CROW AGENCY, Mont. — Democrat Barack Obama got a brand-new name as he courted American Indians in the West.
The presidential candidate was adopted as an honorary member of the Crow nation and given the name Awe Kooda Bilaxpak Kuuxshish that translates as "One who helps people throughout the land."
"What an enormous honor this is," said Obama, occasionally stumbling to pronounce the complex names. "I'm still working on it," he said. "I was just adopted into the tribe, so I'm still working on it."
Sen. Obama’s leadership qualities and commitment to issues of importance to Indian country distinguish him from his opponents” said Chairman A.T. Stafne of the Ft. Peck Tribes“ Our twelve voting members in the Tribal Council passed this endorsement resolution unanimously. I was personally impressed with his commitment to a true government-to-government relationship and his promise to appoint a Native American policy advisor in his White House. ”
“Senator Obama understands the challenges facing Native Americans in Montana,” said Crow Nation Chairman Carl Venne. “His record as a US Senator shows that he cares about Indian communities. He respects Indian sovereignty and is a strong advocate for Indian healthcare and education.
Henry M. Gunn High School senior Molly Kawahata is considered by many to be a model of student activism. She raised eyebrows across the entire city of Palo Alto when she won the Obama Essay Contest this year describing what Obama could do for the United States as president
The California presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has announced that Molly Kawahata, a senior at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, beat out peers from across Northern California to win the campaign’s essay contest “What it would mean to me if Barack Obama were elected our next President.”
As the contest’s winner, Kawahata will be among the speakers at the candidate’s grassroots fundraiser this Wednesday evening at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium — an event the campaign says will be his last visit to Northern California until after the Iowa caucuses.
The essay contest entries were judged by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon of Berkeley, who with his wife, author Ayelet Waldman, had cosponsored an Obama fundraiser in Oakland back in June. “All these essays show the powerful sense of connection young people feel to Barack Obama, because he is directly addressing their deepest concerns, their most powerful hopes, and the boundless idealism that is their greatest resource,” Chabon said in a news release.
Kawahata, formerly a student member of the Palo Alto Unified School District Board, has been involved with the Obama campaign’s grassroots organizing in Anna Eshoo’s 14th Congressional District.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUU9lbXiHXw
Molly's speech
I want my children to hear what Obama has to say.
I'm a mom with two daughters, an 8 and a 5 years old. They are growing up in a world that is vastly different than mine.
I grew up in a parochial school, it was all white. My neighborhood was all white.
Obama embodies my new neighborhood. My daughters' school is 25% non-USA/caucasian. Their best friends are from India and Poland, they play with the Japanese children across the street. One friend just moved here from China, her father is a French cook. Another friend is black, adopted into a white family. Another has parents from Lebanon and Egypt. My kids don't think about it, these are just their friends. Their world is global already.
Obama understands this integrated society, and can speak to our kids. He teaches our kids to have compassion and empathy. He teaches them fortitude. Here's an excerpt from a letter he wrote to a 7 year old boy:
"I hope you always remember to seize every opportunity to make the world better. Now, making the world better is not always easy, and you will probably find in your life that it is more comfortable to ignore injustices that don't affect you directly. Don't take that comfortable road. Challenge yourself to make a difference.
If you don't already know what it means, I want you to look up the word "empathy" in the dictionary. I believe we don't have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.
I leave you with three bits of advice that will make your life more fufilling: Look out for other people, even when it does not directly benefit you; strive to make a difference everywhere you go; and get back up every time you are knocked down."
I want my kids to hear this, I want them to live this.
Our children are listening. Here's a video from a Bronx high school of kids learning to overcome race, and feeling inspired, after listening to Obama DNC in 2004, and his "A More Perfect Union" speech:
I also want my kids to know how to work on a team, to collaborate and cooperate. I want my kids to be able to understand the whole picture, to listen to differing opinions. I want them to be involved in the community, not just consuming wages from a job. I want them to be politically engaged, to understand with a critical eye the influences that try to shape their opinion.
Obama is inspiring this. Here is an essay written by Molly Kawahata, a senior at Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, CA.:
Senator Obama often talks about his children and what they mean to him, and I think Malia and Sasha are driving forces behind his desire to seek the United States presidency. He looks out from his Senate seat in Illinois and sees a broken system, an underrepresented process, a population hungry for change. And he doesn't want his children to have to live in that world. We as Americans have become so jaded, so disenchanted with the political process that we are left with low expectations for our government's ability to serve us. And so we settle. We accept America's divide state as it is. We sit down; we watch, and we simply hope there isn't too much damage.
But that is all changing.
We are no longer waiting, but actively working, to improve our current state. Senator Obama has instilled in us that we, as a nation, as a government, as a people, can do better.
