INTERSECTIONALISM

Oklahoma Governor Spreads Misinformation about Abortion, Tribal Sovereignty

Oklahoma Republican Governor Stitt talking about Oklahoma's "super liberal" Tribes

 and more on FOX News.

BY DARREN THOMPSON 

 

MAY 26, 2022

In the wake of signing extremely restrictive anti-abortion laws, Oklahoma Republican Governor Kevin Stitt has made unsubstantiated claims about the right to abortion on sovereign tribal land.

Calling the Oklahoma Tribes “super liberal,” Stitt continued by saing, “We think that there’s a possibility that some Tribes may try to set up an ‘abortion-on-demand’,” Stitt told FOX News on Friday, May 20. “They think that you can be one-one-thousandth tribal member and not have to follow state law.”

To date, however, there are no Oklahoma tribes that have expressed intentions to build clinics offering abortions.

The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma responded to Governor Stitt’s comments: “Speculating on what tribes should do based on a leaked US Supreme Court draft decision is irresponsible. Just as irresponsible is the Governor of Oklahoma and his disguised media campaign which is really meant to attack tribes and our sovereignty.”

Stitt’s FOX appearance came after the U.S. Supreme Court leak of a draft opinion that would overturn the 1973 ruling of Roe v. Wade, which protects the right to abortions on a federal level. 

Stitt had already signed Senate Bill 612 on April 12, which classifies those who perform abortions, such as medical providers, as a felony crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

“We want Oklahoma to be the most pro-life state in the country,” Stitt said during the signing ceremony for Senate Bill 612. “We want to outlaw abortion.”

"Oklahoma is trying to be the poster-child when it comes to taking away a woman's rights," Democratic candidate for governor and former Oklahoma state senator Connie Johnson told Native News Online. 

Johnson, a longtime advocate for women’s rights, also noted that Oklahoma incarcerates more women than any other location in the world. "We criminalize things here that other states don't," she said. 

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, Senate Bill 612 would go into effect 90 days after the state legislature adjourns on May 27. Known as a ‘trigger law,’ the bill bans most abortions in the state, except if the mother is at high risk of death while pregnant. Thirteen states, including Oklahoma, have passed such laws anticipating the overturning of Roe. 

However, if pregnant by rape or incest there are no exceptions for abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Oklahoma has had another ‘trigger’ law that has banned most abortions since 1910, except in life-or-death situations. Under the old law, performing an abortion also would be classified as a felony, punishable by between two and five years in prison. However, since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, the state has not enforced the law. 

Stitt also recently appeared on FOX News Sunday to discuss a new bill that makes abortions illegal in the state at six weeks of conception.

Stitt’s appearances on FOX News have spread misinformation about Tribal sovereignty and whether or not a Supreme Court abortion decision would apply on Tribal land. 

Stitt is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and a vocal opponent of the 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision that determined much of eastern Oklahoma is an Indian reservation, and that the crimes committed on tribal lands by tribal members cannot be prosecuted by state or local law enforcement–rather they must be prosecuted in Tribal or Federal court.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering another case, Oklahoma vs. Castro-Huerta, which will determine whether the state can prosecute non-Native Americans for crimes committed on tribal lands if the victim is a member of an Oklahoma-based Tribe. A decision is expected early this summer. 

Regardless of the outcome of Castro-Huerta, it is unlikely that Tribes would open a clinic that provides abortions. The chief medical provider on Tribal lands for citizens of tribes is the Indian Health Service (IHS), a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Abortions are largely excluded from health care delivered by IHS because of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal dollars on abortions except in the cases of rape, incest and if a mother’s life is in danger due to the pregnancy. 

If clinics and providers were to provide abortions on tribal lands, they would have to be funded privately and need to navigate local, state, and federal laws. Since Tribal doctors are licensed by state medical agencies, it’s also unlikely that they’ll perform abortions within the state. 

On May 17, Cherokee Attorney Mary Kathryn Nagle tweeted that the discussion of land and jurisdiction in Oklahoma isn’t just about safety, but about politics and power. 

In 2006, former Oglala Sioux Tribal president Cecilia Fire Thunder announced she would facilitate plans to build a Planned Parenthood on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation after the state legislature banned most abortions in the state. She was impeached by the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council in a 9-5 vote for speaking out against the state's abortion ban in July 2006. 

When asked by Native News Online if she had an opinion on Roe v. Wade potentially being overturned, Fire Thunder responded with a meme that read, “Ejaculate responsibly.”

Although data is sparse in regards to abortions, many women living on reservations have to seek abortion clinics off Tribal land. To date, there are no abortion clinics on Indian reservations. 

Indigenous women in the United States are slightly more than twice as likely to die from conditions caused by pregnancy than white women, according to a study published by the CDC in 2016.

The Native News Health Desk is made possible by a generous grant from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation as well as sponsorship support from RxDestroyer, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the National Indian Health Board. This grant funding and sponsorship support have no effect on editorial consideration in Native News Online.

About The Author
Darren Thompson (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe) is a freelance journalist and based in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where he also contributes to Unicorn Riot, an alternative media publication. Thompson has reported on political unrest, tribal sovereignty, and Indigenous issues for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, Indian Country Today, Native News Online, Powwows.com and Unicorn Riot. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Voice of America on various Indigenous issues in international conversation. He has a bachelor’s degree in Criminology & Law Studies from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Violence of Settler Colonialism Stretches Across Generations of Native Families

Photos of a Murdered Native woman, Anna Marie Scott, are shown at the First Annual Red Dress Powwow, which was held to bring awareness to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People.

TY ONEIL / SOPA IMAGES / LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY  David Correia, 

Haymarket Books

PUBLISHED May 30, 2022

PART OF THE SERIES
Progressive PicksThe following is an excerpt from An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents over Three Centuries, out now from Haymarket Books.

