Land Acknowledgement statements

Like all Oregon schoolchildren, I learned the state song "Oregon, my Oregon" in third grade. It begins:

"Land of the Empire Builders
Land of the Golden West
Conquered and held by free men
Fairest and the best."









 

In recent decades these words make people uncomfortable. It is nicer to think that the indigenous people here welcomed White settlers, so they weren't conquered, just outnumbered. And "free men" reminds people that Oregon took an anti-slavery position in 1859; the state constitution forbade Black people to live in the state -- not so good. And "fairest" meant Whitest, not the most committed to equal justice.

The problem with the song isn't that it is wrong. It is that it was all too true, and an embarrassment. 

I find arrowheads on my farm on tilled land after a rain. The shiny obsidian bits glisten. Indigenous people lived here before gold miners and farmers began arriving after 1850. The Rogue River provided salmon; the native oak savannah provided acorns. White settlers clashed with Indians, with surprise attacks and retaliatory attacks. There were more White settlers and soldiers than local Indians, and they were better provisioned. The surviving Indians were moved 200 miles to the north, which ended the Rogue River Indian Wars of 1855-56. Ugly history.

In 1883 my great-grandfather bought 180 acres of that fought-over land from a man who acquired it under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. This Act was an effort by the U.S. government to encourage settlement of the Oregon Territory, which is to say White settlement. It gave 320 acres to every unmarried White male -- and 640 acres to a husband and wife -- if they settled on and farmed the land. The land was fertile and farmable, so people came. 

Public meetings in recent years have been offering up "land acknowledgement statements." Here is a sample, suggested by a guide to these statements:

"We honor and pay respect to their elders and descendants─past, present, and emerging─as they continue their stewardship of these lands and waters. We acknowledge that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide, and multigenerational trauma."

I wish people would not do these statements, although I suspect no one wants to be the one to suggest it to a group of well-meaning conscientious people. So I will be the one. 

They do more harm than good. They feed the narrative that over-educated guilty White liberals hate America, and are doing virtue performance theater with no real practical intent to do anything. The statements are a critique of the very process that built the country -- westward expansion. Every American has a basis for feeling that he or she, too, deserves recognition for an injustice. Blacks for slavery and Jim Crow; Jews for antisemitism; Irish immigrants for discrimination; Catholics for the Ku Klux Klan; German immigrants for discrimination during World War I; the Japanese for internment in World War II; Chinese for the Exclusion Act, women for centuries of second class citizenship. It doesn't stop. Everyone through their ancestry has been an oppressor and oppressed. Today White male millionaires and billionaires feel aggrieved. They know they pay more taxes and at a higher marginal rate than do others. They consider themselves the Atlas, carrying the world, amid the 47% who are "takers." 

Land acknowledgment statements sentimentalize an idealized past that never existed. Humans have been conquering and replacing each other since the beginning of time. The records are scarce here in Southern Oregon but a variety of tribes overlap and struggled and displaced one another. Modoc. Takelma. Siletz. Latgawa. Klamath. Chinook. Shasta. 

Fight over turf continues to this day. The Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Indians and the Coquille Tribe are rivals over who has local "hunting rights", now in the modern form of the right to build a casino in Medford to profit off local gamblers. 

There is no original owner to acknowledge. The land has been conquered by war, by disease, and by disproportionate fertility, again and again. The land is "conquered and held" until a new conquerer comes along. It is the bloody reality of human history. 

The history of Poland for the past 2000 years is better recorded than is the history of indigenous people at my farm, and it makes my point.

From 100 to 400 Current Era, that land was settled by people from the west, by Germanic people. Then the Huns. Then the Avars. Then the Magyars. Then the Vikings. Then the Bohemians. Then the Mongols. Then the Swedes. Then the Austrians, Germans, and Russians. In the 20th Century, the Germans and Russians divided it, occupied it, and committed genocide on it. 

To whom would a land acknowledgement be made in Poland? To whom should we make it in Southern Oregon?

If Americans feel the need to have a moment of quiet reflection on the brutality of war or of the debt we owe previous generations, it be better to settle for the Pledge of Allegiance. As Abraham Lincoln said, it is for us, the living, to dedicate ourselves to our ideals. We are all the descendants of brutal conquerors. There is unfinished work to do. The Pledge reminds us of the aspiration that we are a nation dedicated to liberty and justice for all. Let's go with that.

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Big mistake. Trump is taking on Liz Cheney.

Liz Cheney won't wimp out.

Trump feels like he is king of the forest. He just took on a honey badger. They are the most aggressive, fearless, and ill-tempered animal in the forest.

