Native Americans and Traffic Cameras

Rally remarks 11-23-25

Thank you for coming out this Sunday before Thanksgiving—which, as many of us learned in elementary school, was when the Indians and the Pilgrims in the early days shared a feast in peace and friendship, right? Now we know it was much more complicated than that, a mutually tense diplomatic meeting to which the Wampanoag delegation warily brought their own food to the dinner--five deer--because they didn’t trust what the colonists were eating.

If you’ve watched Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein’s new documentary on public television, The American Revolution, you know that among many other revelations, the series carefully documents the very complex set of roles indigenous peoples had in the Revolutionary period. Some tribes aligned with the rebel Americans, while others strategically allied with the British and helped them in their early battle successes. The British monarchy’s rule of the colonies had set a clear western boundary for white settlement, at least in deed respecting indigenous sovereignty, while it’s the Americans who would conquer their way westward in the quest for unlimited natural resources to mine and land to farm.

This history presents quite a contrast to what the Trump Administration would have us and our children know of the truth of the Revolutionary period—and the reality of the present day. By vilifying DEI--the principle of honoring diversity, equity, and inclusion--the Administration impoverishes our imaginations and our hearts, stripping the gears on the American values we should be celebrating with our neighbors at Thanksgiving.  Trump and his courtiers talk about bringing back American values, in a vision that obliterates the original Americans as well as brown Americans, black Americans, the stew of people and accents and music and dance and foods that has made our society great.

 Just think: in reality, three native American women are now running for state governorships next year—Paulette Jordan in Idaho, former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in New Mexico, and Amelia Schaffer in South Dakota. In our long history as a relative democracy, that is something to celebrate!

Despite the good feelings that arose from election victories on November 4, the deeply disturbing reality is that the United States is becoming an authoritarian state, a police state, a surveillance state. One of the biggest developments of the past week was the incident involving six members of Congress who issued a video—responding to the Administration’s alarming use of the military in American cities and to kill people in boats in the Caribbean. In their video they advise military personnel to uphold the Constitution and refuse illegal orders. Trump reacted by blasting them for their “seditious” statements; he tweeted that they should be executed by hanging. Imagine any other president advocating the execution, the lynching, of members of Congress, to realize how far down the rabbit hole we have come. 

And our own constitutional rights? Increasingly imperiled. A recent presidential memorandum known as NSPM-7 defines a nearly unlimited range of progressive political views as indicators of “domestic terrorism”–you can read it on the official White House webpage--and then it directs the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to investigate any organization that may have committed such thought crimes.

Further, The Guardian reports that the FBI has spied on a Signal group chat among immigration activists in New York who monitor public proceedings at immigration courts. The FBI, having hacked into the activists’ chat, calls them—and we’re not kidding you-- “anarchist violent extremist actors.” The FBI is justifying their move to access our private communications, even on Signal. This is the very definition of the surveillance state.

Still further, access to data stored by traffic cameras—the kind that record your car and its license plate—can now allow the government to locate anyone who’s driving.

Many municipalities across the country and across the state of Washington are responding quickly to this danger, particularly with vulnerable immigrants in mind as the Trump Administration pursues its purge of brown people.

This year Poulsbo installed three new traffic cameras to catch drivers who speed or run traffic lights. Now that the danger of state surveillance has become known, we have repeatedly asked our city officials about these particular cameras’ vulnerability to hacking by the FBI or any other bad actors. They answer that the company that operates the cameras has assured them that the data from Poulsbo’s cameras will not be used by any other party, and they trust that.

Everything’s fine, trust us. With a racist dictator in charge, and a Stephen Miller turning the knob of immigration policy to its highest cruelty setting, are we paranoid to say that it’s naïve to think there’s no problem here? We think that our elected leaders and our police force lack the knowledge and initiative to protect the public from surveillance by the federal government.

Timothy Snyder writes that he was in Washington DC the other day, where he saw the immense pit for the construction of the new White House bunker and ballroom, and there were barriers set up and cops obliging you to cross to the other side of the street. To him this disruption, this transformation of the People’s House into a place that doesn’t welcome the people at all, is perfectly symbolic of the United States now:

“If there is an America on the other side of this, it will have to be a different country, a better one, based not on the restoration of hopes that people my age once had, but on a broader sense of the future, a better American dream.  I think that this America is in there, beneath the pain and the indignation; I believe it is out there, among the voters and the protests. It will take work, work not of pits and barriers, but of organization and courage.”

Keep your voices loud, friends, support the blackout this Thanksgiving week, remember whose ancestral lands we’re standing on, and bon appétit.