Melondrop > Recent Status Updates

Yet the settler anthropologist wants more evidence, more rationale, more comparison, more information, and more justification to feed itself on the unknown. It scavenges for barbarity to justify its own violent social urges: “this is how it’s been, this is why we dominate and destroy.”The living world is sacrificed and consumed on the altar of progress; this is the sacrament of Darwin.

“Tribal sovereignty” is not possible while colonial authority exists, and perhaps a more pressing concern is that it is fundamentally a colonial political concept. While calls to “honor the treaties” on one hand could be viewed as assertions of indigenous political authority, on the other, they are a myopic urge to revisit forced negotiations made under duress to benefit the colonial order.

Perhaps this is the US political machinery’s method of reducing harm or impact from effective social and environmental justice movements. If they can’t kill or imprison the organizers, then fold them into the bureaucracy or turn their struggles into businesses. At the end of the day, not everyone can be white supremacists, but everyone can be capitalists.

Just as our strongest medicines are those that are the most bitter, sometimes our greatest lessons are our deepest scars.

How is kinship established? It is not just the politics of common enemies and leftist unity; it is an anti-political recuperation of who and how we are, with each other and existence, in this world. Interrelationality compels us to turn our solidarities inward, to directly address how we are and how we are not relating in harmony with existence.

Frybread is also the perfect metaphor for colonial politics: it may help us survive for a moment but if we keep consuming it will ultimately kill us. Left and Right wing are two sides of the same piece of deep-fried dough.

To realize Land Back means to end the ways humans have profaned all of existence and imposed their will upon the land and reasserting that the land belongs to no one.

If we interrogate the promises of Land Back, we are brought back to an ancestral perspective that the land belongs to no-one but itself. Land Back then becomes a question of unmapping “legal” terrain, tearing down walls, and cutting through fences. It becomes an undoing of the forceful imposition of the capitalist idea of private property and…domination or dominion over mother Earth and existence.

If a Christian church and a sacred Mountain are intentionally destroyed, one is morally and judicially decried as terror while the other is considered progress. This is what is meant when we assert, “no justice on stolen lands.” Colonizer laws are constructed to benefit settler society.

Federal land management agencies’ inconsistent application of NEPA, varied interpretations of 13007, and view of consultation as a formality to be checkboxed, demonstrates the hostile design of the administrative architecture of “justice” for indigenous peoples lifeways relating to sacred lands.

It is said that when you spot a cluster of baobab trees it’s the sign a village once existed in that spot. I counted at least 13 clusters on the way to Gwolu, but all the other signs of life had perished. These islands of baobab, Shea butter, Locust Bean, and fig trees preserved the history of the stateless; they were the archive of the defeated.

…this was their food as the fish and animals and fruits and berries and seeds were ours. I began to weep at the beauty of this, to say a psalm that Fillan had once taught me praising the good God.

At once I knew that the movement of the blood within me was part of the same pattern that moved the sap in the oak tree to my right. The decay of the food in my stomach was the same as the autumn decay of the plants and trees. When Juniper and I shoveled Earth upon our human droppings, I knew that the flies and the little earth creatures fed upon them;

The energy of mindfulness—our spiritual practice body—helps us identify what kind of feeling is coming up and pushing us to run away. Solidly rooted in our mindful breathing, we realize we don’t need to run away. We don’t need to suppress our painful feelings. We see clearly what is going on inside and take the chance to stop, embrace our feelings, and start to truly take care of ourselves.

Maybe we turn to films, TV series, the Internet, or computer games, or we listen to music for hours on end. We think these things make us feel better, but as soon as we turn them off, we feel just as bad, if not worse, than we did before. It has become a habit to reach for the phone or computer and immerse ourselves in another world. We do it to survive. But we want to do more than just survive. We want to live.

One day with compassion is worth more than one hundred days without it.

When fear, craving, or desire comes up, we need to be able to recognize itwith mindfulness and smile to it with compassion. “Hello, fear; hello, craving.Hello, little child; hello, ancestors.” Following our breathing, and in the safeisland of the present moment, we transmit the energy of stability, compassion,and non-fear to our inner child and our ancestors.

Ghana 1957 after they won independence: “Vice President Nixon, who attended the ceremonies as the head of the US delegation, asked a group of jubilant young men, “How doors it feel to be free?” “We don’t know,” they replied. “We’re from Alabama.”

Unlike my grandparents, I thought the past was a country to which I could return. I refused the lesson of their lives, which in my arrogance I had misunderstood as defeat.

In Palestine, however, it is the immigrant community that decides the future of the indigenous people, not the other way around. (this is a weird quote, seeming to suggest that american 'citizens' are more legitimate than israeli 'citizens', which honestly undermines the entire argument....)

In Dec 2003, Binyamin Netanyahu recycled Ben-Gurion's 'alarming' statistics: 'If the Arabs in Israel fom 40% of the population,' Netanyahu said, 'this is the end of the jewish state.' 'But 20% is also a problem,' he added. 'If the relationship with these 20% becomes problematic, the state is entitled to employ extreme measure.' He did not elaborate.

Not only in Israel, but also in the US and Europe, people genuinely concerned about the Palestine question needed to be reminded that this conflict was not just about the future of the Occupied Territories, but that at its heart are the refugees Israel had cleansed from Palestine in 1948. This was an even more formidable task after Oslo, because then it had seemed that the issue had simply been pushed aside...

In other words, as these areas (West Bank and Gaza) constitute only 22% of Palestine, Israel at one stroke reduced any peace solution to only a small part of the original Palestinian homeland. Not only that, it demanded - and continues to demand today - further territorial compromises...

The first of Israel's three guidelines - or rather, axioms - was that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had its origin in 1967: to solve it, all one needed was a agreement that would determine the future status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The true mission of the JNF, in other words, has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence.

There are also many fig and almond trees. Most Israelis think these are 'wild' figs or 'wild' almonds, as they see them in full bloom...heralding the beauty of spring. but these fruit trees were planted and nurtured by human hands. wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village still blossoming each year, these trees are all that remain.

In the new development town of Migdal Ha-Emek, the JNF did its utmost to try and cover the ruins of the Palestinian village Mujaydil, at the town's eastern entrance, with rows of pine trees, not a proper forest in this case but just a small wood. Such 'green lungs' can be found in many of Israel's development towns that cover destroyed Palestinian villages. (Qiryat Shemona over Khalsa, Ashkelon over Majdal, etc...)

When it set out to create nat'l parks on the sites of eradicated Palestinian villages, the decision as to what to plant was totally in the hands of the JNF. Almost from the start the JNF opted mainly for conifers instead of the natural flora indigenous to Palestine. In part this was an attempt to make the country look European, although this appears nowhere in any official document as a goal. (also for wood industry)

...A member of the committee was the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, who estimated the combined value of property 'left by the Arabs' at 100 million pounds.

But return or resettlement was not the only issue. There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the israeli authorities after may 1948. neither did israel's proposed policy of resettlement address the issue of Palestinian property now in israeli hands.