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animal rights | indigenous issues

Sea Lions, WDFW, and TOKENISM

I am writing from the Yakama Nation. And I want to say that I just saw the most shameful thing. It involves video taped footage of a press conference held by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (and also ODFW) at the Bonneville dam. The press conference was to convince the public that these organizations need to, and can safely kill sea lions to protect salmon at that dam. And to make their point, they paraded out a woman presented as a Native grandmother. It was the most shameless display of tokenism I have yet seen, and went mostly unchallenged by the press who eagerly lapped it up and patted her on her head. It was disgusting.
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