Siletz Language, With Few Voices, Finds Modern Way to Survive - NYTimes.com

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: August 3, 2012

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.

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.)

“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary 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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

Most other language preservation projects have a base, however small, of people who speak the language. The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, for example, which went online this year, focuses on one of the most widely spoken native languages in Canada and the Upper Midwest.

The 12 other dictionaries financed in recent years by the Living Tongues Institute, 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

“We’re the last standing,” Mr. Lane said.

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 Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians now have about 4,900 enrolled members and a profitable casino in the nearby resort town of Lincoln City.

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 charter school 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.

Lucrative California Gambling Pits Indian Tribe Against Tribe - NYTimes.com

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

Published: August 4, 2012

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.

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 Hurricane Katrina.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“That’s what makes it more hurtful,” said Elaine Bethel Fink, 65, the chairwoman of North Fork’s tribal council.

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.”

“They don’t look at me in the same way,” he said.

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.”

In Mexico, Reclaiming the Forests and the Right to Feel Safe - NYTimes.com

By KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY

Published: August 2, 2012

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.

But like the rest of the residents, she cannot afford to let her guard down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“It is difficult to have security in the whole municipality,” he said. “In fact, it is materially impossible.”

The forests around Cherán have also suffered a stark physical transformation. Burned tree stumps and weeds have replaced the old, impenetrable groves.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.”

A Formula for Cutting Health Costs - NYTimes.com

No 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

¶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.

¶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.

¶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.

¶Building trust and long-term relationships between the patients and providers.

¶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.

Visionary health care systems elsewhere are already adopting Southcentral’s techniques, usually after visits to Anchorage to observe them in action.

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.”

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.

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.

Earliest Americans Arrived in 3 Waves, Not 1, DNA Study Finds - NYTimes.com

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: July 11, 2012


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Sometimes the statisticians make wonderful interpretations, but you have to be very guarded,” he said.

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.

“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.

Child Welfare Dangers Seen on Spirit Lake Reservation - NYTimes.com

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: July 7, 2012

Federal and state officials say they have documented glaring flaws in the child welfare system at the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota, contending that while child abuse there is at epidemic levels, the tribe has sought to conceal it.

The problems uncovered by medical and social services administrators include foster children on the reservation who have been sent to homes where registered sex offenders live and a teenage female sexual-abuse victim who was placed in a tribal home and subsequently raped.

The tribe, according to federal officials, also hired a children’s case worker who had been convicted of felony child abuse and employed another social worker who discovered a 1-year-old child covered with 100 wood ticks but did not take the child to a hospital.

The conditions led the State of North Dakota to take the unusual step this year of suspending financing for 31 tribal children in foster care.

Concerns about the children of Spirit Lake, which is in a remote area of northeastern North Dakota, extend to minors outside the social services system as well. In May 2011, a 9-year-old girl and her 6-year-old brother were found dead, raped and sodomized, inside their father’s home on the reservation, a federal official said. By the time their bodies were discovered beneath a mattress, the children may have been dead for as long as three days.

The tribe, according to federal and state administrators, has not conducted required background checks before placing foster children, failed to make mandated monthly visits to children in foster care and illegally removed foster children from homes and placed them elsewhere without determining that the new homes would be safe.

Unease about the tribe’s ability to adequately safeguard children has escalated in the past several weeks after two scathing, detailed e-mails were sent by federal officials to their superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services, alleging misconduct by reservation officials.

In a June 14 e-mail sent to his managers in Washington, Thomas F. Sullivan, the regional administrator for the Administration for Children and Families for six states, called on the government to declare a state of emergency at Spirit Lake, cut off the reservation’s federal financing and charge the tribe’s leader with child endangerment to combat what he described as “daunting” child abuse being covered up by the tribe.

The Spirit Lake reservation, like many Indian reservations across the country, has for years suffered from disproportionately high rates of child abuse and neglect, paired with accusations that abuse is underreported and minimized by tribes and infrequently prosecuted by federal authorities.

American Indians make up 9 percent of North Dakota’s population, but Indian children constitute nearly 30 percent of the state’s child abuse victims, a 2009 study by the Department of Health and Human Services found.

While statistics related to abuse at Spirit Lake are not public information, federal officials believe that the reservation has an even more significant child abuse problem than others in Indian Country. As one indication, the reservation is home to 38 registered sex offenders out of a population of 4,500, according to Justice Department figures — a far higher proportion than in most cities and towns in the United States.

The recent e-mails from two highly respected government officials to the health department’s Washington headquarters present a picture of a reservation hierarchy more intent on masking rampant child abuse than on ensuring the safety of children.

