We’re not supposed to know

In 2016 I gave a book talk about my anthology STOLEN GENERATIONS at the local community college. (Thanks Hope.)  There were many people who sincerely want to understand what is truth, what really happened around here, what they didn't learn in school... from an Indigenous perspective.  

I told the audience my talk should have been titled: "We're not supposed to know."

 

(His)story —that is the division we are seeing everywhere.  There is plenty we are not supposed to know.  So, what is truth?

I sent a letter to the Turners Falls Mascot Committee so they might reconsider its use:

Dear School Board:

I have just a few things about the Turners Falls mascot issue and local history.

This issue is not a surprise.  The community near Great Falls doesn’t know the history.  Who exactly wrote the account of what happened in Turners Falls?  Let’s be clear.  It was not the Pocumtuck or Wampanoag or any of the other tribes who lost their lives on that fateful day.

Time after time, war after war, history is told (or not told) by the victor, the winner of the conflict.

When I interviewed leaders of the Eastern Pequot years back, I wanted Connecticut to know its own history, largely unwritten, hidden.  Marcia Flowers said, “we’ve been cleaning people’s houses for the past 300+ years.”

Indian people knew it was best to be invisible.  Many still feel this way: invisible.

Pequot scalps? The bounty was $100 in colonial times. $100 is like a million dollars today, right?

Why don’t we all know this?

We’re not supposed to know.

This issue over mascots makes it clear.  We argue over history.  If it creates conflict, this is exactly how the oppressor and oppression works.

We in North America are literally educated to be ignorant of the true history.  It’s a blood-soaked path in the pioneer valley and westward.  Fictions were crafted by the nation builders who used war/massacre/colonization on the First Nations Indian People yet these facts were diminished or erased.  Hiding truth and history only perpetuates continued racism and intolerance.  

Your Indian mascot doesn’t honor anyone but reveals our ignorance. 

 

Published in Mental Midgets | Musqonocihte ©2018

(Trace is the former editor of the Pequot Times, Foxwoods Spirit and Ojibwe Akiing.)

 

The Turners Falls School Board did get rid of the mascot... finally. 

Education Secretary threatens to pull funding from NY over its Mascot Ban

 

By The Associated Press

New York is discriminating against a school district that refuses to get rid of its Native American chief mascot and could face a Justice Department investigation or risk losing federal funding, President Donald Trump’s top education official said Friday.

 

“The Trump Administration will not stand idly by as state leaders attempt to eliminate the history and culture of Native American tribes,” the former longtime CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment said.

McMahon said her department will give the state 10 days to sign an agreement rescinding its Native American mascot ban and apologizing to Native Americans for having discriminated against them and attempted to “erase” their history.

READ:  https://www.silive.com/news/2025/05/trumps-education-secretary-threatens-to-pull-funding-from-ny-over-its-native-american-mascot-ban.html

Pray for Rain

 

'Pray for rain,' Manitoba premier says as thousands more flee out-of-control wildfires across province

Wab Kinew urges Manitobans to be calm as crews battle unprecedented fires across all parts of the province

It's a situation Manitoba has never seen before, as large-scale wildfires burn in every region of the province at the same time, Kinew said at a Friday afternoon news conference, calling the current situation a "serious inflection point," particularly for some of Manitoba's larger northern communities. 

READ: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/wab-kinew-wilfire-update-1.7548521 

MMIW Epidemic

  Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women has been an unaccetable epidemic in this country for many many years. (since colonial times)  As was revealed in the television series Alaska Daily, due to historic prejudice, corrupt law enforcement and the disempowered tribal communities to prosecute on their tribal lands, this issue has gone largely unaddressed.  This excellent television series brought it right out front and center but was not renewed after one season.

