Supreme Court(Photo: Getty Images)

In a decision hailed as a landmark in federal Indian law, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week that much of Oklahomas tribal lands had never been rescinded, and that the state had no criminal jurisdictionover those lands.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the courts four liberal justices in the 5-4 decision and wrote the opinionfor the case, McGirt v. Oklahoma.

The ruling primarily affects who gets to prosecute tribal members for serious crimes on tribal lands, and it won't affect non-Indian prosecutions by tribes or property ownership. However, some Indian law experts believe the ruling may lead to more civil and regulatory oversight by tribal governments on land within historic reservation boundaries.

And it's unclear yet whether the case can be used by some Arizona tribes to reclaim sovereignty over lands that were removed from original reservation boundaries.

Robert J. Miller, a law professor at the Sandra Day OConnor College of Laws Indian Legal Program in Arizona State University, said language holds the key to determining if any Arizona tribal nations are eligible to pursue a similar remedy."What did Congress say?" he said. "Ifit did not expressly take away the tribe's reservation or change its borders, then things that happen later do not."

The case was brought by Jimcy McGirt, a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma in east-central Oklahoma. McGirt was convicted in state court on rape charges and sentenced to life in prison. The crime was committed within the reservation lands that had been established for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in 1832. A subsequent treaty enacted in 1866 reduced the Creek land base to its current 3-million-acre historical boundary, but also compensated the tribe for the lostlands. Serious crimes committed by American Indians on tribal lands come underfederal jurisdiction through the Major Crimes Act.

The state of Oklahoma argued in part that since the lands had been allotted in small parcels to individual Native citizens through an 1887 law known as the Dawes Act, the trust land status of the reservation had been rescinded, and the land should now be considered subject to state law.

However, McGirts attorney, Ian Gershengorn, countered that since the law authorizing the allotments never actually removed reservation (also known as trust land) status from those lands, federal and not state courts had jurisdiction over the case.

The Supreme Court agreed. On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise, Gorsuch wrote. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever.

The case, he wrote, asked the Supreme Court whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.

Gorsuch is versed in federal Indian law, and his appointment in 2017 was hailed by many Indian law experts and tribal nations as a voice for understanding and applying the law to the governments interactions with tribes. Hes known as an originalist or, as one legal blog notes, Gorsuch believes the U.S. Constitution should be construed as it was by its original drafters. Hes also the only Westerner on the court.

Miller said that the ruling affects only the Creek treaty lands and the nearly 1.1 million people living within the historic Creek boundary line.Miller is an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe in far northeastern Oklahoma, which also was part of the allotment act era.

However, if all the so-calledFive Civilized Tribes, which also include the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations with lands that were placed into trust in the 19th century choose to pursue similar remedies, some 1.8 million residents would be affected. AndMiller said that others of the 39 tribes in Oklahomamay have similar standing to reassert sovereignty over their historic reservation boundaries.

In the second paragraph of the decision, Gorsuch states the issue the court is answering, Miller said. The Supremes are very specific and careful about the exact question they are addressing in appeals; it is only about criminal jurisdiction.

Indian nations don't have criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians except for narrowly-defined circumstances, most notably when a tribal court obtains authorization from the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute domestic violence suspects under the Violence Against Women Act.

Also, a document shared by the Native American Rights Fund and the Native American Journalists Association said that land ownership in the historic Creek lands would not beaffected by the ruling.

But Miller also said that there could be some changes underway in the historic Creek lands. For example, tribal members may no longer be subject to state taxation if they live and work within the boundaries, he said. Non-Indians who own land within the Creek Nation may find that the tribe now has some zoning or regulatory jurisdiction. They might be taken to tribal court for civil cases.

Miller said that McGirt could now be prosecuted by the federal government, given the heinous nature of his crime, which involved raping a 4-year-old girl."Federal criminal penalties are often harsher than state ones. So Mr. McGirt or future Indian defendants sometimes face higher criminal sentences because of the federal system," Miller said. The Creek Nation could also prosecute McGirt, but since tribes can only sentence a convicted person to no more than 1 year in jail, the feds would be the logical court totake the case, he said.

