By Sonali Kolhatkar for Yes! Media. Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Washington News Service reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration
For generations, Indigenous communities in the United States have protested Columbus Day -- a centuries-old observance in the United States -- and for decades have led a movement to rename the second Monday in October from "Columbus Day" to "Indigenous People's Day."
Today, more than a dozen states have formally embraced Indigenous People's Day as part of a process to recenter Indigenous communities and end the glorification of settler colonialism.
It is precisely within this context that educator and author Oriel Siu takes on the historical myth of Columbus in her new children's book "Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over." Using clever rhymes, but never avoiding the barbarity of colonization.
Siu, whose pen name is Dr. Siu, reimagines Columbus as a monstrous ogre who ravages the Americas. The new book is the second in a series of Siu's books whose protagonist is Rebeldita the Fearless, an "empowered, justice-seeker, border-smasher girl," and "a child born out of long-enduring Indigenous and Black resistances in the Americas."
Siu's first book in the series, Rebeldita the Fearless in Ogreland, was sparked by the horrors of former President Donald Trump's immigration policy enforcement that viciously separated immigrant families and prior to that, the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants under former President Barack Obama.
Siu is based in her home country of Honduras but lived and worked for years as a professor of Ethnic Studies in the United States. She spoke with YES! about what it means for parents and children to have access to books that reflect their diverse histories.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Who is Rebeldita and how was she conceived?
Oriel Siu: Rebeldita is a character who is born out of resistances, out of 529 years of Black, Brown, and Indigenous resistances in the Americas. When I became a mother in Seattle seven years ago, I encountered a problem that many of us socially conscious parents face, and it is the lack of books that not only represent people of color and children of color, but also allow for their mind to expand outside of the White settler mentalities, paradigms, and imaginaries. There weren't enough books that would allow my daughter to know her history in an engaging way and in a way that would push her toward asking questions about where she lives, who she is, and where she comes from. In addition to motherhood, I also came to that conclusion through my work as a professor of Ethnic Studies in the United States for over 14 years. My 18- and 19-year-old students came into college classrooms with all these foundational "fairy tales" as the base from which they understand the Americas, the place where they live and where they are born.
Kolhatkar: Is Rebeldita modeled on your daughter or yourself?
Siu: She is modeled on all children of the Americas. She is a Black and Indigenous child. She is truly a product of the American experience. She knows that she lives on occupied lands and she wants to understand why and how. She wants to know how these ogres came to occupy this land and why it is called Ogreland. To that end she asks questions and through narrative she comes to beautiful conclusions that inspire action.
Watch Dr. Oriel María Siu read an excerpt from her book and share some of the reasons why she wrote it.
Kolhatkar: Was this book an effort toward rethinking "Columbus Day" as Indigenous People's Day and to recenter Indigenous people in the history of colonization?
Siu: It goes much further than just the day. It's aimed at shifting the paradigm, toward rethinking our school curricula, and decentering Whiteness and White Supremacy. It's not just for children of color or children of the United States, but for all children of the Americas. The fairytale of this person named Christopher Columbus who "sailed the ocean blue," and came to "discover" new lands is a lie that is taught not just in the U.S. but throughout the Americas and it continues to be taught in many European schools in Spain and England. It's a transnational lie and one that must be undone because it becomes ingrained in [our] minds and in the ways in which children and adults understand who we are, where we are, and how it is that our societies exist. It's such a fundamental and important moment in history for all of us to understand and to know and yet it gets taught in such a way as to continue to center and "hero-ify" White settler colonialism in the United States, the Americas, and abroad.
Kolhatkar: In your book, the people who the ogre, Christopher Cologre finds, are called the "Abya Yala." Who are they?
Siu: My books look at terms. A term like "the Americas" is also a way of continuing to impose names and terms that come from the period in which this entire continent was occupied, and genocide was committed, after which there was the enslavement of people, Black and Brown, and then Chinese folk and Asians. "Abya Yala" is one of the terms that original nations of the Americas-specifically in the center of the Americas-use to refer to the Americas. There are many other terms as well. I wanted to make sure that Abya Yala was centered in this children's book because it is inviting parents and teachers to begin to look at us through other terms outside of the White Settler paradigm.
