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How Recovering the History of a Little-Known Lakota Massacre Could Heal Generational Pain

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To reach the place known as Mni Tho Wakpala, the Blue Water, you drive west from the Nebraska hamlet of Lewellen, turning from Highway 26 onto a gravel road and turning again through a gate that leads to fenced pastureland. The ancient cottonwood, now known by the Lakota Sioux as the Witness Tree, still towers above the grasslands. Blue Water Creek cuts a crooked path through a broad valley, its waters still pristine.

On that hot, windy afternoon in September 2023, the first of my three recent visits, it was easy to imagine what had unfolded by that placid stream long ago. For the Lakota village of a leader named Little Thunder, the buffalo hunt in late summer 1855 had been particularly bountiful. Some 40 tepees, home to about 200 people, stood beside the water. Women would have been at work tanning hides for tepees, moccasins, shirts and breeches, and drying and curing meat for the coming northern winter. Warriors would have seen to weapons and horses. Children would have been at their games. Old men would have gathered around the fires with their sacred chanupas, their pipes, perhaps reminiscing about the days when the wasichu, the whites, were mere curiosities.

Then, just after sunrise on September 3, 1855, 600 U.S. Army soldiers commanded by Brigadier General William S. Harney surrounded and ambushed the village, the first time in the Indian wars of the Northern Plains that the military attacked a camp full of families. Today the attack is often known, to the extent it is known at all, as the Blue Water Massacre, but for more than a century it was remembered in a few conventional histories as a particularly ruthless U.S. military victory—the Army’s first major salvo in a 35-year campaign against the Lakota, lords of the Northern Plains, the people of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, which ended finally with their subjugation at Wounded Knee in 1890. That episode, where as many as 300 Lakota were slaughtered, is widely known. 

The same cannot be said about Blue Water. 


The bloody chain of events had begun a year earlier, in mid-August 1854, when a lame-footed cow belonging to a Mormon settler wandered into the camp of the Brulé, also known as the Sicangu, one of seven bands that make up the Lakota nation. There, along the North Platte River in what is now Wyoming, the animal was felled by the arrow of a warrior named High Forehead, who may have been hungry.

The Brulé Lakota chief, Conquering Bear, hurried to nearby Fort Laramie and offered the Mormon a horse from his own herd as restitution. The matter might have ended there were it not for the ill-fated ambition of Lieutenant John Grattan, a 24-year-old Army officer a year out of West Point. Grattan was determined to personally arrest High Forehead and make his reputation in the process. On August 19, Grattan, with a drunken interpreter and a detachment of 29 soldiers, began a ten-mile march to the Lakota camp. Frontiersmen and other civilians they met along the way pleaded with the lieutenant to reconsider, as a small city of more than 4,000 Lakota had grown up by the North Platte. “I don’t care how many there are,” Grattan told them. “With 30 men I can whip all the Indians this side of the Missouri.” 

When Grattan and his men marched into the village, Conquering Bear tried to reason with him, but the young officer made clear he would not leave without his prisoner. “For all I tell you, you will not hear me,” Conquering Bear finally said. “Today you will meet something that will be very hard.” 

Surrounded by hundreds of Lakota warriors, a panicked U.S. Army soldier fired the first shot. Grattan and all but one of his men were swiftly killed. (The last soldier eventually succumbed to his injuries.) Grattan’s body was riddled by 24 arrows. Conquering Bear, one of three Lakota who were wounded, died from his injuries several days later.

News of the killings became an object of national outrage, though in the months to come congressional and Army reports placed the blame for what happened squarely on Grattan. That November, three Brulé Lakota warriors, later identified as Spotted Tail, Red Leaf and Long Chin, close relatives of the slain chief, attacked a mail coach traveling near Fort Laramie, killing three men, wounding a fourth, and reportedly making off with thousands of dollars in gold, an act of revenge per Lakota custom.

By then, President Franklin Pierce and his secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, had already endorsed a retributive expedition of their own against the Lakota. To lead it, Davis turned to Harney, an old friend who had experience fighting Native Americans in Florida and Wisconsin. In a White House meeting, Pierce gave Harney, a barrel-chested man with a long white beard, simple orders. “Whip the Indians for us,” the president said. 

In August 1855, Harney and his men, equipped with new, long-range Sharps rifles, set out from a frontier fort. “By God I am for battle,” Harney told a fur trapper as he departed. “No peace!” By September 2, the troops were camped along the North Platte near a place called Ash Hollow, a popular stopping point for westward-traveling emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Harney learned that Chief Little Thunder, who had succeeded Conquering Bear after his death, was camped about six miles north by Blue Water Creek, a tributary of the North Platte.  

Before sunrise the next morning, the general ordered a detachment of cavalry to skirt the village and take up a position to the north. The rest of the force would attack from the other direction, driving the Lakota villagers into the teeth of the waiting soldiers. A separate, smaller village of Oglala Lakota, camped along the creek three miles north of the Brulé, discovered the hidden cavalry, but by the time they did it was too late.

As soon as the Brulé glimpsed Harney’s troops the women began to strike tepees, loading lodge poles, skins and other belongings onto travois, sledges drawn by horses and dogs. Seeing the people flee north, Harney feared his cavalry had insufficient time to set the ambush. To stall, he sent a guide to request a parley with Little Thunder. The chief quickly obliged, galloping toward the soldiers with two of his most renowned warriors, Spotted Tail and Iron Shell. According to one account, Little Thunder approached Harney holding an umbrella as a makeshift white flag.

The conversation took place over a distance of 30 to 40 feet. The general shouted his outrage for the killings of Grattan and his soldiers and the murders of the three men in the mail coach robbery. “The day of retribution had come,” Harney said.

Thirty minutes later, feeling delay was no longer necessary, the general sent Little Thunder back to his people. He gave his soldiers the order to open fire, then took up a viewing position atop a nearby hill.


What happened next was documented in Army after-action reports, in the private letters and journals of American soldiers, and in interviews they gave late in their lives. There was also one recorded account from the perspective of a Lakota survivor, a woman named Cokawin who was in her 40s at the time and gave her testimony many years later to another Lakota woman named Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun. “The smoke of the battle blinded her,” Bettelyoun wrote in her own memoir, With My Own Eyes. “As she looked all around, she could see the soldiers galloping after groups of old men, women and children who were running for their lives. Some were running across the valley only to be met by soldiers and shot right down.”

