The Pillager band was the advance guard in the mid-eighteenth-century Ojibwe migration into what would become the state of Minnesota a century later.  According to Ojibwe mythology, the Great Spirit (gichi-manidoo) had told them to migrate to a place where “the food grows on water.”  Minnesota, with its plentiful wild rice (a sacred plant to […]

  Introduction This article, titled “A Chapter of Russian Reaction,” translated into English here for the first time, was written in German by longtime homosexual activist Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) from London and published in the Swiss gay journal Der Kreis in 1946.  Hiller had been active in Germany’s first homosexual-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific […]

Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA.  Edited by Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith.  HarperPerennial, 304 pp., $15.99. The need for socialism became clear to me more than fifty years ago when I was working as an orderly in the University of Minnesota Hospitals.  One of the patients I was working with in […]

Welcome sign — “Aaniin” (Hi) and “Biindigen” (Come in) — to the White Earth community of Rice Lake, at the entrance to Lower Rice Lake, a popular site for harvesting wild rice.  Photo by David Thorstad. In a historic vote, on November 19, 2013, the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota became the first member […]

The following comments were made at a panel on the topic “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” May 19 at a conference titled “Which Way Forward for Psychoanalysis?” and sponsored by the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry at the University of Chicago.  While Freud and psychoanalysis were a focus on the event, other themes running throughout […]

Squaw Point today (photo by David Thorstad)Silent City (photo by David Thorstad) In 1904, the Ojibwe village at Thief River Falls, in northwest Minnesota, was removed to the Red Lake Indian Reservation to the east, much diminished after the tribe’s cession of 256,152 acres between the reservation and Thief River Falls (known as the eleven […]

Guy Hocquenghem.  The Screwball Asses.  Trans.  Noura Wedell.  Semiotext(e), 2010.  88 pp.  $12.95 “Speak to my ass.  My head is sick.” — Southern French proverb This little book was first published as an anonymous essay at the end of Félix Guattari’s Recherches no. 12, its March 1973 special issue titled Trois Milliards de Pervers [Three […]

On May 14, the day before the Minnesota walleye fishing opener, activists from two northern Minnesota Ojibwe bands exercised what they regard as their right to fish off reservation and outside of the state’s prescribed season.  They dubbed their action the “Great Anishinaabe Fish-Off” and held a Stop Treaty Abuse Rally on the shores of […]

Sherry Wolf.  Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation.  Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009.  333 pp.  $12. The cover photo on Sherry Wolf’s book shows a protest rally with a woman holding a highlighted rainbow flag.  Radical gay and lesbian activists, one assumes.  Look closely, though, and you’ll see that the woman is […]