tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56636222024-03-13T19:39:06.064-07:00Webmaster's Blog - Native American ResourcesA place to put resources of a more ephemeral nature, such as events, recommended new websites, new books, etc.Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comBlogger470125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-7252949473316025172014-02-21T08:57:00.001-07:002014-02-21T09:12:36.970-07:00Nestled Amid Toxic Waste, a Navajo Village Faces Losing its Land Forever - NYTimes.com<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/us/nestled-amid-toxic-waste-a-navajo-village-faces-losing-its-land-forever.html?hp&_r=0">Nestled Amid Toxic Waste, a Navajo Village Faces Losing its Land Forever - NYTimes.com</a><br />
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<span class="byline" itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/dan_frosch/index.html" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" style="font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 0.6875rem; font-weight: 700; line-height: 0.75rem;">By <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/dan_frosch/index.html" rel="author" style="color: black; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by DAN FROSCH"><span class="byline-author" data-byline-name="DAN FROSCH" itemprop="name">DAN FROSCH</span></a></span><time class="dateline" datetime="2014-02-19" style="color: black; font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 0.6875rem; line-height: 0.75rem; margin-left: 12px;">FEB. 19, 2014</time></div>
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CHURCH ROCK, N.M. — In this dusty corner of the Navajo reservation, where seven generations of families have been raised among the arroyos and mesas, Bertha Nez is facing the prospect of having to leave her land forever.</div>
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The uranium pollution is so bad that it is unsafe for people to live here long term, environmental officials say. Although the uranium mines that once pocked the hillsides were shut down decades ago, mounds of toxic waste are still piled atop the dirt, raising concerns about radioactive dust and runoff.</div>
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And as cleanup efforts continue, Ms. Nez and dozens of other residents of the Red Water Pond Road community, who have already had to leave their homes at least twice since 2007 because of the contamination, are now facing a more permanent relocation. Although their village represents only a small sliver of the larger Navajo nation, home to nearly 300,000 people, they are bearing the brunt of the environmental problems.</div>
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“It feels like we are being pushed around,” said Ms. Nez, 67, a retired health care worker, who recalled the weeks and months spent in motel rooms in nearby Gallup as crews hauled away radioactive soil from the community’s backyards and roadsides.</div>
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<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="Bertha Nez said families of Red Water Pond Road fear they could be permanently relocated because of the contamination." data-mediaviewer-credit="Mark Holm for The New York Times" data-mediaviewer-src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/02/20/us/JP-NAVAJO-1/JP-NAVAJO-1-superJumbo.jpg" src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/02/20/us/JP-NAVAJO-1/JP-NAVAJO-1-articleLarge.jpg" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/02/20/us/JP-NAVAJO-1/JP-NAVAJO-1-articleLarge.jpg" itemprop="url" style="display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; width: 540px;" /><br />
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<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="description" style="bottom: 23px; color: #666666; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 1rem; position: static; right: 0px; width: auto;"><span class="caption-text">Bertha Nez said families of Red Water Pond Road fear they could be permanently relocated because of the contamination.</span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder" style="color: #999999; display: inline-block; font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 1rem;">Mark Holm for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="180" data-total-count="1381" itemprop="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 12px; max-width: 540px; width: 540px;">
“This is where we’re used to being, traditionally, culturally” she said. “Nobody told us it was unsafe. Nobody warned us we would be living all this time with this risk.”</div>
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These days, this sprawling reservation, about the size of West Virginia, is considered one of the largest uranium-contaminated areas in United States history, according to officials at the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency has been in the throes of an expansive effort to remove waste from around this tiny and remote Navajo village, and clean up more than 500 abandoned mine areas that dot the reservation.</div>
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Federal officials say they have been amazed at the extent of the uranium contamination on the reservation, a vestige of a burst of mining activity here during the Cold War. In every pocket of Navajo country, tribal members have reported finding mines that the agency did not know existed. In some cases, the mines were discovered only after people fell down old shafts.</div>
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“It is shocking — it’s all over the reservation,” said Jared Blumenfeld, the E.P.A.’s regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest. “I think everyone, even the Navajos themselves, have been shocked about the number of mines that were both active and abandoned.”</div>
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Between 2008 and 2012, federal agencies spent $100 million on the cleanup, according to the E.P.A.; an additional $17 million has been spent by energy companies determined to be responsible for some of the waste.</div>
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But the scope of the problem is worse than anyone had thought. The E.P.A. has said that it could take at least eight years to dispose of a huge pile of uranium mine waste that has sat near Red Water Pond Road since the 1980s — waste that must be removed before the area can finally be free of contamination.</div>
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UTAH</div>
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COLORADO</div>
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50 MILES</div>
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NAVAJO RESERVATION</div>
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NEW MEXICO</div>
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Red Water Pond Road</div>
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Santa Fe</div>
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ARIZONA</div>
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“The community is frustrated, I know I’m frustrated — we’d like it to go quickly,” Mr. Blumenfeld said.</div>
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But before the latest round of cleanup can begin, an application to remove the waste pile must be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will then conduct environmental and safety reviews. That process will probably take two years, and there is the possibility that public hearings on the plan could extend the process several more years, said Drew Persinko, a deputy director for the commission.</div>
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That time frame seems unreasonably long for tribal members, who said that spending so long living away from the reservation has been difficult. So far, the E.P.A. has spent $1 million on temporary housing for residents of Red Water Pond Road; much of that cost will be reimbursed by General Electric, which acquired the old Northeast Church Rock Mine site in 1997, and also its subsidiary company, United Nuclear Corporation, which operated the mine.</div>
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As in the past, the relocations will be voluntary. Some residents wondered — as they have for years now — if the land will ever really be clean.</div>
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“Our umbilical cords are buried here, our children’s umbilical cords are buried here. It’s like a homing device,” said Tony Hood, 64, who once worked in the mines and is now a Navajo interpreter for the Indian Medical Center in Gallup. “This is our connection to Mother Earth. We were born here. We will come back here eventually.”</div>
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Residents still remember seeing livestock drinking from mine runoff, men using mine materials to build their homes and Navajo children playing in contaminated water that ran through the arroyo. Today, the site near Red Water Pond Road holds one million cubic yards of waste from the Northeast Church Rock Mine, making it the largest and most daunting area of contamination on the reservation.</div>
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<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption=""This is our connection to Mother Earth," said Tony Hood, left." data-mediaviewer-credit="Mark Holm for The New York Times" data-mediaviewer-src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/02/20/us/JP-NAVAJO-2/JP-NAVAJO-2-superJumbo.jpg" src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/02/20/us/JP-NAVAJO-2/JP-NAVAJO-2-articleLarge.jpg" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/02/20/us/JP-NAVAJO-2/JP-NAVAJO-2-articleLarge.jpg" itemprop="url" style="display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; width: 540px;" /><br />
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<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="description" style="bottom: 23px; color: #666666; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 1rem; position: static; right: 0px; width: auto;"><span class="caption-text">"This is our connection to Mother Earth," said Tony Hood, left.</span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder" style="color: #999999; display: inline-block; font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 1rem;">Mark Holm for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure><div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="246" data-total-count="5071" itemprop="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 12px; max-width: 540px; width: 540px;">
The waste does not pose any immediate health risk, Mr. Blumenfeld said, but there are concerns about radioactive dust being carried by the wind, runoff from rain, and the area’s accessibility to children, who can slip in easily through a fence.</div>
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Under a plan being developed by General Electric and the E.P.A., the waste would be transported to a former uranium mill just off the reservation — already considered a Superfund site — and stored in a fortified repository. The estimated cost is nearly $45 million.</div>
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“General Electric and United Nuclear Corporation are committed to continue to work cooperatively with the U.S. government, Navajo Nation, state of New Mexico and local residents to carry out interim cleanups and reach agreement on the remedy for the mine,” said Megan Parker, a spokeswoman for General Electric.</div>
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The Navajo E.P.A., which is an arm of the tribe’s own government, for years has been calling for a widespread cleanup of abandoned mines. Stephen Etsitty, the executive director of the agency, said he was hopeful that progress was finally being made, but acknowledged that the scope and technical complexity of the operation at Red Water Pond Road was unprecedented.</div>
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“We’re pushing and doing as much as we can to keep the process going as fast as we can,” Mr. Etsitty said. “It’s just taken so long to get there.”</div>
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On a recent day, Ms. Nez and several other residents stood on a bluff near a cluster of small homes and traditional Navajo hogan dwellings as the wind whipped across a valley that once bustled with mining activity.</div>
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The group talked of their grandparents — medicine men who were alive when the mines first opened — and wondered what they would think about Red Water Pond Road today.</div>
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“They would say ‘How did this happen? They ruined our land,’ ” Ms. Nez said. “ ‘How come you haven’t prayed to have this all fixed up?’ ”</div>
</div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-23791214782236958332014-01-09T09:47:00.001-07:002014-01-09T10:03:39.214-07:00Carter Camp, American Indian Leader, Dies at 72 - NYTimes.com<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="240" data-total-count="240" itemprop="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4375rem; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 13px; max-width: 540px;">
On Dec. 29, 1890, United States cavalry, in the last battle of the American Indian wars, massacred as many as 350 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Three generations later, Carter Camp, a 32-year-old Indian militant, retaliated.</div>
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On the night of Feb. 27, 1973, he led the first wave of armed, self-styled warriors in an operation to seize Wounded Knee, which had become a town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The invaders, carrying a list of grievances against the federal government, seized the trading post, cut the telephone lines, ran the Bureau of Indian Affairs police out of town and took 11 hostages.</div>
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“We were pretty sure that we were going to have to give up our lives,” Mr. Camp said in an interview for the PBS program “American Experience” in 2009.</div>
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A caravan of 200 cars carrying Indians and their supporters followed, beginning a 71-day, gunshot-punctuated standoff that some applauded as a show of new assertiveness by long-downtrodden Indians and that others deplored as criminal.</div>
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<img alt="" class="media-viewer-candidate" data-mediaviewer-caption="Carter Camp, center, in Wounded Knee, S.D., during a 71-day standoff in 1973. William Kunstler, the radical lawyer, is at left." data-mediaviewer-credit="Associated Press" data-mediaviewer-src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/01/09/us/CAMP-obit/CAMP-obit-superJumbo.jpg" src="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/01/09/us/CAMP-obit/CAMP-obit-master180.jpg" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/01/09/us/CAMP-obit/CAMP-obit-master180.jpg" itemprop="url" style="display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; width: 180px;" /><br />
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<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="description" style="color: #666666; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 1rem;"><span class="caption-text">Carter Camp, center, in Wounded Knee, S.D., during a 71-day standoff in 1973. William Kunstler, the radical lawyer, is at left.</span> <span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder" style="color: #999999; display: inline-block; font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 1rem;">Associated Press</span></figcaption></figure><br />
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By the time it was over, two Indians had been shot to death and a federal marshal was paralyzed. He later died. Mr. Camp was convicted of abducting, confining and beating four postal inspectors during the siege and served three years in prison.</div>
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He went on to spend decades fighting for Indian rights and died at 72 on Dec. 27 in White Eagle, Okla., the headquarters of the Ponca tribe, of which he was a member. The cause was kidney and liver cancer, his brother Craig said.</div>
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Carter Camp’s dream was to regain the vast lands his people had lost through unfair and broken treaties. But he started by aiming his sights lower, leading a campaign in 1970 to change the way federal money for Indian education was allocated on the Ponca reservation. He became state leader of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, which was organized in 1968 in Minneapolis as a defender of American Indian sovereignty. In 1972, he helped lead an AIM caravan from the West Coast to Washington, where “red power” advocates occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building.</div>
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During the Wounded Knee occupation the next year, alongside the AIM leaders Dennis Banks and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/us/russell-means-american-indian-activist-dies-at-72.html" style="color: #326891;" title="His Times obituary.">Russell C. Means</a>, Mr. Camp was the spokesman who presented the group’s demands to the government, among them that the government honor 371 broken treaties and that it end what the group called corrupt tribal governments. Mr. Camp rejected an offer of leniency if the protesters left immediately.</div>
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“We decided that the Indian people were more important to us than jail terms,” he was quoted as saying in “The Road to Wounded Knee” (1974), by Robert Burnette and John Koster.</div>
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When the Indians finally did end their occupation, Mr. Camp was one of the leaders who signed the agreement. Mr. Banks did not.</div>
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In August 1973, Mr. Camp was elected chairman of AIM but within weeks was ejected from the organization after being accused of shooting another AIM leader, Clyde Bellecourt, in the stomach. News accounts and histories say Mr. Camp was angry that Mr. Bellecourt had accused him of being a paid informer for the F.B.I. Charges were dropped after Mr. Bellecourt and a witness refused to testify.</div>
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The episode precipitated swirls of speculation. In his 1983 book, “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” Peter Matthiessen said Mr. Camp had called Mr. Bellecourt a coward because he refused to carry a gun. Others suggested that the F.B.I. had planted the rumor that Mr. Camp was an informer to damage AIM’s credibility.</div>
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Bruce E. Johansen, the author of “Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement” (2013), wrote that Mr. Bellecourt had tried to salvage Mr. Camp’s reputation but that Mr. Means had insisted he be expelled.</div>
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Carter Augustus Camp was born in Pawnee, Okla., on Aug. 18, 1941. He graduated from Haskell Institute, a high school for Indians in Lawrence, Kan. (It became Haskell Indian Nations University.) He then joined the Army and served in Western Europe. After his discharge, he worked in a factory in Los Angeles, serving as shop steward for the electrical workers’ union.</div>
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Mr. Camp returned to Oklahoma to be close to his roots, literally. “We believe the soil and every plant contains the dust of our ancestors,” he once said.</div>
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In recent years, Mr. Camp had fought against garbage companies’ using Indian lands for disposal; a proposed pipeline to bring tar sands oil from Canada; and a bar catering to motorcyclists near his reservation. He protested a re-enactment of the Lewis and Clark expedition, calling it a remembrance of the extermination of his people.</div>
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In addition to his brother, Mr. Camp is survived by another brother, Dwain; his wife, Linda; his sons Kenny, Jeremy, Victorio, Mazhonaposhe and Augustus; his sister, Casey Camp-Horinek; 24 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.</div>
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Mr. Camp helped organize annual sun dances conducted by Leonard Crow Dog, the spiritual leader of the Wounded Knee occupiers. Participants, who may not eat or drink, dance around a cottonwood tree from sunrise to sunset.</div>
Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-78644261178759509352013-10-15T09:45:00.001-07:002013-10-15T09:45:24.657-07:00Navajo Leader Drops His Support for Slaughter of Wild Horses on the Reservation - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/fernanda_santos/index.html" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/fernanda_santos/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by FERNANDA SANTOS">FERNANDA SANTOS</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: October 7, 2013</h6><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></span><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">PHOENIX — Under pressure by animal welfare groups and many of his own people, the president of the Navajo Nation, Ben Shelly, has reversed his stance on horse slaughtering, saying he will no longer support it and will order the temporary suspension of the roundups of feral horses on the reservation.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleInline runaroundLeft" style="background-color: white; clear: left; color: #333333; display: inline; float: left; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin: 6px 15px 10px 0px !important; text-align: left; width: 190px;"><div class="inlineImage module" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 12px; width: 190px;"><div class="caption" style="color: #666666; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; line-height: 1.2727em;"><br />
</div></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The agreement, brokered by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, is scheduled to be announced on Tuesday. One of its key provisions is to pressure the federal government to do more to help the Navajos handle the tens of thousands of horses that roam freely on their land. Mr. Shelly has estimated that feral horses cost the Navajos $200,000 a year in damage to property and range.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“I am interested in long-term humane solutions to manage our horse populations,” Mr. Shelly said. “Our land is precious to the Navajo people as are all the horses on the Navajo Nation. Horses are sacred animals to us.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Shelly’s recalibrated position is sure to strengthen the arguments against horse slaughter in the nation, just as a legal fight to block the opening of horse slaughterhouses in New Mexico and Missouri reaches its final stages.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">It could also smooth relations between his administration and tribal elders in some of the Navajo Nation’s largest chapters, who have stood steadfastly against the roundups even as Mr. Shelly embraced them in August as the best available option, given the tribe’s limited resources, to keep its feral horse population under control.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">At the time, his stance put the country’s largest federally recognized tribe in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/us/on-fate-of-wild-horses-stars-and-indians-spar.html" style="color: #666699;">collision course</a> with Mr. Richardson and the actor Robert Redford, who had justified joining a lawsuit against horse slaughtering filed by animal-rights groups by saying they were “standing with Native American leaders.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In a unanimous vote last month, the Navajo Nation chapter in Shiprock, N.M., <a href="http://www.abqjournal.com/260936/news/shiprock-navajos-go-own-way-on-feral-horses.html" style="color: #666699;">banned</a>horse roundups in its territory. The chapter’s president, Duane Yazzie, said members were concerned about the abandoned colts and the sale of the horses to meat plants in Mexico, where slaughter is legal.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">On Saturday, several of the chapter’s members protested as Mr. Shelly took part in a parade at the Northern Navajo Nation Fair in Shiprock.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Shelly and Mr. Richardson met in Farmington, N.M., just outside Navajo lands, shortly after the parade to complete the agreement. It charges several animal welfare groups — including <a href="http://www.apnm.org/" style="color: #666699;">Animal Protection of New Mexico</a> and the Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife, founded by Mr. Richardson and Mr. Redford — with developing alternative policies. One option is rounding up the horses and putting them up for adoption; another is dispensing contraceptives.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“This is a huge event,” Mr. Richardson said. “One of the most important and largest tribes in the country is now on the record against horse slaughtering, and that should be a major factor both in Congress and in the courts.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">All along, Mr. Shelly had spoken about the “delicate balance,” as he put it, between the horses’ significance to the Navajos and the cost of repairing the damage caused by feral horses on the reservation, which covers roughly 27,500 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Navajos estimate there are 75,000 feral horses roaming the reservation, an estimate based on aerial observations, a method they concede is unreliable. One of the points of the agreement is to find a way to take an accurate count.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">During a meeting in Washington last month, Mr. Shelly told several animal welfare groups that the federal government needed to “live up to its responsibilities,” according to his spokesman, Erny Zah, and help the Navajos manage the feral horses. It was not until the agreement with Mr. Richardson, however, that he made his new stance on horse slaughtering official.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The <a href="http://www.humanesociety.org/" style="color: #666699;">Humane Society of the United States</a> and other groups <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/business/lawsuit-aims-to-block-horse-meat-inspections.html" style="color: #666699;">sued</a> the United States Department of Agriculture in July to keep horse slaughter plants from opening in New Mexico, Iowa and Missouri, arguing that the agency had failed to carry out all of the environmental checks, and asked the courts to block its inspectors from working there. The owners of the plant in Iowa have since scrapped their plans to slaughter horses and turned their focus to cattle.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In August, Judge M. Christina Armijo of United States District Court in Albuquerque halted the inspections until she makes her final ruling on the case, which is expected by the end of the month.</div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-5095042364118566752013-10-09T11:09:00.001-07:002013-10-09T11:09:39.817-07:00Redskins Name Change Remains Her Unfinished Business - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ken_belson/index.html" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ken_belson/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by KEN BELSON">KEN BELSON</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: October 9, 2013 <span class="commentCount" id="datelineCommentCount" style="border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; margin-left: 4px; padding-left: 7px;"><a class="commentCountLink icon commentIcon" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/sports/football/redskins-name-change-remains-her-unfinished-business.html?hpw#postcomment" style="background-image: url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/icons/multimedia/comment_icon.gif); background-position: 0% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; color: #666699; padding-left: 13px; text-decoration: none;">Comment</a></span></h6><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" style="font-size: 11px;"></span><nyt_text><span style="font-size: 11px;"><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top></span><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="line-height: 1.467em;"><br />