“The leadership of the Spirit Lake Nation as well as those who are responsible for delivering services on that reservation, by their actions as well as their inactions, have failed in their most basic responsibility to protect children,” Mr. Sullivan wrote. “They have hung signs at the borders of the Spirit Lake Nation, ‘Pedophiles Welcome.’ They have made these signs operational by firing professionally qualified staff, directing their replacements to ignore reports of abuse and neglect, refusing to prosecute the most egregious cases of abuse.”

While the tribe’s leaders have not actually placed such signs on Spirit Lake, a clearly exasperated Mr. Sullivan also called for Roger Yankton Sr., the tribe’s president, to be charged with a federal crime, saying Mr. Yankton has allowed children to continue to be harmed without addressing the problem.

The second e-mail, written in April by Michael R. Tilus, the director of behavioral health at the federally financed Spirit Lake Health Center, came below a subject line that read “Letter of Grave Concern.” Dr. Tilus said that child abuse on the reservation was “epidemic” and that he had “no confidence” in tribal leadership “to provide safe, responsible, legal, ethical and moral services to the abused and neglected children of the Spirit Lake Tribe.”

Tribal officials did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Mark Weber, a Health and Human Services Department spokesman, said the agency was working with the tribe and other agencies “to address concerns regarding the Spirit Lake Tribe’s Social Service Department.”

Nedra Darling, a spokeswoman with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, said the agency, which oversees some of the tribal programs, “has made it a top priority to address deficiencies with the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribal social services program” and plans to “take immediate actions to meet the needs of children on the reservation.”

The agency, Ms. Darling said, is “conducting a comprehensive review” of tribal social services and plans to send a social worker to provide oversight and technical assistance.

Scott Davis, executive director of the North Dakota Indian Affairs Commission, said he had recently met with tribal leaders and believed that many of the tribe’s problems were related to the departure of an employee who had been responsible for filing cases.

“I assume things are on track now,” Mr. Davis said.

Timothy Q. Purdon, the United States attorney for North Dakota and one of the recipients of the e-mails, said he had insisted on holding a meeting with Bureau of Indian Affairs officials within the next few weeks.

Mr. Purdon said his office had prosecuted only a handful of child abuse cases from the reservation in the past year, but acknowledged that others might not have reached the attention of law enforcement if the tribe did not report the crimes.

“This certainly raises concerns for us about the social service function on Spirit Lake,” he said. “I want to meet with B.I.A., agency to agency, and say, ‘What are you doing to make sure we’re responding to this appropriately?’ ”

Native Americans Struggle With High Rate of Rape - NYTimes.com

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: May 22, 2012

EMMONAK, Alaska — She was 19, a young Alaska Native woman in this icebound fishing village of 800 in the Yukon River delta, when an intruder broke into her home and raped her. The man left. Shaking, the woman called the tribal police, a force of three. It was late at night. No one answered. She left a message on the department’s voice mail system. Her call was never returned. She was left to recover on her own.

One in three American Indian women have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape, according to the Justice Department. Their rate of sexual assault is more than twice the national average. And no place, women’s advocates say, is more dangerous than Alaska’s isolated villages, where there are no roads in or out, and where people are further cut off by undependable telephone, electrical and Internet service.

The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994.

A Senate version, passed with broad bipartisan support, would grant new powers to tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians suspected of sexually assaulting their Indian spouses or domestic partners. But House Republicans, and some Senate Republicans, oppose the provision as a dangerous expansion of the tribal courts’ authority, and it was excluded from the version that the House passed last Wednesday. The House and Senate are seeking to negotiate a compromise.

Here in Emmonak, the overmatched police have failed to keep statistics related to rape. A national study mandated by Congress in 2004 to examine the extent of sexual violence on tribal lands remains unfinished because, the Justice Department says, the $2 million allocation is insufficient.

But according a survey by the Alaska Federation of Natives, the rate of sexual violence in rural villages like Emmonak is as much as 12 times the national rate. And interviews with Native American women here and across the nation’s tribal reservations suggest an even grimmer reality: They say few, if any, female relatives or close friends have escaped sexual violence.

“We should never have a woman come into the office saying, ‘I need to learn more about Plan B for when my daughter gets raped,’ ” said Charon Asetoyer, a women’s health advocate on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, referring to the morning-after pill. “That’s what’s so frightening — that it’s more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women.”

The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.

Women say the tribal police often discourage them from reporting sexual assaults, and Indian Health Service hospitals complain they lack cameras to document injuries.

Police and prosecutors, overwhelmed by the crime that buffets most reservations, acknowledge that they are often able to offer only tepid responses to what tribal leaders say has become a crisis.

