‘We’re still here’: past and present collide at a Native American boarding school

Sherman Indian high school – previously called the Sherman Institute – in 1903. Photograph: Sepia Times/UIG/Getty Images

Sherman Indian high school is among the last remnants of a brutal history that students and government are reckoning with


Hilary Beaumont

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 22 May 2022 

With other students’ eyes on her, Wicahpi Medicine’s heart raced, but as she started dancing, she felt proud to embody her Lakota heritage. The beads on her jingle dress swished and her long braids bounced as she moved quickly and lightly in her moccasins.

“People think that we’re extinct – they think we don’t really exist anymore,” said the 17-year-old student, who goes by Kimmi. Dancing at Sherman Indian high school cultural week, she said she was showing “we are still here”.

Medicine is one of more than 200 students from 76 Native American tribes who come from across the country to attend the all-Native American boarding school, which opened in Riverside, California, over a century ago. It was one of hundreds of federally run boarding schools across the US that aimed to assimilate Native American children into white society by taking them from their families, chopping their hair short, and brutally punishing them for speaking their language and practising their culture. In 1901, the institution’s namesake, the congressman James Sherman, declared the school would represent “the redemption of a race”.

Wicahpi ‘Kimmi’ Medicine: ‘We practise our way of life as our ancestors did.’ 

Photograph: Courtesy Wicahpi Medicine

Most of the schools have closed, but the government continues to operate a handful, including Sherman. The US says it has transformed the remaining schools, but students like Medicine feel echoes of the old system.

Today, signposts on the grassy grounds show reservation names and their distances from the school, reminding Medicine how far she is from home: Standing Rock, North Dakota, 1,453.9 miles. “It sucks a lot because there have been times this year that I’ve wanted to go back home, and I can’t,” she said.

Members of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe living in Fort Yates, North Dakota, Medicine’s family smudged, prayed, attended sweats and spoke Lakota.

“We practise our way of life as our ancestors did,” she said.

Medicine lived with her aunt, Kolette Medicine, who is a teacher, in a town of fewer than 200 people where there wasn’t much to do. She said alcohol and drug use were common, which Medicine and her aunt see as a direct consequence of the intergenerational trauma of boarding schools. Medicine attended an off-reservation public school where she felt it was “frowned upon to be Native”, and the on-reservation high school offered little hope. “I probably would have dropped out,” she said.

A friend told her about Sherman – students go on field trips to the beach and Universal Studios in Los Angeles, her friend said. The school also offered a clearer pathway to college. Medicine saw it as a chance to explore the world. She filled out an application form and called every day until she was accepted.

Before attending, she had a conversation with her aunt and grandmother about what it meant to go to boarding school. Few Native Americans are untouched by the dark legacy of the assimilation policy, and her grandmother was no exception. Born in 1946, she attended boarding school in California, where she wore her hair short and was given a white name, Medicine recalled.

“She never really talked about it. I knew it brought up hard feelings for her whenever I would ask,” Medicine said. Her aunt said Medicine’s grandmother shared fond memories of school friends, singing in a choir, and cheerleading.

Her grandmother was the one who passed down the language and culture. She gave her granddaughter the name Wicahpi Win, meaning “star woman”, referencing the belief that Lakota people come from the Milky Way.

“We just talked about the positive, the good things it would be for Kimmi,” Kolette Medicine said. “We thought she would have more opportunities there.”

History and change

The US and Canada are facing a reckoning over their use of boarding schools to assimilate Indigenous children.

A US government report released last week found at least 53 burial sites at boarding schools containing hundreds of graves, with officials expecting to discover thousands more.

Sherman Indian high school’s cemetery, seen last year, as a man encircles each grave with sage smoke. 

Photograph: MediaNews Group/The Riverside Press-Enterprise/Getty Images

A US government report last week found at least 53 burial sites at boarding schools. Photograph: MediaNews Group/The Riverside Press-Enterprise/Getty Images
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The report found that, from 1819 to 1969, there were 408 boarding schools running in every corner of the country. The federal government continues to operate four off-reservation boarding schools for Native American children through the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), but in 2019, the BIE’s deputy assistant secretary Mark Cruz said the schools were “no longer in the business of assimilation” and “their purpose was transformed to support and respect tribal self-determination and sovereignty”.

The Sherman school, which is included in the report, has a cemetery with more than 60 graves, most containing the remains of students who died of diseases, explained Jean Keller, a historian who wrote a book about the Sherman Institute, as the school was previously known. Several children died in accidents: “One kid was killed because he was on the playing field and they were throwing a hammer and the hammer hit him in the head. Another kid was in the bakery and the oven blew up,” she said.

The US used a twin policy of land dispossession and boarding schools to separate Native Americans from their territories and culture. It was the cheapest and safest way to gain land for white people, the report found. Congress passed laws ordering parents to send their children to the schools and authorised the interior secretary to withhold rations from those who refused. Communities hid their children, but officials sent police to chase and capture them.

Sherman was “a place of incarceration”, said Clifford Trafzer, a history professor at the University of California Riverside who co-authored a book about the institute. Children were taught trades and sent to work on ranches as a way to integrate them into society. Today, Sherman looks very different. The Red Power movement in the 1960s and 70s saw Native Americans push for education that included their cultures and prepared students for college.