</span>WASHINGTON — Suzan Shown Harjo still becomes tense when she recalls the only<a class="meta-org" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/profootball/nationalfootballleague/washingtonredskins/index.html?inline=nyt-org" style="color: #666699;" title="Recent news and scores about the Washington Redskins.">Washington Redskins</a> home game she attended, nearly 40 years ago<span style="font-size: 1.5em;">.</span></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="font-size: 1.5em;"><br />
</span></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="background-color: transparent; line-height: 1.467em;">After she moved to Washington, she and her husband received free tickets. Fans sitting nearby, apparently amused that American Indians were in their midst, pawed their hair and poked them, “not in an unfriendly way, but in a scary way,” Ms. Harjo said.</span></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="background-color: transparent; line-height: 1.467em;"><br />
</span></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;">“We didn’t know what was next,” she said.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ms. Harjo and her husband left the game, but they never left Washington. The incident fueled her existing opposition to the team’s name and lent new urgency for her to get the team to change it. Since the 1960s, Ms. Harjo has been at the center of efforts to persuade schools, colleges and professional sports teams to drop American Indian names and mascots that some consider derogatory. The fight has escalated in recent days as groups have intensified lobbying efforts and organized protests, even prompting President Obama to weigh in on the issue.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The debate tends to settle on one central question: how many people must be offended by a team’s name for a change to be warranted? The Redskins, of the National Football League, cite polling in which most respondents said they were not offended by the name, while those lobbying the team to drop its name dispute the accuracy of that data and say that no matter, the word is widely regarded as derogatory.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">More than two-thirds of the roughly 3,000 teams with American Indian mascots have dropped them, many voluntarily and without incident. Along the way, Ms. Harjo, the director of the Morning Star Institute, a group that promotes Native American causes, became something of a godmother to the cause of eliminating disparaging mascots.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“She has led this fight early,” said Ray Halbritter, a representative of the Oneida Indian Nation, which has paid for advertisements calling on the Redskins to abandon their name. “We stand on her shoulders.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But Ms. Harjo, who prefers the term Native American, considers her work unfinished because professional teams, most notably the Redskins, have been vocal about keeping their name. In May, Daniel Snyder, the Redskins’ owner, echoed his predecessors when he vowed never to change the name.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Redskins, playing in the nation’s capital and the country’s wealthiest league, have remained steadfast as many other teams have changed their nicknames, dating to the 1960s, when the owner at the time, George Preston Marshall, opposed desegregation. Edward Bennett Williams, who owned the team in the 1970s, met with American Indians to discuss the team’s name, but little followed.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“There are so many milestones in this issue,” Ms. Harjo, 68, said Monday at an event held by <a href="http://changethemascot.org/" style="color: #666699;" target="_">ChangetheMascot.org</a>, a <a href="http://www.changethemascot.org/" style="color: #666699;">group</a> urging the Redskins to change their name. “It is king of the mountain because it’s associated with the nation’s capital, so what happens here affects the rest of the country.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ms. Harjo, Mr. Halbritter, Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota and others who attended the event said that they would continue to call on Mr. Snyder and the N.F.L. to change the team’s name. Ms. McCollum, via social media and letters, has received the brunt of the backlash from some fans who think the Redskins should not change their name. (“I’m offended by the name Vikings as I have family from Denmark,” one person wrote on Ms. McCollum’s Facebook page, imploring her to “concentrate on a budget and don’t worry about the Washington Redskins.”)</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Last week, days before the league’s 32 owners were to meet in Washington, the debate was inflamed when President Obama said that he would consider changing the name if he owned the team. Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has also called on broadcasters to avoid using the team’s nickname.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In what amounts to a break in the stalemate, Adolpho Birch, the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for labor policy and government affairs, sent a letter last Friday to Peter Carmen, the chief operating officer of Oneida Indian Nation. Mr. Birch suggested that they meet before their previously scheduled meeting on Nov. 22.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“We respect that people have differing views,” said Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the N.F.L. “It is important that we listen to all perspectives.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Ms. Harjo, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, spent her first 11 years on a farm in an Oklahoma reservation. Her family’s home had no indoor plumbing or electricity, and her idea of wealth was to have ice cubes in her drink, she said. Ms. Harjo’s great-grandfather was Chief Bull Bear, who battled the government over land in the 1800s. As a teenager, she lived with her family in Naples, Italy, where her father was stationed in the United States Army.</span></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">After returning to the United States, Ms. Harjo moved to New York to work in radio and theater production. There, she met Frank Ray Harjo and had two children. They worked to promote religious freedom and civil rights and co-produced “Seeing Red,” a biweekly radio program devoted to Native American news and analysis on WBAI-FM. Ms. Harjo also produced hundreds of plays and other programs and helped an improvisational theatrical group.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In 1974, she left for Washington to work as a legislative liaison for two law firms involved in American Indian rights. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed her a Congressional liaison for Indian Affairs, which allowed her to help draft legislation to protect Indian lands and tribal government tax status. She also worked for the National Congress of American Indians.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ms. Harjo has spoken regularly on the issue of team names and held protests, including one at the Super Bowl in 1992, in Minneapolis, when the Redskins played the Buffalo Bills. At the time, Stephen R. Baird, a young lawyer who had clerked in federal court in Washington, was preparing a law review article on an obscure part of the Lanham Act that forbids trademarks that disparage people.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“There was really no precedent,” said Mr. Baird, who now works for Winthrop & Weinstine in Minneapolis. “So I asked, Why hasn’t anyone challenged them on that basis?”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Baird approached Ms. Harjo, and in September 1992 a legal battle began when Harjo et al. v. Pro Football Inc., the corporate name of the Redskins, was filed with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. After the three-judge panel agreed to remove the protections, the case was appealed, and a federal judge overturned the decision, saying that the plaintiffs had waited too long to file their case, something that Ms. Harjo and others call a technicality. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Those of us who were plaintiffs have passed on, and many of us have become grandfathers and grandmothers, and our hair has turned grayer, and still we haven’t been heard on our merits,” said Manley A. Begay Jr., a co-plaintiff who teaches at the University of Arizona. Referring to a once common term for blacks, he added, “After Sambo was removed years and years ago, we still have to deal with these mascots.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">To get around the court’s argument that too much time had passed, Ms. Harjo organized another case with younger American Indian plaintiffs. Oral arguments in that case were heard in March, and Ms. Harjo and others expect a decision perhaps by the end of the year. They are optimistic because, among other things, both sides agreed to recycle the records from the Harjo case as the foundation for this one.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Even if Ms. Harjo and her compatriots prevail in that case, Mr. Snyder will still be able to use the Redskins name. But the federal government would no longer be obliged to protect the team’s trademarks, and thus less likely to seize counterfeit goods, a potentially expensive exemption that could hit the team and league in the pocketbook.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“You’re not just dealing with the Washington franchise, but the whole of the N.F.L.,” Ms. Harjo said. “It’s one monolith after another laden with money and the power it represents.”</div><br />
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</div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-26850406123458091832013-08-15T08:40:00.001-07:002013-08-15T08:40:54.468-07:00Pine Ridge Reservation Votes to End Alcohol Ban - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by TIMOTHY WILLIAMS">TIMOTHY WILLIAMS</a></span> and <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/john_eligon/index.html" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/john_eligon/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by JOHN ELIGON">JOHN ELIGON</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Published: August 14, 2013</span></h6><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" style="font-size: 11px;"></span><nyt_text><span style="font-size: 11px;"><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top></span><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;">For practically as long as the Oglala Sioux have lived on the Pine Ridge reservation, alcohol has been seen as one of the tribe’s greatest enemies.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><br />
</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Over the years, it has been illegally smuggled onto the reservation and blamed for crime, poverty, family estrangements, fatal car accidents, suicides and unemployment.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Now, alcohol is sowing resentment and division within the tribe as the people of Pine Ridge have voted to legalize its sale.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Tribal election officials on Wednesday evening confirmed that tribal members, in a public referendum, had voted to overturn the ban on possessing and selling alcohol on the reservation. The vote tally was 1,843 in favor of legalization and 1,678 against it, according to the election commission.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Tribal members will have three days to challenge the result, but the election chairman, Francis Pumpkin Seed, said the burden to get a vote struck down was high in that whoever complains would have to prove that election law was violated.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">While supporters say legalization will allow them to regulate alcohol and earn money from sales, critics worry that it will only worsen the tribe’s problems.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“How far are we going to let it go?” asked Bryan Brewer, the tribal president, who is staunchly against legalizing alcohol. “How many more children are going to be murdered because of this?”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">There have been protest marches by those opposed to ending prohibition, and the police have said people had received death threats.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Because of threats, the ballots were transferred to a secure location after the polls closed Tuesday so they could be counted.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Those supporting the initiative said opening shops that sold alcohol on the reservation would allow the tribe to keep a share of Pine Ridge’s money on the reservation that is now being spent in liquor stores in towns bordering it. Further, they argued that the tax proceeds from alcohol sales could be used to bolster the Oglala Sioux’s alcohol treatment programs. It remained unclear how much money allowing alcohol sales would produce for the reservation, which is one of the poorest places in the country and has unemployment rates estimated at more than 80 percent.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Not legalizing it is just the status quo,” said Robert Ecoffey, 58, who worked in law enforcement on the tribe and served as a superintendent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “You have all of the issues and none of the resources to help deal with it.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But that argument was unconvincing to Mr. Brewer.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“We’re going to use alcohol money to spend on alcohol issues,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense to me. I consider this blood money that the tribe will be getting. I hate to accept it.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Solving the alcohol problem, he said, requires educating children, returning to the roots of tribal culture and creating jobs through economic development. Instead, he said, the tribal council, the federal government and the people of Pine Ridge have turned a blind eye to the problem.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The United States government has traditionally banned alcohol on reservations, but during the past 20 years, as more tribes have opened casinos — which are the leading economic drivers on many reservations — those prohibitions have been relaxed by tribes. Still, many reservations continue to limit alcohol sales and consumption to casinos.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Even the smell of alcohol on a person’s breath in Pine Ridge has been cause for arrest. But despite the ban, alcohol — particularly beer — is plentiful on Pine Ridge. Most comes from stores that sell alcohol in the tiny town of Whiteclay, just across the Nebraska border from the reservation. Four stores in Whiteclay sell millions of cans of beer and malt liquor a year, almost all of it to the Oglala Sioux of Pine Ridge. Lawsuits, boycotts, police safety checks and protests organized by the tribe have all failed to close the stores or to put a significant dent in their business.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ron Duke, Pine Ridge’s chief of police, said that while he did not personally support opening the reservation up to alcohol sales, legalizing it would free his officers from responding to calls in which there is a complaint about an inebriated person or the presence of alcohol inside a home — which he said took up the vast majority of an officer’s time.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But Chief Duke said that he expected the easier availability of alcohol to lead to a sharp rise in violence, which will challenge a department whose 37 officers are responsible for patrolling an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Like the majority of families on the reservation, Chief Duke, 63, said alcohol has had a devastating impact on his family. He said that he managed to avoid alcohol until he was 16, but was soon drinking heavily, like many among his family and friends.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">During his 20s, he said, it was common for him to leave work at a beef packing plant in Nebraska, spend hours in a bar drinking until closing time at 2 a.m. and then return to work at 6 a.m.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Chief Duke said he finally gave up alcohol when he turned 31. But alcohol’s ill fortune caught up to some members of his family. Two of his daughters, he said, were killed in drunken-driving accidents in the 1990s.</div></nyt_text></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-13346513591728885152013-07-17T08:01:00.001-07:002013-07-17T08:01:24.837-07:00Native American tribes’ lawsuit could decide who controls Senate in 2015 - The Hill - covering Congress, Politics, Political Campaigns and Capitol Hill | TheHill.com<a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/311199-tribes-lawsuit-could-decide-who-controls-senate-in-2015">Native American tribes’ lawsuit could decide who controls Senate in 2015 - The Hill </a><br />
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<div style="border: 0px; font-family: arial, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="author" style="border: 0px; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">By Jordy Yager </span>- <span class="date" style="border: 0px; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">07/16/13 05:00 AM ET</span></div><div class="txt" id="el-article-div" style="border: 0px; font-family: arial, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div class="social" style="border: 0px; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></div></div><span style="border: 0px; font-family: arial, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><br />
<div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">A high-profile lawsuit on the voting rights of Native Americans could help determine control of the Senate in the next Congress.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">A group of 16 Native Americans, nine of whom are military veterans, is waging a protracted legal battle against Montana’s Democratic secretary of State and county administrators, arguing for improved access to voter registration sites. </div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">The case will be significant for Democrats in 2014 as they vie to keep control of the upper chamber by holding retiring Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mont.) seat. Republicans need to pick up six seats to win back control of the Senate. </div><span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="border: 0px; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white;">The litigation is moving forward at the same time as a recent Supreme Court decision that no longer requires a number of jurisdictions to get advance federal permission in order to make changes to their election laws.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><span style="border: 0px; font-family: arial, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"></div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">The three Montana counties now being sued have historically lost Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases. However, for the state’s overwhelmingly poor and geographically isolated Native Americans — who vote predominantly for Democrats — the Montana fight is deeply personal. Tribal leaders say it is an issue of fundamental fairness. </div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">An estimated 50,000 Native Americans are eligible to vote in Montana. Many of them live on reservations throughout the sprawling 550-mile-wide state, which means driving more than 100 miles for some to reach polling sites established long before Native Americans got the right to vote.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">It’s the distance equivalent of voters in Washington, D.C., having to drive to Gettysburg, Pa. and back to complete their late registration forms or cast early in-person absentee ballots.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">If the state allowed more voting stations, known as satellite offices, on reservations, more Native Americans would have the ability to vote by a factor of 250 percent, a group supporting the lawsuit argues.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">This group, which is providing strategic and financial support to the plaintiffs, includes Four Directions, a nationally known voting rights organization, and Tom Rodgers, the Native American lobbyist who blew the whistle on former lobbyist Jack Abramoff for charging Native American tribes exorbitant fees on lobbying.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Together, they have spent about $335,000 waging the legal battle, which began in the months leading up to the 2012 election. They have also offered to pay the cost of establishing the satellite offices, which could run up to $8,000 apiece for each location. </div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Department of Justice, Montana tribal leaders, the ACLU and the National Congress of American Indians have all backed the plaintiffs in the legal dispute.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">The origin of the lawsuit began when Rodgers, a member of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe, received a phone call that U.S. Army Spc. Antonio Burnside, a fellow Blackfeet member whose tribal name was Many Hides, was killed last year in combat on Good Friday in Afghanistan.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">In late April 2012, after raising the money to help celebrate the soldier’s life, Rodgers said a feeling of rage overcame him.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">He noted that Native Americans have the highest percentage of military enlistees of any ethnic group.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“Some of the poorest of the poor can fight a war and die for you on a hellish moonscaped mountainside and then when they return home in a flag-draped coffin, you seek to diminish their native brothers’ and sisters’ ability to vote. Young dead soldiers do not speak. They leave us their deaths. It is us who must give them meaning by remembering them,” Rodgers said. “We got tired of the dark lies in rooms of white marble. Now the plaintiff warriors will take their faith in justice by acting with justice to other rooms of white marble: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and Congress.”</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who won reelection last year, said that poverty and unemployment levels on reservations are higher than in the rest of the state, and that many Native Americans don’t have access to transportation or can’t take time off from work. </div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“Native Americans are about 6 percent of the population, so it’s absolutely significant,” said Tester.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“Everybody who’s entitled to vote, we ought to give them every opportunity to vote,” Tester said. “We shouldn’t be limiting participation, we should be encouraging it.”</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">The suit might have an impact beyond Montana as well. If it goes as far as the Supreme Court, major Native American populations in Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, California, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and Alaska could see their voting rights greatly expanded or restricted.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Democrats are facing challenging elections in four of those states next year. </div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Native Americans have played a crucial role in electing Democratic senators, including Tester and Sens. Tim Johnson (S.D.), Maria Cantwell (Wash.), Al Franken (Minn.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Mark Begich (Alaska.). All have won elections by fewer than 4,000 votes.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">But for now, Montana — where Democrats are scrambling to find a candidate following ex-Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s surprise decision not to run — is the central battleground.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Montana Secretary of State Linda McCulloch (D) says she supports the Native Americans’ demands, but that the lawsuit is misdirected.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">At a <a href="http://youtu.be/OUQPo7GRh4o" mce_href="http://youtu.be/OUQPo7GRh4o" style="border: 0px; color: #181d78; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><b style="border: 0px; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">video-recorded meeting</b></a> with the tribes earlier this year, tensions between the two sides were palpable as they failed to negotiate a compromise after a nearly hour-long discussion.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“I care that the people at this table have equal access, and what is in my power as secretary of State to do, I can do,” said McCulloch. “What I do not have the authority over is establishing county clerk offices. That authority belongs to the county governing body, the county commissioners.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“We will support and assist any county whose governing body has made a decision to open a second county clerk election office that can offer services such as registering voters and issuing absentee ballots. You have my unwavering commitment to that.”</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">A spokeswoman for McCulloch, citing the ongoing litigation, declined to comment for this article.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">The plaintiffs and tribal leaders rejected McCulloch’s remarks. They said Montana’s secretary of State should join the tribes by officially standing with the plaintiffs and leading the county commissioners to create the satellite offices.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">J. Gerry Hebert, who worked on voting rights issues for more than 20 years in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, doesn’t agree with McCulloch’s assessment either, saying that this type of case falls directly within her office’s jurisdiction.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“The secretary of State is the chief election officer and as such has the overall responsibility to ensure that all the state laws are complied with,” said Hebert, now the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center. “And in this case, which is typically the case, a plaintiff will file a lawsuit and bring it against both local and state election officials, because it is both of their responsibilities.”</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Although the issue has been in the local press for nearly a year, the Montana Democratic Party has not weighed in on the lawsuit, saying only that it supports greater access to polling sites and will continue aggressive “get out the vote” efforts.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“Increasing access to the ballot box on reservations and throughout Montana has always been a priority,” said Chris Saeger, a spokesman for the state’s party. “We would welcome any improvements that make it easier for Montanans to have their say in elections.”</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“The Democratic Party of Montana has said we have done what we could,” Rodgers said. “But hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger, for the way things are, and courage, to make a difference.”</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Carole Goldberg, a professor and vice chancellor at UCLA’s School of Law who has dealt extensively with Native American legal rights, said discrimination is widespread in many states with Native populations. </div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">“There are persistent patterns where states have criminal jurisdiction on reservations and the counties that exercise this jurisdiction locate their facilities and services in a place convenient for the non-Native population and not the Native populations,” said Goldberg, who has donated to multiple Democratic candidates.</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border: 0px; padding: 0px;">Barring a settlement, oral arguments are expected to begin this fall.</div><span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="border: 0px; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></span></span></span>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-38474064742957615442013-07-13T07:42:00.001-07:002013-07-13T07:42:30.643-07:00U.S. Budget Cuts Fall Heavily on American Indians - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/annie_lowrey/index.html" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/annie_lowrey/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by ANNIE LOWREY">ANNIE LOWREY</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><br />