After Gallup, New Mexico police killed Larry Casuse on March 1, 1973, they dragged his body out of the sporting goods store where they’d shot him three times and onto the sidewalk along Route 66, where they took turns taking photos of themselves posing over his dead body. They framed one of those photos and hung it above the bar at the Gallup Fraternal Order of Police. The shootout with police that killed Larry, a 19-year-old Navajo activist, began when Larry and a comrade named Robert Nakaidinae kidnapped the Mayor of Gallup at gunpoint from right out of the Gallup mayor’s office. The Mayor, Emmett Garcia, was also the co-owner of the Navajo Inn, the most profitable bar in the state of New Mexico and also its most notorious. Gallup calls itself “The Indian Capital of the World,” but Larry and Indians Against Exploitation, a group comprised of young Navajo and Pueblo activists that Larry organized with, called it the “City of Exploitation”. In 1973, Gallup had 39 bars and liquor stores, 32 more than allowed under a 1956 law limiting liquor establishments to one per every 2,000 people. Most were known as “Indian bars.” Alcohol was illegal to possess or consume on the Navajo Nation. Just shy of 80,000 people lived on the reservation in 1960. Between 1958 and 1960, Navajo police arrested just under 25,000 people on alcohol-related charges. By the time Larry graduated from high school in 1971, Navajo police were making 500–700 arrests per month on various liquor violations on the reservation. Gallup, which built the largest drunk tank in the U.S. during these years, arrested even more. The penalty for driving drunk off the Nation was less than the penalty for possessing alcohol on it, so the safest way to bring alcohol back to the reservation was in one’s stomach. The Navajo Inn was miles north of Gallup but just south of the Navajo reservation, perched along a lonely and deadly highway. Each winter people froze to death walking home, or they were hit by drunk drivers along Highway 264, or they were found beaten to death in ditches. “Exposure” deaths the coroner would call them all. Gallup police and McKinley County Sheriff’s deputies called the frozen dead they found in arroyos and alleys behind the Navajo Inn “popsicles.”

Larry Casuse spent years trying to shut down the Navajo Inn. He worked just as long with other young organizers confronting the commodification of Navajo ceremonies and traditions. Everything about Gallup was designed to produce Navajo misery and suffering and then to profit from it. Garcia was the mayor, the owner of the most violent and notorious bar, the self-appointed director of the city’s alcohol treatment center, and, in February 1973, the Governor’s nominee to join the Board of Regents of the University of New Mexico. Casuse had had enough.

In the days after his violent death, Larry’s brother Donald tried to make sense of it all and thought immediately of Gallup. “You didn’t talk about the Gallup that everyone saw, the Gallup of the drinking and the violence and the poverty. You didn’t talk about it because it just was. It was just how it was. And Lillian, [their mother], accepted it, most everyone accepted that, in a way that Larry never could. Lillian accepted that the drinking was an Indian problem, not a political problem. The violence was an Indian problem, not a problem that had something to do with poverty or with misery. Larry made a commitment to be part of making life better for Navajo people in Gallup. Who does that? Who does that? How many people are willing to give their life to help people they don’t know?

In the weeks after Larry’s death, amid the protests, the marches, the student walkouts, and the demands for investigations, Larry’s friends and family offered possible answers to Donald’s question. Some blamed Larry’s legal troubles. Less than a year earlier he’d hit and accidentally killed a young Navajo woman while driving on the road to Gamerco, north of Gallup. He felt profound guilt and it made him “excitable and high strung,” they said. He couldn’t talk about it without breaking down in tears. Others suspected that he’d grown discouraged in his failure to shut down the Navajo Inn and stop the suffering and misery the bar produced. They wondered if maybe he’d stopped seeing organizing as an answer. Maybe he’d decided he needed different tactics. According to one friend, “he thought he would have to utilize the white man’s way of doing things to get anything done—just to shake people up enough to get a few lines in the paper, to grab people in midair and say, ‘Wait a minute! Listen to me!’”

Maybe an answer could be found in the Casuse family’s move to Gallup when Larry was a teenager and where he witnessed the in-your-face misery of the bordertown. The KIVA Club issued a statement the day after police killed him. Larry, they wrote, “was tired of seeing everyday drunkards lying in the streets, lying in jails, of Indians trying to survive in a conquered oriented society.” He’d come to Gallup that day to cleanse the city of that evil, they guessed, and hoped to “make his death a symbol” for something better. Some pointed to his work feeding people at the many protests and actions he helped organize. He’d listen to the people talk to him as they ate the fry bread and mutton stew he served. How can you do work like that, some said, and not come to hate the enemies who governed them? Others agreed with Donald that Larry sacrificed his life to help Native people and did it because of a deeply felt need to connect to a world he’d been robbed of as a child. Born in Santa Rita, New Mexico, far south of the Navajo Nation, raised among the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking children of copper miners, Larry didn’t grow up on the Navajo reservation, didn’t learn the language, didn’t participate in the ceremonies, didn’t learn the stories, wasn’t part of the traditions. Some, however, found no solace in explanations and no answers in his death. Whatever Larry’s reasons may have been, they died with him on that sidewalk in Gallup on March 1, 1973. “To this day,” his friend Phil Loretto said, years later, “I can’t figure out why he did that.”

“An Enemy Such as This” attempts to answer Donald’s question by telling the story of the Casuse family, a family born in the blood of colonialism, torn apart by the wars and occupations that marked the birth of a world hostile to their own. To follow the generations of Casuses introduced in this book is to enter their world, a world made and remade by war and occupation. The story of Larry Casuse and his family is a story of a long, unbroken line of generations that links the shootout with police in the sporting goods store in 1973 that killed Larry to the Johnson Massacre of 1837 that killed Juan José Compá, another Native leader killed by vigilantes or police. The Johnson Massacre (examined in the book’s third chapter) established US control of the world’s most profitable copper mine, where a century later Larry would be born, where his father, Louis, would work as a miner, and where the most radical labor union in the US would organize mineworkers. The story of the Casuse family links the rough streets of Gallup, where Larry would live and die, to the war-torn streets of occupied Salzburg, Austria, in the 1930s and ’40s, where Larry’s mom, Lillian, was born into a crumbling empire and raised in another, and where Louis would patrol as an occupation soldier during the postwar occupation of Austria. Theirs is a story that links the reservation trading posts on the Navajo Nation, an industry that sentenced generations of Navajos into debt servitude, to the company stores of the copper mine in Santa Rita, where Larry was raised.

