Idle No More Comes to the Gulf Coast, By Cherri Foytlin

Reprinted from our friends at Bridge The Gulf:

Last Sunday, January 20, I had the pleasure of seeing a short-term dream materialize, when over 100 folks traveled from every Gulf state to attend a gathering organized by Idle No More – Gulf Coast, of which I am proudly a part.

Idle No More is the indigenous-led movement that has been sweeping the globe since it began a few short months ago. Inspired by four Canadian First Nations women – Nina Wilson, Sheelah Mclean, Sylvia McAdam and Jessica Gordon, the action-based appeal surrounds issues of environmental protection, women, and indigenous rights.

Spurred in particular by Canada's Bill C-45 - which unapologeticallty violates aboriginal treaty rights and removes protection of sacred waters by overhauling the Navigable Waters Protection Act - Idle No More got a shot of adrenaline after Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence began a six week hunger strike highlighting, in part, the crushing poverty her people and other indigenous nations continue to live under.
The Idle No More - Gulf Coast gathering, which involved a Round Dance, prayers and discussions by supporting Gulf-based indigenous and environmental organizations, was hosted in partnership with Chief Shirell Parfait Dardar and Chief Albert Naquin of the Isle de Jean Charles and the Grand Caillou Dulac Bands of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. Like many of the Gulf Coast's aboriginal peoples, these tribes have struggled for generations against racial, social and economic disparities while being denied recognition by federal entitities.

Far too familiar with the plague of climate change, they have also been the witness of a continuous string of natural and man-made disasters that have laid claim to no less than the soil under their feet, and through subsequent migration, threatened to take their cultural identity with it.

Additionally, and like far too many indigenous nations across the world, the tribes struggle with the environmental justice issues that too often accompany low-income and/or minority communities. Literally, these kind people live and work on a sinking land mass, induced by oil industry pipelines. They epitomize the offering that is the energy sacrifice zone of the nation – the Gulf Coast.

So it is of little wonder that the Idle No More movement and the altruistic actions of Chief Spence would strike hard upon their heart – it is an elated feeling to find out that you are not alone; and further, that you do not have to stand alone.

As for the Idle No More movement, we have yet to see what the long term legacy will be for the world. Some say that, like many recent movements, this too will fizzle and quiet with time and ego-induced infighting. And maybe they will be right, but what of it?

To some degree Idle No More has already accomplished more within the last few months than could have been imagined. From the coasts of New Zealand to the Outback of Australia, from the Black Hills to the rainforest, to the glaciered North, indigenous peoples have begun to claim their place as the protectors of Mother Earth and all of her people. Through enlightened empowerment, the historic solidarity that has been the nucleus of this movement, will survive in the memory of all who are living to witness it. It is without doubt, that the effect of those memories will endure and materialize in a plethora of yet-to-be-told circumstances.

In short, Idle No More has been a lightening bolt in a very dark sky, and whether it stays or rescinds quickly, we are beginning to see the stars again – and that is a great gift.

Cherri Foytlin is a journalist, mother of six and wife of an oil worker, who lives in south Louisiana. She is the author of Spill It! The Truth About the Deep Water Oil Rig Explosion, and regularly contributes to Bridge The Gulf, The Huffington Post, and several local newspapers. In the Spring of 2011 she walked to Washington D.C. from New Orleans (1,243 miles) to call for action to stop the BP Drilling Disaster, and has been a constant voice speaking out for the health and ecosystem of Gulf Coast communities, in countless forms of media. As founder of 28 Stones - a Gulf based media project which focuses on national movement building through art, photography, video and written word - she is working to help build the foundation for a cooperative and unified amplification of voices and needs, particularly of Gulf Coast communities, across the nation and globe.

How NOT to be a Gentrifier With Your Theater: A Starter List, By Catherine Michna

New Orleans has seen a recent theatre resurgence. Below is a critical perspective on this wave of new theatre from educator and writer Catherine Michna, reprinted from her local blog catherinemichna.wordpress.com.

I spent this past weekend at the Network of Ensemble Theater’s MicroFest in New Orleans. Organized by the lovely Ashley Sparks, this festival and conference think tank presented some amazing work by local ensemble theaters and local organizations that use art and performance to do social justice organizing. Participants included ArtSpot Productions, Junebug Productions,New Noise, Mondo Bizarro, Goat in the Road, Resurrection after Exoneration, Kids ReThink New Orleans Schools, Jose Torres-Tama and ArteFuturo Productions, and many others.

Net MicroFest was designed to raise challenging questions about ethics and aesthetics in community-engaged theatre production. The core questions for the weekend and for all four of NET’s MicroFests around the US this year are as follows:

What does the work look like?
What makes the work work?
How does place impact art?
How does art impact place?

(see Pam Korza’s outline of these questions for more thoughts on how NET MicroFests were designed to collaboratively generate answers to these important queries).

Throughout this weekend’s MicroFest, artists took notes about the ethics and aesthetics of place-based theatre in contemporary cities. I look forward to seeing those notes. But I also took my own. The biggest issue that came up for me during the weekend was the impasse around race and gentrification that underlies seemingly all critical dialogues about theatre in post-Katrina New Orleans. At NetFest there was a lot of honest dialogue about this impasse. There were also moments of unchecked white privilege that produced frustration and sadness in the anti-racists of all colors and backgrounds who were witness to them.

In response to these tense moments, my notes from the weekend are a compilation of how white artists might use their work to push against, rather than roll with and increase, structures of racism and gentrification in the city. I’ll share them with you here in list form.

How NOT to be a Gentrifier with your Theater Projects
A set of New Orleans specific guidelines–written for white theatre artists, especially those who are new to New Orleans.

This is a starter list that needs your critique and additions! If you read it, please add a comment.

Step One. If you, like so many others, are thinking of resettling in New Orleans in order to make theatre here (or if you recently moved here), don’t arrive unprepared. Learn the history and culture of this city before you settle here AND before you start to do your work. Also, as you study and talk to people about New Orleans as a place and as a community, think carefully about why you desire(d) to move here. Cultivate honest self-reflections about this question before you start “engaging” with local communities.

* Note 1: If you claim to LOVE second lines, but your first instinct in conversations with your fellow white artists is to label un-gentrified black neighborhoods as “dangerous” or “under-developed” places, you need to go back and start from scratch.

* Note 2: As you learn about the culture that thrives in working class African American communities in this city, resist the urge to romanticize that culture as historic (i.e. merely of the past), static, or “authentically” New Orleans (i.e. local not global in outlook). Instead, think seriously about how African American cultural traditions are incorporated, dynamically, into everyday life here even as they express a broad critique of the nation and global economic structures of oppression. Seek to understand the assets that these practices and the neighborhoods that produce them give to YOU, as a resident of New Orleans, every day.