<h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: July 12, 2013 </h6><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></span><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top></nyt_text><br />
<div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;">PINE RIDGE, S.D. — The Red Cloud-Bissonette family needs a new trailer. Frank, who is disabled, and Norma, his wife, are members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who live on the sprawling grasslands of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Despite their constant efforts to patch the seams of one of their trailers that was hauled here in 1988, rot and mold continue to climb up the walls. The family has punched a hole in the ceiling for a chimney for their wood stove, a necessity given the harshness of the winters but a fire hazard in the dry climate.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><br />
</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="line-height: 36px;">A second trailer a few feet away, where some family members live, including a grandchild, has no plumbing or running water.</span></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/business/economy/us-budget-cuts-fall-heavily-on-american-indians.html?hp" style="color: #666699;">The Red Cloud-Bissonettes are one of about 1,500 families on a waiting list at a local housing</a>improvement program that was recently told that it is being shut down. “These are real, real low-income people,” said Andre Janis, the housing program’s director. “If we go away, a lot of people are going to be without these services completely.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">And it is just one of dozens of cuts the tribe is stomaching, many of them due to the mandatory federal budget reductions known as sequestration. When Congress approved legislation for the budget cuts, which went into effect on March 1, they specifically exempted many programs that benefit low-income Americans, including Medicaid, tax credits for working families and food stamps. But virtually none of the programs aiding American Indians — including money spent through the departments of interior, education, health and human services and agriculture — were included on that list.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">As a result, the cuts are starting to deliver yet another blow to hundreds of the United States’ most deeply impoverished communities.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“More people sick; fewer people educated; fewer people getting general assistance; more domestic violence; more alcoholism,” said Richard L. Zephier, the executive director of the Oglala Sioux tribe. “That’s all correlated to the cuts from sequestration.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">On the Pine Ridge reservation, home to around 40,000 members of the tribe, the unemployment rate is estimated at as much as 85 percent. Shannon County, home to the town of Pine Ridge, has a per-capita income of less than $8,000. The local economy is not just reliant on transfers from the federal government; it in no small part consists of them.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Over all, the tribe’s budget is about $80 million a year, of which $70 million comes from federal sources, said Mason Big Crow, the tribe’s treasurer. The tribe still did not know how much money it would lose, waiting on word from Washington, he said, but the number would be in the millions.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The tribe is cutting the size of a program that delivers meals to the elderly, many of whom are housebound. The school budget, Head Start program and health service are shrinking, too. The tribe has no choice but to cut everywhere, Mr. Big Crow said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Despite the reservation’s extraordinary problems with crime — alcohol and methamphetamine abuse are rampant, many of the tribe’s youth are involved in gangs — its police force is absorbing more than a million dollars in cuts.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“We’re cut to the bone,” Ron Duke, the police chief, said. “Right now, we’re being reactive to things. It’s really hard to be proactive when you don’t have enough staff. We’re just constantly answering calls.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The force has already absorbed a cut of more than 6 percent, he said. This autumn, it will cut another 8 percent. Chief Duke has let 14 staff members go. He said that at any given time, the reservation had only nine patrol cars on duty to cover an area the size of Connecticut, exhausting his officers as they chased down calls.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">With the cuts, the poverty trap that has plagued the reservation for generations looks certain to worsen, with yet more families mired in deprivation, reservation officials and residents said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Imagine how people feel who can’t help themselves,” said Robert Brave Heart Sr., the executive vice president of the Red Cloud Indian School on the reservation. “It’s a condition that a lot of people believe is the result of the federal government putting them in that position, a lot of people are set up for failure. People have no hope and no ability whatsoever to change their fate in life. You take resources that they have, that are taken away, it just adds to the misery.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text></nyt_text><br />
<div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">While the effect of sequestration on the overall economy has been diffuse, with the largest impact falling on the military and companies dependent on Pentagon spending, nowhere has the sting been felt more severely than on American Indian reservations.</div></div><div class="articleInline runaroundLeft" style="clear: left; color: #333333; display: inline; float: left; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin: 6px 15px 10px 0px !important; width: 190px;"><div class="columnGroup doubleRule" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/global/borders/doubleRule.gif); background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; border-width: 0px !important; clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; padding-top: 12px; width: auto !important;"></div></div><div class="articleInline runaroundLeft firstArticleInline" style="clear: left; color: #333333; display: inline; float: left; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 10px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 15px !important; margin-top: 0px; width: 190px;"><div class="story" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px;"><h6 style="color: black; font-size: 1.2em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/07/13/business/Reservation.html?ref=economy" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;"><br />
</a></h6><h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px 0px;"></h6></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">There was a time when the Bureau of Indian Affairs was “a bunch of federal employees providing direct services to tribes,” said Kevin Washburn, the assistant secretary of the interior in charge of the bureau. “Now, a big part of the way we provide services to Indian tribes is that we contract with tribal governments, so they’re providing the services to citizens.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The bureau, he said, had no choice but to pass the cuts directly to the tribes. “Tragic consequences are occurring,” Mr. Washburn said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“In Indian country, there’s a disproportionate number of people employed by the government,” said Amber Ebarb of the National Congress of American Indians, a nonprofit based in Washington. “There is not as much of a private sector presence in Indian country, which tends to be high-poverty and high-unemployment to begin with.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Some tribes, including those that operate successful casinos close to major population centers, have the resources to compensate for some of the cuts, diverting money from rainy day funds or holding back nonessential expenses.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But dozens of smaller or less wealthy tribes and nations are not so lucky. Aaron Payment, the chairman of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan, said the tribe was absorbing a $1.7 million cut, and trying to avoid layoffs and program closings. Still, if worse came to worst, it might have to move to emergency-only medical services, or closing entire programs.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“We put in about 50 percent of our financing, and the federal government puts in about 50 percent,” Mr. Payment said. “But we’re only meeting about 60 percent of our need to begin with.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In the Navajo Nation, Deborah Jackson-Dennison, the superintendent of the Window Rock Unified School District, is in the process of reducing the school budget to about $17 million, from about $24 million, absorbing a cut from sequestration as well as from the local government. “It’s like getting two black eyes at once,” she said. She has let go of 14 employees, and moved the school district down to four buildings from seven.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In response to the cuts, many tribal leaders are lobbying the federal government to protect the tribes from sequestration — on both moral and legal grounds.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“We should be exempt from sequestration,” said Dr. Zephier, the Ogala Sioux director. “All tribes should be exempt.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The tribes contend that the federal government does not just disburse money to them through federal programs. It meets its nation-to-nation treaty obligation to provide certain services to American Indians. Viewed in that light, a cut is not just a cut but a broken legal promise, and one in a long line of them.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“The tribes in this country, the federally recognized American Indians and Alaska Natives, have the world’s first prepaid health plan,” said Stacy Bohlen, the executive director of the National Indian Health Board, an advocacy organization based in Washington that has argued vocally against the cuts to Indian health programs. “They paid for it with their lives, and their land, and their culture, and the forced abrogation of their future.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But on the reservations, a sense of resignation has set in.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“It’s one more reminder that our relationship with the federal government is a series of broken promises,” said the Rev. George Winzenburg, the Catholic priest who serves as president of the Red Cloud Indian School. “It’s a series of underfunded projects and initiatives that we were told would be funded to allow us to live at the quality of life that other Americans do.<br />
”</div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-45202181044278591172013-07-11T07:21:00.001-07:002013-07-11T07:21:39.492-07:00Broken Promises - NYTimes.com<br />
<div class="columnGroup first" style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; text-align: left; width: auto !important;"><nyt_byline><h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">BYRON L. DORGAN</span></h6></nyt_byline><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px;">Published: July 10, 2013</h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;"><br />
</span></h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">As chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, I once toured a school near an Indian reservation where I encountered a teacher who told me that when she asked a young Indian student what she wanted for Christmas, she said she wanted the electricity turned on in her house so she could study at night.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">WASHINGTON — WHEN I retired in 2011 after serving 30 years in Congress, there was one set of issues I knew I could not leave behind. I donated $1 million of unused campaign funds to create the</span><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;"> </span><a href="http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/native-american-youth" style="color: #666699; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">Center for Native American Youth</a><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;"> </span><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">at the Aspen Institute, because our country has left a trail of broken promises to American Indians.</span></h6><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">That type of story is all too familiar. I believe that American Indian children are the country’s most at-risk population. Too many live in third-world conditions. A few weeks ago, I traveled to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It’s hard just to get there. A two-hour drive from Rapid City brings you to Shannon County, the second poorest county in the United States.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The proud nation of Sioux Indians who live there — like many of the 566 federally recognized tribes — have a treaty with the United States, the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which promised that their health care, education and housing needs would be provided for by the federal government.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Tribal leaders, parents and some inspiring children I’ve met make valiant efforts every day to overcome unemployment, endemic poverty, historical trauma and a lack of housing, educational opportunity and health care.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But these leaders and communities are once again being mistreated by a failed American policy, this time going under the ugly name “sequestration.” This ignorant budget maneuvering requires across-the-board spending cuts to the most important programs along with the least important. American Indian kids living in poverty are paying a very high price for this misguided abandonment of Congressional decision-making.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">When we pushed American Indians off their tribal lands, we signed treaties making promises to provide services in exchange for that land. On my visit to Pine Ridge, I saw how we continue to cheat them. Sequestration, which should never have applied to sovereign Indian reservations in the first place, only compounds the problem.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">It’s easy for many to believe those who say that automatic budget cuts aren’t hurting anybody much. But that’s wrong. And I can introduce you to the kids who will tell you why.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">At a round-table discussion I had with students of Pine Ridge High School, I met a young man who qualified for the state wrestling tournament this year. The school and tribe had no money to send him. So the wrestling coach spent $500 out of his own pocket to pay for travel and food. The student slept on the floor of the gymnasium because there was no money for a motel room.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">When I asked a group of eight high school students who among them had had someone close to them take their own life, they all raised their hands. More than 100 suicide threats or attempts, most by young people, have been reported at Pine Ridge so far this year.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The rate of suicide among American Indian youth is nearly four times the national average, and is as high as 10 times the average in many tribal communities across the Great Plains. At the same time, mental health services are being cut as a result of sequestration, with Pine Ridge losing at least one provider this year.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The youth center on the reservation is closed because of lack of funding. Money for the summer youth program, which pays high school students to work during their break, has also been eliminated.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">I met a 12-year-old homeless girl at the emergency youth shelter. Her mother is dead. She doesn’t know the identity of her father. She’s been in multiple foster homes and been repeatedly sexually abused. She found safety in the shelter, but its funding is being cut because of sequestration — an indiscriminate budget ax, I might add, that was thought of as so unconscionable when I was in the Senate that it would never have been seriously considered.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The very programs that we set up to provide those basic life necessities on reservations are the same ones feeling the indiscriminate, blunt cuts of sequestration. How can we justify such a thoughtless policy?</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">While I was at Pine Ridge I also met with the Tribal Council, whose members described a severe housing crisis. In one district more than 200 homes are without electricity. Throughout the reservation, I saw many dilapidated homes missing windows and doors.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Pine Ridge students told me that many of their friends and families were homeless. “Our friends sleep in tents,” one student said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Even in normal times, the Indian Health Service operates with about half the money it needs. Tribal Council members told me that some of their health funds last only until May. If you get sick after May, too bad. Now these health care programs, already rationing care, are subject to the sequester. The Indian Health Service estimates that as a result it will have 804,000 fewer patient visits this year.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Congress should hold a series of investigative hearings on our unfulfilled treaties with American Indians. Add up the broken promises, make an accounting of the underfunding, all of it, and then work with tribes to develop a plan to make it right. In the meantime, we must exempt Indian country from sequestration — right now.</div><nyt_author_id><div class="authorIdentification" style="margin-bottom: 2.8em;"><div style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.467em;">Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, served in the House from 1981 to 1992 and in the Senate from 1992 to 2011. He is a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center.</div></div></nyt_author_id><nyt_correction_bottom><div class="articleCorrection" style="font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 2.8em;"></div></nyt_correction_bottom><nyt_update_bottom></nyt_update_bottom></div></div><div class="columnGroup " style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; text-align: left; width: auto !important;"><div class="articleFooter" style="margin-bottom: 16px;"><div class="articleMeta"><div class="opposingFloatControl wrap"><div class="element1" style="float: left;"></div></div></div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-90843702365224271662013-05-01T20:20:00.001-07:002013-05-01T20:20:40.591-07:00Maria Tallchief, Dazzling Ballerina, Dies at 88 - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"><h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/jack_anderson/index.html" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/jack_anderson/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by JACK ANDERSON">JACK ANDERSON</a></span></h6></nyt_byline><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: April 12, 2013</h6><div class="shareTools shareToolsThemeClassic articleShareToolsTop shareToolsInstance" data-description="Ms. Tallchief achieved renown as an early prima ballerina with the New York City Ballet, dancing for George Balanchine and entertaining audiences with her speed, energy and fire." data-shares="facebook,twitter,google,save,email,showall|Share,print,singlepage,reprints,ad" data-title="Maria Tallchief, a Dazzling Ballerina and Muse for Balanchine, Dies at 88" data-url="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/arts/dance/maria-tallchief-brilliant-ballerina-dies-at-88.html" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; float: right; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin: 5px 0px 5px 5px; min-height: 200px; text-align: left; width: 134px;"><div class="shareToolsBox" style="border: 1px solid rgb(234, 232, 233); margin: 0px; position: relative;"><ul class="shareToolsList" style="list-style: none; margin: 4px 6px 0px; padding-left: 0px;"><li class="shareToolsItem shareToolsItemFacebook firstItem" data-share="facebook" style="background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0.45em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-bottom-color: rgb(234, 232, 233); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 14px; padding: 5px; text-align: left; text-transform: uppercase;"><span style="background-image: url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/icons/sharetools/classic/facebook.gif); background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; cursor: pointer; display: block; font-size: 10px; line-height: 13px; padding: 2px 0px 2px 22px;">FACEBOOK</span></li>
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</ul></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></span><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;"><a href="http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/artists/?entity_id=3758" style="color: #666699;">Maria Tallchief</a>, a daughter of an Oklahoma oil family who grew up on an Indian reservation, found her way to New York and became one of the most brilliant American ballerinas of the 20th century, died on Thursday in Chicago. She was 88.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"><span style="line-height: 1.467em;">She was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief on Jan. 24, 1925 in a small hospital in Fairfax, Okla. Her father, Alexander Joseph Tall Chief, was a 6-foot-2 full-blooded Osage Indian whom his daughters idolized and women found strikingly handsome, Ms. Tallchief later wrote. (She and her sister joined their surnames when they began dancing professionally.)</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/arts/dance/maria-tallchief-brilliant-ballerina-dies-at-88.html?pagewanted=all" style="background-color: transparent;">Maria Tallchief, Dazzling Ballerina, Dies at 88 - NYTimes.com</a>Her daughter, the poet Elise Paschen, confirmed the death. Ms. Tallchief lived in Chicago.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">A former wife and muse of the choreographer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/01/obituaries/george-balanchine-79-dies-in-new-york.html" style="color: #666699;">George Balanchine</a>, Ms. Tallchief achieved renown with Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, dazzling audiences with her speed, energy and fire. Indeed, the part that catapulted her to acclaim, in 1949, was the title role in the company’s version of Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” one of many that Balanchine created for her.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The choreographer Jacques d’Amboise, who was a 15-year-old corps dancer in Balanchine’s “Firebird” before becoming one of City Ballet’s stars, compared Ms. Tallchief to two of the century’s greatest ballerinas: Galina Ulanova of the Soviet Union and Margot Fonteyn of Britain.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“When you thought of Russian ballet, it was Ulanova,” he said an interview on Friday. “With English ballet, it was Fonteyn. For American ballet, it was Tallchief. She was grand in the grandest way.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">A daughter of an Osage Indian father and a Scottish-Irish mother, Ms. Tallchief left Oklahoma at an early age, but she was long associated with the state nevertheless. She was one of five dancers of Indian heritage, all born at roughly the same time, who came to be called the Oklahoma Indian ballerinas: the others included her younger sister, Marjorie Tallchief, as well as Rosella Hightower, Moscelyne Larkin and Yvonne Chouteau.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Growing up at a time when many American dancers adopted Russian stage names, Ms. Tallchief, proud of her Indian heritage, refused to do so, even though friends told her that it would be easy to transform Tallchief into Tallchieva.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">She was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief on Jan. 24, 1925 in a small hospital in Fairfax, Okla. Her father, Alexander Joseph Tall Chief, was a 6-foot-2 full-blooded Osage Indian whom his daughters idolized and women found strikingly handsome, Ms. Tallchief later wrote. (She and her sister joined their surnames when they began dancing professionally.)</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Her mother, the former Ruth Porter, met Mr. Tall Chief, a widower, while visiting her sister, who was a cook and housekeeper for Mr. Tall Chief’s mother.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“When Daddy was a boy, oil was discovered on Osage land, and overnight the tribe became rich,” Ms. Tallchief recounted in “Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/27/reviews/970427.27gottlit.html" style="color: #666699;">her 1997 autobiography</a> written with Larry Kaplan. “As a young girl growing up on the Osage reservation in Fairfax, Okla., I felt my father owned the town. He had property everywhere. The local movie theater on Main Street, and the pool hall opposite, belonged to him. Our 10-room, terracotta-brick house stood high on a hill overlooking the reservation.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">She had her first ballet lessons in Colorado Springs, where the family had a summer home. She also studied piano and, blessed with perfect pitch, contemplated becoming a concert pianist.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But dance occupied her attention after the family, feeling confined in Oklahoma, moved to Los Angeles when she was 8. The day they arrived, her mother took her daughters into a drugstore for a snack at the soda fountain. While waiting for their order, Mrs. Tall Chief chatted with a druggist and asked him if he knew of a good dancing teacher. He recommended Ernest Belcher.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">As Ms. Tallchief recalled in her memoir, “An anonymous man in an unfamiliar town decided our fate with those few words.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Belcher, the father of the television and film star Marge Champion, was an excellent teacher, and Ms. Tallchief soon realized that her training in Oklahoma had been potentially ruinous to her limbs. At 12 she started studies with Bronislava Nijinska, a former choreographer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who had opened a studio in Los Angeles.