As Cokawin tried to flee, a soldier shot her in the stomach. “The bullet ripped her open for about six inches, a glancing shot. … Her bowels protruded from the wound as she fell.” To hide, Cokawin covered herself in tumbleweed and tore off a piece of her sleeve to use as a bandage. “There she lay all day listening to guns roar and to the hoofbeats of the horses, the shouting and yelling of the soldiers who came so near at times that she thought she would be discovered. Once in a while she could hear a Sioux war cry. At these times, Cokawin said she felt like singing and giving the trill.”

Perhaps the most complete account of the massacre comes from the journal of a U.S. Army officer named Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren. The 25-year-old West Point graduate was a noncombatant, attached to Harney’s expedition as a mapmaker and topographer. Apparently appalled by the brutality he witnessed, he devoted several diary pages to describing the day’s horrors, particularly what he saw at bluff-side caves where many Lakota had sought safety. Soldiers, giving chase, fired indiscriminately into the caves, a barrage that went on until the cries of a child were heard from inside.

Warren wrote:

Wounded women and children crying and moaning, horribly mangled by the bullets … Two Indian men were killed in the hole … Seven women were killed … and three children, two of them in their mothers’ arms. One young woman was wounded in the left shoulder … Another handsome young squaw was badly wounded just above her left knee and the same ball wounded her baby in the right knee 

I had a litter made and put her and her child upon it. I found another girl of about 12 years lying with her head down in a ravine and apparently dead. Observing her breath, I had a man take her in his arms. She was shot through both feet. I found a little boy shot through the calves of his legs and through his hams … He had enough strength left to hold me round the neck.

Warren described his attempts to minister to the wounded and his distress at the sounds of a Lakota mother wailing for her dead baby. “The feeling of sympathy for the wounded women and children and deep regret for their being so, I found universal,” Warren wrote. “It could not be helped.” 

The Lakota passed down other stories from that day across the generations. About the heroism of Spotted Tail and Iron Shell, for instance, who fought side by side against the soldiers. Greatly outnumbered, Spotted Tail was said to have killed several soldiers despite being wounded himself by bullets and sabers. He survived and managed to escape.  

The story of a dying grandmother and one little boy—the son of the chief—became something of a legend among the Brulé. In 2005, exactly 150 years later, that story was recounted near the site of the massacre by the boy’s great-granddaughter, a Lakota elder and activist named Rosalie Little Thunder. “His grandmother’s blood dripped on him, but he stayed still when he heard all the hoofbeats, gunshots, cries, shouts,” she said to a group of relatives and others who had gathered for a commemoration. “He finally emerged after some silence. The Army spotted him and gave chase. He ran until he got over a little hill and found a burrow surrounded by tall grass. He hid there and stayed there until just before daylight, when it’s coldest and the dew forms. He emerged from there and started his trek—200 miles north to Sicangu country—to take word of the massacre.”

When it was over, 86 Lakota had been killed, many of them women and children. Four U.S. soldiers died. Harney confiscated tepees and buffalo meat for his expedition. The rest of the Lakota belongings were plundered or burned. Then the general marched 70 survivors, mostly women and children, some 140 miles across the grasslands to Fort Laramie. There he insisted that the perpetrators of the mail coach attack surrender. If they did not, Harney threatened to turn his captives over to the Pawnee, the Lakota’s mortal enemy.

That was why the warriors Spotted Tail, Long Chin and Red Leaf trotted on their horses into Fort Laramie a few weeks later. They were dressed in their finest regalia and sang their death songs when they surrendered, expecting to die at the end of a wasichu rope. Instead, they were taken into custody and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The next year, at the urging of the region’s Indian agent, President Pierce pardoned the Lakota warriors.

The bloody episode had divergent impacts on the Lakota. For some leaders it was a radicalizing event, evidence that the government could never be trusted—that violent resistance was the only path to meaningful tribal autonomy. One such leader was Crazy Horse, who was a teenager in the Oglala village a few miles north of the Brulé camp, and who, coming upon the massacre site, saw firsthand its terrible aftermath. “Scattered along the rocky slope were lodge rolls, parfleches, robes, cradleboards and many other village goods, all trampled and torn and burnt,” Crazy Horse’s biographer Mari Sandoz wrote in 1942, “and among these lay dark places that were blood and darker ones that were the dead of his people.” The Lakota historian Victor Douville has written that the memory never left Crazy Horse, and many say he thought of Blue Water while leading the rout of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876. 

For other Lakota leaders, such as Little Thunder and Spotted Tail, what they saw of the government’s cruelty and disproportionate firepower convinced them that their people’s best, or perhaps only, chance for survival was negotiation and eventual peace. Spotted Tail was sure the Lakota “could not win against the power of the Americans,” his biographer George E. Hyde wrote. Spotted Tail would become the chief lieutenant and eventual successor of Little Thunder, who was also wounded in the massacre but survived. Sensing the ultimate futility of resistance, the two men “prepared to lead their people down the path of peace and survival—a survival that included loss of their independence, and a forced residence on reservations,” the historian Paul N. Beck wrote in 2004. 

In March 1856, Little Thunder was forced to shake hands with Harney, who had summoned leaders of the seven Lakota bands to Fort Pierre, in South Dakota, to dictate his terms for peace—essentially, obedience and docility. In return, Harney released the prisoners he had taken at Blue Water.

A period of relative quietude between the Lakota, some of their Native allies and the U.S. government ended in November 1864, when a U.S. military force attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp near Sand Creek in Colorado, killing an estimated 230 people, most of them women and children. In the violent years to come, government promises to the Plains Indians were made and quickly broken. The Lakota and their allies won several military victories against the Army, most notably at the Little Bighorn, but as the years passed there was a sense of inevitability, culminating with the slaughter at Wounded Knee, which extinguished the last embers of armed Lakota resistance.

Little Thunder died in 1879, having handed over leadership of the Brulé to Spotted Tail in 1866, according to Douville. “He was shrewdly confident that his successor had the best qualification of securing his unfulfilled goal of accomplishing peace.”


I first came across the story of the Blue Water Massacre by accident, in early 2023, while researching a separate historical project about the American West. In the brutality of the violence and in the event’s bewildering obscurity, it immediately reminded me of another event, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when hundreds of African Americans were killed by a white mob in that city’s Greenwood community. 

In 2001, I published a book about the Tulsa massacre, at a time when few people apart from survivors or their descendants knew much about it. What happened in Tulsa, I learned, was not a historical anomaly. Immersing myself in that history not only inspired in me greater compassion for people from different backgrounds, with different histories, but also gave me a more fulsome understanding of the origins of our nation’s racial and social fissures. By the time I returned to the subject of the Tulsa massacre on its 100th anniversary for a story in Smithsonian, the atrocity had become broadly known—and, perhaps not coincidentally, hopeful signs of racial reconciliation in Tulsa and elsewhere had begun to take hold. 

