Morning Star Gali has been deeply involved with the cultural, political and spiritual activities of her nation and urban Indian communities in the San Francisco Bay Area from a very early age. She grew up listening to stories of injustice, and attended demonstrations and marches while still in a stroller.

Gali was a teenager when her father became the first full-time Native prison chaplain hired by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In that role, he provided cultural and spiritual support for, and advocated on behalf of, incarcerated Indigenous people in California prisons. She grew up knowing about the incarceration of her father, and was present at many of his presentations and his educational events for “Native Americans against the death penalty.”

Now, Gali is making it her mission to shed light on a little-known problem: the disproportionate impact of the criminal and juvenile justice systems on Native Americans. Native Americans have never been accurately accounted for in the criminal justice system, nor in other governmental records. The Bureau of Justice did not keep data on Native Americans until 2006, and the fact that there are more than 50 non-federally recognized tribes in California skews the data-collecting process in prisons. Additionally, Native Americans as a category are often considered “statistically insignificant” by researchers; therefore, data related to Native American behind bars is often nonexistent. Data that is available show that the Native American inmate population in California jumped from 145 per 100,000 Native Americans in 1980 to 767 per 100,000 in 2000. In addition, according to a 2014 report by CDCR, recidivism rates are highest among Native Americans.

Gali will document the crisis of mass incarceration among Native Americans in the state. Using her extensive network, organizing and community-based and engaged research background, she will mobilize Native nations, incarcerated Native Americans and their families, allies and policy leaders to address and shift the tide of over-incarceration and human rights violations within corrections institutions. She also aims to build solidarity and power among Indigenous Peoples throughout California, enabling them to restore sovereign rights and to heal, care for and resolve differences among their people on their own terms and by their own tribal governments.

“The first prisons for Native peoples were reservations and boarding schools,” Gali said. “State sponsored extermination policies against Native communities are continually carried out today within the U.S. prison system. My vision is to decriminalize Indian Country and Tribal Nations.”

Gali’s work is groundbreaking, and can lead to a significant shift in narrative and policies for Native Americans in California As part of her Leading Edge fellowship, she will:

• Track, document and publicize accurate information about the number of Native American adults and youth incarcerated in California’s criminal justice system.
• Organize community-engaged research and writing projects about the root causes of incarceration in her community, including elevating the stories of those incarcerated in collaboration with those individuals and families.
• Support and defend the rights of Native Americans in the prison system to engage in ceremonial practices in prisons.
• Work with tribal leaders to assert full sovereignty by bringing tribal citizens into the tribal court system and offer culturally rooted post-incarceration support.

A member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe in Northeastern California, Gali currently works as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Pit River Tribe. Prior to returning to her ancestral homelands and working for her tribe, she served as a volunteer and advocate on behalf of Indigenous incarcerated tribal members in California and worked with a number of Indigenous-led grassroots organizations in the Bay Area for over a decade.

Hailed as a leader in the Native American community, Gali leads large-scale actions and assists with organizing Native cultural, spiritual, academic, and political gatherings throughout the state. She has been the lead organizer since 2006 for the now prominent “Thanks-taking” sunrise ceremony at Alcatraz, an annual commemoration of the 1969-1971 occupation by Native activists of the island within the ancestral territories of the Ohlone people. The sunrise ceremony, coordinated by the International Indian Treaty Council is now is attended by over 5,000 people each year.

“I want to see our families back in balance with each other,” Gali said. “I want healing restored in our community. I want to bring our incarcerated brothers and sisters back home and for them to know they’re needed back in our tribal communities.”

Morning Star Gali is deeply involved with the protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota.  Her organization - the International Indian Council Treaty - has been trying to bring attention to the abuses and excessive violence by the National Guard and police against protestors there and elicited a response from the United Nations in this statement released below by the IICT:

Statement on “Excessive Force” at Standing Rock from the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly Nov. 15th 2016

