Bona Fide Good Cause Alert

If you're looking for a worthy target for your charitable donations this week, please go read about Pretty Bird Woman House, a domestic violence and rape shelter for abused women and their children on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota. Native American women experience sexual assault at a rate several times higher than other American women, and law enforcement in their cases is generally grossly ineffective. Pretty Bird Woman House, named after the murdered sister of the woman who started the shelter, was burned to the ground by arsonists who broke in to steal electronic equipment, leaving many victimized women with no place to turn for shelter and aid. The people who run the shelter are attempting to buy replacement property in a safer location and have started a 501(c)3 fundraising campaign; they need another $9k or so by Friday to make the purchase happen.

PBWH provides emergency shelter, advocacy support, and educational programs for women on the Standing Rock reservation who have been victims of domestic violence or sexual assault. Its services are badly needed; according to the Amnesty International report Maze of Injustice - The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA:

High levels of sexual violence on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation take place in a context of high rates of poverty and crime. South Dakota has the highest poverty rate for Native American women in the USA with 45.3 per cent living in poverty. The unemployment rate on the Reservation is 71 per cent. Crime rates on the Reservation often exceed those of its surrounding areas. According to FBI figures, in 2005 South Dakota had the fourth highest rate of "forcible rapes" of women of any US state.

The whole thing is well documented and explained on the PBWH website. Give it a look and think about including the women of Standing Rock Reservation in your charitable giving this year.

When Netroots Fail: Cecilia Fire Thunder vs. Male Hegemony in Pine Ridge

I thought this was going to be a nice little ray of sunshine piece, about how a modest netroots effort in the face of unjust legislation actually managed to make a difference. A little background for those who missed it the first time: the South Dakota abortion ban pissed off the president of the Oglala Sioux tribe in a major way.

''I'm always an advocate for women, it's all about women. To me, when I heard that [Gov. Mike Rounds] signed the bill including rape and incest, I was going, 'Wait a minute, we know that rape and incest occur - how do we allow white men to tell me what to do with my little brown body?'

''It was just intuitive as a woman to speak up. I shook the tree of denial on the Pine Ridge Reservation and now everyone is talking about it. Did you notice that it's mostly men criticizing what I've been doing?''

Her declaration took the blogosphere by storm and we all did little happy dances.

Her vow to open a women's clinic on the reservation, outside the SD legislature's jurisdiction, almost seemed knee-jerk at the time, a great idea or at least a bold boast that didn't have a chance in hell of becoming reality. But enough people were galvanized by Cecilia Fire Thunder's rhetorical flipoff to the SD governor to send thousands of dollars in donations and letters of support, and enough dollars piled up to make the clinic a reality.

Fire Thunder announced that the Sacred Choices clinic would be built on the reservation in the village of Kyle, to offer comprehensive women's health services--something that's been sorely lacking on the rez.

She said Pine Ridge has a population of beautiful young women who have no education or an awareness of making choices about their bodies.

''This is a good opportunity to do that.'' ''It's a hard enough decision to make, and how many women are strong enough to make that decision and stick by it? So when a woman makes up her mind, she doesn't need someone to undermine her decision. I'm just here to love you and hold your hand and support whatever decision you make,'' she said.

But the movement appears to have come to a crashing halt. The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council yesterday suspended Fire Thunder, pending impeachment, and enacted a ban on all abortions on the reservation.

"It was unauthorized political activity," said Will Peters, a tribal council representative from the Pine Ridge district. "It's just a matter of failing to communicate not only with the governing body but with the people that she was elected to serve."

Peters claims that if Fire Thunder had initially proposed the clinic as a comprehensive women's health center, the tribe wouldn't have had a problem with it. The perception that Sacred Choices was intended solely to provide abortion--despite the fact that Fire Thunder never explicitly used the term "abortion" when talking about the need for a clinic--was apparently too much for the council to take.

"Women need services. Women need support. Right now on the Pine Ridge reservation, there's very little support for women who have been raped," Fire Thunder said.

