Symbol and Essence, Part 3 [MTV Mix]

A BLOG POST exclusive to MTV (as it must be, contractually) can be read by clicking the image above. No video this week. But a specially-crafted Non-Super Wednesday message instead.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican, Culture Kitchen, and OpEdNews.

Because Dreaming is Not Enough (Vlog 1-23-08)

CLICK the pic to the left to find yourself magically transported to a page hosting my latest MTV Street Team '08 video, which was shot in Eugene, Oregon at a Martin Luther King Jr. rally and march on January 21, 2008.

All shooting, editing, and sleeplessness by Nezua.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican, Corrente, and Culture Kitchen.

Christmas for a Wounded, Pretty Bird

YOU MAY RECALL, I posted a request for Olbermann last week or so, passing on the wish/hope/dream that one person in the Native American comunidad expressed for a greater level of exposure of their particular need. That need was that a home be bought, a refuge home for Native American women who have been victimized and have nowhere to go, especially as the law is arranged in such a way that there is very little protection or recourse for them in these times they would need such a shelter.

My request for Olbermann's platform was that he highlight this case because it represents an epidemic in the reservations. And because, well, face it. He has a large, virile platform. I know I can't take my eyes off it. And more importantly, who the hell are we to ignore the pains and suffering of the Native American community? Don't make me point to one of my dreaded "brown" diatribes! (Damn, I did it anyway!)

Unfortunately, Olbermann did not respond to the plea I passed on, nor the charge I made that his comments were getting a bit "frothy" except for a week later with a sudden explanation and defense of his much-needed and "vociferous" Special Comments. (Keep the faith, baby, estoy de acuerdo). And hey, okay. I knew the chances were slim. But really, this ain't about Keith, and we know that. And it's not about the way some issues are highlighted in Big Media and some are never really seen (well, okay, it is, a bit). Primarily, and today, this is about the women in the reservations. And really, helping them doesn't have to have anything at all to do with the past. Because here in the Now, people—people just like you or your mama—are hurting. And have nowhere to go. And guess what? Last time I posted on this, many of you chipped in and we helped bring these women $1500 closer to their goal. That is a real world effect of your actions. I thank you. And so do others.

I think one of the biggest problems is that there are not words to truly convey how we feel. I remember one day last spring, while we were having a Meeting, Georgia brought the mail and handed each of us a stack, telling us to start opening it. Betsy, in less than 10 minutes, I was holding a little under $15,000 in my hand! For Pretty Bird Woman House! I couldn't speak; we just looked at one another and cried.

Our vision, our dreams for the women of Standing Rock....it's happening and it is happening because of folks the likes of yourself, Norman, your colleagues, and all of the caring folks out there who believe and want to make a difference in the world.

—Letter from a Pretty Bird Woman House Board Member

Today there is a little blogpush to try and help the women of Standing Rock Reservation meet their financial goal, which of course, meets so many other larger important goals just in doing so. Like actually having that house and helping countless people in the future. Right now they have enough to have bid on the home, but are still a bit short for having enough to buy it. We are 65% of the way there. And the importance of this shelter existing is still 100% relevant today.

A frightened woman on the Standing Rock Reservation feels her pregnant belly and checks the weather. It’s below freezing. Should she stay and get beaten again or flee? There’s no money for a hotel. She can’t stay but she can’t risk the lethal cold.

She has called Pretty Bird Woman House women’s shelter, but their building was destroyed by arson.

—Write the Christmas story for Pretty Bird Woman House

You can also help by commenting and recommending this post, if you have the proper account. But even if you have no account, I ask you to at least read that post for a well detailed account of why helping now is so important.

Gracias to all generous souls during this time of year and in regards to this effort, and all others at all times. Security and fear and borders and missiles and sanctions are all good and well. But it is generosity that has a better chance of saving our kind than anything else, I think.

And as a final comment, Keith, I still love you. Really, I just want the best for you and your historical image. Remember that.


Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Culture Kitchen, and Corrente.