The arc of the Casuse family follows the arc of US colonial war and occupation. The important moments of their lives overlay like a map onto the world-historical events of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Larry’s great, great grandfather, Jesus Arviso, the subject of the fourth chapter, is famous and revered among Navajos. He was kidnapped from his Mexican family as a child, traded from the Apache to the Navajo as a boy, raised among the Navajo, to whom he became a legendary leader. Larry’s maternal grandfather, Richard Hutzler fought in two world wars. The Bavarian Royal Army of the German Empire drafted him into the military on the same day it declared war on France in 1914. He fought as a lowly private in the wars that ended empires in Europe and was discharged from the army the day after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and the German Empire collapsed, and the day before the doomed Weimar Republic was declared. Larry’s mother, Lillian, celebrated her third birthday watching Nazis march through the streets of Salzburg, Austria, her hometown. She celebrated her eighth birthday hiding from Allied bombs that nearly destroyed Salzburg. She was almost ten when the Soviets invaded from the north and the Americans from the west, ending the war and beginning the postwar occupation of Austria. Lillian’s personal story is part of the apocalyptical story of war and occupation in midcentury Europe. War and occupation are apocalyptical for all, but more so for girls and women. Allied troops raped tens of thousands of women during the occupation. After the war, thousands more migrated to the US from war-torn Europe as war brides, including Lillian.

Larry’s father, Louis, fought in the two bloodiest European battles that American troops fought in World War II, was captured by the Wehrmacht in the Battle of the Bulge, and was held in a Nazi POW camp until his liberation. Louis rejoined the army after the war. He met Lillian in Salzburg, where he patrolled the prisoner-of-war and displaced-persons camps during the US occupation of Austria. After he was discharged, Louis returned to New Mexico and worked in the same mine made possible by the genocidal Mexican war against Apaches of a hundred years earlier. He was one of only two Navajo mineworkers ever to join the radical union made famous in the film Salt of the Earth, which chronicled the strike by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers against Empire Zinc. No history of that union or that strike tells his story.

So, forget Plymouth Rock and all the other stories of American Exceptionalism that celebrate colonization. Look instead at Santa Rita, New Mexico, where settler colonialism was born in the blood of Apaches murdered by American mercenaries, where it was raised by settlers in copper mines that existed only because of the bloody murder of Apaches, and where it came of age in grim and violent bordertowns such as Gallup, New Mexico, those horrible machines of Native misery, suffering, and resistance.

Copyright 2022 by David Correia. 

David Correia is a Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2013), co-author with Tyler Wall of Police: A Field Guide (Verso, 2018), and co-author with Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, and Jennifer Denetdale of Red Nation Rising Nation: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021). He is a co-founder of AbolishAPD, a research and mutual aid collective in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

US Federal Indian Boarding School System Intentionally Sought to Destroy Native Families


"Chiricahua Apaches Four Months After Arriving at Carlisle," black-and-white photographic portrait of a group of Apaches at the Carlisle boarding school. Image courtesy of the Richard Henry Pratt Papers, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

BY LEVI RICKERT MAY 22, 2022

Opinion.

 The 106-page Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report released on May 11 provides a glimpse into the deliberate intention of the federal government to disrupt the Native American family structure through assimilation. The report says the government’s plan involved the permanent breaking of family ties.

A section of the report, Section 7: Federal Indian Boarding School System Framework, reads: “The Department has stated it was ‘indispensably necessary that [the Indians] be placed in positions where they can be controlled, and finally compelled, by stern necessity, to resort to agricultural labor or starve,’ later adding that ‘[i]f it be admitted that education affords the true solution to the Indian problem, then it must be admitted that the boarding school is the very key to the situation.’”

Reading that section of the report brought back memories of the day I first met Dr. Suzanne Cross (Saginaw Chippewa Indians) in the late 1990s when I served on the Native American subcommittee of the Michigan Department on Aging. Dr. Cross is an assistant professor emeritus at Michigan State University and served as a consultant to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS). She came to our subcommittee to discuss the work she had done on her doctoral dissertation on historical trauma. The conversation quickly moved to the historical trauma associated with Indian boarding schools.

Several adults told stories of abuse they suffered at Indian boarding schools, and others shared how boarding schools affected their families. One Ojibwa woman shook and wept, telling us how her mother never hugged her during her life. The mother had learned during her years at an Indian boarding school that she should never hug or show physical affection.

Last week's release of the report on the purposeful and deliberate plan by the federal government to destroy Native families also brought back memories of an interview I did with American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks (Ojibwa) in the fall of 2009 at Grand Valley State University. During the interview, Banks recounted his experiences attending various Indian boarding schools. He told me the experience caused him to maintain an indifferent attitude towards his mother because he felt she had abandoned him during the years he attended Indian boarding schools.

Banks recalled on certain occasions, school officials would announce a mail call so that students could get mail from home. He would show up, but he never received any mail. He felt as if his mother did not love him. 

Years passed by and he eventually was able to go home when he was in his late teen years. He said the first day home was awkward, but on the second day home, his mother made him a blueberry pie because she knew it was his favorite. He felt then perhaps things could return to normal. So, he began talking to her and asked her why didn’t she ever send him any letters or try to bring him home. She told him she did.

He did not believe her.

For the rest of their lives together, he told me, he would look at his mother and have a sense of indifference towards her. This feeling lasted until she died.

Decades later, while he was in his 70s, Banks saw an Internet advertisement with information about how he could obtain his own Indian boarding school records. He followed through on the offer and received several boxes with his school records. 