"If that's the way it was presented to people in the first place, I think she would have been OK," Peters said. "Her stand, by what we read and what we hear from all accounts, was to support abortion. I've never seen such a turn-around."

Peters went on to say that while he feels women should be allowed to control their own bodies, many of the people opposed to the clinic are themselves Lakota women, so he feels that he needs to support them as a Lakota man. I wonder if it bears repeating that Fire Thunder and the women on the Sacred Choices board of directors are also Lakota women who could use some support, that the simple presence of women among the detractors does not trump the greater numbers of female proponents. I fail to understand the logic that dictates a valuable project with the potential to improve the lives of half the reservation's people be discarded because it was initially pitched as an abortion provider.

Kim Tall Bear lauds Fire Thunder as a champion of both female and cultural sovereignity, and articulates the abortion conflict as a Lakota woman herself (emphasis mine):

For those of us who do not subscribe to certain Christian doctrinal teachings, but who do subscribe to cultural imperatives about the sacredness of life, our moral and political response to terminating a pregnancy is not captured by either of the most vocal positions in the American abortion wars: the ''pro-choice'' and ''pro-life'' positions.

My Dakota mother and great-grandmother, for example, did not let me forget the powerful potential of my body to bear children. I was taught that a child is sacred, and that an unwanted pregnancy was to be assiduously avoided through safe-sex practices and, when I was younger, through abstinence.

My mother and great-grandmother never used the words ''choice'' or ''rights,'' but rather they spoke of ''power'' and ''responsibility.'' But my mother and great-grandmother also took a leap of faith that I would have the space to be responsible for my body - that I would not, for example, face rape.

At the same time, I was raised with a politicized understanding of the world. Both women and men in my family and in our tribe endured their share of hardship, including sexual violence. I grew to understand that within a colonial context. Abortion, in that context, might be considered a sad but necessary decision.

We differed from the ''pro-choice'' position in that we spoke of this and all reproductive decisions not as a ''right'' or a ''choice,'' but as a responsibility that grew out of the power in women's bodies. We differed from the ''pro-life'' position in that we recognized that the decision could be shaped by the hardship and violence that haunt Indian people to this day. Our views about the sacred nature of the unborn child were not synonymous with fundamentalist Christian views. From my upbringing, I came to understand abortion as a difficult topic with only context-specific and imperfect solutions.

What happens next for the women of the Pine Ridge Reservation will be largely determined by what happens for the women of greater South Dakota. Betty Bull Bear, one of the board members, said it would be a wellness center, and the board would wait to see what happens with a statewide abortion ban referendum and any subsequent legal challenges before deciding whether to attempt to provide any abortion services.

Meanwhile, they'll start verifying and counting signatures next week from the referendum petition. Volunteers are claiming they already have more than three times the required 16,000-odd signatures, well ahead of the June 19 deadline.

Multiple issues are in play here--cultural views on abortion sometimes twined with and sometimes butting up against women's autonomy and power, entrenched poverty, domestic violence and rape that impacts Native women at a rate four times that of the non-indigenous population, and a mostly male (14 of 17 members) tribal council that has been resistant to the leadership of the first woman Oglala president since her inaguration. This is the second time Fire Thunder has been suspended and threatened with impeachment; she has been viewed as a maverick for going outside traditional channels to secure a loan from a different tribe to finance gaming operations (that impeachment attempt didn't stick). Depending on your perspective, she's either a mouthy woman who has forgotten her place or a courageous leader attempting to fight decades of oppression both within and from outside the Lakota Nation to better her people's lot. The support she enjoys among Lakota women--councilman Peters' claims notwithstanding--suggests the president is not the council member who's out of touch with the people she represents.

Would it have made a real difference if President Fire Thunder had gone through official channels to accept the thousands of dollars in unsolicited donations that poured into Pine Ridge from across the country? Would it have mattered if she had made "comprehensive health care" the first words out of her mouth any time she addressed the issue? As long as some people have a vested interest in keeping abortion or emergency contraception out of any discussion of comprehensive health care, and as long as others have an equally vested interest in maintaining their own gender-based power, I fear the answer will continue to be no.