Native American history has its own infamous gaps, but in recent generations many difficult truths have bubbled to the surface of the nation’s cultural awareness. Dee Brown’s 1970 landmark best seller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, revealed for a broad audience the sanitized nature of mainstream Indigenous history. (Even still, the events at Blue Water received a single sentence.) The American Indian Movement, which flourished around the same time, fought publicly and militantly for unfulfilled treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal lands. In more recent decades, scholars, writers, filmmakers, artists, activists, political leaders and others, Native and non-Native, have filled in the picture more completely. They have highlighted the relatively overlooked history of the enslavement of Native Americans, for example, or challenged simplistic narratives about American colonial expansion to focus on the ways Indigenous people helped shape this country’s borders, history and culture. 

Some of this work has broken through into popular culture. In just the past decade, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted into a movie by Martin Scorsese, publicized the true story of the Osage Nation’s extraordinary wealth after oil was found beneath tribal land—and the string of murders by white settlers intent on stealing that wealth. The Ken Burns documentary The American Buffalo traced how deliberate U.S. policy all but eradicated the once abundant animal, with disastrous effects on the Plains Indians. The theme was explored by the Ojibwe writer David Treuer in his 2019 counter-history, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present. Without the buffalo, he wrote, the Plains tribes had little choice but to move onto reservations. “The reservations might have been designed as prisons, but now they became places of refuge.” In 2021, the Chippewa novelist Louise Erdrich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman, set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the 1950s, the latest of her celebrated books to draw from the realities of Native life and history. And the FX television series “Reservation Dogs” brought American viewers onto a reservation in the present day, following the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic travails of young Native Americans plotting their escape from reservation life for what they imagine is something better. 

The U.S. government, meanwhile, under the direction of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet secretary in U.S. history, has opened a federal investigation into the historical abuses of the Indian boarding school system. Haaland convened listening sessions across the country. She opened each session this way: “My ancestors endured the horrors of the Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.”

In September 2023, in an effort to learn more about the massacre at Blue Water and its persistent impacts, I made the first of two long trips to the Rosebud Reservation, in south-central South Dakota, which has been a home for the Sicangu Oyate, as the Brulé now call themselves, since 1889. (Both the Lakota and French terms refer to “burnt thigh people,” a name apparently deriving from a terrible prairie fire long ago.) The reservation sprawls across more than 900,000 acres of grasslands, rolling hills and pine forests, and is dotted by small towns, smaller villages, and many ranches and farms. I met with Lakota residents carrying surnames like Little Thunder and Spotted Tail and with descendants of Iron Shell. They told me about their lives, introduced me to their songs, drums and prayers, and spoke about the importance of venerating their ancestors and keeping their ancient rituals and ceremonies. Not everybody was forthcoming. At one dinner, a Lakota elder named Phil Two Eagle, the executive director of Rosebud’s Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, asked me succinctly: “Why are you here?” My answer had to do with an acquired belief that cultural healing is not possible without a full and honest accounting of the past. 

The past and its sometimes grim legacies were evident at Rosebud. About one-third of the Sicangu’s 30,000 or so enrolled members live on the reservation. Of those, more than half live below the poverty line. The life expectancy is a decade less than the national average, suicide rates dwarf national figures, and substance abuse is an epidemic. And yet, for many residents, leaving the reservation is close to unimaginable. “It’s hard for any of us to leave, because we’re just real social beings, and we’re grounded here with all of our family,” Gale Spotted Tail, Rosebud’s program director of child care services and the great-great-granddaughter of the chief, told me. “We don’t look through the eyes of being impoverished. We look more at the values you have as a person. We still have that kind of connection.” I learned that many Lakota weren’t aware of the history of the Blue Water Massacre or didn’t feel it was particularly relevant to their lives. Most are simply too preoccupied with the realities of getting by, Gale Spotted Tail told me. 

But I found that some did remember. And I learned that, in addition to recovering the story of the Blue Water Massacre, there was a second, parallel story waiting to be told. It was about a small, unlikely group of people who had taken it upon themselves to reckon with this historical tragedy and find a path toward some form of reconciliation. What began as a private effort has, in recent years and months, grown into a more expansive and even urgent movement.

The first time I spoke with Karen Little Thunder, a great-great-granddaughter of the chief and the younger sister of Rosalie, who died in 2014, she explained that she saw in this effort a way to move beyond the interminable stasis of injustice. “They attacked in very early morning and just slaughtered us, and there was no time for anything except to survive,” she said. “Then the village was burned. Then the survivors were marched away to one of the forts and the women and children were taken and used as pawns. These traumas just kept happening and happening—and we’re still grieving. That’s the way it is, not just for Little Thunder relatives, but for our entire tribal people. We could not do anything except survive back then. Fast-forward 150 years, we’re still in survival mode.”


Karen Little Thunder, today a mother and grandmother at age 59, lives on the Rosebud Reservation in a white double-wide trailer on land that has been in her family for generations. She doesn’t remember hearing about Blue Water until her early 20s, when her father handed her a few photocopied pages from a book that described the massacre. At the time, as she struggled with alcohol addiction, the significance of what she read didn’t register. 

In 2004, after several years of sobriety, she enrolled at the tribal university, where a fellow student told her that a professor named Peter Gibbs was talking about the Little Thunder family in his lectures. One day, Karen Little Thunder ran into Gibbs in the school’s Lakota studies building. “We stood in the hallway for 10 or 15 minutes,” she recalled. The topic of his lectures had been the Blue Water Massacre. “He told me in a nutshell what he was talking about in his class. I remember going through the rest of my day, like—mind blown. I needed to do something with all this information. I took as many classes as I could in the Lakota studies department, and in doing so was able to do my own research about the massacre.” 

By chance, weeks later Karen Little Thunder received a letter from two sisters, Jean Jensen and Dianne Greenwald, who had grown up close to the Nebraska massacre site. As children they hunted for arrowheads while playing along Blue Water Creek. They had heard a battle had happened there but had only a vague sense of what that was. They finally learned about the atrocity as adults, after reading books about state and local history and talking to history buffs. Now they were writing blindly to any member of the Little Thunder family whose contact information they could find. With family members and local friends, the sisters decided to include the massacre in an event commemorating local history. In years past, the event usually focused on white pioneers on the Oregon Trail who traveled through that part of Nebraska. It was time, Jensen told me, “to tell the Lakota side of the story, to make it known.” 

