“The Death Of A Dream”: Celebrating South Dakota’s 125th Birthday — Or Not
South Dakota, like North Dakota, was named after a people; the Dakota or Sioux as they were misnamed by the French, missionaries and the settlers.
Before it became a state it was known as Dakota Territory, clearly identifying it as a land belonging to the Dakota. It became a state on November 2, 1889. One year and 57 days after statehood one of the worst massacres of innocent Indian men, women and children took place on December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee, clearly within the boundaries of the new state.
Nearly 300 innocent victims died that December day many of them torn apart by the new Hotchkiss machine guns, the first time these deadly guns were used against human beings. When the young Nicholas Black Elk saw this carnage he later said, “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard: A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”
This year on November 2, South Dakota will be celebrating its 125th Anniversary as a State. For nearly all of those 125 years the Dakota, Lakota, Nakota people who make up the largest minority in the state were excluded from participation in the state legislative body and were denied the basic freedoms accorded to every white citizen of the state.
They did not become citizens of the state until 1924 when the United States made them citizens of the United States. First understand that the state was named after a people; but Dakota is not only a people, it is a dialect. That is why those people erroneously noted as Sioux called themselves Dakota, Lakota and Nakota. Simply put all of the so-called Sioux spoke the same language with a slightly different dialect. Where the Dakota used a “D” the Lakota used an “L” and the Nakota used an “N.” For example the word for friend in Dakota is koda, and in Lakota it is kola and in Nakota it is kona.
Of course it is much more complicated than that. When one delves more deeply into it they will find that there were actually four dialects: The Santee, Yankton, Teton and Assiniboine and each of these dialects has slight differences, but not sufficient enough for all of the Dakota to understand each other.
According to a dictionary by the great Lakota educator Albert White Hat. Sr., Sicangu Lakota, the name Sioux came about in the 17th century by French trappers and missionaries when they adopted the last syllable of the Ojibwe term “nadowessioux” (literally “snake lesser”). Since the Ojibwe called their major enemy, the Iroquois, “nadowewok” (snake) “Sioux” was the last part of an Ojibwe word that meant in itself only “minor” or “lessor.” The tribes were further divided into the Oceti Sakowin or People of the Seven Council Fires.”
Most of what I write here are simple things the white citizens of South Dakota ignored or failed to learn and continued to shoot and murder the “Sioux” people because there was no law to stop them. The life of an Indian to them was no more important than that of a coyote. And we should never forget that the United States once placed a bounty on a “redskin,” much as they did on a beaver skin or pelt. And there are those out there who still wonder why most Native Americans hate the word “redskin.”
If you were a Lakota, Dakota or Nakota, how would you feel about celebrating the 125th Anniversary of Statehood for South Dakota knowing that you had been excluded, discriminated against, murdered and had most of your land stolen from you by the State of South Dakota?
I’ll leave it up to the Oceti Sakowin to decide that.
By: Tim Giago, Founder, Native American Journalists Association; The Huffington Post Blog, July 3, 2014
“Subtle Forms Of Discrimination”: Without Economic And Educational Justice, There Is No Racial Justice
On a hot, dusty June day fifty years ago, during what became known as Freedom Summer, college students began to arrive in Mississippi—then the most closed society in America—to help register black residents to vote. Three civil rights workers were brutally murdered, a trauma that pierced the heart of our nation and thrust into the open the racist oppression of black political rights by Mississippi’s leaders.
Since that momentous summer, our country has made great strides to extend civil and political rights to all Americans regardless of race. Still, African Americans today face obstacles just as real as poll taxes and segregated restrooms; the difference is that these obstacles are now embedded in our institutions and social structures instead of being posted on public walls.
The reality is that, a half-century after Freedom Summer, African Americans continue to face severe barriers not just to voting but also to economic security. In fact, on the economic front, some indicators have even gotten worse and problems more entrenched in recent decades. The gap between black and white household incomes, for example, is actually wider today than it was in the mid-1960s. So if the primary Civil Rights struggle 50 years ago was for basic political rights, today it is for equal access to the ladder of economic mobility.
A key factor behind persistent racial inequality involves the failures of our education system. While African Americans may no longer be barred from attending school with white children, they still face disproportionate challenges in accessing the quality education that is a stepping stone to a decent life in America. One example is that black students today must survive a climate of punitive and discriminatory discipline that unfairly pushes them out of school and into the criminal justice system. Only last year, a sweeping federal settlement of charges of discriminatory discipline was finalized in the town of Meridian—the same town from which the three murdered civil rights workers left in 1964 on their final day of advocacy. Continued support is needed for such efforts to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.
