UC Berkeley Destroys Native American Sacred Site

BERKELEY, CA- University of California police moved in yesterday morning and cut many limbs and branches of a Redwood tree and cut down twelve Oak trees that have been protected by tree-sitting protesters for the last 21 months. Five people were arrested as they peacefully pleaded with arborists not to destroying the trees of the Memorial Oak Grove deemed a sacred burial site to Ohlone Indians.Twelve trees were cut today and the University says they will continue cutting 46 over the weekend. Four protesters remain in a single Redwood tree in the center of the grove. Arborists trimmed most of the branches from the Redwood tree occupied by the four remaining tree sitters. Cutting the branches made it virtually impossible for the tree sitters to move from tree to tree. A spokesman for the campus said that within three days, the University would no longer honor its agreement to ensure they had adequate nutrition and water. The tree sitters currently only have one liter of water to share between four people as they sit in 90 degree heat.

The Memorial Oak Grove is regarded as a sacred place to Native American people and is documented as such by UC Berkeley’s own Anthropology Department. There is evidence of 2 shell mounds sites in the area, with 19 ancestral remains found within them. Along with UC Berkeley’s attempt to develop on a sacred place, they are guilty of housing over 17,000 sacred remains and objects. UCB currently holds the largest human remains collection in the United States of which it is not in compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

“I brought my five year old daughter and two month old son out today to bear witness to the massacre of sacred life,” said Morning Star Gali of the Pit River Tribe and co-chair of Advocates to Protect Sacred Sites. “The cops responded by yelling to move them behind the median. I asked if they would stand by as complacent if it was their grandmother’ s gravesites being desecrated. I want my children here to witness the destruction of sacred life and how important it is to protect it. I wanted them to witness the cops, arborists and UC Officials that participated and cheered as the trees came crashing down from bulldozers. This exhibits the ongoing Human Rights abuses committed by the University. They refuse to comply with NAGPRA by holding 13,000 of our ancestors remains hostage, they illegally reorganized NAGPRA with no tribal consultation and now they continue to desecrate sacred burial grounds.”

The Memorial Grove is a native Coast Live Oak ecosystem. Native oaks support the most complex terrestrial ecosystems in California. The California Native Plant Society CNPS has stated that the Memorial Oak Grove is “an important gene bank for the Coast Live Oak.” Every one of the oaks in the grove should be protect by law and the Berkeley Coast Live Oak moratorium forbids cutting mature Coast Live Oaks in Berkeley. UC refuses to recognize the law. The grove is also part of a National Historic Site. The Stadium and landscape is a memorial to Californians who died in World War I.

The tree sitters are urging people to come and show support for the trees and bear witness to the University of California’s blatant disregard to sacred sites and native ecosystems.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/09/06/18533607.php

Italy Compensates Italy for Colonialism? Externalizing Injustice, Importing Rewards

Arising from the post on Italy’s decision to pay compensation to Libya for Italian colonial domination, a number of questions and issues come to mind:

1. Injustices were suffered by non-state nations, by ethnic groups, by “tribes” and by individuals. How is payment by the colonizing state to the “independent” state supposed to remedy those injustices?
2. The process also seems to fortify the central role of the state in human affairs, and more than that, it assumes that states in receipt of compensation will be fair in using the proceeds for the benefit of those who suffered.
3. A one-time pay off can imply non-recognition of the continuing inequalities between nations, between those in the centre and the periphery, and unequal capital accumulation.
4. Receipt of payment, by a state, implies continuing incorporation and adherence to a global capitalist state system.
5. As mentioned before, there is the problematic assumption that one can tally human suffering and translate it into a monetary figure.
6. Compensation also implies that the wrongs of colonialism have now been settled, and it ignores forms of continuing colonialism.
7. There is the paradox that by remembering history, and treating it as an account to be settled, an outstanding balance to be collected, that in the post-payment phase forgetting history is now sanctioned — why revisit old wrongs when amends have been made?
8. Compensation paid to another state externalizes the apology — what will a state such as Italy do to decolonize itself within, so that it learns the lessons of colonialism, and commits itself to never again dehumanizing, oppressing, and exploiting other people? Will a right winger like Silvio Berlusconi now lead anti-NATO marches shouting, “Hands Off Afghanistan?”

These are the questions that worry me about this compensation issue, aside from the calculated business moves that are veiled by what appears to be a cynical, false sense of remorse. When looking at compensation processes one has to think of actors, intentions, institutions and the context in which compensation occurs. What I think we are witnessing in the Italian case is a blunt, cold pragmatism that cares nothing at all for Libyan victims, and instead serves as one way that the dominant system produces its own apologia, excuses and legitimates itself in the process. The real outcome here is that Italy has compensated Italy.