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Nijinska, a formidable pedagogue, gave Ms. Tallchief special encouragement. But she also had classes with other distinguished teachers who passed through Los Angeles. One, Tatiana Riabouchinska, became her chaperon on a trip to New York City, which, since the outbreak of World War II, had become the base of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a leading touring company. She joined the troupe in 1942.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Nijinska, one of its choreographers, cast her in some of her ballets. But Ms. Tallchief also danced in Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,"a pioneering example of balletic Americana. It was de Mille who suggested that Elizabeth Marie make Maria Tallchief her professional name. Her sister, who survives her, went on to achieve fame mostly in Europe.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In the summer of 1944, the entire Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo served as the dance ensemble for"Song of Norway,"a Broadway musical based on the life and music of Grieg, with choreography by Balanchine. And Balanchine remained as a resident choreographer for the company, casting Ms. Tallchief in works like “Danses Concertantes,""Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,""Ballet Imperial” and “Le Baiser de la Fee.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Balanchine paid increasing attention to Ms. Tallchief, and she became increasingly fond of him, admiring him as a choreographic genius and liking him as a courtly, sophisticated friend. Yet it came as an utter surprise when he asked her to marry him. After careful thought, she agreed, and they were married on Aug. 16, 1946.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">It was an unusual marriage. As she wrote in her autobiography: “Passion and romance didn’t play a big part in our married life. We saved our emotions for the classroom.” Yet, she added, “George was a warm, affectionate, loving husband.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ms. Tallchief had become a prominent soloist at the Monte Carlo company. But Balanchine wanted a company of his own. In 1946, he and the arts patron Lincoln Kirstein established Ballet Society, which presented a series of subscription performances; it was a direct forerunner of today’s City Ballet.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">At the time, Ms. Tallchief was still a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and she remained with it until her contract expired. Then she went to Paris, where Balanchine had agreed to stage productions for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1947. In her autobiography, she speculated that because Balanchine was a Francophile he might have felt tempted to remain in Paris, but that the intrigues riddling the Paris Opera drove him to leave and return to America.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Balanchine then devoted himself to the City Ballet, which gave its first performance under that name on Oct. 11, 1948. Ms. Tallchief was soon acclaimed as one of its stars.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In addition to “Firebird,” Balanchine created many striking roles for her, including those of the Swan Queen in his version of “Swan Lake,” the Sugar Plum Fairy in his version of “The Nutcracker,” Eurydice in"Orpheus"and principal roles in plotless works like “Sylvia Pas de Deux,” “Allegro Brillante,” “Pas de Dix” and “Scotch Symphony.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">After she and Balanchine were divorced in 1950, she remained with City Ballet until 1965. But she also took time off to dance with other companies, and she portrayed Anna Pavlova in"Million Dollar Mermaid,"a 1952 MGM extravaganza starringEsther Williamsas the swimmer and actress Annette Kellerman.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">She returned to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1954-55, receiving a salary of $2,000 a week, reportedly the highest salary paid any dancer at that time. When she appeared with American Ballet Theater, in 1960-62, she showed she could be an exponent of dramatic as well as abstract ballets. She was cast in such varied parts as the neurotic title role of Birgit Cullberg’s"Miss Julie” and Caroline, the melancholy heroine of Antony Tudor’s “Jardin aux Lilas,” who must enter into a marriage of convenience with a man she does not love.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">At City Ballet, Ms. Tallchief’s partners included André Eglevsky, Erik Bruhn and Nicholas Magallanes. She appeared withRudolf Nureyevon television and on tour in Europe and made guest appearances with Ruth Page’s Chicago Opera Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet and the Hamburg Ballet. One of her last roles was the title role in Peter van Dyk’s “Cinderella” for the Hamburg company in 1966. She retired from the stage soon afterward.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Then Ms. Tallchief became part of dance life in Chicago. She founded the ballet school of the Lyric Opera there in the mid-1970s and was the artistic director of the Chicago City Ballet, which presented its first season in 1981. More successful as a teacher than as a director, she resigned from the post in 1987.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Among her honors, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1996.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ms. Tallchief was married to Elmourza Natirboff, an aviator, from 1952 to 1954. In 1956 she married Henry Paschen, who eventually became president of his family’s business, Paschen Contractors, in Chicago.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Besides her daughter, Ms. Paschen, and her sister, her survivors include two grandchildren.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ms. Tallchief remained closely identified with her Osage lineage long after she found fame and glamour in Paris and New York, and she bridled at the enduring stereotypes and misconceptions many held about American Indians. Recalling her youth in her memoir, she wrote of a dance routine that she and her sister were asked to perform at Oklahoma country fairs, making both of them “self-conscious.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“It wasn’t remotely authentic,” she wrote. “Traditionally, women didn’t dance in Indian tribal ceremonies. But I had toe<span style="font-size: 1.5em;"> </span>shoes on under my moccasins, and we both wore fringed buckskin outfits, headbands with feathers, and bells on our legs. We’d enter from opposite wings, greet each other, and start moving to a tom-tom rhythm.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The performance ended with Marjorie performing “no-handed back-flip somersaults.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“In the end,” she added, “we stopped doing the routine because we outgrew the costumes. I was relieved when we put those bells away for good.”</div><br />
</div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-33282005828320942652013-05-01T15:57:00.001-07:002013-05-01T15:57:32.415-07:00Freedom for California's Indians - NYTimes.com<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.4em; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13px;">By </span><a class="url fn" href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/stacey-l-smith/" style="color: #666699; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;" title="See all posts by STACEY L. SMITH">STACEY L. SMITH</a></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">On April 27, 1863, nearly five months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, California abolished its system of forced apprenticeship for American Indians. Under the apprenticeship provisions of the state’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, several thousand California Indians, mostly children, had suffered kidnapping, sale and involuntary servitude for over a decade.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">Newly elected California Republicans, eager to bring California in line with the national march toward emancipation, agitated for two years in the early 1860s to repeal Indian apprenticeship. And yet those Republicans’ limited vision of Indian freedom — one in which Indians would be free to reap the fruits of their labor, but not free from the duty to labor altogether — made for an incomplete Indian Emancipation Proclamation. Although California was distant from the battlefields of the Civil War, the state endured its own struggle over freedom that paralleled that of the North and the South.<span id="more-143441"></span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">The Republican campaign to abolish Indian servitude ran up against nearly a century of coerced Indian labor in California. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, thousands of California Indians worked on missions and ranches, bound to their employment through a combination of economic necessity, captivity, physical compulsion and debt.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">With the United States’ conquest of California in 1847, the discovery of gold in 1848 and the formation of a state government in 1849, new American lawmakers expanded and formalized Indian servitude to meet growing demands for labor. The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians authorized whites to hold Indian children as wards until they reached adulthood. Indian adults convicted of vagrancy or other crimes could be forced to work for whites who paid their bail.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">Skyrocketing demand for farmworkers and domestic servants, combined with violence between Indians and invading whites in the northwestern part of the state, left Democrats in war-torn counties clamoring for the expansion of the 1850 Indian act. A “general system of peonage or apprenticeship” was the only way to quell Indian wars, one Democrat argued. A stint of involuntary labor would civilize Indians, establish them in “permanent and comfortable homes,” and provide white settlers with “profitable and convenient servants.” In 1860, Democrats proposed new amendments to the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians that allowed whites to bind Indian children as apprentices until they reached their mid-20s. Indian adults accused of being vagrants without steady employment, or taken as captives of war, could be apprenticed for 10-year terms. The amendments passed with little debate.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">As the nation hurtled toward a war over slavery, Californians watched as their own state became a battleground over the future of human bondage. Apprenticeship laws aimed at “civilizing” the state’s Indian encouraged a robust and horrific slave trade in the northwestern counties. Frontier whites eagerly paid from $50 to $100 for Indian children to apprentice. Groups of kidnappers, dubbed “baby hunters” in the California press, supplied this market by attacking isolated Indian villages and snatching up children in the chaos of battle. Some assailants murdered Indian parents who refused to give up their children.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">Once deposited in white homes, captive apprentices often suffered abuse and neglect. The death of Rosa, a 10-year-old apprentice from either the Yuki or Pomo tribes, provides a grim case in point. Just two weeks before the repeal of Indian apprenticeship, the Mendocino County coroner found the dead girl “nearly naked, lying in a box out of doors” next to the home of her mistress, a Mrs. Bassett of Ukiah. Neighbors testified that the child was sick and restless and that Basset shut her out of the house in the middle of a raging snowstorm. Huge bruises on Rosa’s abdomen suggested that Bassett had mercilessly beaten the ill child before tossing her out into the blizzard. Mendocino officials never brought charges in the case.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">The horrors of kidnapping and apprenticeship filled the state’s newspapers just as antislavery California Republicans swept into power in 1861-2. Republicans assailed the apprentice system and blamed Democrats for the “abominable system of Indian apprenticeship, which has been used as a means of introducing actual slavery into our free State.” George Hanson, an Illinois Republican whose close relationship with Abraham Lincoln earned him an appointment as Northern California’s superintendent of Indian affairs, vowed to eliminate the state’s “unholy traffic in human blood and souls.” He tracked down and prosecuted kidnappers in the northwestern counties (with mixed success) and petitioned the State Legislature to abolish the apprenticeship system.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">In 1862, Republican legislators proposed two new measures to overturn the 1860 apprenticeship amendments. Democrats blocked these bills and insisted that apprenticeship “embodied one of the most important measures” for Indians’ “improvement and civilization.” Indian servitude lived on.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">By the time the legislature met again in the spring of 1863, however, all signs pointed to the destruction of the apprenticeship system. Republicans won firm majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, and in January California became the first state to endorse Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans again proposed to repeal the apprenticeship amendments, and this time they achieved their goal with no debate or dissent. Involuntary labor for American Indians died quietly.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The incomplete nature of Indian emancipation in California reflected Republicans’ own ambivalence toward Indian freedom. Most Republicans opposed the kidnapping and enslavement of Indians. They believed that Indians, like former African-American slaves, should be entitled to reap the economic rewards of their own work. On the other hand, they asserted that the key to “civilizing” Indians was to force them to participate in the California labor market. They could not be free to support themselves through traditional mobile hunting and gathering practices that removed their labor from white supervision and tied up valuable natural resources. Such a lifestyle was, in Republicans’ minds, little more than idle vagrancy. Just as their Republican colleagues on the East Coast argued that ex-slaves should be schooled to labor by being bound to plantation wage work through long-term contracts, California Republicans began to advocate compulsory labor as the only way to cure Indian vagrancy.</span>Or did it? Republicans had eliminated all the 1860 amendments authorizing the forced apprenticeship of American Indians. But they had left intact sections of the original 1850 act that mandated the forcible binding out of Indian convicts and vagrants. Moreover, repeal only prevented future apprenticeships; Republican legislation did not liberate Indians already legally apprenticed. After repeal, as many as 6,000 Indian children remained servants in white homes.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">The Republican vision for Indian freedom quickly took shape after the Civil War. Republican appointees who oversaw California’s Indian reservations compelled all able-bodied Indians to work on the reservation farms. Those who refused, or who pursued native food-gathering practices, forfeited the meager federal rations allotted to reservation Indians. By 1867, one Republican agent declared that “the hoe and the broadaxe will sooner civilize and Christianize than the spelling book and the Bible.” He advocated forcing Indians to work until they had been “humanized by systematic labor.” These policies persisted long after the war. At Round Valley Reservation, one critic observed in 1874 that “compulsion is used to keep the Indians and to drive them to work.” Indian workers received no payment for “labor and no opportunity to accumulate individual property.”</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 166px; text-align: left;">The ambiguous postwar liberty of California Indians reveals that the Civil War was a transcontinental conflict that reached west to the Pacific. The freedoms won in wartime, and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation, encompassed not only black and white, free and slave, but also American Indian peoples who suffered from distinctly Western systems of unfree labor. The Civil War and Reconstruction are best understood as truly national struggles over the meaning and limits of freedom, north, south and west.</div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-42175152354266953962013-04-04T16:09:00.001-07:002013-04-04T16:09:21.350-07:00Hopi Tribe Wants to Stop Paris Auction of Artifacts - NYTimes.com<br />
<div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">In a rare case of a cultural heritage claim arising from the sale of American artifacts abroad, the Hopi Indians of Arizona have asked federal officials to help stop a high-price auction of 70 sacred masks in Paris next week.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The tribe is receiving advice from the State and Interior Departments, but each agency says its ability to intervene is limited.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In many ways, the Hopi case illustrates a paradox in the way artifacts are repatriated around the world.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">While foreign nations routinely rely on international accords to secure American help in retrieving antiquities from the United States, Washington has no reciprocal agreements governing American artifacts abroad. And the United States laws that provide some protection against the illicit sale of Indian artifacts in this country have no weight in foreign lands. So tribes reaching overseas to recover objects that they view as culturally important are left to do battle on their own.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Right now there just aren’t any prohibitions against this kind of large foreign sale,” said Jack F. Trope, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, which is seeking new laws and treaties that would give the United States more force to intervene. “The leverage for international repatriation just isn’t there.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Hopis, who number about 18,000 in northeast Arizona, regard the objects in the Paris sale, which they call Katsinam, or “friends,” as imbued with divine spirits. They object to calling them “masks” and say that outsiders who photograph, collect or sell them are committing sacrilege. The brightly colored visages and headdresses, often adorned with horsehair, sheepskin, feathers and maize, are thought to embody the spirits of warriors, animals, messengers, fire, rain and clouds, among other things. They are used today, as in the past, in many Hopi rites, like coming-of-age ceremonies and harvest rituals.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Néret-Minet auction house in Paris says that its <a href="http://www.neret-tessier.com/html/infos.jsp?id=15197&lng=en" style="color: #666699;" title="Page for the auction">sale, on April 12</a>, will be one of the largest auctions of Hopi artifacts ever, and it estimates that it will bring in $1 million. Many of the objects are more than 100 years old and carry estimates of $10,000 to $35,000. The auction house says that among the spirits represented are the Crow Mother, the Little Fire God and the Mud Head Clown.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Sacred items like this should not have a commercial value,” said Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, director of the<a href="http://www8.nau.edu/hcpo-p/" style="color: #666699;" title="Its Web site"> Hopi Cultural Preservation Office</a> in Kykotsmovi, Ariz. “The bottom line is we believe they were taken illegally.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The auction house says that a collector who has not been identified legally bought the items in the United States at sales and auctions over 30 years, beginning in the 1930s, and that the coming auction complies with French law.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“This sale is not just a business transaction but a homage to the Hopi Indians,” said Gilles Néret-Minet, the director of the house.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Historians say many Hopi artifacts were taken long ago by people who found them unattended in shrines and on altars along the mesas of the Southwest. Others were confiscated by missionaries who came to convert the tribe in the late 19th century. Some were sold by tribe members. But even those sales were not legitimate, Hopi leaders say, because they may have been made under duress, and because the tribe holds that an individual cannot hold title to its religious artifacts — they are owned communally.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The market for American Indian artifacts, both here and abroad, is robust, experts say, and auctions of Indian items in the United States typically proceed unimpeded by American law and unchallenged by most tribes. There are some protections, though, under United States theft statutes, experts say, as well as restrictions on the sale of pieces by museums and federal agencies.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Hopis and their supporters say the Paris sale is especially objectionable because of its size and the religious significance of the items involved. They say it also illustrates a striking disparity between what the government is empowered to do to help a foreign country recover an object from the United States and its inability to do much to retrieve an American artifact for sale overseas.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">When a nation like Italy or Cambodia claims ownership of an object in the United States, it typically invokes international accords that require American officials to take up the cases. The Justice Department, for example, recently sent two lawyers to Cambodia as part of an effort to help that country seize an ancient statue that Sotheby’s planned to auction in New York.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The United States does not have similar accords that it could cite in support of the Hopi claim on the Paris auction items. Several experts and activists said the United States had never viewed its own cultural patrimony as a priority because the country is relatively young, has long embraced the concept of free trade and has not historically focused on the cultural heritage issues of American Indians.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But American officials have demonstrated their concern over the Paris sale by providing the Hopis with legal guidance and diplomatic advice, officials said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Emily Palus, the deputy division chief for tribal consultation with the Bureau of Land Management, a division of the Interior Department, recently wrote an e-mail to colleagues suggesting that they raise concerns about the growing “international trade in Native American cultural property, and the continued damage and impact it has on traditional cultural practices.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In recent years Indian tribes have stepped up their efforts to recover cultural artifacts. The Hopis are considered among the most painstaking in that pursuit, and the tribe has recovered dozens of artifacts from American museums and sought to block auctions in the United States. It has never tried to halt an overseas sale before.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In the case of museums, tribes rely on a 1990 law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which governs the sale and handling of Indian cultural objects by American museums. Those institutions are barred from selling such items and must inventory their collections; they then must reach out to tribes or direct descendants to allow them to reclaim objects they view as important.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The process can be costly and take years, however, and unless pressed, some museums simply hold on to their collections.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In the French case, the Hopis sent a letter of objection last month to the Néret-Minet auction house. In it Mr. Kuwanwisiwma cited cultural heritage clauses in the tribe’s 1936 Constitution that say the items for sale are “held under religious custody by the Hopi people.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Neither Mr. Kuwanwisiwma nor a lawyer for the Hopis, James E. Scarboro of Arnold & Porter in Denver, has received a reply, they said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Kate Fitz Gibbon, an art law expert in Santa Fe, N.M., who specializes in tribal issues, said the Hopis could consider a claim that the items are stolen property. But doing so, she said, would require time, money and legal support that are often out of reach.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“The Paris auction of Hopi masks is a complex legal situation involving the interplay of international and domestic French law,” she said, adding that the Hopis might have to resort to publicity and “moral suasion.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Néret-Minet said he was surprised by the Hopi reaction because similar auctions had not drawn attention, including one in Paris in December in which 23 Hopi items were purchased, eight of them by a local museum, the <a href="http://www.quaibranly.fr/en/" style="color: #666699;">Musée du Quai Branly.</a></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Even if it chagrins them, for the tribe this is not a negative,” he said. “I think the Hopis should be happy that so many people want to understand and analyze their civilization.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In response, Mr. Kuwanwisiwma said, “The Hopi Tribe is just disgusted with the continued offensive marketing of Hopi culture.”</div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-69533731655888782262013-03-30T12:10:00.001-07:002013-03-30T12:10:28.016-07:00Wounded Knee Site for Sale, Stirring Controversy - NYTimes.com<br />
