Native American Rights and US Law
According to oral family tradition, I'm part Cherokee. I think about 3 percent. That led to me creating a blog called Native Influence.
The backstory for that is explained in a post on Witness to Destruction. It took me a while to find my voice, but I eventually did.
I was molested by my father and brother. I don't believe either of them was actually a pedophile (someone attracted to children).
My brother is only 4.5 years older than me. My recollection is that's the average age difference between a husband and wife in a first marriage. It's more like seven years for a second marriage.
If he hadn't been my brother and forcing himself on me, the age difference per se wouldn't make anyone give pause about us being sexually involved. And he stopped of his own volition and later made amends.
My father was a newly head injured Vietnam vet. He returned from Vietnam and I was an adorable toddler with a bubbly personality much of the time. Between my blond curls and usually bubbly personality, my mom used to call me Shirley Temple when I was little.
My Dad came back from the war and I think he wanted to spend time with me and soak up bubbles and giggles and forget the war and things got weird. And then I guess his head injury improved and he stopped of his own volition.
And I believe he also made significant personal sacrifices to try to protect me and do right by me. My first version of the blog Native Influence caused me to conclude he most likely left the military when he did, which caused him to fail to keep a promise to my mother, because "I'll be damned if they are sending me back to Vietnam and putting me at risk of doing that to my daughter again."
I've read a lot of books and articles over the years by or about sexual trauma, "bad sexual behavior" of various sorts -- such as prostitution -- etc. AND I talk to people and they act like I'm their NEW BEST FRIEND FOR LIFE and then they HATE me when I try to shut that down because I was just making small talk. So I have had multiple people dump on me like I'm their therapist and share intimate details of their lives with me, etc.
I think I know an uncommon amount about the subject and my experiences don't appear to be the norm.
My initial attempt to write Native Influence got extremely overly personal as I tried to sort out what the hell happened there. And I ended up redacting it.
I hear voices. The lengthy footnote will elaborate some on that.
I wrote all this extremely personal stuff and I didn't really have an audience or traffic, but the crap in my head was really bad. And I believed I was being stalked and psychically harassed by a married man who is a prominent public figure in the Native community and he was saying all this SHIT to me about wanting to marry me.
For purposes of deciding that I should redact the blog entirely, it's not important whether I am having a psychic experience or I'm just NUTS. I wanted this crap in my head to stop.
But as a thought experiment for purposes of deciding how to handle this, let's say I'm not crazy and I really am being stalked and PSYCHICALLY sexually harassed by an esteemed married man with a prominent public career.
I had an actual affair with a man in the flesh who was a minister and officer in the military at the time and I ultimately decided to end the relationship because he wasn't showing up, he wasn't helping me leave my marriage, etc. and I concluded he would never do right by me.
I've read the research. Affairs don't destroy marriages. Dying marriages foster affairs because people who want out want someone else to meet their sexual and emotional needs to help them get out and it's the exception, not the rule, if that leads to marriage.
People typically have affairs with someone providing what their marriage lacks. Tom Fejeran was the first serious relationship I had as I was leaving my marriage of two decades and he was much more emotional and social than my ex-husband and it was initially music to my ears but eventually became "Dude, give it a rest."
So what I think typically happens is someone is starved for something, has a buffet of that and then goes and finds something more long term compatible.
My firsthand experience and the academic literature and all the magazine articles etc, all agree that it's really tough to get a man to actually leave his wife for you and actually marry you even if you are sleeping with him in the flesh.
So, no, I'm not going to buy this BS that a man I am barely Internet acquainted with who has replied to my tweet @ him exactly ONCE (IIRC) is going to leave his wife for me based on a PSYCHIC affair while not finding excuses to email me or whatever and start laying the groundwork for establishing a real relationship.
So I removed the ENTIRE thing from that first attempt to write about my interest in Native stuff because this was a horrible horrible thing happening in the landscape of my mind and I saw no good coming of leaving those posts online, even though it helped me sort MY baggage and changed my mind about what happened in my childhood.
So I don't regret writing it. I don't wish I hadn't written it.
But my mind about events in my childhood is permanently altered. It's not going back to what it was. And whatever was happening "in the present" at that time, I didn't need more of that regardless of the explanation for what was happening.
I don't recall how many times I tried to figure out how to write Native Influence. At least three or four.
So attempt probably number two, I was trying to make it less "free therapy for Doreen Traylor" and more "What am I comfortable saying publicly that other people might ACTUALLY be interested in?" And it was again a MISERABLE experience where I felt it was attracting a lot of HATRED from Natives.
I don't need this shit. My life is hard enough, thanks. So I moved SOME of those pieces to Witness to Destruction -- where they remain even though that blog is again live -- and deleted the rest completely and dropped it and I didn't intend to try again.
Then something gelled in my mind one day and I wrote something in January of this year on that site. And the stuff in my head was different this time. I wasn't feeling sexually harassed and I wasn't feeling like I was being hated on.
So I still have the latest incarnation of that blog because, crazy or not, I FEEL okay about it and I'm not scared it's going to get me violently assaulted or something like that.
Earlier today, I tripped across a note I have had at least since October 2025, in drafts on Witness to Destruction titled mmiw North Dakota Man Camps Oil Development.
That's not intended to be a title for a post. That gibberish is notes to me about what this is. A largely unformatted copy of that note is in the footnote on a piece on Witness to Destruction called Peace is not just an absence of something.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/s/P3wbsF0J7C
Tribal governments, stripped of power by Oliphant v. Suquamish in 1978, have no authority to prosecute non-Native offenders – even when the crime happens on their own land. Federal prosecutors, nominally entrusted with these cases, decline the majority of them, citing limited resources or ambiguous evidence. State police often defer to federal agencies or claim they lack jurisdiction. The result is an elaborate bureaucratic ritual in which survivors recount their trauma again and again, only to watch their cases evaporate.
A recent previous piece by me on this site called MMIW Stuff does link back to the link above called Three Posts from a Defunct Blog... but doesn't seem to link back to the piece with those notes in the footnote and those notes in the footnote are legal citations.
If you are employed in our legal system and care about the welfare of this country AT ALL, you need to know about Oliphant v. Suquamish in 1978 and I encourage you to read Peace is not just an absence of something.
Because when the law establishes such a GIANT legal loophole for raping and murdering specific demographics in specific geographic locations, what you have created for your country is a FREE training ground for serial killers and serial rapists and rampant criminals to practice their craft and get good at it without fear of ANY consequences.
And then those people live among you and appear to be gainfully employed decent people with no criminal record while plotting to rape and murder your sister or wife or mother or daughter under less forgiving circumstances where they need skill to get away with it instead of relying on systemic racism and historic and ongoing genocide to sweep it under the rug no matter how sloppy their first few crimes are.
I don't really care what the consequences are of me pointing out the socially unacceptable obvious conclusion. I'm still homeless and there seems to be no way out of my mess and I'm probably on track to DIE on the street in the near future.
But if you aren't resigned to your horrific fate and want to live in a nice world, maybe stop pretending that worrying about "stupid shit like Native rights for those whiny redskins" is something you need to do as charity for THEIR sake and realize that your idiotic policies are breeding grounds for career criminals of the worst kind and they aren't limiting their abuses to people of the wrong color whom we all agree it's okay to not really care about even though odds are good you, like me, have SOME Native blood.
Footnote
Richard Feynman had a form of synesthesia and I don't know how open he was about that in life, but it gets written about these days. He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and people talk like his mental quirk was COOL and probably most people think it contributed to his success.
Joan of Arc heard voices. She played handmaiden to the birth of modern France. I was saying a LOT of years ago on parenting lists when my grown sons were children and I was homeschooling them that if Joan of Arc was alive today she would be in a psych ward having her meds adjusted.
I hear voices and it's not a socially acceptable mental quirk to admit to these days. I'm not happy about hearing voices. I think it's a psychic experience and I very much wish they would STFU and leave me ALONE. I began writing in reply to The Voices in hopes of getting them out my hair and it's a positive feedback loop AKA vicious cycle and the more I talk to The Voices, the more of my time it takes with NO upside for ME.
But that's largely WHY I continue to blog with no audience -- because I'm frequently addressing stuff in my head that I can't prove is people psychically contacting me -- and if you are reading this site and going "Wow! She makes so much SENSE!!!!" and scratching your head as to how a socially isolated LOSER with no life is doing THAT, maybe consider the possibility that I'm not that socially isolated.
I don't think I ever mentioned hearing voices in my comments on Metafilter or Cyburbia or Hacker News, but I have Swiss cheese for brains and maybe I did and don't remember doing so. However, I'm certain I didn't harp on it.
