Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalSave Bear Butte: Mecca of the Lakota
June 28, 2016
Save Bear Butte: Mecca of the Lakota
by Ruth Hopkins
Turtle Island and the Indigenous groups who have continuously occupied these lands are older than America. Our spiritual beliefs are tied to Ina Maka (Mother Earth). As such, Indian Country holds sacred sites of reverence that pre-date European invasion.
Bear Butte is one of these ancient holy places. My people, the Oceti Sakowin (The Great Sioux Nation), call it Paha Sapa. Bear Butte is crucial to our traditional way of life. It is where the Lakota received star knowledge and divine instruction. Our greatest leaders, like Tatanka Iyotanka (Sitting Bull) and TaSunka Witko (Crazy Horse) prayed there. Even today, I know many Lakota who go there for Hanbleceya, to cry for a vision. Westerners call it Vision Quest. This ceremony takes place on the side of the mountain, over the course of four days and nights. Individuals remain in quiet solitude to fast, pray and commune with Tunkasila and the spirits while supporters keep the fire below.
The Cheyenne refer to it as Noavose. Bear Butte is central to their traditional lifeways as well. Sweet Medicine, a Cheyenne prophet, received four sacred arrows and the covenants of the bundle from Bear Butte. These teachings provide life guidance.
Along with the Oceti Sakowin and Cheyenne, many Native Nations of the plains recognize the sacred nature of Bear Butte. We continue to perform annual ceremonies and rituals there as they have been for time immemorial. If you’ve ever hiked Bear Butte, you will see evidence of this. Lovingly crafted prayer ties made by Native hands adorn the trees all along its base.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/28/save-bear-butte-mecca-of-the-lakota/
Dilma Rousseff interview: Brazil's first female leader on trying to clear her name
Dilma Rousseff interview: Brazil's first female leader on trying to clear her name
Exclusive Q&A : Ms Rousseff said she was the victim of a 'parliamentary coup'
Andrea Dip, Marina Amaral, Vera Saavedra Durão, Natalia Viana Brasilia |
17 hours ago|
President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil has been suspended since May 12, awaiting her impeachment trial by the country’s Senate. In the meantime, an interim government has been formed by her vice president Michel Temer.
The impeachment process against Ms Rousseff has been branded a coup by her allies, who have pointed out that the charges against her, which focus on claims she violated budget laws, were based on relatively minor misdeeds that were also committed by many of her predecessors without consequences.
Ms Rousseff, of the Worker’s Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT) was elected for the second time in 2014 by a small majority.
She was Brazil’s first female president and the impeachment process against her was denounced as “sexist political violence” by the United Nation’s office on women’s rights.
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/dilma-rousseff-interview-brazils-first-female-leader-on-trying-to-clear-her-name-a7105806.html
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera review – romance, heartbreak and a must-see exhibition
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera review – romance, heartbreak and a must-see exhibition
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Breaking a 10-year absence from Australian galleries, the paintings, photos and letters of the two Mexican lovers is illuminating and tragic
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
Monday 27 June 2016 22.22 EDT
Frida Kahlo was 18 years old when the bus she was travelling on crashed in Mexico City. The teenager was impaled, breaking her spinal column, pelvis, collarbone and ribs. The force of the collision ripped off her clothes, leaving her bleeding and naked. And, in a twist somehow prescient of Kahlo’s colourful, tragic life, a packet of powdered gold carried by another passenger exploded, showering her broken body in flakes of the precious metal.
That was Kahlo’s first serious accident. “The other accident,” as she once said, “is Diego.”
Kahlo met renowned muralist Diego Rivera just three years later. Although towering over her, corpulently rotund and two decades older, she fell for him immediately. Both events, as we are reminded in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ winter blockbuster show Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, caused a lifetime of mental and physical anguish. But they also shaped Kahlo’s art, providing her paintings with an obsessive ferocity that have cemented her place as a Mexican icon.
Although small in scale and scope, the exhibition – from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman collection – is significant, not least because neither artist’s work has graced the shores of Australia in any meaningful way for the last 10 years (an absence compounded by the fact no Australian museum owns pieces by either Kahlo or Rivera).
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/28/frida-kahlo-and-diego-rivera-review-exhibition-art-gallery-of-nsw
How Crowdsourced Archaeology Could Help Solve the Mysteries of Peru
How Crowdsourced Archaeology Could Help Solve the Mysteries of Peru
Posted by Sarah Parcak of National Geographic Fellows Program in Explorers Journal on June 27, 2016
Help Decipher Ancient Secrets of Peru on Your Coffee Break
Satellite archaeologist and National Geographic Fellow Sarah Parcak wants to train a 21st-century army of global explorers to help find and protect ancient sites using a cutting-edge citizen science platform called Global Xplorer. When Global Xplorer launches in late 2016, participants will start with Peru. Here’s why it’s the perfect place to begin.
