"The Quilters"

A brief (33 minute) documentary about men in a maximum security prison making quilts for foster and autistic children.  Absolutely worth watching.  Currently available on Netflix, but not in our library system.

Alexis conquers the hurdles

This video has been featured widely on the internet.  I'm going to repost it here because it struck a chord with me on a very personal level, which I'll explain at the end.

This is a remix; the original video (which you can view here) shows an 8th-grade girl named Alexis participating in her first school track event.  The YouTube poster comments "This video is 6yrs old. Alexis did run the hurdles again and didn't fail. She did give me permission to post the video and all of her friends have seen it, while they do find it funny they do support her and her courage."

The remix adds the audio of the Scala and Kolacny Brothers' version of Radiohead's "Creep."

The classically trained Kolacny brothers, Steven (piano) and Stijn (conducting) have turned this Belgian girls’ choir into an international phenomenon, performing imaginatively reworked covers of Radiohead, U2, Rammstein and Nirvana songs...

One can debate whether the lyrics for Radiohead's "Creep" are totally appropriate for the hurdles video, but the rendition by this girls choir is so beautifully executed, and some phrases are so perfect that the remix really "works" for me.  The original hurdles video was time-stretched to match the audio, and the resultant slo-motion effect is quite dramatic.

I've reviewed the comments about the video at 3-4 different websites.  Not surprisingly perhaps, given the shallowness of many websurfers, the dominant theme is that this is a "fail" video.  That the girl is a loser, that she missed a hurdle, that her coaching was dreadful, that this is the funniest LOLs video they've ever seen.

I have a different viewpoint.  And for that I need to tell a story.  In 1952 I contracted polio; after recovering I was left with some residual atrophy of my right quad, so I could ambulate, but couldn't run very fast.  I attended a school where participation in sports was mandatory all three seasons of the school year.  In the spring the school also held an all-school track day in which everyone was required to participate in several events.  I was entered in the discus and the 220 yard run.  For the latter event I can still remember being in the back stretch when the leaders were crossing the finish.  By the time I got to the finish line they were setting up for the next heat.

When I crossed that finish line, the school's track coach came over to me.  Mr. Bettels was a man who knew what impairment was.  He had what I think in retrospect was severe kyphoscoliosis, but he was an inspirational coach and classroom teacher.  He came to me and very quietly and privately congratulated me on finishing the race.  I hadn't viewed my circling of the track as anything heroic; I was just doing what was expected.  He viewed it a bit differently, and it took me some time to fully appreciate the import of his commendation.  In the decades since then I've won a variety of non-athletic honors and have a smattering of trophies and plaques, but those words from Coach are one of the treasured memories of my youth.

So... I offer my congratulations to young Alexis.  I don't find the video to be funny at all - it's inspirational, and it choked me up to watch it.   It's also a good reminder that every day there are children whose bravery and courage goes unrecognized.  We all need to take moments now and then to commend the "losers."

Reposted from 2010 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Radiohead's initial release of this, their debut song.

See also this animated version and Chrissie Hynde's cover of the song.

Reposted from 2012 because t's been thirteen years since I created this post.  It needs to see the light of day again, however briefly.  Lots of courage needed in our current world in the U.S.

Two offerings from xkcd

In the title at the source, these items are referred to as "anachronyms," which highlights the evolved impreciseness of the terms.  Confusion can arise (it did in me) from the term's similarity to "anacronym" - which is an acronym (word composed of first letters of longer phrase) that is no longer thought of as such (examples include "scuba" and "radar.")

For the next one, about Pascal's Law - I have to take off my English major hat and put on my science lab coat...

... because I had no idea what "runia montium" is/was:

Ruina montium (Latin for "wrecking of mountains") was a mining technique in Ancient Rome described by Pliny the Elder...  It is thought to draw on the principle of Pascal's barrel. Miners would excavate narrow cavities down into a mountain, whereby filling the cavities with water would cause pressures large enough to fragment thick rock walls.