Howard Dallas, one of 16 siblings, was sent to Sherman with his three sisters in the 60s because his mother couldn’t care for them all. He said the school was “institutionalised” and taught them vocational training. “You could become a welder, painter, sheet metal worker or carpenter,” he said.

Matthew Levias Sr, another alumnus who attended in the 60s and became a star on the Sherman football team, said the school had taught him leadership. Dallas and Levias joined a student committee to push for better education and wrote a proposal to get the school accredited. “It started with the students. All the ideas came from the students,” Levias said.

The school was accredited in 1971 and renamed Sherman Indian high school, and laws followed: the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act eliminated the assimilation policy, and the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act guaranteed the right to ceremony.

Today, the school hosts an annual powwow, and students take lessons in Native American fashion, basket weaving, native plant uses and the Navajo language. Most of the teachers and staff are Native American. Students learn a standard high school curriculum, and a Native Studies class teaches them American history, including the doctrine of discovery, an international law that European settlers used to justify taking Indigenous land – and boarding schools. At cultural week in April, students wore orange shirts to honour the children who had died.

Sherman is funded by and answers to the federal government, through the BIE. The school suffers from low student achievement that has been endemic in the BIE system for close to a century, according to a 2018 BIE report. Children leave home for months at a time, and staff are considered “in loco parentis”, meaning “in place of the parent”. And with more than 70 tribes represented but only Navajo classes offered, most students still do not learn their own language.

Sherman is funded by and answers to the federal government. 

Photograph: MediaNews Group/The Riverside Press-Enterprise/Getty Images

Marsha Small, a Northern Cheyenne researcher whose work focuses on another operating off-reservation boarding school, Chemawa in Oregon, said many alumni were not fluent in their own languages. “That language ties them to the land. Their land is what their identity is,” she said. “My question to those boarding schools is: are you teaching that student their language? Because if you’re not, you are still committing the same type of genocide that was originated by the colonial system.”

‘You have to live in both worlds’

Medicine has felt homesick, but unlike in the old days, she Snapchats and calls her aunt.

She enjoys her Native studies class and recently visited SeaWorld and Universal Studios. But she noticed that other students don’t know their culture and language, and they struggle with anxiety, depression and intergenerational trauma. “We’re in a Native school for Native children, and you’re seeing more and more students being whitewashed, in a sense of not knowing their cultural and spiritual ways,” she said.

She explained that many students would rather blend into the non-Indigenous world than express their culture. “You kind of have to live in both worlds,” she said, but some step too far into “the white man’s world” and don’t realise how much harm it does to them spiritually. “It’s sad that a lot of people are scared to embrace who they are. I’m proud to be Native. I’m proud to be Lakota.”

Current and former Sherman teachers said it was rare to find a student who speaks their language. Medicine speaks Lakota, a severely endangered language, according to the Endangered Languages Project. She would enjoy taking a Lakota class if Sherman offered one.

Sherry Means, from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, used to teach Lakota at Sherman but left and was not replaced. She had a positive experience at Sherman before a family matter pulled her home. “Today those boarding schools actually do save a lot of Indian kids from their life of poverty,” she said. But she doesn’t think they have fully reformed; she believes continuing federal control leads to a less creative curriculum that doesn’t allow students to immerse themselves in their languages. “The top-down management has always been in existence and really needs to change,” she said.

Medicine plans to apply to college but is considering her options. She wants to keep exploring the world.

She sees how much boarding school has changed, but with continued government management, she doesn’t believe they are truly reformed. “The only difference now is that we can wear whatever clothes we want, and we can talk to our family whenever we want. But at the end of the day, it’s still institutionalised.”

As we talk on the phone, Medicine digs into her lunch: a sub, fries, Gatorade and macaroni salad. “Sometimes they give us Indian tacos, but I could make it better,” she jokes. “It’s a hit and miss whenever they try. It’s never going to be as good as back at home.”

Books

A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hate

In the wake of the Buffalo shooting, Philip Dray’s account of a terrible incident from 1892 seems dreadfully familiar

Visitors at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, 

England examine a 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan outfit from Port Jervis, New York.

 Photograph: Russell Contreras/AP


Michael Henry Adams

Sun 22 May 2022

Featuring Irish immigrants and the descendants of enslaved Africans in effect set upon each other by the rich, Philip Dray’s A Lynching at Port Jervis covers only 261 pages but is a sprawling book nonetheless.

The Last Slave Ship review: the Clotilda, Africatown and a lasting American injustice

It details the mob murder of Robert Lewis on 2 June 1892, an incident instantly appreciated “as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward”.

“The name, Port Jervis, the only city in New York where a lynching occurred between 1857 and 1950, became synonymous with intolerance in the north,” Dray writes.

The picturesque town had been seen not as some outpost for southern-style savagery but as a “satellite” of Manhattan, where shrewd sophisticates took the train to shop.

If, as Dray suggests, the outrage at Port Jervis helped spark the anti-lynching crusade of leaders like Ida B Wells or T Thomas Fortune, it failed, and fails still, to occasion anything close to the “reckoning” cited in his subtitle.

With sufficient thoroughness, Dray catalogues lawless executions up to the present. Thanks to technology, he explains, the shameful spectacle of Black Americans being lynched in modern terms, frequently by police officers, is more pervasive than ever. Footage from cellphones and police body or dashboard cameras purveys racist violence nonstop to an audience larger than ever before.