Pretty Bird Woman House

OLBERMANN, I already know you read me, dawg. Stop LYIN'. And we all know you are down with tha populace, and have been a beacon of hope to many of the voiceless. You have put that pretty mug in front of the camera and scoffed forth many important statements on many crucial topics. (The War on Billoism is fun to watch, too.) So yeah. We're in this together, and even tho you iz da elite, you have positioned yourself in the endzone of social justice lately. Please push your envelope (sorry to abandon the football metaphor, I roused it in your honor, but I just feel too damn corny to continue), let's get that Olbermann® brand up there with the hardcore truth-to-powers, let's get all Historical on their asses. Let's bring attention to an epidemic of violence and poverty among those who have already suffered too much at the hands of this nation's "development" (forgive the gross euphemism, indigenous friends, I'm trying to butter up Olbermann sssh).

Keith, you and I don't need to quibble at the ubiquity of violence that seeks women in our culture. We know it is a reality. And in the American Indian Reservations, this violence flourishes in disproportionate numbers. And consequences for those who would harm these women—as well as protection and justice—withers, caught between indifference, legal complications, and/or hostility. There are at least shelters on-rez for them. It's not a cure. But it is something. A place to go to be safe, to learn, to find some comfort and figure out what to do next.

Except when there is no money for such a place. Then, where could these women hope to find help?

The Story of Pretty Bird Woman House

Jackie Brown Otter created The Pretty Bird Woman House after the brutal rape and murder of her sister, whose Lakota name means Pretty Bird Woman.

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.

Making things worse, Standing Rock Reservation has a tiny police force to patrol all 2.3 million acres. At the time of the murder of Pretty Bird Woman, Standing Rock had only one police officer on duty during the night shift. As a result, it took over a day for anyone to even come out to start to investigate the disappearance.

Pretty Bird Woman House was in trouble. Its future existence was in doubt. Until grassroots internet activism began rallying support and dollars. If people continue to give, then the abused and desperate women of the Sioux Standing Rock Reservation will have a place to go when all else falls away for them (the new house is not bought yet, so all is not over). And this is inspiring, and very hopeful.

But this problem is not limited to this one reservation or house. Sadly, this is a massive ill affecting so many of those who once lived on this land without laws handed down from others, laws that don't even protect them. And women in their culture, as well as ours, still struggle for the most basic of human rights.

each rez has one

I've read about the help being given to PBWH and I also think Olbermann would be a good reporter if you can get him. The sad thing is that each and every rez in South Dakota has an under funded, desperate woman’s house that is struggling to survive on pitiful funds. Some on larger reservations where the needs are even greater, at least in numbers, than Cheyenne River.

Here where I live on Rosebud, the "White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman’s Society" is doing the same hard job on very limited resources. Tribes are doing what they can but with winter coming on they'll be spending their discretionary funds on heating needs. Private and foundation funding is hard to get and even harder to maintain for the long run, yet the needs are increasing with the population.

Welfare reform has been a disaster on the rez because the poverty is endemic in a population where 75% of the population is unemployed. We're seeing an epidemic of child suicides and other social ills all of which can be traced to the grinding poverty and its lack of a solution.

I hope someone like Olberman can use the PBWH to highlight the whole problem.

—I Want Olbermann to Cover Pretty Bird Woman House

So, Keith. This is the official Nezua Request Line ringing ya in hopes that you will cover Pretty Woman Bird House, and the violence against women, as well as the growing poverty problems in the Indian Reservations that this symbolizes. A whole slathering of justice to be done here. Come on, vato. I love your stuff, but honestly, anyone can rage on Bush. That's not daring anymore, it's pretty much hot fashion by now. (And it's beginning to feel a wee bit...frothy.) So shine that big ole light of yours into a corner where harm is doing its work in the dark.

And of course, we can always ask Keith ourselves.

Gracias, Señores y Señoras. And you too, Keith.

• Amnesty International Report-Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA
• Winter Rabbit's Journal
• Pretty Bird Woman House

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Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Culture Kitchen, and Corrente.

Hurricane of H.I.V.

AND WILL THEY SAY nobody could have foreseen the weakness of the levees?

For the first time, Washington D.C. has collected data on H.I.V. and found that in the nation's capital, the "modern epidemic"—as the Washington Post calls it—is now primarily one affecting blacks.

