Indigenous Australians threaten to shut down Uluru

BFP reported on Australian PM John Howard’s proposed alcohol and pornography bans and increased police presence to “combat child sexual abuse” among Aboriginal Australians. Paternalism at its very finest. She’s also linked to some of the reasons child molestation and crime in general is such a major problem in Aboriginal communities in Australia.

And Fire Fly reported that Australia is attempting to reestablish boarding schools for Aboriginal children, because that went so well for the Stolen Generation, and proposals to take over indigenous towns and dump nuclear waste on Aboriginal lands.

Well, it turns out that indigenous Australians don’t think much of these plans. Spotted via getaway:

Aboriginal elders are threatening to ban tourists from one of Australia’s landmarks over a plan to curb child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities.

…

The government’s measures include a six-month ban on pornography and alcohol in the Northern Territory, where evidence of sex abuse was found.

It also includes compulsory (invasive) medical checks for Aboriginal children.

…

“What the prime minister and his minister, Mal Brough, are proposing is in the view of the combined Aboriginal organisations in Alice Springs totally unworkable,” said their spokesman Pat Turner.

“We believe that this government is using child sexual abuse as the Trojan horse to resume total control of our lands.”

Some of the fiercest criticism has come from Mutitjulu, a township in the shadow of Uluru, the iconic red rock in central Australia visited by some half a million people each year.

Mutitjulu leader Vince Forrester said Uluru’s traditional owners are considering a civil disobedience campaign that would include a ban on climbing the rock. [Full story]

Good. Whether it’ll work or not, who knows. But it’s clear that the Australian government needs to discuss and plan the proper response to the child molestation report with Aboriginal leaders and the Aboriginal community, not unilaterally decide how to “punish” the community while secretly planning how to screw them some more in the interim.

First of Jena Six: Convicted

Dr. Elle’s cousin brings the bad news that “Mychal Bell has been convicted of second degree aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit the same. He faces up to 30 years in prison.” (Here.)

30 years for a high school fistfight in which no one was seriously injured, convicted by an all-white jury. I don’t know what to say about that.

EDIT: TOM’S PETITION IS READY TO SIGN HERE.

Eight things you might have known about me

Blame Dr. Elle. *grin*

Rules:
- I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
- Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
- People who are tagged need to write their own blog post about their eight things and post these rules.
- At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
- Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Random Facts:
1. The thing I hate most about having vertigo isn’t that I get dizzy and disoriented, but that I can no longer drink because even one wine cooler makes it about 50 times worse.
2. I like movies with bittersweet or sad endings way better than happy ones. I won’t go see the happy ones in the movie theater unless someone makes me. I’ll wait until they come out on video.
3. Sometimes I think that if I just believed hard enough, I could move things with my mind and walk through walls, and my skepticism is the only thing that stops me. (The rest of the time I feel like a total geek.)
4. I ought to be doing homework right now, because I have a lesson plan and two papers due by Monday, but I’m a terrible procrastinator and probably won’t do anything but the lesson plan before Sunday night.
5. I don’t think I do enough to help people.
6. One of my favorite words is “fuck.” I just love the sound of it and it looks so pretty when I say it. I wish it weren’t a “bad” word so I could use it more. And, much as I liked “Donnie Darko,” “cellar door” is one of the uglier phrases I’ve seen. I overuse quotes, parentheses and emdashes.
7. I cannot tell left from right and have never been able to. This makes giving directions extremely confusing. I can read maps perfectly, though.
8. Every time I go to the Bay Area, I hope for an earthquake. Not a major one that collapses bridges and kills people or anything (I lived in the Bay Area during the ‘89 quake and it was scary and sad) but one that’s just long enough and large enough to make you wonder if it’s going to be the “Big One.” If I didn’t hate chemistry more than anything in the world — I was once literally thankful to have agonizing cramps from food poisoning because I got to miss a day of chem class — I would have been a geologist just to study earthquakes, volcanos and sinkholes, because I think they’re fascinating.

Tagged: If you’re reading this entry and you haven’t done this yet, consider yourself tagged (because I can’t remember who has and who hasn’t, and need to submit an abstract and go to bed now).

The Jena Six go to trial

A lot of people have been hitting my blog for information on the Jena Six. I’m not writing much about them at the moment for various reasons, but mainly because Dr. Elle and the AfroSpear are both running updates on trial information and have better access to info than I do at the moment.

One thing of note: Dr. Elle found in Alexandria Town Talk that Mychal Bell, one of the defendents, will be tried by an all-white jury, which is somewhat suspicious, all you guys who keep insisting to me that there’s no such thing as racism in Jena.

One other thing: Tom at Automatic Preference has been working on the petition some more, and has version five up, which is nearly ready to go. Go check it out, and hopefully it’ll be ready to sign soon.

