How Trump's cuts to public media threaten the first Native American station : Code Switch : NPR
#PublicRadio #PublicBroadcasting #NativeAlaskans #NativeAmericans #Alaska #KYUK
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/15/nx-s1-5520762/how-trumps-cuts-to-public-media-threaten-the-first-native-american-station
#Navy apologizes 142 years after shelling and burning an #Alaska #Native village to oblivion
"'The Navy recognizes the pain and suffering inflicted upon the #Tlingit people,' said the commander of the Navy’s northwest region."
AP, October 28, 2024
"Shells fell on the Alaska Native village as winter approached, and then sailors landed and burned what was left of homes, food caches and canoes. Conditions grew so dire in the following months that elders sacrificed their own lives to spare food for surviving children.
"It was Oct. 26, 1882, in Angoon, a Tlingit village of about 420 people in the southeastern Alaska panhandle. Now, 142 years later, the perpetrator of the bombardment — the #USNavy —has apologized.
"Rear Adm. Mark Sucato, the commander of the Navy’s northwest region, issued the apology during an at-times emotional ceremony Saturday, the anniversary of the atrocity.
"'The Navy recognizes the pain and suffering inflicted upon the#TlingitPeople, and we acknowledge these wrongful actions resulted in the loss of life, the loss of resources, the loss of culture, and created and inflicted #IntergenerationalTrauma on these clans,' he said during the ceremony, which was livestreamed from Angoon. 'The Navy takes the significance of this action very, very seriously and knows an apology is long overdue.'
"While the rebuilt Angoon received $90,000 in a settlement with the Department of Interior in 1973, village leaders have for decades sought an apology as well, beginning each yearly remembrance by asking three times, 'Is there anyone here from the Navy to apologize?'
"'You can imagine the generations of people that have died since 1882 that have wondered what had happened, why it happened, and wanted an apology of some sort, because in our minds, we didn’t do anything wrong,' said Daniel Johnson Jr., a tribal head in #Angoon.
"The attack was one of a series of conflicts between the American military and Alaska Natives in the years after the U.S. bought the territory from Russia in 1867. The U.S. Navy issued an apology last month for destroying the nearby village of Kake in 1869, and the Army has indicated that it plans to apologize for shelling Wrangell, also in southeast Alaska, that year, though no date has been set.
"The Navy acknowledges the actions it undertook or ordered in Angoon and #Kake caused deaths, a loss of resources and multigenerational trauma, Navy civilian spokesperson Julianne Leinenveber said in an email prior to the event.
"'An apology is not only warranted, but long overdue,' she said."
#TruthAndReconciliation #LandBack #Genocide #CulturalGenocide #NativeAmericanHistory #NativeAlaskans #NativeAlaskanHistory #BurnYourVillageToTheGround #200Blankets
2020: How #NativeAmericans’ #RightToVote has been systematically violated for generations
In the new book Voting in Indian Country, Jean Reith Schroedel weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts as the election nears
by Nina Lakhani in New York
Fri 16 Oct 2020
"#VoterSuppression has taken centre stage in the race to elect potentially the 46th president of the United States. But we’ve heard little about the 5.2 million #Native Americans whose ancestors have called this land home before there was a US president.
"The rights of indigenous communities – including the right to vote – have been systematically violated for generations with devastating consequences for access to #CleaAir and #water, #health, #education, economic opportunities, #housing and #sovereignty. Voter turnout for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives is the lowest in the country, and about one in three eligible voters (1.2 million people) are not registered to vote, according to the National Congress of American Indians.
"In a new book, Voting in Indian County: The View from the Trenches, Jean Reith Schroedel, professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University, weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts.
"Is the right to vote struggle for Native Americans distinct from the wider struggle faced by marginalized groups in the US?
"One thing few Americans understand is that American Indians and #NativeAlaskans were the last group in the #UnitedStates to get #citizenship and to get the #vote. Even after the civil war and the Reconstruction (13th, 14th and 15th) amendments there was a supreme court decision that said #IndigenousPeople could never become US citizens, and some laws used to disenfranchise them were still in place in 1975. In fact first-generation violations used to deny – not just dilute voting rights – were in place for much longer for Native Americans than any other group. It’s impossible to understand contemporary voter suppression in Indian Country without understanding this historical context.
"Why didn’t the #AmericanIndianCitizenshipAct 1924 nor the #VotingRightsAct (#VRA) 1965 guarantee Native Americans equal access to the ballot box?
"The motivation for the VRA was the egregious treatment of #black people in the south, and for the first 10 years there was a question over whether it even applied to #AmericanIndian and Native Alaskan populations. It wasn’t really discussed until a #CivilRights commission report in 1975 which included cases from #SouthDakota and #Arizona that showed equally egregious #discrimination and absolute denial of right to vote towards Native Americans – and also #Latinos.
"When voter suppression is discussed by politicians, advocates and journalists, it’s mostly about African American voters, and to a lesser degree Latinos. Why are Native Americans still excluded from the conversation?
"Firstly they are a small population and secondly most of the most egregious abuses routinely occur in rural isolated parts of #IndianCountry where there is little media focus. But it’s happening – take Jackson county in South Dakota, a state where the governor has done little to protect people from #Covid. The county council has just decided to close the legally mandated early voting centre on the #PineRidgeReservation, citing concerns about Covid, but not in the voting site in #Kadoka, where the white people go. Regardless of the intent, this will absolutely have a detrimental effect on Native people’s ability to vote. And South Dakota, like many other states, is also a very hard place for Native people to vote by mail. In the primary, the number of people who registered to #VoteByMail increased by 1,000% overall but there was no increase among reservation communities. In #Oglala county, which includes the eastern part of Pine Ridge, turnout was about 10%.
"The right to vote by mail is a hot political and civil rights issue in the 2020 election – could it help increase turnout in Indian Country?
"No, voting by mail is very challenging for Native Americans for multiple reasons. First and foremost, most reservations do not have home mail delivery. Instead, people need to travel to post offices or postal provide sites – little places that offer minimal mail services and are located in places like gas stations and mini-marts. Take the Navajo Nation that encompasses 27,425 square miles – it’s larger than West Virginia, yet there are only 40 places where people can send and receive mail. In West Virginia, there are 725. Not a single PO box on the Navajo Nation has 24-hour access."
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DoomsdaysCW
Anne Fausto Sterling