In the boxes, Banks found 14 unopened letters from his mother. He took them to his mother’s grave, where he sat in a lawn chair reading them one by one. Inside of one of the letters was a money order to pay for a bus ticket home for him. 

In that moment, Banks, one of the greatest Native American warriors of the last century, wept at his mother’s grave and asked her for forgiveness. He had been lied to by the Indian boarding school officials, not his mother.

As I interviewed Banks at the university in my hometown, I recognized that his inner child, which had been wounded for decades, still resented the policy set forth by the federal government to destroy the very fabric of Native American families.

Banks’ story is just one among a multitude of survivor stories about how Indian Boarding Schools tore Native families apart. 

“There's not a single American Indian, Alaskan Native, or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasn't been affected by these schools,” Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said during the press conference about the investigation and report last week.“That impact continues to influence the lives of countless families, from the breakup of families and tribal nations, to the loss of languages and cultural practices and relatives. We haven't begun to explain the scope of this policy until now.”   

During last week’s press conference, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) said, “The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies, including the intergenerational trauma caused by forced family separation and cultural eradication, which were inflicted upon generations of children, as young as four years old, are heartbreaking and undeniable. When my maternal grandparents were only eight years old, they were stolen from their parents, culture, and communities and forced to live in boarding schools until the age of 13. Many children like them never made it back to their homes.”

The Interior’s report calls for the continuation of the investigation of boarding schools with many more survivor stories to be collected as part of Secretary Haaland's yearlong tour called "The Road to Healing." 

For countless boarding school survivors and their families, the road to healing will be paved with pain. Telling their stories will be haunting and painful, but hopefully it will give them the same type of release that Dennis Banks felt as he sat by his mother’s grave in a lawnchair, reading her long lost letters and confronting the past.  

About The Author

Levi Rickert  (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print/online category by the Native American Journalists Association. He serves on the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/01/did-canadian-government-build-schools.html

Opening of Chicago Field Museum’s Native Truths Exhibition Marks a ‘New Beginning’

The Field Museum (Photo/Monica Whitepigeon)

Yahoo News

BY KELSEY TURNER

 MAY 19, 2022

CHICAGO —This Friday, the Chicago Field Museum is opening its new Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories exhibition to the public, revealing its first renovation of the museum’s Native North America Hall since its initial installation during the 1950s. The exhibition is centered around five core content permanent sections called “Native Truths” that present essential information about Native experience and culture, along with six rotating story galleries.

The exhibition came together after four and a half years of collaborations between Native elders, community members, artists, educators, scholars, and museum staff. Representing 105 different tribes and displaying an estimated 400 items, it explores current issues like tribal sovereignty and climate change while honoring Native history and culture.

“I’m awestruck,” said Dakota and Diné artist and comedian Dallas Goldtooth as he walked through the exhibition. “I’m so used to these spaces feeling so foreign, because it’s like we’re on display, Native people and cultures are on display. This very much feels like we are in charge of the narrative.” A clip from the FX series Reservation Dogs featuring Goldtooth as the character William Knife-Man plays in a loop inside the hall.

As visitors enter the exhibition, they pass bold, black letters on the wall reading, “You are on Native land.” A recording of a poem written by the Indigenous-futurist artist X sounds throughout the entranceway, read aloud by Chicago-based Potawatomi artist Monica Rickert-Bolter. Further inside the exhibition is an acknowledgement in glowing yellow text: “Museum collecting and exhibition practices have deeply harmed Native communities. This exhibition marks a new beginning.”

In addition to displaying traditional art forms and cultural items, the exhibition also highlights more contemporary mediums like digital art, video, photography, and modern music. The labels for each display are written in the first person, allowing the artists to speak for themselves.

“The old hall just really disconnected Native people as humans from our items, because it was very object-based,” said the museum’s Native Community Engagement Coordinator Debra Yepa-Pappan, a citizen of Jemez Pueblo. “With this [exhibition], you’re actually hearing voices, you’re seeing images of children. It’s bringing us back into the present.”

Previously, the Field Museum’s Native North America Hall included over a thousand cultural items from different tribes with little context regarding the stories behind them. Due to cultural insensitivity and a lack of consultation with tribes when the exhibition first opened in the 1950s, the museum had incorrectly attributed certain items and displayed some pieces that were not meant for public viewing.

For the renovated exhibition, the museum spoke directly with tribes about how best to honor their cultural objects. To appropriately display a sacred stand-up headdress made by a Blackfoot ancestor, for example, museum staff spent three years conversing with Blackfoot women and elders to gain their permission and guidance on the exhibit. The museum invited several of these women to attend the exhibition’s opening ceremony on Saturday.

“In the past, museums often would not even talk to anybody in the community about how they were going to present what are often called ‘artifacts,’” said Rosalyn LaPier, an enrolled Blackfoot tribal member, historian, and collaborator on the stand-up headdress display. “We spent time, as I think everybody did, on making sure that the history that was being shared was appropriate and correct.”

The exhibit mixes art, videos with narratives.

 (Photos/Levi Rickert for Native News Online)

The idea for the renovation began after local artist Chris Pappan, a citizen of the Kaw Nation and husband of Yepa-Pappan, displayed his work in a temporary exhibit within the old Native North America Hall from 2016 to 2019. Pappan inserted contemporary artwork depicting Native cultures into the exhibition, a commentary meant to make viewers confront the museum’s outdated portrayal of Native people.

“There was no information regarding who the people were,” Pappan said of the old exhibition. “I was able to intervene and create work to liven up the space and make more of an impression that we’re a living culture.”

When his exhibit went up, a “light went off” for the museum staff as they recognized the changes that needed to be made to the Native hall, said Alaka Wali, curator emerita of North American Anthropology. The museum then began raising money for a renovated Native American exhibition that would properly honor Indigenous people’s stories.

The museum put together an advisory committee of Native American scholars, museum professionals, artists, and community members from across what is now the United States and Canada to guide the project. The committee helped ensure every component of the exhibition reflects and supports Indigenous communities, right down to the hall’s building materials – Menominee Tribal Enterprises, a sustainable lumber supplier that manufactures products on the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin, provided maple wood for the flooring, while birch bark wall panels serve to ground visitors within the Great Lakes region.



