1st Place, Personal Columns, 2021, Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, for Gallup Independent, for 3 columns: “NDN Kars, Windshield Cracks,” “Frozen II: A Heroine fights historical denial,” and John Lewis, Tisha B’Av and the Obligation to Vote.
Rockower Award for Excellence in Arts Criticism, HM, 2021, American Jewish Press Association, for “Windshield Cracks, How the Light Gets In,” NM Jewish Link.

I recently tuned in to “Native America Calling.” What I heard, it was like a light came on, it broke open my heart. I found a new spiritual insight listening to that radio show. And I was having a very dark day.

The guest was musician Keith Secola (Ojibwa), from Minnesota, best known for his song NDN Kars. The recorded program can be found online at https://soundcloud.com/native-america-calling, 10-28-2020, “A Conversation with Keith Secola.” Radio host Tara Gatewood (Isleta) asked Secola to talk about NDN Kars, He said, “The song originally started as a graffiti on a bathroom wall in Winton, MN, they carved it a little derogatory. I wanted to turn it around, the spelling, back in the early 80’s when I wrote this song, N-D-N, with the spelling phonetically,  changed it to something that would give you strength or power, that richness of something that you couldn’t see, that belongs to all of us. People would say, ‘Did you write that song about my uncle’s car, or my sister’s car, or my dad’s car?’ In many way the song becomes metaphysical…”

The song has become a national anthem for Native peoples, the most requested song on Native radio in the U.S. and Canada for almost three decades.

Secola explained what he was doing, saying, “There’s a lot of irony we’re using in oppressor’s language to un-oppress ourselves, to give humanity back to ourselves. I think humor is a portal, is a key, to pass through, because you have to reach a higher level of understanding. This is our special humor, like (callers) said, it belongs to us. When I wrote ‘Put an Indian Power sticker on his bumper, that’s what holds the car together,’ something that’s as metaphoric as that, something that we understand, a code, but it’s something that just doesn’t belong to any person or anybody, so it’s a beautiful thing—when I hear non-Native bands cover that song too, it’s really quite beautiful.” 

As Secola talked friends started to call in, from Minnesota to Gallup to South Dakota to Shiprock. One woman caller told him how she was driving along looking at the cracks in her windshield when the song came on the radio, and hearing the song made her proud. An Indian car comes to be, when there is no money to fix it up. Later, it ends up in the yard getting cannibalized for parts, and enjoys a second life as a a vehicle of the imagination. That’s a strong image, and it’s something no way a white person is going to be able culturally appropriate, this image of a broken down Indian car—something so beloved, loved, in and for its humanity. 

Still, when this woman called in and talked about her cracked windshield, this white listener made a connection, with something in my own experience, and I think that’s important when two peoples might see something, hear each other. I was suddenly reminded of the song “Anthem,”  by Leonard Cohen. It has a similar irony and strength in brokenness. Cohen sang: 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It’s not exactly the same thing they’re talking about, but in a way it is.

Secola sings:

My car is dented
The radiator steams
One headlight don’t work
The radio can scream

I got a sticker
It says “Indian Power”
I stuck it on my bumper
That’s what holds my car together

We’re on the circuit of an Indian dream
We don’t get old
We just get younger
When we’re flying down the highway
Riding in our Indian Cars.

Secola’s words speak with a soaring poetic genius and wit, when he sings, ‘Indian Power—that’s what holds my car together.’ Next to that, Cohen almost sounds prosaic, “that’s how the light gets in.”  Both address spirituality, with Cohen’s words drawn from the Kabbalah.  Both Secola and Cohen wrote their songs in the early ’80’s, neither song was produced until 1992, and both are anthems, one for Natives, the other for many Jewish people in the U.S. and Canada. 

    Why I’m thinking that connecting these two poets is so important is because they both achieve a breakthrough—they break through the oppressive thinking of what has over centuries come to be some kind of religious fanaticism that has taken hold of our world, in the Abrahamic religions, because, if you look back, it really wasn’t there in the original—it got layered on.

And then, it happened, on that radio show, Keith shared a few bars of a new song he just wrote: “Everybody’s moving. Everybody’s moving to a different situation.” 