The GOP-led House just announced they want an FBI investigation of Liz Cheney. GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk said that Cheney's conversations with former White House assistant Cassidy Hutchinson constituted improper "collusion" with a witness. They want hearings, prosecutions, and jail time. Donald Trump has been urging this in speeches, interviews, and Truth Social "truths," where Trump wrote that Cheney "could be in a lot of trouble."

Trump and the GOP will regret this. It is another example of the peril of winning, whether it is in politics, sports, or business. Success can go to your head. You get careless.You think you are invulnerable. 

Yesterday I wrote here that in Biden's post-election "quiet quitting" absence, Trump has center stage. He has allied with Elon Musk's infinite money and Twitter/X's political reach. He is at the top of his game. Trump is taking victory laps intimidating officeholders and businesses. He has already taken over the presidential bully pulpit. "It is time for a Democratic narrator to emerge," I wrote. 

Liz Cheney is not that Democratic narrator. Not quite. She is a Republican of the checks-and-balances variety. She is more a "John the Baptist" to some future leader. She sets the stage. She will remind Democrats that the leadership is not a negotiation among agenda-driven interest groups. Presidential leadership is a contest of strength and courage to tell the public simple truths with a conviction that persuades people. Presidential power is about communication.

Cheney knows one very clear simple truth that aligns with Democrats: Donald Trump is a mortal danger to American democracy. She sacrificed her political career to voice that truth.

She immediately counterpunched. No pussyfooting. No qualifications. No meandering into discussion of process. She offers a sharp denial. You are wrong. You are lying. You are disreputable. You are cowardly. You are protecting the guilty person, Trump.

Chairman Loudermilk’s ‘Interim Report’ intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did. Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth. No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take this seriously.

His so-called ‘report’ is filled with baseless, conclusory allegations rather than facts. That’s because there’s no escaping the reality that Donald Trump bears the responsibility for the deadly January 6th attack no matter how much Mr. Loudermilk would love to rewrite history for his political purposes.

I have been waiting for this kind of clarity. She is angry and sounds angry. She knows right from wrong, and she is right and Trump is wrong. She has nothing to hide. 

In the cynical world of hardball politics, Trump had a great opportunity. House Republicans muffed it. They could have centered their attack on the Democratic chair of the January 6th Committee, Benny Thompson of Mississippi. He is Black. He is not articulate or sharp-tongued. He is soft spoken. He has no national fame or brand. Taking on Thompson would have had the subtext of "uppity Blacks" trying to bring down a White hero, of Democrats trying to bring down Republicans, and of a decisive and strong Trump once again dominating and humiliating a weakling. It is the meta story Trump and the MAGA team love: alpha Trump, born a prince, now a king, swashbuckling his way over rivals, especially a dark-skinned Democrat.

Liz Cheney is royalty, too. Hers was as privileged an upbringing as was Trump's, although in the political realm, not the realm of money, real estate development, and TV. She has a brand. Trump understands the power that flows from money. She understands the power that flows from political convictions. She is down now but she will return because ideas matter. She is a true believer and she believes in herself. She has a compelling story to tell: Trump is guilty, guilty, guilty.

There are good policy reasons for Democrats to disagree with Liz Cheney. But they should respect the courage and sacrifice she made in taking on Trump and having campaigned with Kamala Harris. Democrats will see the power of ferociousness in commanding public attention and support. That hasn't been part of the Democratic brand, and it needs to be if their tone and message is going to match the public's frustrations with the status quo.

Trump just took on a honey badger.

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Trump exercises hard power.

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
       Mao Tse-tung, "On Protracted War," 1938

"Politics ain't bean-bag."
       Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley," 1895

  

Donald Trump is mopping up after his election win. Politics is about power. He has it and is using it. He is on the field, bayonetting the survivors.

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) was showing a bit of independent reluctance to confirm Peter Hegseth as secretary of defense. The word went out: We will primary you. She is crawling back into compliance. She heard the warning. Other senators heard it, too. Be with Trump or be a RINO, and RINOs get purged.

Under Stalin, one-third of Communist Party members were executed.

Trump sued ABC News. George Stephanopoulos said Trump "raped" E. Jean Carrol. The jury said it wasn't rape under New York law.  ABC had the cover of noting that the judge in the case said on the record that by the definition of many Americans, the act of digitally penetrating an unwilling woman was indeed "rape." ABC had a defendable case in a situation with maximum protection of freedom of speech and of the press, but they folded and paid. Disney, the owner of ABC, was vulnerable to intimidation. The Disney Corporation has scores of places where it intersects with the federal government. Trump is a dangerous enemy.