Yepa-Pappan also successfully advocated for the use of copper, a metal that holds significance for Great Lakes tribes, as a decorative element in the walls. The exhibition designer originally planned to use stainless steel, she said. “It looked nice initially, but at the same time, for me personally as a Native person, it still felt somewhat industrial.” The copper used in the exhibition ranges in color from bronze to blue to red, giving the space a more natural feel.

Yepa-Pappan has been encouraged by the positive feedback Indigenous visitors have given the exhibition, which opened to the Native American community last weekend. “I had always hoped that this exhibition would be for Native people – of course, by Native people, but for Native people also,” she said. “This is Native space. We made this our space.”

Details about the Chicago Field Museum’s opening ceremony of the Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories exhibition on Saturday can be found here.

 

The windfalls of this war

by Serge Halimi 

On 10 February, two weeks before the Russian invasion, President Joe Biden told Americans in Ukraine to get out within 48 hours. Since then, the US has returned to this country, albeit in different ways. Without risking a single soldier’s life, they are using the succession of disasters caused by Vladimir Putin to achieve strategic gains: a Russia weakened for the long term; a China discomfited by its neighbour’s setbacks; a NATO strengthened by Sweden and Finland’s fast-track accession; a raft of contracts for American exporters of grain, arms and gas; and a Western media that reliably spouts Pentagon propaganda. Why would US strategists want such a fortuitous war to end?

The answer is, they don’t. For weeks, it’s seemed as if the only conclusion to the conflict which the US would truly welcome would be a victory parade of Western armies through the streets of Moscow, with Biden on the podium and Putin in an iron cage. When it comes to achieving its now express objective of ‘weakening Russia’ — in fact bleeding it — the US is not skimping. It’s delivering more offensive, more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine and (probably) helping it locate and take out Russian generals and even sink the flagship of Russia’s fleet. Not to mention that for the past three months the US Congress has already approved $54bn of assistance for Ukraine equivalent to more than 80% of Russia’s military budget.

Biden initially feared that helping Ukraine too directly would trigger ‘a third world war’. He seems to have concluded that Moscow’s nuclear threat was a bluff and that Russia, whose military might he had overestimated, can safely be backed into a corner. He is thus at one with the neocon Republicans for whom any concession to Putin’s expansionism ‘would be like paying the cannibal to eat us last’ (1). American overreach has gone so far that Biden, speaking to Lockheed Martin workers in Alabama who make the Javelin antitank missiles whose formidable effectiveness many Russian tank crews know first-hand, expressed delight at Ukrainian parents ‘naming their newborn child Javelin or Javelina’.

On 21 May, Volodymyr Zelensky restated that the war could only end at the negotiating table. But, with diplomacy in the doldrums, the Russian army is keeping up its destructive conquest of cities in the Donbass and US political leaders are benefiting from the expansion of the conflict. Europe, meanwhile, looks passive, torn between a rather isolated French president Macron, who rightly observed that ‘peace cannot be built by humiliating Russia’, and Estonia’s prime minister Kaja Kallas, who retorted, ‘We should not offer Vladimir Putin a way out ... The solution can only be military. Ukraine must win this war’ (2). For the moment, it’s Washington’s puppeteers who are pulling the strings in Europe.

Serge Halimi

Serge Halimi is president and editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique.

Translated by George Miller

The Balkan Roots of the Far Right’s “Great Replacement” Theory

The “Great Replacement” theory is behind the far right’s worst acts of terrorism, from Christchurch to El Paso. It has its roots in the Balkans, where it inspired Serb Nationalists to genocide

Jasmin Mujanović

A sticker placed on a traffic bollard proclaiming ‘Multiculturalism is Genocide’ in the Barnsbury area of Islington, north London/Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images


When Ratko Mladic’s Serb nationalist forces entered the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 11, 1995, the general of the self-styled “Army of the Republika Srpska” took a moment to speak to an accompanying camera crew.

“Here we are,” he says solemnly, “on July 11, 1995, in Serbian Srebrenica.” What followed was Mladic’s rationale for the extermination campaign that was unfolding in the city, the culmination of the nearly four-year-long Bosnian Genocide orchestrated by Mladic and his political masters, Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic: “We gift this town to the Serb people. Finally, the moment has come, after the uprising against the Dahijas, for us to take revenge against the Turks in this region.”

Even those who had followed the news of the Bosnian War but were unfamiliar with Serb nationalist lexicon would have struggled to make sense of Mladic’s pronouncements. But this was the clearly articulated thesis of the Belgrade-orchestrated war and genocide in Bosnia, and it is a sentiment that has continued to percolate through to the present – not just in the Balkans but, increasingly, throughout the West.

The essence of Mladic’s project is known to the contemporary, Western far right as the “Great Replacement” theory: the idea that Muslims are waging demographic warfare against white, Christian Europeans, seeking to outbreed and replace them and their civilization. And defending “Western civilization,” as such, requires a confrontation with the “invaders.” Or as the Canadian reactionary Mark Steyn put it in a 2006 New York Times bestseller:


“In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out, as other Continentals will in the years ahead: If you cannot outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.”

Though Mladic and his associates did not use the term Great Replacement (it was only coined by the French neo-fascist writer Renaud Camus in 2010), their paranoid, genocidal campaign against the Bosniak community in Bosnia (and later ethnic Albanians in Kosovo) and the accompanying narratives justifying these pogroms electrified far-right extremists in the West. In a sense, Mladic and his cohort were the true authors of the Great Replacement doctrine – and all its accompanying bloodletting.

Today, the Bosnian Genocide is a rhetorical and conceptual pillar of the Western far right, an example of the kinds of regimes and policies they embrace and aspire to replicate. In untangling the origins of this coupling, a still more disturbing reality emerges: Bosnia’s recent past – the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the ensuing war, and the accompanying genocide – is what many contemporaries on the Western radical right imagine, and aspire to reenact, in their own societies.