That week’s Torah portion, Lech L’cha, Genesis 12:1−17:27, is about the same thing. In the Jewish tradition, each week a portion of the Five Books of Moses is studied in synagogues over the course of a year. God tells Abram, “Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.” 

    These texts have different commentaries going back centuries.“Go forth” speaks to the divine calling us. Rabbi Menachem Feldman writes that the Kabbalah teaches, “that the soul reaches greater heights than it would if it had never embarked on the journey.” God doesn’t tell Abram where he’s going, just, to a new situation.

There are still ways for us all to get humble. Maybe, we could find peace while driving with a cracked windshield listening to NDN Kars on the radio. 

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View as published \ Fall 2020/Stav 5781 The New Mexico Jewish Link: COLORADO’S HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE EDUCATION BILL, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR NEW MEXICO
First Place, Education, New Mexico Press Women 2021.

By Diane Joy Schmidt

On July 9th, Colorado became the 13th state to pass a bill that Ho- locaust and genocide education be taught in high schools. Sue Parker Gerson of the ADL Mountain States, who also runs the ADL’s Governor’s Holocaust Remembrance Program for the region, said this was very close to her heart. The bill was 20 years in the making in Colorado. The Jewish Community Relations Council, the ADL, and Jewish Colorado were lead organizations who worked together and with the legislature there.

Colorado’s Governor Jared Polis signed House Bill 20-1336 standing together with 97-year-old Holocaust survivor Fanny Starr at the Jewish Center in Denver. The bill requires high school students to learn about the Holocaust and genocide as a prerequisite to graduation.

The Colorado bill details definitions of the Holocaust and genocide and includes, in clause c., that “Holocaust and Genocide studies means studies on the Holocaust, genocide, and other acts of mass violence, including but not limited to the Armenian genocide.” Colorado schools have until 2023 to put together curriculum and identify source materials, and each district in Colorado will decide how they will implement it.

Each state’s bill is slightly different. On July 23, Delaware’s Governor Carney passed their Holocaust and genocide education bill, for both middle and high school students. The following week Massachusetts passed their bill, also to begin in the sixth grade. Many of the reported incidents of anti-Semitism occur in schools.

Arizona currently has bills working their way through their house and senate. The Anne Frank Center USA’s 50 States Initiative has made it a goal to see bills passed in every state. The federal Never Again Education Act supports the US Holocaust Museum in providing educational materials.

To date, no bills specifically mention teaching about the Native American genocide, a shadow that hangs over this country’s history.

Pulitzer-prize winning historian John Toland writes in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, on page 702, “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

This passage was pointed out in the article “Hitler Studied U.S. Treatment of Indians,” Indian Country Today, 8/8/16, by Elicia Goodsoldier.

The Navajo’s Long Walk took place here in Arizona and New Mexico a little over 150 years ago, where close to 10,000 Navajo people were rounded up in a scorched earth policy ordered by the government, beginning in 1864, and marched from their lands across Arizona and New Mexico in winter some 400 miles to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner, some 80 miles from the Texas border. Many died along the way and another 2,000 died of starvation over the next four years, until a treaty in 1868 finally allowed them to return to a smaller area of their lands.

The decimation of Navajo women of child-bearing age during those years created a significant genetic bottleneck that may be the cause of a number of genetic mutation-based diseases suffered by Navajo families (See Erickson RP. 2009. “Autosomal recessive diseases among the Athabaskans of the Southwestern United States: Recent advances and implications for the future.” Am J Med Genet Part A 149A:2602–2611).

These include a very rare deadly pigmentation disease that has received particular attention, explored in the award-winning documentary “Sun Kissed.” The very rare XP gene mutation, xeroderma pigmentosum, causes children to become severely sun-burned after only a few seconds of exposure to the sun. Generally found within one in a million, it has now appeared among some Navajo families, statistically, among one in 30,000. Individuals with the disorder can never go outside during daylight hours, are about a thousand times more likely to develop skin cancer and suffer an early death.

Another contributing cause of these various genetic mutation diseases may also be the effects of 40 years of deadly uranium contamination throughout the Navajo Nation, where the EPA has identified that over 530 abandoned uranium mines remain.