In contrast to the coldblooded massacre in Buffalo, the lynching at Port Jervis seems almost quaint. Certainly its three protagonists – a conflicted May-to-September white couple and a light-skinned, affable African American – acted with a heedlessness that seems almost delusional.

Intelligent, pretty and dark-haired, 23-year-old Lena McMahon was doted on by her adoptive parents. Though she lived at home, running the candy counter at the family store gave her unusual independence.

Philip Foley, a dandified salesman and “rascally lady-killer”, initially met with approval as a suitor. Once Foley was booted out of his hotel for not paying a substantial bill, Miss McMahon’s guardians saw things differently.

Robert Lewis came to know Foley while working at that hotel, the Delaware House. Foley was an obvious sport and generous tipper, a smooth operator who persuaded the impressionable Black man to pinch food and drink from his employer.

Lewis was fired but remained in Foley’s sway. So did Lena McMahon. Defying her parents, ignoring Foley’s insolvency, she became his lover and schemed to run away to New York. How, without even enough cash for a room, did Foley convince her an elopement would work? The befuddlement induced by love and lust almost makes it understandable. But Lewis being induced by Foley to “take” Lena if he wanted her – Foley saying she would resist at first but it would not matter – how did that happen? What Black man then could believe that would not lead to certain death?

With great meticulousness, Dray tells how after the rape, Lewis was apprehended. He was discovered with fishing gear on a “slow-moving coal barge”. He told his captors how McMahon’s white boyfriend, Foley, “urged him to commit the act”.

So it was that following Lewis’s hanging, in which hundreds took part, and after other Black men came forward to say how Foley offered them $5 to sexually assault his lover, Foley was arrested as Lewis’s “accomplice”. Many white people have murdered lovers and then claimed “a Black guy did it”. But how did Foley know he would escape without punishment?

“Judge” William Crane, a revered Port Jervis attorney, is one heroic figure to emerge from the tragedy. He attempted repeatedly to calm the mob and free Lewis. At one point, hoping to gain time, he seized on the idea Lewis might be brought before his victim, McMahon, so she might identify him beyond any doubt.

”Victims” were sometimes allowed to light the pyre to destroy their alleged attackers, and, expanding on this extraordinary custom, Dray shows the considerable scholarship with which he has enriched his story. Especially chilling is his account of one woman, about to set her actual clandestine paramour alight, being rebuked with a final plea: “How, after we have been such sweethearts, can you do this?”

A memorial, in the wake of a shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

If nothing more, the Port Jervis lynching gave rise a classic work of American literature. Stephen Crane, William Crane’s youngest brother, was the author of a penetrating novella, The Monster. Its mythologized Port Jervis is stratified by race, ethnicity and social class.


Paul Auster: ‘It’s distress that generates art’

For enlarging our understanding of America’s enduring enthrallment with the violence, guns and control of white supremacy, A Lynching at Port Jervis is superlative.

A 1900 “race riot” and near-lynching of an African American in Akron, Ohio, comes to mind. Louis Peck was held for supposedly attacking a young girl. When it was discovered he had been spirited away to Cleveland, rioters dynamited the stone jail and burned down a municipal building. Peck was tried and convicted in 20 minutes. In 1913, he was found to have been wrongfully imprisoned, and released.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the north during the boom times of the 1920s is also instructive today. So is the subsequent rise of the John Birch Society and a proliferation of riotous rebellions during the civil rights era.

Am I wrong to find Dray’s account of such developments unsatisfying, for its lack of answers? Perhaps there is no answer to race hate, except for the one prescribed by A Lynching at Port Jervis. Investigate, reflect and resolve.

A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age is published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

BOOK REVIEW

His Name is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa review – the murder that shamed the US

‘No longer an anonymous Black man’: a George Floyd mural in Houston, Texas. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

This welcome humanising of Floyd might have benefited from a wider focus, including Black women’s experiences of racism and a global perspective

Kehinde Andrews
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 22 May 2022 

When George Floyd was in high school, his teacher Bertha Dinkins prophetically told the teen: “I want to read about you in the newspaper… that you have made history and done something to change society”. She could never have foretold that Floyd would become a household name because the world watched a video of police officer Derek Chauvin slowly choke him to death with his knee on his neck in 2020.

The killing sparked the largest protests ever against racial injustice, prompting society to discuss racism in ways it has not done for more than a generation. His Name Is George Floyd (written by two Washington Post reporters) attempts to use the life and death of Floyd as a vehicle to examine the bigotry that lies at the heart of the present-day US.

Figures that spark protests are often barely drawn in two dimensions: we have a name, an image and little else. We know Emmett Till – whose lynching in 1955 is credited with sparking the civil rights movement after his mother displayed his disfigured body in an open casket – as a 14-year-old killed for supposedly whistling at a white woman. Trayvon Martin – whose killing by George Zimmerman in 2012 ignited the Black Lives Matter movement – is the teenager in a hoodie who died for going to a shop to buy Skittles.

The authors make a valiant effort to use Floyd’s story to educate society about the ills of structural racism

In this age of misinformation, where the victims of police killings are made out to be the problem, this humanising of Floyd is necessary. The book does not paint him as a saint but explains his flaws in the context of his experiences. Yes, he was an addict, a convict, and even made a porn movie. But these are not separate from his role as a father, friend and the backbone of his family and community. It is welcome that Floyd is no longer an anonymous Black man and you can feel the devastation of his family, friends and community in the interviews that pepper the book.

