J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Television crews and technicians prepare the Cannon Caucus Room for the hearing by the House select committee investigating the attack of Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington, June 7, 2022.

After nearly a year of preparation, the Jan. 6 committee is ready for prime time.

The cast includes seven Democrats and two Republicans who, with the help of a former TV producer, have shaped a script based on more than 1,000 interviews and 140,000 documents. 

Their goal: to establish an irrefutable narrative, based on reams of new evidence, that there was a coordinated attempt to overturn the 2020 election and stop the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden – and that the former president himself was at the center of it. They will also make the case that the danger is not over. 

The select committee will lay out “a clear indication of ongoing threats to American democracy,” a committee aide told reporters Wednesday. 

But a considerable swath of the American people likely won’t be tuning in. Fox News has decided not to air the prime-time hearing tonight, the first in a highly anticipated series. Which raises a question: How widely will this effort resonate throughout the country?

If the committee has concluded that many Trump supporters aren’t reachable, they may be right; some two-thirds of Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen, and nearly half blame the Capitol riot on left-wing protesters trying to make Trump supporters look bad, despite the ample evidence to the contrary. 

Some argue that a blow-by-blow account of the events of Jan. 6 is actually not what’s needed going forward to protect American democracy. “If you think you can find the magic moment that will finally discredit Donald Trump in the eyes of the electorate, you haven’t been paying attention over the last six years,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks on the eve of the hearings, arguing that it’s more vital to shed light on the motivations of millions of Americans who still believe the election was stolen and how they may act going forward.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

Chairman Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, of the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, testify before the House Rules Committee seeking contempt of Congress charges against former President Donald Trump's White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for not complying with a subpoena, at the Capitol in Washington, Dec. 14, 2021.

When asked whether the committee is taking steps to try to win over people who don’t share its view of Jan. 6, Democratic committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said in a phone interview that he and his colleagues are simply focused on laying out the facts.  

“Everyone who watches our hearings and reads our report will have to form his or her own judgments about what to do about these events,” says Representative Raskin, a constitutional lawyer who managed the second Trump impeachment hearings. “But the events themselves actually happened.”

Why efforts to form a commission of experts failed

One of the challenges the committee faces is a perception on the right that its work is tinged with a partisan agenda heading into the 2022 midterms – in part because only two members are Republicans and none are Trump supporters. Democrats say that’s because Republicans blocked a bill to create a more bipartisan commission of experts; Republicans say Democrats were unwilling to broaden their scope beyond a politically advantageous framework. 

Initially, many expressed support for a national commission akin to the one formed to investigate 9/11, with congressional leaders from both parties appointing an equal number of members, drawn from fields ranging from law enforcement to civil liberties. But Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who at first said Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the Capitol attack but changed his tune after visiting the former president at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, ultimately came out against the bill. He said it would be duplicative and counterproductive. Although the bill passed the House with the support of 35 Republicans who broke ranks, it was blocked by Senate Republicans. 

A key sticking point for many GOP lawmakers was the double standard they saw around the racial justice protests of the summer of 2020, some of which targeted police stations and federal buildings. While more than 90% of the demonstrations were peaceful, at least nine people died and more than 2,000 police officers were injured in connection with those protests, which also resulted in an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion in property damage.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, of Calif., center, speaks during a news conference on the House Jan. 6 Committee with members of the GOP leadership, Thursday, June 9, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Although a bipartisan group of researchers found growing support on both the left and right for political violence, Democrats point out that the toll has been lopsided; from 1994 to 2020, there were 15 times more deaths in the U.S. from right-wing extremists than from left-wing ones, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And they say what happened on Jan. 6 was a unique attack on a central function of American democracy that merits its own investigation. Three protesters died in connection with the attack, including one person shot by Capitol Police. Capitol Police officers paid a heavy price: About 150 police officers were injured in the riot and five have since died, including four by suicide. A bipartisan Senate report described what they endured as ”absolutely brutal” physical abuse. The Capitol building suffered an estimated $1.5 million worth of damage from the attack, according to the architect of the Capitol.

How the members of the select committee were picked

After the bill for a 9/11-style commission failed, House Democrats passed a resolution to form a Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. It would be made up of 13 lawmakers who would “investigate the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol,” and produce a report with legislative recommendations. Five of the 13 lawmakers were to be picked in consultation with GOP leadership.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed six Democrats plus GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Then Minority Leader McCarthy put forth his five members – three of whom had voted to challenge the electoral results of two key swing states on Jan. 6. Ms. Pelosi promptly vetoed two of them, saying they would compromise the integrity of the investigation. 

