Only living Elem Pomo speaker teaches so she won't be the last

Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Loretta Kelsey closed her eyes, letting memories ripple through her. Visions of coyotes, childhood acorn hunts and fishermen filled her head. A minute dragged by. She opened her eyes, stared at the calm waters of Clear Lake, and began to speak.

"Ah wee-e-bee, we-e bit," she said quietly. "Fac-ma, fa-a-kepkin. Aquichin wa mit." The words of the old ways rolled on for several minutes, and as they came, Kelsey fixed her gaze on the ground.

"Sholbit," she finally said, looking up and smiling. "The end."

Yes and no.

It was the end of her story, in Kelsey's native Elem Pomo language, about her aunt chewing tule reeds 60 years ago and using the chaff to catch fish in an apron. But by the mere act of telling that story, she was giving a desperately needed new beginning to her people's language.

Kelsey, 59, is the last person on Earth who is fluent in Elem Pomo, an 8,000-year-old dialect spoken by a people who once flourished along the shores of Clear Lake (Lake County). Handed down orally and never written, the language has nearly vanished - and Kelsey, a quiet, almost demure woman with steely gaze, is doing everything she can to make sure the ancient words do not die with her.

Every time an Elem Pomo phrase passes her lips and someone else hears it, she says, she is helping keep it alive. It's even better if one of the young people in her tribe speaks that phrase back to her - and over the past three years, she has been holding workshops to make sure they are able to do that.

"It would be so terribly sad to let this language die out because ... well, look around you," Kelsey said, waving her hands to take in the oak tree-studded spread of her reservation, the Elem Pomo Colony on the southern shore of Clear Lake. "Our language is really right here. It's in our ceremonies, our lives, our people, our ways.

"You keep the language alive, you help keep all of this alive."

It wasn't so long ago that dozens of people spoke Elem Pomo. When Kelsey was a child in the 1950s and '60s, her parents and many other elders in the 250-member tribe were fluent, and her mother spoke no English.

But as the older folks died off and the younger ones forayed into the broader society around them to make a living, many native ways were lost. It was a disintegration that was millennia in coming.

The Elem Pomo tribe originated in about 6000 B.C., and as it perfected the arts of bluegill fishing, making bread from acorns and weaving watertight baskets with bullrush and willow strands, it came to occupy 80,000 acres around the lake. However, the advent of white settlers in the 1800s brought the usual displacement crises, the most notorious being the 1850 Bloody Island Massacre at Clear Lake - in which 200 Elem Pomo and other Indians were killed by the U.S. Army. The massacre was in retaliation for the slaying of white ranchers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, who were killed by Pomo braves retaliating for the pair's enslavement and rape of local Indians.

Today, the casino-less tribe exists on a 50-acre reservation of simple houses, next to a closed sulfur mine so badly polluted with mercury that it is on the nation's Superfund toxic cleanup list.

Over the past 30 years in particular, the Elem Pomo's traditions, such as subsistence fishing and basket weaving, dwindled as people joined area churches and found jobs in mercury mines, logging operations and town stores. The same decline has affected tribes all over California. Of the seven loosely related Pomo tribes around Clear Lake - each with its own language - only one, the Elem Pomo, has a full traditional round house.

Speaking the native tongue only got in the way of trying to fit in, the thinking went.

"It's a difficult language, and my dad never taught it to us because he didn't want the white kids to make fun of us," said Elem Pomo Tribal Chairman Ray Brown. "It's a real shame, now that we all look back on it, because you don't really learn it unless you grow up with it."

It's not too late to fix that, Kelsey said. "All we need is a willingness to want it to live, and I think we have that."

Her interest in reviving the language ignited three years ago when her nephew, Robert Geary, who helps run the tribe's ceremonial events, attended a statewide meeting of Indian tribes interested in preserving their culture. After Geary came back he polled the tribe for who spoke the language, and only one name came up: Kelsey.

Remembering that UC Berkeley linguistic students had recorded tribal members speaking Elem Pomo between the 1940s and '60s, the two called the university for help on how to revive their dialect. They wound up with one of the nation's pre-eminent Pomo language researchers, Professor Emeritus Leanne Hinton.

Together, Hinton and Kelsey dug into the campus archives and found recordings in Elem Pomo on old reel-to-reel tapes - and they included Kelsey's father telling stories, and Ray Brown's father singing.

"California's tribes have been so fractured over the years that it's very hard to tell how many languages are still alive," said Hinton, who co-founded the statewide Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. "What Loretta is doing is special. And for the last speaker of a language, she's amazingly young."

Hinton said that in the mid-1770s, California's Indians - Miwoks, Pomos, Ohlones being the main ones in Northern California - spoke 115 languages. Now, only about 50 dialects remain statewide, and many of those have a just handful of speakers each.
Kelsey is the only lone speaker that Hinton knows of.

"A language is not just a monument to knowledge, it's a monument to identity," Hinton said. "But bringing it back takes generations. Loretta and her people have a lot of work ahead of them."

Listening to the old UC recordings with Hinton was the first time Kelsey had heard the language fluently spoken since she was a young woman. She hadn't really spoken much of it since then, either, but it always remained strong in her for some reason.

"Hearing my father's voice brought back so many memories," she said, sighing. "Memories of him and me camping, of us sliding down the hills on cardboard in the summer, memories of my elders fishing.

"It helped me remember even more of the language to hear these."

Part of the charm of the Elem Pomo dialect for Kelsey, and for Hinton, is its gentle nature. Much emphasis, in passing it down through the generations, was on the telling of stories, such as the coyote myths, which have the wily critter causing floods and the like. There are no swear words in Elem Pomo, and nothing for "hello" or "goodbye."

"We just say 'How are you doing?' or 'I'll see you again,' " Kelsey said. "As a people, we really just want to know how you are doing, I guess. And I don't think anybody was mean enough to say bad words."