About 40 other members of the Little Thunder family accepted an invitation to attend, including Karen and her first cousin Phil Little Thunder, also a great-great-grandchild of the chief. Like Karen, Phil had struggled with addiction, and had turned to the customs and ceremonies of the Lakota as part of his recovery. Together everyone made the roughly four-hour drive from the reservation to a grassy field near Blue Water Creek, where tents were pitched and two sweat lodges built for prayer ceremonies—the first but not the last time many of the descendants returned to the site.

Not long afterward, Karen came across a photograph on the internet—a tiny doll, taken from the massacre site. She was haunted by the image. As a child, she’d learned that, where her ancestors were concerned, moccasins were never just moccasins, buckskin pants and feather bonnets and war shirts were more than mere physical objects. “My uncle Albert White Hat used to talk about how the essence of the person becomes attached to their belongings,” she said. “They are almost like living things themselves.”

And she eventually learned that the doll was hardly the only object plundered that day. Gouverneur K. Warren, the young officer who recorded his horror at the massacre, had apparently collected dozens of Lakota belongings from the site. Karen found a semi-obscure book called Little Chief’s Gatherings, written by a historian of the frontier named James A. Hanson, which had been published in 1996. (The name “Little Chief” derived from a dismissive Lakota nickname for Warren, a reference to his short stature.) Hanson described how Warren transported the Lakota belongings to the East Coast and, the next year, in 1856, quietly donated them, more than 60 items, to the Smithsonian, then a fledgling cultural institution in the nation’s capital. 

Warren never spoke or wrote publicly about his contribution to the museum. “I believe he felt remorse and embarrassment for having looted the possessions of a vanquished foe, even though his motives were entirely for the good of science,” Hanson wrote. But the items made up “one of the most significant Plains Indians collections ever made,” Hanson noted, including “dozens of pony-beaded articles of clothing—dresses, leggings, a war shirt, a headdress, baby carriers and moccasins, as well as quilled robes, trade blankets, tepee bags, pipes, a bow case, a complete set of horse gear, a knife sheath, children’s toys including the earliest known Plains Indian doll.” 

When I spoke with Hanson recently, he said he had come upon the objects by accident, as a graduate student in the early 1970s researching Sioux trade artifacts. Flipping through the card catalog in the anthropology department of the National Museum of Natural History, he recognized Warren’s name from books and western atlases he read as a boy. “Here’s a whole section of the real early stuff”—Native American artifacts—“that says, ‘Collected by G.K. Warren,’” Hanson told me. “I said, ‘My God, this is something I would love to research.’” Hanson tracked down Warren artifacts that had been scattered among hundreds of thousands of other items in storage throughout the museum. He learned that about 20 of the Warren items had once been on display, labeled as “examples of Lakota life in the 1850s.” But other than the musty references in the card catalog, there was no other written record of the collection or its provenance.

When Hanson’s book was published, it included a formal description of the massacre, a transcript of Warren’s diary and 58 photographs, many in color, of Lakota belongings. The most heartrending image was the child’s doll. Fashioned from tanned animal hide, with seeds for eyes and flowing locks made from black horsehair, it wore tiny moccasins and a blue wool cloth dress.

In 2010, Karen Little Thunder contacted the museum and was granted permission to come see the items in person. The museum’s storage facility was located in a Virginia suburb of the nation’s capital. She and her then husband, Clayton Wright Jr., passed through security and were met by a museum official named Bill Billeck. “When we started going down to where the items are actually stored, that’s where it became dark,” she remembered. “The storage cabinets were like those red toolboxes with shallow drawers. I’m wearing these little cloth gloves. We were able to go through and find and view and hold several items.” A number of the belongings appeared to be stained with blood. “It was good until we came upon what looked like a baby blanket, a wrap made out of buffalo hide. You could see a little hood for the child’s head. When I put my hand on that little baby wrap, that’s when it hit me really hard. I could see, I could feel, I could imagine a child in that wrap. I mean, it just hit me so hard. This is real. This is what happened. There was a baby in this blanket. I had to turn around and walk away. I just felt like screaming and crying and beating on somebody. It made me angry and sad at the same time.”

She composed herself and returned to the belongings. Afterward, she felt affirmed. The experience was a sign “that I’m following the right path,” she said. “It’s like when I hear a coyote or I see a beautiful eagle. Those things are answers as well.”


In 1999, Paul Soderman and his family were sorting through the belongings of a recently deceased aunt at her home on Long Island, New York, when they came across a remarkable letter. The letter was written by Soderman’s great-great-grandfather, James Harney Stover, in 1934, when he was in his 80s. In it, he told the story of visiting the White House with his family in April 1861, when he was 12 years old. President Lincoln himself entered the East Room and greeted Stover’s father by name. It turned out the two men had practiced law together in Illinois years before. “The tall president who was 6 feet 4 and a half inches, stooped down and shook hands with me,” Stover wrote. During the visit, it came up that Stover’s mother’s maiden name was Harney. In fact, Stover’s mother told Lincoln, she was the cousin of an Army general named William S. Harney. “And the president said, ‘Well, he is my general in St. Louis, and he and I were in the Black Hawk War together,’” Stover wrote. 

Soderman, then 40 years old, was stunned. A professional blues singer from Princeton, New Jersey, and later a substance abuse counselor, he’d moved to Boulder, Colorado, years earlier, drawn to the city for its thriving music scene. There he also made Native American friends and deepened an interest in Native spiritual practices. By 1999, Soderman knew many Lakota people. He had heard of the Blue Water Massacre. He knew that the tallest mountain in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the spiritual home of the Lakota, was named Harney Peak. And now, in the unlikeliest of ways—through a letter written by his great-great-grandfather describing a meeting with Abraham Lincoln—Soderman learned that he and Harney were distant relatives. “I felt a responsibility right away,” Soderman told me recently. “I’d already been with the Lakota people for a long time. They had already told me how these things affected them. I tried to make sense of all this, and little by little I kept moving forward.”

During the next several years, he immersed himself in Lakota culture, history and language. By chance, he met another Boulder-area resident, a prominent jazz trumpeter named Brad Upton, who shared Soderman’s commitment to atonement. Upton was haunted by the fact that his great-great-grandfather, Colonel James W. Forsyth, had commanded the troops at Wounded Knee. 

Soderman first connected with Karen Little Thunder on an internet message board, and he met her in person in 2014. A short time later, Karen told her cousin, Phil, that a relative of Harney wanted to meet him. Phil Little Thunder, a short, soft-spoken man, saw it as an opportunity to “count coup” on an enemy, the ancient Native practice of getting close enough to touch an adversary. Phil remembers thinking, “I’m going to shake his hand, and hold it real tight—and then I’m going to give him a left hook, because his ancestor did my people that way.” Then they met. “When I shook hands with him, instead of whupping him, he hugged me.”