The arboretum in May - updated

Yesterday [pandemic spring 2020] I hiked at the University of Wisconsin's arboretum here in Madison.  May is a favorite time to visit because of the arboretum's famous collection of lilacs.  In fact, yesterday (Thursday) the parking lot was absolutely full - none of the "social distancing" between cars I noted back in April.  The only other time I've seen the parking lot full has been for the annual native plant sales.  I think the lockdown is triggering more arboretum visits, and social distancing is not difficult with the immense acreage available (about half the visitors I encountered were wearing masks).

As shown above, the cool spring has retarded the blossoming of the lilacs, so after a quick walk-through to sample some fragrances I moved past the lilac collection to the fruit trees.

I didn't take time to ascertain which ones are cherry vs. apple vs. crabapple etc.  It's a stunning visual treat to see all of these bursting into bloom.

Apologies for the relatively low-resolution images, because I hiked with only my cell phone, not with the proper digital camera I have used for some of the autumn foliage hikes.

In addition to the fragrance and the colors, there is an interesting variety of conformations of the fruiting trees.  Some, like the one above, may be naturally splayed out, but the one below has clearly had its lower branches trimmed by the arboretum staff.

I didn't realize a tree that young could be pruned that extensively.  You learn something every day.

Beyond the fruit trees is the collection of maples - a favorite destination in the autumn, but even the spring foliage is impressive, as illustrated by the contrast between the lime green and the deep purple in the two maples above.

Some azaleas still in bloom, and then on the way back to my car I encountered a tree I had never noticed before:

This mountain silverbell is not native to Wisconsin, but apparently has tolerated our winters because it was huge.  Conveniently, there was one branch near the label displaying the iconic downward-hanging blossoms.

As I drove home, I decided that my love for flowering trees probably dates back to imprinting when I was a toddler.  I was born in Washington, D.C. because the Navy stationed my dad there after the war.  Every spring without fail, mom and dad took me to visit the cherry blossoms.  In the photo above near the Jefferson Memorial I was less than a year old, and the one below, also in the Tidal Basin, I was two and a half years old.

One final thought.  The trees will be here all year, but the blossoms are ephemeral.  Any readers living within a half-day drive of Madison who don't take advantage of this remarkable facility in May are missing out on a visual and olfactory treat.  I strongly encourage a visit soon (or to your local arboretum).

Reposted from five years ago to add new photos, including more lilacs -

... and more crabapples -

... a better image of the appropriately-named "silverbell" blossoms -

... and a surprise encounter with a mated pair of sandhill cranes -

- who were teaching their chicks how to probe the grass for food.  Sandhills at the arboretum are tolerant of humans - I have had adults walk past me on a hiking path within arm's reach - but these two had chicks, so I didn't try to get any closer for a better image.  I have in the past encountered turkeys with their young, and their aggressive attempt to scare me off was fully successful.  I didn't want to trigger a similar response in birds with beaks that reach to my eye level.

And one final avian matter:

I saw several bluebird nesting boxes (one of which had a pair in attendance, but they didn't linger for a photo).  This box has an unusual adaptatiom on the front, which presumably serves to deter predation by ?squirrels ?larger birds.  Some reader can perhaps provide some information about this.

I'll close with a repetition of how I closed the post in 2020.  If you live near an arboretum, go visit during the spring season.  And please, if you can, support the institution financially as a "friend" or donor.  These are valuable, educational, entertaining refuges from the hassles of the everyday world.

Remembering my mom on Mother's Day

Edythe Gertrude Finseth was born in 1918 to a classic second-generation Norwegian immigrant family in southern Minnesota, in an era when children were expected to help work the farm. She wore a huge bonnet in the summer sun, so that neighbors said "it looked like a big hat was driving the rig." She learned to drive that team of horses in a straight line so the cultivating tines wouldn't disturb the planted corn (and in that era, cornfields were cross-cultivated). She was 8 years old when she did the field work; a hired man had to hitch up the work horses, but after that it was her job to cultivate and get the team back to the barn.  As an elderly woman she told me one of the proudest moments of her youth occurred when she successfully maneuvered the horses pulling the haywagon so that it went backwards up the ramp where her brothers could hoist the hay to the loft.

