Wampum

When we look for blogs that go to the root causes, to Rehnquist's Oliphant v. Suquamish for the jurisdictional mechanism that protects perpetrators of violence against women, or Cobell v. Clinton's Babbit, then v. Bush's Norton, and now v. Bush's Kempthorne, for the principle of trust that protects perpetrators of theft of individual property, we come up thin to empty.

So we see the outpouring of cash that comes from the PayPal clickstreams of blogs that fund raise for the womens shelter on the Standing Rock Rez as kin to Missionary Barrels. Putting on our American hats we become even less charitable. Private charity, preferably channeled through Christian cults, not public policy, is the dogma of Republicans.

Make no mistake, sixty-k dollars plus a ten-k hat for any detached residential unit, would be nice, even if a handout from White Liberals, but it's no substitute for fixing what's broken anymore than holding bake sales is an effective response to defunding public education.

Yes, the following liberal bloggers posted on Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's community scoop or on their own blogs:

nbier, flautist, sarac, njgoldfinch, Devilstower, Christy Hardin-Smith, mole333, DB, William Neuheisel, and no doubt others

But they don't write about Indian issues, about what's broken and what can be fixed. They've adopted a poster child, and that's all they've screwed themselves up to the sticking point to do. To steal a quote from Noel Pearson, responding to an event that is also making the rounds in the liberal blogs, also in isolation:

In my view, unless we tackle grog and welfare, the problems of this 10-year-old child at Aurukun ultimately will have no solution.

Noel has long argued passive welfare is to blame for a complete breakdown in social norms in Indigenous communities, in Cape York and elsewhere in Australia. His point is that responding to one report of child abuse because the abuse was pack rape, and ignoring the thousands of open or unfiled reports of child abuse because the abuse isn't sexual, just malnutrition or general care -- 80 reported and 30 substantiated per month in Cape York. just isn't reality based.

And yes, on the order of eight hundred people clicked through the donations links for a total of $50,000. So here's the link to contribute to the "netroots", or DailyKos+FireDogLake+... effort to buy a single bandaid.

What you won't get from DK/FDL/... is Abramoff as a complex crook who supports tribal soverignty reckoned in billions of dollars, or the full measure of inter-locked corruption at Interior and Justice, also to the tune of billions of dollars, or the embedding of sexual assault white privilege in Federal Indian Law, not as a crime of war, as the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague determined systematic rapes in 1996 in Kosovo, but as the necessary consequence of eroding tribal criminal jurisdiction, re-affirmed every October by the Supreme Court of the United States.

And so on. These are issues, stories, complex and human interest, that these liberal bloggers don't write or link to, and haven't for as long as they've each been around as on-line venues of political writings. Its why we didn't hold the Koufax Awards this year -- we're tired of people who only read Wampum to see their names, and if their names come first, or close enough to be cool, before going back to their no-Indians-or-Dogs avocations.

We're happy to see the Feminist Law Profs Blog do a post -- Unprosecuted Abuse of Native American Women, but its Zero Hour was April this year, when the Amnesty report got earned media. We hope they go the distance, it would be good to have another progressive legal group of co-authors go the distance too.