* Note 3: You can learn about New Orleans culture and history from reading (Go to the Community Book Center, see the Katrina Reader's excellent starter list of books and articles, or read Students at the Center’s book about the long (and ongoing) civil rights movement in New Orleans, The Long Ride), but such learning is more powerful if it also comes from conversations with community elders. Building relationships with artists and culture makers who have roots in New Orleans takes time and will probably require many difficult false starts and do-overs. Take the time to do this work and to learn how to do it well before you start building new projects and institutions in the city.

Step Two. If you are white, take white privilege seriously. Take advantage of local resources, such as the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond trainings that occur in New Orleans on a regular basis. Spend the dime and the time to understand what racism is and to understand your own position within our nation’s racist social structures. If you do not do this, your work will serve to further entrench the racism that already thrives here.

* Note 1: Taking white privilege seriously also means recognizing that the process of becoming a white anti-racist is a lifelong one. One workshop or even several weekends of training is not sufficient.

Step Three. Do you imagine that your work is saving, helping, or healing New Orleans, especially African American residents in New Orleans? If even a tiny part of you answered “Yes” to this question, then take a moment to learn about and talk with your peers about cultural imperialism as well as racism.

To start: Read this essay by Kalamu ya Salaam for some local context on how cultural and economic imperialism works in New Orleans-past and present.

Next: Ask one of your Teach for America friends if you can sit in one one of their classes–find a KIPP or ReNew school for an especially powerful lesson in what imperialism looks like in New Orleans.

Ask yourself: What kinds of imperialism do you see at work in our city’s public schools? How is imperialism tied to racism and to economics and power? What is the difference between solidarity and charity?

Then ask yourself, what else can your work do that’s productive if it acknowledges that it cannotsave the city and that, if anything, it will probably have the tendency to further the gentrification and structural racism that already thrives here?

Step Four. Participatory or interactive theatre is as trendy as it is important and transformative.Embrace your desire to learn from New Orleans’s African American cultural traditions in order to generate new forms of participation in your productions. However, think with intention about who your audience will be and where their participation will occur. Here are some suggestions about how to do so:

First: Resist the impulse to be yet-another-arts-group that leads a bus full of white people into the Ninth Ward and plops them down for a participatory “social justice” performance that doesn’t engage in a sustained and reciprocal/respectful way with Ninth Ward residents. The same goes for other primarily working class and non-white neighborhoods. Don’t be a geographic pioneer–there are plenty of other, fruitful ways to do original performance work.

Second: if you want to see a start-to-scratch model of how NOT to approach participatory, community-engaged theatre in this city, Read Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot production “Field Guide.” If you’re having a hard time understanding what’s not to like about this model, TALK to the members of and STUDY the aesthetics of locally rooted theatre organizations who have reputations for generating sustained accountability within local communities, such as the Free Southern Theater, Junebug Productions, Ashe Cultural Arts Center, and ArtSpot Productions.

Third: Remember the hardest and most important rule of participatory performance work–your audience members are the makers of the content of the work, too. Recognize the different and diverging knowledges that local audiences might bring to your productions. Cultivate the sharing of those knowledges as a part of the work. Junebug Productions’ Story Circle process is a fantastic locally-rooted tool that will enable you to do so. Fundraise in order to pay for first-hand training in this important process.

Step Five. When you fundraise, recognize the disparities that shape where foundation resources go. Find ways to work around the reality that most resources go to projects that are not asking the kinds of hard questions that you are asking. Privilege gives to privilege–if your project gets huge support from local developers or foundations, think about why that might be. Is there an element of your work that’s subtly furthering racism?

Also, if you do get funding, do the hard work to make sure that your project or your institution contributes to resisting, not deepening, gentrification in New Orleans. This is especially true if you are doing sustained work in one area of the city. Make sure that you share the resources you obtain by paying the local organizations and the locally grounded people who inform and deepen your work. Do not just seize resources, make work, collect your accolades, and leave.

Women With A Vision, Recovering From Arson, Purchases Building

Women With A Vision, a community-based non-profit founded by a grassroots collective of African-American women in response to the spread of HIV/AIDS in communities of color, has just made a downpayment on a building in Midcity New Orleans. The Vision House will enable the organization to continue and expand their work - but first the house needs massive repairs, including gutting the entire structure, shoring of the foundation, and rebuilding the house from the inside out. They have set up an online campaign to donate, here.

Below is more information, from the WWAV fundraising website:

On May 24, 2012, Women With A Vision suffered what could have been a debilitating blow. Our offices were ransacked and torched in an aggravated arson attack; we were left with nothing but the charred remains of twenty-one years of work.

In the wake of this attack, you helped us remember that fire can also be a powerful tool of rebirth. Through your support and generosity, we were not only able to continue to be a lifeline for New Orleans’ most vulnerable women in this time of crisis, but we were also able to reach new heights in the national and international fight for women’s health and wellbeing.

We write now to ask for your continued support as we work to open our new home after the fire.

We at Women With A Vision envision an environment in which there is no war against women and LGBTQ communities, in which people have spaces to come together and share their stories, in which people are empowered to make decisions concerning their own bodies and lives, and in which people have the necessary support to realize their hopes, dreams, and full potential. Since 1991, this vision has been our rallying cry, taking us from the streets of New Orleans to the halls of Congress as we work to give people the tools to make their lives better and to organize for justice.

But 2012 was a particularly big year for us.

* We brought in the New Year with several Hill visits to testify to the on-the-ground impact of HIV criminalization, drug prohibition and funding cuts to health services;
* On March 29th, we won a monumental victory when U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman deemed Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature by Solicitation statue unconstitutional. We have gotten 68 people off the sex offender registry list, and an additional 116 people have filed motions;
* In June, just days after the fire, we launched our Micro-Enterprise program to support our participants’ economic self-sufficiency as they transition from street-based economies;
* In July, we traveled to Washington, DC to bring a focus on the HIV/AIDS crisis among women of color in the South at this historic International AIDS Conference;
* We welcomed Fall with the launch of our new harm reduction policy initiative; and
* We concluded a yearlong partnership with Louisiana State University through which we were able to refer more than 300 low-income women for breast cancer screenings.

Most importantly, we end 2012 having just secured a new space on North Claiborne, which we will make our Vision House. The outpouring of support we received after the fire helped us make the down payment on the property, but we still have massive repairs ahead of us, including gutting the entire structure, shoring of the foundation, and rebuilding the house from the inside out.

Turning Problems Into Parades, By Nick Slie

This weekend is MicroFest USA: New Orleans: RENEW. The event is a celebration of the renaissance that has taken place in New Orleans' performance and social justice fields since Hurricane Katrina.  Part festival, part think-tank, part community tour, and part dance party, the all-local programming includes workshops, learning exchanges, neighborhood tours, meals featuring locally produced food, and presentations by performance ensembles ArtSpot Productions, Cripple Creek Theatre Company, Goat in the Road Productions, Mondo Bizarro, and NEW NOISE and social justice organizations such as the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Moving Forward Gulf Coast, New Orleans Workers’ Center for Social Justice.