<div class="columnGroup first" style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; text-align: left; width: auto !important;"><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">WOUNDED KNEE, S.D. — Ever since American soldiers <a href="http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/knee.htm" style="color: #666699;">massacred</a> men, women and children here more than a century ago in the last major bloodshed of the American Indian wars, this haunted patch of rolling hills and ponderosa pines has embodied the combustible relationship between Indians and the United States government.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">It was here that a group of Indian activists aired their grievances against the government with a forceful <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/occupy-wounded-knee-a-71-day-siege-and-a-forgotten-civil-rights-movement/263998/" style="color: #666699;">takeover</a> in 1973 that resulted in protests, a bloody standoff with federal agents and deep divisions among the Indian people.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">And now the massacre site, which passed into non-Indian hands generations ago, is up for sale, once again dragging Wounded Knee to the center of the Indian people’s bitter struggle against perceived injustice — as well as sowing rifts within the tribe over whether it would be proper, should the tribe get the land, to develop it in a way that brings some money to the destitute region.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">James A. Czywczynski of Rapid City is asking $3.9 million for the 40-acre plot he owns here, far more than the $7,000 that the deeply impoverished Oglala Sioux say the land is worth. Mr. Czywczynski insists that his price fairly accounts for the land’s sentimental and historical value, an attitude that the people here see as disrespect.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“That historical value means something to us, not him,” said Garfield Steele, a member of the tribal council who represents Wounded Knee. “We see that greed around here all the time with non-Indians. To me, you can’t put a price on the lives that were taken there.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Land disputes strike an emotional chord for American Indians, given the United States’ long history of neglected promises and broken treaties. The clash over Wounded Knee is raising the moral, legal and social quandaries that have burdened generations of American Indians.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Should they even have to buy land that they believe was stolen from them? Should the land be developed or preserved as sacred? Should the tribe, whose people are among the poorest in America, capitalize on what happened here?</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Just last year, the Great Sioux Nation found itself in a similar struggle to preserve sacred ground. Pe’ Sla, a vast swath of Black Hills prairie land that they believe was the site of an epic battle between good and evil, was put up for sale by a non-Indian. Several Sioux bands, fearing that the land could be desecrated by commercial development, raised $9 million to buy the 1,942 acres.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The outlook for acquiring the Wounded Knee parcel, which sits on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is not as bright. The burden for buying the land will probably fall to the Oglala Sioux tribe, which is at least $60 million in debt, according to its treasurer, Mason Big Crow, and would need to borrow money to meet Mr. Czywczynski’s asking price.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The massacre on Dec. 29, 1890, was said to have started when a shot rang out as soldiers of the United States Seventh Cavalry searched Chief Big Foot’s band, which it had arrested and detained here. (Some Indians hypothesize that the massacre was retribution for the routing of Gen. George Custer and his troops at <a href="http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/custer.htm" style="color: #666699;">Little Bighorn</a> 14 years earlier.) Estimates of the death toll vary from 150 to more than 300, with some of the bodies recovered on the land Mr. Czywczynski owns.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The land is believed to have gotten into non-Indian hands sometime after a process of allotment began in the late 1800s in which the federal government divided land among the Indians and gave some parcels to non-Indians. Mr. Czywczynski bought the land in 1968, lived there and ran the trading post and museum. He moved away in 1973, after the violent occupation of Wounded Knee by an organization known as the <a href="http://www.aimovement.org/" style="color: #666699;">American Indian Movement</a> left much of the town destroyed, including the trading post and his home. Mr. Czywczynski said he had been trying to sell the land to the Oglala Sioux for about three decades, and he blamed the tribe’s internal disorder for his inability to do so.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“They never could agree on anything,” he said. “They either did not have the money; some wanted it, some didn’t want it; it was too high, too low. I’ve come to the conclusion now, at my age, I’m 74 years old, I’m going to sell the property.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">If the tribe does not buy it by May 1, Mr. Czywczynski said, he will put it up for auction on the open market.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Oglala Sioux president, Bryan V. Brewer, said, “I don’t think we should buy something back that we own.” He added that he would leave it up to the descendants of the massacre to plan a way forward.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But that promises to be tricky. There is considerable disagreement over whether the tribe should profit from Wounded Knee through, for instance, developing tourist attractions.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Whenever we discuss this Wounded Knee massacre topic, it takes us into a deep, deep psychological state because we have to relive the whole horror,” said Nathan Blindman, 56, one of whose ancestors survived the massacre. “Anything that might indicate that as descendants we’re profiting from our ancestors’ tragedy, we can’t ever do that.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Phyllis Hollow Horn, 56, whose great-grandmother and great-aunt were among the survivors, said she would be open to an educational memorial, but was hesitant about seeing the tribe profit.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“How and who should do that is a whole big question,” she said. “Ultimately, that’s a decision the descendants have to make.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But many find that unyielding traditionalism hard to swallow, given the hardship on the reservation. Shannon County, which encompasses most of Pine Ridge, has the highest percentage of people living below poverty in the nation at 53.5 percent, according to census data compiled by <a href="http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/home/home.aspx" style="color: #666699;">Social Explorer</a>. Nearly three-quarters of the people in the county are either unemployed or not in the work force.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Proponents of commercialism at Wounded Knee note that community members already profit at the site, selling crafts to tourists in the area. This frequently leads to turf battles, and some have suggested building a market to bring order to the trade.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Garry Rowland, a Wounded Knee native, runs a one-room visitor center that he built next to the mass grave where most of the massacre victims were buried. Some residents have criticized his center, calling it unofficial and accusing him of profiting on the blood of their ancestors.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But Mr. Rowland said that his great-great-grandfather Chief Fire Lightning owned the land before the massacre and that his family should decide what should be done. (Ms. Hollow Horn disputed that Fire Lightning owned the land or that he was a chief.)</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“We don’t charge admission to our museum,” said Mr. Rowland, who participated in the 1973 takeover, hangs the American flag upside down and proudly wears an F.B.I. cap that he says stands for “full-blooded Indian.” “We’re just trying to preserve what history took place here. We tell the truth of what happened.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Some have advocated for development like a gas station and a general store to save on the roughly 20-minute drive to Pine Ridge for basic amenities. They also say that building a motel would help attract visitors.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">While she respects the lives lost in the massacre, Lillian Red Star Fire Thunder, a 79-year-old Wounded Knee resident, said she disagreed with those who “make it sound like it’s taboo” to develop the land.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“That was yesterday; tomorrow is going to be tomorrow,” she said. “They should think about the future for the children, the families.”</div><nyt_correction_bottom><div class="articleCorrection" style="margin-bottom: 2.8em;"></div></nyt_correction_bottom><nyt_update_bottom></nyt_update_bottom></div></div><div class="columnGroup " style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 7px; text-align: left; width: auto !important;"><div class="articleFooter" style="margin-bottom: 16px;"><div class="articleMeta"><div class="opposingFloatControl wrap"><div class="element1" style="float: left;"></div></div></div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-8701749748136285512013-02-01T13:42:00.001-07:002013-02-01T13:42:33.853-07:00Crow Indians’ Suit Against Federal Agent Allowed - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by TIMOTHY WILLIAMS">TIMOTHY WILLIAMS</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><br />
<h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: February 1, 2013</h6><div agent="" an="" by="" class="articleBody" contends="" crime="" data-shares="facebook,twitter,google,save,email,showall|Share,print,singlepage,reprints,ad" data-title="Crow Indians’ Lawsuit Against F.B.I. Agent Can Proceed" data-url="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/us/crow-indians-suit-against-federal-agent-allowed.html" discriminated="" div="" elsewhere.="" gt="" he="" indian="" less="" on="" reservation="" seriously="" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;" suit="" taking="" than="" that="" the=""><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></span><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top></nyt_text><br />
<div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">Two families from the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana can proceed with a lawsuit against an F.B.I. agent that accuses him of failing to properly investigate crimes against Native Americans on and around the reservation, the United States Supreme Court has ruled.</div></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.aspx?FileName=/docketfiles/12-222.htm" style="color: #666699;">court’s decision</a> upholds a 2010 federal court ruling that said the F.B.I. agent, Matthew Oravec, did not have qualified immunity from legal action, a protection usually given to government employees when acting in an official capacity — and a status sought by the Justice Department, which had appealed the ruling by the Ninth District Court of Appeals.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“The decision puts federal and state law enforcement agents on notice that they may be held personally liable if they discriminate against Indians in investigating crimes against them,” said Patricia S. Bangert, a Denver lawyer who is representing one of the families.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Supreme Court’s decision was dated Jan. 14, but lawyers were only recently made aware of it.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Oravec, who remains an F.B.I. employee, investigated the deaths of two Native Americans, Robert Springfield and Steven Bearcrane, who died in unrelated episodes on the Crow Reservation in 2004 and 2005, respectively.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Federal prosecutors did not file charges in either case, and the men’s families sued, alleging that Mr. Oravec had conducted a second-rate investigation, which they said was part of a wider problem of discrimination against Native American crime victims on the reservation.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The lawsuit also claimed that Mr. Oravec had sought to intimidate family members, made derogatory remarks about Native Americans and had refused to carry out basic investigative tasks, including interviewing potential witnesses or taking crime scene photographs.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Justice Department, which is representing Mr. Oravec, declined to comment.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The rate of violent crime on Indian reservations has for decades been far higher than in the rest of the nation. Most tribes, including the Crow Nation, rely on the federal government to investigate and prosecute serious crime because states generally lack jurisdiction there, and because tribes are prohibited from imposing sentences longer than three years.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But many Native Americans say that the<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/us/wind-river-indian-reservation-where-brutality-is-banal.html" style="color: #666699;"> crime problem in Indian country</a> is connected to the failure of F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/us/on-indian-reservations-higher-crime-and-fewer-prosecutions.html" style="color: #666699;">to take violent acts on reservations as seriously</a> as they do crimes elsewhere.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The lawsuit is being closely watched around Indian country. Filed in 2009, it maintains that federal officials violated the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection and due process rights. In its 2010 ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court dropped several other F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors from the lawsuit but allowed the claim against Mr. Oravec to continue.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Steven Bearcrane, 24, was fatally shot on a ranch on the reservation in 2005, but federal officials determined the shooting had been committed in self-defense and declined to prosecute. But Mr. Bearcrane’s parents, Earline Cole and Cletus Cole, said that Mr. Oravec had conducted only a cursory investigation before arriving at his conclusion.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Ms. Bangert, who is representing the Bearcrane-Cole family, said they had offered to dismiss the lawsuit if the federal government agreed to allow a third party to conduct an independent investigation, but that the government had declined.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“All the Bearcrane-Cole family has wanted is for Steven’s death to mean something,” Ms. Bangert said. “The government’s continuing action in brushing it off as a nonevent that can just be ignored is the continuing fuel for much of the family’s anger and anguish.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In 2004, Robert Springfield failed to return from a bow hunting trip on the Crow reservation. His wife, Veronica Springfield, said the F.B.I. had not bothered to look for him, and his body was found more than a year later<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">.</span></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-63370568144414218082012-10-22T08:22:00.001-07:002012-10-22T08:22:47.323-07:00Russell Means, American Indian Activist, Dies at 72 - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_d_jr_mcfadden/index.html" itemprop="creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_d_jr_mcfadden/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by ROBERT D. McFADDEN">ROBERT D. McFADDEN</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><br />
<h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: October 22, 2012</h6><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></span><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top></nyt_text><br />
<div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;"><br />
Russell C. Means, the charismatic Oglala Sioux who helped revive the warrior image of the American Indian in the 1970s with guerrilla-tactic protests that called attention to the nation’s history of injustices against its indigenous peoples, died on Monday at his ranch in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was 72.</div></div><div class="articleInline runaroundLeft" style="background-color: white; clear: left; color: #333333; display: inline; float: left; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin: 6px 15px 10px 0px !important; text-align: left; width: 190px;"><div class="inlineImage module" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 12px; width: 190px;"><div class="image" style="margin-bottom: 2px;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/us/russell-means-american-indian-activist-dies-at-72.html?hp" style="color: #666699; display: block; text-decoration: none;"><span itemid="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/23/us/Means1/Means1-articleInline.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject"><img alt="" height="153" itemprop="url" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/23/us/Means1/Means1-articleInline.jpg" style="border: none;" width="190" /></span></a></div><h6 class="credit" style="color: #909090; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.223em; margin: 0px 0px 3px; text-align: right;">Marcy Nighswander/Associated Press</h6><div class="caption" style="color: #666666; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; line-height: 1.2727em;">Russell Means in 1989.</div></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The cause was esophageal cancer that had spread recently to his tongue, lymph nodes and lungs, said Glenn Morris, Mr. Means’s legal representative. Told in the summer of 2011 that the cancer was inoperable, Mr. Means had already resolved to shun mainstream medical treatments in favor of herbal and other native remedies.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Strapping, ruggedly handsome in buckskins, with a scarred face, piercing dark eyes and raven braids that dangled to the waist, Mr. Means was, by his own account, a magnet for trouble — addicted to drugs and alcohol in his early years, and later arrested repeatedly in violent clashes with rivals and the law, once tried for abetting a murder, shot several times, stabbed once and imprisoned for a year for rioting.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">He styled himself a throwback to ancestors who resisted the westward expansion of the American frontier and, with theatrical protests that brought national attention to poverty and discrimination suffered by his people, became arguably the nation’s best-known Indian since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But critics, including many Native Americans, called him a tireless self-promoter who capitalized on his angry-rebel notoriety by running quixotic races for the presidency and the governorship of New Mexico, by acting in dozens of movies — notably in the title role of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMZtQhhS14w" style="color: #666699;" title="Trailer for the film.">“The Last of the Mohicans”</a> (1992) — and by writing and recording music commercially with Indian warrior and heritage themes.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">He rose to national attention as a leader of the <a href="http://www.aimovement.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="Web site.">American Indian Movement</a> in 1970 by directing a band of Indian protesters who seized the Mayflower II ship replica at Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day. The boisterous confrontation between Indians and costumed “Pilgrims” attracted network television coverage and made Mr. Means an overnight hero to dissident Indians and sympathetic whites.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Later, he orchestrated an Indian prayer vigil atop the federal monument of sculptured presidential heads at Mount Rushmore, S.D., to dramatize Lakota claims to Black Hills land. In 1972, he organized cross-country caravans converging on Washington to protest a century of broken treaties, and led an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He also attacked the “Chief Wahoo” mascot symbol of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, a toothy Indian caricature that he called racist and demeaning. It is still used.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">And in a 1973 protest covered by the national news media for months, he led hundreds of Indians and white sympathizers in an occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., site of the 1890 massacre of some 350 Lakota men, women and children in the last major conflict of the American Indian wars. The protesters demanded strict federal adherence to old Indian treaties, and an end to what they called corrupt tribal governments.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In the ensuing 71-day standoff with federal agents, thousands of shots were fired, two Indians were killed and an agent was paralyzed. Mr. Means and his fellow protest leader<a href="http://www.dennisbanks.org/" style="color: #666699;" title="His Web site.">Dennis Banks</a> were charged with assault, larceny and conspiracy. But after a long federal trial in Minnesota in 1974, with the defense raising current and historic Indian grievances, the case was dismissed by a judge for prosecutorial misconduct.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Means later faced other legal battles. In 1976, he was acquitted in a jury trial in Rapid City, S.D., of abetting a murder in a barroom brawl. Wanted on six warrants in two states, he was convicted in 1976 of involvement in a 1974 riot during a clash between the police and Indian activists outside a Rapid City courthouse. He served a year in a state prison, where he was stabbed by another inmate.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Means also survived several gunshots — one in the abdomen fired during a scuffle with an Indian Affairs police officer in North Dakota in 1975, a grazed forehead in what he called a drive-by assassination attempt on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, and one in the chest fired by another would-be assassin on another South Dakota reservation in 1976.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Undeterred, he led a caravan of Sioux and Cheyenne into a gathering of 500 people commemorating the centennial of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn in Montana in 1876, the nation’s worst defeat of the Indian wars. To pounding drums, Mr. Means and his followers mounted a speaker’s platform, joined hands and did a victory dance, sung in Sioux Lakota, titled “Custer Died for Your Sins.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text></nyt_text><br />
<div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">Russell Charles Means was born on Nov. 10, 1939, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the oldest of four sons of Harold and Theodora Feather Means. The Anglo-Saxon surname was that of a great-grandfather. When he was 3, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where his father, a welder and auto mechanic, worked in wartime shipyards.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;"><br />
</span></div><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">Russell attended public schools in Vallejo and San Leandro High School, where he faced racial taunts, had poor grades and barely graduated in 1958. He drifted into delinquency, drugs, alcoholism and street fights. He also attended four colleges, including Arizona State at Tempe, but did not earn a degree. For much of the 1960s he rambled about the West, working as a janitor, printer, cowboy and dance instructor.</span></div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In 1969, he took a job with the Rosebud Sioux tribal council in South Dakota. Within months, he moved to Cleveland and became founding director of a government-financed center helping Native Americans adapt to urban life. He also met Mr. Banks, who had recently co-founded the American Indian Movement. In 1970 Mr. Means became the movement’s national director, and over the next decade his actions made him a household name.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In 1985 and 1986, he went to Nicaragua to support indigenous Miskito Indians whose autonomy was threatened by the leftist Sandinista government. He reported Sandinista atrocities against the Indians and urged the Reagan administration to aid the victims. Millions in aid went to right-wing contras opposing the Sandinistas, but none to their Indian allies.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">In 1987, Mr. Means ran for president. He sought the Libertarian Party nomination but lost to Ron Paul, a former and future Congressman from Texas. In 2002, Mr. Means campaigned independently for the New Mexico governorship, but was barred procedurally from the ballot.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Means retired from the American Indian Movement in 1988, but leaders from the movement with whom he had feuded for years scoffed, saying he had “retired” six times previously. They generally disowned him and his work, calling him an opportunist out for political and financial gain. In 1989, he told Congress there was “rampant graft and corruption” in tribal governments and federal programs assisting Native Americans.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Means began his acting career in 1992, and, over two decades, appeared in more than 30 films and television productions, including “Natural Born Killers” (1994) and “Pathfinder” (2007). He also recorded CDs, including “Electric Warrior: The Sound of Indian America,” (1993) and wrote a memoir, <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Where_White_Men_Fear_to_Tread.html?id=Fk7jzBdB8MMC" style="color: #666699;" title="About the book.">“Where White Men Fear to Tread,”</a> (1995, with Marvin J. Wolf).</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">He was married and divorced four times and had nine children. He adopted many others following Lakota tradition. His fifth marriage, to Pearl Daniels, was in 1999, and she survives him.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Mr. Means cut off his braids a few months before receiving his cancer diagnosis. It was, he said in an interview in October 2011 , a gesture of mourning for his people. In Lakota lore, he explained, the hair holds memories, and mourners often cut it to release those memories, and the people in them, to the spirit world.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"><br />