Michael Sage Hider obtained a B.S. Degree in Metallurgical Engineer from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. Having been in the Air Force ROTC Program, he was commissioned into the United States Air Force as a Second Lieutenant. In the Air Force, Hider’s first assignment was to participate in hypervelocity impact studies at Eglin Airforce Base, Florida. He was then selected as part of an elite group of engineers to perform underground nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. Hider says that after conducting atomic bomb tests during the day, it was those many long and quiet nights in the Nevada Desert which allowed him much time to deeply reflect on what matters most in life. He concluded that obtaining and maintaining Enduring Peace of Mind, perpetual and deep contentment at the center of your being regardless of what has occurred in your life, is the greatest treasure in the world. It became obvious to him that perfect peace is much more valuable than fame and/or fortune, silver and/or gold. That is the peace of which Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus spoke. Those musings launched him on his lifetime journey which would ultimately lead to his development of the theory of how a person can obtain and maintain Enduring Peace of Mind through all the vicissitudes of life. After three years of active duty and some reserve time, Hider was honorably discharged from the Air Force with the rank of Captain. In further pursuit of his quest, Hider entered Seminary where he delved deeply into the matters of Theology, Philosophy, Latin, and Greek. It was during this scrutiny that he conceived of the concept of shaping one’s life by the use of Good Life Truths and positive thought dwelling. He came to realize that outside circumstances and conditions do not determine what your life is like nearly as much as the thoughts upon which you choose to dwell. Hider later enrolled into the Master of Arts Program at the University of Toledo, Ohio. He majored in Philosophy with a strong minor in Psychology. From these studies evolved his technique of “The Art of Thought Dwelling to Obtain and Maintain Enduring Peace of Mind”. Based on that effort, Hider graduated at the top of his class, with honors. Seeking more personal freedom, Hider entered Law School at Santa Clara University, California. He was a trial attorney for eleven years in Merced California. He then ran for and was elected a Superior Court Judge in Merced County. During his tenure as a judge, Hider presided over civil and criminal cases touching every aspect of life and the law. Combining that rich and unique experience with his conclusions concerning the importance of controlling one’s thought dwelling, led to his authoring his highly acclaimed book, “Spiritual Healing-Making Peace with Your Past.” The book is based on the premise that “I alone am responsible for how I feel every conscious moment of my life.” The book is now in its second printing by Tate Publishing. In addition to his studies at the University of Cincinnati, Toledo University, and Santa Clara University, Hider has matriculated at Ohio State University, San Jose State University, and Stanford University. Hider has taught courses in mathematics, science, philosophy, and /or law at Merced Community College, Chapman College, and the University of San Francisco’s Master’s Program. After thirty years on the Bench, Hider recently retired and now devotes full time to public and motivational speaker.

Richard Ray Roberts, Jr. (born June 3, 1969 in Asheville, North Carolina) is a retired American professional football player. He played nine seasons in the National Football League as an offensive tackle.

Roberts graduated from Asheville High School in 1987 and played college football at Virginia, where he won the Jacobs Trophy in 1990 & 1991 as the ACC's top blocker.[1]

At 6'6" and over 300 lb., he was the tenth overall selection in the 1992 NFL Draft, taken by the Seattle Seahawks. After four seasons in Seattle, he finished his career with the Detroit Lions.

Following his playing career, Roberts returned to the Seattle area and was an assistant football coach at Interlake High School in Bellevue. He earned a master's degree in intercollegiate athletic leadership from the University of Washington in 2007. Roberts also worked as a diversity specialist at Microsoft and did local sports radio for the Seahawks. He became the head coach at Lake Washington High School in Kirkland in 2008, and resigned in June 2010 after posting consecutive 1-8 seasons.

Allen McNair a published writer of short and epic poetry who has illustrated his work in marker art and acrylics.  I have written and published a major work, I Dream of A'maresh, through CreateSpace and AuthorHouse.  I have contributed my earliest written work to Thresholds' literary magazine, The Musing Place and the Chicago Writing Alliance publication, Journal of Ordinary Thought.  In 1990, straight out of Columbia College Chicago with a Bachelor's degree, I lost my job and became homeless.  Much of my early writing of poetry was inspired by this shocking experience of losing my housing.  I am now enrolled in the Maharishi University of Management Master's degree program in Vedic Science, the theoretical basis for Transcendental Meditation.  I now live on my own in a one-bedroom apartment with my cat, a Siamese Yellow-Tail, Butterscotch.

Mitch Pogue is a seasoned manager with more than 20 years of hands on real world experience guiding and influencing workers in the workplace in the United States. His work teams have become some of the most productive and effective in the history of their organizations with high engagement and mutual satisfaction. In his personal practice as a leader, Mitch has become aware of key principles and practices that harmonize with the universal aspects of human nature creating ideal environment in which positive human engagement occurs naturally and relationships and performance flourish without force, coercion and control. His life mission is to reveal the foundation leadership paradigm shift that will transform today's workplace in America and around the World.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and columnist. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Online Journal, CorpWatch, Multinational Monitor, News Insider, In These Times, and The American Conservative. His columns have appeared in The Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others.