Howl Round: A Journal of the Theatre Commons is commemorating the festival by hosting several essays by New Orleanians who work on art and social justice. Among the artists featured are Kiyoko McCrae, José Torres-Tama, Lisa D'Amour, and Nick Slie, whose essay we are reprinting below. We encourage you to check out the festival this weekend.

The costume making skills of the average New Orleanian are astonishing. As I write, thousands of people in our fair city are busy sewing, beading, bedazzling and thrift store hunting. Today is Twelve Night, the official kick-off to carnival season. Since Mardi Gras Day is February 12th, the internal costume making radars of the entire city are now on alert. Thirty-seven days to the show. Thirty-seven days until food-laden neutral grounds, deep belly laughs, hundreds of marching bands, exhaustive dancing, family dinners and parades. Thirty-seven days until the largest collective ensemble performance in America: Mardi Gras. 

New Orleanians treat this season with reverence for so many reasons: (1) You are the show and everyone knows it. (2) It’s free and it takes place on the streets. (3) It is rooted in centuries old traditions. (4) It is the supreme example of how we use food, culture and music to bring people together to build and strengthen community.

In an ever-accelerating world, taking the time to gather people in person is becoming more radical by the minute. New Orleanians specialize in this and we do so with flare. Any chance to get together is a chance to celebrate. We’ll turn the average Saints watching experience at someone’s home into an event featuring enough fried food, pimiento cheese, booze, glitter and touchdown dances to inspire one to become a football fan. The same goes for an average Tuesday or Wednesday. From January to June, there are four days in Southeast Louisiana without a festival. Reflect on that. 

Everyday life is heightened to an art form here. In this city, the ordinary becomes extraordinary in an instant: a casual walk can result with you swept into a second line, surrounded by the chants of Mardi Gras Indians, swooned by wild jasmine or serenaded by the long wails of tug boats as they slug down river. And you can also hear gunshots, sirens, and the chorus of reminders that New Orleans boasts one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country; or the fact that over twenty-five percent of Louisiana residents live below the poverty line. 

The Crescent City is languid and tense, inspiring and downright brutal. Living here, especially since the storm, is a constant experience of life at its most rousing and most cruel. It is this juxtaposition that fascinates us and it is one of the reasons why our cultural traditions boast such a clear social function. After all, people did not become professional celebrators by accident. They learned to do so because life is hard and to dance, sing and eat through it, even if for a day, is one way to approach an explanation about the joys and calamities of daily life here. Our traditions are celebratory, yes, but they also serve the obvious social function of building community and, since the storm, rebuilding one of the most important cities in the world.

New Orleans is a city with no money but resourceful people who, above all, have one thing on their hands: time. People here have a lot of time and they are generous with it. There are few folks in town that would deny you an hour over coffee –fewer that would turn down the same over beer and dancing. People are accessible and down to earth. What we lack in money, we make up for in spare minutes. I imagine this is one of the reasons people have been migrating here for the last three hundred years. 

Think of time here not just as duration but as density of experience, one of the essential ingredients for making good art. Things (and change) move slowly here. Take this and factor in the aforementioned love of gathering people in live, celebratory public environments and you get an idea of why New Orleans is a perfect incubator for ensemble theater practice.

This week, we will play host to Network of Ensemble Theater’s (NET) Micro-Fest USA: Renew, the third installment in a series of festivals that looks at America and the role that art and artists play in creating healthy, vibrant communities. Ensemble has been the big buzz in the theater world over the last few years. In that time, NET has bravely matured into a national service organization that takes risks and innovates ahead of the curve, engendering a vibrant critical dialogue about ensemble theater making on all fronts. At a time when so many people are excited about ensembles, NET has taken the time to remind us that ensemble theater is not a formula, it is a practice. It cannot be applied instantly. It takes time and a willingness to fail in an honest, forthright manner. 

In this regard, NET is clearly steering the most interesting, nuanced conversation about ensemble theater practice in America. And here NET is again, using these Micro-Fests to get out in front of the conversation about ensemble theater practice by encouraging us to expand the very notion of what ensemble means and how it is applied in one of the most embattled places in the country. The Micro-Fest programming accomplishes this by magnifying how ensembles are using art and advocacy within cross-sector partnerships to create experiences that are as impactful as they are exciting.

The exciting evolution of NET over the last seven years parallels the rapid growth of the New Orleans theater community during the same time. Before the storm, there were many who laid the foundation for what is happening now. Companies and institutions like The Free Southern Theater, Le Petit Theatre Vieux Carre, Junebug Productions,Southern Rep, Le Chat Noir, Anthony Bean Community Theater, Chakula Cha Jua Theater, Dog and Pony, Arte Futuro Productions, ArtSpot Productions, Kumbuka African Drum & Dance Collective, Running With Scissors, Evangeline Oaks, Tsunami Dance, Mondo Bizarro, Inside Out Productions, Sidearm Gallery, CAC and Ashe Cultural Art Center steady the broad (and often unacknowledged) shoulders upon which we stand. 

Since Katrina, we have seen an in-flux of talent and energy into the city, the likes of which has transformed New Orleans into a theater ecology that is swiftly asserting itself as a scene to be watched. This has occurred through a combination of risk, fearlessness and an unprecedented spirit of cooperation and resource sharing between individuals and companies alike. Such new companies and institutions include: Allways Lounge and Marigny Theater, Goat in the Road, Cripple Creek Theater Company, The NOLA Project, NEW NOISE, Skin Horse Theater, The Shadowbox Theater, The Neutral Ground Ensemble, Theater 13, Elm Theater, St Francisville Transitory Theater and the New Orleans Fringe Festival, Dancing Grounds, Night Light Collective, Mudlark Public Theater, and the Black Forest Fancies, to name a few. All of this begs the question: how and why has this happened so fast?

With regards to NET and the New Orleans Community, there are too many factors to name but the truth is, people have been doing this type of work for years. NET was smart enough to capitalize on this movement, recognizing the need for ensembles to frame their own experiences and practices: to define ourselves. In New Orleans, the impulse was similar but heightened by the reality that one of the nation’s most unique cultures was visibly threatened, on the verge of extinction. Like the plants that immediately bloomed after the storm as a means of survival, our job was to flower into action immediately. 

This charge continues today. Many point to ensembles fulfilling a need that larger institutions like regional theaters no longer serve. I hear that, but it only scratches the surface; there is something deeper. The recognition of ensemble practice—flourishing via NET and New Orleans—exemplifies a longing in people for experiences that are meaningful in the face of an increasingly over-simplified, instantaneous reality. The notion that we can have everything we want right now has asserted itself as a cliché that in the modern age has become cunning and directionless, as it does nothing to address the chronic nature of so many of the problems our communities are experiencing. In the face of this, ensembles root into places, using their craft to create experiences and relationships that, by responding to the timescale of the place where they live, enhance their role as stakeholders and amplify the stakes in that community. When stakes are high, we are compelled to go even closer, to approach and approach and approach.