</div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-18681362884511412282012-10-12T07:34:00.001-07:002012-10-12T07:34:53.076-07:00Tribes Add Powerful Voice Against Northwest Coal Plan - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/kirk_johnson/index.html" itemprop="creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/kirk_johnson/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by KIRK JOHNSON">KIRK JOHNSON</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: October 11, 2012</h6><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><span itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="copyrightHolder provider sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></span><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">FERNDALE, Wash. — At age 94, Mary Helen Cagey, an elder of the Lummi Indian tribe, has seen a lot of yesterdays. Some are ripe for fond reminiscence, like the herring that used to run rich in the waters here in the nation’s upper-left margin, near the border with Canada. Others are best left in the past, she said, like <a class="meta-classifier" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/coal/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #666699;" title="More articles about coal.">coal</a>.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleInline runaroundLeft" style="background-color: white; clear: left; color: #333333; display: inline; float: left; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin: 6px 15px 10px 0px !important; text-align: left; width: 190px;"><div class="inlineImage module" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 12px; width: 190px;"><div class="image" style="margin-bottom: 2px;"><div class="icon enlargeThis" style="background-position: 0% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; margin-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 16px; text-align: right;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/us/tribes-add-powerful-voice-against-northwest-coal-plan.html?hp" style="background-image: url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/icons/multimedia/enlarge_icon.gif); background-position: 0% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; color: #666699; display: inline; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; padding-left: 15px; text-decoration: none;">Enlarge This Image</a></div><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/us/tribes-add-powerful-voice-against-northwest-coal-plan.html?hp" style="color: #666699; display: block; text-decoration: none;"><span itemid="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/12/us/COAL-3/COAL-3-articleInline.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject"><img alt="" height="133" itemprop="url" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/12/us/COAL-3/COAL-3-articleInline.jpg" style="border: none;" width="190" /></span></a></div><h6 class="credit" style="color: #909090; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.223em; margin: 0px 0px 3px; text-align: right;">Paul Anderson</h6><div class="caption" style="color: #666666; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; line-height: 1.2727em;">The Westshore coal terminal in British Columbia. As demand declines in the United States, coal companies want to build six terminals on the West Coast for export.</div></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“I used to travel into Bellingham and buy my sack of coal,” she said, standing in sensible shoes on a pebbled beach at a recent tribal news conference, talking about her girlhood of rural subsistence and occasional trips to the nearby market town. The idea that coal producers would make a comeback bid, with a huge export shipping terminal proposed at a site where she once fished, called Cherry Point, is simply wrong, she said. “It’s something that should not come about,” Ms. Cagey said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Many environmental groups and green-minded politicians in the Pacific Northwest are already on record as opposing a wave of export terminals proposed from here to the south-central coast of Oregon, aiming to ship coal to Asia. But in recent weeks, Indian tribes have been linking arms as well, citing possible injury to fishing rights and religious and sacred sites if the coal should spill or the dust from its trains and barges should waft too thick.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">And as history has demonstrated over and over, especially in this part of the nation, from protecting fish habitats to removing dams, a tribal-environmental alliance goes far beyond good public relations. The cultural claims and treaty rights that tribes can wield — older and materially different, Indian law experts say, than any argument that the Sierra Club or its allies might muster about federal air quality rules or environmental review — add a complicated plank of discussion that courts and regulators have found hard to ignore.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Lummi tribal leaders recently burned a mock million-dollar check in a ceremonial statement that money could never buy their cooperation. Last month, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, a regional congress of more than 50 tribes in seven states, passed a resolution demanding a collective environmental impact statement for the proposed ports, rather than project-by-project statements, which federal regulators have suggested.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Leaders of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which focuses on fishing rights, said in a <a href="http://www.critfc.org/text/press/20120927.html" style="color: #666699;" title="link to CRITFC statement">statement</a> in support of the resolution that moving millions of tons of coal through the region could affect a range of issues, like road traffic and economic life on the reservations, not to mention the environment.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“It brings another set of issues to the table,” said Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon, a Democrat who earlier this year asked for a broad federal environmental review that would examine implications of the coal plan from transit through the region by train or barge to the burning of the coal in China. The tribes, Mr. Kitzhaber said, have now added a voice that even a governor cannot match. “It definitely increases the pressure,” he said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Coal producers across the nation have been wounded by a sharp drop in demand in the United States — down 16.3 percent in the period from April through June, compared with the same period in 2011, to the lowest quarterly level since 2005, according to the <a href="http://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/" style="color: #666699;" title="link to latest federal coal production figures ">most recent federal figures</a>. With prices falling and abundant supplies of natural gas flowing because of new fields and drilling technologies, especially hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, many electricity producers that can switch are doing so.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">That has made coal exports, which have increased this year in every region of the country except the West, according to federal figures, even more crucial to the industry than they were when the six terminals on the Pacific Coast were first proposed. Jason Hayes, a spokesman for the American Coal Council, said that with coal-producing nations like Australia and Indonesia competing for Asian markets, a roadblock on the West Coast is an issue for the entire American economy.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The first <a href="http://www.nws.usace.mil/Media/NewsReleases/tabid/2408/Article/4373/scoping-begins-sept-24-for-proposed-gateway-pacific-terminal-eis.aspx" style="color: #666699;" title="link to Army Corps of Engineers statement on upcoming hearings">public hearings</a> for the terminal projects, conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers, are set to begin this month in Bellingham, near the Lummi reservation.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“The people that can produce efficiently and can ship quickly and reliably — those are the big things — they are going to be the ones that are chosen for being reliable business partners,” Mr. Hayes said. “If we can build the ports on the West Coast, then it just becomes that much more reliable.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But by coincidence of history, geography, culture and law, the West Coast, especially Washington and Oregon, is also a center for Indian tribe muscle, legal scholars said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;"></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">Although many tribes around the nation received rights to hunt and fish in the treaty language of the 1800s that consigned them to reservations, few places had a focus on a single resource — fish, especially from the Columbia River and its tributaries — that tribes here did. They also, crucially, persisted in using the resources that the treaties had granted them; fishing did not become a hobby or a cultural artifact.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleInline runaroundLeft" style="clear: left; color: #333333; display: inline; float: left; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin: 6px 15px 10px 0px !important; width: 190px;"><div class="inlineImage module" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 12px; width: 190px;"><div class="image" style="margin-bottom: 2px;"><span itemid="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/12/us/COAL-2/COAL-2-articleInline.jpg" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject"><img alt="" height="265" itemprop="url" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/12/us/COAL-2/COAL-2-articleInline.jpg" width="190" /></span></div><h6 class="credit" style="color: #909090; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.223em; margin: 0px 0px 3px; text-align: right;">Paul Anderson for The New York Times</h6><div class="caption" style="color: #666666; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em; line-height: 1.2727em;">Mary Helen Cagey, an elder of the Lummi Indian tribe, opposes a proposed coal terminal at Cherry Point, Wash.</div></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Then, in the 1970s, when the Indian rights and environmental movements were both surging, tribal timing was fortuitous in pushing court cases that reinforced their claims.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“They made really good use of those rights, and have become major players,” said Sarah Krakoff, a law professor at the University of Colorado who teaches Indian law and natural resources law. Tribal rights have been a cornerstone in the long battle over restoring salmon stocks in the Columbia River. This year, one of the biggest dam removal projects in the nation’s history reached a milestone when a section of the Elwha River near Olympic National Park in Washington was restored to wild flow, with fishing rights an important driver in the process.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Coal has also become an element in the presidential race, as energy executives have <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/us/politics/fossil-fuel-industry-opens-wallet-to-defeat-obama.html?pagewanted=all" style="color: #666699;" title="link to NYT story on energy industry opposition to Obama">poured tens of millions</a> of dollars into campaigns backing Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, and accusing the Obama administration of harboring hostility to coal through tightened air pollution rules.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">An executive order dating from the administration of Bill Clinton could give further ammunition to Northwest tribes in their coal fight, Professor Krakoff and other experts said. The order directs federal agencies to allow tribal access to sacred sites and to take into account religious practices in federal decision making.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Lummi leaders, in the protest this week where Ms. Cagey spoke, said the Cherry Point site in particular — though partly developed years ago by industry, with a major oil refinery nearby — is full of sacred sites and burial grounds. The tribe’s hereditary chairman, Bill James, said in an interview, however, that the tribe would not reveal the locations of the graves for fear of looting.</div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-85939315942514984032012-10-08T07:55:00.001-07:002012-10-08T07:55:36.396-07:00Weighed Down by History, a Town Slides in Mexico - NYTimes.com<br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">The thrust of civilization is commonly imagined as an arc curving ever upward. From the Industrial Revolution on, innovation, comfort, health and wealth have seemed to expand and improve limitlessly for much of the world. But take a long look at the remote, sinking town of Santiago Mitlatongo, in Mexico, and that arc appears to slump — and not just graphically. The geologic term is “slumping”; its foundation diminished by erosion, Santiago Mitlatongo is sliding down its mountain at a rate of about a meter per day.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">The photographer <a href="http://mattblack.com/" style="color: steelgray;">Matt Black</a> has been seeking stories of the indigenous tribes of southern Mexico and the migrants to the Central Valley of California for 10 years, traveling back and forth and documenting the effects on these changing cultures and economies. His series, “<a href="http://mattblack.com/thefall/01.html" style="color: steelgray;">After the Fall</a>,” which was first published in the September/October issue of <a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7009/" style="color: steelgray;">Orion Magazine</a>, is narrow in scope — it’s just one remote Mixteca town upended by a slow-motion tragedy — but the themes it illuminates are vast, implicating the last several centuries of North American history begun by Columbus’s landing 520 years ago this Friday (though observed in most of the United States on Monday).</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">“Here’s the story of this town where literally lives turn upside down,” said Mr. Black, 42, who first photographed this pre-Columbian society in December. “It looked like the entire town had gone through a blender,” he said.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">“The Mixteca were one of the great civilizations in Mesoamerica. And it’s just completely unraveling.”</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">In 1998, after a cold spell had killed off the citrus trees near his home in Exeter, Calif., Mr. Black went to photograph the migrant communities that were suddenly out of work. He heard the Mixteca language spoken for the first time and was entranced. And he was curious to know how these people, who were discriminated against by Spanish-speaking Mexicans as well as by whites, could tolerate life as migrants here — what was so bad at home that this was better?</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">The Mixteca region, which straddles the Oaxaca, Guerrero and Puebla states in southern Mexico, has been subject to centuries of erosion. It’s unclear if it was <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3984782?uid=3739832&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101288717287" style="color: steelgray;">initiated by the Spaniards</a> and their crops, cattle and church-building, or even before the Spanish invasion, when the Aztecs exacted tribute from the Mixtecs, who perhaps overtilled their land to meet the demands. Either way, the erosion has probably been exacerbated by modern agricultural practices and the effects of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html" style="color: steelgray;">climate change</a>. Today, it’s a desert; the Mixtecs can barely feed themselves, so they migrate to the United States, leaving behind fragments of towns that can no longer function well enough to support themselves.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">San Miguel Cuevas, another Mixteca town that Mr. Black photographed, has lost 80 percent of its population to migration, he said, making it essentially a ghost town. He was dismayed that this resilient culture, so profoundly tethered to the land, was witnessing that land swept out from underneath it by unstoppable forces. Walking the dusty paths of Santiago Mitlatongo, Mr. Black described an air of mourning. “There’s this whole other layer of meaning there culturally, and people would describe it to me like someone just died,” he said.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">“Their land is like a member of their family.”</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">This migration story is also a cruel inversion of historical norms. It is heart-wrenching, Mr. Black said, that the Mixtecs, having for so long subsisted on their own land and hard work — using traditional techniques that span back centuries — are forced to abandon their now-barren land to work the massive machines of industrialized agriculture in the United States. These industrialized, subsidized crops in the United States are cheap, and Mexico imports, for instance, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/world/20070501faessay_v86n3_runge_senauer.html?pagewanted=print" style="color: steelgray;">80 percent</a> of its corn from here.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">The circumstances in this region are reminiscent of the dust storms that blanketed the Great Plains in the 1930s, which resulted from the erosion of crop-choked land. Those storms initiated a mass migration of “Okies” to California’s Central Valley.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">“I’m from an area that was utterly transformed by the Dust Bowl,” said Mr. Black. “The Dust Bowl didn’t happen here, but that’s part of the legacy of this place. It really created this place,” he said, noting an uneasy feeling of witnessing history repeat itself.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;">“This is one of the great civilizations of the Americas,” he said. “I mean, the Mixtecs have the oldest, continuous written history in the Americas — older than the Aztecs, older than the Incas.” It survived colonialism and the Spanish conquest, and for centuries this forgotten Mixteca town escaped bludgeons of globalization. And now it’s tumbling down a hill.<br />
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</div>You must visit the link to see the images.</div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-7393841390954619062012-10-04T08:30:00.001-07:002012-10-04T08:30:16.739-07:00Sioux Race to Find Millions to Buy Sacred Land in Black Hills - NYTimes.com<nyt_byline style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></nyt_byline><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 2px 0px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" itemprop="creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" rel="author" style="color: #666699; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by TIMOTHY WILLIAMS">TIMOTHY WILLIAMS</a></span></h6><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: left;"></span><br />
<h6 class="dateline" style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">Published: October 3, 2012</h6><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; line-height: 1.467em;">The Black Hills, the rolling range of mountains that rise out of the badlands of western South Dakota, are considered sacred to the Sioux, who for 150 years have fought on battlefields and in courtrooms for the return of the land.<br />
<div style="font-size: 1.5em;"><br />
</div><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.467em;">And so the Great Sioux Nation exulted this summer when a long-sought parcel in the mountains called Pe’ Sla by the Lakota was put up for sale and a bid from the Sioux was accepted by the family that had controlled the land since 1876, the year that Gen. George Armstrong Custer died not far to the west at Little Bighorn.</span></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em; text-align: left;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But now, anxiety has replaced optimism as more than a half-dozen Sioux tribes, which include some of the nation’s poorest people, race to come up with the $9 million purchase price before the deadline next month.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Not only poverty stands in the way, but also the charged history: many Sioux ask why they should have to pay for land that already belongs to them, given numerous treaties broken by the United States and a landmark federal court decision in 1979 that called the government’s seizure of the Black Hills one of the most dishonorable acts in American history.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“It’s like someone stealing my car and I have to pay to get it back,” said Tom Poor Bear, the vice president of the Oglala Lakota Tribe in South Dakota.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">On Friday, tribal chairmen from across the Great Plains are scheduled to meet to devise a strategy.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But if the Sioux tribes — which for generations have been troubled by grinding poverty, unemployment rates as high as 80 percent, and disproportionate levels of violence, alcoholism and preventable death — are unable to come up with the money, long-held dreams, as well as a $900,000 initial payment, will be lost.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to get some land back that is very, very dear to us,” said Louis Wayne Boyd, the treasurer of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, which has taken the lead in the purchase. “Most of the tribes want to do something, but it’s very difficult for them to raise any money, especially of this magnitude.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 guaranteed the Sioux ownership of the Black Hills, but after the discovery of gold, the federal government took back the mountains.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Pe’ Sla (pronounced pay-shlah), 1,942 acres of prairie in the heart of the range, was first homesteaded by the ancestors of the current owners, the Reynolds family, in 1876.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">More than 100 years later, in 1979, the United States Court of Claims, discussing the federal government’s misdeeds against the Sioux, including its tactic of starving them, before it appropriated the land, wrote that “a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing will never, in all probability, be found in our history.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The next year, the Supreme Court ruled that the Sioux had not received adequate compensation for the Black Hills and ordered the government to pay them. The Sioux, however, have refused to accept any money, saying that doing so would have the effect of selling their mountains. Instead, they insist on the return of the Black Hills to tribal authority.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The government fund, accumulating interest in a federal bank account, has grown to more than $800 million, although the Sioux say that using the money to buy Pe’ Sla is not an option.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Sioux believe that the site was the scene of an epic battle between good and evil, and each spring they hold a religious ceremony there, where life is welcomed back with peace after a long winter.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Pe’ Sla is deemed sacred, but the plan to spend millions in scarce revenue on its purchase may not represent a consensus of the Sioux.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“There are mixed feelings,” said Vernon Schmidt, executive director of the Rosebud Sioux’s land enterprise department. “Some tribal members are wholeheartedly in support, and other tribal members are not. It’s hard to say, ‘Tighten your belt,’ but we’re going to have to do it anyway. There’s no dollar amount you can put on a sacred site.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em;">The Reynolds family, which declined to comment, has used the land it calls Reynolds Prairie Ranch — pristine grassland bisected by an asphalt road — for cattle grazing, but has always allowed access for prayer ceremonies.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Sioux say their culture would be irreparably harmed if their bid to buy Pe’ Sla failed and the land was bought by an owner who prevented them from visiting.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Our ceremonial patterns would collapse,” said Victor Douville, who teaches Lakota history and culture at Sinte Gleska University in Mission, S.D. Mr. Douville said that there had been annual pilgrimages at Pe’ Sla for 3,000 years, and that if they were halted, “we might come to an end as a people.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">So far, though, the Rosebud Sioux say they have received no firm financial commitments from other tribes, despite promises. The deadline to come up with the remaining $8.1 million — an amount roughly equal to the tribe’s annual budget — is Nov. 30.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Not by any means are we a rich tribe,” said Mr. Boyd, treasurer of the Rosebud, whose unemployment rate is 83 percent. “It was always our intention to work with other tribes. We are a little nervous because this is a lot of money, and it would really hurt us if we had to do it ourselves.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Oglala Lakota — one of the few tribes with fewer resources than the Rosebud Sioux — say they intend to help, but have not yet decided how much to give.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">“Our tribe, even though we’re a poor tribe, we’ll come up with some money,” said Mr. Poor Bear, the tribe’s vice president.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">One hope had been that the richest of the Sioux tribes, the Shakopee Mdewakanton, which operates a highly profitable casino and entertainment complex outside Minneapolis and donates millions each year to other tribes, would contribute as well.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">But Tessa Lehto, a spokeswoman for the Shakopee, said in an e-mail that she had “no information” about a forthcoming grant or loan for Pe’ Sla.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">The Rosebud Sioux have been left to negotiate with commercial banks, which often decline to make large loans to tribes because banks are generally prohibited from seizing assets on reservations if a tribe is unable to repay.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em;">Still, Charmaine White Face, the coordinator of the volunteer group Defenders of the Black Hills, echoed the sentiments of Sioux across the Great Plains. “It can’t not go through,” she said of the purchase.</div></div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-88856267965481581932012-09-14T12:54:00.001-07:002012-09-14T12:54:50.989-07:00Slain ambassador was Chinook member - Daily Astorian: FreeMembers of the Chinook Tribe have asked for prayers for the family of tribal member Chris Stevens, the slain U.S. ambassador in Libya.<br />
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Stevens, 52, one of the bright lights of the State Department, was one of four Americans killed Tuesday, as part of worldwide protests by people upset over a U.S.,-made anti-Islam film.<br />
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Stevens, originally from California, took the job in May to great acclaim by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.<br />
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“Chris was committed to advancing America's values and interests, even when that meant putting himself in danger,” Clinton wrote Wednesday in a statement posted on the Facebook page of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.<br />
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The U.S. put all of its diplomatic missions overseas on high alert as Clinton delivered an explicit denunciation of the video as the administration sought to pre-empt further turmoil at its embassies and consulates.<br />
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“The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” she said before a meeting with the foreign minister of Morocco at the State Department. “We absolutely reject its content and message. To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible,” Clinton said. “It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”<br />
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Stevens’ mother, Mary Commanday, is the first cousin of Chinook tribal elders Catherine Herrold Troeh and Charlotte Davis, both of whom are well known in Pacific County, the historic homeland of the tribe that met Lewis and Clark at the mouth of the Columbia River.<br />
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Willapa Bay resident John Herrold is one of Stevens' local first cousins.<br />
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Chinook Chairman Ray Gardner said Stevens “lost his life while working towards bringing lasting peace to the region.” “This will be a hard time for their family and they will need our prayers,” Gardner said.<br />
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President Barack Obama called Commanday, Stevens’ mother, with his condolences.<br />
Publicly, he described Stevens as a “courageous and exemplary representative of the United States.” Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith and two former Navy Seals, Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods, also died in the attack, according to wire sources.<br />
The four “exemplified America's commitment to freedom, justice, and partnership with nations and people around the globe,” Obama said.<br />
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Obama, speaking at a campaign event in Golden, Colo., also vowed that the perpetrators would be punished. “I want people around the world to hear me,” he said. “To all those who would do us harm: No act of terror will go unpunished. I will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the resolve of the United States of America.”<br />
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Born in 1960 in northern California, Stevens had been a diplomat for two decades after previously working as an international trade lawyer in Washington, D.C., according to his biography on the State Department website. Stevens started his career as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Morocco, then spent more than 20 years working on issues related to the Middle East and North Africa.<br />
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As the Chinook grieved for their lost relative, another family member, Joe Brown, posted this message on Facebook late Wednesday:<br />
“My cousin Mary (Stevens’ mom) got two very important phone calls today. One was from President Obama. The other was from from Ray Gardner, chief of the Chinook Indian Nation, who told me, ‘I did call Mary Commanday and let her know that the prayers of the Chinook Nation are with all of your family during this difficult time. I will pass this information to all of our members tomorrow and I will go down to the banks of the Willapa and give a special prayer for all of you. No better place to give prayers then on the banks of the rivers of our ancestors.’ We’re covered. Thank you, Ray Gardner, and klahowya.Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-86159601762548186502012-08-24T15:21:00.001-07:002012-08-24T15:21:52.387-07:00RNC Official: NM Governor ‘Dishonored’ Gen. Custer By Meeting With American Indians | TPMMuckrakerRNC Official: N.M. Governor ‘Dishonored’ Gen. Custer By Meeting With American Indians<br />