The Uranium Education Pro- gram at Dine College in Shiprock, New Mexico points out that there are many hundreds of additional contaminated sites, not just the mines themselves. “Uranium mining and milling has left large areas of the Navajo reservation contaminated with abandoned mines, mine waste and mill tailings and associated radiation. There are well-documented problems with lung cancer and silicosis (Black lung) in former Navajo uranium miners, and there is great con- cern among uranium millers and other Navajos who reside near con-taminated areas about late effects of radiation exposure from these sources. There has been growing concerns over various environmental issues and their impacts to health and the environment.”

Jews know well the devastating effects of inherited diseases as a result of a genetic bottleneck. One in four is estimated to carry a genetic mutation. Following a model aggressive screening campaign led by Jewish doctors, the deadliest, Tay-Sachs, has been virtually eradicated. Couples routinely seek genetic screening.

The most common disease is Gaucher disease. The National Gaucher Foundation states that “Gaucher disease can affect anyone, occurring in up to 1 in 40,000 live births in the general population.” However, “Gaucher disease is more common among Jews of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) descent, occurring in approximately 1 in 450 within this population.”

A very aggressive type of breast cancer, found mainly among Jewish women, is also found to be prevalent among Catholic Hispanic women in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. This has stimulated lively inquiry and is being studied in relation to the history of Jewish Conversos who settled here over 500 years ago following the Inquisition.

For further information about the Native American experience, the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum has begun an online cur- riculum, Native Knowledge 360 Degrees, which “provides educa- tors and students with new perspectives on Native American history, cultures, and contemporary lives.” Their website has information about the Long Walk at https:// americanindian.si.edu/nk360/navajo/long-walk/long-walk.csht- ml. The Navajo Nation Museum, in Window Rock, Arizona, has a large-scale permanent panel dis- play, and the Fort Sumner Historic Site/Bosque Redondo Memorial museum was dedicated in 2005.

The Long Walk is only one part of the story. The Pueblo Indians have theirs, and a series of forced-march resettlements occurred throughout the country, the best-known being The Indian Removal Act of 1830 that resulted in the Trail of Tears.

Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families have expressed concerns that the Holocaust is in some way diminished by identifying other atrocities in the world as genocide. No comparison is implied.

Over the last twenty-five years, the Shoah Foundation, founded by film director Steven Spielberg, has collected the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, and in addition, as their website details, of survivors of other genocides, including “the Guatemalan Genocide, which killed some 200,000 civilians in the early 1980s, mainly indigenous Mayans,” and, in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and most recently, genocide being carried out by ISIS against Yazidis, Muslims and Christians.

The Shoah Foundation has a new initiative “Stronger Than Hate,” following the recent rise in antisemitism and hate against others, together with the University of Southern California, to provide educational materials through their eye-witness accounts to help stu- dents recognize and counter hate.

The Jewish people are in a unique position to bestow recognition on the wounds of others. Historic trauma is exacerbated when there is lack of knowledge and resulting denial. The historic atrocities committed against the Native American population of North America, call for our attention. At this time, while there is no active effort yet to pass a bill in New Mexico mandating the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides, if this effort does go forward here, it would be an historic opportunity to include an initiative joining together with Native educators, that addresses the little-told history of our first citizens. #

Gallup Independent, 8/1/20, New Mexico Jewish Link Fall, 2020
First Place, Columns/Personal, Society Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, for Gallup Independent.
First Place, Religion, NM Press Women, for New Mexico Jewish Link, .

Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av in the Hebrew calendar, occurred this year on Thursday, July 30, 2020. It is the day that traditionally commemorates the saddest tragedies of the Jewish people throughout history, beginning with the destruction of the First and Second Temples. This year, this same day also was the funeral of the great civil rights leader, John Lewis, who devoted his life to voting rights.  There was a meaningful correlation that reverberated between these two events. 

     Jewish people vote, religiously. It was estimated in 2008 that 96% of all people who self-identified as Jews voted in the presidential election. This impetus to vote may be traced to the destruction of the First Temple, the Temple of Solomon, in 586 BC by Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon. When he exiled the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah to Babylon, Jews would learn to acclimate themselves as a people without a land.

John Lewis, when he knew he was dying, earlier in July penned an essay to be read aloud at his funeral. Listening to it, you can feel his deep religious convictions about voting. He wrote, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself. 

“Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

Lewis saw the storm coming. Earlier that same morning, July 30, before Lewis was buried, the U.S. president, having not been invited to the funeral, tweeted “…Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

In a Washington Post perspectives column published later that day, “Trump’s ‘Delay the Election’ checks all 8 rules for fascist propaganda,” Yale University professor of history Timothy Snyder wrote “With this tweet, the president both revives fascist propaganda and exploits a new age of Internet post- truth: He follows a trail blazed by fascists, but adds a twist that is his own. A fascist guide to commentary on elections would have eight parts: contradict yourself to test the faith of your followers; tell a big lie to draw attention from basic realities; manufacture a crisis; designate enemies; make an appeal to pride and humiliation; express hostility to voting; cast doubt on democratic procedures; and aim for personal power.

“…This is where the differences with historical fascists begin. Fascists believed in responsibility: a terrible responsibility, as they understood it — the need to destroy an old decadent world in the name of a new racial paradise, to drown democracy in blood, to fight wars for territory abroad, to set the world on fire. Trump has no such visions and no sense of responsibility, terrible or otherwise. He simply prefers to stay in power and have a comfortable life. He expresses just enough fascism to make this possible.”

In their regular column, “Ask The Rabbi,” the independent Jewish magazine Moment asked rabbis in the May-June, 2016 issue, “Are We Commanded to Vote?” Rabbis from nine different flavors of Judaism responded: Independent, Humanist, Renewal, Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Orthodox and Chabad.  All agreed that while we are not ‘commanded’ to vote, we are obligated to (God did not “command” us to vote because back in Biblical days we lived in monarchies, not democracies).  In short, voting is definitely a thing, among Jews.

Each person counts, and by voting, you affirm that value. Chabad Rabbi Dov Wagner responded, “We each count. Every one. And each person counts for no more—and no less—than one. Although that may be arguable at times in the vagaries of our political structures, it never varies where it truly matters—in our absolute and essential value in the eyes of G-d.”

Judaism teaches tikkun olam, that we are here to repair the world, to be involved in the social welfare of society. Modern Orthodox Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg of Riverdale, NY, wrote, “The prophet Jeremiah does say that the Israelites should join in the country where they live, should build it, seek its welfare and pray for it. Voting is a key way to assure the well-being of the country. I believe that democracy is the political system most likely to advance the Torah’s goal of tikkun olam—to repair the world—so that every human being is treated as an equal, valuable and unique image of God.”

Independent Rabbi Gershon Winkler, of the Walkingstick Foundation, underscored how this passage from Jeremiah was related to Tisha B’Av,  “It was long ago suggested that we do what we can to contribute to the general welfare of the lands in which we sojourn. One could argue that voting may be a part of this contribution. The suggestion came to the prophet Jeremiah in a message from God, which he forwarded to our exiled ancestors following the destruction by the Babylonians of the First Jewish Commonwealth more than 2,400 years ago:
‘To all [those] I have exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat of their yield. Start families, have children, and help your children start families, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace of the village to which I have exiled you, and pray to God on her behalf, for in her state of peace shall you too find peace” (Jeremiah 29:4-7).’

     In 2018,  Reform Rabbi Josh Levy wrote, in an essay for the reform community of Great Britain, “Reform Judaism in 1000 Words: Tisha B’Av” (https://www.reformjudaism.org.uk/reform-judaism-in-1000-words-tisha-bav/, 7/19/2018), about how Tisha B’Av allowed a freedom that gave agency to each individual. “The model of Judaism lost in the destruction of the Temples was one in which God is the preserve of one location – the Temple in Jerusalem; one caste – the hereditary priesthood… As a result of the loss of the Temple, Judaism evolved to a form in which all can be in relationship with God irrespective of where we are or who we are … through prayer and through the way in which we live our lives.”

Navajo humanist Frank Morgan has expressed a deep sentiment in Navajo thought in his teachings, “They say that Shiprock was a great flying monster and it was later killed by the older Warrior Twin, Monster-slayer. Eagles evolved from transformation of the monster. We say that there is always transformation from destruction.”
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