Around that time, a Lakota elder and spiritual leader named Basil Brave Heart was leading a campaign to rename Harney Peak. As a seventh-generation descendant of Harney, Soderman publicly endorsed the effort. In August 2016, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names announced the Harney name would be removed, and the landmark would henceforth be known as Black Elk Peak, for the legendary Lakota warrior and holy man. “The initial emphasis was to get Harney Peak changed,” Soderman recalled. “When that was done, we started thinking, in collaboration with Karen and Phil, ‘What can we do now?’”


Not long afterward, the Little Thunders and their Nebraska friends gathered beneath the Witness Tree for a healing ceremony. When it was finished, Karen Little Thunder was approached by Shelie Hartman-Gibbs (no relation to Peter Gibbs), who had grown up near the Blue Water and remained active in historical commemoration there. The 150th anniversary of Nebraska’s statehood was approaching. Hartman-Gibbs and her sister had the idea of bringing part of the Warren collection back to Nebraska for a temporary exhibition. What did Karen think? “I only remember the overwhelming feeling that this was another piece of the puzzle,” Karen says.

The women sought and received the blessing of Basil Brave Heart, who felt that returning the items to Nebraska would foster healing among both white Americans and Native people. “Is it possible that when everyone vibrates with complete forgiveness, that all of a sudden all of this division will shift?” Brave Heart said, in a testimony recorded for Smithsonian officials. “Absolutely.”

After the women presented the plan to a large group of Little Thunder relatives, who endorsed the idea, the Smithsonian approved the loan of seven items from the Warren collection (deemed by curators as in the best condition to travel) for a three-day exhibition at the visitor center of the Ash Hollow State Historical Park. The center commemorates Ash Hollow’s significance to pioneers on the Oregon Trail, but it also sits atop a bluff overlooking Blue Water Creek and the valley where the massacre occurred. 

The belongings were flown to Denver and driven to Nebraska, arriving at Ash Hollow late on a Wednesday afternoon in July 2017. Phil Little Thunder told me that he felt a sadness and a restlessness, like a caged wolf, when he first saw the belongings, which included the doll from Hanson’s book, plus a ceremonial rattle, a decorated saddle, a bag of porcupine quills, a bow, an ammunition pouch and a powder horn. But he couldn’t help but think about the rest of the items, which remained in vaults on the East Coast. “It was like a halfway apology,” he said.

In mourning over the items, he had let out a plaintive cry. “I’ll never forget the sound,” Soderman told me. “He’s done it a few times at the Witness Tree. That’s the connection between now and then, the sound of his grief. It’s real. That’s what I try to explain to my family and others who ask, ‘Why are you digging up the past? That happened 160 years ago.’ For Phil, it might as well have happened last week. That’s how connected they are.”

That night, a Lakota medicine man performed a healing ceremony in the part of the visitor center where the belongings would be displayed. “I can’t describe what actually happened,” Karen Little Thunder told a reporter for the Lakota Times. “But when I first came out of the ceremony I was numb. We all gathered for a meal, and I spoke to my cousin—my brother—Phil. He said, ‘The ancestors are happy.’ And I felt that, too. The spirits of our ancestors joined us in the ceremony and they were welcomed home.”

Karen Little Thunder spent the night in her van at the massacre site. “And I woke up the next morning and was just so happy,” she told the Lakota Times. “I could have been dancing by myself. I felt happy. I felt laughter. I felt peaceful. That told me things were good.”

Afterward, Karen and Phil Little Thunder and another cousin, Harry Little Thunder, together with Soderman, began to discuss the possibility of getting the entire Warren collection returned to the Lakota for good. 


The timing for such an appeal felt right. Cultural institutions around the world have been reckoning, sometimes publicly, with the fact that many of their holdings were collected in ways that we now consider unethical. In the United States, federal agencies and many museums and institutions are already mandated by law to repatriate requested Native American human remains, burial artifacts and sacred objects held in their collections. The Warren collection objects don’t fall under these categories, but the Smithsonian has recently enacted a broader, Institution-wide policy called Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns. Under the policy, which went into effect in 2022, artifacts of everyday life that Native groups deem of cultural importance may qualify to be returned. In certain cases, shared stewardship agreements allow the Institution to care for the items at the request of the original owners.

I spoke recently with Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for museums and culture and a member of the Pawnee nation of Oklahoma, who served for 14 years as director of the National Museum of the American Indian. He was forthright about how much the Institution’s perspective has evolved. “Even if we have legal title for a given artifact, if it was acquired unethically, whether by us or whoever it was that acquired it originally, then we should give it back,” he said. He cited the Smithsonian’s recent return to Nigeria of 29 “Benin Bronzes” plundered by the British during an attack in 1897. “In our parlance, that was unethically acquired. That’s why we were not just willing but anxious to return those to Nigeria. I think the same would apply here,” he said, referring to the Warren collection. “If these artifacts were from a battlefield, even worse from a massacre, clearly they were unethically acquired, not necessarily by us, but by the U.S. Army and given to us. We have an obligation to return them.”

In August, the Little Thunder group formally applied under the new policy for the return of 69 items they believe came from the massacre site. Sarah Loudin, the National Museum of Natural History’s head registrar, told me that the process for reviewing the application will take time. As the museum gathers information, it will consider questions of standing, including, for example, whether the applicants are lineal descendants of the original owners of the belongings; are official representatives of the community where the items originated or are acting on its behalf; and whether there are competing requests for the objects. 

Another critical issue will be demonstrating provenance—whether the items can be shown definitively to have come from the Blue Water Massacre. Hanson, in Little Chief’s Gatherings, pieced together impressive circumstantial evidence that the Warren collection had come from the massacre, but he had “no smoking gun,” Billeck, a former Smithsonian repatriation manager, told me. That changed last year, Billeck says, after he unearthed an obscure letter in the Institution’s archives that he described to me as “the first evidence we have.” The letter was written in 1873 by Smithsonian founding Secretary Joseph Henry to General William T. Sherman, the Civil War hero who was then head of the Army. At the time, Sherman commanded U.S. troops engaged in ongoing hostilities against Native tribes. Henry was asking Sherman to order soldiers to “embrace any opportunity that may be presented in the course of service to secure and transmit to Washington specimens illustrating Indian life and warfare.” As an example, Henry cited Warren’s actions at Blue Water, in which the officer had secured a large assortment of Lakota belongings “from the bodies of the slain.” 

Billeck shared Henry’s letter by email with Karen Little Thunder and Paul Soderman, writing that the letter made clear that “Warren obtained the objects at the Smithsonian and that they are from Ash Hollow or Blue Water Creek.” The Little Thunders included the letter as a part of their application to the Smithsonian. 