Amazon got that warning. So did Meta, the owner of Facebook. So did Google. So did Comcast, owner of MSNBC. So did JPMorgan and other banks that have been wary of cryptocurrencies. 

Trump warned in a press conference that he was going to sue the Des Moines Register. He did so the yesterday. The Register published a poll saying that Harris might win Iowa. Trump was furious. He called the poll "election interference." His lawsuit calls for damages to be paid by the polling company, the newspaper, and the newspaper's corporate owner, Gannett. Trump's lawsuit claims consumers were "badly deceived and misled." 

In the lawsuit Trump shapes the narrative of a landslide win:

"[T]he November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history."

Trump and the GOP-led House are turning their attention to Liz Cheney. She condemned Trump's behavior, agreeing with the description by Mitch McConnell, that the Capitol invaders "had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth – because he was angry he’d lost an election." Cheney is one of the Republicans who said Trump attacked our democracy. Trump is not merely disagreeing with her. That is beanbag. He is turning the power of the government on her.

The American public chose this. Trump said he was willing to use hard force to get his way. Trump sold himself for what he is, a decisive, cruel, brutal, get-things-done leader, who would cut through the niceties and formalities of checks-and-balances democracy. Marginal voters may have thought that meant he would "get tough" with China, with shoplifters, with criminal gangs, and with immigrants here illegally. Trump and his MAGA supporters have a wider sweep in mind. Get Democrats. Get the media. Get RINOs. Get people who stop short of full support.

He does not need to bayonet every survivor on the political battlefield. He just needs survivors to see what he has done and know that he is willing to bayonet more. He just needs a Justice Department staffed with people with an enemies list and the credible threat of saying everyone on it is guilty of treason. He has made those nominations.

Trump is center stage. Biden has quietly quit. Trump is narrating the story of what is happening in America. Mexico capitulated on immigration. The economy has already recovered, thanks to his election. He won a monumental election victory. He never coordinated his campaign with Russia in 2016. Biden runs a crime family. Kamala Harris is stupid. Trump saved Israel. 

It is time for a Democratic narrator to emerge. He or she will get attacked by Trump. A worthy narrator will parry the attacks reverse them and create a credible and popular alternative story. I am waiting.

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Silent Night: American aren't reproducing and replacing ourselves.

There is a baby gap in the developed world.

Here is where babies come from:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-number-of-babies-born-every-hour-by-country/

Women in countries with boundaries many Americans would struggle to find on a map are producing more new babies than is the USA. 

Something is happening all over the developed world. Women as a whole are choosing to have fewer children, if any at all. Replacement rate -- the number of babies woman on average need to have to maintain a stable population, is 2.1 per woman. Women in the U.S are having on average 1.62 babies per woman.

Fertility rates in Europe are in the range of 1.5 per women in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, to 1.3 in Italy and Spain. Being a Catholic country doesn't matter. Japan is famous for its low birthrate, 1.3 per women, but the rest of east Asia is similar. Bhutan's is 1.4, Thailand's is 1.3, Singapore's is 1.1, and South Korea's is 0.9.

Countries worried about their birth rates have put in place "pro-natalist" policies. Nordic countries with a strong social safety net use incentives to make childbirth and childrearing more affordable. This includes cash payments, universal childcare, and paid parental leave. It hasn't changed the birthrate. 

South Korea considers its birth rate a national emergency. It has cash and parental leave incentives, plus a propaganda campaign urging young people to have sex and make babies -- to no avail. In South Korea the social norm of reproduction and childrearing is less powerful than the social norm of hard work, long hours, and men not helping out with household duties. South Korean women have organized a Four-No program that has received international attention: No dating men, no sex with men, no marrying men, no children with men. 

The baby-gap is emerging as a political issue in the U.S. JD Vance raised the issue with his "cat lady" remark and his praise for baby-making by native-born American women. He is part of the backlash against current feminism that has focused on women's autonomy in career and the sphere of life outside the home. The modern feminist young woman competes with boys and men, graduates from college, gets professional training, is self-supporting, has body autonomy, uses contraception, and has babies if and when she wants. The trans issue adds an element of backlash to wokeness, in the Republican critique of de-feminized autonomous woman. As Democrats struggle to define the boundaries of female, detaching it from childbearing, Republicans think it is obvious who women are. They are the ones who make babies.  