These stories are not getting much play on the newswires; please write to your newspapers and ask them to run stories about the trials, or ask to write a column covering the trial information, or something. Demand creates a supply when it comes to the AP.

Though I see on CNN that Liz Claiborne has just died, so between that and Paris getting out of the slammer, don’t expect any real news of any kind at all for the next three days or so.

Immigration update: Former city councilwoman to be deported

A former city councilwoman of Adelanto, Calif., Zoila Meyer, a 40-year-old mother who has lived in the U.S. since she was one, may be deported. Her crime? Listening to her parents when they told her she was a naturalized citizen.

After Meyer was elected to the council in Adelanto in 2004, someone told officials that she was born in Cuba, prompting an investigation.

Eventually, ‘the police came to me and said, ‘Zoila, you’re not a citizen. You’re a legal resident but you’re not a citizen,” said Meyer, who now lives in the San Bernardino County desert town of Apple Valley, near Adelanto.

She resigned after 10 weeks in office in Adelanto, a town of about 23,000.

Meyer, whose story was first reported in the Victorville Daily Press, applied to become a naturalized citizen and continued with her life: raising her children and attending two local colleges to earn degrees toward her goal of working in the justice system as a forensic nurse.

However, because she was not a citizen, Meyer faced a felony charge of illegally voting in the 2004 election.

In April 2006, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent voting and was placed on probation, fined and ordered to pay restitution. [Full story]

However, fraudelent voting is a deportable offense, and Meyer was arrested and jailed for it.

The story itself is only remarkable in that this time it is a former city councilwoman and not a meat packer, farm worker, plastics worker or leather stitcher being deported. However, Meyer has found out the hard way, as Yadirlin Jimenez and Pedro Guzman did, that to ICE, you’re just another non-white person who isn’t a real American, and they’ll get rid of you at the first opportunity.

‘To be honest with you, I’m scared. How can they just pluck me out of my family, my kids?’ the 40-year-old mother of four said in a telephone interview Friday.

‘If they can do this to me, they can do it to anybody,’ she said.

…

‘It makes me feel like we’re all just numbers,’ she said of her case. ‘I see people writing ‘this is my country.’ It really isn’t. It belongs to the government and they decide who stays and who goes …. You think you’re free; you’re really not.’

And there are those who remember history

Ninotchka Rosca’s blog entry Stories We Were Told, Stories We Will Tell is amazing. She explores the idea of constructed histories and obliterated memories and links things all together, in a way that’s both fascinating and inspiring.

I spent much of my undergraduate career thinking about the old adage that history is written by the winners, and exploring how the “revisionists” and revitalists are turning that on its head. In many cases, it’s like Rosca says: The account survives, but in the face of another, stronger account being forced on people, it dwindles and comes close to disappearing. In some cases, people manage save the story and use it as a rallying point. In others, it disappears entirely, unremembered forever.

How many stories, how much of human history, has been lost or warped because the memories of a colonized people were replaced in an instance of historical imperialism? How many times have people been robbed of their identity at the hands of their colonizers?

History is identity. All of us are shaped by the histories of our people and our ancestors, and by the histories of the places we live. It’s not the dead past, but a living influence on the modern world, a current event, and it can be changed by those who want to retain power, or remembered by those who have been robbed of power. It can be used as a rallying point to try to change the heirarchy and structure of the world.

As Rosca points out, remembering the stories as they happened can inspire people to social revolution and the reclaiming of something thought lost. Remembering the stories as they happened and not the history remembered (and often twisted or created from whole cloth) by the “winners” is not an act of revisionism. It’s an act of rebellion.

Why women are afraid to step forward

There was a big scuffle in one of my LiveJournal communities two or three months ago when several people insisted that rape and domestic violence victims have absolutely nothing to fear in going to the police and pressing charges. No one would do anything to them.

There are women in the news all the time, women who were killed for speaking out in court against their rapists, women who were killed despite an order of protection against abusive ex-partners. People who argue that are entirely out of touch with reality.

Here’s another case they’ll probably ignore.

A woman had the word “snitch” burned into her face with a branding iron in apparent retaliation for helping police in a domestic violence case, authorities said.

The brand singed into her flesh during a June 13 attack is 4 to 6 inches long and stretches across her left cheek from lip to earlobe, Mesa police Sgt. Chuck Trapani said Friday.

“Obviously, they were trying to send a message to her, and they were obviously trying to humiliate her,” Trapani said.

Trapani declined to identify the 38-year-old woman. He said the woman had not returned calls relaying interview requests from the news media.

The woman told police she was attacked by four people, including an acquaintance whose Mesa apartment she was visiting, Trapani said. That acquaintance, Preston L. Valdez, 21, told police the woman was smoking methamphetamine with him shortly before the attack.

The woman said the three others who attacked her were hiding in the bedroom, Trapani said. She said they came out, knocked her unconscious, then cut and shaved large swaths of her hair and branded her, Trapani said. She was treated at a hospital and released.