"Now Arizona has created Emily's Law to immediately alert authorities and communities when Native American's go missing. Emily's Law honors Emily Pike, whose remains were found Feb. 14 more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) from a group home she left in Mesa, Arizona, in late January." "Pike’s death spurred a resurgence of activism aimed at bringing more awareness to the disproportionate number of disappearances and violent deaths that have gripped Native American communities for decades, and prompted lawmakers to amend the bill to recognize her. A movement began in 2022 (wonder if Alaska Daily had any influence) in Washington State to quickly share information about missing Native peoples."  READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/arizona-governor-signs-emilys-law-alert-native-americans-go-missing-rcna206692

A tribute to Emily Pike in Mesa, Arizona on 6 March.

MORE MEDIA COVERAGE OF EMILY'S LAW https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/what-is-emilys-law-arizonas-new-response-to-missing-native-americans-explained/3825705/   SOURCE: www.coalitionofnativesandallies.org

Cutting Commodities?

 

Trump Pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” Then Cut a Program Many Tribes Rely on for Healthy Food

by Mary Hudetz

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans.

Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona.

Weeks later, in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, he said processed foods had resulted in a “genocide” among Native Americans, who disproportionately live in places where there are few or no grocery stores.

“One of my big priorities will be getting good food — high-quality food, traditional foods — onto the reservation because processed foods for American Indians is poison,” Kennedy told the committee. Healthy food is key to combating the high rates of chronic disease in tribal communities, he said.

Yet even as the president tasks Kennedy’s agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with improving healthy eating programs, the USDA has terminated the very program that dozens of tribal food banks say has helped them provide fresh, locally produced food that is important to their traditions and cultures.

That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes.

In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, a USDA spokesperson said the department continues to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars through more than a dozen other nutrition programs that help families meet their nutrition needs. For tribal communities, the spokesperson said, that includes the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations for low-income households.

Good News in Montana

 

READ MORE or LISTEN:

https://www.mtpr.org/montana-news/2025-05-28/native-american-lawmakers-turn-political-capital-into-policy-gains

Stolen Trust Funds

 

 

CLICK AUDIO RECORDING:  https://www.startribune.com/tribes-say-the-us-misappropriated-funds-to-pay-for-native-american-boarding-schools/601359629

 

Several Native American tribes have filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to order the United States to release documentation of the brutal boarding school system that included one such institution in Carlisle.

The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California sued the Department of the Interior, its Bureau of Indian Affairs, its Bureau of Indian Education and its current leader, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for breaching its legal obligations to the tribes in stealing money from their trusts to fund torture and genocide at its federal Indian Boarding Schools.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania and encompasses its allegations under two counts while seeking certification as a class action lawsuit.

READ:  https://www.syracuse.com/native-american-news/2025/05/tribes-sue-for-full-accounting-of-money-used-to-fund-native-american-boarding-schools.html

The Story Changes in China, and it's horrific

HUMAN TRAFFICKING, MONEY FOR BABIES?

The Chinese Adoptees Who Were Stolen

As thousands of Chinese families take DNA tests, the results are upending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins.

By Barbara Demick

May 23, 2025

Photograph by Akilah Townsend for The New Yorker

In September of 2022, at the start of her senior year at Indiana’s Purdue University, Mia Griffin was working in her bedroom, laptop propped up on her knees, when an e-mail came in from 23andMe saying that her genetic testing was completed. Mia was not in a hurry. She’d bought the kit a year before, when she’d seen a sale on Amazon. It was an impulse buy for which her enthusiasm had quickly waned. It took months before she got around to spitting into the tube and mailing it back in the prepaid package.

When she logged on, all seemed as anticipated. The test listed her ancestry as 99.9 per cent East Asian and Indigenous American. (At the time, the two were lumped together by the company.) No great surprise there—she had been adopted in 2002 from China, one of more than a hundred and sixty thousand children sent abroad to the United States and other countries in the course of three decades. Not knowing her family’s medical history, she had taken the test mainly to find out if she had a heightened genetic risk for cancer, and she was relieved to learn that she did not, although the test showed a propensity for lactose intolerance and an allergy to cats, two things she already knew about.

Mia knew that finding family was a possibility, but it wasn’t on her mind. She clicked anyway on the tab that listed genetic relatives. There it was at the top of the list: Zhou Changqi, born in 1956.

👇A VERY LONG STORY...