Everyone needs this new book for the children in their lives! Order it here. There’s also a great website with more resources.
Unequivocal Solidarity
Last week, the U of Minnesota deleted this American Indian Studies’ statement on Palestine, which was posted in December 2023.
We the undersigned faculty and staff in American Indian and Indigenous studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (UMN) understand our accountability to the peoples, lands, waters, and skies of Dakota Oyate. We are employed by a land grab university built from stolen Dakota, Anishinaabeg, and Ho-Chunk wealth, land, and blood. Invaded and then claimed by Euro-American settlers, “Minnesota” has, for more than one hundred years, maligned and demonized Dakota patriots who resisted genocide. Their descendants continue to be denied return or land back. Streets and university halls proudly bear the names of the architects of genocide while Dakota calls for justice are ignored, silenced, or shuffled into empty gestures of reconciliation, land acknowledgement, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
It is from this place and position of advancing justice for the crimes of genocide in “Minnesota” that we proclaim unequivocal solidarity with the Palestinian people who presently suffer and resist genocide halfway across the world.
No nation-state should exist through the genocide of another people, particularly when that existence also involves, as it does in Palestine, a longer and ongoing history of colonial and military occupation and apartheid of the other’s homelands and peoples.
Recently, some of us have helped the Palestinian community at UMN publicly say the names of Palestinian relatives and friends killed in this obscene and criminal campaign. For this act, we have also been criticized for being anti-Semitic and for “supporting Hamas.” But we will continue to say their names like those of so many other victims of hate and war fueled by imperial and colonial violence. We say their names to witness and resist genocide and injustice everywhere.
Of the more than nineteen thousand Palestinians killed, almost 70% are women and children, the direct result of the state of Israel’s indiscriminate revenge for the deaths of more than a thousand foreign nationals, Israeli soldiers, and Israeli civilians and the capture of more than 200 Israeli soldiers and civilians after Palestinian fighters and civilians broke through the Gaza border on October 7, 2023.
In no way is the “conflict” an equal one: we see in the staggering incongruity of the tally–and in the rubble in Palestine–the grotesquely disproportionate demands of, on the one hand, Palestinian national defense and right of return, and, on the other, the Israeli state’s genocidal expression of its right to exist.
Also unequal, unjust and obscene is how the Israeli state acts with such remarkable impunity, a pass made possible by the monstrosities of financial, military, technical and cultural imperialism of the United States and the Western world powers.
Like other universities in nation-states whose existence is procured through the genocide and removal of Indigenous peoples, UMN risks functioning as a proxy for mounting state repression of resistance and justice. Like the recent measure by the U.S. Congress to criminalize outspoken Palestinian students, political figures, and allied organizations, University leaders across the country have also capitulated to external lobbying and financial pressure to crack down on freedom of speech and critical expression by outspoken faculty, staff and students. Such campaigns of repression on campuses silence critical perspectives that undergird vital principles of academic freedom, governance, and excellence. These campaigns of repression, too, are complicit with genocide and injustice. They, too, should be loudly condemned and resisted. We applaud, therefore, those few University Presidents and University leaders who have courageously spoken up in this milieu to affirm the rights of faculty and students to speak out and to condemn retaliatory action against them.
We will not be silent. We will not be silenced. We will resist. We welcome you to join us.
Our statement, by we who constitute a large majority of the members of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, does not reflect the views of the College of Liberal Arts nor should be taken as the official view of the University of Minnesota.
signed (alphabetical order):
Prof. Christine DeLisle
Nicholas DeShaw
Prof. Vicente M. Diaz
Prof. Nick Estes
Prof. Jessica Garcia Fritz
Prof. Kat Hayes
Prof. Brendan Kishketon
Nora Livesay
C̣aƞtemaza Neil McKay
Prof. Meixi
Prof. Jean O’Brien
Prof. Gabriela Spears-Rico
Prof. Melanie K. Yazzie
Continue to Fight Even When you are Weary
By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, Senior Advisor, The Fellowship of Reconciliation USA, Director & Chief Visionary, Faith Strategies LLC, Pastor Emeritus, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ
April 1, 2025
The presidential announcements and outrage come at us so viciously fast that it is difficult to keep up with the latest assault on governance, our intellect, decency, or humanity. Much of the perceived chaos is planned and judiciously meted out to keep our heads spinning leaving little time or energy to respond to anything before something new intrudes the space. Their goal is to produce as much confusion and chaos as possible so the public will struggle to keep up and lose the ability to pay close and constant attention to the important things of democratic and constitutional order. Our national setting has become a mixture of reality TV with the sensationalism of that genre, where mean-spirited sound bites emanate from those in power who smirkingly stare into the cameras knowingly creating the next news cycle. There is a racist, hate-filled, untruthful, and vindictive blanket covering this government and suffocating the country under its weight. We have never seen anything like this before.
