Pickers
I’m no longer legal to drive their bombs
The Judas goat state is the enemy of the poor, regardless of skin color
Soon enough, we’ll all be pickers for Amazon
We lived out in the Tules. Fifteen miles down a rutted dirt road. Long past the sewer lines. Out past the telephone lines. Closer to Three Peaks than we were to town. Papa Skinner bought flat land when flat land was cheap. Cheap, flat land with forage and a high enough water table was a good investment. You could always run cattle on it, dig a well, and grow alfalfa.
My birth certificate lists my daddy’s profession as “Pipe Fitter.” But his true vocation was PTSD from Vietnam. He wanted to become a commercial artist. That didn’t happen. In late 68, the same year M.L.K. and R.F.K. were slain in plain sight, a counselor at Harbor College miscalculated his class credits and his A1 draft notice followed. The surfer boy they deported was not the broken child soldier they shipped back.
My mama’s profession ain’t listed. Neither were her aspirations. At the time, she was a cocktail waitress using …
A Paiute Meeting in Big Pine
A legacy of lies, dust, and poisoned minds
The City of Los Angeles stole their water
Theft breeds mistrust
After 15 minutes pass, the doors to the Alan Spoonhunter Memorial Gymnasium remain closed. The crowd begins to mutter. No one has a key. Near the front of the assembly, Shannon of the Woods clears her throat.
“There’s no one here,” she announces, “and the meeting began 15 minutes ago. If no one opens these doors, we won’t be able to hold council.”
“That’s what they want!”
“Right. So we’ll hold it out here. I’ve got nowhere to be.”
A couple people glance at the sky.
“It’s supposed to rain,” croaks an old woman.
“Doesn’t look like it to me,” says Shannon.
At this moment, Jacklyn Bryan, Tribal Administrator for the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of Central California — irrigators of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains and cousins to the Shoshone — appears in a silk shirt embroidered with flowers. The Paiutes go silent. She looks at the doors and looks at the sky. She stares off at …
A Raccoon Among Tigers
It’s been another year of progress at our beloved Princeton University, as Old Nassau grows more inclusive and diverse with each incoming class. For Princetonians of conscience, the profoundly problematic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, our racist former president, remains a challenge, of course, and will forever — but ours is a vibrant community of scholars resolutely focused on the future. In this, we Tigers take deserved pride.
Nevertheless, we recognize at Princeton that social justice is a process, and grounds for self-criticism remain. As exams approached last semester, in mid December, a troubling incident occurred on campus that showed we are still falling short of our ideals.
The raccoon appeared at night, near Dillon Gym, a building erected in 1947 on the animal’s age-old habitat. (In press accounts of the events that followed, the creature was repeatedly referred to as a “masked marauder” or …