The numbers most starkly illustrate HIV's impact on the African American community. More than 80 percent of the 3,269 HIV cases identified between 2001 and 2006 were among black men, women and adolescents. Among women who tested positive, a rising percentage of local cases, nine of 10 were African American. [...]

The District's AIDS rate is the worst of any city in the country, nearly twice the rate in New York and more than four times the incidence in Detroit, and it has been climbing faster than that of many jurisdictions. [...]

—Study Calls HIV in D.C. A 'Modern Epidemic'; More Than 80 Percent Of Recent Cases Were Among Black Residents

And big propz must go to the woman who dares try and change the world, as well as shout out the truth as she lives and sees it:

In the nation's capital, a 24-year-old is helping to lead the fight against AIDS.

Nicole Styles is doing what she can to stop a major health-care crisis — an epidemic, even. This AIDS activist is stepping in where parents, educators and the government have failed, devoting her life to handing out condom kits and trying to persuade people to use them.

Styles is trying to save the lives of kids in the nation's capital, home to the worst HIV/AIDS rate in the country. One in 20 D.C. residents are infected with HIV, and in some neighborhoods, that number is as high as one in 10.

Styles thinks that when these staggering numbers were announced, a state of emergency should have been declared. Instead, she and many others in D.C. suspect that the government's seeming indifference is because 80 percent of those infected are black and most of the others are gay.

Styles believes that if the disease affected white heterosexuals at a rate of one in 20, the city and federal government would have more of a response.

'It would be all over the place. It wouldn't be difficult to obtain information about HIV and AIDS,'she said. 'You wouldn't have to have us standing on every corner trying to get the people, passing out stuff trying to let the community [know] about what's really happening'

Styles' anger and compassion motivated her to join the staff of Metro Teen AIDS, an activist group that offers free and confidential HIV testing and counseling services to youth.

—AIDS in DC, Turning Anger into Action

Before my mother became the Director of Public Health for an unnamed New York county, H.I.V. prevention (Infection Control) was her area. And it was her job to break this news to many people, too. I heard a lot about AIDS in this way, when I was younger.

When I think of Africa and how it has been exploited and divided and harmed for so long, I think too of the disgrace called the "US response to Hurricane Katrina." And when Katrina happened, I couldn't help but think of all the Bob Marley lyrics I grew up hearing every day of my young life, about blacks being crammed in slave ships, about people who work and live and die so that an economic giant like the U.S.A. can get its feet underneath it, and who are still living with so much hate and antagonism and resistance to their health. From many directions. Y también, I think of Hurricane Katrina, when I read about the lack of funding and attention given toward educating and helping the black community in the very capital of our nation.

There is no reason any one population—gays, blacks, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Chileans, Cubans, women, children—should be bearing the brunt of a disease or disaster or a hardship while the rest escape to firm ground. This type of inequality is a direct result of believing in some mystical "Us" and "Them" that will keep these ills from our own doorstep. I do not believe in that divide. I feel all the pains and horrors that come for any of us can come for all of us. (If this were not so, you wouldn't see sudden, unpredictable conversions among the GOP toward stem cell research, scuba outfits, etc.) And it hurts me and actually makes me furious to the point of getting teary to see how black people have been, since time immemorial, the group who bear the most brunt. From so many directions.

It should go without saying that we should all care about all of us. And further, that any HIV proliferation is a threat to all of us, everywhere. But the time has long past arrived for us all to stand and fight to make things better for those worse off than others. The poor, the gays, the hunted migrants, mujeres, blacks, the illiterate, the hungry, the voiceless. I do believe in working to thrive, and getting ahead, and succeeding. I made my bones up in this place, aqui, in the U.S.A.! But we must not hop on the first fast boat and flee far from the wreckage around us. We must look to save those in the deep tides, and we must stand with the most maligned and hunted of our species. In this way, and only in this way, can we hope to redeem our kind in the face of the deeds of the worst of us.

Don't give up the fight!
—Bob Marley

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nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez blogs as the unapologetic mexican, and is fishing for rainbow trout in the neighbor's porcelain birdfeeder.

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Culture Kitchen, and Corrente.