Kolhatkar: In addition to the protagonist Rebeldita, you feature a grandmother figure in your book. Is she a representation of how histories and information get passed down orally from generation to generation through women?
Siu: Yes. In the White supremacist curricula that permeates our schooling systems we know that the White male patriarchal voice is centered in every single textbook. So, I needed to make sure that this abuelita, this grandmother figure, was very important in how children are able to understand and explore the history that has been robbed from them, the truths that have been robbed from them, by this "Ogre Cologre." She's interrupting the way in which we have understood and learned history. She interrupts it using oral traditions brought in via African traditions and Indigenous traditions from the Americas.
Kolhatkar: There are some disturbing scenes in your book such as images of children in chains-of course, it is a disturbing history. Often children's books tend to be very sanitized because perhaps adults think children can't handle it. Why was it important for you to show these scenes?
Siu: This is a conversation I have all the time, mostly with my White students, who ask, "Well don't you think these kinds of conversations are too painful or not appropriate for children of 4 or 5?" I don't even have to answer the question because my students of color always step up and respond, "Well, this is a conversation we have to have anyway, right?" White children grow up sheltered from understanding many of the realities and experiences of children of color. By the time they are 18 or 19 years old, going to college, they realize they've been lied to the entire time through their elementary and high school curricula. During our ethnic studies classes, White students realize, often for the first time, that they have been lied to. What do they do with that? It becomes a very important conversation in understanding how we can live in the same place through such different experiences for White and non-White children. Children of color and White children are fully capable of engaging the truth. It's the way in which we offer it to them and how we guide discussion and conversation so that these become productive critical conversations as opposed to hiding it, or lying, or brushing it off, or pretending it doesn't happen.
Kolhatkar: It seems as though for children of color especially, knowing the truth of the disturbing history can help them make sense of their world as they grow up?
Siu: Absolutely. That's one of the problems we have in the United States. Children of color, as of 2016, are now the majority. Non-White babies are now the minority, so they are having to grow up trying to figure out the things that don't make sense. We need truth to occupy their textbooks and we need to do it in a way that is empowering and not laying blame on anyone. Understanding our collective history in the Americas is not an attempt to blame White America for [how] we live in present times. It's an attempt to understand it so we can change it.
Kolhatkar: Ethnic Studies programs and Critical Race Theory curricula are under attack from the right-wing these days. Do your books help to counter such attacks?
Siu: Ethnic Studies is coming under a lot more attack, but it's always been a target because it is questioning and rewriting history from the non-White perspective. So, I'm very happy to be contributing children's literature to that area.
The White conservative fear against Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory is what is pushing all the hate that we see on a daily basis. I've seen my own students having grown up with these big lies as their foundation for understanding the Americas. And at the beginning of the semester, they sit with their arms locked, absolutely not accepting the fact that there is a woman of color in front of them who is a professor, and not wanting to engage with me. But once I begin to create a solid foundation, starting with pre-1942 history, and they begin to understand how it's related to everything-the environment, law, policies, health-their attitude tremendously changes and the questions they ask become different. We need to rewrite these transnational foundational lies because it makes a huge difference in how children and young adults later on conceive of themselves and their world.
Kolhatkar: How has your daughter responded to your books?
Siu: She's been as present and as active a participant as I have been. We actually wrote many of the phrases, verses, and rhymes of the first book together, so that was a very beautiful process. It is similar to the process of what I am attempting to do as a mother of a Black, Chinese, and Indigenous child. We have been having these conversations since she was born. Race is not a taboo subject in our home, so it feels very natural to her. What I'm attempting to do is to bring to children like my daughter, the books that represent their experiences and empower them through history.
Sonali Kolhatkar conducted this interview for YES! Magazine. She is currently the racial justice editor at YES! Media and a writing fellow with Independent Media Institute.
