Social Movements & the Law

Firm moves ore through land without telling tribal leaders as mine resurfaces painful legacy of nuclear development

The Navajo Nation has temporarily banned any transport of uranium and other radioactive material over its land without an explicit approval. The executive order issued by Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren will be in effect for at least the next six months. Earlier this week, Navajo police attempted to stop two trucks carrying uranium ore across the reservation from an Arizona mine to a Utah processing mill. Nygren said Energy Fuels Inc., which owns the mine and processing mill, did not provide any notice that the trucks would be crossing through Navajo Nation. Nygren said in a statement, “We’re taking this stance of interpreting and executing the law to ensure the safety of our people and respect for Navajo sovereignty.”

More than 100 pregnant women in medical distress who sought help from emergency rooms have been turned away or negligently treated since 2022.

The I-Portal contains full-text electronic resources including articles, e-books, theses, government publications, videos, oral histories, reports, and digitized archival documents and photographs. As of 2022, the I-Portal had over 71,000 records and new content is added on a continuing basis.

An aid to those who are conducting legal research on the Navajo Nation

Across America, it is altogether too hard for Native Americans to vote. They often must go off-reservation and travel outrageous distances to reach voting services. Many do not have home addresses or mail delivery, making registering and receiving a ballot difficult, if not impossible. Native Americans still face racial discrimination and hostilities when casting their ballots. NARF, in collaboration with Native American advocates across the country, have extensively documented these barriers and are fighting every day against this discrimination.

In June 2021, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive effort to recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and to shed light on the traumas of the past. The announcement directed the Department, under the leadership of Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, to prepare an investigative report, the first volume of which was released in May 2022, detailing available historical records relating to federal Indian boarding schools and to develop the first official list of sites. The Department released the second and final volume of the investigative report, in July 2024. The second volume builds on the initial volume to significantly expand on the number and details of institutions to include student deaths, the number of burial sites, participation of religious institutions and organizations, and federal dollars spent to operate these locations. It also included policy recommendations for consideration by Congress and the Executive Branch to continue to chart a path to healing and redress for Indigenous communities and the nation.

On July 17, 2024, we noticed a posting from Wisblawg which stated in part that “In recent months web developers and SEO experts have noted significant changes in Google’s Indexing practices ...

"A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice explains the history and theories behind abolition and disability justice in a way that is easy to understand for those new to these concepts yet also gives insights that will be useful to seasoned activists. The book uses extensive research and professional and lived experience to illuminate the way the State uses disability and its power to disable to incarcerate multiply marginalized disabled people, especially those who are queer, trans, Black, or Indigenous. Because disabled people are much more likely than nondisabled people to be locked up in prisons, jails, and other sites of incarceration, abolitionists, and others critical of carceral systems must incorporate a disability justice perspective into our work. A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice gives personal and policy examples of how and why disabled people are disproportionately caught up in the carceral net, and how we can use this information to work toward prison and police abolition more effectively. This book includes practical tools and strategies that will be useful for anyone who cares about disability justice or abolition and explains why we can't have one without the other"--Amazon.com.

"Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard in 2011, We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For argues for the importance of self-cultivation in pursuit of justice as a critical feature of Black politics, what Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls Black democratic perfectionism. Building on the political scientist Adolph Reed's work on 'Black custodial politics' Glaude critiques our impulse to outsource political needs to a professional class of politicians that purportedly represent us. Instead, he affirms the capacities of ordinary people to cultivate a better self and a better world by locating the prophetic and the heroic not in the pulpit but in the pew"--

"Changes at the global, federal, state, and municipal level are pushing forward the reparations movement for people of African descent. The distinguished editors of this volume have gathered works that chronicle the historical movement for reparations both in the United States and around the world. Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people's human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent. Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time"--

There is no DEI without justice. This book brings the J in DEIJ to life, giving organizations a road map to justice-centered action. We have not yet succeeded at dismantling systems that perpetuate harm and exclude non-white groups. Many organizational DEI efforts fail because they are too tactical and focus on "fixing" marginalized communities rather than reworking the systems that uphold inequity. A component is missing from the diversity, equity, and inclusion equation-- justice. Justice as an orientation focuses on repairing broken systems, acknowledging harm, and implementing deliberate processes and practices that produce equity and shift power. Justice work diverges from traditional metrics-driven DEI work and requires a new approach to thought and action to effectively dismantle power structures. DEIJ pioneer Mary-Frances Winters seeks to provide understanding and guidance to organizations committed to doing the work properly. With additional chapters written by the Winters Group's core team and strategic partners, this book shares relevant theory and practical remedies to achieve equitable workplaces and features advice on how to ditch neutrality, practice restorative dialogue, amplify anti-racist practices, and more. By taking a justice perspective, this book will help readers to both achieve equity and sustain it. --

