Sometimes there is an overwhelming amount of info, and I rarely read
everything. I'm primarily interested on articles on American Indians.
As some have pointed out, some of the NativeNet articles are not about
Indians. That's fine with me... these are the articles I skip.
I agree with a comment made about helping our own first. I recognize
that "broader social justice" in the absolute sense (for all people)
is a greater ideal to work towards. But, I think there's already many
people doing good work on these issues. In the meantime, who is working
on issues directly affecting my tribe? Our people could be going down the
tubes while the "world is being saved." This is why I choose to concentrate
my energies with my own tribe. The biggest issue facing us, the Tsnungwe
or South Fork Hupa, is having our tribal status clarified, i.e. regaining
our federally recognized status.
I think someday we will see a network linking all tribal governments.
When? I don't know. The power of this would be incredible. Whenever the
BIA or anybody else is theatening us, we would broadcast a message to let
other tribes know what we were facing. It would be in the other tribes
interest to support us since they would not want to be threatened in the same
way. Basically, the information exchange would strengthen our political
power. (Tribes are political entities :=) )
I wouldn't want to have to distinguish for everybody between an article that
was about "native rights" vs. one pushing a "broader European agenda".
I do make this distiction for myself while reading through the articles,
but I wouldn't want to make this distinction for everybody [such as a
moderator might do]. I would suggest that NativeNet set up a separate list
for stuff on logging or the environment. Then, if somebody submits an
article about a tree in Indonesia being logged, they could send it to just
that list. These are the kind of articles I skip. Note that I am not
advocating cutting down every tree in Indonesia; I'm just saying that I
would like to concentrate my time on Indian people (particularly my own)
and this is why I skip such articles.
Danny Ammon