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RYAN J. REILLY AUGUST 24, 2012, 5:30 PM 3979 <br />
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A progressive group called on Republican National Committee leader Pat Rogers to step down on Friday after emails showed him telling New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez’s staff that meeting with a group of American Indians “dishonored” Gen. George Armstrong Custer, the 19th century commander who killed scores of American Indians.<br />
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“The state is going to hell,” Rogers, who is a member of the GOP executive committee and is currently in Tampa for the RNC convention, wrote in a June 8 email released by Progress Now New Mexico. Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Col. Allen Weh “would not have dishonored Col Custer in this manner,” he wrote.<br />
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Martinez is required by law to attend the annual state-tribal leaders summit, according to Progress Now New Mexico, which called for him to step down.<br />
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“Such a blatantly racist statement against our native people is offensive from anyone, but to come from a national GOP leader and lobbyist for some of our country’s largest corporations is indefensible,” Progress Now New Mexico’s executive director Pat Davis said in a statement.Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-26869149886491191552012-08-09T07:45:00.001-07:002012-08-09T07:45:51.030-07:00More Casinos and Internet Gambling Threaten Shakopee Tribe - NYTimes.com<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"><nyt_byline></nyt_byline></span><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" itemprop="creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/timothy_williams/index.html" itemprop="name" rel="author" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by TIMOTHY WILLIAMS">TIMOTHY WILLIAMS</a></span></h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Published: August 9, 2012</h6><div class="articleBody" style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px;"><br />
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<div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">SHAKOPEE MDEWAKANTON INDIAN RESERVATION, Minn. — A generation ago, the Shakopee Mdewakanton tribe lived in a motley collection of beat-up trailer homes, melting snow for bath water when wells froze over because they lacked indoor plumbing. Three-quarters of tribal members received government food supplements.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><span class="articleBody" style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 24px;">Today, the Shakopee Mdewakanton are believed to be the richest tribe in American history as measured by individual personal wealth: Each adult, according to court records and confirmed by one tribal member, receives a monthly payment of around $84,000, or $1.08 million a year.</span></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The financial success of the 480 members of the Shakopee Tribe — whose ancestors 150 years ago were hunted down, slaughtered and eventually exiled from Minnesota — derives from their flourishing casino and resort operation, which on weekends swells the population of their tiny reservation to the size of a city.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“We have 99.2 percent unemployment,” Stanley R. Crooks, the tribe’s president, said as he smiled during a rare interview. “It’s entirely voluntary.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">While the Shakopee tribe continues to prosper, casino gambling in much of Indian Country — which tribes say is the only economic development tool that has ever worked on reservations — has in recent months come increasingly under threat, stirring worries that the long lucky streak is over.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The primary anxiety is competing casinos being hurriedly opened by states in pursuit of new revenue. But more menacing, tribes say, is a sophisticated and growing movement to legalize Internet gambling under state laws that would give those states the potential power to regulate and tax online gambling even on reservations.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Further, the current expansion of legalized gambling in the United States, and the prospect of more to come, could not have arrived at a worse moment for tribes, because after 25 years of booming profits, the tribal casino business has suddenly gone flat. The vast majority of tribes have not become rich. Instead, casinos have become a baseline economic necessity, lifting thousands out of poverty by serving as a primary source of income and employment.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“My worry is this may be the beginning of the end, that in the push to increase state and federal revenue we are putting at risk the groups who continue to need Indian gaming,” said Kathryn Rand, co-director of the Institute for the Study of Tribal Gaming at the University of North Dakota. During the past year or so, Maine, Ohio, Kansas and Pennsylvania have all opened large casinos, and in Maryland, pent-up demand caused a traffic snarl miles long— during the middle of the night — at the opening of a new casino in June.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Among other states, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/us/new-law-in-massachusetts-allows-for-three-casinos.html" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="Times article">Massachusetts recently approved casino gambling</a> and New York <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/nyregion/new-yorks-first-casino-at-aqueduct-racetrack-is-set-to-open.html" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="Times article">is moving in that direction</a>. In November, Oregon voters will decide whether to open their first casinos while Michigan voters will determine whether to expand gambling there as well.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">While the new commercial casinos turn over much of their revenue to state and local governments, tribal facilities do not pay direct state taxes because of the tribes’ status as sovereign nations.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">That status, however, has become a concern for tribes as it relates to legalized online gambling, which is expected to transform the industry by allowing people to play casino games like poker on mobile devices whenever and wherever they want.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Attempts by some states to tax all online gambling revenue, which tribes regard as an unacceptable violation of their sovereign status, have set up a collision course. “We are very adamant that people understand we are governments, and expect to be treated like governments,” said Ernie Stevens Jr., chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Delaware, in June, became the first state to legalize casino-style gambling on the Internet, a move that followed a Justice Department interpretation last December that opened the door to online gambling. All this has come as unwelcome news in the $26 billion tribal gambling industry. In recent years, a number of casinos have closed, the days of building elaborate new complexes appears to have ended, and efforts to build new casinos off reservation — and nearer metropolitan areas — has proved largely unsuccessful.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Even some of the most successful gambling tribes have had to reduce or eliminate gambling revenue payments to members.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Ledyard, Conn., for instance, has stopped making individual awards that had once been as high as $120,000 a year after <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/mike-sokolove-foxwood-casinos.html" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="Times article">it amassed $2 billion in debt</a>. And members of the Mohegan tribe in Uncasville, Conn., who operate Mohegan Sun, had been receiving about $360,000 annually before seeing significant reductions in recent years.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 24px;">Gambling analysts say the coming wave of casualties will most likely be Indian casinos in remote areas that make little money but employ dozens of tribal members and use gambling proceeds to pay for social services. The Shakopees are under no such pressure. While it is impossible to say for certain whether individual tribal members are indeed the nation’s richest based on their monthly income — derived from the tribe’s two casinos, championship golf course, big-name concert acts, 600-room hotel and other business ventures — each adult earns enough each year to be a millionaire.</span></div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 24px;">But for the tribe, whose purple casino buses are as common a sight in the Twin Cities as summer mosquitoes, any significant downturn in profits would spread economic pain in a fairly wide arc.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"></span></div><div class="articleInline runaroundLeft firstArticleInline" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 10px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 15px !important; margin-top: 0px; width: 190px;"><div class="story" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px;"><h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px;"></h6></div></div><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Since 1996, the tribe has donated $243.5 million, including $120 million to poorer tribes, and lent $478.5 million.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">It is Scott County’s largest employer, and has contributed tens of millions of dollars for roads and to schools and hospitals. “We’re doing very well,” Mr. Crooks said. “We feel we have an obligation to help others. It’s part of our culture.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Measuring the tribe’s charity however, is difficult because the amount it doles out to members is secret. (The $84,000 a month figure that each adult in the tribe receives comes from a 2004 divorce case involving a tribal member, but was confirmed by a current tribal member as still correct.)</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Alan Meister, an economist who compiles tribal gambling data, said Minnesota’s 18 tribal casinos earned a combined $1.4 billion in 2010, although the Shakopees’ portion of that is unclear. But even if the tribe accounted for nearly the entire $1.4 billion, its philanthropy would compare well with corporations, even though the tribe receives no tax write-offs for giving.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">For example, the tribe’s $28.5 million in charitable cash contributions in 2010 was more than those of several Minneapolis-area Fortune 500 companies, including the 3M Corporation, which had 2010 revenue of $23 billion, and U.S. Bancorp, which had $19.5 billion in revenue in 2010, according to the Minnesota Council on Foundations.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Despite its wealth, however, the Shakopee reservation has few mansion-size homes, although most families have at least one high-end car in the driveway. Many tribal members own large second homes off the reservation and nearly everyone sends children to private schools. Expensive hobbies like thoroughbred breeding, big game hunting and elaborate trips — which sometimes last for months — are common.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Families say it is difficult to teach children the value of money when everyone knows no one will likely ever need to work.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“Why dig a hole when you don’t need to dig it — when you can pay someone to dig a hole?” said Keith B. Anderson, the tribe’s secretary and treasurer, who once worked for Target as an industrial designer. “Instead of budgeting a dinner and movie, you can go to dinner and a movie and have dinner again and see another movie, but you can’t see enough movies and dinners to spend all your money.<br />
”</div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-48783719973420376112012-08-05T08:50:00.001-07:002012-08-05T08:50:28.995-07:00Siletz Language, With Few Voices, Finds Modern Way to Survive - NYTimes.com<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"><nyt_byline></nyt_byline></span><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/kirk_johnson/index.html" itemprop="creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/kirk_johnson/index.html" itemprop="name" rel="author" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by KIRK JOHNSON">KIRK JOHNSON</a></span></h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Published: August 3, 2012</h6><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></div><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">SILETZ, Ore. — Local native languages teeter on the brink of oblivion all over the world as the big linguistic sweepstakes winners like English, Spanish or Mandarin ride a surging wave of global communications.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape are also creating new ways to save its hidden, cloistered corners, as in the unlikely survival of Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only about five speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the world: Hey, we’re talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch’aa-ghit-’a.)</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online <a href="http://siletz.swarthmore.edu/?q=talking&fields=all&semantic_ids=" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="The dictionary">Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary</a> for nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries himself. In its first years the dictionary was password protected, intended for tribe members.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Since February, however, when organizers began to publicize its existence, Web hits have spiked from places where languages related to Siletz are spoken, a broad area of the West on through Canada and into Alaska. That is the heartland of the Athabascan family of languages, which also includes Navajo. And there has been a flurry of interest from Web users in Italy, Switzerland and Poland, where the dark, rainy woods of the Pacific Northwest, at least in terms of language connections, might as well be the moon.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“They told us our language was moribund and heading off a cliff,” said Mr. Lane, 54, sitting in a storage room full of tribal basketry and other artifacts here on the reservation, about three hours southwest of Portland, Ore. He said he has no fantasies that Siletz will conquer the world, or even the tribe. Stabilization for now is the goal, he said, “creating a pool of speakers large enough that it won’t go away.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But in the hurly-burly of modern communications, keeping a language alive goes far beyond a simple count of how many people can conjugate its verbs. Think Jen Johnson’s keypad thumbs. A graduate student in linguistics at Georgetown University, Ms. Johnson, 21, stumbled onto Siletz while studying linguistics at Swarthmore College, which has helped the tribe build its dictionary. She fell in love with its cadences, and now texts in Siletz, her fourth language of study, with a tribe member in Oregon.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Language experts who helped create the dictionary say the distinctiveness of Siletz Dee-ni (pronounced SiLETZ day-KNEE), or Coastal Athabascan as it is also called, comes in part from the unique way the language managed to survive.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Most other language preservation projects have a base, however small, of people who speak the language. The <a href="http://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="dictionary">Ojibwe People’s Dictionary</a>, for example, which went online this year, focuses on one of the most widely spoken native languages in Canada and the Upper Midwest.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The 12 other dictionaries financed in recent years by the <a href="http://www.livingtongues.org/" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="tongues">Living Tongues Institute</a>, a nonprofit group, in partnership with the National Geographic Society — which helped start the Siletz dictionary project in 2005 and now uses it as a blueprint — are all centered on languages still in use, however small or threatened their populations of speakers may be. Matukar Panau, for instance, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, has about 600 speakers remaining, in two small villages.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Siletz, by contrast, had become, by the time of the dictionary, almost an artifact — preserved in song for certain native dances, but without a single person living who had grown up with it as a first language.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">There were people who had listened to the elders, like Mr. Lane, and there were old recordings, made by anthropologists who came through the West in the 1930s and 1960s, but not much else. Mr. Lane wants to incorporate some of those scratchy recordings into future versions of the dictionary.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">What can also bridge an ancient language’s roots to younger tribe members, some new Siletz learners said, is that it can sound pretty cool.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“There are a couple of sounds that are nowhere in the English language, like you’re going to spit, almost — kids seem much more open to that,” said Sonya Moody-Jurado, who grew up hearing a few words from her mother — like nose (mish), and dog (lin-ch’e’) — and has been attending with a grandson Siletz classes taught by Mr. Lane.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“They’re trailblazers, showing the way for small languages to cross the digital divide,” said K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore who worked with the Siletz tribe and the other partners to build the dictionary. Professor Harrison said he went to Colombia recently, talking to indigenous tribes about preserving their languages, but when the laptops opened up, the Siletz dictionary, with its impressive size and search capabilities, was the focus. “It’s become a model of how you do it,” he said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">When settlers were streaming west in the 1850s on the Oregon Trail and displacing American Indians from desirable farmland, government Indian policy created artificial conglomerates of tribes, jamming them into one place even though the groups spoke different languages and in many instances had little in common.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The Siletz people were among the largest bands that ended up here on this spit of land jutting into the Pacific Ocean. By dint of their numbers, their language prevailed over other tribes, and their dances, sung in Siletz, became adopted by other tribes as their cultures faded.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“We’re the last standing,” Mr. Lane said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But the threat of oblivion was constant. In the 1950s, the tiny tribe was declared dead by the United States — a “termination” from the rolls, in the jargon of the time. The Siletz clawed back — clinging to former reservation lands and cultural anchors in songs and dances — and two decades later, in the mid-1970s, became only the second tribe in the nation to go from nonexistence to federally recognized status. The <a href="http://ctsi.nsn.us/" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="confederated">Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians</a> now have about 4,900 enrolled members and a profitable casino in the nearby resort town of Lincoln City.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">School was also once the enemy of tribal languages. Government boarding schools, where generations of Indian children were sent, aimed to stamp out native ways and tongues. Now, the language is taught through the sixth grade at the public <a class="meta-classifier" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/charter_schools/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="More articles about charter schools.">charter school</a> in Siletz, and the tribe aims to have a teaching program in place in the next few years to meet Oregon’s high school language requirements, allowing Siletz, in a place it originated, to be taught as a foreign language.</div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-87509559631471135172012-08-04T14:18:00.001-07:002012-08-04T14:18:50.205-07:00Lucrative California Gambling Pits Indian Tribe Against Tribe - NYTimes.com<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"><nyt_byline></nyt_byline></span><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px;">By <span itemid="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/norimitsu_onishi/index.html" itemprop="creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/norimitsu_onishi/index.html" itemprop="name" rel="author" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: none;" title="More Articles by NORIMITSU ONISHI">NORIMITSU ONISHI</a></span></h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Published: August 4, 2012</h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 24px;"><br />
</span></h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 24px;">OROVILLE, Calif. — A pitted gravel road snakes through the forest to the Enterprise Rancheria of the Maidu Indians’ sole piece of tribal land about 15 miles east of here in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Broken trailers and a hot tub rejiggered to irrigate a garden sit in a clearing, the few acres of flat land where a handful of people live in houses in disrepair.</span></h6><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemid="http://www.nytimes.com" itemprop="sourceOrganization" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"></div><nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">With little accessible space on its 40-acre territory, the 800-member tribe used government grants last year to buy a nearby trailer park that is now home to a dozen families. About half live in old trailers that were used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house those displaced by <a class="meta-classifier" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricane_katrina/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="More articles about Hurricane Katrina.">Hurricane Katrina</a>.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">To pull itself out of poverty, the tribe applied in 2002 to build an off-reservation casino at a spot with more economic potential, near towns and highways about 35 miles south of here. After the federal government gave its approval last year, the final decision now rests with Gov. Jerry Brown, who is expected to decide on the fate of the Enterprise casino and another tribe’s off-reservation proposal by an Aug. 31 deadline.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But plans for the two casinos are drawing fierce opposition and last-minute lobbying in the state capital from an unexpected source: nearby tribes with casinos that they say will be hurt by the newcomers. Leading the fight against Enterprise is the United Auburn Indian Community, whose casino, Thunder Valley, has become one of America’s most profitable and has brought the formerly destitute tribe unimaginable riches.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“It’s really sad right now in Indian country with the divide between the haves and have-nots,” said Cindy Smith, the secretary of Enterprise’s tribal council. “It’s just a struggle to get on equal footing. And even when you’re on equal footing, you’re really not, because we’re almost two decades behind.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Since Indian gambling was legalized in the United States in 1988, only five tribes have gotten final clearance to build casinos off their reservations. The intense campaign against Enterprise and the other applicant, the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians, comes as the gambling market has grown crowded, especially here in California.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Opposing tribes accuse the newcomers of encroaching on areas to which they have no historical ties. “We have other tribes out there doing what we call reservation shopping,” said Brenda Adams, the treasurer of United Auburn. “We played by the rules. We had to stay on our historical lands. They call it equal footing, but is it? We’d like to have a casino in downtown San Francisco, but that’s not our territory.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The issue has raised larger issues in Indian communities across the nation about the goals of gambling. A decade ago, tribes were united in their efforts to further Indian gambling, which was supposed to give them the means to become self-sufficient, said Steven Light, co-director of the University of North Dakota’s Institute for the Study of Tribal Gaming Law and Policy. But he said that talk of “fairness and justice” has given way in an increasingly competitive market.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">A short drive from Sacramento — and about 30 miles from Enterprise’s planned site — Thunder Valley has a 2,700-machine casino, a 300-room hotel, an amphitheater and a golf course. Helicopters fly in high rollers from San Francisco. With 80 percent of its revenues coming directly from gambling, Thunder Valley is so profitable that it has transformed the lives of its owners, the 400-member United Auburn tribe, most of whom received welfare benefits until the casino opened in 2003, said Ms. Adams, 40.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The tribal council has provided housing for members, built group homes for troubled children and connected residential areas to water and sewer systems. All members receive free health care and dental benefits. Children making the honor roll receive hundreds of dollars as incentives. Tribal trips were made to France, Italy and Mexico.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The tribe’s 200 adult members each receive a share of the casino’s revenues, a cut that the local news media has reported as $30,000 a month per member but that industry experts estimate is more. Douglas G. Elmets, a spokesman for the tribe and a former White House spokesman during the Reagan administration, said only that members did not need to work for financial reasons, but that many did in tribal affairs.</div><div><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Another tribe opposing the off-reservation casinos, the 20 members of the Jackson Rancheria of Miwuk Indians, depended on welfare and gathered firewood to make ends meet before gambling, said Rich Hoffman, the casino’s chief executive. Now, the tribe owns real estate in California and Nevada; Goldman Sachs manages the tribe’s portfolio, which is “in the hundreds of millions” of dollars, Mr. Hoffman said.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Still, he was worried that the good times would not last. With the state eager to get a greater share of gambling revenues, Mr. Hoffman said he believed that other forms of non-Indian gambling, particularly online operations, could become legal. “I don’t think the tribes 20 years from now will still have an oligopoly on gaming,” he said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Another small tribe, the 60-member Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, has used profits from its Cache Creek casino to buy land and diversify into agriculture. The tribe has hired experts to farm 1,300 acres with a dozen crops. Its wine and olive oil, Séka Hills, is sold in San Francisco. Its new multimillion-dollar olive mill, which other olive oil producers in the area have contracted to use, is scheduled to start operating soon.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The tribe, which used to oppose the off-reservation casinos but is now publicly neutral, has felt the need to diversity beyond gambling. “Too many eggs in one basket is probably not a good thing,” said Marshall McKay, the tribal chairman.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Nationally, most tribes, including those with less profitable casinos, remain in poverty, experts say. So opposition, especially from some of the most profitable tribes, rankles the North Fork tribe, one of California’s biggest tribes with 1,900 members. Of the state’s 104 federally recognized tribes, 61 have casinos in what is the nation’s biggest market for Indian gambling.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“They don’t want to see other Indians prosper, I guess,” said Alvin McDonald, 34, one of a handful of people living on the tribe’s 80-acre tract on the edge of the Sierra National Forest about 200 miles southeast of here.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The tribe is waiting for the governor’s decision on its plans to build a casino on a highway about 35 miles away. Its main opponent, the nearby Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, accuses North Fork of being interlopers from the other side of the Sierra Nevada. The two tribes share many links, including intermarriage.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“That’s what makes it more hurtful,” said Elaine Bethel Fink, 65, the chairwoman of North Fork’s tribal council.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Here in Oroville, in the decade that he has fought for a casino, Art Angle, 70, Enterprise’s vice chairman and a retired logger, has lost friends in the opposing tribes — men with whom he had spent a chunk of his life “logging and partying.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“They don’t look at me in the same way,” he said.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">With the final decision only weeks away, Mr. Angle’s worries were turning inward. “I don’t have any money yet,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years. I may become as bad as them.”</div></div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-17403032122910214882012-08-03T06:55:00.001-07:002012-08-03T06:55:06.506-07:00In Mexico, Reclaiming the Forests and the Right to Feel Safe - NYTimes.com<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"><nyt_byline></nyt_byline></span><br />