By Sarah Parcak
Archaeologists have studied the ancient city of Petra for more than 200 years. So I didn’t feel wildly hopeful about finding anything unknown when I did a satellite survey of the site in 2012. But then, there it was: a massive monumental platform. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unknown archaeological sites around the world, and new technology is helping us locate them. (See archaeologist Damian Evans’ recent LIDAR scan of Cambodia, which revealed multiple medieval cities in the jungle, each between 900 and 1,400 years old.)
I’m thrilled that Global Xplorer, the citizen science platform my team is developing with the 2016 TED Prize, will launch later this year. We’ll use the power of the crowd to locate unknown sites. But where to begin? There’s an entire world out there! I knew I wanted to start somewhere with a rich history. Somewhere where we could partner with key archaeologists to help explore what we find on the ground. Somewhere with breathtaking landscapes.
I’m excited to announce that Global Xplorer will launch in the country that’s the home to Machu Picchu, the Lord of Sipán, and the Nasca Lines: Peru. My team has started looking at high-resolution satellite imagery, and we’re already seeing potential sites, including what could be a new cemetery in the Nasca region. That’s four people looking for a few days. Imagine setting loose the world and having them look for months!
Below, four reasons why Peru is the perfect place to start this work.
More:
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/27/how-crowdsourced-archaeology-could-help-solve-the-mysteries-of-peru/
41 Years Since Jumping Bull (But 500 Years of Trauma)
41 Years Since Jumping Bull (But 500 Years of Trauma)
June 27, 2016
by Leonard Peltier
June 26th marks 41 years since the long summer day when three young men were killed at the home of the Jumping Bull family, near Oglala, during a firefight in which I and dozens of others participated. While I did not shoot (and therefore did not kill) FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, I nevertheless have great remorse for the loss of their young lives, the loss of my friend Joe Stuntz, and for the grieving of their loved ones. I would guess that, like me, many of my brothers and sisters who were there that day wish that somehow they could have done something to change what happened and avoid the tragic outcome of the shootout.
This is not something I have thought about casually and then moved on. It’s something I think about every day. As I look back, I remember the expressions of both fear and courage on the faces of my brothers and sisters as we were being attacked. We thought we were going to be killed! We defended our elders and children as they scattered for protection and to escape. Native people have experienced such assaults for centuries, and the historical trauma of the generations was carried by the people that day — and in the communities that suffered further trauma in the days that followed the shootout, as the authorities searched for those of us who had escaped the Jumping Bull property.
As the First Peoples of Turtle Island, we live with daily reminders of the centuries of efforts to terminate our nations, eliminate our cultures, and destroy our relatives and families. To this day, everywhere we go there are reminders — souvenirs and monuments of the near extermination of a glorious population of Indigenous Peoples. Native Peoples as mascots, the disproportionately high incarceration of our relatives, the appropriation of our culture, the never-ending efforts to take even more of Native Peoples’ land, and the poisoning of that land all serve as reminders of our history as survivors of a massive genocide. We live with this trauma every day. We breathe, eat and drink it. We pass it on to our children. And we struggle to overcome it.
Like so many Native children, I was ripped away from my family at the age of 9 or so and taken away to get the “Indian” out of me at a boarding school. At that time, Native Peoples were not able to speak our own languages for fear of being beaten or worse. Our men’s long hair, which is an important part of our spiritual life, was forcibly cut off in an effort to shame us. Our traditional names were replaced by new European-American names.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/27/41-years-since-jumping-bull-500-years-of-trauma/
Poverty Doesn’t Stop Cuba From Keeping Its Black Citizens Healthy. So What’s America’s Excuse?
Poverty Doesn’t Stop Cuba From Keeping Its Black Citizens Healthy. So What’s America’s Excuse?
Cuba is poorer and, due to the embargo, has had less access to drugs and medical equipment, yet its citizens live just as long, if not longer than people in the U.S.
By: Tonyaa J. Weathersbee
Posted: June 27, 2016
Whenever I hear Cubans talk about their nation’s advancements in health care, and when I think about where the U.S. is on all this, what I hear is a tale of two scarcities. The tales, however, end differently for the people of color who are the main characters.
Because Cuba has, for the past five decades, struggled to bring health care to all its citizens in spite of a U.S. embargo that cripples its ability to purchase drugs and medical equipment, it has kept most of its people well because it cannot afford for them to get sick.
“If you don’t see the doctor, the doctor will come to see you,” Juan Jacomino, a Radio Havana journalist who acted as our guide during a recent trip to one of the island’s many polyclinics, told me.
So Cuba has taken great steps to build health care around family and community. Physicians and nurses share the same neighborhoods with their patients. If someone isn’t going for their checkups, it doesn’t go unnoticed.
