Articles

May 25, 2020
Published on the What I Miss? website

As virus panic mounted in the United States, I was already researching the psychic and actual sickness that came with the Mayflower four hundred years ago. Appalled to find myself descended from six of its passengers in a year when big celebrations were planned, I wanted Americans to see our history through the lens of disease. A full ninety percent of the Indigenous Wampanoag people had died from European illnesses even before the ship landed—and our founders themselves faced […]

December 5, 2019
Published on the Eat Drink Films website

My first reaction is “No way I’m going to review a film with the name “R——.” I’ve spent too long telling relatives in the nation’s capital how their team’s name evokes bloody skins of the First People of our continent hunted for bounty. Even though this film acknowledges the R-word as a slur, even though today’s reviewers think it progressive for its time, I’m reluctant. Our history is […]

Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images | Firefighters battle flames at a burning apartment complex in Paradise, north of Sacramento, California, on November 9, 2018.

November 28, 2018
Published in Yes! Magazine

I want us to go humbly to the very people our culture tried to exterminate to listen to what they can teach us.

May 9, 2017
Published in the Napa Valley Register

These were times when Napa Valley was a fulcrum of hateful, murderous activity against the Indian population, which…set the pattern for what became an all-out genocide.

January 27, 2017
With Courtney Martin
Published in OnBeing

California was particularly violent, but the story holds true in different ways throughout the country, whether our white ancestors were actually there for the killing or immigrated later and moved into places that had been conquered….We’re living with the kind of shadow Jung talked about — played out in our political life, denial of climate change, and lack of true respect for darker-skinned people.