So far, Kelsey has conducted four weekendlong language camps for her tribe. Each had a theme - animals and birds for one, foods and utensils for the other three - and the 30 or so participants played bingo in Elem Pomo using the themed words to make things more fun.

She's also writing a dictionary and a phrase handbook, with the help of Hinton and a couple of other linguists from the UC system.
Such endeavors are a whole new direction for Kelsey, who raised two children, has six grandchildren and worked as a nurses' assistant before retiring on disability in 2004 after a back injury.

"I just never thought of things like this, but now I really wish I had spoken the language to my kids as they grew up. It was kind of crazy, but that's just how life was," Kelsey said. "It saddens me. I have a tremendous responsibility now."

She sat with friends around an unlit fire pit at the reservation as she spoke, grandchildren and dogs happily playing nearby. Occasionally an Elem Pomo word would pop up in the chatter, and she'd smile.

"It's pretty hard work picking up the language, and it's hard to get everyone together to learn," said Joe Peters, Kelsey's 19-year-old grandson. "I can actually use words with my grandma now, like I'll say "where" or "I love you" in Elem Pomo. But I can't really say a whole phrase just yet."

Tribal Chairman Brown said that if the teaching proves too difficult, he may ask all seven Pomo tribes to try to combine their languages into one, so at least one dialect will be carried on through the ages. That will be tough, he admitted, since only two words are common to all the tribes - hiyu, meaning dog, and masin, meaning white man.

The Elem Pomo, like many tribes around California, is also reassessing its tribal enrollment lists, and many members - including Kelsey - are being considered for disenrollment based on historical family records. That could prompt people to move away from the reservation, further fracturing the ability to get together for language classes.

Kelsey watched Joe and his cousins kick a ball back and forth in the bare dirt yard - the same yard she once kicked balls in 50 years ago as her elders called to her in Elem Pomo. "At least when I speak it now, I can live those old days again," she said, her eyes getting a faraway look. "Maybe someday my grandchildren and their children will get to experience that too."

But Kelsey said that no matter what happens, she is now committed to passing her tongue along for the rest of her life.
"Sometimes I really wish for the old days, when things were simpler," Kelsey said. "Back then, our culture was clearer, things made more sense."

Nike unveils first shoe for American Indians

BEAVERTON, Ore. — Nike on Tuesday unveiled what it said is the first shoe designed specifically for American Indians, an effort aiming at promoting physical fitness in a population with high obesity rates.

The Beaverton-based company says the Air Native N7 is designed with a larger fit for the distinct foot shape of American Indians, and has a culturally specific look. It will be distributed solely to American Indians; tribal wellness programs and tribal schools nationwide will be able to purchase the shoe at wholesale price and then pass it along to individuals, often at no cost.

“Nike is aware of the growing health issues facing Native Americans,” said Sam McCracken, manager of Nike's Native American Business program. “We are stepping up our commitment ... to elevate the issue of Native American health and wellness.”

Nike said it is the first time it has designed a shoe for a specific race or ethnicity. It said all profits from the sale of the shoe will be reinvested in health programs for tribal lands, where problems with obesity, diabetes and related conditions are near epidemic levels in some tribes.

Nike designers and researchers looked at the feet of more than 200 people from more than 70 tribes nationwide and found that in general, American Indians have a much wider and taller foot than the average shoe accommodates. The average shoe width of men and women measured was three width sizes larger than the standard Nike shoe.

As a result, the Air Native is wider with a larger toe box. The shoe has fewer seams for irritation and a thicker sock liner for comfort.

Jerry Bread, outreach co-ordinator for the Native American Studies program at University of Oklahoma, said the idea was “fantastic” and addressed a core issue for tribes, though he was skeptical that the feet of people from so many tribes could be so similar.

“It's an excellent gesture and I know it will get a lot of support from tribal people,” Mr. Bread said. “We stand to profit from it in our physical health and well being.”

Dr. Kelly Acton, director of the national diabetes program for Indian Health Services, said she was dubious of working with a corporation at first but said she was delighted with the result, saying Nike “bent over backwards” to design a shoe and respect public health needs.

The N7 name is a reference to the seventh generation theory, used by some tribes to look to the three generations preceding them for wisdom and the three generations ahead for their legacy.

The design features several “heritage call outs” as one product manager described it, including sunrise to sunset to sunrise patterns on the tongue and heel of the shoe. Feather designs adorn the inside and stars are on the sole to represent the night sky.

The company anticipates selling at least 10,000 pairs and raising $200,000 (U.S.) for tribal programs. At $42.80 (U.S.) wholesale, it represents less of a financial opportunity than a goodwill and branding effort.

“The reason I like it is that, even if there's not a big Native American market, it gives people the impression there is a constituency that deserves attention,” said John Dickson, a member of the executive council of the Native American Leadership Alliance in Washington, D.C.

Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon, said the product reflects how Nike does business.

The company prides itself on designing specifically for certain athletes and having close ties to its customers. Nike has been involved with the tribal community for years, supporting tribal athletic teams, events and other social initiatives.

“It reinforces the core of the Nike brand, which is: If you have a body you are an athlete,” Mr. Swangard said.

Beyond the Reservation

MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT INDIAN RESERVATION, Conn. — With hundreds of millions of dollars in annual profits flowing in from their gambling business, the Mashantucket Pequots first floated the idea of building a large amusement park. But those plans were shot down by neighbors already unhappy with the huge Foxwoods casino in their midst.

Some Indian tribes are also winning contracts to manage others’ casinos for a cut of the profits.
The tribe then bought into a ferry-building business in hopes of diversifying its holdings, but that only provided a costly lesson in the dangers of “building Cadillacs for a Chevy market,” said Michael J. Thomas, the tribe’s chairman.

So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Pequot tribal leaders would choose to stick to what they know best. In doing so, however, they have moved far beyond their reservation here in eastern Connecticut, scouring the nation for new market opportunities in gambling just like any other large casino operator.

That is how the Pequots came to be one of the main investors in a large casino-resort being considered by officials in south-central Kansas; earlier this year, Kansas joined the ever-swelling list of states legalizing casino gambling.