In response, Mr. McCarthy pulled all five members. Ms. Pelosi then added Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to the panel, resulting in a commission of nine: seven Democrats, including the managers of the two Trump impeachment hearings, and two Republicans who had voted to impeach former President Trump for inciting Jan. 6.  

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announces her appointments to a select committee to investigate the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol, including from left, Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Zoe Lofgren, and Bennie Thompson, who will lead the panel, on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 1, 2021.

Representative Raskin says their work has been refreshingly free of partisanship. “While every other committee I serve on is constantly engaged in partisan polemics and insults, this is one committee which is actually laser-focused on just the work product,” he says. 

But critics on the right see it as stacked against Mr. Trump. The speaker’s inclusion of Representative Cheney in her initial slate of members was a politically calculated move, not an olive branch, they say. “Nancy Pelosi didn’t do that to be nice,” says former Rep. Barbara Cubin of Wyoming. 

GOP lawmakers also accuse the committee of ignoring questions about Capitol security weaknesses. In a press conference Thursday, GOP Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana – one of the two members whom Speaker Pelosi vetoed – called the committee “a fraud” and listed more than half a dozen questions he said were vital to answer regarding why officers were unprepared and underequipped, saying an ad hoc group of Republicans would publish a report in the coming weeks.

“Everybody has a duty to do”

Thursday night’s hearing will serve as an opening statement – laying out what the committee has found so far. It will include testimony about the involvement of militia members in that day’s violence, and will feature two live witnesses: Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards and documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, as well as video clips that have not been publicly shared before. 

On a background call with reporters Wednesday, aides were tight-lipped about what other evidence or witnesses would be put forward in the coming weeks, and what themes they would address. Their goal, they said, was to provide the American people with answers about Jan. 6 and make legislative recommendations to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. 

They emphasized that the vast majority of the witnesses they sought out have cooperated voluntarily, and even those subpoenaed have largely complied – though a few high-profile ones, including former Trump administration officials Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, have not. The Department of Justice has indicted both for criminal contempt of Congress.

Two Capitol Police officers who spent hours fending off violent protesters and were witnesses at the committee’s first hearing last summer say they applaud the committee for trying to get to the truth.

“On Jan. 6, we were protecting the Capitol. What Liz Cheney is doing is the same thing,” says Sgt. Aquilino Gonnell, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who says he still holds true the ideals of America despite the pain of hearing GOP lawmakers downplay the violence of that day. 

“Everybody has a duty to do,” agrees Officer Harry Dunn, who says the truth shouldn’t be a partisan matter. “We did ours. Time for you to do yours.” 

Shortly after the draft opinion overturning women’s constitutional right to an abortion in the United States was leaked, activists began showing up outside the homes of Supreme Court justices. On many nights since, protesters have marched and chanted along the tree-lined street in suburban Maryland where Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family reside.

To some, these demonstrations, which have been nonviolent, represent a last-ditch effort to try to send a message on an issue of vital importance. Many others, however, see them as harassment – and a breach of privacy that could ultimately endanger public officials. 

Those fears seemed to play out this week, when police arrested a man in his mid-20s, armed with a pistol and other weapons, who told them he was in the neighborhood to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh.

Following the neighborhood protests in early May, the Senate unanimously passed a two-page bill that would boost security for Supreme Court justices and their families. The bill has yet to be voted on in the House, a measure that Republicans have pushed for in recent days. But House Democrats’ delay isn’t because they disagree with the basis of the bill – it’s because they don’t think the Senate bill goes far enough. They want to add protection for clerks, staff, and their family members as well. 

Threats against federal judges have jumped fourfold in recent years, and threats against elected officials in Washington have increased ninefold. A Brennan Center poll from earlier this year found that 1 in 6 local election officials have experienced threats, and a Johns Hopkins survey found more than half of local public health departments were targets of harassment during the first year of the pandemic.

Experts say it all reflects a political environment in which the stakes across a range of issues suddenly seem greater than ever – and the outcomes often all or nothing. With the country closely divided, many voters feel as though the views of the other side are being unfairly imposed upon them. That sense of powerlessness, along with the erosion of norms surrounding political discourse, has led to a rise in confrontations and a greater potential for violence.

“Politics feels existential now because there is so little overlap in the middle,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies democracies facing polarization and violence. “It used to be that a moderate Republican from New England and a conservative Democrat from the South used to overlap quite a bit in their policy beliefs. But now we see very little overlap – and that has a huge impact on your daily life: what your kids learn in school, if you can have an abortion or carry a gun.”

From fringe toward mainstream?