Her first school is pictured above - a one-room schoolhouse on a far corner of the farm, to which she walked each day (in cold weather her little brother went earlier to get the fire started before the students and teacher arrived). The teacher lived upstairs in the family farmhouse.

She did well in school, and was admitted to St. Olaf college (at age 16) at a time when girls were expected to study secretarial skills. She preferred science courses, so she left college to attend nursing school in Rochester, Minnesota in the hopes of earning some money to help support her family.

In the early 1940s the fledgling commercial aviation industry needed a new type of employee called a "stewardess" to take care of passengers on what at the time were many-hour-long flights across the country, and they recruited nurses for this work. She received her "wings" in the first graduating class of stewardesses for American Airlines, and was assigned the Chicago to NY route, cooking individual meals aboard the flights for the passengers, and being lodged by American Airlines at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago and The Plaza in New York during layovers.  It was a glamorous lifestyle in an era when everyone dressed up to go on a plane trip, and stewardesses knew the names of all the passengers.

She met and married a young Navy officer; they settled in Washington, D.C., where her two children were born, later moving to Minnesota in the 1950s. When the children were reasonably self-sufficient, she went back to school to catch up on 20 years of nursing innovations, then resumed working, first as a school nurse, then as a burn unit and dialysis nurse in a county hospital, then in her 70s as a private-duty home care nurse.  She lived as a widow in our old family home, mowing the lawn and clearing the snow until age 70, when she opted for a condo in a senior living center.  

She had saved and invested her nursing salary in mutual funds during the boom of the 70s and 80s, then used those funds to purchase the condo unit; two weeks later the market crashed in October of 1987. She let the rest grow during the bull market of the 90s and the dot-com bubble, cashing out in June of 2007, just before the market cratered again.  And after 60 years of voting for Republican presidential candidates (including George W. Bush x2), she switched allegiance in 2008 to cheer wildly for the election of Barack Obama.

She lived quietly in her condo unit, following world events via television (but not the internet), and cheering for all Minnesota sports teams. Every day, without fail, she solved the "Crytoquip" in the local newspaper.

In 2011, at age 93, she walked from her condo unit down to the central office area to pick up her mail and realized she couldn't remember how to get back to her unit after having lived in the building for about 20 years.  She knew what that meant, and immediately phoned me, and we began making arrangements for her to move to my home city of Madison, Wisconsin.  

In Madison she insisted on living independently as long as possible in a nice "senior apartment," but as the dementia progressed she agreed to downsize to a single room in an assisted-living facility that offered meal service.  Later it became necessary to hire "sitters" to prevent nocturnal wandering, and finally on the morning after her 97th birthday she passed away quietly.  

She was greatly loved by her passengers, patients, and those who spent time with her.  I will always remember that as we wheeled her body on the gurney from her room out to the waiting mortuary vehicle, the nurses, cooks, and cleaning staff of the assisted living facility had formed a "color guard" on the sides of the hallway to say goodbye to her.  I had been calmly composed during all of the final hours, but that group response brought tears to my eyes.

PostNord will stop delivering letters in Denmark

As reported by the American Philatelic Society:

"The state postal service of Denmark, PostNord, has announced it will cease handling letters in Denmark at the end of 2025 "to focus on becoming the Danes’ favorite parcel delivery service." The cut in service is tied to a reported 90% decline in letter volumes since 2000.

Postnord has also announced that any postage stamps bought in 2024 or after could be refunded for a limited time in 2026, presumably marking the end of the country's stamp issues.

Denmark's Transport Minister, Thomas Danielsen, told Danes concerned about the future of their mail that "a free market" would ensure they could still send letters, just not through a national postal service...

