutrient, but are you still growing these plants that have these stories that are important to your culture. And so a decline in traditional foods has led to language loss in some places, whether that's the names of different plants or whether that's the interactions that people might have had working together in the field that are important to bring back and recover and reimplement ? And for a lot of nations, the creation story mentions food, and there's important connections to food." There is a lot to look forward to as Indigenous people in North America continue working to reclaim food sovereignty. For Dr. Hoover, gardening is hugely important, not only in order to maintain a connection to traditional foods and to preserve seeds, but also as a way to learn language. She highlights the importance of tribal governments, not only in protecting treaty rights and access to land for gathering and hunting, but also in protecting habitats and supporting local food producers. Fighting pipelines and other sources of water contamination is also important to food sovereignty, as "you can't have healthy food if you don't have clean water." In the following sections, we'll look at examples of both challenges and exciting successes from across the continent to explore the concept of Indigenous food sovereignty. And as always, we'll share resources so you can learn more. Tribal Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty, and Thanksgiving Over the course of this reading group, we've learned about challenges to Native sovereignty as well as the myriad ways in which it is upheld and strengthened. From the PBS series We Shall Remain, we learned that the Wampanoag tribe offered peace and diplomacy, food and resources, and relationship building to colonists, to whom they extended the first Thanksgiving meal 400 years ago. We know also that the Europeans responded with colonial advancement and violence. We also learned from Dr. Lisa Brooks' research that women's leadership and labor have always been central to Wampanoag life. Women cultivated community-held intercropped mounds of crops. Weetamoo, the Wampanoag saunkskwa during the time of King Philip's War, was devoted to the survival and sustenance of the tribe located in the Kteticut River basin and she directed distribution of food and resources throughout the webs of communities and to every family via trails, canoes, and kinship. Recommended Reading: The 'Thanksgiving Tribe' Is Still Fighting for Food Sovereignty by Alexandra Talty, Civil Eats, June 26, 2020, updated November 17, 2020 https://civileats.com/2020/06/26/the-thanksgiving-tribe-is-still-fighting-for-food-sovereignty/ Earlier this year -- 400 years after the Mayflower arrived in Wampanoag land -- the Bureau of Indian Affairs informed the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe that their reservation in Massachusetts was de-established by the Department of Interior. This meant that while the Mashpee Wampanoag could still hold their land, they would lose sovereignty as a nation and no longer have jurisdiction over the land their tribe has inhabited for over 12,000 years. "They killed us off and took our land. . . . Talk about re-opening wounds and repeating history," said [Cedric Cromwell, Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe], referencing how Pilgrims distributed diseased blankets to the tribe, after the Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims to fish and hunt for cod, sea bass, turkey, rabbit, and lobster . "When you think of our homelands being taken away, that would take away our ability to farm our land as a sovereign nation," he added. What is unique about the Mashpee Wampanoag is that they still inhabit and farm on their ancestral land, which is uncommon in the U.S. because of forced displacement. Therefore, the tribe has still had some access to their traditional hunting and fishing grounds for deer and striped bass. They also rely on Native and wild foods like "elderberry, blueberries, beach plum, wild garlic, milkweeds or fiddlehead ferns." In addition to these wild foods, the Mashpee Wampanoag have been strengthening their food sovereignty and security by building greenhouses. In a 3,500 sq. ft. greenhouse, the tribe is growing traditional foods like beans, squash, and corn to feed their elders. The Mashpee Wampanoag filed a restraining order against the BIA. As of November 2020, their reservation is still not federally established. A bill was passed in the House and sits in the Senate to protect the Mashpee Wampanoag's reservation and their sovereignty. Supplementary Reading: - Interested in more about demystifying Thanksgiving - especially during COVID-19, which disproportionately impacts Native peoples? Read "The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year ," by Brett Anderson for the New York Times. - What can healing look like? A member of the Lumbee Tribe and a Scottish descendant who live on traditionally Lumbee land talk about building a relationship to deconstruct Thanksgiving history in "Healing from Colonization on Thanksgiving and Beyond ," by Edgar Villanueva and Hilary Giovale for Yes! Magazine. Local Food Sovereignty Across the country, Native peoples are connecting millennia of food traditions to the global Food Sovereignty and local food movements. This is happening in many places and in many ways, including by preparing and sharing what the National Congress for American Indians called "First Foods." For example, take the story of Sean Sherman, The Sioux Chef. Sean is a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe. He grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and began working in restaurants as a teenager. He had gotten his first executive chef job before coming to a realization: as an accomplished cook, he knew a lot about European cooking, but little about the food traditions of his own Tribe. This led Sean to found The Sioux Chef, an organization of many Tribes "committed to revitalizing Native American Cuisine...re-identifying North American Cuisine and reclaiming an important culinary culture long buried and often inaccessible." In 2018 Sean won a James Beard Award for his cookbook, "The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen," and the following year he won a James Beard Leadership Award for his social activism and drive to reimagine our food system. Recommended Reading & Watching: Sean Sherman, The Sioux Chef: 'This Is The Year To Rethink Thanksgiving' By Julie Kendrick, Huffington