The job market is another area still rife with racial inequities. While high school graduation rates for African Americans have improved dramatically since 1964, nearly 35 percent of recent black male high school graduates nationwide have no job—a far higher jobless rate than any other group. However, this summer, 100 of these students in the Mississippi Delta and Biloxi are now working full time in a project to support the restoration of federal summer jobs programs. Although it was launched on short notice, this initiative was flooded with three times more applications than available positions. Providing summer jobs opportunities is a vital first step towards ensuring economic stability.
In higher education, the white-black gap in college graduation has worsened, setting the stage for similar racial disparities in the job market. One problem is that African Americans seeking to advance beyond a minimum wage job often are recruited through targeted advertising into fast-track for-profit career schools as an alternative to traditional college education. Many of these companies charge hefty tuition fees, even as they fail to deliver degrees that qualify people for their intended career. Over the past several months, the U. S. Department of Education has proposed regulations to curb the misconduct of these predatory schools and ensure that career degrees lead to employment. Reining in these predatory schools will require support for strong final regulations, which are to be issued this fall.
It’s not just education and jobs: Deregulation in the lending industry in the 1980s further narrowed opportunities for many working African American families. Even as families supported by a minimum wage earner sank below the poverty line, state legislatures enabled the emergence of the predatory payday lending industry by carving out exceptions to their usury laws to allow small dollar, high-interest loans. So, just as the paychecks of poor families no longer met basic survival needs, and as traditional banks withdrew service from low-income neighborhoods, the payday industry ramped up pressure to ensnare borrowers into a cycle of high-interest loans that become a revolving door of debt.
In Mississippi, after fast-cash lobbyists blocked reforms in the state legislature, the Mississippi Center for Justice launched a new model for providing loans to low-income borrowers: the New Roots Credit Partnership, an alliance between employers and banks to provide emergency loans on fair, non-predatory terms. A growing number of Mississippi employers are signing up for this program, which is a promising model for helping low-income families achieve economic security. We need to expand such efforts and ensure all Americans have access to fair banking services.
Fifty years after Freedom Summer, we recognize that America cannot know true racial justice until there is economic justice. We should attack those more subtle forms of discrimination with just as much energy and determination as did those who started a powerful movement in the long, hot summer of 1964.
By: Reilly Morse, The American Prospect, July 3, 2014
“Target The Corporate Sponsors”: So Redskins Sponsor FedEx Is OK With That Racist Team Name, Too?
So Chainsaw Danny Snyder is digging in his heels again. This time, after the federal government determined this week that his football team’s name disparages Native Americans, he trotted out his trademark lawyer, Robert Raskopf, to yawn at the decision and assure racists and idiots everywhere that he’d seen this movie before and knew how it ended, which is the opposite of how most Redskins’ games end—in victory.
At least we were spared hearing anything from the execrable Lanny Davis, another of the execrable Snyder’s execrable henchmen. Lanny, a quick Google reveals, has had plenty on his plate lately anyway, the kinds of items one would expect of the ur-Fox Democrat: Writing for HuffPo that Jeb Bush would be a great candidate, whacking Obama on Fox News over the Bowe Bergdahl deal. Thank God it’s an election year. This is like choosing between water torture and nipple clothespins, but I’d much rather have to hear Davis lecture us about how he has regretfully come to conclude that the Democrats deserve to lose the Senate than listen to him bray about the grand tradition of the Washington football club’s name.
Snyder and Raskopf, alas, have a case—not an irrefutable case, but a case—on First Amendment grounds. But that question, remember, has never been tested. When a federal court in 2003 overruled the Patent and Trademark Office the last time that office declared the team’s name disparaging, it did not do so on free-speech grounds. It tossed the case mainly on the grounds that the plaintiffs had waited too long to file suit.
Presuming that the plaintiffs won’t make that mistake this time (and they apparently have not), we might someday soon have a court decide the question on the merits. That will be interesting. As I say, Snyder has an argument. Thursday morning on the radio, I heard Bruce Fein, the estimable conservative-but-heterodox constitutional scholar, say it was basically an open-and-shut First Amendment claim: Just as the American Nazi Party was allowed to march in Skokie, Illinois, in the 1970s (a heavily Jewish Chicago suburb full of Holocaust survivors), so Chainsaw Dan is entitled to call his team whatever he wants to call it.