In an era when we mistake mimicry for mastery, information for explanation, there is something downright enlivening about a group of people who craft experiences that engage the community where they live, ask questions of which they do not know the answers, and labor with one another for decades. This is what ensembles do and in the process they bravely approach the eradication of the instant results cliché. Ensembles allow time for their social function to become more apparent, often resulting in a body of work that is interesting and important. There is nothing new about this approach, though it may feel novel due to its proximity to the current times.

As the sage Ricardo Levins Morales reminds us, every ecosystem needs its poisons in order to create functioning antibodies. The theater community in New Orleans (and across the country) has some big poisons that need addressing. We are not in a sustained dialogue about the reality of race and racism and because of this we are not as unified as we should be. We do not have a healthy critical dialogue about the quality of the work (bar chatter is only part of it) we are creating and its impact on our home. We rarely, if ever, discuss who in our community is making a living. And we have not done a good enough job of acknowledging our ancestors and the labor they have contributed (how many New Orleanians can speak with passion about The Free Southern Theater, one of the most significant theater movements of the 20th Century?). 

These poisons left unchecked will eat us from the inside out. We need to develop the necessary antibodies to function with more communal health. That is, if we want this scene to blossom into a movement where theater has a pronounced social function beyond vanity alone. Considering the current state of New Orleans, all we’ve come through together, all the jitterbug nights and the complexity we have seen over the last seven years, wouldn’t it be remarkable? If not us, who? I mean, who knows better how to turn problems into parades?

This is Not Theoretical: Reflecting on a Recent Visit to Louisiana State Penitentiary, By Nicky Gillies

Reposted from our friends at The Oyster Knife.

This piece was written after guest contributor Nicky Gillies participated in the NOLA to Angola bike ride, a fundraiser for the Cornerstone Builders’ Bus Project, which helps people in Louisiana travel to visit their incarcerated loved ones. 

This October I spent three days pushing through the 160 winding bike miles from my home in New Orleans to Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola.  It is still a functioning plantation, much as it has been since the time of slavery.  Angola spreads across 18,000 acres of lauded farmland tucked into a bend in the Mississippi River.  Roughly 5,000 people live and work and eat and sleep and write and shit and dream and shower there, not counting the employees.  Most of those 5,000 people are Black men, young and old, and the vast majority of them—almost 90%—will die inside barbed wire.

Intellectual discussions of the 13th amendment and years of participating in prison-related organizing did not prepare me for the heartbreak and outrage of seeing farmland that is still tilled by a captive and almost 80% Black population.  This is not an antiquated system.  Slavery is contemporary, although it has been refashioned several times, and prison labor is integral to the US economy.  Activist lawyer and former prisoner Paul Wright wrote that simultaneously removing over 2 million incarcerated people from the work force and employing another million as guards “is the most thoroughly implemented government work program in American history since the New Deal.”  Knowing this, seeing Angola—endless barbed wire and guard towers and prison uniforms and eerily beautiful fields stretching in all directions—is devastating.  It is an atrocity.  It is also mundane.

Here are things I saw and learned:  The warden uses dogs bred with wolves to guard prisoners and chase them down, and has even recruited dogs in the area that were supposed to be euthanized for aggression to work in the prison.  There is a golf course in Angola.  You can tee-off there for twenty dollars.  The prisoners manufacture the coffins used when someone passes away inside, which happens on average 32 times each year.  An inmate is paroled and walks out the gates to the free world an average of only 4 times a year.  There are 18,000 acres where cotton is grown.  The operating budget is one hundred million dollars.  The prison museum keeps an old electric chair on display, as if the state no longer murders people, as if this was a fleeting oddity.  And then there’s the rodeo, which was happening the day of our visit.

We blow past several miles of backed up cars waiting to enter through the first set of gates.  A mass of smelly kids on bikes, we press into the surge of 10,000 people there to see the rodeo.  The rodeo has been running since the 1960s, and at $5 per person to enter the inner gates and $15 per person to get rodeo tickets, it brings in an enormous profit for Warden Burl Cain each October.  (Angola proudly calls itself a self-sustaining prison, meaning that its profits—mostly extracted from an exploited labor force—cover its operating costs.)  The rodeo is quite dangerous.  Some events require significant skill and others are designed to humiliate the participants.  Prisoners compete to win extra visitation hours and cash prizes.  The rodeo also features a “crafts fair” where prisoners can sell things they’ve produced and keep about 80% of the profit.  This money can only be spent in the prison—phone calls, soap, cigarettes, underground purchases from guards, etc.

We approach the gates to the rodeo, but cannot bring ourselves to hand over $5 for a closer look.  Instead we wander the perimeter and stare: children jumping on the bounce house next to the guard tower, families excited and laughing and shouting across the crowd, the fake trolley bus that laps the parking lot to transport visitors, the prisoners in their uniforms staffing the event, the hotdog stand, the barbed wire, the guards, the guns.  I wonder how many generations have died inside these gates.  I also wonder why anyone would bring their children to a prison for fun on a gorgeous Louisiana October Sunday.  What does this teach them?  Some in the crowd are probably rushing to see their incarcerated loved ones.  But many, many more of them are shoving through the gates to get good seats.  I pass a white woman walking away from her parked car, yapping into her phone and scanning the crowd for whoever she plans to meet.  “This is a nightmare,” she says, exasperated.  She means the fucking parking.

This is a nightmare.  Named for the country where the original group of enslaved Africans were abducted from when this land first became a plantation, Angola used to be known as the bloodiest prison in America.  The particulars of its atrocious conditions are widely known, documented, and criticized, and must absolutely be reformed.  But narratives of imprisonment often fixate on the sensationalized details—the wrongly accused, the exonerated, the most extreme of inhumane conditions, the gruesome executions gone wrong.  These things matter, but that story is one of exceptions.  How many hours does it take to exonerate one innocent person?  How many lawyers?  And how much media attention?  And the right hand of how many governors?

What about those who are guilty of their charges?  It is morally convenient to assume that they are monsters who deserve to be locked away from society.  But mass incarceration in the US is a recent and economically-driven trend; it does not have to be this way.  If we refuse to accept that over 2 million people are beyond help, and if true safety is rooted in access to living-wage jobs, better schools, counseling, drug treatment, childcare, mediation, intergenerational mentorship, and safe places to live and play, what a great responsibility we then bear.  This is what most fundamentally disturbs me:  We incarcerate the largest percentage of our population of any nation in the world.  The vast majority of people inside prisons are non-violent offenders.  Penal work camps are widely accepted as a logical solution to crime.

We sit outside the rodeo and watch the crowd and I try to burn everything into my cells—what it is to be literally and physically free, what it is to see people living in cages, what it is to have no family inside this or any prison, to have never before schlepped out to visit someone I loved and couldn’t even touch, what it is to witness all this and strive to live a just life.  I pedal slowly back out of Angola past manicured marigolds (prison labor) and stashes of extra barbed wire.  We congregate in the shade of the tiny post-office nearby.  Someone has brought half-eaten funnel cake back from the rodeo.  My friend casually laughs that she almost waltzed into the prison with two joints in her bag.  I wonder how many of these inmates were once kids who forgot to take the joints out of their pockets.