Samuels and Olorunnipa’s greatest triumph is placing Floyd’s life in the context of white supremacy. Before we get to Floyd, we learn about his ancestors’ struggles as tenant farmers in the period after slavery was abolished, known as “reconstruction”. Rather than abolition marking an end to racism, we grasp how the logic of racism continued. Racist laws and segregation became the tools for keeping the Black population oppressed. Floyd’s great-grandfather was stripped of the land and money he had managed to accumulate in tobacco farming, leaving the family in the poverty that was passed down through the generations.

The authors reflect on the irony of Floyd being killed after allegedly buying cigarettes with a fake $20 bill, given his family’s history with tobacco. Throughout, Floyd’s life is used to discuss issues such as racial terrorism, housing segregation, mass incarceration and racism in schooling. The point is driven home that his life and death were a result of the racism built into American society. David Smith was killed by Minneapolis police in 2010, in an almost identical manner to Floyd, but there was no public outcry.

There is a way in which all the attention on Floyd’s death has in some way limited the conversation: we all agree that his murder was indefensible, Derek Chauvin went to prison, minimal policing reforms occurred… and now we can move on. His Name Is George Floyd adds to this narrative by focusing on this one event and its aftermath. The lack of any global context severely limits our understanding of racism, which, as Malcolm X explained, is “not just an American problem, but a world problem”.

The focus on Floyd also follows the unfortunate pattern of highlighting the plight of Black men, reinforcing how we are drawn to the spectacle. The violence has tended to be public, from lashings on the plantation to lynchings leaving strange fruit hanging from southern trees. The oppression of Black women is more private – sexual violence, evictions and deadly institutional inequalities, such as being four times more likely to die in childbirth – and more difficult to capture on camera.

Activist and professor Kimberlé Crenshaw started the #SayHerName campaign to draw attention to the Black women who were far more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts. I couldn’t read this book without thinking how Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her home by police in 2020, would have been a rich subject.

Fear of Black Consciousness by Lewis Gordon review – why minds, not bodies, are the problem

The horrific murders in Buffalo last weekend are a reminder of how a focus on racism can cloud larger issues. Killing sprees by White supremacist males are a symptom of structural racism but they are so violent and public that they, rather than the ways in which society kills Black people every day, become the basis of our discussions.

In defence of the authors, they make a valiant effort to use Floyd’s story to educate society about the ills of structural racism; for many readers this will be the first time they have encountered the history that shapes the present. But it is also a depressing reminder of how much work needs to be done, of the lessons that still need to be learned this deep into the 21st century.

Kehinde Andrews is professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University and the author of New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World

His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa is published by Transworld.

Trump shares CPAC Hungary platform with notorious racist and anti-Semite


Hungarian talkshow host who has called Jews ‘stinking excrement’ and Roma ‘animals’ addresses rightwing conference

Donald Trump is shown on screen speaking via a videolink at the CPAC conference in Budapest, Hungary, on Friday.

 Photograph: Szilárd Koszticsák/EPA

Flora Garamvolgyi 

and Julian Borger

in Washington

THE GUARDIAN

Sat 21 May 2022 

A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.

Zsolt Bayer took the stage at the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Hungary, a convention that also featured speeches from Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The last featured speaker of the conference was Jack Posobiec, a far-right US blogger who has used antisemitic symbols and promoted the fabricated “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory smearing prominent Democrats as pedophiles.


Viktor Orbán tells CPAC the path to power is to ‘have your own media’

Bayer, a television talkshow host in Hungary, has been widely denounced for his racism. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, he wrote on his blog: “Is this the future? Kissing the dirty boots of fucking [racist epithet] and smiling at them? Being happy about this? Because otherwise they’ll kill you or beat you up?”

In 2011, he used the phrase “stinking excrement” to refer generically to Jews in England, and in 2013 wrote: “a significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals.”

When he was awarded the Hungarian order of merit in 2016 by the country’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the star speaker on the first day of CPAC Hungary on Thursday, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum protested, saying it “reflects the longstanding refusal of the leadership of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party to distance itself from Bayer, in spite of Bayer’s repeated pattern of racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, and anti-Roma incitement”.

At the CPAC event on Friday, he appeared on stage with a prominent rightwing Hungarian screenwriter talking about gender issues. Bayer focused on deriding Calvin Klein for political correctness, comparing a 2009 ad featuring a white supermodel, whom Bayer called “a very hot woman”, with a 2019 ad featuring the Black rapper Chika who he described as “not so hot”, adding: “it’s clear that this ad was born under the aegis of Black Lives Matter”.

Addressing the conference by video shortly before Bayer’s appearance, Trump poured compliments on Orbán, who was recently elected for a fourth term as prime minister.

“He is a great leader, a great gentleman, and he just had a very big election result. I was very honored to endorse him,” Trump said.

The US thinktank Freedom House has downgraded its assessment of Hungary to being a “partly free” society under Orbán and the Fidesz party, noting “constitutional and legal changes that have allowed it to consolidate control over the country’s independent institutions, including the judiciary”.

It also criticised the government for anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT+ policies and curbs on the independent media universities and NGOs.


Orbán and US right to bond at Cpac in Hungary over ‘great replacement’ ideology

Orbán, like many American Republicans, has embraced the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which involves promoting the belief that the white population is being deliberately reduced by leftist policies and diluted by immigration.

