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October 29, 2007
Register your protest at morningshow@92kqrs.com
KQRS remarks upset Indian leaders
On-air comments about Sioux tribes made by Tom Barnard and his co-host sparked the uproar.
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To read a transcript of the show posted on Red Lake Net News, go to startribune.com/a3565.
Representatives of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Red Lake Indian Reservation and urban Indian leaders hope to meet with executives from the classic-rock station (92.5 FM) at its southeast Minneapolis headquarters regarding the on-air statements by Barnard and his co-host, Terri Traen, AIM co-founder Clyde Bellecourt said Sunday.
Bellecourt said the remarks about the Red Lake Chippewa and Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux tribes were "ignorant." He compared them to comments made this spring by shock jock Don Imus, who was fired from his syndicated show for calling members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team, "nappy-headed ho's."
The KQ morning show, known for its pull-no-punches style when delivering weird news, ethnic jokes and political diatribes, is among the most popular morning programs in the Twin Cities.
Calls placed to Marc Kalman, president and general manager of KQRS, were not immediately returned Sunday.
The uproar stems from a broadcast last month in which Barnard and Traen talked about the Red Lake and Shakopee tribes while discussing a report by the state Health Department that Beltrami County has the state's highest rate of suicide among young people.
The jocks then mentioned Bemidji and the Red Lake Indian Reservation, which are both located in Beltrami County.
"Maybe it's genetic; isn't there a lot of incest up there?" Traen said about the tribe.
"Not that I know of," Barnard replied.
"I think there is," Traen continued. "Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure."
"Well, I'm glad you just threw it out there, then," Barnard said to laughter in the background.
Barnard also criticized the Shakopee Sioux, who own the Mystic Lake Casino, for "doing a hell of a job helping them out."
Traen commented, "They don't give them anything?"
"Hell, no!" Barnard replied.
Another member of the morning team refers to the casino as "Mistake Lake," and calls Bellecourt, "Clyde Bellycourt."
Bellecourt said Red Lake has received nearly $4 million in grants from the Shakopee tribe since 2004 toward building a new Boys and Girls Club, assisting with the recent rebirth of the tribe's walleye fishing industry and creating a center in Bemidji to address sexual assault.
He said the Indian leaders will push the station executives to take swift action on Barnard.
"He's been getting away with this crap for years," Bellecourt said, adding that the Morning Show crew should be disciplined and be required to take sensitivity training courses.
Minority groups have long criticized Barnard and his crew for their on-air banter.
In the late 1990s, members of the Somali community picketed over Barnard and Co.'s mocking of Somali dialects after a Somali cabdriver was slain. Before that, the Asian-American community was irate when Barnard and his co-hosts made fun of a teenage Hmong girl who was charged with killing her newborn son.
They said of her potential $10,000 fine: "That's a lot of eggrolls."
Terry Collins • 612-673-1790
Terry Collins • tcollins@startribune.com
October 25, 2007
October 24, 2007
October 18, 2007
Book of the week: Out of Place
I am loving this book, a memoir by Edward Said. In his tortured relationship with his rigid and domineering father his relationship reminds me of Franz Kafka's relationship with his feared father.
It's a portrait of the development of an incredible mind and consciousness,as well as a very personal experience of the tragic disappearance of a Palestine.
October 16, 2007
October 15, 2007
After many years, we are home
Photo by David Joles, Star Tribune
Rachel Kupcho, left, reached across Duane Reynolds to give Odanas Day'Castro a comforting squeeze at a gathering of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. Kupcho and Reynolds were adopted as children by non-Indian families. The band may be the first to formally welcome back adoptees.
At a homecoming on the White Earth Indian Reservation, some who were adopted out were welcomed to their place in the circle.
By Curt Brown, Star Tribune
Amid the sweet smell of burning sage and the heartbeat thumping of Ojibwe drummers, Reynolds, 60, and Kupcho, 30, stood side by side in a circle of 60 people as tribal spiritual elder Joe Bush prayed and performed pipe rituals.
The hand-stitched banner on the wall proclaimed in Ojibwe: Ishkwa Niibawa Dasobiboon Niiawind Abi Endad. And in English: After Many Years, We Are Home.
With the all-day healing ceremony, White Earth became Minnesota's first reservation, and perhaps the first in the nation, to formally welcome back some of the thousands of children adopted off reservations under a decades-long federal policy that encouraged their placement in non-Indian homes.
"Just to literally be on this land has been incredibly powerful," said Kupcho, who grew up in Chanhassen. "When I drove up and saw the sign, I just started crying. I've always believed my relatives are from here, so it's an emotional time, but a good time."
