Posted in a private group; so am sharing without attribution. Fantastic, inspiring story about one of the Tennessee Three🙏

"When I was a young organizer, we would often sit in MCS (Memphis City Schools) board meetings, even when we had nothing pressing on the agenda, to listen and observe. In those days, public comments came last, which meant if you wanted to say something you were sitting in a 3 hour meeting into the night in order to do so. This often culled many a poorly planned or not determined speaker. Often by the point they’d be called it was 10 PM and the three minutes they were about to get didn’t seem worth it anymore.

As the meeting wore on it always thinned and it was usually me, a few reporters, and staff. This particular night I looked over and noticed a young man who was sitting and waiting to speak. We didn’t often get young people who came and spoke in those days and I was very interested in what he was going to say. He was the very last of the public comments called which meant it was nearly 10:30 by the point he got to speak.

Once he got to the podium and started talking the room completely shifted. This young man was from Mitchell High School and he wanted to know why his school wasn’t respected enough to have textbooks students could use. He explained he was going to college and the credits that Mitchell offered wasn’t even enough for him to qualify for most prestigious schools. He challenged the board to answer for why they had such low expectations for his school and his community and how those expectations were reflected in the resources they allocated. He pushed them in a way I had never seen another public speaker do. I was amazed. Once he was done I gave him a standing ovation.

From there, that kid got some things in motion. Books were distributed. People paid closer attention. I went to go speak with his dad who was a pastor and I never forgot him speaking about intentionally moving into New Chelsea and sending his child to his alma mater because he believed in investing back in the communities that raised you. I remember telling him, your kid is going to change the world, and he said, that’s the hope.

That kid is an adult now and that adult just got expelled from our house floor making national news. I stand with Justin J. Pearson. I stood with him when he was 17 and I stand with him now. And I can tell you one thing, he has been unstoppable since 2012, and that ain’t changing any time soon."

What is Transgender Day of Remembrance?
Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) was started in 1999 by transgender advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith as a vigil to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman who was killed in 1998. The vigil commemorated all the transgender people lost to violence since Rita Hester's death, and began an important tradition that has become the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance.

"Transgender Day of Remembrance seeks to highlight the losses we face due to anti-transgender bigotry and violence. I am no stranger to the need to fight for our rights, and the right to simply exist is first and foremost. With so many seeking to erase transgender people -- sometimes in the most brutal ways possible -- it is vitally important that those we lose are remembered, and that we continue to fight for justice."
- Transgender Day of Remembrance founder Gwendolyn Ann Smith

How can I get involved in the Transgender Day of Remembrance?
Participate in Transgender Day of Remembrance by attending and/or organizing a vigil on November 20 to honor all those transgender people whose lives were lost to anti-transgender violence that year, and learning about the violence affecting the transgender community. Vigils are typically hosted by local transgender advocates or LGBTQ organizations, and held at community centers, parks, places of worship, and other venues. The vigil often involves reading a list of the names of those lost that year.

Please see resources below on how to write stories about transgender people who have been victimized by crime, and additional resources for writing about the violence that affects transgender people, especially transgender women of color.

The most silenced issue in North America right now is the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) epidemic. In order to truly understand the scope, intensity, and relevance of the MMIW movement, it is important to first understand the factors that bleed into it. This issue runs deep into the veins of Canada and the United States, and its origins are deeply rooted in our social and political systems. To put into perspective the severity of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, you first need to know the facts. An Indigenous woman is 10 times more likely to be murdered versus her white female counterpart. 1 in 3 Native women has been sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Over 94% of Indigenous women in Seattle have been raped or coerced into sex. According to Annita Lucchesi, who has made one of the only databases in the US that are tracking MMIW cases, the estimated number of Indigenous women in America who have gone missing or who have been murdered since 1900 is around 25,000 (Between the Lines, Huff Post). Only a fraction of those cases are solved, let alone looked at.

Of course, sexism and racism are prevalent factors in this issue. Gender-based violence is a result of misogyny and colonialism. But environmental racism plays just as an important role. It is no secret that communities of color are subject to air pollution, acid rain, and contaminated water due to the fossil fuel industry, US government, and large corporations building toxic plants near their homes that simultaneously contribute to climate change. Oil and gas pipelines have become popular in the states of North Dakota and Montana. Of course, these pipelines are built outside Native land and often on tribal land, which not only defies treaties but contaminates water sources as well. Famously, this occurred in Standing Rock, North Dakota where the Sioux tribe protested to save their land from further destruction. In response, the US government sent militarized police.

The oil and gas pipeline industry is male-dominated and what some refer to as “man camps”, are built near the construction sites. Construction workers live in these camps for months on end and earn more than the average blue-collar worker. Background checks are not run on job applicants so often sex offenders are hired without anyone ever knowing. There is a lack of law enforcement in these areas because police are stretched so thin in rural areas as it is, which allows gambling and sex trafficking to thrive. There are clear connections between the “man camps” that are being built outside Native reservations to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women cases.