An increase in use of digitial communication is largely cited as the reason for the decline in number of letters sent in the country. However, Denmark's Postal Act of 2024 also allowed private firms to enter the postal arena, and inland letters are no longer exempt from value-added tax, or VAT, meaning that a letter cost Danes 29 krone ($4.20) to send...

Exceptions were previously made for populations in remote areas and with vision impairment, but PostNord's statement does not suggest that will be the case again. The statement also does not directly say whether letters can be sent from other countries to Denmark; however, at this time we can only infer that international letters will not be accepted or distributed..."

Mother-of-the-Year candidate

Reposted for Mother's Day, 2025.

The long crystals in a meteorite

Comment from the discussion thread at the mineralcollectors subreddit:

To be clear, large crystals can and do form on Earth, most are much larger than those in these structures. There are stable places in the earth crust where this can happen - but the cooling rates required for this iron-nickel pattern is what makes them unique.

These interlocking structures are like a fingerprint for iron-nickel meteorites. They can only form only in space, where asteroid cores cool at an incredibly slow and stable rate—about 1 to 100°C per million years. That kind of slow cooling doesn’t happen on Earth.

Edit: Had to look up the name. They’re called Widmanstätten patterns.

So molten metal gets ejected into space from some collision, and then in a vacuum there is nothing to conduct the heat away, so it cools only by radiation and only a couple degrees per million years.  You learn something every day.

More info on Widmanstätten patterns.

U.S. Secretary of Education mispronounces "A.I."

There has been quite a bit of press about her letter to Harvard University that was riddled with grammatical errors, but I found this report only in the Irish Star.

The former promoter, who co-founded World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), shared her thoughts during a recent panel discussion in San Diego, California. McMahon said to an assembled crowd: “I heard…there is a school system that is going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-K, have ‘A-one’ teaching in every year, starting that far down in the grades.”

How do people botch a firing squad execution ?

The shooters were standing 15 feet away...

Mahdi was sentenced to death in 2006, and the execution was carried out on 11 April [2025]. On the evening of his killing, Mahdi was brought into the state’s execution chamber, strapped to a chair and had a red bullseye target placed over his heart. Witnesses were positioned behind bulletproof glass, and three prison employees on the firing squad stood roughly 15ft (4.6 metres) away.

Officials placed a hood over Mahdi’s head before the staff fired, according to an Associated Press reporter, who was a witness. As shots were fired, Mahdi cried out and his arms flexed, and after roughly 45 seconds, he groaned twice, the AP said. His breaths continued for around 80 seconds, then a doctor examined him for a minute. He was declared dead roughly four minutes after the shots.

South Carolina regulations call for the shooters to fire bullets “in the heart … using ammunition calculated to do maximum damage to – and thereby immediately stop – the heart”.

But the autopsy report commissioned by the SCDC indicates there were only two gunshot wounds, not three, and that the bullets largely missed his heart before hitting his pancreas, liver and lower lung, Mahdi’s lawyers say.

Text from The Guardian.  Details re the case at Associated Press.

Sea anemone sting

This lesion developed on the posterior thigh of a 28-year-old woman who fell on a rocky beach in Greece.  The central clearing is a characteristic pattern reflecting the morphology of the anemone.  Case published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Pizza ovens are HOT

All of this was news to me...

"In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The temperature required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza...

The traditional home oven is great for lots of things: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys, roasted brussels sprouts, whatever. Pizza is not one of them. Let’s consider a classic New York pie, which doesn’t require the same extreme heat as its Neapolitan brethren. It sounds weird, but you want the pie to be medium rare. The crust should be crispy but still pliable, the cheese melted but not burned. The only way to achieve that is to blast pizza dough with heat from both top and bottom—about 600 degrees at the very least, preferably 650. But nearly every kitchen range tops out at 550 degrees...

