Alex-jon Earl

On October 6th, 2014, something monumental happened in Seattle--no, I’m not talking about the Seahawks win (though more on that in a moment), I’m talking about the Seattle City Council passing a resolution to honor Indigenous People’s Day on the Day Formerly Known as Columbus Day (DFKACD). This resolution...

So much of what we as urban Indians do is stymied by study and data. In the 19th Century it was the Indian Agents and Commissioners. In the 20th anthropologists (see Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins for more on that). Today? It’s some of all of the...

An enduring myth of modern indigeneity is the notion that we are locked into our homelands, venturing out only once in a while to get a feel for the white world. We are the stuff of John Ford films, constantly raising the ire of John Wayne types as they...

At 4:15pm on August 30, 2010, an officer responded to the life’s work of one Native man in the worst of all possible ways. Since then we’ve seen no progress in fixing what led to this event. The laws that shielded an officer from justice are still there, urban Indians...

  I’m not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination but I do think and I do see inspiration in words like those in Matthew 25:40. I take this sort of thing seriously, and by the by a lot of what I write and right will end up...

  Of all the recent regional policy discussions to fall behind the couch in urbanist circles perhaps the most important is on the topic of fish. In short, Governor Inslee is considering changes to clean water standards that could potentially increase allowable cancer rates in fish tenfold while grossly underestimating the...

Portland’s newest car-free bridge will be named “Tilikum Crossing”, and it’s by no accident or quirky Portlandia-style convention. Prior to the settlement of the Pacific Northwest, before the Bostons hauled their canoes up on the shore,this land was--and still is--a busy land of indigenous peoples of all sorts. Among these in Portland...