With so many children unaware of their roots and heritage, the White Earth ceremony is one that Native organizations across the nation are watching closely.
"The White Earth band is on the forefront and taking the national lead on a very important trend we hope will take off across the country," said Terry Cross, founder and director of the Oregon-based National Indian Children Welfare Association. "Tribes are collections of families, and to be healthy and intact, they must know who all their members are."
The adoptions were common until 1978, when Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act that gave tribes more control over adoptions. But at the peak of assimilation, roughly one in four Indian babies was adopted out, according to Cross and White Earth Chairwoman Erma Vizenor.
Federally funded programs enabled nonprofits, counties and states to remove children from reservations. The practice was often prompted by good intentions to help kids escape poverty. But many Indian leaders insist it came at an insidious price by forcing native people to forsake their culture and heritage.
"Many of these people have been stolen from their relatives, and we have had these people stolen from the tribe," White Earth Chief Tribal Judge Anita Fineday told the group of 20 adoptees, including Reynolds and Kupcho. "We need these people to come back. We need to make these connections.
"We need these resources to make the tribe whole again. So our arms are open to those adopted out to reconnect."
'I really wondered'
For the first 59 of his 60 years, Reynolds, a social worker from New Hope, knew nothing of his White Earth roots. His parents, Stella and Robert Brown, married in 1946 and separated a year later when he was a toddler.
Reynolds grew up in Northeast Minneapolis, taking his name when his mother remarried and his stepfather adopted him when he was 9.
He never met his birth father. His only wisp of a clue came from five words his mother uttered only once when he was 7.
"Your father was part Indian."
Talking in the circle of adoptees last weekend, Reynolds said: "I carried those words around in my head my whole life. Like anyone with a parent they don't know, I've spent time looking out the window of my house ... wondering who those people might be."
By the time his curiosity grew, no one was left to ask. His mother died when he was 27. He'd once asked about his dad. But his mother, trying to protect him, lied that his father had died.
In fact, his father had tried to find him, but his mother refused to help. So Reynolds never said a word to his wife of 39 years, Patty, or their two now-grown daughters in Crystal.
A call and an epiphany
Last Dec. 21, a tribal probate attorney called out of the blue, hoping to close his father's case.
Robert Brown had died in 1994.
In the past year, Reynolds tracked down his uncle, Gaynard Brown, whose kidneys were failing in hospice care in Seattle.
Gaynard died 10 days later, but not before telling Reynolds how his father had grown up on White Earth, been bused to Indian schools, joined the service and moved to Seattle to find work building planes.
"Hearing about his escapades was like an epiphany," Reynolds said. "I was finally facing someone who could answer my questions, and I learned that my father fought his demons, but was an honorable, honest person."
Reynolds has exhaustively researched his family tree and determined that he's three-sixteenths White Earth Ojibwe. He has met other cousins, and the trek to the reservation "is part of an ongoing process that gives me an opportunity to learn more. ..."I've had a wonderful life, but there has always been a fleeting sadness," Reynolds added. "Coming here, to this homecoming, puts some of the questions to rest and gives some meaning and truth to what my mother told me so long ago."
"I know I'm amongst family"
Rachel Kupcho's adoption papers were sealed in 1977 when her birth mother gave her up in a voluntary private adoption through Catholic Charities. She grew up in the western suburbs and was surrounded by adopted siblings of Irish, Filipino, German and African-American descent.
She had never stepped foot on White Earth.
She's petitioned Ramsey County to obtain her birth certificate, but so far has been rebuffed. The White Earth Tribal Council is now trying to help.
All Kupcho has to go on were the words of a social worker who oversaw her adoption 30 years ago. The woman said her mother was from White Earth.
As she stood in the circle of adoptees, she said: "What I do know here today is that I have relatives here -- whether I know who they are or not. I know I'm amongst family, and that feels good."
Kupcho said her adoptive parents, Lisa and Keith Kupcho of Chanhassen, have always encouraged her to be proud of her American Indian heritage.
"They had given me all of the love and support parents can give, but I think realized there was always something they couldn't give me," said Kupcho, who monitors youth court proceedings in Hennepin County. "And that's what I can find here."
Walking two roads
In the hall of the casino, Joe Bush, the spiritual leader, talked about what was going on at White Earth last weekend, that his people "travel two roads -- the red road and the white road."
To see those on the white road returning to the red road that their ancestors had followed brings him pride.
"Today is a first, and the White Earth band is the first to welcome home those adopted far away," Bush said. "I hope to see more reservations take the same step and initiative to welcome back those lost."