Overcoming the limitations of the reviled kitchen range has long stumped homemade pizza enthusiasts. Julia Child laid out tiles in her oven to soak up the oven’s heat and transfer it to the crust for extra crispiness. That inspired the pizza stone, an oversize ceramic tile that you insert into your oven...

Before making pizza, some recipes suggest that you should leave your oven at full heat for 45 minutes, or an hour, or even two... Even if your oven reaches 750 degrees, its walls “are not going to be as thick as the walls of a commercial pizza oven.. So there’s just less heat energy trapped in there..."

The discussion continues at The Atlantic.

"My Old Ass"

Suppose you could meet and talk with your teenage self - the self that is finishing high school, leaving home and starting a new life.  Suppose you want to give your younger self advice that might improve your (joint) lives.  You can't tell your young self to invest all your money with Warren Buffett because that might change your life too much, and your adult life is o.k. so you don't want to take a chance on messing it up with some big intervention.  But maybe you could give your younger self some advice regarding a relationship.  Perhaps that would make your joint lives better... but perhaps not.

I thought My Old Ass was a real gem.  The premise of meeting your younger self has been done in books and movies before, but I did enjoy this take on it.  The mechanism of the meeting isn't sci-fi but rather just your basic magical realism; the meeting and conversations happen and you don't need to know or understand why - you just accept it.  In terms of genre I would agree with the publicity calling it a coming-of-age movie, but it blends in a touch of rom-com - a category I turn to in times of stress.

The acting is spot on.  This is the first movie role ever for the lead actress, Maisy Stella; she won multiple awards for her performance.  The older self, the parents, the siblings, the boyfriend are all equally well executed.  But my real award goes to the scriptwriters for crafting a series of dialogues that sound true to real life.

An additional plus is that the movie was filmed in the lake district of Ontario north of Toronto, where the landscape features look ever so much like northern Minnesota.  Excellent.  

Addendum: Note to my future self.  The storyline skillfully addresses my favorite quotation from Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (which I can't cite here because it might serve as a spoiler for those who haven't yet seen the movie).

"The Indian Card. Who gets to be Native in America?"

I suppose most of the books I've reviewed for my list of recommended books have been of limited interest to a broad population but of intense interest to certain subgroups of readers.  Such will likely be the case with The Indian Card, a scholarly examination of the role of racial identity in modern American life.  The book was of interest to me because through marriage and adoption I have relatives from at least four Native American tribes (Ácoma, Laguna, Ngäbe-Buglé, and Seminole).

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, but one of her grandfathers was German, passing on to her a European surname and a complexion that allows her to "pass for white."  She can also "play the Indian card" when social situations render that the best choice.  This flexible identity gives her a breadth of experience and a deep insight into the importance of (and the determination of) race.

She is also a skilled writer, holding an MFA in creative writing and a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  She spent seven years working in the Obama administration of issues of homelessness and Native policy.  Her writing style is to describe detailed individual situations (friends, relatives, professional colleagues) and then to extrapolate from the specific to the general.  She combines these narratives with deep dives into publicly-available statistics from surveys and census data.  Sometimes the details are TMI, but they lend credence to her conclusions.

There are lots of reviews you can access on the internet, so what I'll do here is just append a series of notes, excerpts, and thoughts that I jotted down while reading (lots of notes, so I'll dispense with full sentences and precise grammar).  Page notations are so that I can go back to look stuff up.