Random Wednesday

Some thoughts, in no particular order...

Scalia won't recuse himself from cases involving the right of captured enemy combatants to trial. He said:

"War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by Newsweek. "Give me a break."

Hum. I would point out that it's also never been the case that we've been capturing combatants (or at least taking custody of people turned in to receive a bounty who may not be actual combatants) in the course of an open-ended war declared on a concept, but I suppose that's splitting hairs. How do we maintain the moral high ground, again, when we keep men detained for years without access to counsel or even a declaration of their specific crimes, other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time? There are surely some bloodthirsty bastards languishing in Gitmo. I suspect there are plenty more innocent guys who are there only because of shit-ass bad luck.

More from South Dakota, courtesy of Rep. Roger Hunt, main sposor of The Bill (thanks to this dKos diary):

Hunt notes that the bill forbids doctors from prescribing any drug or doing any procedure on a pregnant woman “with the specific intent” of ending a pregnancy. It also protects the right of women to use “ a contraceptive measure, drug or chemical, if it is administered prior to the time when a pregnancy could be determined through conventional medical testing…”

In other words, a woman presenting herself to an emergency room immediately after a rape, Hunt says, would be able to use emergency contraception; the trick is that she has to do within the first few days after the assault, before any test can determine whether she was pregnant in the first place. The lawmakers concluded that it’s OK for a rape victim to have an abortion, so long as she doesn’t know for certain that she’s doing it.

Well, okay, Rog. You just lost your cred for having repulsive but consistent logic. Before, you and your ilk were on rock-solid ground when you said all abortions are murder, regardless of the circumstances of conception, and thus prohibited. But now, we have to consider the extreme anti-choice position that because pregnancy begins at conception (as opposed to the mainstream medical view that pregnancy begins at implantation), emergency contraception preventing implantation thus is equivalent to abortion. You're saying that kind of abortion is okay if the woman doesn't know she's pregnant. So if she's raped and "impregnated," that is, if sperm manages to crash into egg and the woman goes straight away to the ER and has an "abortion," that is, she's administered enough birth-control meds to flush the uterine lining, well, that's okay.

That's where you lose any moral legitimacy you're trying to claim. By your own biologically shoddy definition, you're allowing the abortion of a rape-induced pregnancy so long as the procedure occurs within a timeframe you've so very tightly and arbitrarily defined.

If abortion is okay under those circumstances, it has to be okay under all circumstances of rape.

Maybe Roger thinks he's carved out the unassailable loophole that his conscience was surely nagging him for. All he's done is expose the uncomfortable (for the religious right) reality that people really don't like the idea of a woman being forced to carry and deliver her rapist's child. Maybe he thinks the window-of-ignorance exemption gives him a free pass because of course every woman who's raped by a stranger or coerced by an abusive boyfriend or husband marches straight to the emergency room, announces she's been raped, and is promptly administered the pill. And of course every minor girl who's raped by her father or grandfather or uncle does the same thing. Straightaway. Within a day or two. They all make it to hospitals staffed by doctors who don't put personal religious beliefs ahead of their patients' welfare.

Then they go home to find what the tooth fairy left under their pillows, with a side trip to pick up the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Another little gem from Roger Dodger:

Hunt says, once more citing the findings of the task force, “she may be dealing with a lot of pressure, from family, boyfriend, husband. We have a situation in which the woman may be getting so much pressure she’s not thinking clearly.” The doctor, on the other hand, “should be operating in a calm and collected manner, have identified all the risks to the woman; he’s counseling the woman. We think its appropriate to place a greater burden upon the doctor.”

The doctor is to blame for an abortion because unwillingly pregnant woman do not think clearly. Because she's not thinking clearly, she should not be given the option to elect an abortion. Apparently pregnant women are only considered to be capable of clear, independent thought when they decide to keep the baby. Lovely.

In happier news, the women's NCAA tournament had several barn-burners in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight games. We are particularly enamored of Ivory Latta. Mainly because we are short and scrappy ourselves. The men's side of the tournament has been too cool this year, with seedings thrown out the window. A large commuter school with an on-campus population of only 5,000 has tossed the big boys aside with aplomb, although we were sorry to see our Tarheels go down to them. Anyway, go George Mason.