What purpose does it serve for these 5,000 people to be in Angola?  We have long abandoned the notion of rehabilitation for those imprisoned in this country.  Locking up poor people and people of color in the south has never been a means to help offenders re-enter society, but was instead a solution to the economic crisis when the chattel slavery system was declared (mostly) illegal.  But slavery remains explicitly legal as punishment for a crime.  This is not theoretical.  It’s 160 winding bike miles from my house.  It’s the children and parents and cousins and lovers of my neighbors and co-workers and of my political community.  Notably, it’s not my close friends.  The statistical impossibility of having lived in this hyper-policed city with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world for six years without anyone close to me getting locked up is only explained by whiteness and class privilege.

We arrive back in New Orleans, hug, and gather damp tents.  With aching legs I push through the five miles back to my house—five miles now seems like a short flight of stairs or a deep breath.  Flashing blue lights up the Treme and St. Claude Avenue, where I have never once been pulled over despite joints in cars and loud, tipsy bike rides and lots of sober speeding to work and yes that one time we all peed in the gutter when we were lost and drunk and nineteen.  Behind Armstrong Park, I see a young man pressed into a NOPD car.  I hear the cinch of metal cuffs as my wheels clatter past him across raggedy pavement.  I wonder if his white undershirt is hanes like mine and if he has a toddler who pulls on his ears and I wonder if his mom will call his cellphone over and over until she thinks to check the Orleans Parish Prison docket online.  I wonder if he will pick cotton until he fucking dies.  I do not want this world–I did not make it, but it sure as hell made me.  Now the question is can we unmake each other.

I hope that if by the grace of the universe I grow old, the small children I treasure now will become adults who are ashamed that I lived less than 200 miles from this sprawling prison farm camp and did very little.  That I averted my eyes and paid my bills and breathed shallowly and claimed not to smell it upwind of my home, upriver of my life.  I do not want them to know a world where young people are plucked out of difficult and violent circumstances to work until their untimely death behind bars.  I want to make them something better.

Nicky Gillies moved to New Orleans in 2007, works as an ASL interpreter, and strives to learn how to accountably organize against the Prison Industrial Complex and live in a just way.

Our People Are Worth the Risks: A Southern Queer Agenda from the Margins and the Red States, By Southerners On New Ground (SONG)

Reprinted from the SONG website and from the Scholar & Feminist Online, a webjournal published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women: 

In the best parts of our tradition as LGBTQ people for liberation, we have resisted assimilation. We have held die-ins, we have risked our lives at pride celebrations, we have been willing to be part of spectacle and even to be hated—in the hope that our work would mean motion towards liberation. We have witnessed a mainstream LGBT movement that has moved away from these practices, and many of us have spent years in conference centers and hotel rooms all around this country pushing back against a mainstreaming of this movement. It is not enough to disagree with the mainstream agenda. We must be actively creating, resourcing, and organizing new strategies that move a politics of intersectionality into the fields, the small towns, the cities, the bedrooms, the televisions, and the visions of this country and this world. These strategies must work tirelessly to build contagious power with those LGBTQ people who have been left behind by a mainstream gay rights agenda and the unlikely allies who have been passed by. 

In the past two years, SONG has mobilized and transformed thousands of LGBTQ people in the South through two campaigns. In 2011, our campaign against anti-immigrant hate in Georgia unleashed the power of an unprecedented number of LGBTQ people in a fight for liberation that was not slanted “single-issue” toward the traditional definition of gay rights. In 2012, our fight against the antifamily amendment in North Carolina (denying the basic rights of all unmarried couples and our children) was named by the North Carolina News Service as one of the biggest grassroots efforts in the history of North Carolina. Both of these campaigns happened in the South: the part of the country that the media tells us is the most hateful and hostile to marginalized communities. We know without a doubt that all the successes in this work originate from the thousands of LGBTQ southerners and allies who led these efforts. They are voting for a new queer agenda with their sweat, risk taking, and voices. SONG listened to them, created an organizational container, and provided strategic direction. They did the rest. At every turn, when we reframed messages away from a narrow, single-issue, gay rights agenda, our people on the ground responded with vigorous affirmation, agitation, and effort.

All over this country, our people grow tired of a defensive, apologetic LGBT strategy against the right wing. Bullies do not stop when they are appeased. We have nothing to apologize for, and yet we watch as our own people and issues are publicly “de-gayed,” portrayed as middle-class and white—all in the name of eventual equality. In the South, we watch tall grass grow up over the houses where our neighbors used to live and over the businesses that used to populate our small towns. We watch as our family members are detained and deported, our comrades are pushed involuntarily into sex work just to survive, and our children are incarcerated. We turn on the television and hear a conversation about LGBTQ people every day that names us as perverted; sinful; and worthy of pain, isolation, and death. 

Yet our mainstream movement, which claims it speaks for us, tells us to wait for policy wins. We are assured that these wins will trickle down to us as some form of victory on our behalf. As people living in the South, as undocumented immigrants, as people of color, as trans people, as rural people, and as people with disabilities, SONG says this is not good enough. In the absence of stronger national leadership, we call on queer liberationists to build and amplify our power and take our rightful leadership regardless of the scale of our organizations: local, statewide, regional, or national. This article seeks to lay out a little bit more about evolving thoughts on how to do just that, from a Southern perspective on queer liberation. We hope that it inspires other groups (who have not already done so) to seize the moment, stop, listen, and respond to the conditions of today.

Post-Katrina, Funders and Foundations Failed New Orleans

In December of 2006, New Orleans' social justice community came together to draft a letter addressed to foundations and funders, in response to the dismal response to the continuing post-Katrina crisis. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and other disasters still to come, the issues raised then are as relevant as ever. 

The letter is reproduced below, along with many of the original names of those who signed on; a range of signatories that helps show the extent of the anger and frustration felt at that time. 

We also encourage those interested in this issue to see this 2007 letter written by civil rights lawyer Bill Quigley. 

LETTER FROM THE PEOPLE OF NEW ORLEANS TO OUR FRIENDS AND ALLIES

December 15, 2006

We, the undersigned, represent a wide range of grassroots New Orleans organizers, activists, artists, educators, media makers, health care providers and other community members concerned about the fate of our city.  This letter is directed to all those around the world concerned about the fate of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but is especially intended for US-based nonprofit organizations, foundations, and other institutions with resources and finances that have been, or could be, directed towards the Gulf Coast.

In the days after the storm, there were promises of support from the federal government and an array of nongovernmental organizations, such as progressive and liberal foundations and nonprofits.  Small and large organizations have done fundraising on our behalf, promising to deliver resources and support to the people of New Orleans.

Many organizations and individuals have supported New Orleans-led efforts with time, resources, and advocacy on our behalf, and for this we are very grateful. These folks followed through on their commitments and offered support in a way that was respectful, responsible, and timely.

However, we are writing this letter to tell you that, aside from these very important exceptions, the support we need has not arrived, or has been seriously limited, or has been based upon conditions that become an enormous burden for us.