Two of those who attacked the woman James H. Standridge, 34, and, Jackie L. Getz, 26 were arrested in a domestic violence case in February 2006 after the woman answered officers’ questions about them. The police investigation later led to the removal of a child from the home because drug paraphernalia was found there. [Full story]

This is absolutely horrifying to me, and yet I can’t say it completely shocks me. May the men who attacked her get what they deserve and not the slap on the wrist that keeps telling society that violence against women is fine and dandy.

Found via Egotistical Whining.

Teaching multiculturalism in a monocultural area

One of my classmates works in a school where she estimates that about 95 percent of the students are white and of the same cultural background. However, she wants to give her students a more “multicultural” education and inclusive point of view, and she’s looking for activities outside of reading/writing that will help kids get a sense of other cultures.

Suggestions from the class so far:
- Culture days, where students choose a culture and bring in food, music, games, clothing, etc. from that culture
- Guest speakers to come in and talk about growing up in a non-U.S. culture, or growing up a person of color in U.S. culture
- Assign stories, reading, art, etc. from other cultures and countries
- Assign each student a country and have them do a multimedia presentation on that country and its culture
- Teach students how to greet people and introduce themselves in other languages
- Teach about other dialects of American English spoken in the U.S.
- Christmas all over the world
- Don’t tokenize students of color or put them on the spot to be cultural guides; let them offer

What are some other ideas? Right now she’s a long-term sub at a middle school, but she also occasionally teaches high school classes, and she will be teaching at a high school once we complete the certification program, I think. (There’s a focus on language for the class because it’s an English immersion workshop. Language-related suggestions are especially appreciated.)

Also, for my own nefarious purposes, what are some good songs (traditional or contemporary from any country or area of the U.S.) that would be useful to introduce students to music other than Top 40? Songs about historical or current events and protest songs are preferred, but anything is useful.

I’m not saying what I have already, because when I don’t, sometimes people suggest things in genres I think I have covered that leads me on a downloading spree, and when I do, people say, “Oh, well, if you have [blank] covered, I don’t know what to suggest.”

Allied Media Conference

Today the Allied Media Conference starts in Detroit. Sadly, I am not there.

However, the following people are, and some of them are liveblogging it:
- BFP of Women of Color Blog
- Nadia of No Snow Here
- Sudy of A Womyn’s Ecdysis
- Black Amazon of Having Read the Fine Print…
- Yolanda Carrington of The Primary Contradiction
- Fabiola of Fabulosa Mujer

Yay for liveblogging! Otherwise I’d be superjealous.

EDIT: Nadia has posted, and Sudy and BFP both have several posts up from the AMC. Sudy has photos! Already!

EDIT II: *steals from Kai*

Alexis and Jasmine of UBUNTU! and Noemi Martinez of Hermana, Resist are also at AMC, but sadly do not appear to be blogging it. Yet, anyway.

On that note, what happened to Please Professor Black Woman? I know she was trying to get to AMC too, but now her blog is gone.

EDIT III: BFP has an updated list of AMC bloggers here.

Immigration Update: 81 arrested in Pennsylvania

Another immigration raid, this time in the Poconos, outside Allentown, Pennsylvania.

All the workers arrested Tuesday at Iridium Industries Inc.’s Artube division have been placed in removal proceedings for eventual deportation, said Ernestine Fobbs, a spokeswoman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

She declined to say what led to the raid. The East Stroudsburg company on the New Jersey border about 70 miles north of Philadelphia makes plastic tubes for lotions and other consumer products, according to its Web site.

The arrested immigrants, from Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia and Ecuador, were taken to detention centers for processing, Fobbs said. [Full story]

Anyone know of any action being taken in the area? I did a Google search but couldn’t find much, since I don’t know any of the organizations out there.

EDIT: Oh, and while I’m at it, ICE has told Yadirlin Hiraldo, the wife of Army Spc. Alex Jimenez who was one of the three soldiers kidnapped in Iraq last month, that because she entered the country illegally to be reunited with her husband, she will be deported and barred from applying for a green card for 10 years. They found out she was in the country when she and her husband applied for a green card and legal residence for her. Story is here.

Fucking nice. It’s not just Pinoy veterans who get screwed over by the government on immigration. Apparently, people who are currently suffering for Bush’s War on Terror are fair game, too, if they’re brown. (And yes, it’s racist. I don’t see any raids in San Francisco or Boston “rounding up” people with last names like Connelly, Sullivan, O’Brien, Maguire and Bergin, do you? ICE arrests the Asians and Latinos, while Ted Kennedy makes an amnesty bill for the Irish — the only reason it applied to everyone is because a vocal, organized group of undocumented Irish immigrants in San Francisco insisted on amnesty for everyone. Kennedy originally offered to create a bill for Irish amnesty only.)