That is also how the tribe, which has operated one of the world’s most profitable casinos since 1992, ended up as the prime mover behind a $500 million slot parlor and hotel planned to open in Philadelphia by the end of 2009, beating out Trump Entertainment Resorts, Pinnacle Entertainment and several other established gambling companies.

The Pequots are hardly alone. Last November, the Mohegan tribe, which operates the giant Mohegan Sun casino hotel not far from here, opened a slot parlor in Pennsylvania. At about the same time, the Seminole Tribe of Florida paid $965 million to buy Hard Rock International, the rock-’n’-roll-themed chain of restaurants, hotels and casinos.

“This is bringing tribes into uncharted territory,” said Steven Andrew Light, co-director of the Institute for the Study of Tribal Gaming Law and Policy at the University of North Dakota. He called the moves a “harbinger for a new wave within the Indian gaming world.”

The Mohegan and Pequot tribes are also competing with traditional gambling companies like Harrah’s on a second front: the lucrative management deals that give operators a large cut of the profits in exchange for managing casinos on behalf of tribes with less experience in the gambling business.

For several years, Indian country has been defined by a new brand of leader as well versed in the nuances of casino management and corporate accounting as tribal politics. But now add to their ranks Native American elected officials who call to mind nothing so much as aggressive corporate chief executives using the profits generated by one property to open others.

“My answer to your question of why is, Why not?” said Mr. Thomas, the Pequot chairman.

Other tribes are certainly watching the trend with keen interest. Bruce Bozsum, chairman of the Mohegan tribe, said he had heard from many of his fellow tribal leaders, as well as conference organizers, interested in hearing the details of his tribe’s off-reservation economic activities.

“That’s all people want to talk about,” Mr. Bozsum said.

The first effort to move gambling operations off-reservation dates to 2000. That is when the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, which was already operating several casinos in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, opened the Greektown Casino in Detroit, a commercial casino well away from their reservation land.

Greektown generated $351 million in revenue last year. Adding that to revenues from its other casinos, the Chippewa have used the money to expand their land holdings while building health centers and offering other services for the tribe’s 29,000 members.

More recently, the Mohegan and Pequot tribes — fierce rivals that for years have operated wildly successful casinos only a short drive from one another — have taken steps to expand their gambling operations off-reservation. When Pennsylvania passed a law in 2004 authorizing up to 61,000 slot machines at 14 sites around the state, both tribes jumped at the chance to diversify their operations.

Under the Pennsylvania plan, horse racing tracks were automatically granted a slot license. So the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, a corporation wholly owned by the tribe’s roughly 2,000 members, spent $255 million to buy the Pocono Downs, a harness racing track 110 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

Renamed the Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs, the property generated $55 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2007, though it is only a temporary facility while the tribe builds a more permanent home that will accommodate 2,500 slot machines, or more than twice as many as the present site.

U.N. Assembly Backs Indigenous Peoples' Rights

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. General Assembly passed a sweeping declaration of rights for indigenous peoples on Thursday despite opposition from several developed states that said it gave excessive property and legal powers.

Four countries -- the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- voted against the nonbinding declaration, but it went through overwhelmingly with 143 votes in favor and 11 abstentions. Not all countries in the 192-member Assembly took part in the vote.

Under negotiation for 20 years, the document says that indigenous people, whose number has been put at 270 million worldwide as understood by the declaration, "have the right to self-determination."

One of its most controversial articles states that "indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired."

That could potentially put in question most of the land ownership in countries, such as those that opposed the declaration, whose present population is largely descended from settlers who took over territory from previous inhabitants.

A balancing clause inserted at a late stage in the text says nothing in it can authorize or encourage "any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity" of states.

POLITICAL FOOTBALL

That was not good enough for the four objectors, notably Canada, where the issue has become a political football. Many of Canada's 1 million aboriginal and Inuit people live in overcrowded, unsanitary housing and suffer high rates of unemployment, substance abuse and suicide.

"The provisions in the declaration on lands, territories and resources are overly broad, unclear, and capable of a wide variety of interpretations," Canada's U.N. Ambassador John McNee told the General Assembly.

That stance was attacked by Canada's left-leaning opposition New Democrats. "It's very disappointing. I think it's cowardly and very un-Canadian ... we pride ourselves on being advocates for human rights," legislator Jean Crowder told Reuters.

U.S. delegate Robert Hagen said the U.N. Human Rights Council, which prepared the text, had not sought consensus. "This declaration was adopted ... in a splintered vote. This process was unfortunate and extraordinary," he said.

Aside from land ownership issues, critics also assailed provisions on indigenous peoples' intellectual property, right to be consulted on laws affecting them and right to exempt their land from military activities.

But supporters of the declaration said it gave long overdue recognition to indigenous peoples.

"This declaration is the least that could be approved to give us all instruments recognizing the existence of indigenous people," Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, himself indigenous, told the General Assembly.

"It is an important step for indigenous people to do away with discrimination, to strengthen the identity, to recognize our right to land and natural resources, to be consulted, to participate in decisions," the minister said.

Most U.S. allies, including Britain and Japan, also voted for the declaration, saying last minute amendments had made it acceptable, given that it did not have the force of international law.

In Germany, Wild for Winnetou

RADEBEUL, Germany, Sept. 7 — The other day I found Jürgen Michaelis, a short, 50-year-old, beefy-handed man with a broad smile, standing by himself inside a teepee not much bigger than a phone booth behind a house in this suburb of Dresden. A former locksmith and demolition worker from Chemnitz (which used to be called Karl-Marx-Stadt), Mr. Michaelis settled here a couple of years ago.

Gazing through inch-thick lenses and overjoyed to have a visitor, he showed off his homemade deerskin suit. Perched halfway on his head, about to tumble, was a matted black wig with a blue feather. At his feet burned a tiny charcoal fire, large enough to warm a single metal mug of water on a cold morning. A few forlorn trinkets rested on wood blocks, ostensibly for sale.

