By Mordecai Specktor

Jim Denomie walks on
I was sad to learn that Jim Denomie, a very talented Anishinaabe artist, died March 1. He was from Lac Courte Oreilles (Wisc.).

Jim was a friendly, approachable guy; and his art meditated on Native history and depicted contemporary struggles, such as the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. His paintings were bursting with color and many reflected his sly sense of humor.

A series of paintings, “They Sing Their Death Song,” depicts the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minn., on December 26, 1862, and the hanging of Shakopee and Medicine Bottle at Fort Snelling, three years after the end of the U.S.-Dakota War.

Regarding this series, Robert Cozzolino, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, said, “They are powerful history paintings of our time, made with the knowledge that past and present speak to one another, talk back, argue, and ultimately strive for a future.”

Over recent years, Jim’s visionary art received greater recognition, with exhibitions in museums and galleries across the U.S. and abroad. May his memory always be a blessing for his loved ones.

Putin’s war in Ukraine
At the end of February, I turned to online periodicals and social media to follow the increasingly disturbing news from Ukraine. At this writing, the Russian dictator has unleased artillery shells and missiles across the country, and launched a full-scale invasion.

Apart from his rhetoric about hitting military targets, Putin’s troops are targeting Ukrainian civilians – a war crime. And a few days into the conflict raging in Eastern Europe, the Ukrainians are putting up a valiant resistance to the invaders. Also, antiwar demonstrations have popped up in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and other Russian cities; cops have arrested some 2,000 people.

The Irish writer James Joyce once said something like “America is the sweepings of all nations” – i.e., apart from the Native people, along with Black people whose ancestors survived the transatlantic slave trade, we’re here in the U.S. mainly because our forebears didn’t want to starve in the Old World or become cannon fodder in some insane imperial war.

With the press focus on Ukraine, I recently retrieved the original copy of my maternal grandmother’s Soviet passport – she lived in Kyiv and the document is actually from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Some of the writing on the document is in both Ukrainian and Russian. Her name was Rebecca Levenberg, and she was 22 when she came to America in 1923. She lived through the Russian revolution, civil war and anti-Jewish pogroms (mass killings) by Cossack militia men. I should clarify that I’m not Ukrainian; my Jewish grandparents fled the killing fields of Ukraine about 100 years ago.

My grandmother’s passport has myriad immigration stamps: apparently, her escape route included Riga, Latvia; London; and Halifax, Nova Scotia. I’ll have to look again to see if there’s a U.S. immigration stamp. My paternal grandfather, Benjamin Specktor, served in the czar’s army in Siberia. He told me a little about that time when I was very young.

When his father died, Ben the soldier was allowed to travel back to his hometown, Tiraspol, which is now in Moldova, for the funeral. He kept going and made his way to Canada, then entered the U.S. illegally. He was never a U.S. citizen.

While some elements of the Republican Party openly support Putin in his aggression against Ukraine – Trump called it “very savvy” and a “genius” move – another line of attack faults Biden for ostensibly weakening this country’s gas and oil production. (Some deluded folks on social media seem to think that Biden goes into the Oval Office each morning and dials up the price on gas pumps across the country.)

In fact, Putin’s war machine floats on a sea of fossil fuels, oil and natural gas, which power Western Europe and other nations. The same goes for tyrants in the oil-rich Middle East that kill political opponents and chop up their bodies.

Groups like the American Petroleum Institute are seizing on the Ukraine crisis to make a pitch for increasing oil and gas production. Of course, Native people have been resisting energy projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline and other boondoggles for years. In addition to exacerbating the climate crisis and destroying our natural environment, we can see the untallied cost of fossil fuels in the depraved behavior of Vladimir Putin. The energy hard path is killing Mother Earth and all of us that depend the planet’s bounty.