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Billings-based Western Native Voice is holding its annual membership conference in Great Falls starting tomorrow, and members are discussing democratic participation but also cultural issues affecting tribes.
The conference is called No Vote Left Behind and will focus on helping Indigenous people register to vote and know where and when to cast ballots.
Just as importantly, workshops will discuss cultural identity and what it means to be Native.
Western Native Voice communication's director Tracie Garfield is a member of the Assiniboine tribe, and said more than 50% of Indigenous people in Montana live off reservations - which leaves many wondering where and how they fit it with their culture.
"Participants and members of the workshop will be able to talk to each other - talk about what it means to be Native, how they grew up," said Garfield. "Some grew up on a reservation. We'll have people who grew up in urban areas. We'll also have people who grew up in rural Montana - off the reservations."
Cultural identity was the number one topic requested by members for this conference. Western Native Voice has over 13,000 members from Montana and across the U.S.
The conference starts tomorrow morning in Great Falls.
Garfield said Western Native Voice will hold its Expanding Horizons: Beyond Survival youth conference next Monday and Tuesday in Bozeman - where they will be learning about native history, traditional knowledge and cultural identity.
The conference will bring together students from both urban and reservation high schools. She said true native history and cultural identity weren't always taught when she was young.
"When we were growing up, we weren't really taught the true history of our tribes," said Garfield. "Say I'm Assiniboine. I didn't know my own tribal history. Even though I felt Native I didn't really know what it meant to be Native."
Garfield said cultural identity is a complex issue with so many people living in urban areas, and Western Native Voice wants to create a space for people to talk about it by training youth early on so they understand what it means to be Native in today's world.
Disclosure: Western Native Voice contributes to our fund for reporting on Budget Policy & Priorities, Civic Engagement, Education, Native American Issues. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
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Plans to open a new gateway to Redwoods State and National Parks got a big boost Tuesday, paving the way for a key parcel of land to be returned to the Yurok Tribe.
The place is called 'O Rew in the Yurok language, on Highway 101, about 40 miles north of Eureka, at a former lumber mill site in Orick.
Joseph James, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, said this is a model for the "land-back" movement.
"We are able to share our culture, our knowledge as Indigenous people, first people, keepers of the land," James explained. "It's not driven by western society providing interpretation. It's being driven by Yuroks."
The nonprofit Save the Redwoods League bought the 125-acre property 13 years ago and has been restoring the mill site and nearby Prairie Creek alongside the tribe and the nonprofit California Trout. The area is closed for construction now, but will reopen in 2026 as the 'O Rew Redwoods Gateway with new trails, cultural signage and visitor facilities.
Steve Mietz, superintendent of Redwoods National and State Parks for the National Park Service, said it is the first-ever comanagement agreement for tribally-owned land with the National Park Service and California State Parks.
"This is just a recognition of their sovereignty," Mietz pointed out. "Their need to regain land that was taken from them years ago and turning it back, and creating greater understanding about the original people in this area."
In future years, the Yurok Tribe plans to build a full visitor center, including re-creating a tribal village with plank houses and a sweat lodge.
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By Frank Hopper for Yes! Magazine.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Washington News Service reporting for the Yes! Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration
This month marks four years since Manuel Ellis, a 33-year-old African American man, was killed by Tacoma police. Despite the all-too-familiar injustice of the killing, something happened in the aftermath that had never before occurred in Washington state: The police who killed him were put on trial for murder.
Although the officers were found not guilty, the trial itself would not have happened at all if not for the Puyallup tribe and their years-long struggle to change the law that protected police in Washington from being prosecuted for killing suspects in the line of duty.
The Puyallup tribe of Washington has always been a protector of Native rights, especially during the Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They fought back when the state of Washington tried to take away their treaty-protected fishing rights during the fishing wars of the 1970s.
They also fought back against federal termination and relocation policies with the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz and the 1970 takeover of Seattle's Fort Lawton. They fought alongside the Oglala Lakota against the federal support of a corrupt puppet tribal government at the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.