Mladic’s oratory in Srebrenica referenced the events of the First Serbian Uprising (1804-1813), during which the leaders of the incipient Serbian state sought to overthrow the Dahijas – the largely autonomous, Ottoman-backed military regime that governed the then Sanjak of Smederevo. In the canon of Serbian nationalist thought, the struggle against the Dahijas (a South Slavic transfiguration of the Ottoman Turkish word dayı) signified the rebirth of the Serbian nation, whose statehood and autonomy, they argued, had been extinguished by the 15th century conquest of Southeastern Europe by the Ottomans.

This is a Christian parable of the (re)birth of a nation. And as in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” the central conceit is the eternal struggle between a noble warrior race and a savage, racialized Other. In the standard telling of the former, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo – a bloody but indecisive clash between the invading Ottomans and a coalition of Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Albanian lords – marked the metaphorical death of the medieval Serbian state. Prince Lazar, who led the Serbian forces, and the knight Milos Obilic, who in the oral tradition is said to have killed Murad I on the battlefield but may in reality be a mythic figure invented after the fact, subsequently assumed Christ-like characters. They became folk heroes who sacrificed themselves to preserve the Serbian people and their state in the Kingdom of Heaven, even as it was conquered on Earth.

The prophecy of the second coming of the Serbian polity was then fulfilled in the 19th century as the Ottoman hold on the Balkans slipped, and a modern Serbian state emerged and quickly began vying for political and military supremacy in the region. But left unaddressed for both 19th and 20th century Serbian nationalists was the lingering problem of “the Turks,” that is, the indigenous Muslim populations of the Balkans – primarily the Bosniaks of Bosnia and the Albanians of Kosovo (often referred in the discourses of the era as Arnauti, another Ottoman era term for region’s ethnic Albanians).

In the century between the First Serbian Uprising and the start of World War I, a de facto (if not always systemic) method took root to address this problem: Local Muslim populations, whether Slavic, Albanian, or Turkish, were to be expelled and/or exterminated wherever the new Serbian authorities managed to establish even a momentary political claim. The process was emulated by the new Greek, Bulgarian, and Romanian authorities as well. The exact figures are disputed or otherwise difficult to establish, but, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of Muslims left the area during this period – primarily resettling in modern-day Turkey – and at least that many were killed. But both figures are likely in the millions. Taken in conjunction with the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, the period marking the end of the Ottoman Empire is likely one of the bloodiest in modern European history, a horrific and sustained unmixing of peoples.

But the new state system that emerged in Southeastern and Eastern Europe in the wake of the Ottoman era was weak. The new nationalist regimes were perennially unsatisfied with the boundaries of their territories and devoted the brunt of their meager resources to war making rather than the development of local economies or civil societies. By the time the First World War began in 1914, most of the region had already seen two devastating years of fighting and atrocities during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1914. After 1918, the long-promised unification of the South Slavs produced the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, a union so ensnared by crisis and factionalism that its brief experiment with parliamentary democracy lasted barely a decade before it was aborted by the autocratic Serbian crown. By the time of the Axis invasion of what was then called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the country was effectively on the brink of civil war.

The second Yugoslav state, the one formed by Josip Broz Tito’s communists after the Second World War, lasted twice as long as its predecessor, but it too collapsed under the weight of authoritarian and sectarian animus. Once more, it was the regime in Belgrade, this time led by the soon-to-be genocidaire Slobodan Milosevic, that whipped up Serbian nationalism to carve out a “Greater Serbia” from the carcass of the Yugoslav federation. Fusing medieval myths with sectarian grievances from the 20th century and disseminating it through modern propaganda techniques, Milosevic, an erstwhile and middling communist apparatchik, presented himself as the new Lazar.

The four subsequent wars he launched – in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo – spanned the entire decade of the 1990s, resulting in the deaths of nearly 150,000 people, with two-thirds of these occurring during the Bosnian War. The concurrent Bosnian Genocide was not merely a byproduct of Milosevic’s project but, in fact, its primary objective. The creation of the so-called Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and the Republika Srpska Karjina in Croatia) – the breakaway territories self-declared by local proxies of the Belgrade regime, similar to the Russian-occupied “People’s Republics” in eastern Ukraine today – was explicitly premised on the wholesale removal and extermination of the non-Serb populations of these areas; in many cases, these populations constituted the majority in the targeted region.

There was no motive for Milosevic’s policies in Bosnia, or the policies of his proxies, other than the imposition of ethnic homogeneity through violence and terror. These were both the aim and the method for achieving these objectives. But the outward face of the project – embodied by the telegenic figures of Karadzic and Milosevic, who both spoke fluent English – was pure equivocation. Though both Karadzic and Milosevic routinely denied the systematic nature of their genocide, they never denied its necessity. Here they remained categorical: The Bosniaks, like the Kosovar Albanians, were an abscess that had to be removed from the body of Christian Europe. It was ugly going, to be sure, but they were the knights on the ramparts “guarding” the whole of the continent. In the fevered swamps of the Serbian tabloids, the language was even more explicit: Serbia was Byzantium restored, the cradle of Christian civilization, taking its glorious vengeance on the Turks, the Moors, and the whole of the Muslim world.

From the onset, this narrative made inroads into segments of the West. Robert Kaplan’s 1993 “Balkan Ghosts” did not embrace the Bosnian Genocide but, like Steyn, he framed it as a historical inevitability; the triumph of what he infamously called “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Kaplan’s framing was formative, profoundly shaping the views of then-U.S. President Bill Clinton in (initially) rejecting the possibility of American or international intervention in the war. After all, what business did Washington have in meddling in this primordial bloodletting? British and French officials of the time were even more blunt in their remarks to Clinton: The events in Bosnia were “painful” but also the “necessary restoration of Christian Europe.”