Last week in United States v. Cooley, the U.S. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld tribal officers' authority to at least investigate and detain non-Native people they suspect of committing crimes on reservations while waiting for backup from non-tribal law enforcement.

Authority to detain only goes so far

That's exactly what Lucero did in the case of this traffic stop. But he says that authority to detain only goes so far.

"I started calling around for help and [the County Sheriff's Office] didn't even want to come out. They just flat out said they were busy," Lucero says.

The New Mexico State Police first told Lucero that they couldn't spare an officer, and later said they believed state police also lacked jurisdiction to arrest the man on tribal land.

policies were creating conditions of hunger

In the 1940s, federal bureaucrats found that malnutrition was widespread in Indigenous communities and residential schools. But this wasn't new information to many Indigenous people.

"Indigenous people had been arguing for a long time that their kids were hungry in residential schools, that government policies were creating conditions of hunger in their communities," explained Mosby.

The Canadian government began to send researchers to examine these conditions of hunger. In many cases, the researchers found "severe malnutrition," said Mosby.

Some federal bureaucrats and scientists saw the pervasive malnutrition and hunger experienced by Indigenous people as an opportunity to test their scientific theories.

As discussed in previous blogs within the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (“MMIW”) series, Native women face murder rates at more than ten times the national average, and 96% of these women experienced violence from a non-Native perpetrator.[1] Under current legal precedent, the federal government is responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes committed by non-Native defendants against Native victims.[2] Historically, these cases have failed to be investigated or prosecuted to a level that provides adequate safety for Indigenous people.[3] This is in part due to jurisdictional issues that create law enforcement loopholes which do not hold perpetrators accountable for crimes they commit against Indigenous women and children.[4] Pipelines and the oil industry have exacerbated violence against Native women, as this blog will explore.

Violence Against Women and the Extraction Industry

Since the oil boom, Native communities have reported increased rates of human trafficking, sex trafficking, and missing and murdered Indigenous women in their communities.[5] Workers who come to a region for well-paid oil and gas jobs often set up “man camps.”[6] Placed in largely rural areas these camps strain infrastructures in communities that already have inadequate resources to support population booms.[7] In 2015, violent crime reports increased in the Bakken oil-producing region of Montana and North Dakota, due to the socio-economic changes brought to the area with the oil boom.[8] According to one report, sexual assaults on women on the Fort Berthold reservation increased by 75%.[9] Conversely, there was no corresponding rise of violent crimes in the counties outside of the Bakken oil region. In fact, the overall crime rate decreased during this time.[10] Overall, the potential for harm from “man camps” is exacerbated when they are on or near Indigenous peoples’ lands.[11]

The risks of oil development on Native reservations are distinct from development in other areas of the USA, as federal “Indian” law requires a jurisdictional analysis that “focuses on the identity of the perpetrator and the land status of the location where the crime occurred to determine which governmental body is responsible for arrest, detention and prosecution.”[12] Complicating issues further is the nature of colonization and the societal exploitation of Native women and children that stems from it. Such legal and historical treatment of Indigenous people has contributed to the increased risk of sex trafficking of Native women and children.[13] Studies demonstrate that generational and historical trauma along with high incidences of poverty, depression, homelessness, and substance abuse in Native communities can make Indigenous women and children vulnerable to trafficking.[14]

In April 2018, about 20 years after the early incel community coalesced, a college student in Toronto named Sohe Chung decided to walk to the library. It wasn’t a short walk — the subway would have been faster — but Chung and her roommate, So Ra, wanted to enjoy the sunshine.

Chung and So never made it to the library. On the way there, a van hopped the curb onto the sidewalk and slammed into pedestrians. Chung was one of 10 killed; So was one of 16 wounded.

The van’s driver was a self-described incel — but the community today would not be recognizable to those who built it decades earlier. Today’s incels are almost entirely men and boys who pollute their online forums with posts blaming women for their sexless lives. Some posters even celebrated Chung’s killer the day of the attack, calling for other incels to follow up with “acid attacks” and “mass rape.” What was once an open-minded support group had degenerated into a place where praise for mass killers was tolerated, even normalized.

On a balmy afternoon last June, dozens of demonstrators carrying “Stop the Violence” and “Rape is Rape” placards descended on the Hilton DoubleTree in downtown Detroit. They had come to protest the first-ever national gathering of the men’s rights movement, which aims to battle discrimination against men but has drawn criticism for stirring up hatred of women. Two weeks earlier, a sexually frustrated 22-year-old named Elliot Rodger had gone on a suicidal rampage in Santa Barbara, California, killing 6 people and injuring 13. He had left behind a chilling 137-page manifesto suffused with a bitter misogyny and language commonly found in men’s rights forums. “The girls don’t flock to the gentlemen. They flock to the alpha male,” Rodger wrote. “Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?” His attack ignited a firestorm online, spurring women to share their experiences of misogyny via the hashtag #YesAllWomen, and bringing major media attention to the men’s rights movement.