They never backed down at these and many other direct actions. So when one of their own, Puyallup tribal member Jacqueline Salyers, was brutally and senselessly gunned down by Tacoma police in 2016, they consulted with the elders who had organized and led many of the tribe's early direct actions.
The result was the passage of the nation's first police accountability bill, Washington state's Initiative 940, which removed the immunity the police once had that historically allowed them to murder citizens with impunity.
Jackie's Murder
On Jan. 3, 2016, Puyallup tribal member Lisa Earl got a call from a Tacoma police detective about her daughter, Jacqueline Salyers, who went by Jackie. Earl was at the Puyallup tribe's Little Wild Wolves Youth Center where she worked as a youth coordinator.
"He asked if I knew the whereabouts of my daughter," Earl recalls, "because she was known to be with Kenneth Wright, who had a warrant out for his arrest and they needed to get ahold of him."
Earl explained to the detective that she and her family were also looking for Salyers. Kenneth Wright, Salyers' abusive boyfriend, had been keeping her away from her family, according to Earl. He had even threatened Earl's life, telling Salyers if her mother didn't stop bothering him, he would kill her.
"I was afraid for my life. I told the detective, 'I want you to catch him!'" Earl explains. "'I want my daughter back! I want her to come home!'"
A few weeks later, on January 28, Salyers was shot four times by Officer Scott Campbell. He said she had tried to run him over while he and another officer were attempting to arrest her boyfriend. She died a few minutes later, just after midnight on January 29.
Later that day, James Rideout, Salyers' uncle and Earl's brother, heard about the shooting and found his sister at the medical examiner's office, hysterical. He drove to the crime scene in East Tacoma and found the entire area cordoned off. He couldn't get anywhere near where the shooting happened. A local news reporter offhandedly told him he thought the shooting was going to be deemed justified.
"Why would you say that?" Rideout remembers saying. "They haven't even investigated this case!"
The reporter knew the facts weren't important; police were protected from prosecution.
The Alleged Cover-Up
According to a 2021 story in the Tacoma News Tribune, official police reports state an informant had told Officer Campbell of Wright's whereabouts. Campbell and another officer located Wright's vehicle and pulled up in front of it. Salyers and Wright were inside. After seeing Wright, who was considered armed and dangerous, they drew their weapons and approached the vehicle, screaming at Wright to put his hands in the air.
Salyers, who was in the driver's seat, was startled, turned the ignition on, and began driving away. Campbell relates he felt sure Salyers was trying to run him over, although she was only "crawling" according to Wright.
Campbell fired seven rounds at Salyers. She was hit four times, two bullets penetrating her abdomen and head.
Right from the beginning, Rideout could tell the official story didn't add up. A bullet hole was present in the driver's door, indicating Campbell was not in front of the car when he fired.
According to an official investigation by Tacoma police, after the shooting Wright grabbed a rifle, crawled over Salyers' body, got out the driver's side door, and ran off. Campbell and his partner, Officer Aaron Joseph, chased Wright, but apparently lost him and broke off pursuit, supposedly afraid Wright would fire at them from a hidden position.
Mysteriously, a police surveillance camera mounted in the area that should have captured the entire event "malfunctioned" according to police reports.
The Community Response
Salyers had been active in the Puyallup tribe. Many had grown up with her and remembered her loving personality and concern for others.
Adding to the tragedy, the medical examiner determined she was pregnant at the time of the shooting. Earl and her family not only lost a beloved daughter, they also lost a new member of the next generation.
"You need to do something," Rideout remembers telling the tribal council. "And they did. They responded."
Council members Sylvia Miller and Tim Reynon, along with tribal elder Ramona Bennett and other influential members of the community, began meeting weekly at the Little Wild Wolves Youth Center to plan how the tribe would respond.
The elders had experience with activism going back to the 1960s. Over the years they had fought with police over many issues, including fishing and land rights. They had been beaten, tear-gassed, and incarcerated. They knew what they were facing, and they were not afraid.