Many experts point to the unprecedented attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as a prime example of what can happen when confrontation is encouraged by a political leader. And while the man arrested near Justice Kavanaugh’s house was reportedly upset about expected conservative-leaning rulings on abortion and guns, the overall trend toward violence has been far more prevalent on the right.  

“When a mainstream party has aggrandized violence as a way of serving a citizen, that brings political violence into the mainstream,” says Ms. Kleinfeld. “Political violence that used to be a fringe phenomenon of the left and right 50 years ago is no longer fringe on the right.”

A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll from December found that one-third of Americans think it is sometimes justified for citizens to take violent action against the government. Broken down by party, the divide is stark: Twenty-three percent of Democrats surveyed feel this way, compared with 40% of Republicans. 

Many Republicans, however, are blaming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for Wednesday’s event in Chevy Chase, Maryland, sharing clips of the Democrat telling Justice Kavanaugh that he has released “the whirlwind” with the court’s draft abortion ruling and “he will pay the price.”

And officials are preparing for more violence in the future. Two layers of fencing still surround the Supreme Court as the Department of Homeland Security and state governments are expecting “increased incidents” of unrest or criminal behavior after the final abortion ruling is released later this month. 

“Being in these echo chambers – which more and more Americans find themselves in – leads individuals to see more differences across groups of people,” says Alauna Safarpour, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who has studied views on violence. “If you see less of yourself in other Americans, it could be less of a leap to think these people are inherently evil. Incidents like this really speak to the need to get to know people unlike yourself.” 

To this point, Michelle Peterson says she has a “personal line” when it comes to protesting. Standing alone outside the Supreme Court on a drizzly afternoon in mid-May, holding a handmade sign that says “My Body My Choice” in front of the recently erected fencing, Ms. Peterson says she declined to join fellow activists outside the justices’ homes because she herself is a mother. 

“I understand that they are public figures, that these people are protesting within the limits of the law, and that’s well within their rights,” says Ms. Peterson, a stay-at-home mom in Silver Spring, Maryland. “But as a mom myself with two teenagers at home, I don’t want my address out there. And it just takes one nut.”

Lawrence Bryant/Reuters/File

Protesters gather to oppose then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's plan to immediately vote on a replacement of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, outside his home in Louisville, Kentucky, on Sept. 19, 2020. The internet has made it easier for activists to find out where public officials live and to organize protests in front of their homes.

New technology, less privacy

Social media and the internet have played an undeniable role in this trend.

Within a few minutes of searching online, this reporter was able to track down the home addresses for Supreme Court justices. And activist groups such as Ruth Sent Us, which has been organizing most of the neighborhood rallies, have shared locations on Facebook and promoted marches across these suburbs almost every night of the week this month.  

Meanwhile, they themselves have been victims of the same dangers they are criticized for inflicting on others. When asked to speak with the Monitor, several members of the group declined to be interviewed for fear of their own safety. 

“We are being doxxed, swatted, getting non-stop death and rape threats and gory photos sent to us via all channels,” one member texted the Monitor. “Do not put our names out there,” instructed another. “You will be endangering our lives.”

But the limits of social media have also worked to reinforce an American tradition of public protests – even if the style of these protests feels more dangerous today. 

“You have this media landscape with the claim, ‘You can reach millions of people with a click of a mouse!’ But unless you have thousands of followers, no one hears you online,”  says Timothy Zick, a law professor at William & Mary and author of the forthcoming book “Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest.” “People are still doing these classic forms of protest because the visual sends a message ... and people are desperate to get their point across.” 

The desperation in part reflects how politics has devolved into a zero-sum game. Single-party control of Congress for substantial periods of time is less common than it used to be as elections become increasingly competitive – meaning that the policies directly affecting Americans’ day-to-day lives can be completely upended by a few votes.

“Not only do the issues feel existential, but the fight feels winnable to either side. So we are correct as a country that the stakes are very high,” says Ms. Kleinfeld. “But it would behoove people of all parties to realize that no one wins when people start using violence to solve political problems.”

Alberto Pezzali/AP

A demonstrator holds a placard depicting British Prime Minister Boris Johnson while attending a protest outside the gates of Downing Street in London, May 27, 2022. Mr. Johnson has been losing popular support among voters who no longer trust his word, after his denials that he had attended illegal parties that broke lockdown rules.

The parallels are powerful: on one side of the Atlantic, former U.S. President Donald Trump; on the other, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – flamboyantly norm-busting politicians, both, who have sorely tested the resilience of the Western world’s two oldest democracies.

But events this week in London, where Mr. Johnson only narrowly survived a no-confidence vote by his own Conservative Party colleagues in Parliament, have highlighted key differences in how each country has responded to charismatic leaders flouting long-established safeguards in public life and promising to “get things done” on their own terms.

