The first comes from the Chinook tribe in Washington. They need a new headquarters, inland and away from the rising river and the danger of tsunamis. And the government just closed the Naselle Youth Camp, a juvenile justice facility in a remote corner of the state. The state has no use or plans for the facility--it's not conveniently located for anything the government might want to do, which is part of why it was closed--and so the land and buildings are just sitting there. They're on Chinook land, and would be great for a new headquarters for the tribe. So the tribe has a petition to the  Washington State Government & Tribal Relations Committee to give them their land back, which you can sign here.



The second petition is a widget to email your Senators and Representative to urge the US Senate to reintroduce the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act (S.1723) and urge the House to also introduce it. Yes, this link is to a Christian group, but it is easy to use because it will figure out the correct contact information for you. You can easily delete the two references to faith in the letter before you send it; if you are uncomfortable using it, I encourage you to contact your Senators and Congressperson some other way.

sathari gave a little blurb in thisfinecrew about happenings in Ohio, and specifically how the special election in August is going to be a critical one. If you or someone you know is from Ohio, make sure the August 8th election is on your radar!

Republican lawmakers in the state of Ohio are playing a bit fast and loose with efforts to support redistricting reform and abortion rights: they have passed an amendment to the state's constitution to make it harder for voters to pass constitutional amendments (like one that's being considered to make abortion a right in their state constitution) and they are hiding it in a special election on August 8th, where they hope voter turnout will be low to begin with. Here's a nice explanation from dailykos. And you may remember the Hope Springs from Fields folks from a previous post of mine, but they're kicking off canvassing for the 2024 election cycle in Ohio, which may also be relevant to the August election.

The US and Canada have a horrifying history of enacting cultural genocide (and sometimes physical genocide) by removing Native American/First Nations/Alaska Native children from their families, first to residential schools and then to put them in white families. In the US, this was mostly stopped by the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, which said that if Native American children were removed from their families they needed to be placed with other Native American families. ICWA is being challenged in the Supreme Court as we speak, and the Trump-packed Supreme Court is highly likely to overturn it.

This would be a disaster. However, it could be mitigated by legislation at the state level. The Lakota Law Project has a widget for you to email your state Governor and state legislators asking them to put in place state laws to protect Native American children should ICWA fall.

A lot of people on the left don't like the Democrats because the vast majority of Dems aren't left, they're solidly center, and there aren't any true leftists you can vote for. And it's really discouraging when you have a choice between someone you don't like and don't agree with or someone who's actively evil. It's not exciting or happy-making to choose from the lesser of two evils, especially when that's the choice every election.

(This post, by the way, is not for people who are the victim of voter-suppression tactics who can't vote for one reason or another; this is a post for people who can vote and choose not to.)

Here's the thing. If we ever want there to be actual leftist politicians in the US, if we want to move the Democrats to the left or create a new leftist party that actually is large enough to get shit done on a national level, then we have to vote now, reliably, every election, even if it's only for the lesser of two evils.

Politicians don't give a crap about what citizens want. They care deeply about what voters want.

Let me say that again: Politicians don't give a crap about what citizens want. They care deeply about what voters want.

( This is not because all politicians are evil or whatever. This is because even the most ideologically pure person ever can only accomplish anything in politics if they get elected. And then get re-elected. )

South Dakota hasn't been complying with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (aka the "Motor Voter Act"), and doing so in a way that disenfranchised Native voters, especially those who lived on reservations, more than any other group. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Oglala Sioux Tribe, Lakota People’s Law Project, and individual voters sued them, and they just won! South Dakota now has to fix their voter registration process so it complies with the NVRA, and they have to cover all the court costs of the groups and people that sued them.

thisfinecrew posted: S.2992

There is a bill in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, S.2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. It has bipartisan support, and is meant to Regulate Big Tech. Bloomberg has an overview with helpful graphics, and I have already contacted both my senators to ask them to support it, as they are not co-sponsors (my text below the cut for your use!). There is a similar bill in the House which I have not read as yet.

The above link has a script for what to say on the phone with your senator.

There is currently an act before the senate, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act, which would establish a commission to investigate past injustices of the federal government's cultural genocide and assimilation practices through its Indian Boarding School policy.

