wow!!!!

CONTACT: Lakota Freedom
Naomi Archer, Communications Liaison
(828) 230-1404
lakotafree@gmail.com or press@lakotafreedom.com


Freedom! Lakota Sioux Indians Declare Sovereign Nation Status
Threaten Land Liens, Contested Real Estate Over Five State Area in U.S.West Dakota Territory Reverts back to Lakota Control According to U.S., International Law



WASHINGTON, DC - December 20 - Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today in Washington D.C. following Monday's withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government. The withdrawal, hand delivered to Daniel Turner, Deputy Director of Public Liaison at the State Department, immediately and irrevocably ends all agreements between the Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians and the United States Government outlined in the 1851 and 1868 Treaties at Fort Laramie Wyoming.

"This is an historic day for our Lakota people," declared Russell Means, Itacan of Lakota. "United States colonial rule is at its end!"

"Today is a historic day and our forefathers speak through us. Our Forefathers made the treaties in good faith with the sacred Canupa and with the knowledge of the Great Spirit," shared Garry Rowland from Wounded Knee. "They never honored the treaties, that's the reason we are here today."

The four member Lakota delegation traveled to Washington D.C. culminating years of internal discussion among treaty representatives of the various Lakota communities. Delegation members included well known activist and actor Russell Means, Women of All Red Nations (WARN) founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr., and Garry Rowland, Leader Chief Big Foot Riders. Means, Rowland, Martin Sr. were all members of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover.

"In order to stop the continuous taking of our resources – people, land, water and children- we have no choice but to claim our own destiny," said Phyllis Young, a former Indigenous representative to the United Nations and representative from Standing Rock.

Property ownership in the five state area of Lakota now takes center stage. Parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as predecessor sovereign [historic owner]. Lakota representatives say if the United States does not enter into immediate diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions in the five state region, clouding title over literally thousands of square miles of land and property.

Young added, "The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people".

Following Monday's withdrawal at the State Department, the four Lakota Itacan representatives have been meeting with foreign embassy officials in order to hasten their official return to the Family of Nations.

Lakota's efforts are gaining traction as Bolivia, home to Indigenous President Evo Morales, shared they are "very, very interested in the Lakota case" while Venezuela received the Lakota delegation with "respect and solidarity."

"Our meetings have been fruitful and we hope to work with these countries for better relations," explained Garry Rowland. "As a nation, we have equal status within the national community."

Education, energy and justice now take top priority in emerging Lakota. "Cultural immersion education is crucial as a next step to protect our language, culture and sovereignty," said Means. "Energy independence using solar, wind, geothermal, and sugar beets enables Lakota to protect our freedom and provide electricity and heating to our people."

The Lakota reservations are among the most impoverished areas in North America, a shameful legacy of broken treaties and apartheid policies. Lakota has the highest death rate in the United States and Lakota men have the lowest life expectancy of any nation on earth, excluding AIDS, at approximately 44 years. Lakota infant mortality rate is five times the United States average and teen suicide rates 150% more than national average. 97% of Lakota people live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers near 85%.

"After 150 years of colonial enforcement, when you back people into a corner there is only one alternative," emphasized Duane Martin Sr. "The only alternative is to bring freedom into its existence by taking it back to the love of freedom, to our lifeway."

We are the freedom loving Lakota from the Sioux Indian reservations of Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana who have traveled to Washington DC to withdraw from the constitutionally mandated treaties to become a free and independent country. We are alerting the Family of Nations we have now reassumed our freedom and independence with the backing of Natural, International, and United States law. For more information, please visit our new website at www.lakotafreedom.com.

comics and sexism (a rambling and hopefully coherent response to a good question)

Ben—sorry it took so long to respond to your questions. I really appreciate that you asked those questions—the last post was very vague and didn’t specify what I was really talking about. I’ll try to give a quick overview of what I meant when I said many comics are sexist. I think there are lots of people who can say these things more coherently than I can and I encourage anyone and everyone to seek out information about sexism, feminism, media literacy, and other related topics.