"At the same time that the number of people in the U.S. who claim Native identity has exploded - increasing 85% in just 10 years - the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not." (intro)

There are notations in the 1830 census of Native American heads of household who were also owners of (black) slaves (57-8).  Because they owned slaves they were recorded as "white" in the census. (87-8)

"Cases of white men marrying and the divorcing Creek women to qualify for a land allotment were rampant.  Neah Micco, a Creek headman noted that 'desperate men are rapidly collecting among us, under color of authority as Indian countrymen, are seizing and occupying our most valuable lands.'" (89)

A Native girl raised by an Amish family found herself "too dark" to be accepted in an Iowa community, but "too white" when she's in the Navajo Nation.  While there she picks up new vocabulary ("rez words"), but on a return to Iowa "she performs the careful dance of code-switching, reverting back to the Iowa way of speaking, with all the midwestern politeness she can muster." (92)

During the 1832 Creek Census, the (white) census-takers had a powerful incentive to undercount Natives because that number determined land allotments, so fewer Natives would mean more land available for Whites.  Those who were listed on the census as white rather than Native would then have descendants generations later who assume they are full-blood white. (94)

In modern times there is an incentive for Tribes to "disenroll" members, in part stimulated by the sharing of casino revenues or land and services on a reservation. (95)  The Pechanga Band in Southern California disenrolled 250 members, including posthumously (and thus their descendants).  The enrolled population is only 1,400, so the process resulted in an increase in "per cap" from casino revenues tom $15K to $40K per month. (98)

Hitler and the Nazis knew of the American process of displacing and disenfranchising Native peoples, and applied the same principles to the Jews in Germany.  

Lots of detail re the term "blood quantum" - the determination of what % of a person's blood is Native vs white or black.  Equivalent to the slave era process of designating mixed-race slaves as mulattos or quadroons or octaroons etc.

Details re the immense tragedy of the "Trail of Tears" during the forced removal of Natives from areas in the southeastern U.S.  (Chap 5 "Remove").

Details about forced "acculturation" (kidnapping of Native children and placement of them in boarding schools).  "In many cases, children were purposely separated from their siblings or other members of their Tribes.  Schools forcibly mixed together children from different Tribes, to prevent their use of Native languages of the practice of cultural traditions." (116)  "Indian agent Fletcher J. Cowart recalled that "it became necessary to visit the [Native American] camps unexpectedly with a detachment of Indian police, and [to] seize such children as were proper and take them away to school, willing or unwilling."

"To determine if a person can enroll, both Red Lake and Leech Lake use a calculation of blood quantum.  And, as with most Tribes in the United States, that blood quantum has to be from one Tribe alone.   So, to be enrolled at Leech Lake, a person must prove they have the required one-quarter blood quantum from the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe." (121)

Note the following words in the United States Declaration of Independence.  "Among the laundry list of grievances against the king of England was the accusation that he had "endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." (123)

Theodore Roosevelt: "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are." (124)  George Washington had called Native people savages who needed to be "extirpated" or destroyed.

Details about the great land grab of the nineteenth century (Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion, homesteading).  "... there was a significant amount of fraud.  Historians estimate that most of the land granted through the Homestead Act went to speculators, cattle ranchers, miners,loggers, and railroads.  Of the more than five hundred million acres dispersed by the General Land Office between 1862 and 1904, only eighty million acres went to homesteaders." (127)

The Dawes Act, like the Homestead Act, alloted "the lands of any reservation anytime it was deemed advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes."  Plots were 160 acres for Indian heads of household and 80 for single adults.  The land was placed in trust, and people allotted land were given 25 years to demonstrate that they could succeed at Europeanized agricultural practices.  If so, they got the land.  (note the land being allotted was already tribal land).  But much of it wasn't appropriate for farming (soil, rain).  Many natives didn't have the $$ to purchase equipment to farm 160 acres.  The government also levied hefty taxes on the land granted to the Natives after the 25 years was over.  Whites were waiting in line for the land to go into forfeiture to pay taxes. (130-131).  Horror stories on pgs 132-3 re Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

"As with many Cherokee people, Marilyn's relatives included Black Natives and people enslaved by the Cherokee Nation.  It's a common story among the Five Tribes.  All five had a significant history of slavery, one that garered them the name "Five Civilized Tribes" by southern white society.  The thinking being that to own slaves qualified them as civilized."  Sometimes people enslaved by Tribes were part of those Tribes by blood.  Or the slaves spoke Native languages and practiced Native traditions.  "Categories like "Cherokee by blood" and "Freedmen" and "Black Native" were not distinct but, rather, significantly overlapping."...Some estimates are that the Cherokees enslaved more than 2,500 people in 1860; in 1867, in a census conducted of the Nation, there were almost 2,500 Freedmen among the 17,000 total Cherokee people." (134-5)