"Drawing on a wide range of case studies, this book provides an examination of the role of United States federal law in shaping the invocation game of police interrogation. It is essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of forensic linguistics, law and society, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis"--

"Restoring Relations introduces, synthesizes, and analyzes traditional stories by Dine and Dene storytellers in orature and film. Restoring storied autonomy, identities, kinship, and languages is coming to a state of harmony, beauty, wellness, peace, and balance by recognizing hane' (story/narrative) in oral, literary, and visual formats (spoken, published, directed, and beaded). The book conceptualizes narrative autonomy as hane'tonomy and visual storytelling from a Dine perspective and offers a map for restorying that resists inauthentic and misappropriated stories. The base of the argument privilege Indigenous narratives and how these narratives are tied to land and relations. In the book's final movement, the author explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Dine and Dene, across time and space through re-storying of relations"--

"Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities examines the relationship between the Wet'suwet'en nation and pipeline development, showing how colonial governments and corporations seek to control Indigenous claims, and how the Wet'suwet'en resist. Tyler McCreary offers historical context for the unfolding relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonialism and explores pipeline regulatory review processes, attempts to reconcile Indigeneity with development, as well as fundamental questions about territory and jurisdiction. Throughout, McCreary demonstrates how the cyclical and ongoing movements between resistance and reconciliation are affected by the unequal relations between Indigenous peoples and colonial government and development operations. This book will be of interest to readers interested in Indigenous and Wet'suwet'en politics, as well as the politics of pipeline development. Scholars in geography, environmental studies, political science, law, and Indigenous Studies will benefit from this sophisticated analysis."--

"An examination of the historical and present racial inequities of the prosecutorial system and a blueprint for transforming the system to one of fairness and justice"--;A deeply revealing expos of the American prosecutorial system and its historic and present racial inequities -- and how we can transform the system to one of fairness and justice. In Get Off My Neck, Debbie Hines draws on her unique perspective as a trial lawyer, former Baltimore prosecutor, and assistant attorney general for the State of Maryland to argue that US prosecutors, as the most powerful players in the criminal justice system, systematically target and criminalize Black people. Hines describes her disillusionment as a young Black woman who initially entered the profession with the goal of helping victims of crimes, only to discover herself aiding and abetting a system that prizes plea bargaining, speedy conviction, and excessive punishment above all else. In this book, she offers concrete, specific, and hopeful solutions for just how we can come together in a common purpose for criminal justice and racial justice reform. Get Off My Neck explains that the racial inequities in the prosecutorial system are built into our country's DNA. What's more, they are the direct result of a history that has conditioned Americans to perceive the Black body as insignificant at best and dangerous at worst. Unlike other books that discuss the prosecutor's office and change from inside the office, Hines offers a proactive approach to fixing our broken prosecutorial system through a broad-based alliance of reform-minded prosecutors, activists, allies, communities, and racial justice organizations -- all working together to end the racist treatment of Black people. Told intimately through personal, family, and client narratives, Get Off My Neck is not only a deeply sobering account of our criminal justice system and its devastating impact on Black children, youth, and adults but also a practical and inspiring roadmap for how we can start doing better right now. -- Provided by publisher.

Hume tells the story of the radical feminist networks who worked outside the law to defend abortion. Starting in the 1970s, small groups of feminist activists met regularly to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and learn how to safely perform a procedure known as menstrual extraction, which can empty the contents of the uterus in case of pregnancy using equipment that can be easily bought and assembled at home. This "self-help" movement grew into a robust national and international collaboration of activists and health workers determined to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, at all costs--to the point of learning how to do the necessary steps themselves. Even after abortion was legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, activists continued meeting, studying, and teaching these skills, reshaping their strategies alongside decades of changing legal, medical, and cultural landscapes such as the legislative war against abortion rights, the AIDS epidemic, and the rise of anti-abortion domestic terrorism in the 1980s and 90s. The movement's drive to keep abortion accessible led to the first clinic defense mobilizations against anti-abortion extremists trying to force providers to close their doors. From the self-help movement sprang a constellation of licensed feminist healthcare clinics, community programs to promote reproductive health, even the nation's first known-donor sperm bank, all while fighting the oppression of racism, poverty, and gender violence. Hume follows generations of activists and clinicians who orbited the Women's Choice clinic in Oakland from the early 1970s until 2010, as they worked underground and above ground, in small cells and broad coalitions and across political movements with grit, conviction, and allegiances of great trust to do what they believed needed to be done--despite the law, when required. Grounded in interviews of activists sharing details of their work for the first time, Hume retells three decades of this critical, if under-recognized story of the radical edge of the abortion movement. These lessons are more pertinent than ever following the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the devastation to abortion access nationwide. --