Miller said that the 21 Indian reservations in Arizona may or may not be affected by the decision. "If Congress did the removing [of tribal lands], it's valid," he said. "Congress has the power to abrogate Indian treaties and U.S. treaties with foreign governments." However, Miller said Congress must say "expressly" that a reservation is diminished, or its lands reduced, or disestablished, or returned to federal, state or local control, as several other cases specify.

If a tribe were to determine that parts of its lands were taken without express congressional statement and some kind of payment for those lands, a suit could be brought to remedy that, Miller said.

At least one Arizona tribe, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, has had their original trust lands reduced.

Their lands werediminishedfive times between 1872 and 1902 by a series of presidential actions. This included oneof themost sacred places to Apache people.Dzi Nchaa S'an, known now as Mount Graham, was placed under public domain in 1873 and is now part of Coronado National Forest.

Miller comparedGorsuch's written opinion to "judicial poetry," and said that the justice has been what Native rights organizations like the National Congress of American Indians hoped for;"Gorsuch knows some Indian law and does not hesitate to vote for tribal positions even when conservatives would probably argue that he has turned into a liberal."

Debra Utacia Krol covers Indigenous issues atthe intersection of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Southwest. Reach the reporter at debra.krol@AZCentral.com or at 602-444-8490. Follow her on Twitter at @debkrol.

Coverage of tribal issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation and the Water FunderInitiative.

Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

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Supreme Court ruling expanded tribal land. What does that mean for Arizona? - AZCentral

Within one family, both the mother and daughter had important roles to advocate for the people they represented in their seats of power: The mother, Magdalena (Carpenter) Birch, advocated figuratively, and the daughter, Jocelyn (Birch) Burdick, did so literally.

Magdalena, Baums niece, is said to have been the inspiration for Dorothy in her uncles classic childrens book. Jocelyn Burdick was a U.S. Senator, the first woman to represent North Dakota in the Senate.

Magdalena (Carpenter) Birch. Special to The Forum

"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was published in May 1900 and proved to be very popular, selling out within weeks of its publication. The text of the book was then adapted into a theatrical musical and it premiered at the Chicago Grand Opera House on June 16, 1902.

Because of its huge success, the musical was moved to the Majestic Theater on Broadway on Jan. 21, 1903, where it ran for 293 performances. The original cast then went on traveling tours across the U.S.

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Meanwhile, life was changing for Magdalenas family. Dry summers, severe winters and poor grain prices had forced the Carpenters off of their land. In 1899, they moved their house off of the farm and into Edgeley, N.D., where her father, James, started a dray line business, transporting goods within the town. In 1901, the Carpenters moved to Fargo, and James became an insurance salesman.

Despite his new fame and fortune, Baum continued to remember the Carpenters. This was evidenced during the early part of the new century when Baum, under the pseudonym Laura Bancroft, began publishing "The Twinkle Tales." Originally, there were six individual stories, each published in a booklet, centering on the adventures of Twinkle in Edgeley that were reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland.

Twinkle was an inquisitive farm girl who was constantly swept away into the world of enchantment. She and her friend, Chubbins, were miniaturized by a prairie dog magician and then entered the world of sugar people. In 1906, these six stories were combined into a book titled "The Twinkle Tales," which was followed by "Policeman Bluejay" in 1907 and "Babes in Birdland" and "Twinkle and Chubbins" in 1911.

With his success as a writer established, a new opportunity was opening up that Baum hoped to capitalize on motion pictures. In 1908, he wrote, produced and starred in the two-hour movie "The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays." Even though it received good reviews, it did not have adequate funding and closed after appearing in only two cities.

Undeterred, he and his wife, Maud, moved from Chicago to Hollywood in 1910 and bought a home that he named Ozcot. For the next six years, Baum produced eight movies based on his writing, and on May 5, 1919, he died at his home in Hollywood.

Magdalena attended public schools in Fargo and went to college at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1913. She then taught school in Iowa and South Dakota before marrying Albert Birch on Nov. 20, 1913. Albert, who was originally from Minto, N.D., was also a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in civil engineering.