Madsen is the author of The Handbook of Personal Data Protection (London: Macmillan, 1992), an acclaimed reference book on international data protection law; Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); co-author of America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II (Dandelion, 2003); author of Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates; Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day; The Manufacturing of a President: the CIA's Insertion of Barack H. Obama, Jr. into the White House; L'Affaire Petraeus; and National Security Agency Surveillance: Reflections and Revelations.

Madsen has been a regular contributor on RT and PressTV. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows.  He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and a terrorism investigation judicial inquiry of the French government.

Madsen has some thirty-five years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Madsen was a Senior Fellow for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy public advocacy organization.

Madsen is a member of the National Press Club.

Early WMR Alerts On Trump, Epstein, Pedophiles, 'Fake News'

Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen (shown at left) is a widely published journalist and author. He edits the Wayne Madsen Report, appears frequently as a broadcast commentator, and has published 15 books. Previously, he worked 14 years as a Navy Intelligence officer, including a year as an NSA analyst. He later worked as chief scientist with a major defense contractor and as a privacy expert at a think tank. When Madsen was in the Navy, the FBI named him to be a temporary special FBI agent to help follow up his tip that a fellow officer, later imprisoned, was sexually assaulting underage victims.

In 2006, he published a three-part series on the WMR website revealing for the first time that then-U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, shown at right, was a gay pedophile who had assaulted students as a high school wrestling coach before being forced out and campaigning in Illinois as a Republican advocate of family values. A decade later, Hastert, the longest-serving GOP speaker in U.S. history, was federally indicted and then imprisoned on federal charges arising from cover-up money that he was paying to hide those assaults.

Madsen has written many such reports on the WMR site naming names to document how powerful entities use pedophilia and other hidden sex scandals to install, blackmail or otherwise influence high-ranking government officials.

2018

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Welcome to Waterbury: The city that holds secrets that could bring down Trump, Wayne Madsen and Andrew Kreig, Jan. 9, 2018 (Subscription required; reprinted above with permission). A woman who was allegedly sodomized and raped at the age of 12 along with at least one other underage girl by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s midtown Manhattan townhouse in 1993 is alive and trying to maintain obscurity from alt-right operatives who have identified her and her current residence.

2017

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Trump has the real "Pizzagate" scandal on his tiny hands, Wayne Madsen (shown lecturing in New York City in a 2015 JIP photo), Dec. 18, 2017. (Subscription required; excerpted with permission.)

On December 15, Donald Trump, Jr. raised eyebrows when he "liked" a tweet sent by far-right conspiracy monger Mike Cernovich citing a New York Times op-ed calling pedophilia a mental illness and not a crime. The 2014 article was written by Rutgers University Assistant Law Professor Margo Kaplan.

Kaplan argued in her op-ed that "about half of all child molesters are not sexually attracted to their victims." That argument might have some merit if half of the children assaulted by pedophiles did not experience some form of sexual abuse. However, that is far from the case. Pedophiles attracted to children are not merely taking them to baseball games, county fairs, or the movies.

Cernovich's and Trump Jr.'s endorsement of pedophilia as a mental disorder rather than criminal predation by adults on children came after the revelations that Alabama GOP failed Senate candidate Roy Moore had been charged by several women claiming the disgraced former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice had sexually harassed them when they were in their teens.

Cernovich's defense of pedophilia is all the more ironic since it was Cernovich who helped concoct and disseminate a libelous false story about Hillary Clinton, two pizza restaurants in Washington, DC, and former White House chief of staff John Podesta being involved in a child trafficking ring involving pizzerias, pizza-oriented code words, and child torture chambers. After the fake story was amplified by the lunatic rantings of nutrition supplement salesman Alex Jones, Edgar Welch, a 28-year old man from North Carolina, shot up Comet Ping Pong in northwest Washington with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Welch believed that children were being held and tortured in the basement of the pizza restaurant, even though there is no basement. The accusations against Comet Pizza and another nearby pizzeria were groundless and they resulted in an on-air and written retraction by Jones.

It appears that Cernovich's idea for the pizza story was derived, in part, from his cousin's Cerno's 1898 pizza restaurant in Kewanee, Illinois. However, the phony story about pizzerias and pedophilia has another, much more sinister, beginning....