We remain in crisis, understaffed, underfunded and in many cases in desperate need of help. From the perspective of the poorest and least powerful, it appears that the work of national allies on their behalf has either not happened or if it has happened it has been a failure.

In the days after August 29, 2005 the world watched as our city was devastated.  This destruction was not caused by Hurricane Katrina, but by failures of local, state and national government, and institutional structures of racism and corruption.  The disaster highlighted already-existing problems such as neglect, privatization and deindustrialization.

As New Orleanians, we have seen tragedy first hand.  We have lost friends and seen our community devastated.  More than 15 months later, we have seen few improvements.  Our education, health care and criminal justice systems remain in crisis, and more than 60 percent of the former population of our city remains displaced. Among those that remain, depression and other mental health issues have skyrocketed.

While many nationwide speak of "Katrina Fatigue," we are still living the disaster.  We remain committed to our homes and communities.  And we still need support.

In 15 months we have hosted visits by countless representatives from an encyclopedic list of prominent organizations and foundations.  We have given hundreds of tours of affected areas, and we have assisted in the writing of scores of reports and assessments.  We have participated in or assisted in organizing panels and workshops and conferences.  We have supplied housing and food and hospitality to hundreds of supporters promising to return with funding and resources, to donate staff and equipment and more.  It seems hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised in our name, often using our words, or our stories.

However, just as the government's promises of assistance, such as the "Road Home" program, remain largely out of reach of most New Orleanians, we have also seen very little money and support from liberal and progressive sources.

Instead of prioritizing efforts led by people who are from the communities most affected, we have seen millions of dollars that was advertised as dedicated towards Gulf Coast residents either remain unspent, or shuttled to well-placed outsiders with at best a cursory knowledge of the realities faced by people here. Instead of reflecting local needs and priorities, many projects funded reflect outside perception of what our priorities should be. We have seen attempts to dictate to us what we should do, instead of a real desire to listen and build together.

We are at an historic moment.  The disaster on the Gulf Coast, and especially in New Orleans, has highlighted issues of national and international relevance.  Questions of race, class, gender, education, health care, food access, policing, housing, privatization, mental health and much more are on vivid display.

The south has been traditionally underfunded and exploited by institutions, including corporations, the labor movement, foundations, and the federal government.  We have faced the legacy of centuries of institutional racism and oppression, with little outside support.  And yet, against massive odds, grassroots movements in the south have organized and won inspiring victories with international relevance.

In New Orleans, despite personal loss and family tragedies, people are fighting for the future of the city they love. Many are working with little to no funding or support.

We are writing this open letter to you to tell you that it's not too late.  The struggle is still ongoing.  Evacuees are organizing in trailer parks, health care providers are opening clinics, former public housing residents are fighting to keep their homes from being demolished, artists and media makers are documenting the struggle, educators and lawyers are joining with high school students to fight for better schools.

We ask you, as concerned friends and allies nationwide, as funders and organizations, to look critically at your practices.  Has your organization raised money on New Orleans' behalf?  Did that money go towards New Orleans-based projects, initiated and directed by those most affected?  Have you listened directly to the needs of those in the Gulf and been responsive to them? Have you adjusted your practices and strategies to the organizing realities on the ground?

We ask you to seize this opportunity, and join and support the grassroots movements.  If the people of New Orleans can succeed against incredible odds to save their city and their community, it is a victory for oppressed people everywhere. If the people of New Orleans lose, it is a loss for movements everywhere.  Struggling together, we can win together.

Signed,

Cherice Harrison-Nelson, Director and Curator, Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame
Royce Osborn, writer/producer
Greta Gladney, 4th generation Lower 9th Ward resident
Corlita Mahr, Media Justice Advocate
Judy Watts, President/CEO, Agenda for Children
Robert “Kool Black” Horton, Critical Resistance
Jennifer Turner, Community Book Center
Mayaba Liebenthal, INCITE Women of Color Against Violence, Critical Resistance
Norris Henderson, Co-Director Safe Streets/Strong Communities
Ursula Price, Outreach and Investigation Coordinator, Safe Streets/Strong Communities
Evelyn Lynn, Managing Director, Safe Streets/Strong Communities
Shana griffin, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
Min. J. Kojo Livingston, Founder Liberation Zone/Destiny One Ministries
Shana Sassoon, New Orleans Network Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans
Althea Francois, Safe Streets/Strong Communities
Malcolm Suber, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund
Saket Soni, New Orleans Worker’s Justice Project
Nick Slie, I-10, Witness Project, Co-Artistic Director Mondo Bizarro
Catherine Jones, Organizer and co-founder, Latino Health Outreach Project
Jennifer Whitney, coordinator, Latino Health Outreach Project
S. Mandisa Moore, INCITE! New Orleans
Aesha Rasheed, Project Manager, New Orleans Network
Dix deLaneuville, Educator,
Rebecca Snedeker, Filmmaker
Catherine A. Galpin, RN, FACES and Children's Hospital
Grace Bauer, Families and Friends of Louisiana 's Incarcerated Children
Xochitl Bervera, Families and Friends of Louisiana 's Incarcerated Children
Bess Carrick, Producer/Director
John Clark, Professor of Philosophy, Loyola University
Diana Dunn, The People's Institute, European Dissent
Courtney Egan, Artist
Lou Furman, Turning Point Partners
Ariana Hall, Director, CubaNOLA Collective
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Historian, writer and lecturer, New Orleans and Mississippi Pine Belt
Susan Hamovitch, Filmmaker/Teacher, NYC/New Orleans
Russell Henderson, Lecturer, Dillard University and Organizer, Rebuilding Louisana Coalition
Ms. Deon Haywood, Events Coordinator, Women With A Vision Inc.
Rachel Herzing, Critical Resistance, Oakland
Rev. Doug Highfield, Universal Life Church, Cherokee, AL
Joyce Marie Jackson, Ph.D., Cultural Researcher, LSU Dept. of Geography & Anthropology, and Co-founder of Cultural Crossroads, Inc., Baton Rouge
Elizabeth K Jeffers, Teacher
Dana Kaplan, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana
Vi Landry, freelance journalist, New Orleans/New York
Bridget Lehane, European Dissent and The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond
Karen-kaia Livers, Alliance for Community Theaters, Inc.
Rachel E. Luft, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of New Orleans
Damekia Morgan, Families and Friends of Louisiana 's Incarcerated Children
Ukali Mwendo, (Hazardous Materials Specialist, NOFD),President, Provisional Government - Republic of New Afrika / New Orleans LA (former resident of the Lafitte Housing Development)
Thea Patterson, Women's Health and Justice Initiative
J. Nash Porter, Documentary Photographer and Co-founder of Cultural Crossroads, Inc., Baton Rouge
Gloria Powers, Arts Project Manager
Bill Quigley, Loyola Professor of Law
Linda Santi, , Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans
Tony Sferlazza, Director of Plenty International NOLA
Heidi Lee Sinclair, MD, MPH, Baton Rouge Children's Health Project
Justin Stein, Neighborhood Relations Coordinator and Community Mediator, Common Ground Health Clinic
Audrey Stewart, Loyola Law Clinic
Tracie L. Washington, Esq., Director, Louisiana Justice Institute
Scott Weinstein, Former co-director of the Common Ground Health Clinic
Melissa Wells, New Orleans,
Jerald L. White, Bottletree Productions
Morgan Williams, Student Hurricane Network, Co-founder
Gina Womack, Families and Friends of Louisiana 's Incarcerated Children

Remember All the Children, Mr. President, By Bill Quigley

Remember the 20 children who died in Newtown, Connecticut.

Remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from Israeli bombardments.

Remember the 168 children who have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006.

Remember the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6 months of this year.

Remember the 400 other children in the US under the age of 15 who die from gunshot wounds each year.

Remember the 921 children killed by US air strikes against insurgents in Iraq.

Remember the 1,770 US children who die each year from child abuse and maltreatment.

Remember the 16,000 children who die each day around the world from hunger.

These tragedies must end.

Bill is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.  You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com  A version of this article with sources is available.

Crime Against Nature Law Back in Court

From our friends at Women With A Vision and Center for Constitutional Rights:

Fill the Court For Oral Arguments In the Case To Overturn Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature Law!

Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012, 10:00 a.m
Federal District Court, 500 Poydras Street
Judge Feldman’s Court—Room C551

Many of you supported us during Doe, et al. v. Jindal, et al.-- a federal lawsuit filed against state officials in Louisiana, challenging the fact that a Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) conviction requires registration as a sex offender on the state sex offender registry.  On March 29, 2012, the Court ruled in Plaintiffs’ favor, agreeing that this registration requirement violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. The Court unambiguously ruled that it is unconstitutional to require someone to register as a sex offender solely because of a CANS conviction.

Yet almost 500 people remain on the registry.

So we’ve sued the state again, and we need your support. 

Doe, et al. v. Caldwell, et al. is a federal class action lawsuit seeking to remove from the sex offender registry the hundreds of people who are still forced to register solely as a result of a CANS conviction despite the March 29, 2012 ruling in Doe v. Jindal that deemed that practice unconstitutional.

In Louisiana, people accused of soliciting sex for a fee can be criminally charged in two ways: either under the prostitution statute, or under the solicitation provision of the Crime Against Nature statute.  This archaic statute, adopted in 1805, outlaws “unnatural carnal copulation,” which has been defined by Louisiana courts as oral and anal (but not vaginal) sex.  Police and prosecutors have unfettered discretion in choosing which to charge.  But a Crime Against Nature conviction subjects people to far harsher penalties than a prostitution conviction.  Most significantly, individuals convicted of a Crime Against Nature are forced to register as sex offenders.

The registry law imposes many harsh requirements that impacts every aspect of our clients’ lives.  For example, they must carry a state driver’s license or non-drivers’ identification document which brands them as a sex offender in bright orange capital letters.  They must disclose the fact that they are registered as a sex offender to neighbors, landlords, employers, schools, parks, community centers, and churches.  Their names, address, and photographs appear on the internet. 

Many of our clients have been unable to secure work or housing as a result of their registration as sex offenders.  Several have been barred from homeless shelters.  One has been physically threatened by neighbors.  And another has been refused residential substance abuse treatment because providers will not accept sex offenders at their facilities.

Our clients are not alone in being forced to register as sex offenders solely as a result of a Crime Against Nature by Solicitation conviction.  Indeed, almost 40 percent of registered sex offenders in Orleans Parish are on the registry as a result of such a conviction.  76 percent of these individuals are women, and 80 percent of them are African American.

CCR argues that being forced to register as a sex offender because of a Crime Against Nature conviction serves no legitimate purpose whatsoever.  As such, it is unjustifiable and unconstitutional.  CCR further contends that the only reason our clients are registered sex offenders is that they were convicted under the provisions of a 200-year-old statute that condemns non-procreative sex acts and sex acts traditionally associated with homosexuality, solely on grounds of moral disapproval.

Women With A Vision also spoke at the New Orleans City Council about the recent arson attack they faced. See the clip here.

"I'm The Miracle": The Story of Exoneree Derrick Jamison

From our friends at Resurrection After Exoneration:

“I’m number 119,” proclaims the man sitting beside my desk. His smile is broad and sincere, gold teeth glistening in the artificial light of the office. “Damon Thibodeaux is number 141, you know, the one who got out of Angola a couple weeks ago. Joe Ambrosia is number 140; we was together on death row in Ohio.” He seems so comfortable with these numbers, actually proud of them. Proud to be number 119!

If I were not aware of what he refers to, I might be shocked by his proud announcement, but it isn’t that way for us. Derrick Jamison is here to share his story with me, the story of how he landed on death row for a crime he did not commit, the story of a young man who spent over seventeen years fighting for his life as he awaited execution, and the story of a man who was finally exonerated, the 119th such person in the United States.

Derrick Jamison, from Cincinnati, Ohio, was twenty-four years old when he was convicted of aggravated murder and robbery on October 16, 1985. He was represented by a public defender in a case where the prosecutor and homicide detective withheld thirty-five pieces of evidence. They knew he was not guilty from the start, but getting the conviction was their goal. Apparently, it did not matter who their “victim” was!

Derrick entered death row at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on October 25, the very day he was sentenced, and was placed into solitary confinement, behind bars, in a 6’x9’ cell, with no physical human contact for seventeen years. At times the prison would be locked down, and he would not be allowed visits or mail from anyone, even from his lawyer, for extended periods of time. For many years of his confinement, Derrick was allowed only two five-minute phone calls per year, one on Christmas Day.

While on death row, Derrick was granted six stays of execution. One was while he was in lockdown, so he did not even receive the notification. Another stay was granted on the actual scheduled date of his execution. He waited until the last minute, with crowds of protesters and supporters gathered outside the prison. When asked what he wanted for his last meal, he replied ,”A cake with a saw in it! I’m not thinking about no food. I’m thinking about dying.” Six times he went through various stages of this harrowing process, and six times it was halted by an official stay by the governor of Ohio.

For the first fourteen years, until 1999, Ohio had the death penalty as part of its system, and there were many inmates on death row awaiting execution, but the state did not use it. Since 1999, they have executed forty-seven inmates and exonerated six. These statistics do not include the even larger number of death row inmates whose sentences were reduced to life imprisonment during the past thirteen years. At one point, the governor, Richard Celeste, upon leaving office, reduced the sentences of all eight women on death row and of several men who were on their final appeals. One of the women whose sentence he reduced had been sentenced to at least eight death penalties for serial murders. Derrick says that he would not have accepted this condition had it been offered. He knew he was innocent and sought exoneration, not a reduced sentence.

At one point, Derrick was offered the opportunity to go free on time served, if he would admit guilt and stop his appeals. He refused. “People thought I lost my mind. I couldn’t admit to something I didn’t do. I’d rather die.”