And surprisingly, it’s Britain that seems better poised to weather the storm.

On the face of it, the United States might have seemed more strongly equipped to respond, given its web of codified checks and balances underpinning the founders’ concern to keep a single-minded leader from bending the system to his will. Britain’s democracy, lacking a written constitution, has relied on precedent, tradition, and the assumption that politicians on all sides would abide by them.

But it’s not the institutional guardrails of British government, nor even the members of Parliament who tried to topple him, that have led to Mr. Johnson’s reversal of political fortune, barely two years after leading his party to its largest parliamentary majority for more than three decades.

Rather, it is ordinary Britons, of all parties and regions, whose shift of judgment has been borne out by recent opinion polls.

And this is not principally because of matters of policy. It is instead down to issues of personal behavior and ethical values.

Quaint though it may sound to American ears, the grassroots pushback seems a reassertion of what Britons like to describe as “fair play,” and a broadly accepted sense of what is right and proper for their political leaders to do and say.

Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/Reuters

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks as he takes questions at the House of Commons in London, June 8, 2022.

The main catalyst has been a series of eating-and-drinking parties in No. 10 Downing Street during the pandemic lockdown, in violation of rules Mr. Johnson himself dictated that prevented citizens even from visiting family members in hospitals or care homes.

Mr. Johnson has made things worse for himself with repeated denials in Parliament that the parties happened – denials not believed by the police, who have recently issued a series of fines, including one to the prime minister himself, for disregarding the legal regulations. That implies that he misled Parliament, a grave breach of convention – to which he’s responded by insisting he hadn’t “knowingly” done so.

What this will all mean for Mr. Johnson’s future is unclear. He remains prime minister, and though wounded, he could well hang on even though more than 4 in 10 of his own MPs voted to oust him.

But whereas in Washington the clearly worded constitutional provisions for presidential impeachment failed to unseat Mr. Trump, in London the much vaguer sense that the prime minister should “do the right thing” may well prove Mr. Johnson’s downfall in the coming months.

If so, his fate will likely be sealed by the fact that ordinary voters are mostly convinced that Mr. Johnson’s word cannot be trusted.

And there lies the starkest contrast between his position and that of his political soulmate across the ocean.

Former President Trump’s influence is weaker than when he was in office. He may face legal or political challenges related to his business dealings or, even more seriously, to his supporters’ assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 last year.

But he retains a powerful hold on the Republican Party. And, unlike Mr. Johnson, nothing he has said or done seems to have weakened his appeal to his huge number of grassroots supporters.  

This suggests a more fundamental difference between the political atmospheres in both countries.

As long as Mr. Trump holds on to a large base of Republican voters, it’s hard to envisage a significant number of his party’s politicians contemplating anything like the rebellion mounted by Conservative MPs in Britain.

At the same time, the almost gladiatorial divide in the United States has limited the prospect of finding common ground across party lines.

Britain, too, is deeply divided, as evidenced by the close-run 2016 referendum to end the country’s decadeslong membership in the European Union. Mr. Johnson led that campaign, but the move against him in Parliament this week suggests the mood has changed and that, unlike in the U.S., concerns about the prime minister’s moral compass may transcend policy issues or partisan loyalties.

His tattered reputation could scarcely contrast more tellingly with the prestige of last weekend’s popular star, Queen Elizabeth II, who was celebrating the Platinum Jubilee of her accession to the throne.

Nearly 20 million people took part in street parties and other celebrations nationwide in tribute to her 70-year reign and her determination to keep the monarchy above the partisan fray.

When Mr. Johnson arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral for a Jubilee thanksgiving service, he was booed.

Indigenous communities across North America have long lived with harmful stereotypes perpetuated by settler societies: that they are drunks, that they are beggars, that their Indigenous ways are anti-science, that their languages are outdated.

Across the continent that they call “Turtle Island,” many from Fairbanks, Alaska, to rural Nova Scotia, to the Navajo Nation talk of their communities’ enduring struggles.

But speaking to Monitor reporters on assignment, six people from different Indigenous communities focus attention on what they, and others like them, are doing to push back, to give back, and realize their dreams for “Indian Country.” 

Their comments have been slightly edited.

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff; Map: Jacob Turcotte/Staff; Data: Impact Observatory, Microsoft, and Esri

Melissa Spence is from Long Plain First Nation in Manitoba and has been volunteering with the Bear Clan Patrol, an Indigenous-led community safety group in Winnipeg, for almost four years.

I lost my brother to suicide. It will be five years in December.

