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Beware the Thug’s Vengeance George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published 77 years ago, and still offers prescient insight into the human condition.  Image from Vish Mangalapalli, WordPress, April 23, 2025. Artist unknown And while the book was required reading when I was a high school student in Britain, I imagine thousands of students across the globe sweated over term papers…

2 October 2025 Earlier this week I wrote about ouright lies and censorship advanced by leaders of the US government. Some are breathtakingly absurd (such as the vice president’s claim that residents in his homestate of Ohio were eating the neighborhood cats and dogs.) Other lies feed into the many falsehoods that have taken hold in popular culture of, for example, vaccines. I created a…

Our city has been threatened by the felon-in-charge (Trump was found guilty on 34 unlawful acts) who declared Portland “war-ravaged,” according to today’s New York Times. Our governor simply said: “Let’s not take the bait.” Tina Kotek—a rational and just human being—is right. Don’t take the bait. Portlanders have been posting photos of peaceful protests and bucolic scenes on social media for…

Nanye’hi (pictured), a Cherokee leader, called for peace between the denizens and settlers. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1832 that Georgia had no authority over the Cherokee, which was a sovereign nation, President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling. Source: Tennessee State Museum website. Note: Photo could not be authenticated. 1 November 2024 Today feels fresh, just like when you…

Are ordinary citizens really helpless to distinguish truth from lies, and is misinformation as prevalent as we have been led to believe? — Read on www.ft.com/content/4b2ee578-0085-465f-b112-e8ad9061f14b

PREVIEW 8 September 2024 My friend Jan Haaken—a professor of psychology and a filmmaker—is steeped in a fund-raising campaign to clear $25,000 and finish a documentary about how faculty, students, staff and college communities in the US cope with speech freedoms, academic integrity, and protests surrounding current skirmishes in Israel and Palestinian territory. The image has been attributed…

Remembering What We Forgot The photo from the February 1939 issue of National Geographic was repurposed as a postcard: a rare example of Native history that features fishers at Celilo Falls. Credit: Three Lions, Inc. (A US photo agency), copyright expired. Although it is has been just days since I published my last blog about writing postcards—and my discovery that many North American…

[The Wasco and Wishram lived along what is now called Hood River in Oregon, and lost their territory to settlers in the 1800s. Edward S. Curtis captured an image of a Wishram girl in 1909. Photo from the Library of Congress, in the Public Domain.] A Postcard Tradition Picture postcards in the US have long presented an affordable way to share beach vacations with relatives, and offer a quick…

NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH My Mother is Watching Me Margaret Sue Barnes Coleman Some Sundays we drive 90 minutes North of our Portland home, paralleling the Columbia River, headed for the Zen Monastery in Clatskanie (Oregon), where we spend the morning meditating and then listen to a dharma talk (I translate “dharma” as truth). We then break for lunch and visit with second…

Four Osage sisters create the heartbeat of the new film, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), which is based on David Grann’s 2017 book about the murders of tribal members in the early 20th century. Pictured, from left, are Rita, Anna, Mollie and Minnie. (Credit: The Osage National Museum/Doubleday. Date missing). 9 October 2023 The second week of October welcomes National Indigenous Peoples Day,…

September 2023 Lewis W. Hine documented child labor conditions in the 1900s—traveling throughout the country and taking photos with his five-pound Graflex 4×5 camera. Historians credit Hine with creating the “photo story,” where images—rather than copy alone—capture a narrative. When visiting a mine in West Virginia in 1908, Hine snapped the picture (above) of a youngster who worked as a…

The Blog is reposted from Laura Trace Hentz Museum Apologizes for Asking Native Mother to Remove Traditional Baby Carrier A staff member at the Portland Art Museum told her the basket violated … Museum Apologizes for Asking Native Mother to Remove Traditional Baby Carrier

“American Gothic,” photo of Ella Watson, by ©Gordon Parks, 1942, Washington DCCopyright: Gordon Parks Foundation Reading Deeply I’ve been chewing on news about the College Board’s Advanced Placement test in African American Studies that made headlines over the past weeks, trying to sort out my sympathies. Let me disclose that I worked on a consulting team, revising national communication exams…

JUST OPEN A CAN I miss the days when we made garlands with strips of colored paper folded into rings and glued together for the Christmas tree. In winter we would crack nuts that arrived with their shells intact. My father would split walnuts by gripping together two in one fist. Some nuts were impossible to break—like macadamias—whose shells resist bashing and end up whole in the…

When Vegetarians and Meat-eaters Break Bread

CHRISTMAS DINNER 2022 Chacun à son Goût Uncredited linocut from the website Zazzle Today: I’m laundering cloth napkins. And ironing them. This is my kind of housework: I like to see things clean and shine. A tiny red streak on white fabric catches my eye. My thumb is dripping blood onto the freshly ironed cloth. I start a new wash, spraying the bloody napkin with spot remover, find a…

Celebrating the Holidays Uncredited photo from “antique advertising” on the web I spent Saturday afternoon at a friend’s home learning how to make tamales, a tradition in many Indigenous communities in North, South and Latin America. She invited a few pals to snack on hors d’oeuvres (deviled eggs, chips and tinned mackerel) and prepared a host of ingredients in advance: stewed pork, cooked…