‘Cover Stories’ Archives
CAROLING WITH CROWS Phillips Neighborhood, Christmas 2016
BY THOMAS R. SMITH Some people came out to greet us, others held back, facades preserving a solemn silence, whether of privacy, vacancy or sorrow. Yet smiles escaped our little roving chorus, whether for our stumbles over the carols”' verses in Spanish, or for having lit a few faces in windows and doorways of South Minneapolis. Lifting my gaze from twilight pavement and shadowed porches. I”'m not sure when it happened. I suddenly saw them, crows, hundreds, maybe thousands in the burnt- orange dusk, surrounding us in all directions, clustered crows enough to re-leaf the bare trees, great black choir-lofts of crows, their dark notes strung on staves of the sky. Overhead, too, crows everywhere, flapping through the lurid, smudged air like ash from some vast burning which perhaps was after all simply the crows¹ Christmas, their excitable cawing and clacking a kind of caroling above our earthbound song, urging us out from our less visible darkness [...]
Nowa Cumig: Dennis Banks 1937-2017
By Laura Waterman Wittstock A tribute to a life well-lived should not start with a quarrel with the New York Times, but this instance is an exception. On October 30th the New York Times called the Ojibwe patriot a militant as he had been labeled so many times before during his lifetime. The newspaper, in its apparent omniscient wisdom said he “achieved few real improvements in the daily lives of Native Americans, who live on reservations and in major cities and lag behind most fellow citizens in jobs, housing and education.” The article went on to describe the 1973 police encounter in Custer, SD. Later demonstrations in 1999 led by Tom Poor Bear in nearby White Clay, NE led to discontinuation of alcohol sales, having a major effect on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. The area had the highest per capita alcohol sales in the US. To be sure, “D.J.” as he was known to many, exhibited real anger and frustration at the conditions Indian people were forced to [...]