And the first year I lost him, I lost myself. I just didn’t have any faith in anything anymore. And it was my cousin’s idea to join Bear Clan. She was like, “Come out.” It’s like she always says, helping is healing.

So I come out. I feel better. I get exercise too. It’s about being here for the community, for people.

I think the biggest problem that we face is racism. With everything that’s happened over the last year, with the children found in graves across Canada on these residential school grounds, it took that much for people to go, “you know what? Yeah, Indigenous people haven’t been treated fairly.” If it had been anyone else, a whole other race, it would have been a whole other situation. 

My dad – he legally adopted me – is a residential school survivor. He attended residential school on his reserve in Sagkeeng, just north of here. And his younger brother, who is two years younger than him, also attended. He actually lost his brother Tony in residential school. He died there. Of course, there was no real digging into it as to why. I’m the oldest of five kids and the only one my dad ever shared these things with.

There are some really traumatic stories. You see it every day being out here in the streets. We see people every day that are still suffering from these traumas. And it’s intergenerational. And the cycle continues.  It comes down to someone in the family being able to break that cycle and say, “I want better.”

My biological father, he committed suicide when my mom moved on. He was very abusive towards my mom. That’s what made my mom leave him. My mom took us away. I give all gratitude towards my mom because I feel like if she had stayed with him I wouldn’t be who I am today.

It’s groups like [the Bear Clan] that give me hope.  

I think of what my mom’s gone through and then what I had to go through. And then when I think of hope, I think of our kids. Empowering our youth. Like my niece is a [Bear Clan] walker. I’m raising her since my brother passed away. She’s lived with me since she was four. And she’s one of the leaders for the [Bear Clan] youth patrol. And then my grandson, who just turned 12 today, he also walks with the Bear Clan Youth Patrol.

I love being a part of the Bear Clan. You know, from when I was in a dark place there, when I lost my brother, this just completely changed everything. I just love being there for people and just showing them that there’s someone who cares about them.

I think a lot of us have ties in that sense, to some degree, in some way. And that’s why we come out. To heal ourselves or to help others.

– As told to Sara Miller Llana

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff; Map: Jacob Turcotte/Staff; Data: Impact Observatory, Microsoft, and Esri

Irene Bennalley is a rancher on the Navajo Nation, home of the Diné people.

People think that everything’s free on the reservation, and it’s not.

Like for me, I don’t get handouts. Our home here, we’re barely getting stuff done. On the inside, the ceiling hasn’t been replaced because most of the money’s gone to keeping the animals alive. We’ve got to get the materials ourselves, we’ve got to do the labor ourselves. They’re trying to make it to where we just rely on the government, that’s what they’re trying to do to us now. But there’s some of us that are fighting it.

Out here there’s still some people that don’t have running water or electricity. Even my mom. My dad did later, we’ve got electricity and running water. But she never experienced having running water or electricity. Still, to this day, some people don’t have it.

And then the roads. In Arizona, where it gets rain or snow, the snow starts to melt and it gets so muddy, they park their vehicles along the main road. They can’t get off it to get home. They have to walk home. The roads are just bad.

You really can’t change much. Let’s use the sheep as an example. Sheep will go where the leader would go, they’ll just follow. But here, with people, if you want to change something, there’s always going to be one that’s not going to agree with you. So it’s going to be hard to really change something. And I think that is one of the problems with our Native people. Everybody is not in agreement.

What’s giving me hope? The fact that the sun comes up, and that if we decide we’re going to make it a good day, it’s going to be good.

– As told to Henry Gass

Photo: Moira Donovan/Special contributor; Map: Jacob Turcotte/Staff; Data: Impact Observatory, Microsoft, and Esri

Chris Googoo is the chief operating officer of Ulnooweg, an organization that has been working toward a goal of self-determination for the Mi’kmaq Nation through economic development and education for 35 years. He lives in Millbrook First Nation in Nova Scotia.

When I look at myself personally, and the journey that I’ve been going through personally, for the last five to 10 years, I’ve been trying to understand what it is actually to be Indigenous, and what it actually is to be an Indigenous community, an Indigenous nation, and all these things that have come up in the last decade in terms of residential schools, Indian day schools, the treaty relations, and ongoing fights with the government that we’ve had in the last 20 years.

The way we do things within the community, the way we do things with family, is not the same way as it’s done outside of the community.

I use an example that an elder told me. They, of course, had all the Indigenous knowledge about ecology and forestry, and they went through the university system, they went through getting their masters, not to gain knowledge, but to see where Indigenous knowledge can match up – that’s [called the] two-eyed seeing concept.