“Death Row is the same as Schindler’s List,” Derrick continues. “You’re just watching your friends be murdered time and again.” Derrick watched healthy young men come in “like babies – 18 and 19 years old. I watched them grow into men and then they just killed ‘em. It’s like somebody pointing a gun at you and there ain’t nothin’ you can do. They had nobody to fight for them.” Ohio is second in the nation behind Texas in executions.

In 2002, John Byrd was executed. Another man came forward and admitted to the crime for which John had been convicted, but they still killed him. John and Derrick had become close friends on death row. “I curled up on my bunk watching TV, trying not to deal with it, but when they rolled John out on the gurney to his execution….” He paused and cleared his throat, attempting to regain his composure. “It still haunts me. A healthy young man, my buddy, but he was rebellious on the row.” Derrick, on the other hand, never had any write ups on death row. He was not a rebel. “If I had given in to anger and hostility, I would’ve lost my mind. I seen what it did to those other guys. I’m a miracle. All them men, all them babies were in there, some innocent like me, and I walked out. I’m the miracle.”

On May 23, 2002, Federal Judge Arthur Spiegel granted Derrick a new trial. He was moved to general population for three years while the justice system plodded along the path to his ultimate exoneration and release on October 25, 2005, exactly twenty years to the day from the day he first entered death row. His nephew came to pick him up, and the entire family was waiting for him when he got home…everyone except his two closest and most active supporters. “I didn’t die on death row, but my death penalty killed my parents.”

There were events of celebration for a month straight. It was a busy time, and it was good. “If I could bottle up that feeling and sell it, I’d be a millionaire!” He was enjoying life. “When I first came home, I went to the casinos. I won a lot of money; I lost a lot of money. That’s why they call it gambling. I had been a gambler before I went to prison.” There were parties, media events, and Derrick was in demand to speak at area events, “but my biggest supporters weren’t there. My mom was smiling from heaven.”

Asked about his current situation, Derrick reveals that he is on disability due to post traumatic stress disorder. “We ain’t been to jail; we been to hell and back,” he says. The disability compensation permits him to have a part-time job with limited pay, but he remains unemployed.

He spends a significant amount of time speaking to others, sharing his story. He remembers that he went to Catholic schools as a child and says that God gives him the power to go out and share his message with others. “When I speak to a large crowd, something comes over me. That’s God. God has made me into a teacher. I’m a teacher now.”

Derrick tells kids that he thinks that they are all at risk in today’s society. He urges them to remember him and others like him when they experience bad times. “We need to get rid of the death penalty,” he says. “What are we teaching our young people, when our government says it’s alright to kill?” He compares the death penalty to modernized lynchings, remembering what he learned in history class about families coming out with picnic baskets to watch the hangings in the town square. “That might have been a deterrent then, but this, what we have, doesn’t work!”

Our system will always make mistakes. “To err is human, right? We have to stop executing entirely so we won’t be killing innocent people on those mistakes.”

Derrick tells his audiences that he was never involved in drugs in his life, because he was always against them. “I seen what it did to people in my neighborhood.” He assures them that death row is populated by many different types of people. “A lot of guys on death row were pure evil and dangerous, but that doesn’t give somebody the right to kill them. Some were good guys that made mistakes.”

What does his future look like? “I’ll never heal; none of these guys will ever heal. We can’t be compensated for what’s been done to us. My life will get better, but I’ll never get over it. It will always be there…the nightmares. It’s something no human being should have to experience.”

Documentary Planned on United Houma Nation's "Indian Santa," By Adam Crepelle

Reposted from our friends at Bridge The Gulf:

Indian Santa is a short documentary about, as the name suggests, Indian Santa. The tradition was started in 1985 when Hurricane Juan devastated the Houma Indian communities along the Gulf Coast. The Houma families received little help after the storm, and presents were going to be absent from many Houma children's Christmas.

Joe Dardard, a Houma Indian, decided to take action. He teamed up with Toys for Tots and dressed as Santa--with a twist. In addition to the red Santa suit, Joe Dardard donned a traditional tribal headdress. The result, children in the Houma community received at least a moment of joy during the holiday. Over 20 years later, Indian Santa continues to spread Christmas cheer throughout the Houma Indian community. Thomas Dardar, Joe's nephew and Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation, has been serving as Indian Santa for the past seven years.

I produced the film because, although several chapters in books and a few films have mentioned the Houma, all of those pieces focus on the adversity the tribe faces. I wanted to show something genial happening within the tribe.

Indian Santa was scheduled to be shown December 6th and 8th at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian's "At the Movies" Screening Series with My Louisiana Love but due to Hurricane Sandy, the screening has been moved to the spring of 2013. Indian Santa is an official selection of the New Orleans Film Festival, the South Alabama Film Festival, the Life Film Festival (Winner Best Documentary), and the American Indian Film Festival.

Just as Indian Santa is a tradition among the Houma, dealing with disaster has become part of the Houma culture as well.

Hurricanes and the BP spill have absolutely crippled many citizens of the United Houma Nation, who primarily work in the seafood and oil industries. This year, Hurricane Isaac wreaked havoc in Braithwaite, Louisiana, a Houma Indian community.

Aside from disaster, another constant is the federal government's persistent refusal to acknowledge the United Houma Nation as an Indian tribe. Houma Indian children were forced to attend a segregated Indian school until 1969; that is, five years after the passage of the Civil Rights of 1964 officially desegregated society. Nevertheless, the federal government insists the Houma are not an Indian tribe.

Federal recognition would be immensely beneficial to the Houma because it would make the tribe eligible for disaster relief programs and funds to help combat coastal erosion. Coastal erosion is major reason recent hurricanes have been unusually impactful. The barrier islands, now vanished, served as a buffer weakening hurricanes before they hit coastal populations – the Houma. Thanks to the vanished islands and shrinking coastline, Houma Indian communities such as Isle de Jean Charles and Point-Aux-Chenes are now the storm buffer.

The BP disaster serves the most obvious example of how lack of federal recognition harms the Houma. In response the United Houma Nation's damages claim, BP replied:

"While BP indeed processes claims from federally recognized Indian Tribes through this process, our review of your claim submission indicates that the United Houma Nation is not a federally recognized Indian Tribe entitled to assert claims pursuant to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 ('OPA'). Therefore, we are closing your claim file with regard to this matter."

Indian Santa is lighthearted movie. It spotlights something positive happening in a community wrought with hardship. My hope is the film's success will bring interest to the tribe, its ongoing struggles, and support from allies. The more national recognition the UHN receives, the closer the UHN will be to federal recognition.

Photo: Principal Chief Thomas Dardar as Indian Santa in 2011, courtesy of 'Indian Santa'. Learn more about Indian Santa at the film's website or Facebook page.

Adam Crepelle is a citizen of the United Houma Nation. He serves on the tribe’s Tribal Security and Community Services Committee and the tribe’s Diabetes’s Coalition. Adam received his degree in exercise science from the University of Louisiana Lafayette in 2009. He is currently in his third year at Southern University Law Center.