Post, Nov. 17th 2020 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sean-sherman-sioux-chef-thanksgiving_l_5f904626c5b686eaaa0d36fb The (R)evolution of Indigenous Food with Sean Sherman, Western Forestry and Conservation Association's 2020 Empowering Tribal Culture, Ecology, And Food Systems Recorded Webinar Series https://vimeo.com/463609426 Similar efforts are also taking place locally. Early last year, Sherry Pocknett, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe, purchased an abandoned bar in Preston, Connecticut. Sherry is a lifelong cook. She was raised in Wampanoag food traditions by her mother and father, and spent her formative years helping her grandmother prepare food both outside and inside the influential restaurant her grandmother owned with Sherry's uncle, called The Flume. Sherry's uncle, Chief Flying Eagle, Earl Mills Sr., opened The Flume in 1972. The restaurant overlooked the beach at Mashpee Pond in Mashpee, Massachusetts. Until the restaurant closed in 2005 the restaurant served food drawn from Wampanoag food traditions. Now, Sherry Pocknett has plans to open a restaurant of her own. Called the Sly Fox Den, a reference to her father, Chief Sly Fox. The restaurant and bar will also feature a cultural center to celebrate indigenous culture and cuisine. The restaurant, bar, and cultural center are being built, and in the meantime Sherry is operating a food truck , which is serving a full menu. Pocknett told the Rhode Island Magazine Motif , "When I get this restaurant open, it will complete my dream. I want people to leave with education about why it's so important to take care of this planet. It's not about 'selling' my culture ? I want to teach my life ways. My life ways make my culture. People have to stop eating out of boxes and recognize the bounty." Recommended Watching: Journey Cakes Cooking Demo with Sherry Pocknett (Wampanoag), First Foods Facebook Live video, Nov. 18th 2020 https://fb.watch/1XG3y-Mnel/ Another group working to promote Indigenous Food Sovereignty is the I-Collective , "an autonomous group of Indigenous Chefs, Seed Savers, Artists, Activists, and Knowledge Keepers." The "I" in the group's name refers to its four principles: Indigenous, Inspired, Innovative, and Independent. The I-Collective recently partnered with Belly of the Beast , a restaurant in Northampton, Massachusetts. Seven I-Collective chefs are participating in a residency at the restaurant, where they are serving precolonial and "-Inspired" dishes. Gather Film Restoring and reclaiming Indigenous food systems looks different in each part of the nation. Each place has a unique landscape, foods, seasons, and traditional ways of knowing that Indigenous peoples are fighting to relearn after centuries of displacement and disconnection from their land and resources. The documentary film Gather, co-produced by First Nations Development Institute, is a celebration of Indigenous resilience and the reclamation of food sovereignty. The film highlights the stories of Indigenous leaders who both honor the traditions of their ancestors while making changes to their local food systems that empower and teach the next generation. Gather weaves together the stories of a White Mountain Apache chef who opens a restaurant in a former gas station to serve Native foods; an aspiring scientist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation studying the health benefits of grass-fed buffalo in Indigenous diets; a Yurok salmon fisherman navigating the rights to fish and passing on traditional fishing practices to the next generation, and a San Carlos Apache master forager who shares her knowledge of plants with her young granddaughter and her community. The film explores the connection between Native food systems and both physical and mental health, bringing a new sense of hope that as food systems are restored, so are the physical, mental, and spiritual health of Indigenous peoples. You can watch the film on Amazon or Vimeo . For more about the film, you can register for this live talk and film streaming with Director Sanjay Rawal on Dec. 8th, and read articles written about the film such as this one by Monica White Pigeon in Native News Online. Acknowledgements We are immensely grateful to all those whose stories and knowledge we have shared here. We also acknowledge that many other groups and individuals have long been doing the work to share resources that celebrate Indigenous food traditions; highlight important and exciting work by Native people to strengthen food sovereignty; and interrogate the myth of Thanksgiving. We would like to call attention to just a few that we have learned from: - November 2020 Issue of Indigenizing the News - Seeding Sovereignty on Instagram: "What is Food Sovereignty?" - "Unlearning the History of Thankstaking" resource list curated by I-Collective - List and map of Native-owned food companies across the country , compiled by Andi Murphy and the Toasted Sister podcast - Indigenous People's Month Events from the Yale Native American Cultural Center - Yale Sustainable Food Program Newsletter (sign up here ) - Yale School of Drama Newsletter: "The Prompter" ----------------------- Thanks so much for joining us. Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you'd like to share? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you'll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/. Let us know if you would like us to consider sharing your comment with the whole group! If you would be more comfortable sharing thoughts and feedback with us anonymously, please do so here: https://forms.gle/4tPajvuuB6vpC9mGA. Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can subscribe and learn more at our info page: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group. You can find past posts in our archives: https://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yale-forests-reading-group/. We are immensely grateful to all those whose stories and knowledge we have learned from and shared here. We also acknowledge that many other groups and individuals have long been doing the work to share resources that celebrate Indigenous food traditions; highlight important and exciting work by Native people to strengthen food sovereignty; and interrogate the myth of Thanksgiving. Thanks so much for joining us. Have thoughts, comments, or resources you'd like to share? Leave a comment, send us a message, or email us at yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: