Connecting Circles

09/06/2026

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a law granting U.S. citizenship to every Native American born within the country, decades after many had already fought and died in its wars.

The Indian Citizenship Act came after roughly 12,000 Native Americans served in World War I despite not being considered citizens at all, exposing a contradiction the government could no longer ignore. But citizenship on paper didn't mean equal rights in practice, some states continued blocking Native Americans from voting for decades afterward using other legal loopholes, and full voting access in every state wasn't secured until 1962.

Fighting for a country that wouldn't even count you as one of its citizens. How long do you think the gap should have been allowed to last between the two?

09/05/2026

Bellingham has a history of expelling Asians. In 1907, it was Indians.

September 4, 1907: A mob of four to five hundred white workers in Bellingham, Washington gathered to drive a community of South Asian migrant workers out of the city.

Most of the roughly 250 men targeted were Sikh laborers from Punjab, working in local lumber mills for lower wages than white workers were paid. Rioters broke into the mills and pulled them from their jobs, then tore through their bunkhouses, destroying and stealing what they found. Some men were beaten in the streets. Others were rounded up and held overnight in the basement of city hall, ostensibly for their own protection.

Within days, nearly all of them had fled north across the border into Canada. It didn’t make them safe. Three days later, a mob in Vancouver rioted against Chinese and Japanese residents there too, partly stirred up by news of what had just happened in Bellingham.

Many of the men in the Bellingham mob belonged to the Japanese-Korean Exclusion League, a group founded two years earlier in San Francisco to push for laws barring Japanese and Korean immigration. The League’s members had already been agitating against South Asian workers beforehand, when its leadership arrived within days to seize on the moment. They held a mass meeting demanding further Oriental exclusion laws, and shortly after, renamed the group the Asiatic Exclusion League, broadening its mission to include South Asians too.

This wasn’t a one time event for the city. Twenty two years earlier, in 1885, a mob had driven out Bellingham’s Chinese residents the same way. Thirty five years after that, Japanese Americans across the West Coast, including many in Bellingham, were forced from their homes into incarceration camps during WWII.

In 2018, Bellingham dedicated a monument, the Arch of Healing and Reconciliation, to all three communities the city once expelled.

09/01/2026

🩺 THE EXTINCTION PROTOCOL

In the 1960s and 1970s, Indigenous women in the United States were subjected to serious abuses within federally funded healthcare systems. 🇺🇸⚖️

Investigations found cases in which Indian Health Service doctors performed sterilizations without adequately informed consent, including procedures involving women who did not fully understand what they were agreeing to. 📋🩸

A 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation found that four IHS service areas had performed 3,406 sterilizations on Indian women between 1973 and 1976. Later investigations and testimony documented additional cases of coercion and inadequate consent.

The often-repeated claim that the government sterilized 25% of all Native American women of childbearing age is disputed and appears to originate from an extrapolation that has been criticized by researchers. The documented abuses are serious enough without overstating the numbers.

The deeper injustice was the violation of bodily autonomy and informed consent:

Healthcare became a place where some Indigenous women were pressured into permanent reproductive decisions they had not freely chosen. 🕯️

When a patient cannot freely say yes or no, it isn't informed consent.

«“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the State, am the people.’”
— Friedrich Nietzsche»

🧵 THE DARK HISTORY OF POLITICS

08/29/2026

☘️ The same women who were told they owed allegiance to a foreign power and couldn't be trusted built the largest private hospital network and the largest private school system in the history of the United States. They were Irish nuns and most Americans have never heard their story.

When the Famine Irish arrived in American cities in the late 1840s they arrived into a country that viewed Catholic women in religious orders with open suspicion. Protestant ministers gave public sermons warning their congregations that nuns were instruments of a Vatican plot to undermine American democracy. Convents were accused of harboring foreign agents. In 1834 a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts had been burned to the ground by a Protestant mob. The women who stepped off ships from Ireland into that environment and immediately went to work building hospitals and schools did so in the face of organized institutional hostility.

Seven Sisters of Mercy left County Carlow in 1843 and arrived in Pittsburgh, where the bishop had begged for nuns to staff his diocese. The oldest of them was twenty-four years old. Within years they had founded a hospital, a high school, and an orphanage. They moved to Chicago, where Sister Mary Vincent McGirr established Mercy Hospital, the first permanent hospital and first teaching hospital in the city. She was a novice when she arrived. President Abraham Lincoln visited a military hospital staffed by the Sisters of Mercy during the Civil War and wrote afterward that of all the charity and benevolence he witnessed in the crowded wards, that of the Catholic sisters was among the most efficient.

By 1968 there were approximately 204,000 women religious in the United States, the vast majority of them from Irish and Irish-American backgrounds, staffing 10,000 schools, colleges, and universities and running the largest private hospital network in the nation. By 1870 twenty percent of all schoolteachers in New York City were Irish women. By 1890 Irish women comprised two-thirds of teachers in some New York City school districts. The nuns did the same work as their lay counterparts for one-third of the salary and asked for nothing in return. The hospital you were born in, the school that educated your parents or grandparents, the social safety net that caught Irish immigrant families when nothing else would, a significant portion of all of it was built by women who arrived from Ireland in habits, in a country that didn't want them, and simply got to work. Follow The Irish Remembered for more. ☘️

08/27/2026

08/27/2026

Today AB 2115 was voted off the Assembly Floor and is moving to the Governor’s Desk! In honor of my mother this bill is known as the Rowena Mae Ramos Act.

It requires the State of California, and the Legislature in particular, to recognize and accept responsibility for harms caused to California Native Americans and to issue and memorialize a formal apology. This bill will also require that a plaque be displayed in the State Capitol to memorialize the Legislature’s apology.

In the almost eight years since Governor Newsom’s apology. However, the Legislature and courts have not yet to acknowledge their own roles in the massacres, denial of civil protections, and rights such as the right to vote and other abuses. It is time for California to recognize these historical injustices.