April 24

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), It's Trump that has the real "Pizzagate" problem, Wayne Madsen, April 24, 2017. During the 2016 presidential campaign, disreputable websites attempted to tie Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff to a fantasy tale about a network of pedophiles who trafficked in child sex slaves using, of all things, pizzerias. Members of Donald Trump's inner circle trafficked in the "Pizzagate" myth using such social media networks as Twitter.

Although there was absolutely nothing to the tale of pizzerias and pedophiles, an actual network of pedophiles in the Trump campaign has emerged.

The Trump campaign pedophile story begins on March 9, 2017, with Oklahoma Republican state senator Ralph Shortey checking into a Super 8 Motel in Moore,

Oklahoma. Shortey was not alone. Entering the room with him at 12:30 am was a 17-year old teenage boy. Shortey was arrested and charged with three felonies: engaging in child prostitution, engaging in prostitution within 1000 feet of a church, and transporting a minor for prostitution.

Shortey, a six-year veteran of the state senate, resigned after his arrest. Shortey was the chairman of the Trump campaign in Oklahoma and was chief among Trump's campaign officials in the state to organize Trump's appearance at the Oklahoma State Fair. Police were tipped off about Shortey and the boy by a relative requesting a "welfare check" on the minor.

After the police "got Shortey," the Republican Party tried to remove the photographs and postings from Facebook and Twitter, but to no avail. The Internet never forgets.

Feb. 17

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Labor pick Acosta part of Epstein-Trump underage sex crime cover-up, Feb. 17, 2017. Alexander Acosta, President Trump's pick to replace failed nominee Andrew Puzder as Labor Secretary, has his own political baggage stemming from his actions as U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida in the sweetheart plea deal involving billionaire pederast Jeffrey Epstein.

Feb. 8

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Trump's Jane, Tiffany, and Joan Doe problem, Wayne Madsen (shown in a screeshot from a TV appearance), Feb. 8, 2017. President Trump has a problem hanging over his head. During the presidential campaign, Trump and his phalanx of attorneys pressured a California woman to drop her lawsuit against Trump and convicted Palm Beach, Florida pederast Jeffrey Epstein for sexually assaulting her when she was 13 years old.

My  great great grandfather was a riverboat captain on the Missouri River.  He met and married a full blood Sioux woman my great great grandmother.  This was the grandmother of my mother's father.   My family never talked about that part of the family tree because according to my mother's cousin " . . . it was not popular because of Custer's Last Stand".  I became interested in my Sioux background when my mother passed.  I traveled to Bear Butte South Dakota, the holy land of the Sioux, with my friend Robin (in the photo).   

I met a Lakota Sioux Hunkpapa (Head of the Circle) elder Marge Edwards there.  I began to learn of the Natives deep connection with mother earth and the Great Spirit.  Marge and I spent days together and she took Robin and me up the Native side of Bear Butte to pray.  At the end of our time together Marge asked my friend and I to Sun Dance for her.  I said sure and had no idea what the Sun Dance was.  My friend said you have no clue what you just said yes to.  Your life is going to change.  And it did!!  

Marge was from Standing Rock reservation and I stayed in touch with her until her death.  Her husband and son still reside in Standing Rock.  I have had the amazing experience of honoring up an elder's request and have Vision Quested and Sun Danced for two years.  It has been an incredible blessed journey.  I began to hear about the North Dakota Pipeline when I returned from Sun Dance this summer.  I knew I had to go and return to the land of my ancestors.  

The natives have a saying when you show up at the Sweat Lodge which is our monthly time of worship prayer and song . . . they say: that your ancestors prayed you here. With my background in environmental studies and being concerned about the environment since my early 20's and all the connections, I HAD to come! 

How can people help?  Go to: defund DAPL  to find stories on line or on instagram at #defunddapl and #bankexit

The offending banks contributing to this project to drill under the Missouri river and endanger the drinking water of 10 million people are Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Citibank, ING Bank, PNC Bank and Chase Bank.

Ace Hardware in Bismarck North Dakota was told by Morton County Sherriff’s not to sell small propane canisters to campers who need them for heat and cooking.  The Comfort Inn in North Dakota had a sign that said we love all veterans but when they found out the veteran staying with them was on his way to Standing Rock they asked him to leave.

Attend rallies-watch facebook or on line for NODAPL Rallys.  There is one in Los Angeles on December 10th at 2 pm.  Location to be announced.