<h6 class="byline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 2px;">By <span itemprop="creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY</span></span></h6><h6 class="dateline" style="color: grey; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Published: August 2, 2012</h6><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">CHERÁN, Mexico — The woman’s exhausted eyes reflected the flames dancing in front of her. A 38-year-old grandmother, she is also a leader of the civilian insurgency that has taken over this mountain town in the state of Michoacán, 310 miles west of Mexico City. Sixteen months of cold and sleepless nights at Bonfire No. 17, one of a number of permanent burning barricades set up here, have taken their toll.</div></div><div class="articleBody" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But like the rest of the residents, she cannot afford to let her guard down.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">On the morning of April 15, 2011, using rocks and fireworks, a group of women attacked a busload of AK-47-armed illegal loggers as they drove through Cherán, residents said. The loggers, who local residents say are protected by one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations and given a virtual free pass by the country’s authorities, had terrorized the community at will for years.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Cherán’s residents said they had been subjected to multiple episodes of rape, kidnapping, extortion and murder by the paramilitary loggers, who have devastated an estimated 70 percent of the surrounding oak forests that sustained the town’s economy and indigenous culture for centuries.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">What happened next was extraordinary, especially in a country where the rule of law is often absent and isolated communities are frequently forced to accept the status quo. Organized criminal syndicates, like the drug cartel La Familia, created in Michoacán, act like a state within a state, making their own rules and meting out grisly punishments to those who do not obey.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But here in Cherán, a group of townspeople took loggers hostage, expelled the town’s entire police force and representatives of established political parties, and forcibly closed the roads.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The Mexican government authorities had previously ignored their repeated pleas for help, the residents said, so the people of Cherán simply took the law into their own hands.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“I felt my knees shake like castanets,” said the woman standing vigil at Bonfire No. 17, Rocio, who, like others here, withheld her last name for fear of reprisals by the criminal networks they are resisting. She recalled her overwhelming fear during those first days of revolt, when residents gathered around as many as 200 bonfires set up at every intersection in town to prevent the loggers from retaliating.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">In the months since then, Cherán’s townspeople have established a simple but effective internal protection system. There are fewer bonfires today, but several remain active and a security patrol of residents, or “ronda,” keeps watch at all times. Armed townspeople — from middle-age men to teenage girls — guard the barricades blocking all entrances into town. Their weapons are AR15 assault rifles, seized from the police when they expelled them.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Inside the town, they say, crime is now down almost to zero and most residents seem to feel safe. In recent days, however, people from nearby communities have taken several federal police officers captive, demanding that the newly instated forest patrols be canceled so that they can continue their logging activities. (The officers have since been released.) It is unclear if the hostage-takers were illegal loggers, but tensions are flaring in Cherán as the rest of the country looks on with concern.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Last November, in a court appeal, Cherán acquired a degree of autonomy from the Mexican government; the town still receives federal and state money, and its people must pay taxes, but they are allowed to govern themselves under a legal framework called “uses and customs” that has been granted to some indigenous communities.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Legal experts and academics say that Cherán is the first community to be granted this right as a result of a conflict over natural resources with one of the country’s increasingly powerful criminal syndicates.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"></span><br />
<div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><nyt_text><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The residents’ actions have ignited a regional spark of do-it-yourself justice. In nearby Opopeo, residents have organized community patrols and created an alert system using church bells. In Santa Clara del Cobre, disgruntled townspeople kidnapped their police force for several days last February, suspecting it of having abducted and “disappeared” a local man accused of rape.</div></nyt_text></div><div class="articleBody" style="margin-bottom: 1.7em; margin-top: 1.5em;"><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Still, the neighboring communities have not gone as far as Cherán. “If we do that here, we would need someone to take the lead, and if they did, they’ll kill him,” said Noe Pamatz, 64, a former member of the civilian security organization in Opopeo. He quit last month after its leader was found murdered.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Cherán’s residents say they were inspired to push for autonomy by some notable precedents. In 1994, Subcommander Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista rebels, staged an uprising in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, demanding better treatment for the indigenous communities there, placing the issue on the national political agenda.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The next year, Oaxaca became one of a handful of states to formally include the system of “uses and customs” for indigenous areas in its constitution. At the same time, indigenous communities in Guerrero, angered over the ineffectiveness and corruption of the local police, organized “community police forces” that have been largely successful, and remain in operation today.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The hurdles that Cherán has faced in recent years highlight the plight of Mexico’s most disenfranchised communities, which have suffered disproportionately during the nation’s drug wars, often without national notice.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“It’s not Acapulco, where you have foreign investment; it’s not Ciudad Juárez, where you have the maquiladora industry,” said David Peña, a lawyer representing the residents of Cherán. “It’s just a miserable little indigenous town.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Cherán now exists in an uneasy calm, but its residents are beginning to doubt their survival as an island amid hostile waters. In late July, an army base was set up near Cherán after two residents were killed when they ventured into the forests. Since April 2011, other residents have been murdered under similar circumstances. The presence of soldiers provides a level of comfort, residents say, but even Obdulio Ávila, deputy secretary of Mexico’s Interior Ministry, acknowledges that it may not be enough.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“It is difficult to have security in the whole municipality,” he said. “In fact, it is materially impossible.”</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The forests around Cherán have also suffered a stark physical transformation. Burned tree stumps and weeds have replaced the old, impenetrable groves.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“You can see that an entire beautiful forest existed and no longer does,” said Pedro, a native of Cherán who moved to Southern Illinois 35 years ago and last visited in 2009. Pedro and other expatriates have sent money and basic staples to their families still living in the embattled town since they began their uprising.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Some in Cherán say that they have begun to feel captive and desperate, confined to their town but still dependent on the forests, from which they take wood and wild mushrooms, a community staple. The forests also represents something more intangible but no less important to them — a source of wisdom and an integral part of the Cheránean identity.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">With access to the forests cut off, Cherán’s economy is beginning to dwindle. Unemployed woodworkers are now trying to secure odd jobs inside the town, but there are few to be had. The prized colorful, fleshy mushrooms are sold at increasingly high prizes in the main square. Outside support has become increasingly vital.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“They are living practically off of the remittances coming in from the United States,” Leonardo Velazquez, a hospital administrator living in Cherán, said of his neighbors. Indeed, Michoacán was the Mexican state with the highest flow of remittances in 2011 and the first three months of 2012. Still, the state’s economy appears to be falling apart.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Here in Cherán, the women around Bonfire No. 17 talked late into the chilly night about their fallen comrades and their devastated forests. They seemed to find energy in their scorching tea and courage in the words of a song that a woman seated next to Rocio had been composing.</div><div itemprop="articleBody" style="color: black; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.467em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">“I have lived, but what are we going to give our children?” she sang, a toddler son clinging to her thick wool sweater. “They won’t even be able to buy a little log like the ones we are burning here.”</div></div></div></div>Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-41240124911354263962012-07-22T08:03:00.001-07:002012-07-22T08:03:29.398-07:00A Formula for Cutting Health Costs - NYTimes.comNo matter what happens to President Obama’s health care reforms after the November elections, the disjointed, costly American health care system must find ways to slow the rate of spending while delivering quality care. There is widespread pessimism that anything much can be achieved quickly, but innovative solutions are emerging in unexpected places. A health care system owned and managed by Alaska’s native people has achieved astonishing results in improving the health of its enrollees while cutting the costs of treating them.<br />
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At a recent conference for health leaders from the United States and abroad at the native-owned Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage, the Alaskans described techniques that could be adopted by almost any health care organization willing to transform its culture. Such a transformation would require upfront financing for training, data processing and the like, but the investment should rapidly pay off in reduced costs.<br />
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The foundation, established in 1982, provides primary outpatient care to Alaska natives and American Indians who had previously been the responsibility of the federal government’s Indian Health Service. It serves 45,000 enrollees in the Anchorage area and 10,000 more scattered in remote villages, most reachable only by air, on an annual budget of $200 million. It also jointly owns and manages (with a consortium of native tribes) a small hospital, and has built a modern campus of outpatient clinics with the help of loans, grants, bonds and retained earnings.<br />
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About 45 percent of its revenue comes in what amounts to an annual block grant from the Indian Health Service, a source unavailable to most health systems; another 45 percent comes from Medicaid, Medicare and private insurers, and the rest from philanthropy and grants.<br />
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As the Commerce Department noted when it gave Southcentral a national quality award in 2011, known as the Malcolm Baldrige award, the foundation has achieved startling efficiencies: emergency room use has been reduced by 50 percent, hospital admissions by 53 percent, specialty care visits by 65 percent and visits to primary care doctors by 36 percent. These efficiencies, in turn, have clearly saved money. Between 2004 and 2009, Southcentral’s annual per-capita spending on hospital services grew by a tiny 7 percent and its spending on primary care, which picked up the slack, by 30 percent, still well below the 40 percent increase posted in a national index issued by the Medical Group Management Association.<br />
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Patients have not been shortchanged; in fact, care and access to services have improved greatly. Patients are virtually guaranteed a doctor’s appointment on the day they request it, and their calls are answered quickly, usually within 30 seconds. The percentage of children receiving high-quality care for asthma has soared from 35 percent to 85 percent, the percentage of infants receiving needed immunizations by age 2 has risen above 90 percent, the percentage of diabetics with blood sugar under control ranks in the top 10 percentile of a standard national benchmark, and customer and employee satisfaction rates top 90 percent.<br />
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The staff is trained to treat patients courteously, not with the disdain often reserved for the poor or ethnic minorities. The atmosphere is so welcoming that natives routinely congregate in waiting areas to swap stories and meet old friends even when they do not need medical care.<br />
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Although Southcentral has unique attributes (it even refers cases to traditional tribal healers if doctors agree), here are some of its techniques that almost any health care system can adopt:<br />
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¶Assigning small teams — consisting of a doctor, a nurse, and various medical, behavioral and administrative assistants — to be responsible for groups of 1,400 or so patients. The team members sit in the same small work area and communicate easily. When a patient calls, the nurse decides whether a face-to-face visit with a doctor or other health care provider is required or whether counseling by phone is sufficient. The doctors are left free to deal with only the most complicated cases. They have no private offices and the nurses have no nursing stations to which they can retreat.<br />
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¶Integrating a wide range of data to measure medical and financial performance. Southcentral’s “data mall” coughs up easily understood graphics showing how well doctors and the teams they lead are doing to improve health outcomes and cut costs compared with their colleagues, their past performance and national benchmarks, and it provides them with action lists of what they can do to improve and mentors to guide them. That almost always spurs the laggards. One doctor whose team ranked well behind 10 others in scheduling annual eye exams for diabetics jumped to first place within two months once she became aware of how poorly her team was performing.<br />
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¶Focusing on the needs and convenience of the patients rather than of the institution or the providers. The facilities feature rooms where providers and families can chat as equals on comfortable chairs, in sharp contrast to examination rooms where a doctor looms over a patient. Every patient visit is carefully planned so the patient can get in and out quickly without being delayed because, say, a needed lab test result is not available.<br />
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¶Building trust and long-term relationships between the patients and providers.<br />
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¶Changing from a reactive system in which a sick patient seeks medical care to a proactive system that reaches out to patients through special events, written and broadcast communications, and telephone calls to keep them healthy or at least out of the hospital and clinics.<br />
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Visionary health care systems elsewhere are already adopting Southcentral’s techniques, usually after visits to Anchorage to observe them in action.<br />
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CareOregon, a small Medicaid managed-care plan in Portland, sent not only its own people but also delegations from the clinics that serve its patients. It then paid the clinics a subsidy to get started and found that, within two years, Southcentral’s tactics greatly reduced the use of costly emergency departments and hospital admissions while improving health outcomes. Dr. David Labby, CareOregon’s medical director, said in an e-mail that the example set by Southcentral was “hugely inspirational” and “remains the model that guides us.”<br />
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Similarly, Maxine Jones, the service manager of a primary care practice in the county of Fife, Scotland, is supervising a pilot study for the National Health Service using techniques adapted from Southcentral that almost immediately produced a sharp decline in visits to the practice because many problems could be handled by an integrated team of doctors and nurses by phone. “I can see that this model has the potential to transform the face of primary care in Scotland,” she said in an interview at the conference.<br />
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Many other health care organizations in the United States and elsewhere have consulted with Southcentral on how to make their delivery of care more efficient and less costly while maintaining or improving quality. If enough of them summon the energy to transform their operations, their combined impact could help slow the rising curve of health care costs, or even bend it downward.Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5663622.post-67129173556999686532012-07-11T14:31:00.001-07:002012-07-11T14:31:07.658-07:00Earliest Americans Arrived in 3 Waves, Not 1, DNA Study Finds - NYTimes.comBy NICHOLAS WADE<br />
Published: July 11, 2012<br />
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North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada.<br />
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Some scientists assert that the Americas were peopled in one large migration from Siberia that happened about 15,000 years ago, but the new genetic research shows that this central episode was followed by at least two smaller migrations from Siberia, one by people who became the ancestors of today’s Eskimos and Aleutians and another by people speaking Na-Dene, whose descendants are confined to North America. The research was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.<br />
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The finding vindicates a proposal first made on linguistic grounds by Joseph Greenberg, the great classifier of the world’s languages. He asserted in 1987 that most languages spoken in North and South America were derived from the single mother tongue of the first settlers from Siberia, which he called Amerind. Two later waves, he surmised, brought speakers of Eskimo-Aleut and of Na-Dene, the language family spoken by the Apache and Navajo.<br />
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But many linguists who specialize in American languages derided Dr. Greenberg’s proposal, saying they saw no evidence for any single ancestral language like Amerind. “American linguists made up their minds 25 year ago that they wouldn’t support Greenberg, and they haven’t changed their mind one whit,” said Merritt Ruhlen, a colleague of Dr. Greenberg, who died in 2001.<br />
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The new DNA study is based on gene chips that sample the entire genome and presents a fuller picture than earlier studies, which were based on small regions of the genome like the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. Several of the mitochondrial DNA studies had pointed to a single migration.<br />
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A team headed by David Reich of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Andres Ruiz-Linares of University College London report that there was a main migration that populated the entire Americas. They cannot date the migration from their genomic data but accept the estimate by others that the migration occurred around 15,000 years ago. This was in the window of time that occurred after the melting of great glaciers that blocked passage from Siberia to Alaska, and before the rising waters at the end of the last ice age submerged Beringia, the land bridge between them.<br />
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They also find evidence for two further waves of migration, one among Na-Dene speakers and the other among Eskimo-Aleut, again as Dr. Greenberg predicted. But whereas Dr. Greenberg’s proposal suggested that three discrete groups of people were packed into the Americas, the new genome study finds that the second and third waves mixed in with the first. Eskimos inherit about half of their DNA from the people of the first migration and half from a second migration. The Chipewyans of Canada, who speak a Na-Dene language, have 90 percent of their genes from the first migration and some 10 percent from a third.<br />
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It is not clear why the Chipewyans and others speak a Na-Dene language if most of their DNA is from Amerind speakers. Dr. Ruiz-Linares said a minority language can often dominate others in the case of conquest; an example of this is the ubiquity of Spanish in Latin America.<br />
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If the genetics of the early migrations to the Americas can be defined well enough, it should in principle be possible to match them with their source populations in Asia. Dr. Greenberg had argued on linguistic grounds that the Na-Dene language family was derived from Ket, spoken by the Ket people in the Yenisei valley of Siberia. But Dr. Reich said there was not yet enough genomic data from Asia or the Americas to make these links. His samples of Na-Dene and Ket DNA did not match, but the few Ket samples he had may have become mixed with DNA from people of other ethnicities, so the test, in his view, was inconclusive.<br />
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The team’s samples of Native American genomes were drawn mostly from South America, with a handful from Canada. Samples from tribes in the United States could not be used because the existing ones had been collected for medical reasons and the donors had not given consent for population genetics studies, Dr. Ruiz-Linares said. Native Americans in the United States have been reluctant to participate in inquiries into their origins. The Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society wrote recently to all federally recognized tribes in the United States asking for samples, but only two agreed to give them, said Spencer Wells, the project director.<br />
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Interracial marriage — or admixture, as geneticists call it — may have distorted earlier efforts to trace ancestry because subjects assumed to be American may have had European or other DNA admixed in their genomes. Dr. Reich and his colleagues have developed a method to define the racial origin of each segment of DNA and have found that on average 8.5 percent of Native American DNA belongs to other races. They then screened these admixed sections out of their analysis.<br />
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Archaeologists who study Native American history are glad to have the genetic data but also have reservations, given that several of the geneticists’ conclusions have changed over time. “This is a really important step forward but not the last word,” said David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University, noting that many migrations may not yet have shown up in the genetic samples. Michael H. Crawford, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, said the paucity of samples from North America and from coastal regions made it hard to claim a complete picture of early migrations has been attained.<br />
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“Sometimes the statisticians make wonderful interpretations, but you have to be very guarded,” he said.<br />
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The geneticists’ finding of a single main migration of people who presumably spoke a single language at the time confirms Dr. Greenberg’s central idea that most American languages are descended from a single root, even though the genetic data cannot confirm the specific language relationships he described.<br />
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“Many linguists put down Greenberg as rubbish and don’t believe his publications,” Dr. Ruiz-Linares said. But he considers his study a substantial vindication of Dr. Greenberg. “It’s striking that we have this correspondence between the genetics and the linguistics,” he said.Karenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08353055775245342658noreply@blogger.com