The formal request is one step in an ongoing process of considerable cultural and spiritual complexity. For example, in the past, some Little Thunder family members expressed reservations about reclaiming the items, arguing that other Sicangu families descended from massacre survivors should be involved. There is also a question about what the Sicangu would do with the items if they are returned. Some Lakota elders would likely advocate ritual burning, per tradition, while others favor keeping them for educational and ceremonial purposes. That raises other practical considerations, such as where the Lakota would store the items and how they would pay for any associated costs. 

In recent months, Karen Little Thunder, her cousins Phil and Harry, and Paul Soderman have been busy gathering support back home. They found an ally in Phil Two Eagle, the Sicangu treaty council executive director, who last December placed the Blue Water Massacre on the agenda for the annual conference of treaty councils from all seven Lakota bands. 

In a hotel ballroom in Rapid City, South Dakota, the Little Thunders and Soderman appeared before the conference and spoke about what happened in 1855. Afterward, the elders stood and, singing an old Lakota honor song, shook their hands. 

The next day, Phil Little Thunder read a resolution that Phil Two Eagle had helped draft. In the name of the Sicangu Oyate and the Blue Water families, it called not only for the return of the Warren collection, but also for a geophysical survey of the massacre site to identify and recover any remains of victims, and for the establishment of a memorial and interpretative center at the site. The resolution, while nonbinding, was unanimously endorsed by representatives of the seven Lakota bands. 

Gale Spotted Tail, the descendant of the Sicangu chief, has become another important supporter. “I’m in favor of it, because it will bring attention to the Blue Water,” she told me. “A lot of people don’t know about it. Healing ceremonies would come with those belongings being returned. That kind of spiritual power will help our souls. It’s an opportunity for kids here to know their identity.”

Ione Quigley, a Sicangu elder and Rosebud’s historic preservation officer, has also enthusiastically endorsed the collection’s return. “If you took my grandma’s dress right off her body, I will still carry that,” she said. “And my child will still carry that, and on and on. But instead of holding on to being a victim, we decided to stand up and take control and do something about it. People will take notice that this has happened. Now we’re trying to get somebody to make it right.”

Recently, the Rosebud Sicangu’s historic preservation office, along with representatives of the Little Thunder family, have been in discussions with Nebraska state officials about storing the items, should they be returned, at the Ash Hollow visitor center. Under the proposed agreement, the visitor center would host the items in a secure and managed environment for at least two years while the Sicangu work to decide on their final disposition. During that time, according to the proposal, descendants of massacre survivors and other Sicangu tribal members would have the right to privately view the collection.

Gover, when I spoke with him, recalled attending ceremonies as director of the National Museum of the American Indian when belongings were returned to their original owners. “People would just weep,” he said. “That made it a powerful experience for us as well. It’s not even making amends. In the Native view of the universe, that is a step toward restoring balance, just putting things right to return those things to the community where they originated. There is real power in that. There are a lot of these incidents from history that still need to be put right.”


The Blue Water valley has been in private hands for generations. Today it includes a patchwork of different owners, not all of them sympathetic to the Lakota or an organized effort to remember the massacre. A Nebraska rancher named Pat Gamet, who is 56, is an exception. He owns the acreage surrounding the Witness Tree and the area where the Lakota village once stood. He says he has kept the land as it was to protect it for the Lakota people and help honor their history there. “That’s my role in all of this. It’s a very humble one.”

On that hot afternoon last year, the 168th anniversary of the massacre, about 30 people gathered under the Witness Tree with the Little Thunders. Gamet was there, and the sisters, Jean Jensen and Dianne Greenwald, and their families. In the healing circle, Soderman and his wife, Cathie, who were ceremonially adopted into the Little Thunder family a few years ago, stood side by side with Brad Upton, all of them singing ancient Lakota healing songs. The echoes from Phil Little Thunder’s drum were carried off by the wind. Karen Little Thunder spoke up. “I would just like to say thank you to everybody for being here, for being here for us, for all of us,” she said. “You’re helping us to lighten this heavy load that we carry.” 

The scene called to mind a favorite phrase of Basil Brave Heart, the Lakota spiritual leader, that has become a mantra of sorts for the people beneath the Witness Tree. 

Taku wakan skan skan, the saying went. “Something sacred is in motion.” 

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This Must Be The Place lyric tattoos

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Liverpool tattoo artist Rachel Baldwin made charming tattoos for each line of the Talking Heads classic and made it into a music video #
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This got pushed to me by a friend who knew I had a tiktok account, but never used it. She reached out on FB and everything. Anyway, it's good to have a brand so strong that people send you things like this.
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Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024)

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Today's links



A rifle-bearing, bearded rebel with crossed bandoliers stands atop a mainframe. His belt bears the RSS logo. The mainframe is on a floor made of a busy, resistor-studded circuit board. The background is a halftoned RSS logo. Around the rebel is a halo of light.

You should be using an RSS reader (permalink)

No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, "What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?"

It's frustrating, but my general answer is, "Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something systemic."

There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar and digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can't agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave for and so end up stuck there.

I've been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last XOXO, in search of uplifting fare:

https://www.youtube.com/@xoxofest

I found it. Talks by Dan Olson, Cabel Sasser, Ed Yong and many others, especially Molly White:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c

Molly's talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:

But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable…

Are the platforms really that vulnerable? The collective action problem is so hard, the switching costs are so high – maybe the fact that "there's a lot more of us than there are of them" is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.

And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly's excellent work is totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for everyone to be less enshittified.

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.

It's RSS.

RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, "Really Simple Syndication") is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public "feeds." For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard to do!), you can just sign up for Wired's RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they're published. Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow Wired's feed without any cookies, and Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read. Wired doesn't even get to know that you're monitoring its feed.

I don't mean to pick on Wired here. This goes for every news source I follow – from CNN to the New York Times. But RSS isn't just good for the news! It's good for everything. Your friends' blogs? Every blogging platform emits an RSS feed by default. You can follow every one of them in your reader.

Not just blogs. Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They've all got RSS feeds. You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is always delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.

Are your friends too pithy for a newsletter, preferring to quip on social media? Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get an RSS feed from Insta/FB/Twitter, but all those new ones that have popped up? They all have feeds. You can follow any Mastodon account (which means you can follow any Threads account) via RSS. Same for Bluesky. That also goes for older platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. There's RSS for Hacker News, and there's a sub-feed for the comments on every story. You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you're awaiting, too.

Your local politician's website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There's an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).

