"I am good at what I do because I am not afraid to stand up to the boys"

Alice and indie are not impressed with fake returns on fake value, especially where CEO stole value from them to finance his greed. He is the intruder; he is the non-native species ruining EVERYTHING, and the endemic natives demand you hold him legally liable and financially accountable for every scandal.  If you live on the North American continent and your ancestors hail from anywhere other than the continent of North America, that is your job: stop the thing doing the most damage.  He has no rights to be buying whatever he wants here, he has no rights to be in your cellphone conversations, to be linked to from your non-profit websites, he has no rights to be abusing the telecommunications infrastructure of a place that does not and never will belong to him.  Stop him.

Learn from the mistakes of others when they are kind enough to share their experience.

I'll reference a direct quote from my rez husband regarding what he calls "the collapse of the white man's money system". His people (they prefer to be called Diné rather than Navajo; "Diné bizaad" can be translated as meaning "the language of the people") and other indigenous language keepers of the North American tectonic plates have a long-storied prophecy about collapse of "the white man's money". I've thought about his phrasing often since we met.  Consider yourself lucky that you get to be alive while it happens.

And to put it in the most succinct way possible, I think the phrase means that the facts and truth will always come out to double-indemnify the perpetrator of greed-based lies. In other words, almost nothing in economics or finance can be rated "G".  Teaching kids about money cannot be done without talking about colonization, native and invasive species.  The costs of sanitizing history will always be at least an order of magnitude greater than the potential maximum benefit available to those trying to sanitize a history.  People most embarrassed when native peoples' issues come up are those whose ancestors built their empires trying to erase / eradicate cultures, languages, and species.  Yet none of those cultures, languages or species lost can be replaced with "the white man's money."  Rain forests that have regulated climate anomalies for thousands of years getting reduced to one narcissistic CEO's short-sighted "Quest" to make a name for himself?  Enough is enough.

And similar to many young people whose neural pathways were not mature at age 19, I was also (in hindsight, very stupidly) shacked up with my first boyfriend.  I thought I was saving money, but it was worse than that -- he used my student loan debt I'm still stuck with to finance his 1960 classic car restoration.  As noted previously, he was obsessed with cars, rock music videos and Hollywood movie stars.  Interestingly, his name -- like the CEO of Unroyal Caribbean -- was also "Jason".  He was way too tall for me.  If I'd had my mother in my life in my teens when this all-too wrong boy chased me, I know I would not have made many mistakes I made as a young person.  (Spoiler alert -- I escaped this first relationship; we never had children, and I would have many years of good life ahead of me after our divorce). I mention all of this because -- I want you to know that if you are a woman who feels "stuck" with the wrong dude dependent on draconian ways, do not assume there is no way out.

Jason and I had succumbed to the social pressure to marry before I was legally old enough to drink -- largely due to a bishop from a local church ward.  Going through college as a very young married person, I became laser-focused on my field of study:  Accountancy. I thought it was fun and interesting to compile and share data from my pizza delivery job RE: "tips by neighborhood" with my undergrad statistics class.  Ms. Whitelaw taught that class; she was (despite her name) also a Native American, one who ignited my love of statistics.  I did not even realize at the time how lucky I was to have been taught by her.  I think if we were ever to reunite (even online), I'd probably cry with gratitude.  I still love that woman.

By the time my MBA studies were over, I knew my marriage was over as well.  The year of 2004, Jason and Leona were making enough money -- despite half of the marriage being a working student wife -- for us to have to pay US Federal Income Tax.  This was neat to me because I got to attempt to apply some of what I'd learned in school in doing our taxes.  But Jason hated the idea of paying taxes.  We hadn't attended church in years, and yet -- he insisted that I "fudge" and lie on the tax return saying we paid tithing.  

To make the long story short, I ... just couldn't do it.  2004 was not long after the ENRON scandal, and ENRON /ethics were pretty much all we talked about during graduate classes in school.  A mere four years after I'd wandered into that CS lab as a young student who wanted to learn about spreadsheets, I knew I could not betray myself.  I'd learned enough about tax law to know that was the best way to assess a person's ethics.

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