“My Indian name,” Mr. Michaelis told me, “is Lonely Man.”

A few months ago the director of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Tex., told me in passing how his museum was frequently overrun by visiting Germans, so the curious German obsession with the Wild West — which newly arrived Americans repeatedly discover to predictable eye-rolling from Germans, for whom it’s hardly news — was not exactly unknown to me. Still, the extent of it is a little astonishing.

At powwows — there are dozens every year — thousands of Germans with an American Indian fetish drink firewater, wear turquoise jewelry and run around Baden-Württemberg or Schleswig-Holstein dressed as Comanches and Apaches. There are clubs, magazines, trading cards, school curriculums, stupendously popular German-made Wild West films and outdoor theaters, including one high in the sandstone cliffs above the tiny medieval fortress town of Rathen, in Saxony, where cowboys fight Indians on horseback. A fake Wild West village, Eldorado, recently shot up on the outskirts of Templin, the city where Angela Merkel, the chancellor, grew up.

The cause of this infatuation is a writer named Karl May (1842-1912), virtually unknown in the United States but the most popular author in German history.

A con man and Walter Mitty-like homebody who spent eight years in jail dreaming of Wild West adventures, May (the name is pronounced My) wrote dozens of tall-tale books that have sold more than 100 million copies, maybe twice that many if you count translations from the German. Kaiser Wilhelm II, like May a fantasist who loved to dress up in exotic costumes, adored May’s books. So did Einstein and Albert Schweitzer, Kafka and Fritz Lang. Hitler did too.

May’s hero was Winnetou, a fictional Apache chief, a household name here. To Germans Winnetou is like Paul Bunyan, Abe Lincoln and Elvis rolled into one. During the World Cup last year, an occasion for the Germans to debate, as they often do, the pitfalls of reviving their nationalist spirit, Der Spiegel, the leading newsmagazine, published an article titled “The Land of Winnetou.”

“There are the German poets and thinkers, the German forest, the German ‘comfortableness,’ German efficiency, the German longing for Italy, and there is Winnetou,” it pronounced. “Winnetou is the quintessential German national hero, a paragon of virtue, a nature freak, a romantic, a pacifist at heart, but in a world at war he is the best warrior, alert, strong, sure.”

“Eleven Winnetous,” the author, Dirk Kurbjuweit, added, referring to the German soccer team, “and we would be world champions.”

That was pretty much what Hitler told his troops when he distributed May’s books as object lessons; never mind that May himself had been a vocal pacifist.

Mr. Kurbjuweit also called Winnetou “a German with a migration background,” a phrase I’ve heard used to describe Turks here. Tormented German intellectuals like to ponder whether May’s concept of an “edelmensch,” his term for a truly noble man, as he called Winnetou, has inspired more feelings of fraternity or of racial superiority in the country. An American today is likelier to wonder how May shaped German views of the United States over the last century.

“Immensely,” Johannes Zeilinger told me. A hand surgeon by day, Dr. Zeilinger, a 59-year-old May enthusiast, is the curator of a big Karl May exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

“May framed a popular image of North America, with Indians as a dying race, tragically killed off by fate and by the spread of a new empire,” he said. The doctor ushered me toward a painting that shows Indians ambushing an oncoming train, trains having signified Manifest Destiny. In May’s books Winnetou’s loyal sidekick, Old Shatterhand, was a German émigré, a schoolteacher who went West, became a crack shot, had a deadly right jab and, not coincidentally, got work as a surveyor for a railroad company.

Dr. Zeilinger wouldn’t go so far as to say that May demonized the United States, which clearly he didn’t, although Hans Ottomeyer, the director of the museum, who wandered by to listen in on the conversation at that point, said: “May taught Germans that America was a wild place. There were natives and intruders, and he taught us to be suspicious of intruders, half of whom are good, half are very bad.” Like all German men, Mr. Ottomeyer, who’s 61, lapsed unbidden into recollections of reading May’s books as a boy. Children read him less today, he added. “The West used to be on the border of the imagination,” he said. “Now it’s a place they see every day, full of conflict and catastrophe.”

You might say that May has become a Rorschach of German identity. German “natural sympathy” for American Indians is rooted in ancient times, Dr. Zeilinger explained. The Roman historian Tacitus described German tribes as uncorrupted, primitive, fierce and at one with nature, a people on the edge of a corrupt and voracious empire. May tapped into that primordial Germanness and also into what became, by the mid-19th century, a growing interest in America and the wider world.

May wrote about the Orient and Africa, too, and, as with the West, claimed to be recounting his own experiences, going so far as to distribute photographs of himself dressed up as Old Shatterhand or as Kara Ben Nemsi, Old Shatterhand’s doppelgänger in the Ottoman world. He finally made it to the United States at 66, briefly scouring the wilds of Massachusetts and meeting his first Indian near Buffalo before retreating home to Saxony. When he confessed publicly to having cooked everything up, he pitched himself as a homily about a brute turned noble man, the Winnetou myth given a fresh spin.

Dr. Zeilinger showed me a typed collection of May’s adventures in a vitrine of objects from the former East Germany. Communists banned May — too Christian, too popular with Hitler, they said — and they shuttered his house in Radebeul. The typed copies were Wild West versions of samizdat, lovingly made over hundreds of hours by a fan from smuggled May books.

Needing to sate long-standing appetites, East German officials concocted ersatz versions of May tales with imitation Winnetous, and they also filmed May-like adventures in Cuba and Yugoslavia that became runaway hits behind the Iron Curtain.

Mr. Michaelis, the Lonely Man, remembers growing up on these, and on the East German schoolbooks about Indians and the capitalist West.

“It was a little bit of adventure, an escape and romantic,” he recalled. “From the books I saw it was a hard life being an Indian, and I identified with that. Indians could handle any situation with no resources, just like here. All this put the flame in me.”