Your RSS reader lets you put all these feeds into folders if you want. You can even create automatic folders, based on keywords, or even things like "infrequently updated sites" (I follow a bunch of people via RSS who only update a couple times per year – cough, Danny O'Brien, cough – and never miss a post).

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

Now, you sign up to so many feeds that you're feeling overwhelmed and you want an algorithm to prioritize posts – or recommend content. Lots of RSS readers have some kind of algorithm and recommendation system (I use News, which offers both, though I don't use them – I like the glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of the undifferentiated firehose feed).

But you control the algorithm, you control the recommendations. And if a new RSS reader pops up with an algorithm you're dying to try, you can export all the feeds you follow with a single click, which will generate an OPML file. Then, with one click, you can import that OPML file into any other RSS reader in existence and all your feeds will be seamlessly migrated there. You can delete your old account, or you can even use different readers for different purposes.

You can access RSS in a browser or in an app on your phone (most RSS readers have an app), and they'll sync up, so a story you mark to read later on your phone will be waiting for you the next time you load up your reader in a browser tab, and you won't see the same stories twice (unless you want to, in which case you can mark them as unread).

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform.

Unlike those largely useless, performative boycotts of widely used platforms, switching to RSS doesn't require that you give anything up. Not only does switching to RSS let you continue to follow all the newsletters, webpages and social media accounts you're following now, it makes doing so better: more private, more accessible, and less enshittified.

Switching to RSS lets you experience just the good parts of the enshitternet, but that experience is delivered in manner that the new, good internet we're all dying for.

My own newsletter is delivered in fulltext via RSS. If you're reading this as a Mastodon or Twitter thread, on Tumblr or on Medium, or via email, you can get it by RSS instead:

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

Don't worry about which RSS reader you start with. It literally doesn't matter. Remember, you can switch readers with two clicks and take all the feeds you've subscribed to with you! If you want a recommendation, I have nothing but praise for Newsblur, which I've been paying $2/month for since 2011 (!):

https://newsblur.com/

Subscribing to feeds is super-easy, too: the links for RSS feeds are invisibly embedded in web-pages. Just paste the URL of a web-page into your RSS reader's "add feed" box and it'll automagically figure out where the feed lives and add it to your subscriptions.

It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference.

But using RSS will! Using RSS to follow the stuff that matters to you will have an immediate, profoundly beneficial impact on your own digital life – and it will appreciably, irreversibly nudge the whole internet towards a better state.


Hey look at this (permalink)


* You Can't Make Friends With The Rockstars https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/



A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony bullies Retropod off the net https://web.archive.org/web/20041018040446/http://www.retropod.com/

#15yrsago This Side of Jordan – Violent jazz age novel by Charles M Schulz’s son Monte https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/16/this-side-of-jordan-violent-jazz-age-novel-by-charles-m-schulzs-son-monte/

#10yrsago FBI chief demands an end to cellphone security https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/politics/fbi-director-in-policy-speech-calls-dark-devices-hindrance-to-crime-solving.html

#10yrsago Please, Disney: put back John’s grandad’s Haunted Mansion tombstone https://thedisneyblog.com/2014/10/16/petition-to-return-a-lost-tombstone-to-the-haunted-mansion/

#10yrsago How Microsoft hacked trademark law to let it secretly seize whole businesses https://www.wired.com/2014/10/microsoft-pinkerton/

#10yrsago If you think you’ve anonymized a data set, you’re probably wrong https://web.archive.org/web/20141014172827/http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/

#10yrsago The lost cyber-crayolas of the mid-1990s https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/16/the-lost-cyber-crayolas-of-the-mid-1990s/

#5yrsago “The People’s Money”: A crisp, simple, thorough explanation of how government spending is paid for https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2019/10/the-peoples-money-part-1.html

#5yrsago What it’s like to have Apple rip off your successful Mac app https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/what-its-like-to-have-apple-rip-off-your-successful-mac-app/

#5yrsago Blizzard suspends college gamers from competitive play after they display “Free Hong Kong” poster https://www.vice.com/en/article/three-college-hearthstone-protesters-banned-for-six-months/

#5yrsago Terrified of bad press after its China capitulation, Blizzard cancels NYC Overwatch event https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-15/blizzard-cancels-overwatch-event-as-it-tries-to-contain-backlash

#5yrsago A San Diego Republican operator ran a massive, multimillion-dollar Facebook scam that targeted boomers https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc

#5yrsago Britain’s unbelievably stupid, dangerous porn “age verification” scheme is totally dead https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/uk-government-abandons-planned-porn-age-verification-scheme/

#5yrsago Not only is Google’s auto-delete good for privacy, it’s also good news for competition https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/not-only-is-googles-auto-delete-good-for-privacy-its-also-good-news-for-competition/

#5yrsago Edward Snowden on the global war on encryption: “This is our new battleground” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/15/encryption-lose-privacy-us-uk-australia-facebook

#5yrsago In Kansas’s poor, sick places, hospitals and debt collectors send the ailing to debtor’s prison https://features.propublica.org/medical-debt/when-medical-debt-collectors-decide-who-gets-arrested-coffeyville-kansas

#5yrsago Want a ride in a Lyft? Just sign away your right to sue if they kill, maim, rape or cheat you https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/want-a-ride-in-a-lyft-just-sign-away-your-right-to-sue-if-they-kill-maim-rape-or-cheat-you/

#5yrsago #RedForEd rebooted: Chicago’s teachers are back on strike https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/union-strike-chicago-teachers/

#1yrago One of America's most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 818 words (64779 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.


How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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digdoug
16 days ago
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You really should be using Newsblur, people.
Louisville, KY
popular
16 days ago
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2 public comments
cjheinz
16 days ago
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RSS FTW!
I've been using NewsBlur since Google killed Reader.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
countswackula
15 days ago
Same!
Ferret
16 days ago
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The irony of sharing Cory's 'use should be using an RSS reader' post in my RSS reader is not lost on me

Stop Trying To Be Cool

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“Stop trying to be cool. Be nerdy and obsessive about the things you love. Enthusiasm will get you farther than indifference.”

James McCrae

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digdoug
17 days ago
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Done... wait, is this 'farther'?!
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Origin Story | No Mercy / No Malice

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I’m in L.A., and it’s been an emotional week — on several dimensions. Many of my closest friends are celebrating our 50th. It’s wonderful. Any competitiveness, jealousy, or other petty bullshit has melted away. All that’s left is collective joy at our friendships, and adult children to boast about and cap our accomplishments. On the other end of the spectrum, my dad, who’s 94, is struggling and no longer recognizes me. I knew it was coming but still wasn’t prepared. All these emotions are colliding and reminding me that much/most of the joy/tragedy in our lives is not in our control. This is difficult for humans to accept, so we create an origin story. 