And she gave an example of where she took a bunch of forestry graduates out, and she looked up in the sky and said, “Oh, it’s a good day to burn the forest floor, for management.” And, with all their education, they couldn’t see that, the students.

She talked about how she saw something gliding through the air at a very high level. And she explained that our people, Indigenous people, looked at the environment and looked at the signals of the animals and how they basically acted in their own natural settings, and it told us when to do things. The higher winds, of course, how they were behaving, gave them opportunity that if you light it up ... it wouldn’t basically expand or go out of hand.

So the forest graduates were just commenting that in all their years, they never learned anything like that. So that as an example is how ... you take that Indigenous knowledge of just a simple thing of a bird flying in the wind, as science. ... We have a lot of stories and observations of nature, that still require science to validate. But our knowledge also validates the science that comes with it. So they validate each other.

– As told to Moira Donovan

Photo: Sara Miller Llana/Staff; Map: Jacob Turcotte/Staff; Data: Impact Observatory, Microsoft, and Esri

Dolly Martel is a South Slave Dene from Hay River, Northwest Territories. After struggling with addictions and homelessness for years, she now helps other Indigenous people in Yellowknife.

Both my parents are survivors of residential school, so there was a lot of alcoholism in my family, a lot of abuse. There was a lot of violence on the reserve. I grew up being sexually abused. A lot of that took a toll on me.

The first time I did cocaine was when I was probably 15. Crack cocaine kind of hit my reserve in my early 20s. At that time I owned my own home. I was in a happy relationship and had my kids. The day that I tried crack cocaine was the last day I walked my daughter to school. I lost my partner, I lost my home, I lost my kids.

When I turned 21 I came to Yellowknife, and it just got worse. It was over 20 years of my life that I lived on the street. Everybody lost hope for me.  One day in 2014, my dad had come to look for me, but when he got home, he was crying. He told my mom, he said, “I found her, but that’s not my baby.” He hugged me, but said he didn’t feel anything, like I was gone. That really stayed with me for a long time.

One day I saw myself in the mirror, and I was stunned by how skinny I was, how my face looked. And I thought, “this is not you.” I talked to myself in the mirror. “What are you doing to yourself? You’re supposed to be a strong Dene woman, Dene women don’t live like this.” And I took all my drug paraphernalia and I threw it away. I’ve been clean for going on eight years. My family has forgiven me.

I make moccasins and vests and things like that. I could sew and stuff like from watching my grandmother and my aunts when I was younger. And I started doing little earrings and things like that, just on the side to have a little bit of spending money. To go to the movies or to buy something and buy food or whatnot. And then my partner and I were invited to a crafts market. And we were doing really well and meeting people from all over the world. And it was just so fun. And ever since then, it’s just like my Facebook just grew and people wanted more and more and more. I don’t know why.

I’m doing things with moose antlers and moose hide and things like that. I’ve never had so much respect for an animal than I do now. I am reconnecting with my Dene heritage through listening to elders. I do fundraisers for homeless people. I help families. I try to give back, because I took so much away from my own community. I’m going to do what I can now to try to make it better for somebody else. And if it’s sharing my story to give somebody else hope, then I hope they can overcome it. 

I really believe the things I’ve been through in my life really made me the strong and resilient person I am today.

– As told to Sara Miller Llana

Photo: Jessica Mendoza/Staff; Map: Jacob Turcotte/Staff; Data: Impact Observatory, Microsoft, and Esri

Yatibaey Evans is the creative producer for animated children’s series “Molly of Denali.” She is Ahtna, originally from Mentasta, Alaska, and now lives in Fairbanks.

I think one of the bigger challenges facing our communities is healing from the traumatic past that was forced upon us. Learning from the past and healing from that.

There’s the old saying, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” And so boarding schools cropped up, Indian boarding schools. And we were taken from our families and told that our ways were heathenistic and that we would go to hell. And made to cut our hair and made to stop speaking our language. My uncle, Fred John, was taken when he was 7 years old, and his sister was only 5. And they didn’t go back to our village of Mentasta for two years. During that time, he was abused, all in the name of assimilation. And then when he went back home, his parents wouldn’t speak their Ahtna language to him for fear of retribution when he went back to school.

And so if you can think about the healing or processing that people like my uncle have had to go through … it’s hard to sit with emotion, it’s hard to sit with the struggles that we go through in our minds. But they’re all part of our culture.

I think the biggest misperception [Native Alaskans face] is that we’re just a bunch of drunks. And we don’t have anything valuable to contribute, and that’s not true. And there are ways in which people have decided to try to numb the pain of the past that aren’t healthy. But there are a lot of healthy people out here doing really good and powerful work and helping to raise amazing, strong children for our future.