I think there are many ways that comics can, and many do, embody sexist and misogynistic traits.

One of the ways that is very visible is the sexual objectification of women as they are often illustrated in comics. This is the same as what happens so frequently in advertising. Essentially, it is the process of reducing women to nothing more than a sexual entity, usually to be consumed in some way by a male audience.

This is really easy to see in advertising. For example, sexually objectified women are often used to sell a product, usually a product that has nothing to do with breasts, legs, or other sexualized parts of female anatomy. It is so bad that often the female figure used in an advertisement doesn't even include the woman's head. Seriously.

What this does as it is visually repeated over and over and over (in advertising, in comics) is to say that women are meaningful only to the degree in which they are sexual objects; this is the only valid part of a woman's total make-up.

There are lots of articles, books, and even blogs that do a lot better job of explaining this than I can. But just start doing some media analysis on your own....it is pretty crazy. For example, you might notice that in many ads with both a male and female person, the female is often positioned below the man in a position of subservience. And I already mentioned the headless female figure in advertising. And we all know that sexually objectified women somehow equal all sorts of products (beer, clothes, perfumes and colognes, almost everything related to fashion, etc.). This is not true in every single ad but it is extremely prevalent.

The same is true for comics.

There are less obvious ways in which comics can, and often are, sexist. This includes the nature of the characters' relationships to one another. For example, I can think of so many comics in which a female character is used only to further the characterization of the male character. Usually this takes the form of a woman, who is close to the male character, dying or being tortured and/or killed so that the readers empathize with the loss the male character experiences. It is supposed to make him a deeper character, one with much suffering and pain (although, ironically, it is the woman who has been kidnapped or tortured or killed, although the reader is not supposed to feel this pain and suffering). This is such a common tactic in writing. Think about movies.....just sitting here I can think of several that follow that pattern (Little Big Man, Gladiator, Braveheart, etc.). It is the same with comics, as well (Wolverine’s origin story, Wolverine’s later relationships, Dreadstar, the original Spider-man story line with the death of Gwen Stacy, etc.). If this was just an occasional story line, and not used over and over and over again, it could be understood as a valid story. But it happens repeatedly--the man is the important and meaningful character and the woman character is there solely to make the man more 'interesting.'

This makes me think of how often in comics and movies there is a child character whose mother has died or been killed in the past and the ongoing suffering of the child over the loss of her/his (it seems to me it's almost always a 'he' but I'm not sure) mother is part of the plot. I am not saying that this is in and of itself sexism; there are numerous stories that share this that I really enjoy (The Neverending Story; Mother, Come Home; Night Fisher; Atari Force; and others). But I do think it is interesting and worth thinking about and trying to figure out what it means culturally and socially.

Violence against women happens a lot in comics and not just as a way to talk about the problem of violence against women. That would be something else entirely (and some comics do this--not all comics are sexist and misogynistic). Again, this is usually a plot device with which to explain the actions of a male character. Sometimes violence against a female character, when it is not used to kill her, is used to show deeper characterization in the female's character. But this is usually done in such a way that 'breaks' the woman character--mentally or emotionally. Again, then we as a reader are supposed to understand her character and inner fears better. This is not what happens when a male character is faced with violence or psychological attacks based on inner fears.

This violence issue reminds me of the first of the new Spider-man movies. There is a scene in it that is a sexualized rape scene. Mary Jane is assaulted by some 'thug' looking men in an alley. It is clear they intend to rape her. This scene is intentionally orchestrated to show the actress’ breasts and nipples--after being almost raped, the audience can clearly see her sexualized image and, again, right after almost being raped, she begins passionately kissing her rescuer--Spider-man.

There is lots more to sexism in media....a good thing to do would be to read some of the different sources that talk about sexism in general and about sexism in comics. Check out some of the feminist perspectives on comics. It is really interesting and I like learning about it. So much of sexism and its expression (for example—sexual objectification of women, violence against women) is so every-day, so institutionalized, that without purposefully learning about it, it is very easy to not even notice it.