Bennett, now 85, was a veteran of many battles, standoffs, and occupations, and she suspected a possible cover-up in Salyers' case, after the police realized what they'd done.
"'Now look what you did! You killed that stupid Indian girl!' That's what Ramona Bennett said [the police] would say," Earl recalls.
The Birth of Initiative 940
Bennett knew from experience that change would only come about through publicity, cooperation with other groups, and community support. So she recommended they stage a march. On March 16, 2016, Earl led a procession of nearly 300 people from the Puyallup tribe's administration building to the federal courthouse in downtown Tacoma.
To her surprise, many other families of police shooting victims joined them in support.
"We didn't have any clue until Jackie was killed that there were so many others out there going through the same thing as we were," Earl remembers.
Over time, attendance at the weekly community meetings at the tribe's youth center grew. Families of other police murder victims shared their stories and discussed what they could do to address the problem.
One supporter was Rick Williams, the older brother of John T. Williams, who had been shot by Seattle police officer Ian Birk on Aug. 30, 2010. According to Birk, Williams, 50, was carrying an open pocket knife and refused to drop it. Williams was a seventh-generation master carver of the Ditidaht tribe who was carving a board as he walked down the street.
Dashcam footage of the incident clearly indicated that after Birk exited his patrol car, he almost immediately fired at the nearly blind and partially deaf Williams.
King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg announced he could not charge Birk with murder due to a clause in state law, enacted in 1986 during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, that said unless it can be proven a police officer acted with evil intent or malice, they cannot be prosecuted for killing suspects. Since malice is a mental state, it is nearly impossible to prove its presence in a court of law, giving police in Washington nearly complete immunity to kill suspects.
Rick Williams had since been working to change the law. He campaigned and collected signatures for Washington state Initiative 873, known as the John T. Williams Bill. It was written by police reform advocate Lisa Hayes after the unjustified Seattle police shooting of Che Taylor in February 2016.
The initiative failed to get enough signatures to be put on the ballot but later became the template the families at the Puyallup community meetings used to draft Initiative 940.
Along with the families of many other police shooting victims and the financial support of every federally recognized tribe in Washington state, the Puyallup tribe successfully gathered 360,000 signatures to get the initiative on the ballot. And in 2018 Washington voters passed Initiative 940 into law.
How the New Law Affected the Police Killing of Manuel Ellis
Manuel Ellis died in 2020 while Tacoma police held him face down on the ground, put a bag over his head, and kneeled on his neck, causing him to die of hypoxia, or lack of breath, just as in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. If his death had happened before the passage of Initiative 940, the three officers responsible for his death, Matthew Collins, Christopher Burbank, and Timothy Rankine, would never have been charged with a crime or put on trial.
Due to the new law, however, Collins and Burbank were charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter and Rankine was charged with manslaughter.
All three officers were acquitted on Dec. 21, 2023, by a mostly white jury, and the city of Tacoma paid them $500,000 each to resign. This outcome is considered "perverse" by Ellis' family and supporters.
Chester Earl, Salyers' cousin, feels the issue of white privilege played a major role in the verdict. He thinks the white jurors had no experience dealing with police racism and violence. He feels they probably believe the police are always right.
"You got to remember, all's we been able to do with 940 is give the prosecutors the opportunity to charge and convict and take them to court. We can't make prosecutors argue it in a certain way," he explains.
The fight for true police reform will likely take years and will require a major shift in how the public feels about the role of law enforcement in our society. Salyers' tragic murder, however, caused a major step in that direction, according to her uncle, James Rideout.
"What makes me most proud," he says, "is she brought the best out in me to do something that has never been done in the history of the United States, and that's to change this law for the protection of our future generations. And I thank her, and it'll be a lifetime before I can tell her, 'You changed our entire tribe and community forever, and you will always, always be remembered. We will never forget you. Your life mattered.'"
Frank Hopper wrote this article for Yes! Magazine.
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