CPAC, which is organised by the American Conservative Union, did not respond to a request for comment on Bayer’s participation. Matt Schlapp, the CPAC chairman, complained on its website that: “Leftist media launched a coordinated smear campaign” on the event.

“Our mission is to increase freedom and opportunity across the globe, including for those living under socialist and Communist regimes,” Schlapp said.

“To hear the condescending whines from socialist boosters in the media like the Guardian, however, you would be led to believe that CPAC stood for something very different,” he added. “In the woke, warped logic of government-financed NPR [National Public Radio], somehow calls for liberty and national sovereignty are akin to racism and authoritarianism.”

‘Extremely active’ jumping worms that can leap a foot raise alarm in California


Earthworm native to east Asia and known for its large appetite poses threat to forest ecosystems, scientists say

Amynthas agrestis. Jumping worms can destroy a forest ecosystem by chewing through fallen leaves, destroying the top layer of soil. 

Photograph: Wikimedia Commons


Maya Yang

Sat 21 May 2022 

An invasive worm species known for its “voracious appetite” and ability to jump a foot in the air is raising alarm in California, where scientists have expressed concerns about the threat the worms pose to forest ecosystems.

The Amynthas agrestis, also known as the Asian jumping worm, Alabama jumper or crazy snake worm, have been spotted in California in recent months. The earthworm is native to east Asia, particularly to Japan and the Korean peninsula. However, in recent years the worms made their way to North America via various landscape plants that have been imported from the region.

Initially spotted in Wisconsin and across the New England area in 2013, the worms have spread westward into dozens of states, and were first seen in California’s Napa county in July.

The worms, which can grow up to 8in in length and have a milky white band around their dark body, are distinctive for their theatrical behavior, including wild movements and even detaching body parts. They’re also hermaphrodites and can reproduce without mating, and produce cocoons at the soil surface.

“These earthworms are extremely active, aggressive, and have voracious appetites,” California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) warned in a report. “True to their name, they jump and thrash immediately when handled, behaving more like a threatened snake than a worm, sometimes even breaking and shedding their tail when caught.”

Of greater concern, however, is the worms’ impact on the environment. Jumping worms can destroy a forest ecosystem by chewing through fallen leaves, in turn destroying the top layer of forest soil upon which many plants and organisms depend.

“They are destructive and cause severe damage to hardwood forests, especially those consisting of maple, basswood, red oak, poplar or birch species that rely on thick layers of leaf litter that serve as rooting medium,” according to the CDFA report, which notes that the “voracious feeders” can devour a cover of organic material in “two to five years”.

“Soil is the foundation of life – and Asian jumping worms change it. In fact, earthworms can have such huge impacts that they’re able to actually reengineer the ecosystems around them,” Mac Callaham, a Forest Service researcher specializing in soils, said in a forest service blogpost.

Experts have recommended several strategies to detect and eliminate the worms, including using a mustard pour - a mixture consisting of water and yellow mustard seeds - over soil to drive out any worms to the surface, and covering moistened soil with a sheet of transparent polyethylene for two to three weeks until soil temperature exceeds 104F for at least three days, destroying the worm’s cocoons.

Another strategy to eliminate the worms is to bag them and throw them in the trash, or place them in a bag and leave them out in the sun for at least 10 minutes before discarding the bag.

Experts have also advised people to take steps to prevent the worms from spreading in the first place. The USDA has warned that because the worms live in soil, they can easily spread in mulch, potting mixes or potted plants. Additionally, raking or blowing leaves can spread earthworms or their egg sacs.

When certain municipalities collect fallen leaves from local residents and then return it in the form of compost, this can also help spread the worms.

The CDFA has warned that the worms will likely be “able to establish a widespread distribution through California’s forest habitat and ornamental production sites particularly in residential and commercial environments.”

“If these worms didn’t spread into forests and natural areas, they wouldn’t be such a problem,” said Callaham. “But unfortunately, they simply won’t stay where you put them. The best way to prevent future invasions is to avoid moving earthworms around.”

Human skull found by Minnesota kayakers 8,000 years old, experts say


Skull discovered in drought-depleted Minnesota River last summer to be returned to Native American officials

The Minnesota River on its way to meet the Mississippi. 

Photograph: Wikimedia Commons/Tony Webster


Associated Press in Minnesota

Sat 21 May 2022 


Native American officials will be given a partial skull discovered last summer by two kayakers in Minnesota after investigations determined it was about 8,000 years old.

The kayakers found the skull in the drought-depleted Minnesota River about 110 miles (180km) west of Minneapolis, Renville county sheriff Scott Hable said.

Thinking it might be related to a missing person case or murder, Hable shared the skull with a medical examiner and eventually to the FBI, where a forensic anthropologist used carbon dating to determine it was likely the skull of a young man who lived in that area between 5500 and 6000 BC, Hable said.

“It was a complete shock to us that that bone was that old,” Hable told Minnesota Public Radio.

The anthropologist determined the man had a depression in his skull that was “perhaps suggestive of the cause of death”.

After the sheriff posted about the discovery on Wednesday, his office was criticized by several Native Americans, who said publishing photos of ancestral remains was offensive to their culture.

Hable’s office removed the post, according to the sheriff.

“We didn’t mean for it to be offensive whatsoever,” Hable said.

Hable said the remains will be turned over to Upper Sioux Community tribal officials.