Reasons for the high rate of sexual assaults among American Indians are poorly understood, but explanations include a breakdown in the family structure, a lack of discussion about sexual violence and alcohol abuse.

Rape, according to Indian women, has been distressingly common for generations, and they say tribal officials and the federal and state authorities have done little to help halt it, leading to its being significantly underreported.

In the Navajo Nation, which encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, 329 rape cases were reported in 2007 among a population of about 180,000. Five years later, there have been only 17 arrests. Women’s advocates on the reservation say only about 10 percent of sexual assaults are reported.

The young woman who was raped in Emmonak, now 22, asked that her name not be used because she fears retaliation from her attacker, whom she still sees in the village. She said she knew of five other women he had raped, though she is the only one who reported the crime.

Nationwide, an arrest is made in just 13 percent of the sexual assaults reported by American Indian women, according to the Justice Department, compared with 35 percent for black women and 32 percent for whites.

In South Dakota, Indians make up 10 percent of the population, but account for 40 percent of the victims of sexual assault. Alaska Natives are 15 percent of that state’s population, but constitute 61 percent of its victims of sexual assault.

The Justice Department did not prosecute 65 percent of the rape cases on Indian reservations in 2011. And though the department said it had mandated extra training for prosecutors and directed each field office to develop its own plan to help reduce violence against women, some advocates for Native American women said they no longer pressed victims to report rapes.

“I feel bad saying that,” said Sarah Deer, a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota and an authority on violent crime on reservations. “But it compounds the trauma if you are willing to stand up and testify and they can’t help you.”

Despite the low rates of arrests and prosecutions, convicted sexual offenders are abundant on tribal lands. The Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, with about 25,000 people, is home to 99 Class 3 sex offenders, those deemed most likely to commit sex crimes after their release from prison. The Tohono O’odham tribe’s reservation in Arizona, where about 15,000 people live, has 184, according to the Justice Department.

By comparison, Boston, with a population of 618,000, has 252 Class 3 offenders. Minneapolis, with a population of 383,000, has 101, according to the local police.

The agencies responsible for aiding the victims of sexual assault among American Indians are often ill prepared.

The Indian Health Service, for instance, provides exams for rape victims at only 27 of the 45 hospitals it finances and, according to a federal report in 2011, did not keep adequate track of the number of sexual assault victims its facilities treat and lacked an overall policy for treating rape victims. Additionally, the health service has just 73 trained sexual assault examiners.

The Justice Department, which has increased the number of F.B.I. agents and United States attorneys on Indian reservations and is seeking to help the Indian Health Service train more nurses, said combating sexual violence was a priority.

“There’s no quick fix. There’s no one thing that will fix the system,” said Virginia Davis, deputy director for policy development in the department’s Office on Violence Against Women. “We’re taking a systematic approach to this — thinking about different ways to solve the problem.”

In the meantime, the problem persists. Lisa Marie Iyotte, 43, who was raped on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, said prosecutors had never told her why they did not charge the man arrested in that crime. He was later convicted of another rape, and when he was released from prison in 2008 and moved back to the reservation, no one told her, she said. She has not seen him yet.

“When I think about it, I say, ‘What am I going to do?’ ” she said. “I don’t know.”

Nine hundred miles away, in the Navajo Nation, Caroline Antone, 50, an advocate for the reservation’s victims of sexual violence who has herself been raped, said sexual assault was virtually routine in her community.

“I know only a couple of people who have not been raped,” she said. “Out of hundreds.”

A Repository for Eagles Finds Itself In Demand - NYTimes.com

By DAN FROSCH
Published: May 4, 2012

Miles from downtown Denver, in a small warehouse on the city’s edge, Bernadette Atencio watched as two men methodically bundled piles of dead eagles into boxes, careful to include enough frozen gel packs so the remains would not thaw.

“This one’s going to Prescott, Ariz.,” Ms. Atencio said, nodding toward one bird tightly parceled in plastic. “That one’s going to Pendleton, Ore.”

Despite appearances, this was not some surreptitious animal-smuggling ring. It was a typical Wednesday at the National Eagle Repository, the only place where American Indians can legally obtain bald and golden eagles from the federal government for traditional ceremonies.

Through a series of federal acts dating to the 1940s, bald and golden eagles have been fiercely protected. It is illegal to hunt the birds and also to collect feathers or eagle parts without the proper permit.

And so, for more than 30 years, this United States Fish and Wildlife Service program has been shipping thousands of eagle carcasses and parts to American Indians, who view the animals as sacred.

But a growing backlog of applications, and a slew of recent court battles over when American Indians can lawfully obtain eagles on their own, has raised questions about whether the repository is sufficient.

Currently, tribal members seeking an immature golden eagle, the most coveted bird, must wait about four and a half years. Wait times for a bald eagle are two years. Despite the efforts by the Wildlife Service to ship animals as swiftly as possible, the waiting list has swelled to more than 6,000 applications.

“More and more of our young people are going back to our spiritual way of life, and we can’t do our ceremonies without the eagles,” said Lee Plenty Wolf, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe who lives in Fort Collins, Colo., and received a bald eagle on April 26 after waiting almost three years.

Federal law, however, forbids anyone without a specialized permit who finds a dead eagle or eagle feathers from taking them. Each week on average, the repository receives dozens of dead eagles or parts sent from across the country by state and federal wildlife officers. Some have died naturally; others were roadkill or electrocuted by power lines.

But with 4,500 requests coming in each year, the repository simply does not have enough eagles, said Ms. Atencio, who supervises the warehouse, in an old Army maintenance building.

“It’s a supply and demand issue, and we need more supply,” she said. “It’s a double-edged sword. To fill all the requests in a timely manner means we need more dead birds.”

Having to wait so long to use eagles in religious ceremonies has become a source of frustration for many tribes.

“Eagles are sacred to us, so of course we are interested in eagle protection,” said Melissa Holds the Enemy, a lawyer for the Crow tribe in Montana. “But there is a huge disconnect that is not being addressed. Protecting eagles and accommodating Indian religious freedoms do not need to conflict with one another.”

Driven by the delays, the Crow have been fashioning a plan to present to Fish and Wildlife officials that would allow tribal members with permits to keep dead eagles found on tribal land, Ms. Holds the Enemy said.

Daniel M. Ashe, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said in an e-mail that the agency was especially sensitive to American Indians’ religious needs and recently streamlined the application process to reduce wait times.

Mr. Ashe also cited a special program that has, in recent years, allowed five tribes to keep injured eagles that could not be released in the wild. The tribes are permitted to distribute naturally molted feathers for ceremonial use, but cannot kill the birds.

“We understand the importance of eagles to the religious beliefs of tribal members, and we are committed to doing everything we can, within the boundaries of federal law and our mandate to ensure healthy eagle populations in the wild, to improve tribes’ access to eagles for religious purposes,” he said.

Debate over the issue has also played out in courtrooms of late. In 2005, a Northern Arapaho man, Winslow Friday, was prosecuted for killing a bald eagle on tribal land. Mr. Friday’s lawyer, John Carlson, argued that the repository’s wait time was intolerably long and that when birds were sent to tribe members, they were often too badly burned or decomposed for use.

A federal judge in Wyoming, William F. Downes, dismissed the charge against Mr. Friday. But the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, overturned the ruling. Mr. Friday eventually pleaded guilty in tribal court and paid a $2,500 fine.

In March, the Fish and Wildlife Service granted the Northern Arapaho a permit to “take,” or kill, two bald eagles for religious purposes. The tribe, which initially applied for the permit more than two years ago, had filed a federal lawsuit in 2011 saying the process was taking too long. Applications for such permits are rare.

On March 30, a lawyer for the Northern Arapaho filed an amended complaint in federal court in Cheyenne, Wyo., calling the permit “a sham” because it forced the tribe to obtain the eagles off its reservation, which left tribal members subject to prosecution under state law.

According to Jerome Ford, assistant director of the Wildlife Service’s migratory bird program, a joint tribal statute between the Eastern Shoshone tribe and the Northern Arapaho, who share the Wind River Reservation, prohibits the taking of eagles on the actual reservation.

The permit was “the only option that did not create a conflict” between the two tribes, he said.

As that case continues, Fish and Wildlife officials planned to meet this summer with tribal governments to figure out ways to speed the process for receiving eagle feathers.

“This is an issue across all tribal nations,” said Myron Pourier, who sits on the executive board for the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, which hopes to build its own eagle repository. “All of them are going through the same federal red tape when they shouldn’t be. Especially when this is a part of our way of life.”

Bison Return to Montana Prairie - NYTimes.com

By NATE SCHWEBER
Published: April 26, 2012


WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.

That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.

“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department, who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.

But with several groups now navigating a complex and contentious path to return bison to these plains, agribusiness is fighting back. Many farmers and ranchers fear that bison, particularly those from Yellowstone, might be mismanaged and damage private property, and worry that they would compete for grass with their own herds.

“Bison are a romantic notion, but they don’t belong today,” said Curt McCann, 46, a Chinook rancher who this month drove four hours to a public meeting in Jordan to speak against bison reintroduction.

When the explorer Meriwether Lewis followed the Missouri River through this region in 1805, he came across bison herds he described as “innumerable.” Just eight decades later, a young Theodore Roosevelt noted that all that remained were “countless” bleached skulls covering the Montana badlands.