Such attitudes were widespread, especially in Europe. The Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke, for instance, explicitly defended Milosevic and his war effort. As soon as the Bosnian War had ended, Handke toured the killing fields and partied with the killers. He was a guest of honor at Milosevic’s funeral and delivered his eulogy. Such abasement notwithstanding, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. Living Marxism, the magazine of the U.K.-based Revolutionary Communist Party, falsely claimed that photographs from the Trnopolje and Omarska concentration camps were staged. One of the magazine’s editors, Claire Fox, eventually went on to join the Brexit Party (now Reform UK) and today sits as a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of the U.K. Parliament.

While the Clinton administration finally – and begrudgingly – intervened in the war, European governments remained largely unmoved even as they watched the killings in Srebrenica unfold in real time.

After 9/11, preexisting revisionist and negationist discourses about Bosnia began to aggressively percolate through a newly invigorated Western far right. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon recast the nature of Milosevic and Karadzic’s project; to Western reactionaries it became a prophetic war, led by men who recognized the true threat of “militant Islam” and thus the need for a true clash of civilizations. That the cause of Bosnian independence was overwhelmingly secular, led by a multiethnic coalition of Bosnians of all ethnicities and religions, including non-nationalist Serbs, of course, never entered this discourse.

By the 2010s, Bosnian Genocide denial and the valorization of Serb nationalist war criminals became a staple of Western far-right discourses – a pillar of their ideological and political lexicon like the Confederacy, the Third Reich, or the African apartheid regimes. It soon started featuring in the manifestos of far-right terrorists.

Anders Breivik, the terrorist who executed the attacks in Norway in 2011, made nearly 1,000 mentions of the Yugoslav Wars in his meandering manifesto. Eric Frein, who orchestrated the 2014 attack on the Pennsylvania State Police barracks, frequently cosplayed in Serb nationalist uniforms. And Brenton Tarrant, sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2019 Christchurch mosque killings, covered his rifles and munitions in the names of Serb and Montenegrin historical figures and livestreamed himself playing a Serb nationalist ballad glorifying Karadzic’s genocide from the Bosnian War. And while the 2019 El Paso terrorist did not cite Serb nationalist motifs, his manifesto credits Tarrant and the Great Replacement as his primary inspirations, directing his ire at Latinos and Hispanics rather than Muslims.


Among the far right, “kebab” is used as a derogatory term for Muslims, and Tarrant referred to himself as a “kebab removalist” in his manifesto.

In the sewers of the online far right, Serb nationalist themes are even more prominent. The song Tarrant played on his way to massacre the congregants in Christchurch is a well-known meme among extremists and gamers. The original is titled “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (“Karadzic, lead your Serbs”) but it is known online primarily as the “Remove Kebab Song” or “Serbia Strong.” Among the far right, “kebab” is used as a derogatory term for Muslims, and Tarrant referred to himself as a “kebab removalist” in his manifesto. A cursory search for the song on platforms like YouTube reveals millions of views and hundreds of thousands of comments, most of them in English. Those willing to dive deeper into the underground forums and message boards of the far right will easily discover their intimate familiarity with the Bosnian Genocide and the deeds of Serb nationalist genocidaires.

As the Western far right gains political currency in Europe and the U.S., it is likely that their interest in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo will become more pronounced. The turn toward paranoid identity politics and demographic fetishism among ostensibly center-right parties on both sides of the Atlantic readily comports to the ideological discourses developed by Serb nationalists during the 1980s and 1990s. Their current encounters with similar “traditionalist” and “patriotic” discourses emanating from Russia – and the Kremlin’s court intellectuals like Aleksandr Dugin or the late faux-dissident Eduard Limonov (a close associate of Karadzic) – will also serve to further disseminate Serb nationalist ideas, as Moscow is the primary international patron of the revisionist regimes in Belgrade and Bosnia’s Republika Srpska.

Following the sacking of the U.S. Capitol by an extremist mob on Jan. 6, 2021, the ascendancy of far-right movements in the established democracies has finally landed as, arguably, the central national security issue facing the West. Confronting the QAnon cult has required that researchers and law enforcement decode an obscurantist ideological and political lexicon; the same will be required in recognizing the extent to which Serb nationalist ideas have penetrated many of these same extremist circles.

Beyond the immediate security concerns, however, the Bosnian Genocide should serve as a critical lesson for democratic societies everywhere. Genocides are not sudden eruptions of freewheeling violence. They are meticulously organized, administratively complex undertakings. They require project managers, bureaucrats, and executioners. Above all, they require ideological justifications. The ideas and discourses of the architects of the Bosnian Genocide have already taken root in the West, contributing to many deaths. Failure to recognize this runs the risk of letting Bosnia’s recent past shape our collective future.

Jasmin Mujanović

DEATH OF A POET

Muzaffar Al Nuwab, Iraq’s Runaway Train

Muzaffar Al Nuwab’s legacy and pain lives on among Iraqis and Syrians

Rasha Al AqeediRasha Al Aqeedi is the Middle East deputy editor

May 30, 2022

Mourners carry the coffin of Muzaffar Al Nuwab on May 21, 2022 / Qassem al-Kaabi / AFP via Getty Images

On a late-night train between Baghdad and Iraq’s south, poet Muzaffar Al Nuwab listened to a beautiful woman in her mid-forties reminiscing about a lost love from decades before. As the train neared her home village, her sorrow grew more visible. The chance encounter on the train some time in the 1960s inspired one of the most popular poems and songs in Iraq’s modern history: “The Rail” (it has the same title in Arabic: “Al Rayl”). Folklore singer Yas Khudur, known for his urban vocals, sang the words of “Al-Rayl,” which reflected a woman’s perspective:

We passed your home, oh Hamad

While on the night train

We heard coffee grinds

We smelled the cardamom

O, Train

Don’t make sounds of heartbreak and pain

Don’t make a sound of passion and fondness

I yearn for Hamad,

and I do not yearn to be for anyone else

Both poem and song captivated audiences in Iraq, the Gulf states and Syria — the same three geographical entities that chronicled the life, times and death of one of Iraq’s most celebrated poets.