May was finally recuperated by the Communists during the mid-80s, his house reopened alongside a log cabin museum of Indian artifacts and stuffed animals. Rathen, the open-air theater, also got to restage Winnetou plays.

I caught one recently. Beyond slumbering fields of cows and castles, across the Elbe on a little rope-drawn ferry, then through a tiny gingerbread town and a forest of conifers and beech, I climbed into the sandstone cliffs to see “The Treasure of Silver Lake.” On a rainy afternoon a few hundred hardy children and elderly Germans sat outdoors, watching a Dolph Lundgren lookalike in war paint carrying a spear.

Back here in Radebeul, Mr. Michaelis acknowledged what has clearly evolved into a mix of American Indian and German identities. “I’m 75 percent Indian but still German,” he said. He explained that while he loves his teepee, he has lately taken up an offer to sleep in Karl May’s house because the traffic between Dresden and Meissen has been keeping him awake at night. Then he waved one hand. “The Indians made these out of the cotton that perfidious Americans sold them,” he said, meaning his teepee. “This one’s better. It’s acrylic. From Saxony.”

Lunchtime was approaching, and he recommended a saloon around the corner that sold buffalo burgers. He said he goes there when he can afford to. Tonight he’ll be cooking on the fire.

“Schnitzel,” he said.

Earmark Gone, Indian Project Is One-Winged

FORT PIERRE, S.D. — From the scrub and gravel, a building rises here in the shape of a giant eagle — a striking symbol, its creators say, for an American Indian cultural facility and a judicial center.

The center, which would house a judicial system, was estimated to cost $18 million. That number has risen to $25 million.

Except that this eagle has only one wing. Federal money for the other has run dry. And even the one eagle wing, all 30,000 square feet of it, is mainly just a shell, ceilings unfinished and rooms empty, silent but for the buzz of black flies that bite.

This $18 million center, once championed by Tom Daschle, the former South Dakota senator and Senate Democratic leader, was meant to accomplish something unprecedented: lure outside investment to impoverished Indian reservations across the region by creating a court system where outsiders could recoup losses if a business deal went bad.

The effort had drawn praise from bankers’ associations, South Dakota’s bar association, the State Chamber of Commerce, the National Congress of American Indians and the 11 chairmen of the Sioux Nation tribes. But along the way, Mr. Daschle lost his seat in the Senate and annual funds for the half-finished project known as the Wakpa Sica (pronounced WALK-paw SHE-cha) Reconciliation Place have dropped precipitously, leaving some here to wonder what, if anything, will come of the place.

Proponents of Wakpa Sica, named, in Lakota, for the Bad River junction where Sioux leaders met members of the Lewis and Clark party, say theirs is the story of a good idea swept aside in Washington’s abrupt distaste for certain pet projects paid for through budget mechanisms known as earmarks.

In this remote town of 2,000, the people who have been planning the center for more than a decade say they feel unfairly tarnished by anti-earmark sentiment, prompted in part by the scandals surrounding the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Representative Randy Cunningham of California and by proposed projects like the $200 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska.

“The thing is, this is anything but a bridge to nowhere,” said Marshall Matz, a lawyer in Washington who is representing the center. “But no one wants to hear that. The Congress seems to feel we are an earmark, and earmarks are very difficult now to get money for.”

The South Dakota center finds itself contending with the risk inherent in every earmark, silly or worthwhile. Its champion, Mr. Daschle, is gone, and with him the money. That is the fate of many earmarked projects with powerful sponsors who move on. Those tied to large companies, which can ensure survival by seeking help from multiple lawmakers, struggle less; little projects in little places risk more.

And even though those in South Dakota’s current Congressional delegation say it is a worthy project, this is hardly a climate in which others are likely to fight for someone else’s earmark.

“This is a cautionary tale,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks such federal spending and describes the earmarks from the 2005 budget as “out of control,” including $1.3 million for Wakpa Sica. “If you had a more objective funding system — not political patronage — the funding would be consistent, and that’s one of the problems with these things. Live by the earmark, die by the earmark.”

Despite new rules brought about by the recent scandals requiring lawmakers to attach their names to their pet projects, Washington has hardly sworn off earmarks. House lawmakers have put together spending bills with nearly 6,500 earmarks worth almost $11 billion, though the budget process is far from done.

But the pace, so far, is significantly slower than in the prescandal days of 2005, when Congress financed more than 15,000 pet projects, by some estimates, totaling more than $30 billion.

In the late 1990s, a group of American Indians and outside civic and academic leaders approached Mr. Daschle about the center here. In a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a special policy adviser at a law firm, Mr. Daschle recalled that he viewed it as a way to accomplish many things: to tell the history of American Indians and this country in South Dakota; to further reconciliation with the state’s nine tribes; and, perhaps most uniquely, to create a legal model, a court system and a high court that would make non-Indian businesses more comfortable in Indian Country.

Outside investors often fear that the tribes’ independent legal systems and shifting leadership pose too much risk. Ultimately, the new judicial center was intended to encourage economic development — in the form of investment in business and loans for new enterprises — on reservations, where poverty rates are among the worst in the nation.

“You can draw a red line around every reservation in South Dakota and until we have an appellate court, we’re not going to have any economic development on the reservation,” said Clarence Mortenson, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the chairman of the board of Wakpa Sica.

In 2000, Mr. Daschle succeeded in getting Congressional authorization for Wakpa Sica as part of a larger Indian Advancement Act, but that did not include money. Mr. Daschle recalled working to convince his colleagues that the legal element of the center could be used by tribes all around the country and that it was not “just some Indian pork” for South Dakota. At the time, Mr. Daschle said, no one “seriously challenged” the project.

In the budget bills that followed, the project (then estimated to cost $18 million, now estimated at closer to $25 million) was granted annual appropriations of at least $1.3 million for a total of nearly $8 million.

But in 2004, after the budget was set for the next year, Mr. Daschle was defeated by John Thune, a Republican and former congressman. In the next budget, Wakpa Sica received $350,000. For the 2007 fiscal year, it got nothing. The 2008 budget process is not completed yet, but the House proposal would give Wakpa Sica $150,000.

