All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

‘Whitewashed’: how gentrification continues to erase LA’s bold murals

Occupiers the same globally. Tries to wipe indigenous people from history and culture. Ultimately, it will not work but will cause years of tension and reactions harmful to both communities.

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The artwork in the Highland Park area told the story of its history and culture – until newcomers decided to wipe it out

Kathy Gallegos remembers the first time she saw John “Zender” Estrada’s striking mural of an Aztec warrior flanked by two eagles. She was parking behind a music venue in Highland Park, a heavily Latino working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and couldn’t help noticing the bold imagery of a piece that Zender had painted in the wake of the 1992 riots to urge ordinary Angelenos to “resist violence with peace”.

“I remember thinking, that’s a really nice mural,” Gallegos recalled. “Next thing I knew, the place was bought and it was gone.”

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Dear White People: You have treaty rights, too

Wayne Ducheneaux

Wayne L. Ducheneaux II, executive director of the Native Governance Center, recalled being in a room with a mix of indigenous and non-indigenous people, and the moderator asked: “Would everyone with treaty rights raise your hands.”

“Every Indian’s hand shot up and every non-Indian’s hand stays down,” he recalled.

It’s an icebreaker Ducheneaux now uses to open a discussion about how everyone has treaty rights, non just Indians. “It’s just that those rights are vested differently,” he said.

For tribal nations, treaty rights are about reserving a place to live and the right to self determination, he said. “Non Indian people have treaty rights as well. Their vesting is their ability to occupy space that tribal nations vacated.”

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When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice | Sonia Sodha

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As we watch the Harvey Weinstein trial unfold, other horror stories emerge in our own courts

Harvey Weinstein is at last facing justice in a New York courtroom. As I hear in graphic detail the accounts of the women he allegedly raped and sexually assaulted, it’s hard to stop myself imagining what I would do if a 21-stone man suddenly reappeared naked and lunged at me after manipulating me to accompany him to his hotel room on false pretences. Scream? Fight back? Try to escape?

It’s impossible to tell unless you find yourself there. Our body’s response to acute danger is not rational: it releases a flood of hormones that trigger an automatic response over which the thinking part of our brain has little control. For decades, that response was understood as fight or flight. But that was a highly gendered understanding developed as a result of tests primarily done on men. (Women were considered too complicated as test subjects because of the hormone fluctuations associated with our menstrual cycles.)

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