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Calculating Colonial Injustice: Italy’s “Compensation” to Libya

As discussed previously on this blog, Italy has now finalized an agreement to pay Libya $5 billion (US) in compensation for colonial injustice. In some respects it represents more of a business plan motivated more by Italian strategic calculations than anything else:

the hefty dollar figure includes a large portion in investment projects that will benefit Italian companies, including a long planned major highway to link Algeria to Tunisia and Egypt. Gaddafi also announced that Italy will get preferential deals on his country’s oil and gas reserves, and threw in the return of an ancient Venus statue taken to Rome during colonial times as a sign of goodwill.

At the same, it could be a miscalculation, since it sets a precedent:

The agreement also sets an interesting new precedent. Italy also spent time in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, which may now demand similar compensation.

Former colonies of other European powers may have reason to study Libya’s deal. Algerian newspaper Liberte’, for instance, called on French President Nicolas Sarkozy to “take heed of the Italian example.” The paper L’Expression added that “genocide, torture and crimes against humanity most definitely existed in Algeria. They were the work of colonial France and its military contingent, and lasted 132 years.” Le Potential, a daily in Congo, sent a similar message to the Belgium government that once reigned in that country.

One has to wonder how the human social, cultural, and personal toll of colonial oppression can be translated into a dollar figure, and one that might be seen as rather small. Otherwise, I personally think that compensation is important symbolically and politically, and in some instances could be very useful economically. Other nations will be right to begin to press their cases for compensation, especially when in so many instances, the majority in fact, formal colonial rule ended only in the last 40 to 50 years, with a significant mass of humanity (even if not the majority) having been born as colonial subjects.

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Slavery Denial Will Be Next

Thanks to JW at Bobolee Chronicles for pointing me to this:

New York New York – Distorted words on Emancipation
Published on: 8/8/08.
BY TONY BEST

Some extracts from the article:

“SOMETIMES WE FORGET that our two major ethnic groups – Africans and British – first arrived on the same ship.”

Barbados’ Minister of Culture Steve Blackett used those words to articulate an interesting thesis: Emancipation celebrations in Barbados are for everyone, not simply people of colour.

“This,” he said of the Emancipation season, Crop-Over included, “must not be seen as being only for persons of African descent.”

…

…Blackett’s implied suggestion that because Blacks and Whites came on the same ship, there was some measure of equal status for the two ethnic groups.

…

Dr Kamau Brathwaite, historian, world-famous poet and a professor of literature at New York University, and Austin “Tom” Clarke, a Barbadian who is one of Canada’s most celebrated authors – who also taught writing and African history at several universities in the United States and Canada – have reacted negatively to Blackett’s statement. Clarke urged him to be “more precise” in his pronouncements.

“The relationship between the people arriving on those ships into Barbados was certainly not one of equality,” Clarke said. “The slave was kept penned up in darkened unsanitary holds below deck and the Whites were either the slave catchers, the slave owners, the seamen who had no respect, sympathy or feelings of equality for the other passengers, that is to say, the slaves.

Falsifying history

“For a minister with that portfolio to propagate this is to refuse to acknowledge a more modern day equivalent of that imbalance in the relationship, meaning he only has to look at the plantation system in Barbados, which existed probably in the same way that it existed years and years ago to see that the slave, in spite of his emancipation, had become a cane field worker and remained in that status for many years in spite of certain enfranchisement.”

What is “American Art”? Thin-Lipped Gravitas

In an essay by John Updike, in The New York Review of Books titled “The Clarity of Things” (Vol. 55, No. 11, June 26, 2008), he asks what is American in American art? He quotes a 1958 essay by Lloyd Goodrich who wrote:

One of the most American traits is our urge to define what is American. This search for a self-image is a result of our relative youth as a civilization, our years of partial dependence on Europe. But it is also a vital part of the process of growth.

(This alone is interesting, because it reminds me of almost identical statements made by C.L.R. James, who argued that the West Indian search for an identity, is the West Indian identity, and who was one of a series of writers to cast the Caribbean as part of the Western cultural experience.)

Updike continues his piece by observing:

My impression is that inquiries into an essential Americanness are less fashionable than they were fifty years ago, since they inevitably gravitate, in this age of diversity and historical revision, to that least hip of demographic groups, white Protestant males of northern European descent. These thin-lipped patriarchal persons figure, as founding Puritans or Founding Fathers, as western pioneers or industrial magnates, at every juncture of traditional history books, and our diverse, eclectic, skeptical present population may have heard quite enough about them.

But far from turning his back on “dead white guys,” Updike takes us to revisit them, in a piece that is of interest for much more than its art history. Updike ends his article by essentially positioning the roots of “American art” in colonial terms, in relation to “nature” and “civilization”:

The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principle study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.