More:
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/06/poverty-doesnt-stop-cuba-from-keeping-its-black-citizens-healthy-so-whats-americas-excuse/
Why Mining Corporations Love Trade Deals
Why Mining Corporations Love Trade Deals
06/21/2016 09:57 am ET
Ben Beachy
Senior Policy Advisor, Responsible Trade Program, Sierra Club
From the salmon-spawning waters of Alaska to the cloud forests of Ecuador, communities are standing up to mining projects that threaten their health, environment, and livelihoods.
But mining corporations are fighting back with a powerful tool buried in trade and investment agreements: the ability to go to private, unaccountable tribunals and sue governments that act to protect communities from mining.
In these private tribunals, which sit outside of any domestic legal system, corporate lawyers - not judges - decide whether governments must pay corporations for halting destructive mining projects. To date, mining corporations have used these private tribunals to sue over 40 governments more than 100 times.
In two-thirds of the concluded cases, governments either have been ordered to pay the mining corporations or have settled with them, which can require handing over payment and/or weakening mining restrictions. In the 44 publicly available mining cases still pending, mining corporations are demanding over $53 billion from governments.
More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-beachy/why-mining-corporations-l_b_10589832.html
Argentines snatched as babies of Dirty War ‘disappeared’ grope for truth, real kin
Argentines snatched as babies of Dirty War ‘disappeared’ grope for truth, real kin
AP
Jun 27, 2016
BUENOS AIRES – Pedro Sandoval stopped celebrating Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and even his own birthday after he found out the truth: The mom and dad he knew growing up had stolen him from his biological parents, who were kidnapped, tortured and never heard from again during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
“I’m still jealous of friends who can hug or get into arguments with their parents,” said Sandoval, 38, alluding to the biological parents he never met. “But I’m also thankful that I could at least hug my grandfather and grandmother.”
Four decades after the ruling military junta launched a systematic plan to steal babies born to political prisoners, Argentina’s search for truth is increasingly focused on the 500 or so newborns whisked away and raised by surrogate families. Several hundred have yet to be accounted for.
This spring a visiting U.S. President Barack Obama and Argentine President Mauricio Macri announced, on the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought the junta to power, that Washington would open up a trove of U.S. intelligence files from Argentina’s Dirty War era, when an estimated 30,000 people were killed or forcibly “disappeared” by the regime. It may take a few years for the documents to be released, but the news gave families hope for word on the fate of other stolen babies.
More:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/06/27/world/social-issues-world/argentines-snatched-babies-dirty-war-disappeared-grope-truth-real-kin/#.V3BTw-RTEq0
TransCanada slaps the US gov't with US$15 bil. suit
Source: Agence France-Presse
TransCanada slaps the US gov't with US$15 bil. suit
AFP
June 27, 2016, 12:19 am TWN
OTTAWA -- TransCanada has formally filed a US$15 billion suit against the U.S. government for blocking its controversial project for an oil pipeline linking Canada with the Gulf of Mexico, legal documents show.
The company first announced its intention to sue in January, but then sought negotiations toward "an amicable settlement of the dispute" surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline, according to legal documents posted on its website.
Unable to settle, the company formally filed suit late Friday, asserting that denial of a permit to complete the pipeline was "unjustified" under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and that the decision also exceeded U.S. President Barack Obama's constitutional powers.
The suit is based on Chapter 11 of NAFTA — the 1994 trade pact between the United States, Canada and Mexico — which aims to protect foreign investors from potential losses.
Read more: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/americas/2016/06/27/470449/TransCanada-slaps.htm
4 Things to Remember About Chile's 1973 Coup
4 Things to Remember About Chile's 1973 Coup
Chile remebers its socialist president Salvador Allende
Published 26 June 2016
June 26 marks the birthday of former president Salvador Allende, who died in the coup.
Salvador Allende, the iconic left-wing leader and one of Chile’s best known presidents, was born on this day on June 26, 1908. The tragic fate of his government, overthrown in a right-wing coup in 1973, changed the history of the country—and region—forever. On September 11, Allende's socialist was toppled by a U.S.-backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, barely three years after being elected.
Allende wasn't the only casualty of the coup, as thousands of Chileans were subsequently tortured, jailed and killed by the military regime. Democracy in Chile was irreparably altered, and even now the country continues to be scarred by one of the darkest eras of fear and repression on the continent.
After winning the 1970s presidential elections in Chile, the left-wing Salvador Allende worked toward social reforms and justice, nationalizing natural resources, building homes for the poor and focusing on better access to health and education.
Allende fought until the last hours of his life to defend the social gains and constitutional order. On his last speech, just minutes before the military bombed the presidential palace, he gave Chileans one last message of hope. “I will not resign. Placed in a historic transition, I will pay the loyalty of the people with my life. And I tell them I have the certainty that the seed that we have planted in the dignified conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled. You have the power, they can destroy us, but social progress cannot be stopped neither by crime nor by force. History is ours, and people make it happen.”
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/4-Things-to-Remember-About-Chiles-1973-Coup-20160626-0012.html
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