"In New York Harbour, at the entrance to the United States of America, stands the Statue of Liberty: Liberty Enlightening the World. Liberty stands as a beacon welcoming all to the land of the free, holding a torch and a tablet inscribed with the date of American Declaration of Independence. At her feet lies a broken chain. The ideal of freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization, and is exported to the world, often by force. Wars and invasions are justified with the claim that we must free the foreign people, whom we will then turn away at our borders. Many are excluded from the ideal of freedom: the American Declaration of Independence was signed by slave owners, and the land that was declared independent was stolen from Indigenous peoples. Indigenous lands and peoples around the world remain colonized, and the practice of Black slavery continues in practices of mass incarceration. The land of the free, like other "developed" nations, polices its borders to keep out unwanted foreigners. Walls are not really necessary. Worldwide, the freedom of some depends on the exploitation and oppression and exclusion of most of the world's people"--

"Co-edited by two activists with deep experience in organizing prison books programs (PBPs), Books Behind Bars introduces readers to PBPs and their decentralized organization. PBPs are a grassroots-level and nationwide activist movement challenging the largest prison industry in the world by refusing to let incarcerated people remain isolated and forgotten. Operating on shoestring budgets, will all-volunteer workforces and donated libraries, books to prisoner programs are examples of ordinary people acting to undermine the isolation and judgment of incarceration. Although there are currently fifty-three books to prisoners groups serving in all fifty states, these programs remain relatively unknown. The goal of this book is to bring awareness to this diffuse and long-standing social movement and offer readers a way to get involved. In addition to highlighting voices from PBPs throughout the United States, the volume also includes essays, images, and artwork from independent bookstore owners, formerly and currently incarcerated folks, activists, artists, journalists, volunteers, organizers, and scholars"--

"In Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference, Chloe Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the 20th century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty. Using Texas as a case-study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of 'pathological' mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the 'rehabilitative penology', Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways"--

By: Matt Nosanchuk, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Operations and Outreach, Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education All students deserve access to learning environments that are inclusive and free from discrimination and that nurture their intellect, wellbeing, and creativity, preparing them for success in school and beyond. Books have been the gateway toContinue Reading

“I love working on iPretendians/i because it gives me an opportunity to use humor as a vehicle to teach and inform. ” says Angel Ellis, co-host of iPretendians/i, Apple Podcasts' Spotlight show for July 2024. Angel Ellis is a free-press activist and director of Mvskoke Media. Her co-host Robert Jago is a freelance writer, entrepreneur, and Indigenous rights activist from Richmond, British Columbia. Together, they pitched the show to the podcast network, Canadaland, as a new original series. “I broke one of the first big Pretendian stories of this whole moment,” says Jago, “and the way that I did it didn’t provide enough context. This series gives me a chance to try and reshape that.”Ellis and Jago hope listeners understand the serious nature of the problem, while becoming more acquainted to Native joy and humor. “The broadest part of society coming to understand its impact on Indigenous people, has always been a driving motivation for me,” says Ellis. “ If nothing else, I hope listeners learn that there is a way to be supportive of and enjoy Indigenous cultures without wearing it like some passing fad.”What do some of the most prominent and successful Indigenous artists, leaders and professors have in common? They aren’t Indigenous. There are hundreds of cases of Indigenous identity fraud that we know about, and likely thousands that we do not. So why do these so-called “pretendians” do it? How do they pull it off? And what happens when they are exposed? In each episode of this riveting new podcast series, co-hosts Robert Jago (Kwantlen First Nation and Nooksack Indian Tribe) and Angel Ellis (Muscogee (Creek) Nation) reveal unbelievable stories of audacious fraudsters and investigate the complex phenomenon of Indigenous identity theft.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vice-president says Black woman who was shot in her home by an Illinois sheriff’s deputy ‘deserved to be safe’

Alexis Smith tells audience that her abuser is in crowd and that ‘I, and my community, deserve healthy relationships’

The 17-year-old was having a meal on the floor when she was attacked with a butcher knife Sunday. Officials say they aren't yet ruling out hate crime charges.

The disgraceful lack of care she endured was a direct result of Texas’ deadly new abortion law.

Kamala Harris news and opinion

The billionaire tech mogul "vowed to destroy the woke mind virus" and said people who promote gender-affirming care "should go to prison."

Upsurge in activity from white supremacists and swastika-toting extremists follows rash of anti-LGBTQ+ state laws