In November 2016, Evergreen’s Equity and Inclusion Council released its 2016-2017 Strategic Equity Plan. The central commitment in the plan is to “substantially improve the experiences of underserved students on our campus so that we close equity gaps in student learning and student success.” Strategic plans don’t necessarily lead to…
Posts published in “Uncategorized”
In July 1941, Albert Einstein, ten months a US citizen, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt asking her, as First Lady, to raise with the president the matter of lifting bureaucratic hurdles so that Jewish refugees threatened by Hitler’s final solution could be granted entry into the United States. “I know of no-one else to…
November 17, 2016 — I just returned from 3 days at the main camp at Standing Rock Sioux (off) reservation site near Cannonball, North Dakota. I traveled there with two companions: a fellow Green Party member and her nine-year-old daughter. We were inspired to go by all the reports coming…
So you joined law enforcement or the National Guard because you wanted to uphold the law, protect innocent civilians against the bad guys, and help your community in times of need. Instead, they’re having you blockade unarmed people who are trying to hold a prayer vigil, chasing them with…
It’s not about our safety… The cover of the September Atlantic magazine blared a question “Are We Safer?” When I saw the title, I thought I might find out whether Americans are safer from the dangers to life and limb we face every day—safer from what, I thought? And then—who…
Olympia Stand & Indigenous Caucus Olympia, WA November 22, 2016 — A train transporting fracking proppants to the Bakken Basin in North Dakota, the source of oil for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and explosive Bakken oil trains, was prevented from leaving the Port of Olympia for almost seven days…
I heard Lucia Perillo read on a December evening at Orca Books in 2010. The following week Perillo was the featured poet at the Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute in Washington, D.C. To the handful of us seated in our metal folding chairs, she recounted her excitement when the Folger Shakespeare…
Last month, our neighbors, the rank-and-file members and local officers of the Boeing Machinists union proclaimed a huge victory at the International Association of machinists (IAM) Grand Lodge convention in Chicago. They succeeded in amending the constitution of the IAM to include a members’ bill of rights. This is a…
Dear Friends, Family and WIP: I leave for the US tomorrow, Sunday. I’ve been in Salonica just over a month. All my time here has been as a volunteer in the Elpida Refugee Center, working mainly in the communal kitchen or in the food distribution center. A 14th century Byzantine scholar wrote…
Evergreen Colleagues, and members of our wider community who are connected in a multitude of ways to the Evergreen Community, we have a problem. Last week a student came to me. She wanted some help on an op-ed article she was writing. Because I have always seen her as bright,…
On October 18th, I listened to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! report from outside the Morton County Courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota, where she was preparing to turn herself in on criminal trespass charges that the local prosecutor had switched to riot charges in the twenty-four hours before her surrender.…
Olympia community groups drew about 300 people to an October 22 rally to oppose the Port of Olympia’s shipments of oil “fracking sands” to North Dakota. The material enables the extraction of Bakken oil. This is the oil destined for the Dakota Access Pipeline being blocked by the Standing Rock…
Boudicca Walsh The storm that hit Olympia over the weekend of the 14th of October was, per the weather forecasters, going to include 70 mph winds, flooding, and tornado warnings. After the storm had passed, local social media was ablaze with memes joking at the lack of damage in…
The charm of disgusting According to a recent article in the Economist, Hillary Clinton “is reckoned to be the second most-unpopular presidential nominate ever, after her Republican opponent Donald Trump.” The historically unprecedented dislike of both candidates is illustrated in the case of Clinton by a recent pool among registered…
El encanto de lo repulsivo De acuerdo con un reciente artículo en The Economist, Hillary Clinton “es reconocida como la segunda candidata presidencial más impopular en la historia del país, el primer lugar es ocupado por su oponente republicano Donald Trump”. Este desagrado sin precedentes de ambos candidatos se ilustra…
I own a T-shirt that is almost 40-years old. I’ve kept it as a symbol of my feminism, of an idea that resists patriarchy and powerful old men, pandering to so-called, moral, constituencies. The quote on the T-shirt is about a woman’s body, my body; about a woman’s mind, my…
Trump, Clinton, Stein and Beyond November 8, 2016 I watched the three presidential debates. Trump’s contempt for women, his anti-choice, anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim immigrant stance, his stereotyping of Black and Latinxs, his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations are disgusting. His toxic machismo and not so coded…
I would like to begin with something of a confession. During the beginnings of the #BlackLivesMatter movement I latched onto to the spin-off slogan #AllLivesMatter and even carried an All Lives Matter sign at the first Black Lives Matter protest I participated in. Back then, the battle lines had not…
Danny Gibson Blanchard State Forest is an enormously popular recreation area located south of Bellingham off Chuckanut Drive that is visited by tens of thousands of people every year. Blanchard Mountain features such things as the popular Oyster Dome and bat caves; hiking, horseback riding and mountain biking trails;…
At the southernmost tip of Puget Sound, the direct descendent and grandson of Sitting Bull, Benjamin Sitting Bull, Ogalla Lakota Sioux, spoke to Olympians on Saturday afternoon in downtown Olympia. About 65 people gathered in solidarity with the water protectors blocking the Dakota Access Pipeline route at Standing Rock, North Dakota. A sea lion…
The Chaplin-Thompson trial is scheduled to begin on October 11, 2016, at the Thurston County Courthouse. The Chaplin-Thompson family has requested that the community support them by showing up at court. Seating is limited, but overflow crowds will be accommodated in another room with a live feed. Check the Courthouse…
Lt. Aaron Jelcick of the Olympia Police Department’s Shooting Review Board had four pages of questions for Officer Donald similar to those raised by WIP and the Olympia community. This is a summary of that document, including Jelcick’s hand-written notes of Donald’s responses. The document is in three sections. The…
Much of Officer Donald’s narrative centers around his fear of being assaulted by Bryson Chaplin hitting him with his skateboard. For supporting evidence, Thurston County Prosecutor Jon Tunheim pointed to what he says was similar behavior when Chaplin was at the Safeway on Cooper Point Rd. earlier that night. Stills…
Each member of the SRB was given a sheet that contained the two questions they had been tasked with answering. Despite all five members having had reservations about Donald’s decisions, the Board was unanimous that he followed OPD policy. The following is their complete responses: Question #1: Did the force…
A close look at the internal investigation of OPD Officer Ryan Donald WIP has conducted an extensive review into documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) relating to the Olympia Police Department’s Shooting Review Board internal investigation into Officer Ryan Donald’s shooting of brothers Bryson and André Chaplin-Thompson…
In support of Standing Rock and their efforts to protect the water Hundreds of tribes from the United States and Canada are gathered along the Cannonball River next to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. They have come together to stand as one in opposition to the Dakota…
The plight of inmates in the rather newly built Thurston County Corrections facility, which only opened its doors in late 2015, is becoming drastic. The inmate overcrowding is a threatening problem that exceeds the purpose for which the jail was constructed–to accommodate the influx of inmates that the previous jail…