Minnesota Indian Affairs Council cultural resources specialist Dylan Goetsch said in a statement that neither the council nor the state archaeologist were notified about the discovery, which is required by state laws that govern the care and repatriation of Native American remains.

Goetsch said the Facebook post “showed a complete lack of cultural sensitivity” by failing to call the individual a Native American and referring to the remains as “a little piece of history”.

Kathleen Blue, a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University, said Wednesday that the skull was definitely from an ancestor of one of the tribes still living in the area, the New York Times reported.

She said the young man would have likely eaten a diet of plants, deer, fish, turtles and freshwater mussels in a small region, rather than following mammals and bison on their migrations.

“There’s probably not that many people at that time wandering around Minnesota 8,000 years ago, because, like I said, the glaciers have only retreated a few thousands years before that,” Blue said. “That period, we don’t know much about it.”

Tamil refugees detained by UK on Chagos Islands go on hunger strike


Forty-two hunger strikers are part of group of 89 Sri Lankans whose boat was intercepted in Indian Ocean by UK military

Diego Garcia, a joint military facility of the UK and the US based on the largest of the Chagos Islands, which a UN court has ruled were unlawfully detached from Mauritius by the UK.

 Photograph: CPA Media Pte/Alamy

Haroon Siddique 

Legal affairs correspondent

THE GUARDIAN

Fri 20 May 2022 

Dozens of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees who have been detained for more than seven months in a military base on an overseas territory claimed by Britain have gone on hunger strike in despair at their plight.

The 42 hunger strikers are part of a group of 89 Sri Lankans, including 20 children, whose boat was intercepted and escorted to Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean by the British military after running into distress while apparently headed to Canada from India in October.

Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Islands, which a UN court has ruled were unlawfully detached from Mauritius by the UK when it granted Mauritius independence in 1968. The UK, which calls the archipelago British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) has refused to cede sovereignty over the islands.

The UK law firm Leigh Day, which is representing 81 of the Sri Lankans, says since their arrival on Diego Garcia, which is home to a US military base, the group have had very limited contact with the outside world and for the first six weeks were held without being able to communicate with anyone.

They are being kept in a tented compound away from the island facilities and are understood to have made clear to the authorities that they are seeking international protection but no steps appear to have been taken to allow individuals to claim asylum.

Leigh Day has written three letters to the foreign secretary and BIOT commissioner saying that returning the group to Sri Lanka could put them at risk of serious harm and be incompatible with the UK’s obligations under domestic and international law. It further says that refusing to allow them to communicate regularly with the outside world, including family members and their legal team, is unlawful.

The latest letter, sent this week, says: “Our clients feel increasingly desperate at the conditions they are enduring on Diego Garcia and the lack of any apparent progress towards finding a solution for them. They have been given no information about how, when or where they will be afforded the opportunity to claim international protection, how long they are to be kept on the island, where they might be sent, and/or when (if ever) their conditions might improve.

“We remind you that the group includes victims of torture and 20 children, many of whom are under the age of 10. The mental state of many of our clients can best be described as utterly despairing.”

The letter says that such is the state of mind of its clients that they have asked what what the UK government will do in the event of their deaths on the island, with some requesting that should they die their organs should be donated to the British people.

Sri Lanka’s civil war ended with the defeat of the militant Tamil separatist group, widely known as the Tamil Tigers, in 2009. But human rights organisations and the UN have reported an escalation of the harassment, surveillance and arbitrary detentions of – and land seizures from – Tamils over the past two years.

The Leigh Day partner Tessa Gregory said: “It cannot be right for the UK government to leave this vulnerable group, which includes victims of torture and 20 children, stranded with limited access to communication, no education and without an opportunity to seek international protection.

“Understandably the group are getting increasingly desperate and we have serious concerns for their mental and physical wellbeing. Immediate action is needed to ensure that a durable solution is found without any further delay.”

A UK government spokesperson said: “The UK government has rescued a number of people in damaged fishing boats since last October and escorted them to the British Indian Ocean Territory. We have been working tirelessly since to find a long-term solution to their current situation. At all times their welfare and safety have been our top priority.

“We have helped to provide dedicated 24-hours-a-day medical support, as well as temporary healthcare, food and telecoms.”

This ‘super reserve’ is not just for the birds. It could change the landscape of Britain

A wildlife-watcher’s paradise, the Somerset site will also serve as a blueprint for sustainable countryside management

A great white egret in Avalon Marshes. 

Photograph: Michael Hannon/Alamy

Stephen Moss
Sun 22 May 2022

The creation of a “super nature reserve” in Somerset is a gamechanger for wildlife conservation. But the real question is: what happens next?

“Build it, and they will come”, to paraphrase the 1980s feelgood movie Field of Dreams. And they have. Since former peat diggings were transformed into the Avalon Marshes 30 years ago, a host of new species have colonised these watery flatlands. Cranes, bitterns, spoonbills, glossy ibises and three kinds of elegant, snow-white egrets – little, cattle and great white – are now a regular sight here.


Fifty years ago, when I began birding, I would have seen just one long-legged waterbird here – the grey heron. Today I can find all these species just a short cycle ride from my home. And, on winter evenings, the nightly murmuration of hundreds of thousands of starlings, watched by crowds of awed spectators from all over the country.