If you would like to contact your senators about it, the ELCA (a Christian denomination) has a widget that will email them for you. It is quick and easy to use, and easy to edit out the religious bits if you wish.

Currently, in the US, federal law allows disabled people to be paid sub-minimum wages under certain conditions. That's right, disabled people can be paid less than the minimum wage, and it's perfectly legal! This exception was carved out of the minimum wage back when it was first implemented, because obviously nobody would ever be willing to pay disabled people a living wage, amirite? And they should be grateful to have any job at all, amirite? 😱

There is currently a bill before congress called the The Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act (TCIEA), which would end the discriminatory practice of subminimum wage, and give states and service providers the resources they need to create better employment support programs.

If you would like to contact your members of congress to encourage them to support TCIEA, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has a handy widget to help you email them.

The US Capitol in Washington DC has a Statuary Hall where each state gets two statues, chosen by the state in question. One of Washington state's two statues was of Oregon Trail pioneer and missionary and colonizer Marcus Whitman. The state legislature just voted--with bipartisan support!--to replace that statue with a statue of Billy Frank Jr, a Native American activist for treaty rights and environmental protection. It's an awesome achievement, and I'm proud of my state, but I find the way they did it interesting. Because it did have bipartisan support! Yes, many Republicans voted to replace an old white colonizer with an indigenous person!

But that's not how the people pushing for it framed the discussion. They never once breathed anything against Whitman. The movement to change the statue focused on Frank, and what a great guy he was, and how much he changed things, and shouldn't he be honored, etc., etc. Frank died a few years ago, just long enough to get a rosy glow in peoples' memories but not long enough ago to be forgotten. And when Whitman came up, oh, it was nothing against him, it's just, isn't Frank a more modern symbol of our state? And wouldn't it be nice if Whitman's statue could come home to the Walla Walla valley to a museum near where he lived?

(Of course, the thing is, that museum already HAS a copy of that statue, and it gets regularly vandalized by locals who hate the guy and his legacy and want the museum to change how it tells the story of white colonization of Washington, but that little detail mysteriously never got brought up in legislative and news discussions of the bill to change statues.)

And that's how they got the Republicans to support replacing a white colonizer with a Native American activist.

So, like most states, Washington had a law on the books that made possessing certain "hard" drugs a felony. If any are found in your possession--in your clothing, in your house, in your car, in your bag, whatever--that's an automatic felony. And it's the basis of a TON of the current prison-industrial complex, because it's leverage they can use. For example, while there's no way of knowing what percentage of felony drug charges are based on drugs the cops planted so they'd be able to get someone to testify against someone the cops wanted evidence against, we know that it can and does happen. It's easy for the cops, and there's pretty much no defense against it.

As of February 25, that is no longer the case in Washington state. The State Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional, because it is based on a presumption of guilt. Instead of "innocent until proven guilty" it's "guilty until proven innocent." The case that was decided this way was about a woman who was visiting a friend when the cops showed up at the door. She put on pants to go open the door; the pants belonged to the person she was staying with. Cops searched her, and found illegal narcotics in her pocket. She didn't put them there, she owned neither the pants nor the drugs, but she was the one charged with felony possession because according to the law, nothing matters except the fact that they were in the pocket of pants she was wearing, therefore she is the one to go down for it. And so the State Supreme Court struck down the law.

I read an article about this in the local paper with lots of quotes from the county sherriff about how terrible this is and how it's going to destroy their ability to police the community and how many people are being released with charges dropped because all they had on them was possession and also there's going to be a huge spike in drug use.

Me: ... the only one of these things that sounds like a problem is the predicted spike in drug use, and that's something that the cops shouldn't be handling in the first place, that should be handled by social services.

Now, the state legislature could of course write a new bill that criminalizes felony drug use but is written differently and doesn't presume guilt, but it's too late in the current legislative session for that to happen this year, so it'll be next year at the very earliest before anything could be done. And, you know, instead of defending the status quo, the people trying to criminalize it will at that point be changing the status quo. It should be easier to defeat any such hypothetical bill than it would have been to get the old one repealed.