As the center has struggled, the very definition of the word earmark has become a matter of intense debate here. The fact that the center received broad Congressional authorization in 2000 — rather than being slipped into a spending bill as part of a deal — makes it unfair to consider it an earmark, Mr. Matz said.

Others, including Mr. Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, vehemently disagree.

“It’s still a line-item provision inserted at the request of a lawmaker,” Mr. Ellis said.

And at least one lawmaker, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, questioned elements of the center itself.

“We don’t need any more cultural centers,” Mr. Coburn said. “We’re fighting a war; why should we be spending any more on a cultural center?”

As the money has faded away, plans here have been scaled back. During a tour, the construction manager, Richard Rangel, spoke of ways to stretch the money — lower-grade carpet and ceiling materials. The grant proposal writer, one of just a handful of staff members at the center, was let go.

Members of South Dakota’s delegation defended and praised the project, but offered little in the way of comfort. After all, they have their own favored projects to fight for. And the demands of Indian tribes, in particular, often run toward more basic needs like keeping emergency rooms, schools and roads open.

A spokesman for Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a Democrat and South Dakota’s only member of the House, called the project a “top priority” and pointed to the $150,000 being considered this year as something she had secured.

Kyle Downey, communications director for Mr. Thune, said, “Budgets are tight these days, and earmark reform has made it tough for this project and many others to get finished simply on federal funding.” Mr. Downey added that Mr. Thune helped get authorization for Wakpa Sica during his tenure in the House.

The state’s other senator, Tim Johnson, a Democrat, said the war in Iraq and tax breaks had “drained resources from many important domestic projects, including the Wakpa Sica Reconciliation Place.”

While work on a judicial system continues, Mr. Daschle said he still hoped there would be a center to house it. He said he recalled being at the ground-breaking ceremony and feeling a rush of momentum and hopefulness.

“It has eroded,” Mr. Daschle said. “The half-eagle is a perfect metaphor for the half-commitment we’re now getting from government.”

In Argentina, a Museum Unveils a Long-Frozen Maiden

SALTA, Argentina — The maiden, the boy, the girl of lightning: they were three Inca children, entombed on a bleak and frigid mountaintop 500 years ago as a religious sacrifice.

Unearthed in 1999 from the 22,000-foot summit of Mount Llullaillaco, a volcano 300 miles west of here near the Chilean border, their frozen bodies were among the best preserved mummies ever found, with internal organs intact, blood still present in the heart and lungs, and skin and facial features mostly unscathed. No special effort had been made to preserve them. The cold and the dry, thin air did all the work. They froze to death as they slept, and 500 years later still looked like sleeping children, not mummies.

In the eight years since their discovery, the mummies, known here simply as Los Niños or “the children,” have been photographed, X-rayed, CT scanned and biopsied for DNA. The cloth, pottery and figurines buried with them have been meticulously thawed and preserved. But the bodies themselves were kept in freezers and never shown to the public — until last week, when La Doncella, the maiden, a 15-year-old girl, was exhibited for the first time, at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology, which was created in Salta expressly to display them.

The new and the old are at home in Salta. The museum faces a historic plaza where a mirrored bank reflects a century-old basilica with a sign warning churchgoers not to use the holy water for witchcraft. Now a city of 500,000 and the provincial capital, Salta was part of the Inca empire until the 1500s, when it was invaded by the Spanish conquistadors.

Although the mummies captured headlines when they were found, officials here decided to open the exhibit quietly, without any of the fanfare or celebration that might have been expected.

“These are dead people, Indian people,” said Gabriel E. Miremont, 39, the museum’s designer and director. “It’s not a situation for a party.”

The two other mummies have not yet been shown, but will be put on display within the next six months or so.

The children were sacrificed as part of a religious ritual, known as capacocha. They walked hundreds of miles to and from ceremonies in Cuzco and were then taken to the summit of Llullaillaco (yoo-yeye-YAH-co), given chicha (maize beer), and, once they were asleep, placed in underground niches, where they froze to death. Only beautiful, healthy, physically perfect children were sacrificed, and it was an honor to be chosen. According to Inca beliefs, the children did not die, but joined their ancestors and watched over their villages from the mountaintops like angels.

Discussing why it took eight years to prepare the exhibit, Dr. Miremont smiled and said, “This is South America,” but then went on to explain that there was little precedent for dealing with mummies as well preserved as these, and that it took an enormous amount of research to figure out how to show them yet still make sure they did not deteriorate.

The solution turned out to be a case within a case — an acrylic cylinder inside a box made of triple-paned glass. A computerized climate control system replicates mountaintop conditions inside the case — low oxygen, humidity and pressure, and a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit. In part because Salta is in an earthquake zone, the museum has three backup generators and freezers, in case of power failures or equipment breakdowns, and the provincial governor’s airplane will fly the mummies out in an emergency, Dr. Miremont said.

Asked where they would be taken, he replied, “Anywhere we can plug them in.”

The room holding La Doncella is dimly lighted, and the case itself is dark; visitors must turn on a light to see her.

“This was important for us,” Dr. Miremont said. “If you don’t want to see a dead body, don’t press the button. It’s your decision. You can still see the other parts of the exhibit.”

He designed the lighting partly in hope of avoiding further offense to people who find it disturbing that the children, part of a religious ritual, were taken from the mountaintop shrine.

Whatever the intention, the effect is stunning. Late in August, before the exhibit opened, Dr. Miremont showed visitors La Doncella. At a touch of the button, she seemed to materialize from the darkness, sitting cross-legged in her brown dress and striped sandals, bits of coca leaf still clinging to her upper lip, her long hair woven into many fine braids, a crease in one cheek where it leaned against her shawl as she slept.

The bodies seemed so much like sleeping children that working with them felt “almost more like a kidnapping than archaeological work,” Dr. Miremont said.