Continue reading “Continue to Fight Even When you are Weary”A Critical Conversation
An important message from Christians for a Free Palestine.
In the coming months, we’re engaging in a series of critical conversations about Christian supremacy and how it affects the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Our first conversation in this series will take place Thursday, April 10, at 8:00pm ET / 5:00pm PT. We’ll be joined by Ben Lorber, author of “Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism”, Shoshana Brown from the Diaspora Alliance, and Rev. Anne Dunlap from @liberatinglineagescollective for a discussion about Christian supremacy, antisemitism, Project Esther, and more.
Register HERE.
Genocide Cannot Be An Afterthought
From Linda Sarsour (above), a Palestinian-American community organizer. Re-posted from social media (4/5/2025).
A call in post.
Liberals & national orgs, don’t make the same mistakes over and over and over again and expect different results.
You cannot demand Hands Off Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security/Free speech/etc without also demanding the end to the genocide of the Palestinian people. While our neighbors suffer and can’t meet their basic needs, this government AIDED by Democrats just sent ANOTHER $8.8B to an apartheid regime to annihilate the Palestinians. Genocide cannot be an afterthought. Can’t be something “mentioned”. It has to be core to a movement. It’s the backdrop. It’s the theme. What more needs to happen? How much more complicit do we need to be?
What part of – you cannot separate your domestic demands while your country is aiding and abetting a full blown livestream genocide right now do we not understand? It’s one fight. One struggle.
We have to be intentionally in this together or we will all lose.
MLK was a Radical
By Dr. Cornel West, written seven years ago for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968), originally posted in The Guardian
The major threat of Martin Luther King Jr to us is a spiritual and moral one. King’s courageous and compassionate example shatters the dominant neoliberal soul-craft of smartness, money and bombs. His grand fight against poverty, militarism, materialism and racism undercuts the superficial lip service and pretentious posturing of so-called progressives as well as the candid contempt and proud prejudices of genuine reactionaries. King was neither perfect nor pure in his prophetic witness – but he was the real thing in sharp contrast to the market-driven semblances and simulacra of our day. Continue reading “MLK was a Radical”
The Migrant Trail
A compelling offering from The Migrant Trail, a spiritually diverse, multi-cultural group who walk together on a journey of peace to remember people, friends and family who have died, others who have crossed, and people who continue to come.
The Machinery of a Functioning Conscience
From Omar El-Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025).
Fallow Trees and Falling Cities
A sermon from Jim Perkinson on Luke 13:1-9 (March 23, 2025 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI)
13 There were some present at that very time who told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? 3 I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. 4 Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Silo′am fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”
6 And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. 7 And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Lo, these three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down; why should it use up the ground?’ 8 And he answered him, ‘Let it alone, sir, this year also, till I dig about it and put on manure. 9 And if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’” (Lk 13:1-9)
You know me, always trying to get down under the meaning, looking for an unforeseen seed going on journey in the soil, suddenly bursting unanticipated from below ground. Well, it happened here. In today’s text We read our bibles in English. Which translates the ancient Latin (Vulgate). Which translates the Greek. Which translates the Aramaic. Which translates the Hebrew. We are more than four times removed, more than four cultures out of sync with the text. We can’t really get back there in any pristine form but can at least muse. Let some things happen with images that provoke consternation or amusement! So come with me for a minute.
Our indigenous teacher, Martín Prechtel is always telling us, “Pay attention to the etymology, to the sequence of meanings that a given word harbors over time.” Underneath this word right here, that seems mundane and boring to you, there is an older meaning, and under it an even older meaning, and then another and another and another. Follow the root of the word back and down and ultimately you come out in place that is likely ancestral and indigenous and very different than here in the seemingly “ordinary” sense the word now conveys. There are ancestors and grand mysteries up inside many of our words, but deep under their present appearance and sound—like the hair on the side of a root of a mushroom under the soil, leading into a network as wide as an entire forest.
Continue reading “Fallow Trees and Falling Cities”The Truth they Tried to Bury
From Hossam Shabat, who was murdered in Gaza a few days ago by the IOF.
Radical Discipleship 