I feel like in the day of communication that we’re in now, we’re able to share so much information across generations and communicate how important our lives are and that we all have values to share and help our world heal.

– As told to Jessica Mendoza and Jingnan Peng

Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff; Map: Jacob Turcotte/Staff; Data: Impact Observatory, Microsoft, and Esri

Don Begay, of the Diné people, is a site worker for nonprofit organization DigDeep, which is bringing water into people’s homes on the Navajo Nation for the first time. Many families there lack running water and electricity.

I think when we call ourselves a sovereign nation, we’re not really. How can we call ourselves a sovereign nation when we don’t have the resources to generate, [to] economically build up our own? This is it. I mean, this is substandard. A lot of people don’t like to live like this. I don’t like going and getting water and using an outhouse. The younger folks are not going to stick around for that. They say, “No, I don’t like this life.” So they’re going to leave for bigger cities.

At least [DigDeep] showed up and we gave them water, so we’re going to make water come into their homes with these tanks that we have. It’s temporary, but at least it’s something.

Most people that come out here, they say, “My God, this is how you live?” Well, over thousands of years we’ve adapted to how we live. Our people have survived. Not only us, but you know, you’ve got the Black folks, you’ve got the Mexican Americans. They have adapted to mainstream America, [or are] trying to. And we’re slowly like still in the back seat.

And right now, it’s good that there was a Black American that was the president. That’s a start, but we need many more, you know. Not just the African Americans, but I think about all the races, they have a lot of knowledge of what America is really about.

[People think we’re] beggars. Or drunk. “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t feel like hiring that guy. What, is he an Indian? Nah, he’s got to be a drunk.” A lot of people look at a person’s history and they say, “Oh, well, he’s Indian, he’s a savage. He doesn’t understand how we live.” Oh wow, really? That’s what they think? But the thing is, how do we survive a thousand years? We didn’t let our kids die because of starvation. No, we adapted.

Doing this is my way of helping people. It really helps. I’ve seen America, I’ve seen corporate America because I used to work for corporate America, and I know how they operate, which is just more of the budgets, the figures, the numbers. But here, the numbers is more, how many people can you help today?

– As told to Henry Gass

There are more refugees now than at any other point in recorded history, but Luma Mufleh, who founded the Fugees Academy schools to serve refugee children, knows that “statistics are numbing. … For people to care they need stories.” Her riveting debut, “Learning America: One Woman’s Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children,” is filled with them – affecting accounts of the experiences of her young students, who’ve come to the United States from Afghanistan, Sudan, Liberia, and other countries after being forced by war or religious, ethnic, or political persecution to leave their homes. 

Mufleh’s own story is also compelling. Born to a privileged family in Jordan, she arrived in the U.S. to study at Smith College. During her senior year, she applied for asylum, fearing for her safety as a gay woman if she returned to her native country, where homosexuality is stigmatized and women can be the victims of so-called “honor killings.” She was disowned after coming out to her family.

Eventually Mufleh settled in Georgia, opening a cafe in Decatur. In 2004, after making a wrong turn, she pulled into the parking lot of a run-down apartment complex in Clarkston, outside Atlanta, to make a U-turn. There, a ragtag group of boys playing soccer caught her eye. Clarkston is home to a large refugee community, and the boys, some barefoot, reminded her of the street games of her childhood in Amman. 

Mufleh, by then in her late 20s, was an experienced soccer coach, helming a girls’ team for the YMCA. She asked the skeptical kids if she could join their game, enticing them with a new ball to replace their deflated one. The first half of the book, in clear, engaging prose, describes how, after that encounter, Mufleh went on to coach an expanding roster of refugee boys; within a couple of years, they numbered 60 players on three teams. She enrolled them with a league (team name: the Fugees) and raised money for uniforms and equipment. But her relationships with many of them extended beyond the soccer field as she was increasingly drawn into their lives, whether helping with grocery shopping and doctor appointments or intervening when they had problems at school.

Much of what she learned of her players’ situations distressed her. Only a tiny fraction of the world’s refugees get resettled in the United States, making them, Mufleh acknowledges, “lottery-winner lucky.” (The process for accepting refugees, she laments, is arbitrary and lacks transparency.) But she began to feel that the system was stacked against them. Many families who arrive in America are transported to bare-bones apartments and left with a bag of groceries and no other support. They’re required to reimburse the International Organization for Migration for their airline tickets; given that most refugees come with nothing, they begin their lives in America thousands of dollars in debt. “What could be more American than that?” Mufleh wryly asks. 