The newlyweds relocated to Great Falls, Mont., and Albert was employed as an engineering contractor. The couple later moved to Fargo and Albert joined his father, Steven Birch, in establishing a construction firm, S. Birch and Son. When Steven died in 1942, Albert became president of the company and Magdalena became vice president, a position she held until her death on Oct. 9, 1948.

Albert and Magdalena Birch raised two daughters, Jocelyn and Helen. Jocelyn, who was born on Feb. 6, 1922, was named in honor of her great-grandmother, Matilda Joslyn Gage. Jocelyn grew up in Fargo, but also spent considerable time living with her aunt, Maud Baum, in Hollywood.

Following her graduation from Central High School in Fargo, Jocelyn attended Principia College, a private liberal arts college in Elsah, Ill. Two years later, she transferred to Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., and graduated in 1943 with a degree in speech.

Jocelyn (Birch) Burdick. Special to The Forum

Jocelyn returned to Fargo and worked as a radio announcer and disc jockey for the KVOX radio station. Jocelyn married Kenneth Peterson in 1948, but 10 years later, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

On July 7, 1960, she married Quentin Burdick, who had been elected U.S. Senator one week earlier. Quentin was reelected to the Senate five times, and when he died in office on Sept. 8, 1992, North Dakota Gov. George Sinner appointed Jocelyn to fill his vacancy four days later, which made her the first woman to serve as a U.S. Senator from the state of North Dakota.

Jocelyn finished out her husbands term, which lasted until Dec. 14, 1992, and then returned to her home in Fargo, where she remained active in politics. On April 6, 2019, she again made news when, with the death of Fritz Hollings from South Carolina, she became the oldest living former U.S. Senator. Jocelyn died on Dec. 26, 2019.

In 1964, historians began to look at "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" in a new light. Similar to Jonathan Swifts "Gullivers Travels," it is a childrens book that is also believed to be a satirical take on the political, social and economic situation of the time.

While Baum was a newspaperman in Aberdeen, S.D., during the late 1880s and early 1890s, many farmers lost their land because of the low prices they received for their produce and the severe drought that occurred at the same time. Baum embraced populism, a political movement that opposed the tactics of the railroads, bankers, millers and elevator owners who exploited the small farmers.

Many historians saw similarities between the characters in "Oz" and the groups of people in the Midwest. The Wicked Witch of the East represented the eastern industrialists and the bankers who controlled the people (the Munchkins). The Wicked Witch of the West represented the drought that melted away after Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her.

The Scarecrow was based on the wise but exploited Midwestern farmer, and the Tin Woodman was the dehumanized industrial worker. The Cowardly Lion represented William Jennings Bryan, who roared about the way the people were treated, but lacked the courage to do anything about it. The Wizard represented the presidents of the time who operated out of Washington, D.C. (Emerald City).

Who did Dorothy represent? Some wrote that she represented the American people: level-headed, innocent and naive, but when determined, capable of defeating the evil forces around her.

Baums description of Dorothy Gales home is that of Magdalena Carpenters home. Dorothy lived on a farm with her aunt and uncle, who were poor. Dorothys simple wood-frame home on the gray prairie very closely paralleled the Carpenter home as Magdalena described it to her daughter, Jocelyn Burdick.

The bleak setting near Edgeley was well-experienced by Baum, who was a frequent guest at the Carpenters' farmstead. In 1899, the Carpenters were forced to give up their farm, one year before the publication of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

If Magdalena indeed was the inspiration for Dorothy, isnt it ironic that, 90 years later Magdalena Carpenters daughter, Jocelyn Burdick, represented North Dakota Munchkins in Emerald City?

ARCHIVE: "Did You Know That" columns

Did You Know That is written by Curt Eriksmoen and edited by Jan Eriksmoen of Fargo. Send your comments, corrections, or suggestions for columns to the Eriksmoens at cjeriksmoen@cableone.net.