You asked a couple of specific questions--sexism in comics isn't specific to any one genre or any one publisher. But all of this definitely pertains to the big mainstream publishers, as well as many of the smaller ones.

As a final note, I was just trying to look up some information about the “woman is killed to develop and create empathy for the male character” tactic in plot writing—I’ve never read anything about this particular thing and was hoping to find an article about it. I am sure there are many good analyzes of this but I just haven’t come across them. Anyway, I did find the following website (Women in Refrigerators):

http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/women.html

It is specifically about female comic book characters and includes a list of female characters who have been killed, raped, tortured, and “depowered” (as in super-powers taken away). It’s interesting and also a bit horrific (not the site but the repetitive and often sadistic treatment of female characters).

I also found the following site that includes a lesson plan for a classroom activity on understanding sexual objectification. It is really interesting and has some great hands-on activities—check it out!

http://web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/prjdis/html/usmsxobj.htm

It reminds me of a class I took in North Dakota called Language Bias. This class included the idea of ‘media literacy’ as an important tool in navigating our cultural world. It was an amazing class that really challenged me. Sometimes it gave me moments of epiphany-like feelings, sometimes angered me, sometimes made me feel ignorant, and usually really excited me and made me feel like I was really learning and seeing things for the first time that were right in front of me.

I remember one video we watched in that class; it was called “Tough Guise.” It’s a very punny title! If there is anyway you can find this video (check school libraries—I know some universities carry it), watch it. It is super interesting. It covers a lot of different things but mostly focuses on what it means to be a “man” in our culture. It uses a wide variety of ways in which to examine this—from action figures to movies to interviews with teenagers. It was put together and narrated by a person named Jackson Katz. He has also written books dealing with the same and similar things (our culture’s definition of a “man” and violence against women) and these you can definitely find at libraries or through inter-library loan programs. He maintains a website:

http://www.jacksonkatz.com/

Also, I like the author bell hooks. She has written a lot of books on many topics, including autobiographical works, books on feminism, class issues, art, education, and movies. I’ve read some of her books but not the one I want to mention here! It is called “Feminism is For Everybody.” I have read some of her other writings on feminism and I think this book is an overview, introduction, and synthesis of many of her ideas and writings about feminism.

Sorry about the length of this response (that’s way I didn’t just post it as a comment!) but I think your questions are really valid and sure make me think. I wanted to try to provide some ways of thinking more about the issues involved, instead of just saying “(many) comics are sexist and this is why (or at least, why I think so).” Anyway, those are some ways in which some comics are sexist. While this applies to lots and lots of comics, there are many that I've read that I don't feel fall into this category. And thinking and talking about comics in this way helps me to think about our culture on a larger scale (I suppose this can be true with just about any aspect of our culture, especially things that are overtly about expression--like comics and other media).

feminism and comics

I really like reading comics. But there is a problem. It is very difficult to find comic books that are not sexist and misogynistic. Browsing through new comics, it seems the problem is increasing (this is is not relegated solely to comics).

Sometimes I find some old comics that are not so thoroughly sexist and that I enjoy reading. There is only one new comic on the newsstands that I read....it's the only one I've found that's not sexist (and also doesn't have advertisements and has a story that I enjoy). All you have to do is look at the cover illustrations on the majority of comics on the rack to realize how endemic the problem is.

I was just sitting, thinking about comics, misogyny, gender roles, the sexual objectification of women, and related ideas when I decided to do an internet search for 'feminist comics.'

I came across the following site: http://girl-wonder.org/girlsreadcomics/

I read through a few posts at random and liked what I saw. It is basically a blog in which people write about comics through a feminist perspective. And I really liked what I read. If you are interested in comic books and/or feminism and/or just not being a sexist, misogynistic member of our culture, check it out.