One of the children, a 6-year-old girl, had been struck by lightning sometime after she died, resulting in burns on her face, upper body and clothing. She and the boy, who was 7, had slightly elongated skulls, created deliberately by head wrappings — a sign of high social status, possibly even royalty.

Scientists worked with the bodies in a special laboratory where the temperature of the entire lab could be dropped to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and the mummies were never exposed to higher temperatures for more than 20 minutes at a time, to preventing thawing.

DNA tests revealed that the children were unrelated, and CT scans showed that they were well nourished and had no broken bones or other injuries. La Doncella apparently had sinusitis, as well as a lung condition called bronchiolitis obliterans, possibly the result of an infection.

“There are two sides,” Dr. Miremont said. “The scientific — we can read the past from the mummies and the objects. The other side says these people came from a culture still alive, and a holy place on the mountain.”

Some regard the exhibit as they would a church, Dr. Miremont said.

“To me, it’s a museum, not a holy place,” he said. “The holy place is on top of the mountain.”

The mountains around Salta are home to at least 40 other burial sites from ritual sacrifices, but Dr. Miremont said the native people who live in those regions do not want more bodies taken away.

“We will respect their wishes,” Dr. Miremont said, adding that three mummies were enough. “It is not necessary to break any more graves. We would like to have good relations with the Indian people.”

Tribal Group Kills Whale Off Washington

SEATTLE, Sept. 10 — The gray whale, harpooned and shot many times, lies dead at the bottom of the ocean somewhere in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Five Makah tribal members accused of killing it have been arrested. Embarrassed tribal leaders have denounced the killing and sent representatives to Washington to assure the state’s politicians that the hunt was not approved.

Gov. Christine Gregoire added her condemnation.

Perhaps worst for the tribe, the hunt has complicated its quest to return to whaling, an effort the tribe has been waging in court for years.

The hunt began around 6:30 a.m. Saturday, when five tribal members boarded two boats in search of whales seen offshore, the Coast Guard said. When they finished hours later, a 40-foot-long gray whale had been harpooned and shot an estimated 20 times off Neah Bay in the northern reaches of the Washington coast, before the Coast Guard surrounded the animal and detained the hunters.

The Coast Guard cut the whale loose, and it drifted with the current until it died early Saturday evening and sank in 500 feet of water.

The five men were turned over to tribal authorities.

The hunt sent reverberations throughout the tribe, which has been fighting in court for nearly 10 years over the right to hunt whales.

The last time a Makah killed a whale was in 1999, and that was despite protests of animal rights groups that tried to sabotage the hunt.

The killing led to a court fight over the right to hunt whales, as the tribe had done for centuries before commercial whalers all but eradicated the population by the 1930s.

The 1999 hunt included stringent federal guidelines that were ignored last Saturday, including using a canoe and having a federal observer in place.

All five men were released after spending much of Saturday evening in jail. A statement by the tribe said all were booked at the Makah jail but gave no indication of the charges.

The statement also denounced the actions of the whalers, saying that they took it on themselves to conduct the hunt and that it was a “blatant violation of our law.”

On Sunday, the hunt leader, Wayne Johnson, told The Seattle Times that he was unapologetic and in fact wished that he had done it sooner. Mr. Johnson was among the hunters who killed a whale in the 1999 hunt.

On Monday, Ms. Gregoire said she was “very upset” by the killing, which did not even benefit the poor of the tribe.

“Not only did we lose a very important species here, but that is now sitting at the bottom of the water,” she said at her weekly meeting with reporters. “It does nothing. And it flies in the face of the law.”

Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said that an environmental impact statement in the Makah legal fight had been due this fall, but that the whale kill would no doubt cause delays.

“I don’t know how long this is going to take,” Mr. Gorman said.

Paul Watson, president of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which opposed the 1999 hunt, likened the killing to the cruel treatment of dogs in the case of the football star Michael Vick and said the Makah hunters should be prosecuted.

The United States attorney’s office here said the whale killing could result in a year in jail and a $20,000 fine.

“The whale suffered for hours before finally dying,” Mr. Watson said, “and there can be no justification for their cruelty and contemptuous indifference to the law.”

Complex Defeat for Nobel Winner in Guatemala

SANTIAGO ATITLÁN, Guatemala, Sept. 10 — There are two ways to win political office in this traditional Mayan town nestled on the southern shore of Lake Atitlán, and campaigning is but one of them.

The other is to call on Maximón, a quasi deity carved from wood that is stashed away in a darkened room near the town center. Ringed by candles and doused with rum, the figure is said to have magical powers, including the ability to sway an election.

Before the nationwide elections here on Sunday, representatives of several political parties secretly called on Maximón, although the keepers of the statue declined to specify who they were.

One who did not seem to get any spiritual help is Rigoberta Menchú, the first indigenous presidential candidate in this predominantly indigenous country and the winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy on behalf of Guatemala’s marginalized Mayans.

She finished sixth in a field of 14, according to results released Monday, with just 3 percent of the vote. The two front-runners, Álvaro Colom and Otto Pérez Molina, will compete in a runoff on Nov. 4.

Why Ms. Menchú fared so poorly is as complex as the Mayans themselves.

She was not from around here. That was obvious to anyone who scrutinized the details of the embroidery on the traditional Mayan clothes she wore to campaign. She is a Quiche Mayan, from the midwestern highlands. Her indigenous language is different, unintelligible to a local Tz’utujil speaker. Nineteen other Mayan groups live in Guatemala, each linguistically distinct. Because of the rivalries and conflicts among Mayans, Ms. Menchú had to win over Mayan voters just like any other outsider.

“She’s one of us, but she’s not,” explained a Tz’utujil Mayan who voted for someone else.

She also entered the race without a social organization as a base and was considered a lackluster campaigner and an uninspired speaker.

Furthermore, many older Mayan men are traditional when it comes to women. “Lots of men don’t want a woman to boss them around, and especially a woman president,” said Delores Ratzan, a Tz’utujil Mayan tour guide here. “They think it will ruin the country, and they tell their wives that.”

