CULT OF JAMES

The bill is called the SECURE Data Act. Say it out loud. Secure. It sounds like a deadbolt. It sounds like someone finally doing something. The full name is even better: “Securing and Establishing Consumer Uniform Rights and Enforcement over Data Act.” Every word chosen by someone who gets paid to make legislation sound like protection. Here’s what it does:…

The car needed to go to the shop. So RAI walked it there, and then kept walking. A mile and a half on a Tuesday morning in Pensacola with the windows of the day still open — before the heat sets in, before the inbox fills up, before the world starts asking for things. Just an errand that became a…

Ten years ago, something unprecedented happened on the plains of North Dakota. More than 300 federally recognized tribes sent delegations to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. First Nations from Canada. Indigenous peoples from New Zealand and the Ecuadoran Amazon. By some accounts, it was the largest single gathering of Native Americans in over a century. They came to stand between…

Hanna Harris was born on May 5, 1992. Northern Cheyenne. She disappeared on July 4, 2013, after going to watch fireworks in Lame Deer, Montana. She was twenty-one years old. Her family reported her missing. Law enforcement did not conduct an adequate search. Her family and friends searched for her themselves. They found her body five days later. She had…

In 1862, a poorly armed militia — many of them indigenous Zacapoaxtla farmers who had never seen European military formation — defeated the French Empire at Puebla. France hadn’t lost a battle in fifty years. Mexico handed them one with machetes and muskets. In the 1960s, Chicano activists on college campuses across the Southwest claimed May 5th as their day….

In 2018, several thousand Google employees signed a petition opposing Project Maven, a Pentagon contract for drone targeting AI. Dozens resigned. Google dropped the contract. Then Google published its AI Principles — a public promise that the company would not develop AI for weapons or surveillance. The employees won. The story was: workers have power, conscience has teeth, even inside…

In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 143 countries voted yes. Four voted no: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. All four are settler-colonial states. All four eventually reversed their votes and endorsed the declaration. This is the version they teach. Here are the verses they don’t sing. Nineteen…

The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues met this month for its 26th session. One of the agenda items was artificial intelligence — specifically, whether AI could help Indigenous peoples protect their land. It can. In Brazil’s Acre State, 21 agroforestry agents on the Katukina/Kaxinawá Reserve use AI-assisted drone monitoring to detect illegal deforestation. In Nunavut, Inuit communities blend…