Now this wildlife-watcher’s paradise, created from a post-industrial landscape, has become a “super national nature reserve”. Good news for the birds, of course. Good news for local people: the wetlands act as reservoirs to hold back flood waters, thus safeguarding thousands of homes. Good news for Somerset’s economy, with tourists flocking here throughout the year, bringing much-needed revenue. And good news for us all, because managing this land for nature helps capture and store carbon, mitigating the global climate emergency.
If we are to truly transform the way we manage our countryside, this is just the start

But amid the celebrations, I must sound a note of caution. If we are to truly transform the way we manage our countryside, to create a resilient and sustainable landscape for the future, this is just the start. Conservation organisations need to replicate this project throughout the UK. We must look at the rural landscape in a more holistic way, so we can continue to produce food – even more essential during the current cost of living crisis – without marginalising wildlife.

The government would claim this is exactly what it is doing, by pledging to protect 30% of Britain for nature by 2030. But not only is it likely to miss that target, it is also focusing on quantity, not quality. Our existing national parks are included in that 30% target; yet many are “natural” in name only.

This reserve can inspire communities to demand the same where they live, genuinely increasing biodiversity, with the many economic benefits that brings. As is happening in Somerset, conservationists need to work with farmers and landowners to develop new ways to create sustainable schemes that work for everyone. Though the news that hard-right Tories are opposing plans to manage farmland in an environmentally sensitive way does not bode well for the future.

For too long, decisions about how our land is used and managed have been in the hands of people who claim to be “custodians of the countryside”, yet remain mired in the old and discredited ways, championing intensive farming, game shooting and blanket forestry. It’s time to call their bluff, by showing how a new and inclusive way of working for places, people and wildlife can provide a wealth of opportunities.

As one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, Britain has a long way to go. Somerset’s super nature reserve is a great start; but it must also be an opportunity to change the way we regard and manage the countryside for the 21st century.

Stephen Moss is an author, naturalist and president of the Somerset Wildlife Trust

UK

Plans to keep passengers moving and shelves stocked as rail strike looms


With 40,000 RMT members voting, union warns of ‘potentially biggest rail strike in modern history’

Transport secretary, Grant Shapps, is expected to meet Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak next week to discuss the strike threat. 

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images


Jane Clinton

THE OBSERVER

Sat 21 May 2022 

Contingency plans are being drawn up to try to keep passenger and freight trains running and prevent empty supermarket shelves after unions warned of “potentially the biggest rail strike in modern history”.

The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) is balloting 40,000 members on the industrial action, which network sources have reportedly said would create “serious challenges” in keeping goods moving and supermarket shelves stocked.

The vote, which is scheduled to close on Tuesday, includes staff on Network Rail and 15 train operating companies. The RMT said the action was being taken over pay, compulsory redundancies and safety concerns.

The Times has reported that plans under consideration include giving freight trains priority over passenger services. It also refers to senior rail insiders saying there could be times when the tracks were reserved for goods only.

A source quoted by the paper said: “There is an awful lot of work going on behind the scenes including around what the timetable might look like. One option is times of the day when only freight services operate.”

Switching goods from rail to roads is not a solution given the shortage of HGV drivers.

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, will meet the prime minister and chancellor next week to discuss the threat as fears grown in Whitehall that the action could be worse than the junior doctors’ walkout in 2015, the paper adds.

The RMT has also said it intends to ballot members in Scotland for strike action after what it describes as a derisory 2.2% pay offer and proposed timetable changes that it called a “kick in the teeth” to workers.

The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association union has warned of summer disruption unless pay disputes are resolved.


ScotRail axes more than 700 train services amid pay dispute

The union’s general secretary, Manuel Cortes, said many members had not seen a wage increase for two years.

“If the Department for Transport, train operating companies and Network Rail don’t come forward very soon with proposed pay increases which at least match inflation, a summer of discontent is on the way across our railways,” he said.

The RMT’s general secretary, Mick Lynch, said: “Railway workers have had to contend with pay freezes, the prospect of losing their jobs and repeated attacks on their terms and conditions.

“Removing 2,500 safety-critical jobs from Network Rail will spell disaster for the public, make accidents more likely and will increase the possibility of trains flying off the tracks.”

The ballot will be among RMT members on Network Rail and Chiltern Railways, Cross Country Trains, Greater Anglia, LNER, East Midlands Railway, c2c, Great Western Railway, Northern Trains, South Eastern Railway, South Western Railway, Island Line, GTR (including Gatwick Express), Transpennine Express, Avanti West Coast, and West Midlands Trains. The results will be announced at 10am on Wednesday.

Tim Shoveller, Network Rail’s regional director, said: “We are disappointed that the RMT has taken this decision and urge them again to work with us, not against us, as we build an affordable railway fit for the future … We would not consider any changes that would make the railway less safe.”

A DfT spokesperson said: “With passenger numbers down and our railways on life-support, we need to act to make them fit for the future. We want a fair deal for staff, passengers and taxpayers so money isn’t taken away from other essential public services like the NHS.

“The unions should talk to us about the proposals before causing irreparable damage to our railways and strikes should be the last resort, not the first.”

The alleged Buffalo shooter was also inspired by Islamophobia. That’s telling

The alleged shooter copied the manifesto of the New Zealand mosque attacker – showing how easy it is to replace Muslim with Black or Jewish in the logic of the extreme right

A makeshift memorial near the scene of Saturday's shooting at a supermarket

 in Buffalo this week.

 Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Sun 22 May 2022 
Moustafa Bayoumi
THE GUARDIAN


On 14 May, an 18-year-old white supremacist shot and killed 10 Black people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, about 200 miles away from his home, according to police. The alleged shooter scrawled a racial epithet on the barrel of his gun and live-streamed his killing spree. He (I prefer not to name him) was clearly participating in a long and horrible American tradition of murderous hatred toward Black people, and media coverage and commentary have rightly emphasized the long reach of anti-Black racism that motivated this killer.

But the alleged shooter’s motivations were not only anti-Black racism. He uploaded a 180-page document shortly before carrying out his attack, and even a quick perusal will show the disgusting antisemitism that he also wallows in. Pages and pages of anti-Jewish slurs – including an excerpt from Der Giftpilz, a Nazi-era children’s book published by Julius Streicher of Der Stürmer infamy – fill the document. At one point, the killer writes, “If the Jews did not have connections to Judaism, then I believe that they would be able to live in White countries such as the USA. But because of the irreversible rabbinic teachings they must be removed from all European and White countries.”

The document is clearly an expression of replacement theory, a garbage conspiracy theory that believes Jewish and corporate elites aim to “replace” white people from their own countries through mass immigration. To explain “replacement theory”, media reports immediately began citing the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white men in starchy polo shirts carried tiki torches while screaming “Jews will not replace us.”

The main frames of analysis for this attack, in other words, have been thoroughly American. Seen through the domestic American lens, this attack looks very much like a toxic mix of America’s anti-Black racism with a virulent strain of American antisemitism. There’s no doubt that this is true, but it’s not the entire story. Almost completely absent from the discussion is Islamophobia, and how this kind of extreme rightwing violence is in significant part a byproduct of the war on terror and the Islamophobia it spawned.

Consider how the Buffalo shooter acknowledges, in his document, that the person who radicalized him the most was none other than the man who, in 2019, live-streamed himself shooting and killing 51 worshipers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. In fact, the title of the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto (“You wait for a signal while your people wait for you”) is a line written in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto, which itself was titled The Great Replacement.

Moreover, the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto lifts many lines verbatim or nearly so from the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto, a move that is quite typical of the genre. A few examples must suffice, but in truth there are many more. Both documents adopt a question and answer format.

New Zealand shooter’s document:


Why did you carry out the attack?

To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.

Buffalo shooter’s document:


Why did you decide to carry out the attack?

To show to the replacers that as long as the White man lives, our land will never be theirs and they will never be safe from us.

New Zealand shooter:


Did/do you personally hate muslims?

A muslim man or woman living in their homelands? No.

A muslim man or woman choosing to invade our lands live on our soil and replace our people? Yes, I dislike them.

The only muslim I truly hate is the convert, those from our own people that turn their backs on their heritage, turn their backs on their cultures, turn their back on their traditions and became blood traitors to their own race. These I hate.

Buffalo shooter:


Did, or do you personally hate blacks?

A black man or woman living in their homelands? No.

A black man or woman choosing to invade our lands, live on our soil, live on government support and attack and replace our people? Yes, I dislike them.

The only people I truly hate are the converts, those from our own people that turn their backs on their heritage, turn their backs on their cultures, turn their back on their traditions and become blood traitors to their own race. They are not completely hopeless however. I believe some can come back, so it’s important to welcome them when they are awoken instead of shaming and ostracizing them.

New Zealand shooter:


Do you consider it a terrorist attack?

By the definition, then yes. It is a terrorist attack. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.


Buffalo shooter:


Do you consider the attack an act of terrorism?

By definition yes. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.

The point of this comparison should not be about plagiarism. All these far-right manifestos freely cut-and-paste texts and images from each other and from around the web. They are, as I’ve written elsewhere, better understood as wikis of the far right, where each person contributes their literary share of hate. Such compendiums are avenues to crowd-source the energy and commitment required for mass murder.

But by placing them side-by-side, what’s both amazing and completely unsurprising to see is how easy it is to replace Muslim with Black in the logic of the far right, grimly ironic for an ideology that is so violently dead-set against “replacement”.

It’s likewise important to see the glee with which these bored and lonely individuals find heroism in fascism. (The Buffalo shooter says he started browsing 4chan in May 2020 out of extreme boredom in the early days of Covid.) They want to be called terrorists. They glow at being labeled racists. Dick Cheney once stated that, to win the war on terror, the United States would have to work through “the dark side” and “use any means at our disposal to achieve our objectives”. These shooters, in murderous delusions of grandeur, want to see themselves as the final bulwarks of an otherwise dying western civilization – doing what they have to do to save us from the invaders, just as Jack Bauer saved us from terrorist invaders weekly in Fox’s drama 24. They have moved to the dark side – for us. (Though not for me, obviously.)

As Kathleen Belew chronicles in her book Bring the War Home, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam contributed significantly to the rise of the modern white supremacist movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, it’s time we confront the fact that the (definitionally) inconclusive war on terror, which has also displaced somewhere between 38 and 60 million people, continues to fuel the rise of rightwing movements around the globe.

We do ourselves a disservice when we see the right wing narrowly and understand the right exclusively through an American lens. Is it any wonder that the American Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) traveled to Victor Orbán’s Hungary for their conference this year? From the fringe to the mainstream, the right wing increasingly gathers strength by nurturing its international connectivity. If we want to protect ourselves from more of these shooters, we must do the same.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at Guardian US