Scientists estimate that tens of millions of bison once roamed America, but by 1902 there were only 23 known survivors in the wild, all hiding from poachers in a remote Yellowstone valley. For decades, attempts to transplant bison from the rebounding Yellowstone herd were thwarted, despite requests from tribes to steward some of the animals.

“I call them my brothers and sisters because they are a genetic link to the same ones my ancestors hunted,” said Tote Gray Hawk, 54, a Sioux who has brought the Fort Peck bison hay and water each day since their arrival. Their meat, lower in cholesterol than beef, will feed elderly tribe members and their skulls will be used in traditional sun dance ceremonies, he said.

The last hunt for indigenous bison on the Fort Peck reservation happened in 1873. In the 1880s, hundreds of tribe members starved to death on the barren land. Around them homesteaders from Europe began wresting an agricultural living from this windswept expanse of rolling amber in northeast Montana. Most of the neighboring farmers and ranchers today are descendants of those pioneers, and they safeguard their traditions with generational grit.

“Bison is a big issue that could really impact our livelihood,” said Brett Dailey, 52, who ranches near Jordan.

Today there are three million cattle in Montana and agribusiness is the state’s biggest industry, but not a single bison roams free. A 2011 survey commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation showed that a majority of state residents support reintroducing huntable bison to the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, similar to a Utah herd created in 1941 from the last few bison allowed out of Yellowstone.

“Within this sea of agriculture there is room for small islands of conservation,” said Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve, the charity that brought the group of genetically pure bison back to a pasture just north of the refuge.

The arrival of Yellowstone bison was welcome news around the troubled Fort Peck reservation. When the first calf was born on Sunday, a rust-colored baby bull, tribal flags still hung at half-staff for a teenage boy who had committed suicide days earlier. Rates of poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction hover stubbornly above national averages here.

Census data shows that around northeast Montana, a prairie expanse almost the size of Indiana, most county populations peaked in the early 1900s and have since dropped by almost half.

The region’s fastest growing economic engine, oil production, is proving a mixed blessing. In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency reported that toxic chemicals from nearby drilling contaminated drinking water supplies for Poplar, a reservation town of around 3,000. This year a schoolteacher from Sidney, near the North Dakota border, was kidnapped during her morning jog and murdered. The suspects are two Colorado roughnecks.

“These bison represent healing,” said Iris Greybull, 62, of Poplar.

The bison debate has dredged up old tensions between tribes and their neighbors. Before Ms. Greybull, a Sioux, spoke in favor of the animals last fall at a fractious meeting in Glasgow, dozens of farmers and ranchers walked out in protest.

She and other tribe members say they see an ugly double standard in the fact that there are more than 130 private bison ranches in the state, including one belonging to the mogul Ted Turner housing dozens of controversial Yellowstone bison, and yet only the Fort Peck herd has been visited by protesters.

But some say the bison on the ranches do not pose the threat that the wild ones do.

“Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks,” said State Senator John Brenden of nearby Scobey, who has long done battle on the bison issue in the state Legislature.

Around a century ago some Yellowstone bison contracted disease from domestic livestock and in recent decades thousands have been slaughtered in an effort to protect ranchers’ herds. At the direction of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a few of these bison were quarantined for years and certified healthy. Some may soon go to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 170 miles west of Fort Peck, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by opponents.

“I took a lot of arrows for this, but it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “If you want to get into a fistfight in Montana, go into a bar and share your opinion about bison or wolves.”

U.S. to Pay $1 Billion Settlement to Indian Tribes - NYTimes.com

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Published: April 13, 2012

In one of the largest financial settlements made to American Indian tribes, the federal government said this week that it had ended dozens of lawsuits by agreeing to pay tribes more than $1 billion for the mismanagement of funds and natural resources that the government holds in trust.

The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay 41 tribes — many in the Western United States — a total of about $1.023 billion because the Interior and Treasury Departments had failed to adequately oversee concessions on Indian lands from companies that exploit a wide variety of resources, including minerals, timber, oil and gas, dating back more than 100 years in some cases.

The Interior Department, which manages about 56 million acres for Indian tribes and oversees more than 100,000 leases on those lands, has long been accused by tribes of doing a poor job of keeping track of the tribal funds it maintains and of not being diligent in collecting fees from companies that hold leases on reservations and elsewhere in Indian country. In addition to administering the land leases, the Interior Department manages about 2,500 trust accounts for more than 250 tribes.

“These settlements fairly and honorably resolve historical grievances over the accounting and management of tribal trust funds, trust lands and other nonmonetary trust resources that, for far too long, have been a source of conflict between Indian tribes and the United States,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement.