Curt Eriksmoen, Did You Know That? columnist

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Eriksmoen: North Dakota mother and daughter represented people they cared about in 'Wizard of Oz' and the real-life Emerald City - Grand Forks Herald

The People, No

The People, No

Photo: Metropolitan, Handout

The People, No

The People, No

Book World: How elites distorted the meaning of populism

The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

By Thomas Frank

Metropolitan. 307 pp. $26.99

---

If one were to try to pinpoint the birthplace of populism, eastern Kansas - home to the honest-to-God geographical center of the U.S.A. - would be a solid bet, historically and metaphorically. During the drought-ridden years of the 1880s and 1890s, movements such as the Farmer's Alliance flourished there, promoting a vision of government that supported the interests of America's farmers over those of bankers, corporations and railroads. In the city of Winfield, the radical American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator newspaper was the first to use the term "populist" in print, referring to the new People's Party formed in 1891 to push collective bargaining, a graduated income tax and other people-centered policies. The Nonconformist was firmly in the populists' corner, but 150 miles to the north, Kansas's leading Republican newspaper derided the reformers as a gang of disgruntled hayseeds.

Nearly 130 years later, in the decade of Trump, Brexit and Bolsonaro, both of these views are alive and well. And as always, the populist label remains easier to apply than to define.

"From the very beginning . . . populism had two meanings," Thomas Frank instructs in his brilliantly written, eye-opening "The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism." "There was Populism as its proponents understood it, meaning a movement in which ordinary citizens demanded democratic economic reforms. And there was populism as its enemies characterized it: a dangerous movement of groundless resentment in which demagogues led the disreputable."

Frank - a former Harper's columnist, founding editor of the Baffler and best-selling author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" - is the ideal public intellectual to grapple with this duality. From 1891 to the rise of Trumpism, Frank walks readers through a minefield of assumptions about populism's nature and history. His reflections on the 1896 presidential election set the narrative's pace and tone, describing the new alliance between populists and Democrats that delivered the latter party's nomination to William Jennings Bryan, and the competing alliance of big business and Republicans that ultimately propelled William McKinley to victory and precipitated the populists' decline.

Stressing populism's egalitarian roots in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, Frank rails against modern Democratic and GOP elites for a disdainful attitude toward ordinary, hard-working people - an attitude he considers as "poisonous today as it was in the Victorian Era, or in the Great Depression." Frank calls out TV talking heads for stripping the populist label from Martin Luther King Jr. and the AFL-CIO, and instead linking it only to the xenophobia, racism and Twitter rants of the current president. By devaluing populism, he believes, America has abandoned the organic political values that produced the labor and civil rights movements and contributed to decades of broad-based prosperity. What's left is an almost cartoonishly polarized choice between Beltway elite meritocracy and bigoted, authoritarian Trumpism.

Frank devotes the middle chapters of "The People, No" to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which fused populism with a smart liberalism. Though it helped millions survive the Great Depression, it also earned endless opposition from Republicans, their Wall Street backers and most of America's big-city newspapers. Frank documents how the DuPont family and other wealthy industrialists founded and lavishly funded the right-wing American Liberty League to destroy Roosevelt, smearing him as a socialist and a traitor to his class.

Having enacted a flurry of New Deal programs in his first term, Roosevelt offered a full-throated lambasting of his conservative adversaries when he accepted the Democratic nomination for a second term in 1936. "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America," he thundered. "What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for."

For Frank, the lineage is clear between the People's Party of the 1890s and Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism. Roosevelt succeeded, Frank insists, because he rejected his generation's accepted wise men of finance and industry and instead sought counsel from progressives like Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes and Frances Perkins - genuine reformers who recognized that the historic moment called not for doubling down on the system but for devising smart new solutions to meet grave new challenges.

"Painful though it may be for liberals to acknowledge nowadays, it was Roosevelt's willingness to disregard elites that won that war," Frank concludes. "These were the reasons the New Deal succeeded and democracy lived. If the heroes of those days were cranks, then thank God for cranks. Thank God for populism." Given our current historical moment, that's a lesson Joe Biden would do well to heed.

Among postwar anti-populists, historian Richard Hofstadter receives particular scorn for his influential book "The Age of Reform" (1955), which valorized professionalism, pluralism and benevolent, administrative capitalism while depicting the People's Party as low-IQ racists and proto-McCarthyites.

"When reform came from the bottom up, in other words," Frank complains of Hofstadter, "it was moralistic, demagogic, irrational, bigoted, and futile. When reform was made by practical, business-minded professionals - meaning lobbyists and experts who were comfortable in the company of lobbyists and experts from other groups - prosperity was the result."

Throughout "The People, No," Frank takes pains to look at populism through a broad lens - from Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin, Fred Harris and Frank Capra to Father Charles Coughlin, Pat Buchanan and Steve Bannon. His reflection on how the jeans-clad Jimmy Carter wrapped himself in populism to avoid being tagged as a socialist, liberal or conservative is spot-on. In Frank's view, Carter was "a bland technocrat" who donned populism to win the White House but then chose as his Fed chairman Paul Volcker, who famously said, "The standard of living of the average American has to decline" and raised interest rates to 20% to make it happen.

Frank also accuses Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and "blue-collar billionaire" Donald Trump of being faux populists in bed with Wall Street and the ruling class. Obama earns scorn from Frank for leaning on tropes of populists as anti-science zealots clinging to guns and religion, and for his 2016 charge that an unnamed candidate had "embraced a crude populism that promises a return to a past that is not possible to restore." Hillary Clinton is chastised for stereotyping half of Trump's supporters as "deplorables" and "irredeemables."

By the close of "The People, No," readers know where Frank stands. He bristles over an elite that dreads "the lower orders" and uses its power and wealth to squash peace movements, labor strikes and demands for universal health care. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the type of politicians Frank thinks we need more of.

"For whom does America exist?" he asks in closing. "Its billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people just a laboring, sweating instrument for the bonanza paydays of our betters? Are we just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings? Are we nothing more than a vast test market to be tracked and probed and hopefully sold on tickets, fast food, or Hollywood movies featuring awesome new animation technology? Or is it the other way around - are they supposed to serve us?"

Frank wants readers to ponder this fundamental question and come away knowing that at its heart, populism means just one thing: This land was made for you and me.

---

Brinkley is Katherine Tsanoff Brown chair in humanities and professor of history at Rice University and the author of "Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America."

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Book World: How elites distorted the meaning of populism - The Advocate

Beatrice Mompremier gave herself about a week of disappointment before getting back to the basketball grind.

Mompremier was drafted in the second round by the Los Angeles Sparks on April 17 and was cut a little over a month later (May 26) before WNBA teams even had training camps.

"It was a downer for me not to get an opportunity to actually try out," Mompremier said. "My high school coach that I was working out with (Sam Baumgarten from Miami High in Florida) was like, 'yourtime will come. Just continue working.'"

Mompremier's time came a little over a month later. The Connecticut Sun needed to add post depth when All-Star Jonquel Jones announced on June 22 that she was opting out of this season due to concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Sun signed Mompremier the next day.

"I had an overseas contract that I had recently signed (with CMB Cargo UNI Gyor in Gyor, Hungary)," Mompremier said. "Then a couple of days later, I got the call from (Sun head coach and general manager) Curt Miller. He said I had an opportunity to come in if I'm interested in playing this summer, and I was, and now I'm here and excited about that."

Mompremier, a 6-foot-4 post, averaged 16.82 points and 9.82 rebounds in 17 games during her redshirt senior year at Miami(she missed 13 games due to an acute foot injury). She was the 2019-20 ACC Preseason Player of the year afterranking ninth in Division I in rebounding (12.2 rpg) and fifth in double-doubles (25) during her junior year. She was also a finalist during her final two seasons for the Lisa Leslie Award, awarded to the best center in women's basketball.

She transferred to Miami after playing for Baylor as a freshman and sophomore.

"I feel like I can bring defense, rebounding and blocking shots," Mompremier said. "I think I'm capable of doing whatever the team needs me to do in order for us to win."

Mompremier was one of many players who never got a chance to compete for roster spots at training camps. Teams had to cut their rosters down to a maximum of 12 players on May 26 so that the league could start paying players on June 1.

Shes an underrated offensive player, Miller said. She can really drive it from the elbows. She can be creative from the short corners as a five (center).

Shes typically going up against either Alyssa (Thomas) or Bri (Brionna Jones at practices), and thats not easy for a seasoned pro. Shes just got to make the quick adjustment to the physicality that this level has.

New players such as Mompremier have little time to adjust because of the WNBA's compacted season, which will be held on the campus of IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. Every team except the Indiana Fever arrived last Monday and went into quarantine. Those teams started training camp last Friday.

The regular season starts July 25. The Sun play their first game the next day against the Minnesota Lynx at noon.

Mompremier will be busy off-the-court, too,as she's taking online courses to earn a masters degreein liberal arts from Miami. She graduated in December with a degree in economics, and while she's not certain what she'd like to do after basketball, she thinks it might be social work.

"I could take year off and come back and do it," Mompremier said about getting her masters. "I honestly know myself and if don't get it done now, I would probably never come back and finish it off. And I only have one more semester. It's one more semester. ... Why not get my masters done?

"Helping kids. ... being in that system where I go into people's homes and just make sure everything is okay, stuff like that, that's what interests me more than anything else."

n.griffen@theday.com

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Mompremier happy to land with Sun - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com

M Rajivlochan

Historian

As India goes about dismantling the underpinnings of the structures that had nurtured separatist movements and ideas in the country, it is an apt time for us to reflect upon the idea of self-determination, its connection with the will of the people and the nation. Self-determination is an idea that is frequently used to accuse the government in India of being oppressive, imperialistic etc. Few today recall that the USSR was created by Russia subjugating over two dozen countries in the name of self-determination. Much like China today goes about unhindered, subjugating over six nationalities and claiming everyone to be part of the Middle Kingdom.

In European usage, the idea of a nation has had many meanings. I am born was its meaning some 2,000 years ago. The term nation was a derogatory term, used in common language in the Roman empire to refer to a non-Roman group bound together by some similarity in birth; either birth in the same city or land. The Romans never used it for themselves. Cicero used it for foreign peoples, like the Jews and Syrians, as being born in servitude.

After the collapse of Rome, feudal Europe used it in the councils for representatives of different European rulers at the great ecclesiastical meetings that were presided over by the Pope. The council of nations was an elite body which ruled over the commoners, who in turn, had no political or social identity. Till the 18th century, the term nation was used for the rulers and aristocrats. The people had no existence. It was the ruling class that represented the nation. When in 1731, in the Transylvanian parliament, a priestly delegate spoke of the Walachian nation, he was shouted down by the rest, who said that there was no Walachian nation, only Walachian plebs.

In the 19th century, the humungous growth in the production of almost all goods seemed to empower the plebs. So much so, that the deep distancing between the commoners and those who ruled over them gave people like Karl Marx the hope that the plebs would recognise a sense of commonness between themselves and stop sacrificing their lives in the wars that benefited only their national elite. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains was based on the hope that the workers were disconnected from the land where they worked. It was this connection, which Marx was not able to see, into which began to merge the concepts of people, nation and state all of them to uniquely define those who lived in a specific geographical region. The nineteenth century wars between the European nations that led to the First and the Second World Wars, fostered nationalism, forcing people to pay a heavy price for being part of that nation.

India, in contrast to Europe, was characterised by an easygoing culture in which people lived together, irrespective of language, religion or ethnicity. The common people knew three or more languages, the slightly educated knew four to five languages routinely, with the well-educated and well-travelled being comfortable with 10 or more. This was how Indians lived till as recently as the 1950s. The monolingual Indian, ever willing to protest the learning of other languages, was the creation of the crazy 1960s, when all of a sudden, Indians began to fight each other over identity. The easygoing ways of the past were now gone. People forgot that it wasnt any idea of inclusivity which was behind appointing a Momin governor for the Konkan by a Hindu king in the eighth century. Neither were the Mughals appointing Hindu Rajputs as governors in order to appease the local Hindu population. The fact was that the mindscape in India was rarely based on religion, caste or ethnicity. A persons individual capabilities were all that mattered. Till as late as the eighteenth century, the Brahmin Peshwas had Shindes, Gaekwads, Bhonsles and other people of lower caste working as trusted soldiers and generals. Pune had a habshi kotwal, as did Hyderabad.

The idea of a nation began to haunt Indians only in the nineteenth century. By this time, Indians had lost all their social and cultural moorings, saw themselves as losers, considered their society degenerate and began to find ways to fit themselves into some imagined European paradigm of being a good nation.

Indians never realised that the textbook idea of a European nation with a single language and religion did not exist in reality. France, despite the efforts of Napoleon to privilege the language of le-de-France as the national language, continued to have many regional languages. As recently as 1999, the French Government recognised as many as 75 languages as regional or minority languages. China, great as it is today, comprises Han control over six major nationalities, representing between them eight main languages, each of which has hundreds of variations, not counting minority languages like Mongolian or Tibetan and their variants.

In fact, the only one time in history when the principle of self-determination was actually implemented was in the early 1920s when Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin used it as an excuse to militarily overthrow the governments of as many as 32 countries which had been forcibly occupied by Tsarist Russia at one time or the other. The Russians then installed puppet Communist governments in these territories which then were pulled together in the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Since the simplistic Western notions of nation and nationalism did not seem to gel with the reality of India, Western observers of India have been predicting the falling apart of India since 1950. This was the time when the people of India gave to themselves a Constitution by which to live together. The Constitution did not specify a national religion or a national language. It did not even make clear whether India was a union or a federation of states. Not only that, it provided every adult Indian, irrespective of caste, class, gender, wealth or education, an equal weightage in electing a government.

The liberal British had promoted the idea of Islam being a separate nation in India that resulted in a disastrous partition, creating Pakistan as the only nation in the world for Muslims. Indians, despite suffering the Partition, have refused to be drawn into the morass of equating religion with nation. An unthinking acceptance of these Western ideas of what constitutes a nation created the bogey of self-determination in Kashmir and became the basis of much tragedy.

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Being a nation and the bogey of self-determination - The Tribune India

TORONTO -- Ontario Premier Doug Ford says that municipalities wont have to wait long to find out what their share will be of the billions in federal funding that was announced on Thursday.

The Liberal government has said that it will provide provinces and territories with $19 billion in funding to help them restart their economies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic with at least some of that money earmarked for municipalities and transit providers facing large operational deficits.

Speaking with reporters during a press conference in Kitchener on Friday afternoon, Ford said that his government is in the process of crossing the Ts and dotting the Is on the allocation of the money right now and expects to be rolling it over the next week.

He did not directly answer a question about whether Toronto would receive enough money to cover the entire $1.35 billion shortfall it expects to face by the end of 2020 but did say that his government will do everything it can to cover as much of the operational deficits faced by Ontarios 444 cities and towns as possible.

I want to work with the City of Toronto. They are the big white elephant in the room of the 444 (cities and towns) and I understand that, he said, noting that the losses faced by the TTC alone make Torontos challenges particularly acute. But everyone needs money. We are going to split it up equally and make sure that the people that need it get the money.

Ford has previously indicated that Ontario will receive about $7 billion in funding from the feds but that money also has to go towards a number of other areas, including expanding testing and contact tracing and acquiring personal protective equipment.

For his part, Tory has said that he is cautiously optimistic that the city will get enough money to stave off major cuts but he has also said that it would be premature to declare victory without reading the fine print.

On Friday, Ford credited city officials for finding more than $500 million in savings in Torontos budget and reducing the expected deficit from $1.9 billion to $1.35 billion.

He said that while it would be hogwash for any municipality to suggest that it cant find savings in its budget, the financial challenges faced by the municipal level of government as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic are very real.

In Toronto, the TTC alone faces a $700 million budgetary pressure, mostly due to reduced ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic. The city also expects to lose out on $249.2 million in budgeted Municipal Land Transfer Tax revenue in 2020 as a result of real-estate slowdown that accompanied the pandemic.

We have to work together, Ford said. We are going to do everything we can to cover as much as we can in all areas and I just want to thank the municipalities that have been prudent fiscal managers.

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Ontario premier won't say if province will cover $1.35B deficit faced by Toronto - CTV News