Democratic orthodoxy -- for now -- deals with population decline by saying that women have autonomy and they make the rules, so if there are fewer babies, so be it. Democrats support immigration, and if we really need more Americans, we can get them from Latin America and Asia. Immigrants are good and necessary. They are more law-abiding than are native born people. They are better workers. They fit into a Democratic multicultural "American tapestry" ethic. 

Republicans voice a different notion of real Americans. Immigrants are better defined as outsiders, not on-deck Americans, suitable for the melting pot. Mormons and Orthodox Jewish couples are still having large families, although the tradition of large Roman Catholic families has eroded. People with traditional values are more open to the presumption that women operate in a different, parallel arena from men: the hearth and home sphere. Republicans are validating traditional gender roles. Home-makers are okay. (Democrats give them a sneering name, "trad wives," a political mistake. A party does not win votes by belittling a choice some families choose to make.) 

The trend line of the past half century in developed countries is that most women -- now that they have access to reliable contraception -- are choosing the Democratic model, whether or not it is good for the country they are in. The birth rate numbers tell that story. Women are impervious to government incentives to have larger families. They have choices, and are saying "no thanks." 

The culture isn't baby-positive the way it was in my youth. I see lifestyle shows about home remodels, about extraordinary food, about gracious living. But not babies. Eight is Enough went off the air in 1981.

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Trump did not rape E. Jean Carroll.

It wasn't rape.

It was "sexual abuse" and "defamation."

ABC just settled a case with Donald Trump, giving him $15 million, plus another $1 million in attorney fees. George Stephanopoulos said Trump "raped" her. Trump said it wasn't rape, not exactly.

Democrats should resist a temptation. It backfires when they imitate Trump. No need to exaggerate or round up when describing Trump's misbehaviors. Trump makes wildly untrue exaggerations. He gets away with it because about half of Americans like the schtick. Americans are told we must take Trump seriously, but not literally. 

ABC TV anchor George Stephanopoulos made an unforced error. It cost ABC more than money. Trump supporters can claim that the settlement proves that ABC is biased. It proved to the rest of the world that ABC will cave to intimidation by Trump. Like other media companies, they are "making nice" with Trump, hoping to be out of the line of regulatory or prosecutorial fire.

It is unwise from the point of view of persuasion to speak loosely about Trump's misbehaviors. Rounding up backfires. It gives Trump and his supporters a basis for denying what Trump is accused of, rather than acknowledging his crimes for what they are.

Trump didn't force his penis inside Carroll without her consent. Apparently he just did it with his fingers. This is bad enough. The truth preserves the "ick" factor. Let Trump's defenders assert that "it wasn't that bad." Let them go on TV with that.

 A lot of people do in fact minimize and accept Trump's misbehavior. They show he is bold and unbowed. This shirt was for sale at the Trump rally in Medford this June:

Trump has a magical effect on people in his fan club. He is a star, and as we heard him say in the "Access Hollywood" video, "When you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." Trump has permission to be Trump-the star. But not blanket permission, and not from everyone. That is why E. Jean Carroll spoke up, and a jury found that Trump sexually assaulted her.

There have been opportunities to describe Trump's misbehavior in the past, and there will be more going forward. It is a mistake to say "Trump carried out an armed insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government." That isn't exactly accurate. He encouraged it. He plotted to replace bona fide electors with electors who perjured themselves. He attempted to intimidate his vice president into throwing out valid certificates of election in order to overthrow the election. That is bad enough.

What Trump did to E. Jean Carroll is bad enough. What he has promised to do is bad enough. 

Here is the official record of the jury verdict:

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Easy Sunday: Pruning grapes.

You build a grape vineyard by subtracting.

Most of the work is shaping plants by pruning them.

(This is new to me. Melons are the other way around. You work to get the plants to grow as big and lush as possible. Large and dense melon vines mean healthy melons.)

Last weekend we took off the top story of now-leafless plants. The top canes are visible in the upper two wires four and five feet off the ground. I took this photo three weeks ago to show the ice that encrusted the plants on a cold morning. 

The crew last week left the plants looking like this: one index-finger-thick vine coming out of the root knot. At one point, several stems came out of that spot just off the ground, and this one is the survivor, the strongest of them, so it was kept. Notice the branches on the ground from last week's pruning. The tiller on the back of my tractor will chop them into small pieces and return them to the soil.

This weekend the crew is taking the next step: training the vine to the metal rod so the vine will be straight up. Then they are bending this two-year-old plant so that there will be fruit-producing vines along the cane wire. That wire is the one about 31 inches off the ground, the second-lowest one, the one a foot above the wire that supports the black irrigation tube. 