I will be casting my first vote for Senator Obama, and I feel fortunate that, within my lifetime, a figure resembling those I've only read about in history books or heard about my parents' generation has emerged. I have never seen anyone of this caliber. When our children, like Malia and Sasha, have grown up and inherited the world we left them, they will look back at man who started uniting the country before he even became president. And they will read about him in history books and recognize that there was a time when the American people united from the ground up, and all together said, "We can do better."
Molly's essay beat out peers from across Northern California to win the campaign’s essay contest “What it would mean to me if Barack Obama were elected our next President.” The essay contest entries were judged by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon of Berkeley, who with his wife, author Ayelet Waldman, had cosponsored an Obama fundraiser in Oakland back in June.
“All these essays show the powerful sense of connection young people feel to Barack Obama, because he is directly addressing their deepest concerns, their most powerful hopes, and the boundless idealism that is their greatest resource,” Chabon said in a news release.
I want my kids to hear Obama for the next 8 years. I want my kids to know how to step aside from meaningless divisions that consume our energy and distract us from the real issues. I want my kids to hear:
There is not a liberal America, and a conservative American, there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a latino America, an Asian America, there's the United States of America.
|  |
| Obama's multiracial, multicultural background | |
| ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Part of Obama's ability to relate easily with all types of people may stem from his own multiracial, multicultural background.
Barack experienced another culture when he left for Indonesia with his mother and her new husband, and soon a half-sister. At age ten, he was sent back to Hawaii to attend the prestigious Punahoe Prep School while living with his grandparents. He saw his father only once before he was killed in an automobile accident. His father's death prompted him to travel to Kenya to try and understand the country and connect with his large Kenyan family. At age 33, he wrote of his unusual heritage in a memoir, "Dreams from my Father," a story of race and inheritance. Michelle Obama says as chaotic as her husband's early life was, he did have a strong support system.
I think there's no doubt that he struggled, but it probably made him hungrier to strive to be great. So I think all of that combined just led to the outcomes of this wonderful stable individual who is very calm, very rooted in his values, very respectful of others and incredibly loving. |  |
| A career in politics | |
| ELIZABETH BRACKETT: After college, Obama took a job in Chicago organizing in low-income communities that had been hard hit by the loss of thousands of jobs in the steel mills.
Recruited by top law firms across the country, he chose a small Chicago firm specializing in civil rights and economic development in the minority community. But Judson Miner, a law firm partner, says it wasn't long before a career in politics was on the horizon.
ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Three years later Obama was in the Illinois state senate representing a predominantly African American district on Chicago's south side. BARACK OBAMA: I just want to stand in strong support of this bill; I'm working for a number of the organizations throughout the state that are trying to deal with this homeless issue. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Today he focuses on the same issues of social justice in his U.S. Senate campaign. BARACK OBAMA: If there's a child on the south side of Chicago that can't read, that makes a difference in my life even if it's not my child. |  |
| National attention | |
| ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Given his stance on social issues plus his early opposition to the war in Iraq, his Republican opponent immediately charged that he was far too liberal for most Illinois voters. But shortly after the Republican primary, winner Jack Ryan said he would drop out when salacious details were revealed in his divorce records. While Republicans scrambled to find a new candidate, Obama was catapulted onto the national stage.
BARACK OBAMA: I'm going to be one of many voices. And so although it's called the keynote address, obviously the real keynote address is John Kerry's acceptance of the nomination. |  |
| Democratic National Convention keynote address | |
| ELIZABETH BRACKETT: His media advisor says Obama will handle all the attention.
He always says that having grown up in Hawaii that he's learned that the tide comes in and the tide goes out, and when the tide comes in you just ride the wave, and he's riding the wave right now. But he knows, I think, that some of this is kind of illusory, ephemeral and that it's not really what's important. BARACK OBAMA: I'm not sure it can happen? You just tell them, what are you going to tell them? Yes, we can, yes, we can! ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Well known now to Illinois voters, Obama introduces himself to the nation with his keynote address tonight. |  |
The author argues that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or gender, but on truth.
March 27, 2008
I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.
When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.
My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.
We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.
The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.
True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.
We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Namaste;
And with all my love,
Alice Walker
Cazul
Northern California
First Day of Spring
His Kansas born mother, met his Kenyan born father at the University of Hawaii in 1959. The couple lived in Hawaii until Barack was two, when his father left to study at Harvard and returned to Kenya without his family.
MICHELLE OBAMA: I see his very untraditional family and that worked because he had the support systems. 
Wanting to be more effective, he headed to Harvard Law School where he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. 
JUDSON MINER, Miner, Barnhill, and Galland: He was so talented that I think it was reasonably clear early on that he was going to be under a lot of pressure at some point to jump into government or politics. 
His impressive victory, his credentials and the possibility of his becoming the only African American currently in the Senate brought national attention culminating with the invitation to give the convention's keynote address. 
DAVID AXELROD: It would be easy to become intoxicated by all that attention, but Barack is very grounded.