Children begin their education in newcomer centers, where they are ostensibly caught up academically with their peers before being placed in public school classrooms. These centers, however, are poorly funded and disorganized. Mufleh was dismayed to discover that many of her players could not read or write, yet were promoted in school year after year.

Clyde Click/Courtesy of Fugees Family

Mufleh runs a soccer practice session. She came from Jordan to the U.S. to attend college, became a soccer coach, and recognized that her players from refugee families needed more assistance and educational support than they were receiving.

The second half of “Learning America” describes the author’s “radical and yet simple” idea to confront some of these problems: a school specifically for refugee children. Mufleh founded the first Fugees Academy in Atlanta in 2006; she later opened two more, both in Ohio. The fully accredited public charter schools have rigorous academic programs – and, in a nod to their roots, a requirement that all students play soccer.

Some critics, Mufleh reports, are discomfited by the fact that the schools separate refugee children from the rest of the population. But the author, comparing the schools to women’s colleges like the one she attended and to historically Black colleges and universities, argues that they leave “more time to learn and less time having to advocate for the basic assumption of your worth.” 

"Learning America: One Woman’s Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children," by Luma Mufleh, Mariner Books, 237 pp.

Indeed, by making the refugee experience the primary experience, Mufleh and her staff highlight all that their students’ families have accomplished. For instance, she frequently saw the public schools treat her players’ mothers, who often didn’t speak English and worked low-wage jobs, with contempt. “At Fugees Academy,” Mufleh writes, “we recognize the things our parents have achieved: protecting their children in war zones, starting over with nothing in a foreign country, working double shifts without complaint.” 

Significantly, they also help the students, many of whom had been teased and bullied in the public schools, to see themselves differently. “If you survived hunger and war and profound loss, the challenge of graduating high school was surmountable,” she writes. “We needed to shift the way we looked at our students, to see their lived experiences as assets, not deficits.”

“Learning America” also describes how Mufleh herself “learned America.” She writes vividly about her childhood in Jordan, noting the influence of “artifacts from the West” like Motown records and Archie comics. Most influential of all, however, was the movie “9 to 5,” whose depiction of unapologetically strong women inspired her. Decades later, Mufleh herself is an inspiration.

AP

Pro-democracy protesters rally in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, on June 3.

When countries succumb to military power grabs – there were five in Africa alone over the past year – a common pattern unfolds. The international community cries foul; civil society groups protest; the putschists promise a quick restoration of democracy. And then those promises fade, as they have in Mali and Myanmar, as the generals find excuses to tighten their grip.

Talks in Sudan this week mark the latest attempt to chart the path back to the rule of law following a military coup. That process is still fragile, but it has already offered a hint that civic renewal starts with a recognition of the shared interests of adversaries rather than with hardened demands and punitive measures.

The country’s current crisis stems from the ousting last October of a short-lived transitional government tasked with establishing constitutional democracy after 30 years of military dictatorship. Since then, pro-democracy groups and the military junta have been locked in a battle that has unfolded largely in the streets of Khartoum, the capital, and other regional cities. More than 100 people have been killed by soldiers deployed to break up peaceful marches. Scores more have been arrested and detained.

Western and African diplomats, working through the United Nations, African Union, and a regional trade bloc, sought for months to bring the various factions to the table. But pro-democracy groups have steadfastly refused to accept the junta as a legitimate partner in a transition back to civilian rule.

A breakthrough came when Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, under U.N. pressure, lifted a state of emergency and released all detainees on May 29. Those measures, he said, were meant “to prepare the atmosphere for a fruitful and meaningful dialogue that achieves stability for the transitional period.” On Wednesday, military and civilian representatives met in an opening round of talks.

The main alliance of pro-democracy groups, the Forces for Freedom and Change, remained unconvinced. It refused to participate in the talks due to ongoing violent crackdowns during protest rallies. But that boycott masked deeper thinking. The pro-democracy groups seek a fully inclusive, civilian process of democratic change. That includes restoring the military to its rightful role and purpose.

“We seek radical change with a democratic framework,” said Khaled Omar Youssef, a pro-democracy leader and former minister in the ousted transitional government, last month. He warned, however, that “hostility between civilians and the military ... unites the military establishment against the democratic transition.” He urged his fellow pro-democracy advocates to seek military reform rather than the dissolution of forces deployed by the junta to quash its opponents. “If those forces are dissolved, where will these fighters go?” he asked.

That appeal voices a principle still under construction in Africa – the constitutional norm of militaries under civilian command. But it also includes a recognition that all Sudanese, in or out of uniform, hold a common interest in peace and prosperity. An acknowledgment of shared humanity among adversaries is a strong starting point for peace in Sudan – and elsewhere.