Portside

The struggle over history, from Wounded Knee to Thanksgiving to ICE detentions, is not a debate about the past. It is a struggle over who defines America and whose humanity matters.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of a historic event in Native America, the action at Wounded Knee. What was its significance, and why it still resonate with Native peoples. How it connects with the resistance at the Dakota Access Pipeline.

We didn’t stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, but nonetheless, it was a win. It was part of a longer struggle to radically transform our carbon economy, our extractivist economy.

Reader Comments: Bank Failures, GOP DeRegulation; Pentagon Budget; MAGA in Office Bans Books, Not Guns; Workers and Their Unions; AI, False Promise of ChatGPT; Triangle Shirtwaist Anniversary; Ending the Vietnam War; Rosenberg Case 70 Years Later;

50 ago the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee with the goal of changing the way the Oglala Sioux governed themselves. AIM also sought to raise the profile of Native Americans -- Wounded Knee was the scene of one of the nation’s worst massacres of Sioux children, women and men near the end of the 19th Century.

The Academy formally apologized to the Native American activist and former actress in June after she was blacklisted for representing the actor at the 1973 Academy Awards.

Bellecourt and the American Indian Movement taught us that colonizing society is weak because of its sense of superiority. It has God, guns, and gold, but its soft underbelly is glory. 

Does the United States have a homeland? Is it truly a nation? Or is it still just a colony that exists to exploit the homelands of other peoples?

Race and class after Trump, and more reports on the shifting consensus