The Interior Department says it has developed better accounting systems to avoid future problems.

About 60 other similar lawsuits by tribes against the United States have not been settled, the government said.

The amount each tribe will receive is based on a formula that takes into account how much land and money the government held in trust, and the value of the concessions. Tribes holding oil and gas concessions, which are usually of far greater value, generally will receive the most from the settlement.

The Osage tribe of Oklahoma, for example — because of its extensive oil and gas reserves — will get $380 million. The tribe has about 16,000 members.

Among the other 41 tribes receiving money are the Minnesota Chippewa tribe, which has about 40,000 members and will get about $2 million; the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington State, which has about 10,000 members and will get $193 million; and the Nez Perce tribe, which has 4,000 members on its Idaho reservation, and will receive $34 million.

Many tribes say they have not decided how to spend the money. In most cases, tribal councils — the elected governing bodies — will have the ultimate authority. Tribes are variously considering making monthly payments to members, establishing loan programs, financing social service groups, improving infrastructure on reservations and undertaking environmental initiatives.

Heather Keen, a spokeswoman for the Coeur d’Alene tribe in Idaho, said that while the tribe was doing well economically — it generates $309 million annually in economic activity, including at a casino resort — the $18 million the 2,000-member tribe will receive represents an important boost.
Large swaths of the tribe’s land, she said, were damaged by clear-cutting in the 1970s and 1980s.

Some tribes will get the money as early as next week, arriving at a time when many reservations rank among the nation’s poorest places. About half of the people on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, for example, live in poverty. In the 1990s, the tribe considered storing nuclear waste on the reservation because members would have earned about $250 million in payments over 40 years. Now the tribe, which has about 4,000 members, will get $33 million from the settlement.

Chief James Allan, chairman of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, said that despite longstanding tensions between tribes and the federal government, the settlement represented the fairness with which the Obama administration had treated American Indians.

“They have kept their promise to Native Americans to ensure we are heard in Washington,” Mr. Allan said. “He has not made treaties with us, but he gave us his word. And his word has been golden.”

President Obama signed legislation in December 2010 authorizing payment for a similar, though far larger, settlement for Indians. That money, totaling $3.4 billion, has not been distributed because of several pending lawsuits.

Street artist Jetsonorama tries a new kind of healing in Navajoland — High Country News

By Sarah Gilman
In 1991, a young doctor delivered a baby Navajo girl in his backseat. A man had pounded on his door earlier that evening, his girlfriend in labor and his truck too slow for the 50-mile trip to the Tuba City, Ariz., hospital. The doctor loaded the woman into his own car, thinking they could make it. The baby, whom we'll call Emily, had other ideas.

Sixteen years later, Emily was in treatment for meth abuse. In 2009, the doctor visited the girl in jail, where she was serving time for drunk driving. Her drinking had worsened after her mother's death, she told him. But she looked hopeful: In nine days she'd be out. Then, she promised, she'd stay clean.

The doctor was at a turning point of his own. He told the girl that he had started moonlighting as a street artist under the pseudonym Jetsonorama, which he prefers we use in print. It was a different sort of healing project.

"(Emily's) story is very typical here on the Rez," Jetsonorama says now from his home in Inscription House, in northeastern Arizona, where he's the only permanent physician at the Indian Health Service's clinic. "The recidivism rate is quite high, the teen pregnancy rate is quite high. There's an epidemic of methamphetamine use. In some ways, there's not a lot of hope. I'm trying to present especially positive images of the Navajo on the reservation -- to inject an element of beauty, an element of surprise and an element, hopefully, of pride."

He draws photos from his portfolio, enlarges them in two-by-two-foot sections at a print shop, cuts them out on his kitchen floor, and uses wheatpaste -- a mixture of Bluebird flour (favored by Navajo grandmas), sugar and water -- to attach them, piece by piece, to ruined buildings, roadside jewelry kiosks, market walls, water tanks. Any surface will do, as long as it's big enough for his subjects to stand out against the vast stretch of desert between Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon, where tourists race through at 70 miles per hour. The images are monolithic, visually arresting and biodegradable -- echoes of human life on the landscape, almost as fleeting in the wind and weather as the moments captured in the photos themselves.

A black man originally from Raleigh, N.C., Jetsonorama sports a trim, frosty beard and often a jaunty fedora and sunglasses, looking unassailably hip for his 55 years. He traces his artistic inclinations back to a seventh-grade stint at a progressive, hippie-run Quaker school. Later, during his family practice residency, he dabbled in graffiti and hip-hop.