Wicked Good Fun

Do we all remember Bill Napoli, the South Dakota state senator whose creepily-detailed fantasy of the Christian virgin rape victim made us all, to borrow an apt bit of language from the author of the above-linked article, want to scrub our eyeballs with bleach after reading it? Good. Now go read this cartoon and do what you will.

I wrote my letter to Cecilia Fire Thunder this morning and tucked a small check inside, basically all I can afford given that this is the mortgage-payment paycheck today. I notice that the "pro-life" people have picked up on this and are encouraging people to send their own letters to the same address, so we need to step it up before the post office in Pine Ridge explodes from the overload.

Action.

Ah, the wonder of the internet, or at least of the internet-usin' progressive population: sit tight for 24 hours and some kind soul with more time than you and a functioning PC will find the info you need. Forthwith, if you want to support President Fire Thunder's proposed Planned Parenthood clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation, send a check to:

Oglala Sioux Tribe
ATTN: President Fire Thunder, P. O. Box 2070
Pine Ridge, SD 57770

OR (and this may be preferred, due to mail volume):

Oglala Sioux Tribe
ATTN: PRESIDENT FIRE THUNDER , PO BOX 990
Martin, SD 57751

Make checks out to OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder.

And at this point I'll continue the willy-nilly linking. More information about Fire Thunder is available via this excellent diary on dKos.

I am stoked about this. Seeing a woman stand up in the midst of the hopelessness that has been the legacy of US Indian policies, hopelessness compounded by the machinations of the state legislature in Pierre, is beyond inspiring. Ian Frazier's excellent On The Rez, which details the recent history and social climate of Pine Ridge, devotes a considerable amount of space to SuAnne Big Crow, a Pine Ridge girl who was a remarkable human being. Star athlete, good student, concerned with spreading peace and hope among the kids who saw none. She died in a car wreck at a young age; some commented that she was the spirit of White Buffalo Calf Woman returned to give hope to her people. Maybe Cecilia Fire Thunder is picking up that mantle now. Even if the legal details won't allow a rez PP clinic to offer services to non-Lakota, what a wonderful bit of defiance, of grabbing back a bit of the power and self-determination the state legislature has tried to rip away.

Yup, there are plenty of causes out there, plenty of opportunities to do the right thing. God knows there are wrongs needing righted in my own back yard. I do what I can there, in the yard, but this one feels worth venturing farther afield for. Uh, I've sent care packages to the troops too, so I'm not totally parochial in my search for needy causes.

And no, I'm not hoping to do a pony trek through the Black Hills someday on a vision quest in order to be adopted by a Lakota band, got no desire to dangle by the danglies in the sun dance. This simply kicked open the file folder in my brain where I keep everything I've read about the tribe and their uphill slog against history. I don't know much about persecution personally, but my Irish genes have enough of a memory for me to gleefully shout Up the Lakota, and Up Fire Thunder.

Yip Yip Yip

W held a press conference yesterday, in which he exhibited the biggest case of the yips I've seen since the last time I was puttin' for bird with a dollar riding on the hole. The camera frequently could not keep up with his side-to-side bobbing and weaving behind the lectern, he laughed nervously throughout, and at several points appeared to be hyperventilating. Some commentators remarked on his oddly dilated pupils as further evidence that he was hopped up on something, but I only watched the internet feed on my brightness-challenged monitor and couldn't make them out.

Highlights included his lecturing Helen Thomas about how "9/11 changed everything".... again... and claiming he never wanted to go to war ::cough choke:: and two very interesting asides, almost, that he muttered at the end of some convoluted syntax passing as answers to questions: "I'm stalling for time here," and my favorite, "They're telling me what to say." I have never seen him look so discomfited; perhaps more than one handler at a time was screaming through his earpiece.

