Ofelia Zepeda’s Ocean Power and the Apocalyptic American Summer of 2020

Black and white photograph of Sonoran desert

by Greg Evans Anybody who reads the Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda’s collection of poems, Ocean Power: Stories from the Desert, might reasonably assume she is being ironic with the title. What power, after all, can an ocean have over a people who live in the Arizona desert, “That land where the ocean has not …

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The Dawn of Everything

The illustration is a detail from Abraham Bosse's frontispiece for Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

by Thomas Moore Perhaps once in a generation, a new contribution is made to our understanding of who we are and how we relate to our fellow human beings that brings about what the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift. I believe David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything …

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Katherine Smith: Remembering a Resister

Detail of photograph of Katherine Smith in front of her hogan

I made my first visit to Big Mountain in the early ‘80s. I came alone as a journalist, my personal struggle, to a world I could not have invented. Big Mountain is an area north of the Northern Arizona Hopi village, Hotevilla. Dirt roads maybe still are the only roads. I was directed to Katherine …

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Trial Begins for Indigenous Protesters in Peru

OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN After five years of bureaucratic delays and internal contradictions in the Peruvian judiciary system, the trial of 53 protesters in the northern Peruvian jungle town of Bagua has begun. The indigenous protesters, opposed to a dozen decree laws that truncated indigenous territorial rights that had been promulgated by then President Alan García. …

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Who’s Your Daddy?

OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN The United States is often considered the first modern democracy, bringing a new form of government that spread across the world. Approaching the 250th anniversary of Independence the US faces a mountain of debt, wars across the globe, an environmental crisis and more guided by its elected leaders whose powers are limited …

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