Jetsonorama settled permanently on the Rez in 1987. There, a neighbor helped him assemble a darkroom, and he began documenting Navajo life. In the early '90s, he took to posting small prints around Flagstaff. That idea evolved into the wheatpasting project after a 2009 sabbatical to Brazil, where he spent time with a community of street artists and dug more deeply into that world -- finding particular inspiration in the pasting work of the renowned street artist JR. The doctor's own handle is a mashup of his initials, the name of a family dog, an email address, and the 1960s-era space-age cartoon.

The response to Jetsonorama's "hits" -- both sanctioned and unsanctioned -- over the last two and a half years has been largely positive. The pieces spark a sort of spontaneous community-building: Passersby stop to investigate, trade stories about the people pictured, share thoughts about the images with others later. Last fall, Jetsonorama decided to push these off-the-cuff conversations to a new level with more provocative pieces, such as an image of a baby underneath a large chunk of coal -- a metaphorical black cloud referencing the tribe's complex relationship with the fuel.

The work can be tricky. Last year, he learned to be more careful after some tribal members read a lurking coyote in one of his pieces as a skinwalker -- a Navajo witch. He tries to be respectful, saving his edgier and more magical-realist proclivities for his urban pieces. "Who am I as an outsider to use images from the culture and give them back to the people?" he observes. "But I think it's important that I'm here. I'm trying to facilitate understanding and growth and exchange."

"He's earned that right, especially in his capacity as a medical doctor," says longtime friend Shonto Begay, a Navajo artist. "What he's done with the people -- it's really special. He's like a latter-day medicine man."

It's fitting that Jetsonorama calls many of his pastings "Love Letters to the Navajo Nation," for they seem to celebrate the grace, strength, and myriad ephemeral beauties that arise even in the most difficult places. Just six hours after Emily's birth back in 1991, Jetsonorama attended a healing ceremony for another patient -- a toddler who had suffered febrile seizures. A healer and his daughter spent all night composing a meticulous, multicolored sand painting, then sang a prayer and placed the child at its center to swirl her hands and feet as she wished. "The painting ... was being erased as (she) began her journey to wholeness," Jetsonorama later recounted on his blog. Wheatpasting is like that, too, the images fading once their purpose is served. "The healing," he wrote, "is in the letting go."

Yurok Indian Traditions to Be Revived in New Village - NYTimes.com

Yurok Indian Traditions to Be Revived in New Village - NYTimes.com

Next to Tribe With Alcohol Ban, a Hub of Beer - NYTimes.com

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: March 5, 2012

WHITECLAY, Neb. — Four rickety metal shacks that line the main road in this town of maybe 10 people sell an average of 13,000 cans of beer and malt liquor a day. The nearest sizable city is two hours north. But just 240 yards north — across the state line in South Dakota — is the sprawling Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where alcohol has been banned since the 1970s.

Nearly all the alcohol bought in Whiteclay winds up on Pine Ridge or is consumed by its residents, tribal officials say. Pine Ridge is home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe and is one of the poorest places in the country, according to 2010 census data.

In February, the Oglala Sioux filed a federal lawsuit against the stores, and Anheuser-Busch and several other large American brewing companies, accusing them of encouraging the illegal purchase, possession, transport and consumption of alcohol on the reservation. Fetal alcohol syndrome, fatal drunken driving accidents and beer-fueled murders have cast a pall over Pine Ridge for decades.

After the lawsuit was filed, Whiteclay’s two-lane road, Highway 87, bustled with traffic driving to and from the beer stores. Dozens of people in various states of inebriation wandered along the road. Other men and women were passed out in front of abandoned buildings. A Hank Williams Jr. 45, “I’d Rather Be Gone,” was among the detritus along the road, as well as empty liquor bottles, a copy of “Tabernacle Hymns No. 3,” soiled clothing and a dead puppy.

Thomas M. White, the Omaha lawyer who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the tribe, describes Whiteclay as “Sodom and Gomorrah.” There is a lawless feeling in the town.

The Sheridan County sheriff’s office, responsible for patrolling Whiteclay, is 19 miles away and has only five deputies. The department says it lacks the resources to properly patrol the town. The tribal police department, which has 38 officers — down from 101 six years ago — lacks jurisdiction.

John Yellow Bird Steele, the tribal president, said 90 percent of criminal cases in the court system and a similar number of reservation illnesses were caused by alcohol — the vast majority of which, he said, was brought illegally from Whiteclay.

“We believe we can’t get ahead, or function, without Whiteclay being addressed,” he said.

