Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

“Those of us that are deemed American Indian and Alaskan Native have the highest rates of disability of any other ethnic or racial group in this country,” Jen Deerinwater told me. Jen is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a bisexual, Two Spirit, multiply disabled journalist and organizer whose work focuses heavily on the intersections between disability and the issues Native communities face. That group also faces the highest rate of police violence per capita, and even the lowest-quality medical care remains inaccessible to wide swaths of their population. As Jen expounded, the same spirit of resistance that has sustained Indigenous communities through centuries of genocide and colonial violence has also been weaponized against them, often by unionized state agents, to cause further harm. “Any time you have an oppressed group of people who rise up, the state and the corporations are going to come down on you,” Jen explained,