As a Latino/Native American, I’m used to having things stolen from me: civil rights, land, elections…but one of the most egregious acts of theft that stings the most is when local gabacho writers like Greg Elwell take my hard-fought ideas and words and repurpose them and repackage them not only as their own, but with a Christopher Columbus-esque mind-frame that makes it look like they are Northside explorers discovering some sort of minority-based New World that is ripe for the plundering.
Typically I ignore it and go on about my day—the creatively bankrupt gonna be creatively bankrupt—but last week I started receiving messages from numerous people telling me to pick up that latest copy of the Oklahoma Gazette. From close friends to area civil rights leaders, people were letting me know that something was rotten in the state of NW 36 and Shartel.