On Pine Ridge, which is roughly the size of Connecticut but has a population of about only 45,000, the tribal police last year made 20,000 alcohol-related arrests. As an indication of the depth of the problem, Thomas Poor Bear, a tribal vice president who has been a leader in calling for change in Whiteclay, was arrested and jailed last month and charged with obstructing government function and having consumed alcohol. Mr. Poor Bear has denied the charges, saying he had taken cold medicine. But his lawyer, Tom Clifford, said that his client drank “a couple of beers” before his arrest.

The lawsuit seeks $500 million for costs incurred by the tribe for health care, law enforcement and social services related to chronic drinking, and to limit the amount of beer Whiteclay shops can sell. The legal argument is that the brewers and the stores know that they are selling alcohol to people who have no permissible place to consume it, and who are smuggling it onto the reservation for illegal use and resale. Any sign of alcohol — the smell of beer, walking funny, slurred speech — can get a person arrested in Pine Ridge.

The suit was filed in federal court because the federal authorities oversee Indian reservations and are the ultimate arbiters on alcohol issues. Anheuser-Busch and the other alcohol companies named in the lawsuit declined to comment or did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Excessive alcohol consumption is the leading cause of preventable death among American Indians, and they are affected at about twice the rate of the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The lawsuit comes amid a growing debate on Pine Ridge and other reservations about the wisdom of alcohol prohibition.

About a third of the nation’s 310 reservations ban alcohol, but Pine Ridge is the only remaining dry reservation in South Dakota. It abuts the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, which allows alcohol.

Proponents of repealing prohibition say legalizing alcohol would enable tribes to enact tighter controls and to use new revenue for treatment programs.

“Not to disrespect our elders and ancestors, but we’ve gone through several generations,” said Milton Bians, a tribal police captain, who was raised by grandparents because his parents drank.

Though the reservation is dry, nearly every aspect of life there is affected by alcohol. Tribal leaders say four in five families on the reservation have someone with a drinking problem, and one in four babies are born with fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Rates of diabetes, teenage suicide, crime and unemployment are in some cases exponentially higher than national averages, according to federal and tribal data and officials.

The beer store owners declined to comment, citing the lawsuit. Whiteclay’s other businesses, which include two groceries and an auto body shop, say they feel little responsibility.

Victor Clarke, who has lived in Whiteclay 19 years and owns Arrowhead Foods, a grocery that does not sell alcohol, said there would be dozens of places within an hour’s drive where alcohol could be bought if the town’s annual sale of 4.9 million cans of beer and malt liquor was halted.

He said the widespread fear that Whiteclay’s troublesome customers would then move elsewhere virtually guarantees the town’s survival.

“People don’t want Whiteclay to go away,” he said. “The state of Nebraska doesn’t want Whiteclay to go away because it allows problems to be isolated in this one little place. You hear people in the towns around here, saying, ‘We don’t want these guys in our town.’ ”

Each side blames the other for the drunken assaults, robberies and murders that are part of Whiteclay’s ebb and flow.

“A lot of times, there’s a problem that boils up in South Dakota and ends up in Whiteclay,” said Sheriff Terry Robbins of Sheridan County. About the prospect of more patrols, he said, “With the economy the way it is, I don’t see us doing anything that we’re not trying now.” Deputies patrol the town two to three times a day.

The Arrowhead Inn, one of Whiteclay’s four beer stores, has a sign posted saying, “Cash your income tax check here.” The store takes a 3 percent commission. Pine Ridge has no banks, so the liquor stores serve that purpose.

The shop sells a 30-pack of Budweiser cans for $27.25 — a price higher than in New York City, and nearly twice as high as elsewhere in the country. But the drink of choice in Whiteclay is Hurricane High Gravity Lager, a malt liquor brewed by Anheuser-Busch. A 16-ounce can costs $1.50 at the Arrowhead Inn. Its alcohol content is 8.1 percent; regular beer has an alcohol content of about 5 percent.

Daryl Walking, 46, a former Marine who said he has been drinking since he was a boy, said he spends three nights a week in jail for public intoxication and the other four in the cold.

“I’ll curl up against the wall and I’ll wake up half frozen, but I’ll still be O.K.,” he said.

His friend James Whiteface, 43, was recently released from the tribal jail. It was his birthday, and he showed the date of birth on his arrest form to prove it.

“I came here right after I got out,” he said, referring to Whiteclay. “This is where everybody meets.” he said. Mr. Whiteface, a slight man, said he could drink six 16-ounce cans of Hurricane in one sitting.

A Nebraska State Patrol officer drove past. Someone shouted an obscenity. The trooper slammed on the brakes and shouted obscenities back, threatening to call in the sheriff to “clear this town.”

An hour later, there was no sheriff, and the crowds of drinkers had grown thicker

Published with photographs in the New York Times 3/06/12