Here is what it looks like when they are done:

The vine is flexible enough that it accepts this 90-degree turn, but it requires about four or five ties with slightly-stretchy green tape to keep it in place.

Workers start near the base, then work up. Bottom two are tied:

Then the third and fourth tie.

Then the bend to the cane wire:

The pruner makes a judgment call here to decide if the vine is big enough to support fruit this year. If the cane is little-finger-thickness at the cane-wire turn, then it is kept and tied to the wire. If it is smaller -- pencil-thickness -- it is cut off at the cane wire and left to grow another year. The pruner is holding an example for comparison of a cane too small to be turned to the side for 2025 fruit. Most of the vineyard consists of healthy two-year- old plants, so most of them are thick enough for the turn.

It takes about two minutes per plant to do this pruning. Nine people, working eight hours yesterday, got about 2,200 plants done. I have about 6,000 plants in the vineyard. This pruning prepares the plants for the first small harvest this coming fall. It also sets up the plants for a pruning a year from now. Then the cane now being attached to the wire and everything above it is removed. The entire plant will be brought down to about 25 inches off the ground -- below the cane wire -- leaving just a single stick cut off below the current 90-degree turn. The 2026 harvest will come from buds that grow out from the top of that short cane. That new growth will be attached to the cane wire.

Remove, remove, remove.

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What to do about women's athletics?

Democrats can't dismiss the problem of trans women participating in women's athletics by saying it involves too few people to be important.

Republican campaigns made it important. 

They reversed the question of who was "weird."

"Trans" became a litmus test of common sense for voters. Kamala Harris could not -- did not -- say clearly that there was a difference between the genders that was relevant to athletics. Republicans spent a quarter of a billion dollars driving home that point.

Voters in battleground states would rather elect a felon, a tax cheat, a thief of national secrets, a multiple sexual assaulter of women, and a person who plotted to overthrow an election rather than elect a person who would not say clearly that trans women had an unfair advantage competing in women's sports leagues. 

It turns out that gender is complicated. There is social gender (how the person interacts in society); there is chromosomal gender (XX, XY or other combinations); expressed genital gender (i.e., what an infant looks like that gets listed on a birth certificate); there is endocrine gender (levels of testosterone, estrogen, androgen, and other hormones and how any one body reacts to them); and intersex people who are a little of both and neither.

Jack Mullen writes about politics and sports. He argues that the key to fair competition in women's athletics is to test for endocrines, specifically testosterone. Let athletic leagues -- not politicians -- make the rules. That makes sense to me. After all, sports leagues make decisions on what constitutes eligibility on other issues (age, attendance at school) and what constitutes fair play (strike zones, roughing the kicker.) So let them make this decision. It is in their interest to promote safe, fair competition.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

                                                 CHEAP SHOTS

If you thought George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign featuring an ad of a convicted rapist on the loose was bad form, you were right. It was. At least I thought so. Bush played on White alarm that an African American rapist had been let loose somewhere on American streets. It worked. Bush won.

The effectiveness of Bush’s Willie Horton ads could not hold a candle to the Trump campaign’s ads targeting the transgender community, especially transgender athletes.

My autumn weekends are spent watching football, both college and pro. When I should have spent the Saturday before the election knocking on doors, I couldn’t resist staying home to watch the November 2 game between Oregon and Michigan.

While basking in the Duck lead over the Wolverines, I winced at Trump ads mocking the transgender community. Then I realized, damn, Trump officials are playing up to the ‘‘bro’’ voting bloc, the voting bloc with the lowest participation in presidential elections since 1972, back when young males no longer had to worry about the military draft. Trump was riling up the group that, if they actually turned out to vote, could make the difference in the swing states.

Every football game I watched over the first weekend in November featured major teams from swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Donald Trump, the guy who said he would “defend women,” looked strong against Kamala Harris, who wouldn’t address the “hot topic” of transgender female athletes competing against defenseless little girls.

I have no idea how many pre-teens or teenagers have sex-changing operations. If they do, I would suspect they aren't doing it because they want to compete against lesser competition in sports.

The fact is that there are fewer than 40 transgender athletes out of 55,000 who compete in NCAA-sanctioned sports. The NCAA requires an athlete’s testosterone level be tested, and that it not exceed the upper limit of a normal female range. I think that is fair. The normal competitive nature of women athletics is not affected.

If other athletic venues, from school districts to the Olympics, adopted the NCAA guidelines for transgender participation, then girls and women could compete on equal footing and the hysteria can lessen and not be a political football anymore.

 

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