Posts published in April 2014

The Houston Rockets made the playoffs this year and I’m particularly interested in the Rockets because Jeremy Lin is on that team. I am fascinated by Lin’s career and what I think his experience reveals about professional basketball, cultural mediocrity, economic collapse and catastrophic climate change.

In November of 1969 three boats took members of twenty tribes from all over the country to occupy Alcatraz, reclaiming it as “Indian land and demanding fairness and respect for Indian Peoples.” The spokesman for the Indians was a Mohawk from New York named Richard Oakes, who offered the U.S. Government “$24 in glass beads and red cloth.” Oakes said, “We hold The Rock,” and that became the movement’s motto. Unfortunately, a few months later his 12-year-old daughter fell from a three-story structure in the prison and died. He left the Island shortly after, as did many others during the 18-month occupation.