But the most chilling moment for me was when he was asked about withdrawing our forces from Iraq. He said that's going to be up to future presidents to deal with. Nothing like shitting on the floor and then breezing out of the room, leaving your mess for the next poor fucker who walks in--and I'd wager my left nut, had I a left nut to wager, that he's going to then disparage that next poor fucker for not cleaning up the mess quickly enough, or cleanly enough, or with enough of a lingering fresh scent.

In other news, finally something ::gasp:: positive to report from South Dakota. The new president of the Oglala Sioux tribe is a woman named Cecilia Fire Thunder, who has spent her adult life working to end the abuse of women and children on the Pine Ridge Reservation and to fight alcoholism in the community. She's righteously pissed that a group of white guys in Pierre have decided to take away the last avenue of self-determination available to a woman who's raped--which happens to Lakota women at a rate three times higher than among the white population--and has declared she'll open her own damn Planned Parenthood clinic within the sovereign nation of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where state laws can't touch it. The first couple Google passes haven't turned up reliable contact information for Ms. Fire Thunder's office, so my project in the next couple of days will be figuring out how serious she is about this initiative and how you, my faithful readership of seven, might be able to contribute.

Travelogue, Part 2

I grew up in the heart of the Midwest, bouncing around various locales in Illinois and Indiana before moving out here to Tucson at the ripe old age of 27. As a kid I read every book I could find dealing with the tribes and leaders of the Great Plains. Stting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall--I was all over those guys. But I had never been to the Black Hills before this trip. It was amazing and awesome to finally be in that country where everything had happened that I'd read about. I thought about visiting Wounded Knee, but in the end I didn't. I didn't want to look like just another wasichu gawking with a camera. So I ended up camping in a state park named after Custer. It was a trip of many contradictions; go figure. I played music from the Honor the Earth tour on the way, hoping it might take care of some karmic cleansing. Anyway...
The first stop in South Dakota, if you're driving up from Colorado via friggin' eastern Wyoming, is the Hot Springs Mammoth Site. Back in the 1970s, workers who were clearing land for a housing development uncovered bones that proved to come from a mammoth. Indeed, they came from one of an assload of mammoths that had gotten stuck in a giant sinkhole several thousand years ago. Instead of saying, "Oh, that's nice," and bulldozing the whole thing, the good folks of Hot Springs agreed to preserve the site. It's currently protected by a large structure incorporating a museum. Excavations are ongoing, and the cool part is that you can take a tour through the sinkhole and see the many mammoth skeletons pedestaled on the sediments where they were found.
Interestingly, my girlfriend worked on the excavations there way back when the Mammoth Site was just a tarp over a hole in the ground. Her ex wrote many of the scholarly papers and books available for purchase in the gift shop, and his picture from back in the day is still on the wall next to the sinkhole.


From there we drove up into the Black Hills, to the unfortunately named Custer State Park. If you can get beyond the really wretched genocidal connotations, the park itself is magnificent. It's a huge swath of land encompassing several different elevational and ecological zones, including open grasslands, forested hills, streams, lakes, and stunning needle-like granite formations. Wildlife out the wazoo.

The fishing is allegedly fantastic. If by "fishing" you mean "drowning several pints of nightcrawlers in lovely but fish-free surroundings," then yes, the fishing IS fantastic.




Wildflowers were a-bloomin' all over.






We went buffalo-ing in the park and in the town of Custer. The town versions are fiberglass and decorated by local artists, to be auctioned for charity later (as in the Cows on Parade in Chicago and other cities...). The real versions are huge, marvelous animals, with improbably mismatched front and back ends.







Custer is adjacent to Mt. Rushmore. Did I mention this was a trip of contradictions? If someone were to come out tomorrow and propose jackhammering a pristine mountaintop into a memorial to dead presidents, I would most likely be disgusted. Wellllllllllllll in any event, uh, I guess it's pretty impressive. We got the added bonus of being there for the first cleaning in the history of the monument. A German company that specializes in power-washing skyscrapers offered their services for free (and, I assume, for photo rights) to blast the lichens out of the boys' noses. Here two Grosskopfgebirgsbergsteigern make their way down Jefferson's forehead.