First of all, Snyder, who is Jewish, ought to give some serious reflection to the notion that an expert defending his position had to reach deep enough into the constitutional barrel to haul out the American Nazi Party. But second, while I can’t claim to match Fein on constitutional bona fides, as the good citizens of Carrboro, North Carolina, would no doubt attest based on the night I debated him there, I would venture that his analogy is pretty inexact. The First Amendment is not absolute. There’s the clear and present danger exception. The fighting words exception. The libel and slander exception. The time, place, and manner exception. Read of them here. Obviously, a federal judge so inclined could very easily find that the offensive name constitutes fighting words or slander. In fact, I find it difficult to imagine that a federal judge who isn’t a knuckle-dragging hellspawn of the Federalist Society could find in 2014 (or 2015 or whenever the case is decided) that the name Redskins isn’t slander.
But that’s for down the road. For now, what should happen? It seems to me, decent and like-minded citizens who are leading this fight, that your next target is FedEx. The delivery giant has, of course, paid the Snyder organization since the late 1990s to have its name plastered on the stadium. FedEx is paying the team $7.6 million a year through 2025. Only—and this is really odd, but true—Royal Phillips Electronics pays more per year for naming rights, shelling out $9.3 million per annum to the Atlanta Hawks for the naming rights to Phillips Arena. Most naming rights run in the $1 million to $3 million a year range.
FedEx is probably already locked in for this fall’s season. But suppose enough pressure could be placed on the corporation that by next fall, or the next, it is willing to say: We no longer wish to be associated with this team. The company will say that if it is made to feel that its association with the team is bad for business. Into the bargain, FedEx would save itself—and cost the Redskins—something on the order of $75 million over a decade. FedEx is public. It has stockholders. Like pension funds and universities. You follow?
Imagine the blow that would be: “FedEx Withdraws Name From Stadium Over Redskins’ Name.” Sure, some other whorish corporation would step in. Maybe Sambo’s restaurant! There still is one. Redskins’ Field at Sambo’s Stadium. In a perverse way, I’m almost for it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 20, 2014
“Redskins’ Running Out Of Downs”: The Profit Principle Always Trumps Tradition
We interrupt your viewing of the sport the rest of the world calls football in order to take note of a potentially game-changing (or at least name-changing) development in the American version of the game. As many American football fans know by now, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the Washington professional football team’s trademark registration on the name “Redskins” (and also “Redskinettes”) on the grounds that “they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered.” You can’t legally register “marks that may disparage persons or bring them into contempt or disrepute,” according to the order.
It’s been clear for some time now that – despite the from-my-cold-dead-hands denunciations of team owner Dan Snyder – there is a realistic path forward for changing the name: not moral suasion as such but the power of the marketplace. Once Snyder, and if not him then his 31 other team-owning National Football League colleagues, start to see their collective bottom line erode, they will do the right thing.
As my colleague Pat Garofalo wrote a little more than a year ago: “The Redskins are the fifth most valuable sports franchise in the world, so cutting off the trademark spigot would likely be more effective, sadly, than the string of Native American leaders who have come forward to explain the derogatory history of the term with which Washington endows its team.” And as ProFootballTalk.com’s Michael David Smith writes:
Could Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who insists that he will never change the name, afford to lose that money? Yes. But even if Snyder is so devoted to the Redskins name that he’s willing to lose money over it, losing the ability to trademark the name wouldn’t just cost Snyder money. It would also cost the other teams, and the NFL’s merchandising partners, money. Snyder’s fellow owners aren’t going to stand for that.
Snyder and his colleagues are all people of principle, after all, and in this case I suspect that the “profit” principle will trump its “tradition” counterpart.
None of this should come as a surprise. As USA Today wrote last month (h/t Washington Post):
If the team were applying for federal trademark protection for its “Redskins” name today, it would almost certainly be denied: At least 12 times since 1992 the USPTO has refused to register such marks on disparagement grounds, including seven applications from the Washington team (for terms such as “Redskins Fanatics” and “Redskins Rooters”) and one from NFL Properties (for “Boston Redskins”).
I understand the desire to cling to tradition; and I even get the knee-jerk instinct to oppose things that smack of political correctness, but cultural grounds shift and sometimes in weighing political correctness we need to place more emphasis on the “correct” than on the “political.” Perhaps the name Redskins might have been acceptable in 1933 when then-owner George Preston Marshall changed the franchise’s name from the Braves to the Redskins. (Despite what Snyder says, Marshall didn’t select the name to honor its putatively Indian coach but rather, he said at the time, so that he could keep its logo whilst disambiguating his then Boston-based team from the baseball franchise of the same name.) There was probably also a time when someone could have gotten away with Washington Darkies or Washington Wetbacks, but neither of those names would fly today. Neither should Washington Redskins.