Originally posted in early 2023.

Every one of us has an origin story: We define ourselves by our background, the narrative of what made us who we are. However, people often don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, and the narrative of “I” is often that, a story.

James Frey found no takers for his novel, so he repackaged it as a memoir, his story, which became the No. 1 bestseller A Million Little Pieces. Biographies and memoirs are America’s second-favorite book genre. Ronald Reagan tried to curry favor with Israeli leaders with a story about how he helped liberate Nazi death camps in WWII. He didn’t — did his military service in Hollywood. Fabricated military service is apparently so common that Congress passed a law against it.

People embellish their origin stories, as it’s the only thing others have to go on — from potential employers and friends to potential mates. We are the product of our circumstances, personally and professionally, and a good origin story confers meaning to our life and career. We should recognize that and embrace it … but also be honest about it.

Self-Made? No Such Thing

The most important factor in determining a person’s future is when and where they are born. Each of us, born into any other situation, would experience a different outcome. Just as the market trumps individual performance, so does circumstance. I likely wouldn’t be an entrepreneur or an academic had I been born in South Sudan. If I’d been born in 1920s Germany, I’d likely have been a Nazi who perished on a Russian field.

This isn’t just true across continents and centuries — it’s also evident at a micro level. Being born one year earlier or later can make a big difference. People who graduate into a recession earn less for 10 to 15 years than those who graduate amid prosperity. Fate also changes block to block: One of the strongest signals of life expectancy (and much else) is the ZIP code where you’re born. Within the same city, life expectancy can vary by 30 years based on ZIP code. Meanwhile, an American female whose parents rank in the bottom decile of earners has a 3 in 10 chance of giving birth as a teenager. For daughters in the top decile, it’s 3 in 100.

This all confirms a basic point: The cards you’re dealt matter … a lot. Your income is the clearest indicator of how much money your kid will make when they’re 30. Churn is increasingly a rare earth element in the U.S. Per a Georgetown analysis, “It’s better to be born rich than smart … The most talented disadvantaged children have a lower chance of academic and early career success than the least talented affluent children.”

However, the people dealt the best cards can’t see their hands. The myth of the “self-made man” is rife among U.S. citizens who’ve never faced a draft or registered a devaluation in their currency — people who are remora fish on investments made by the U.S. government. Tech has raised a cohort of people who simultaneously credit their character for their success and blame a rigged market for their failures. The real cage match in tech is entitlement vs. empathy. The former is winning, and that results in a staggering accumulation of power that’s amoral, focused only on the aggregation of more power regardless of what happens to people with less. (Side note: I hope they beat the shit out of each other. Is that wrong?)

iStory

Until 40, my story was that I was the son of a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary. I overcame those humble beginnings to achieve significant success because, you know, I’m awesome. After 40, my eyesight began to wane, but I could see clearer: I was born a straight white male in 1960s California, which gave me state-sponsored access to elite universities. UCLA had an acceptance rate of 76% when I applied — this year it’s less than 9%. Later, Berkeley admitted me to its MBA program with a GPA of (no joke) 2.27 from UCLA. Total tuition for all seven years? $8,000. I came of professional age in an era of processing power and the internet. I lived in San Francisco, where, in the decade of the nineties, more wealth was created within a 7-mile radius than in all of Europe since WWII.

I was given a rocket ship, built by others. To be clear, I’m talented and navigated my ship well … but I wasn’t going to soar without the sacrifice and talent of millions of others. The ship blew up several times, but I survived, and there were other vessels waiting. “Luck” doesn’t begin to describe my situation. My freshman college roommate, born gay, took his own life at 33 when his HIV progressed to full-blown AIDS. Two decades later, I’m in Los Angeles with friends finding a quiet place to FaceTime my boys and guide them through abridged Crossfit workouts.

Like others, I have faced hardship (an absent father) and tragedy (lost my mom early). But each of these losses has played a role in my good fortune. I make my living communicating, and much of this skill isn’t the result of my own hard work. My dad can captivate any room, and even though he wasn’t around much, I inherited some of his ability. My mom’s sickness, and our inability to access good care, was a hugely motivating, defining event for me. I saw the rough cut of the American story and decided to get my shit together in hopes of living a richer life and garnering the resources to take better care of the people who mattered to me. Capitalism is brutal — and motivating. Lately, the balance has swung too far to the former. But that’s another post.

Coming Home

Supposedly, each of us contains bits of every material present at the dawn of the universe. It makes sense — at least the morning after eating mushroom chocolates — that our matter will also be present in galaxies/stars/planets/organisms birthed trillions of years from now. Our stories may or may not make the journey, but the emotions they inspire will become instinct, then DNA, and this matter will disperse. So the question is, distinct from the story you and others tell about yourself, how do you make people feel? When people come in contact with you, do they feel insecure or inspired? Do you leave people cold or comforted? Do you bring joy, harmony, love?

I’m in a deficit here — I’ve taken more than I’ve given. I have a debt to pay. I’ve started with my boys and am working outward from there. Still time. It’s a comforting thought, that bits of us will live on and arrive at distant places trillions of years from now. We all have our longest journey still ahead of us. When you get there, when you show up, what will be felt? Distinct from your origin story, what was your real journey? There’s only one real journey that matters: Who did you love, and who loved you?

Life is so rich,

P.S. This week I spoke with Dr. Marty Makary about the issue of overmedication, weight loss drugs, and the food industrial complex. Listen on Apple or Spotify

P.P.S. The Section team just re-ran their AI Proficiency Report with 5k knowledge workers. They found that most of the workforce has AI anxiety, but that number goes down as they get more proficient. COO Taylor Malmsheimer is walking through the results in a free event on 10/23. RSVP

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digdoug
18 days ago
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> Until 40, my story was that I was the son of a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary. I overcame those humble beginnings to achieve significant success because, you know, I’m awesome. After 40, my eyesight began to wane, but I could see clearer: I was born a straight white male in 1960s California, which gave me state-sponsored access to elite universities. UCLA had an acceptance rate of 76% when I applied — this year it’s less than 9%. Later, Berkeley admitted me to its MBA program with a GPA of (no joke) 2.27 from UCLA. Total tuition for all seven years? $8,000. I came of professional age in an era of processing power and the internet. I lived in San Francisco, where, in the decade of the nineties, more wealth was created within a 7-mile radius than in all of Europe since WWII.
Louisville, KY
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digdoug
18 days ago
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this really was enjoyable.
Louisville, KY
digdoug
18 days ago
Interesting... this was shared by the share-shortcut, from youtube while watching a video. No idea why it's in german.
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