I've been careful to try to NOT sound like a loon, but it's not actually a secret. I mentioned it a lot of years ago on a homeless blog of mine in hopes of helping other homeless people figure out how to make their lives work because maybe being psychic contributes to mental health issues or gets you dismissed as a psych job instead of taken seriously and "Homeless people are all junkies and crazies!" is a tiresome trope blaming homeless people for their problems so we can pretend we don't really have an obligation to resolve the nationwide housing crisis while we keep ASSHOLE in office in Washington so he can enrich his children with politically unjustifiable wars.
I also talked about it briefly recently on a health blog in a post about Schizophrenia:
But I also hear voices that I believe are probably other people thinking too loud and I've made some effort to check that hypothesis. And my debacle of a life works less bad when I operate on the assumption that the voices I hear are other people communicating with me psychically and -- like anyone -- they have their own agenda and they may be lying etc.It's problematic to ignore the voices entirely and also problematic to assume it's trustworthy information.
The first link above on the homeless site talks about my mom trying to convince people she was psychic and my opinion that she probably was but chose a terrible means to try to deal with the social element. Her negative experiences with trying desperately to get people to believe her informed my decision to not wear this stuff on my sleeve and, instead, try to manage it another way.
I don't think I'm schizophrenic. My older sister has a bachelor's degree in psychology. Yes, I have written criticisms of her on this site and I suspect she cheated on her SAT and probably broke into the university computers to change a grade or two to not lose her scholarship, but as far as I know MOST of her academic credentials were earned.
So she had a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Georgia in Journalism and double majored in journalism and psychology and completed a double degree in four years.
She completed all general education requirements to earn most degrees, all her journalism requirements to keep her scholarship and all psychology requirements to get the degree she actually wanted.
And after her divorce while her long distance boyfriend dithered on whether or not to move where she was and marry her, she took at least a couple of masters level classes in psychology because she was contemplating getting her master's degree and changing careers.
She told me once "We must not have the genes for schizophrenia or someone in the family would have it." So I personally see that as an informed opinion by someone with appropriate professional credentials that whatever the hell is going on with me, I'm probably not schizophrenic.
She knew ME well, she knew MY family well because she is part of it and she has appropriate education. This was NOT a casual comment. It's something she thought about a fair amount.
There's more to schizophrenia than hearing voices and my sister didn't ever look at me and go "Maybe you should get that checked because you ain't RIGHT."
I believe I was borderline for multiple personality disorder at one time. I've written about that elsewhere.
I mentioned that once on Metafilter and they deleted it and made sympathetic noises while pissing all over me because I was homeless and that was their standard operating procedure for interacting with me.
I was molested as a child. I'm extremely open about that and have been since I was a teenager. I have more recently begun being open about "it was my brother and father and that makes me a victim of incest twice over."
Do I have mental health issues? Maybe. Maybe not.
We don't really know what goes on inside the minds of most people and certain things are not socially acceptable to talk about. Links above support my argument that most NOMINALLY White Americans are probably technically mixed race and part Native because we murder people and refuse to hire them etc etc etc if you don't pass for White and agree to call yourself White.
Similarly, if you are at ALL capable of appearing to be "normal" and are competent and making your life work, only a fool would volunteer that the extremely private details of the landscape of their mind are details that confessing to could get you locked up for.
The way our minds work and what is actually normal for what is happening between our ears is "a final frontier" -- an unexplored territory with insufficient documented hard data to say what's normal.
If you want to dismiss me as "incompetent" AKA NUTS, cool. My opinion: The way to bet is you're also a classist jackass like the people on Metafilter and also won't take me seriously because I'm poor, but that's not a socially acceptable reason to give. And/or you're a misogynistic jackass who will NEVER take a woman seriously and that's also not socially acceptable to openly admit, so you need a GOOD excuse.
If you want to take me seriously, then take this under advisement:
In my experience, Natives and Blacks trend more psychically sensitive than Whites.
So in addition to White European colonizers nearly exterminating Native Americans in a multiple hundreds of years and ongoing campaign of genocide in the name of Manifest Destiny that makes what happened to Jews for a few years during World War II look like a paper cut, maybe they don't trust you because they can hear your shitty racist thoughts while you imagine every shitty thing in your skull is COMPLETELY private.
(This piece is NOT about Black Americans, but ditto that for Black Americans: Maybe some of them are hearing the racist SHIT you imagine is entirely private.)