So what’s next? The Redskins have vowed to appeal and as many reports have noted, the team did get a near-identical ruling tossed out in 1999 on the grounds that the people who brought it didn’t have standing. Will they get the same result this time? As Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio notes, the “difference this time comes from the surrounding debate on the name. In 1999, the opposition was far less organized and mainstream. In 2014, the opposition has coalesced and assumed a sense that it will last until the name inevitably changes.”
In the meantime, those Redskin deadenders who deplore the idea of changing the team name can take comfort: Prices are about to drop on the team’s paraphernalia.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 18, 2014
“Small Men With Ugly Thoughts Expressed Aloud”: Bigoted Gasbags Reduced To Their Proper Size
Lonesome Racist of the Week: Robert Copeland of Wolfeboro, NH.
He’s not as wealthy or prominent as Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, but the 82-year-old Copeland is no less detestable.
Until last week he served as one of three elected police commissioners in Wolfeboro, a town of about 6,300 people in central New Hampshire. A resident had complained to the town manager that, while dining at a local restaurant, she overheard Copeland use the N-word to describe President Obama.
Copeland didn’t deny making the slur, and brilliantly sent the following email to the other commissioners: “I believe I did use the ‘N’ word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse (sic). For this I do not apologize — he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.”
Many people in Wolfeboro felt Copeland met and exceeded the criteria for being a bigoted gasbag, and a public meeting was convened. The crowd was virtually all white because fewer than two-dozen African-Americans live in the town.
Copeland sat there listening to all the outraged demands for his resignation, and never said a word.
Wolfeboro was in turmoil. It wasn’t as if Copeland could be ignored or led away like some demented old uncle. The police commission is in charge of hiring, firing and disciplining officers, and also setting their salaries. Copeland also worked as a dispatch supervisor.
The governor of New Hampshire and several state lawmakers condemned Copeland’s remarks about Obama and said he should resign immediately. So did Mitt Romney, who owns a house in the state.
After a few days Copeland gave up and quit. He’s now free to shamble around the house in his bathrobe and boxers, spewing the N-word as much as he wants.
He has little in common with Sterling besides hateful prejudice and advanced age (the Clippers owner is 80). After Sterling’s embarrassing mangled apology while being interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, some began to wonder if creeping senility is what causes old white guys to drop their guard and blurt whatever dumbass racist thought enters their brains.
They point to Cliven Bundy, 67, the deadbeat Nevada rancher who for two decades hasn’t paid grazing fees for the cattle he lets roam upon federal lands. When officers showed up last month to remove the livestock, they were met by a defiant Bundy and a band of armed supporters.
Bundy has claimed native rights to the lands, saying he doesn’t recognize the existence of the U.S. government. For “standing up to” the feds (and stiffing American taxpayers for more than $1 million), he was lionized by conservative radio hosts, Senator Rand Paul, Sean Hannity and the other parrots at Fox News.
If at that point he’d shut his mouth, Bundy would still be a media darling of the bug-eyed right. But while chatting with a New York Times reporter, he decided out of nowhere to offer some casual thoughts about “the Negro.”
He mused that black people might be “better off as slaves” rather than living “under government subsidy.”
Whoops. Here we go again.
Instantly Bundy became politically toxic. His cheering section at Fox fell silent, while Senator Paul, who has presidential ambitions, declared he didn’t agree with Bundy’s view on slavery and even unholstered the O-word (“offensive”).
Like Sterling, Bundy’s attempts to clarify his feelings about black Americans only made things worse.
“Are they slaves to charities and government subsidized homes?” he said two days later. “And are they slaves when their daughters are having abortions and their sons are in prisons? This thought goes back a long time.”
On CNN Bundy labored to stem the backlash with an incoherent reference to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, while on his Facebook page he stated more clearly that he doesn’t believe anyone should be put back into slavery today.
That’s comforting to know, but at this point Bundy’s trespassing cows are his biggest audience.
He, Copeland and Sterling have blabbed themselves into caricatures. It’s not that they’re harmless (Sterling’s discriminatory practices as a landlord were punitive to many black families), but all the repudiation and ridicule has reduced them to their proper size.
They are just small men with small, ugly thoughts, and every so often it’s useful to be reminded that they’re still out there.
Lots of ‘em.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald, The National memo, May 27, 2014
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