Muzaffar Al Nuwab died on May 20, 2022 at the age of 88 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

He had a way with words in formal Arabic and colloquial Iraqi that was relatable and expressive. In one poem, he asks an absent lover to “come to me in my dreams, I would consider it a visit.” There were, however, other forms of heartbreak he wrote about extensively. The heartbreaks shared by his generation in the Middle East: disappointment in the ruling class, riveting criticisms of authoritarianism and sorrow over Palestine. These heartbreaks established the various stations of Al Nuwab’s life.

Muzaffar Al Nuwab was born in Baghdad in 1934 to a wealthy upper-class family with Hashemite roots — descendants of the Prophet Mohammed. From an early age teachers saw his talents in arranging words and expressions and encouraged him to write on the schools’ open walls; a chalkboard for students to pin their artwork.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Baghdad and was appointed as a teacher soon after. By the age of 22, despite his privileged background, Al Nuwab was ideologically left-leaning which caused his expulsion from his job in 1955, the first of many turbulent encounters with authority. Al Nuwab was reassigned to his post following the end of Iraq’s monarchy in 1958 but soon clashed with Arab nationalists after the 1963 revolution that placed Baathists in power.

He attempted to flee to the Soviet Union through Iran but was captured by Iranian intelligence and returned to Baghdad. He was sentenced to death for one of his fiery poems against authoritarianism, but later received a reduced prison sentence. Al Nuwab managed to escape prison and become a fugitive in southern Iraq where he supported himself by working for a Dutch company in Basra.

In 1969, the government, now completely under Baathist control, issued a pardon for political prisoners and fugitives. Al Nuwab emerged from hiding and was re-employed once again as a teacher. During these eventful two decades, he penned his most famous political poem following the defeat of Arab countries in 1967. In his poem, he describes Arab leaders as “sons of whores.” The poem and its use of profanity gained Al Nuwab a cult following among disappointed youth in the region, particularly Iraq and Syria. He fled Iraq once again soon after, making Syria his second home. Although also Baathist, the regime in Damascus was more tolerable to Al Nuwab, though that didn’t stop his criticism. He continued scorning Arab leaders in poems, including Hafez Al Assad who miraculously overlooked it.

In 2003, Al Nuwab supported the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Although he was an anti-imperialist leftist, he accepted that an occupying American force was the means to remove a dictator. He did not necessarily endorse the occupation. In fact, in the years that followed, Al Nuwab’s poems about Iraq grew more painful, reflecting a deeper sorrow: disillusionment and complete desperation. Al Nuwab no longer believed that he would see his homeland prosper in his lifetime. He visited Iraq again, but by then he was too frail and too sick to live in Baghdad.

He settled in the United Arab Emirates, an ironic destination: He wrote some of his harshest poems against the monarchs and sheikhdoms, yet found a home during his hospice years in one of them until his death. Muzaffar Al Nuwab was 88 years old. He had been in and out of prison and on the run throughout his youth. He illustrated his agony through his words from the diaspora for decades while becoming one of the most admired figures in the art of spoken, written and sung words for generations of Iraqis. He was simply exhausted.

Muzaffar Al Nuwab was taken to his last destination, back home to Baghdad, for his final rest. His funeral procession was akin to a majestic homecoming ceremony where his life was celebrated by legions of admirers despite never having met their idol during their lifetime. Many politicians attended the funeral such as the infamous former PM Nouri Al Maliki. In true Al Nuwab fashion, Al Maliki was ejected from the procession by young Iraqis, his name cursed and his presence unwelcome. If anything could patch Muzaffar Al Nuwab’s broken heart, it is knowing that his legacy, passion and pain carry on, and were on full display as he was laid to rest.

Yazidi refugees again flee fighting in Iraq

2:37 Our Observer told us how these Yazidi refugees fled the violence in Sinuni, Iraq. 

© Observers

By:Djamel Belayachi
Issued on: 30/05/2022 - 

Intense fighting broke out between the Iraqi Army and Yazidi fighters affiliated to the Kurdish rebel group the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on May 1 and 2 in the region of Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq. The clashes displaced thousands of Yazidi people for a second time – as many as were only recently resettled in the area after fleeing the Islamic State group in 2014. Our Observer told us about fleeing the fighting.

Yazidis are a Kurmanji-speaking minority who are indigenous to the Sinjar region in Iraq. They follow a monotheistic religion with similarities to the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism.

The Iraqi Army wants to enforce an agreement signed between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan providing for the withdrawal of Yazidi fighters and PKK fighters from the Sinjar region. But the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBŞ), a Yazidi militia created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group, don’t want to withdraw and accuse Baghdad of wanting to take control of their region.

On the night of May 1, the Iraqi Army finally launched an offensive to push back Yazidi fighters, some of whom had taken up positions in civilian areas in villages near Mount Sinjar.

'Local residents were terrified'

When the fighting broke out on May 2nd, our Observer, Ferhad (not his real name), was at his uncle's house in the village of Sinuni. He fled with his family to neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan.

I called one of my friends and he told me the Iraqi army was attacking the Sinjar Resistance Units, with tanks and helicopters. Local residents were terrified. We fled in a car. I saw lots of other families heading for the Sinjar mountains and villages that were not affected by the fighting.

There were 22 of us in the vehicle. We made our way to a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the attack, about 10,000 displaced persons flooded into the camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. Many of the newly displaced were already forced to live in these camps once after fleeing the Islamic State group back in 2014. Many have moved into already overcrowded tents with family or friends already living there.

Sinjar massacre - Wikipedia

The Sinjar massacre marked the beginning of the genocide of Yazidis by ISIL, the killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children. It took place in August 2014 in Sinjar city and Sinjar District in Iraq's Nineveh Governorate and was perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The massacre began with ISIL attacking and capturing Sinjar and neighboring towns on 3 August, during its Northern Iraq offensive.