Sandy White Hawk, who runs the First Nations Repatriation Institute in St. Paul, organized the ceremony and expects other tribes to follow suit.
"You are here because of the prayers of your ancestors," White Hawk told the adoptees.
"They don't know your names and you don't know their names. But the Spirit knows, and all those prayers for health and happiness have been heard."
White Hawk, now 54, returned to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota 19 years ago.
It was the first time she'd been back since her mother passed her through the window of a pickup truck to a Christian missionary when she was a toddler.
Since unlocking her past, she has organized healing ceremonies for others of similar circumstances.
"As Indian people, we believe we are all part of the sacred circle of life that has no beginning or end," White Hawk.
"There is a sacred energy that connects us in this circle. As you come back to the circle, know there is space waiting for you."
With that, each adoptee walked from outside a circle formed by tribal members and stood in its middle where they each embraced one another -- and their now less-distant pasts.
Curt Brown • 612-673-4767
Curt Brown • curt.brown@startribune.com
October 11, 2007
October 08, 2007
A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate
Over four years, the Rev. Patrick Desbois and his group have
identified more than 600 common graves of Jews in PARIS, Oct. 5 — His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time,
terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom
rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi
soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before
execution. "I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react,
the stories will stop." In a World War II photograph, a member of a Nazi SS
paramilitary group prepared to execute a Ukrainian Jew, one of 1.5 million put
to death during the war. They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing
the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out,
roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the
unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to
document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried
throughout the country. He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic
priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his
clerical collar. The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of
the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941
slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that
history has gone untold. Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the
memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in
church. “At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois
in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these
horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If
I react, the stories will stop.” Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with
witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews,
most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the
execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.
Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if
to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were
assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is
one reason he is so effective. “If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think — that this is
someone coming to accuse,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington. “When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a
kind of legitimacy, a sense that it’s O.K. to talk about the past. There’s
absolution through confession.” Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the
searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden
away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets. “There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with
guns,” said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation,
Ukraine’s largest philanthropic organization. “That’s why Father Desbois is so
important.” The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbonne
this week — the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scholars — and has
begun contributing funds to Father Desbois’s project. Some of the results of Father Desbois’s research — including video
interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty
bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims — are on
display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in the
Marais district of Paris. The exhibit shows, for example, images of the 15 mass graves of several
thousand Jews in a commune called Busk that Father Desbois and his team
discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. Among
hundreds of other items on display is a black-and-white photo from 1942 that
shows a German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in
the Rivne region. Traveling with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a
cameraman, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a notetaker, Father
Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone
himself, and asking questions in simple language and a flat tone. In Buchach in 2005, Regina Skora told Father Desbois that as a young girl she
witnessed executions. “Did the people know they were going to be killed?” Father Desbois asked
her. “Yes.” “How did they react?” “They just walked, that’s all. If someone couldn’t walk, they told him to lie
on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck.” Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched from the porch of her mud hut
in Konstantinovka in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pit and
set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed “like flies and worms,” she
said. There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid having
to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex slaves
of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-old he hid and
watched as his best friend was shot to death. Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the
back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. “One witness told
of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Father Desbois recalled.
Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a
child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His
paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in
Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing
about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson,
“For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.” There were other family links to the German occupation of France. One
maternal cousin who carried letters for French resisters perished in a Nazi
concentration camp. Father Desbois’s mother told him only recently that the
family hid dozens of resisters on the farm. After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa and
working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the priesthood. His secular
family was horrified. He started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during a
stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and was
appointed as a bridge to France’s Jewish community. It was on a tour with a group in 2002 that, visiting Rava-Ruska, he asked the
mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know. “I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he
didn’t know,” Father Desbois recalled. The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100
villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to
help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet. He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In
2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to
Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class
neighborhood in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust
foundation in France and the Catholic Church. To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge
archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as
well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only
after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses. Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will
take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the
Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi
atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message. “People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t
exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have
been waiting for you.’”
Multimedia
The Rev. Patrick Desbois
October 05, 2007
Reviews
Poems, a few online
Interviews
- "On and Beyond Korean Adoption, Influence, and Community," with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Jane Jeong Trenka, by Lee Herrick
- Twin Cities Daily
- "Voices from the Gap" at the University of Minnesota
- Asian American Poetry and Writing
- July 5, 2007, KFAI, Write On Radio!
- Outsiders Within - The Adoption Show
- uprisingradio.org � Outsiders Within: Transracial Adoption
