March 2009

In a Navajo Way

March 30, 2009

Robert Yazzie and Amber Kanazloah Crotty don’t like to say that Navajos have “lost” their knowledge of their native traditions. They might say that some Navajos are not in “relationship” with elements of their culture. The knowledge is there somewhere, as a part of who they are – like a vague sense of “coyote” as [...]

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for an American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

March 26, 2009

When the United Nations passed its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007, only four nations voted against it: Australia, New Zealand, Canada – and the United States. Not difficult, historically, to understand why, but what millennium is this? Of course, Bush was president then. But while the Obama administration recently and [...]

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Blog Love

March 26, 2009

Don’t know why I’ve only just discovered him, don’t know how he isn’t bigger than Kos and Instapundit combined, but Patrick Barkman, blogging as The Local Crank, is my current blog throb. Barkman offers “Musings & Sardonic Commentary on Politics, Religion, Culture & Native American Issues.” About himself: Just a simple Cherokee trial lawyer, Barkman [...]

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The Taking of Enchanted Trails RV Park

March 26, 2009

JD & AJA Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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Poem of the Day

March 24, 2009

Julia and I are often asked what this experience is like – traveling around the country in our motorhome with our two dogs, doing the work we love, writing and photographing.  I first caught the bug of motorhome travel nearly twenty years ago, when I toured the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming, including Yellowstone, in a [...]

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More Updike

March 21, 2009

Apropos Kerouac’s Sal Paradise feeling like “a speck on the surface of the sad red earth,” the following from John Updike on the influence of science on our sense of our place in the universe: The non-scientist’s relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from [...]

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A Late Homage to John Updike

March 21, 2009

If you missed it, the February 9 & 16 issue of The New Yorker offered representative samples of Updike’s over fifty years as a contributor of short stories, poetry, essays and criticism. This excerpt is from his memoir A Soft Spring Night in Shillington, in which he ruminates on the pleasure of finding close shelter [...]

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Some Pawnee Come Home

March 20, 2009

Prior to 1907 there existed in the United States an area referred to as the Indian Territory, an area, ultimately reduced to the Oklahoma territory, to which various Indian Tribes were removed from their native grounds in order to make way for white settlement. These relocations became famously dramatic through the Trail of Tears that [...]

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Picture of the Day – Vote for Us!

March 18, 2009

Photographer Julia Dean and writer A. Jay Adler are traveling the U.S., visiting all the corners of Indian Country, as we attempt to document the nature and state of Native American life in the country today, the most neglected and underreported social story in the United States. This blog, the sad red earth, is an [...]

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The Reason for “the sad red earth”

March 12, 2009

If you are new to this blog, you may not yet know it’s main and driving purpose. Photographer Julia Dean and writer A. Jay Adler are traveling the U.S., visiting all the corners of Indian Country, as we attempt to document the nature and state of Native American life in the country today. This story [...]

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Blink, part III

March 9, 2009

In the World It would be an obvious conclusion to draw that I was now finished with both Kenny and Robert as friends, but that would be only half true. It might, as well, more tightly shape my theme to be done with Robert here, but that also would be only half true. Robert talked [...]

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Code Talker

March 5, 2009

Originally there were twenty-nine. They developed the code. Then there were about 390 more. Sam Tso was one of the 390. During the Second World War, he was a Navajo Code Talker. It had been done before, on a smaller scale, with the Cherokee and Choctaw, in the First World War. The Comanche were used [...]

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The Conservative Hole

March 2, 2009

Ultimately, a conservative will disappoint. I was one of those liberals who liked John McCain. Not the politics, but the man. Then he ran his disgraceful Presidential campaign, a kind of disgrace – aside from the consumptive ambition – made possible only by the ideological dimensions of the Republican Party. Journalist and top-blogger Andrew Sullivan, [...]

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