A Free Left Blog

I have been meaning to write about the American Indian peoples and their clash with ‘Western’ civilisation almost from when I set up this blog. Some visitors might have seen and perhaps clicked on some of the video links detailing some fragments of Indian history. Many of these are deeply moving, but they are only fragments. I have recently read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , an amazing book which approaches the clash between Indian and white people from the point of view of the various Indian tribes which were defeated by ‘white’ civilisation. I am now reading another book on the American Indian Wars. However the more I have read, watched, and heard, the more this topic, with its tragedies and dreadful abuses, expands beyond my capacity to deal with it in a blogpost or website article. Like the Lakota (Sioux) man Albert White Hat said of his personal predicament in this video from the terrific PBS series The West , “it’s too much”. There are a great many factors...

This article has been published previously on Shifting Grounds and then LabourList . I had just finished my last (official) shift at the Paralympics. Sitting down alone with my last plate of food from the wonderful staff at the Copper Box canteen, I got talking to another volunteer who was at the same table. As with just about every conversation in those few weeks, we spoke about how it had been for us – and I quickly discovered that this woman was no ordinary pleb volunteer like me. She had been a volunteer from almost the beginning, from years ago. Retired and keen to do all she could, she had ended up in the midst of the Olympic Opening Ceremony, in charge of one of the maypole groups in the Green and Pleasant Land opening sequence. She loved her experience of course. It was special. And she said a huge part of what made it special was a guy called Danny Boyle . In those precious few minutes while we ate and talked, she told me how Boyle had gathered all of the ...