The Dawes Rolls database was a massive census that includes more then 100,000 people, but they are listed in no particular order.  It attempts to categorize people by "degree of Indian blood" (blood quantum), a principle incorporated into law in 1785 in Virginia.  In 1866 Virginia defined "Indian" as "every person, not a colored person, having one-fourth or more of Indian blood."  (144-5)

The U.S. government only quantifies three things by blood: dogs, horses, and Indians. (174)  There is an official Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood.

The possibility of multiple racial identities is now present in the U. S. Census.  "In 1990, 1.96 million Americans checked the Indian box.  In 2000, when respondents could suddenly check more than one racial category, 4.1 million people checked the Indian box... By 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 9.7 million people." (181)

"Sovereignty, enrollment, membership - these are all manifestation of a political identity, not a racial one." (186)

"I've lost track of the number of times I've been asked "how much" Indian I am, sometimes by complete strangers.  I'm often surprised at the number of people both familiar with the concept of blood quantum and comfortable asking Native people about theirs.  As if that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask someone.  As if it's anyone else's business.  As if there were some mathematical way to quantify an identity that was both meaningful and accurate.   I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a question I'd also asked of myself..."(187)

"It is in January 2023 - while I was writing this book - that I begin to notice an uptick in the number of people who have claimed Native identity who are exposed as liars... many of the claims of fraud feel legitimate, like true instances of people knowingly making false claims to profit somehow... In some ways, Native identity is relatively easy to forge.  Native people have no particular "look," despite what their portrayals on television and film might lead us to believe... (examples given of people tanning skin, dying hair)... My observation, though, is that while stories like these have some shock value, many of them are not so clear-cut... Often, such claimants are relying on stories passed down by family members or genealogy going back centuries.  They may have been told that their great-great-great-grandparent was Cherokee, and so they have internalized this not only as historical truth but as their modern-day reality. (191-2).  I've been told there's a list of "pretendians" floating around on the internet..."

"The problem - whether or not we care to admit it - is that we treat Nativeness differently depending on what a person looks like... In the US we generally accept claims of Native American ancestry by people who present as white.  We believe that it's possible to look white but also be Indian... Yet we do not as willingly give this same benefit of the doubt to people presenting as Black.  It was this way for my grandfather, my cousins, and it's this way for many Lumbee people when they travel outside Robeson County.  Their skin matches the color swatch to which society has assigned the category "Black," and so, therefore, they are Black.  If they claim Native identity, it's seen as hoax, a fanciful tale they've spun out of a desire to accrue privileges of some sort. (209)  

"Partly, I imagine, this is a result of the contradictory ways the United States has dictated Nativeness and Blackness throughout history.  For Native people, the federal project has long been to dilute their Native blood, to assimilate them into the larger society, to root out their Native traditions and force Europeanization (and whiteness) upon them... In the United States, Blackness has long been governed by the idea of "one drop" - that even a single drop of Black blood made a person Black and, thus, stripped them of any privileges or freedoms granted to white people... In the nineteenth century, as slavery became more important to the U.S. economy, the goal was to increase the number of potential slaves.  It was therefore the project of the dominant (white) society to ensure that anyone with Black ancestry could be enslaved.  Hence, anyone with any amount of Black blood would have been considered Black.   White people weren't as much after Native bodies as land... So, instead, the goal was to decrease the number of Native people to eventually make them disappear."  (200-201)

Credit for both bowls to Carmen Sarracino, Acoma, New Mexico

The improbable fact of our existence

"It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate.  That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable."

— Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (I), translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland