UPDATE #15: IT'S DONE!!!! Sometimes our own need help. This is family.

Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved.

UPDATE 15:  Third update today, and this is the last one.  WE DID IT!!!  Thank you, thank you, to everyone who donated, shared, boosted, or otherwise supported this effort.  [Now she just has to build up her inventory and figure out all the ins and outs of launching her business, LOL.]  Seriously, thank you all so much, from Lee and her family, and from Wings and me.

YUP!  WE ONLY NEED TO RAISE ANOTHER $67!  SO CLOSE NOW!

$293 raised just since this went up late last night!  As of today, and a very big donation from a dear friend, we are at $838 $988 $1,848 STILL $1,973 $2,273 $2,373 $2,423 $4,423 raised just since two Thursdays ago! Thank you, everybody; thanks to your generosity, Lee was able to order her son's laptop. That leaves $4,707 $4,162 $4,012 $3,152 $2,727 $2,627 $2,577 with only $577 left to raise to cover LeeAndrea's own laptop and other equipment and Internet service so she can work from home while schooling her son, so please continue to share, and give if you can. Ideally, I'd like to raise another $700 $600 today, so that she can order M's laptop; school's been in session for two weeks already, and we don't want him to fall behind for lack of necessary technology. This is the harder part, raising the funds so Lee can transition to running her own business online, but it has to happen. She was injured recently at work, and she can't keep doing this. Please help us get her the tools to continue working from home and keep her family well and safe. We should have been able to raise another $1,000 over the long weekend, but progress has stalled entirely. Can we make it happen this week? I'll bump this to the top every day with an update.

It's been a brutal year and a half here. Sometimes our own need help.

At the moment, it's an Indigenous family very close to us who needs our help: our niece, Lee Andrea Trujillo, and her husband and sons. [For those of you who remember Roy, Lee is his youngest daughter; if you remember Ona, who walked on last May, this is his sister.] We're trying to help her raise $5,000 for her youngest son's educational needs and her own work. It will cover four pieces of necessary equipment and all the associated costs that go with them: two laptops, a digital camera, and a replacement for Lee's broken cell phone. [Hence the image above; the relevance of the earrings will become clear shortly.]

If we had the kind of money that would allow us just to give her everything she needs? We'd do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, we don't have it, either. So I promised her I'd do my best to raise it, so that she and her family have what they need this coming school year (which is already in session here). We need to raise enough to 

If you want to donate without scrolling through all the details, you can do that here, via PayPal:  leebtru [at] yahoo [dot] com. Don't forget to check the "friends and family" box so that she doesn't lose part of your donation to fees.

Now, the backstory: 

Lee's youngest son, M, is too young to be vaccinated (like us, the rest of her family got their vaccinations long ago). He also has asthma, and common colds are dangerous enough for him as it is. COVID-19? No chance. She's homeschooling him now because it's the only way to keep him safe. That's one more layer of labor, and it makes it harder to work outside the home. More immediately, M's small tablet won't handle all the complexities of his school assignments and interactions; for that he needs a full-scale computer, one with the usual bells and whistles that will make Zoom and other things workable. They can't afford to buy him one.

Lee Andrea has consulted the hardware and software requirements, and has found one via Amazon that will do the job well, and leave M with room to grow, so to speak, as a student. You can see the model here; it's a small [in size] MacBook with enough memory, hard drive space, and speed for M to be able to do all the work he needs in the years to come. That retails for $1,349, but that's before insurance, sales tax, shipping, and whatever other cabling and apps he may need. By the time all that's added on, you can figure well over $1,500.

But that's not all she needs now.

Lee Andrea and her family are like us: They've always worked, and worked hard. But it's hard enough for Indigenous people at the best of times, and these are nowhere near the best. But in addition to losing her brother last year to West Nile (a tragedy that was extremely costly for the whole family), we've had a year and a half of uncontrolled deadly pandemic. Work is hard to come by. Among the other things she does to help support her family, Lee cleans people's houses, and that's heavy labor, hard on her body under any circumstances. Now, with COVID-19 and far, far too many people refusing to get vaccinated or wear masks or distance, any of the most minimal things that are part of being a decent human and decent member of society? It's downright dangerous. [We have both a state-wide and a local mask mandate here, and a trip to the dentist today showed us that most people are ignoring it. Meanwhile, state-wide, there are already at least 50 people on a waitlist for an ICU bed, any ICU bed in a hospital anywhere. We're averaging 700-1,000 new reported cases state-wide per day again, and that's only the reported ones; the real number is much higher.]

Anyway, this shows you what it's like trying to work here in any kind of public-facing capacity. And Lee's at the point where her body no longer needs the physical punishment of that kind of labor anyway. But she has another option, IF we can get her the equipment she needs to make a go of it.

Lee Andrea is a brilliant beadwork artist. The four pairs in the photo above? Are all by her. Those are part of my own collection; in fact, I wore the white/turquoise pair on the left when we went to the dentist today. Her work is very tight, very clean, beautifully stitched, with wonderful gradients and contrasts — and it always, always gets compliments. Now, what if she had the chance to work from home, build inventory, and sell her work online? How much better and safer would that be for everybody?

So. I've promised to help walk her through the logistics of setting up a site, photographing her work and writing descriptions for it, and promoting it online. But she can't do that without the proper equipment. So that's the purpose of the second laptop [same model as M's], one that will devoted exclusively to her work and to building her own online business. [And with that, we're already up to well over $3K.]

But in addition to the laptop, she needs a digital camera. She's found one she's comfortable with, here. A little over $200 for the camera, but again . . . extended warranty, sales tax, shipping, etc. on top of that. And then there's the broken cell phone, out of warranty, can't be repaired, and she needs a decent one to be able to stay in touch with her husband and sons and the rest of the family, and potentially to be able to adapt it for use with her work. The replacement model? More than $700 just for that. Sales tax and so forth, round up to near $800, and suddenly we're already at $4K.

But there are always eventualities no one can predict. I personally have no idea how much insurance on the two laptops and the warranty for the camera will run, but she needs that layer of protection. I do know it won't be cheap. I also don't know how well her current Internet set-up will work, either for her work or for M's school needs, so that may require an upgrade. And the this is only the second week of school here; M may well wind up needing to buy additional software/apps throughout the year for various subjects. And so I've suggested she set her goal at $5K, so that if we've forgotten something, or something entirely new but essential crops up, it's covered.

It's a modest goal, one that should be easily reachable if we work at it. We're in for the first $100 right now. If 50 people match us, she's covered. If 100 people can give $50 each, it's covered. This is family; please help us help our own cover school and work needs now, when local resources are so scarce.  Here's that PayPal address again:  leebtru [at] yahoo [dot] com. And even if you can't donate, please share the link, because the more eyes on it, the quicker we can fund it and get their family's school and work needs met.

As I said, this is family. Wings and I will take any help for them as a personal favor. Thanks to everyone in advance.

Watery Trading Posts, Where the "Trade" Is in Indian Women

Photo copyright Wings, 2013. 2014;
all rights reserved.

Author's Note: This piece first appeared as the second of a two-part series at Daily Kos on September 8, 2013, as part of the RaceGender DiscrimiNATION diary series there. Since this is Women's History Month, and since indigenous women remain invisible to the dominant culture except as cartoon characters and subjects for appropriation, it seemed an apt time to run them again. What follows is Part II; Part I appeared here yesterday.

In Part I, I wrote about the escalating rates of rape and other violence inflicted on Native women in and around the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota — a deadly byproduct of the new colonial invasion of Indian land courtesy of the fracking companies drilling in the Bakken oil shale reserve. Last Monday, I posted a companion piece in last week's edition of "New Day: This Week In American Indian News.", noting that it would be expanded into a full-length diary today, covering the story of the colonialist trafficking in the bodies and spirits of indigenous women in the shipping lanes separating the U.S. and Canada.  

As I said last time:

This series is, among other things, about the intersectionality of race and gender in this country's culture, both historical and contemporary.

Intersectionality is simply a fact of being, of existence, for women of color. Every moment of our lives is lived at a crossroads.

Sometimes, the four roads don't lead outward, but rather, inward — toward a vortex of interrelated and competing risks, benefits, calculations, interests, slings and arrows and aggressions micro and macro and everything in between.

Today, I'm going to talk about four very specific roads:

Objectifying. Commodifying. Targeting. Trafficking.

It's spectrum and linear progression, crossroads and vortex.

It's destroying indigenous women's lives.

And today, these watery crossroads meet at a very specific vortex: a whirlpool of colonialist sexual violence in the boundary waters of the Great Lakes.

Author's Note: At the outset, readers need to be aware of the content of this piece. Much of what follows deals with stories of extreme physical, psychological, and sexual violence and human trafficking. If any of these issues presents a trigger for you, you may not wish to read further.

Of course, this one is also an old, old story, and even in its latest incarnation, it's been around for several years now. Unfortunately, it's been mostly women who have done the reporting of it so far, particularly Native women. Which means, of course, that it's gotten virtually no attention in the mainstream.

Much as I loathe Bill Maher's casual racism and sexism, his new multimedia project, VICE, has the capacity to change that: A white man is reporting this story now, for an "edgy" media outlet founded and run by another, much more famous white man. The CBC has also now picked up the story. So I'm grabbing this opportunity.

For what?

To bring attention to the fact that our women, our girls — our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our very selves — are being sold into the sexual slavery of human trafficking. Right here. In the U.S. and Canada. In the boundary waters separating the two countries, just as they are in the filthy, gritty oilfield towns of the Northern Plains.

Indian women are being raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, and worse — on a daily basis, and in an organized way.

And it has to stop.

Indigenous Women at the Crossroads of a "Male-Dominated Dystopia"

Photo copyright Wings, 2013. 2014;
all rights reserved.

Author's Note: This piece first appeared as the first of a two-part series at Daily Kos on September 1, 2013, as part of the RaceGender DiscrimiNATION diary series there. Since this is Women's History Month, and since indigenous women remain invisible to the dominant culture except as cartoon characters and subjects for appropriation, it seemed an apt time to run them again. What follows is Part I; Part II will appear here tomorrow.



This series is, among other things, about the intersectionality of race and gender in this country's culture, both historical and contemporary. 

Intersectionality is simply a fact of being, of existence, for women of color. Every moment of our lives is lived at a crossroads.

Sometimes, the four roads don't lead outward, but rather, inward — toward a vortex of interrelated and competing risks, benefits, calculations, interests, slings and arrows and aggressions micro and macro and everything in between.  

Today, that vortex is a place called North Dakota. It's a place that at least one writer has labeled, with frightening accuracy, a "male-dominated dystopia." For several years now, conditions have become increasingly dire for women generally. but for women of color — and particularly for indigenous women — they are downright hellish.

The further hell of it is, they've been that way for some time. And once or so a year, a few reports trickle out. They're confined mostly to blogs and Web sites of specific scope and limited circulation, and the corporate media mostly stand by and let the stories go unreported in the wider culture. Politicians and policymakers are nowhere to be found.

In other words, where the lives of indigenous women are concerned, it's business as usual.

Author's Note: At the outset, readers need to be aware of the content of this piece. much of what follows deals with stories of extreme physical, psychological, and sexual violence and human trafficking. If any of these issues presents a trigger for you, you may not wish to read further.