The Mayans of Guatemala are poorer and sicker than Ladinos, as Guatemalans with mixed Spanish and indigenous blood are known. Those who live traditionally straddle two worlds, one ancient and one modern, which can be difficult.

Santiago Atitlán, flanked by three volcanoes and a huge lake, remains one of the last frontiers of traditional Mayan culture.

Still, in Mayan communities everywhere, the dream of wealth in the United States is a strong draw. Those who manage to get there send back remittances. But the migrants change in their families’ eyes, becoming less Mayan.

Ms. Menchú, 48, who is married and has a son, is regarded by many as one of these émigrés because she spent years in Mexico. And the Mayans seem to expect her to share her wealth.

“Menchú has gotten all this money from the outside, and we haven’t seen it,” said Diego Ramírez. He backed Mr. Colom, whom he considered more likely to bring a much needed public hospital here.

Ms. Menchú set up a foundation to aid Mayan communities with her $1.2 million in Nobel Prize money, and she subsequently invested in a chain of pharmacies. But during her campaign, she found herself on the defensive, insisting that she had helped her people and was not rich.

Her campaign certainly was not. Ms. Menchú did not have enough money for the radio and television advertising campaigns that other candidates employed or even to give away T-shirts or hats.

“Campaigns shouldn’t be only for multimillionaires,” Ms. Menchú said Friday on her last day of campaigning. “We are against spending so much to get in office when there are people dying of hunger. It seems obscene.”

Still, some voters said they feared that a poor campaign would translate into poor governance.

Ms. Menchú won her prize while living in exile in Mexico, and has always been far better known outside Guatemala than at home.

“Her principal strength, which is her international presence, her international strength, her international work, is in Guatemala her principal weakness,” Ricardo Falla, an anthropologist, wrote in July when polls indicated that Ms. Menchú had less than 2 percent of the vote.

There was also the question of “Mano Dura,” or firm hand, the campaign motto of Mr. Pérez Molina, a former Guatemalan Army general who has vowed to rub out crime.

Guatemala’s indigenous communities suffered mightily during the country’s long civil war, from 1960 to 1996. The people of Santiago Atitlán felt brutalized, rising up against the army after a massacre in 1990.

But violence has returned to the country in the form of gangs and drug lords. During the campaign season, at least 50 people tied to various campaigns were reported killed.

Guatemalans appear eager for peace again even if it requires a tough crackdown, analysts say. Some voters regarded Ms. Menchu, who lost her father, mother and two brothers at the hands of government security forces, as insufficiently tough.

Mr. Pérez Molina received 2,406 votes of 14,000 here, compared with 347 for Ms. Menchú.

The most oft-heard argument against Ms. Menchú was her lack of experience. “It’s her first time participating,” said Francisco Mardoqueo Reyes García, the indigenous mayor of San Raymundo, who backs Mr. Colom. “She’ll do better next time around.”

Next time around, in fact, Ms. Menchú, as a Myan, might have a mystical advantage. The next president will take office in 2012, a significant year in the Mayan calendar, although nobody is certain what the year will bring.

Some say it will be a cataclysmic earthquake. Others fear it will be the end of the world. Or could it be, as some of Ms. Menchú’s backers are already whispering, something as jarring as a Mayan president?

For Poor Tribe, Even a Windfall Has a Dark Side

KLAMATH, Calif. — You do not have to drive far into the town of Klamath to see the poverty and the potential of the Yurok Indians, the largest tribe in California and one of the poorest.

Just off Highway 101, past an understocked grocery and an overstocked bar, sits a row of ragged mobile homes behind a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Beat-up cars sit along the gravel drives, as does the occasional bored teenager.

There are also signs of change. A handsome tribal headquarters and a crisp new gas station anchor the reservation. And slot machines are on their way, 99 of them approved by the state, expected to be housed in a new building near tribal headquarters.

But in many ways, the Yurok people have already hit the jackpot. This spring, the Department of the Interior paid the tribe $92.6 million in logging proceeds, a figure roughly six times the tribe’s annual budget.

Yet even the silver cloud, it seems, has a dark lining. The money, which had been held in trust by the government for nearly two decades, has sharply divided the Yurok people, pushing them into two passionate camps: those who prefer long-term community projects and social programs and those who want the money handed up now.

It is a dispute that has echoed through meetings and conversations for months, and one that has upset elders who watched the tribe battle all manner of enemies — settlers and neighbors, white men and fellow Indians — only to find themselves fighting one another.

“We’re a culture people, we’re a fishing people and a ceremony people,” said Raymond Mattz, 64, a member of the tribal council. “But it’s a rough time for us because everybody is so poor, and the money is making everybody a little goofy.”

On one side of the issue are leaders like Maria Tripp, the tribal chairwoman, who favors programs to address the myriad problems the tribe has struggled with over the years, including high unemployment, flagging fishing, drugs and alcohol, and the dwindling of lands, traditions and hope.

“We’re not going to get another $92 million dropped in our lap,” Ms. Tripp said. “This is an opportunity for us.”

On the other, some here feel that the money could — and should — be used to alleviate the day-to-day problems for hundreds of the tribe’s 5,000 members.

“We’ve got tribal members right now who have been waiting all their life,” said Willard Carlson Jr., 57, a tribe member. “And the thing about it is, it’s not the tribal government’s money. It’s the people’s money.”

The settlement was a result of a 1988 act of Congress that established the Yurok reservation. The law provided payment for the pre-1988 sale of logs on their land, some 63,000 acres about 325 miles north of San Francisco that snake along the fog-shrouded, and once salmon-rich, Klamath River. To gain the timber payment, the Yurok leadership only recently agreed not to sue the government in regards to the 1988 law, said Douglas Wheeler, a lawyer with Hogan & Hartson in Washington who is representing the tribe.

The issue of how to spend the money is up for a vote this fall, and the tribal council is required to put forth a plan. But at a tribal meeting in early August, several speakers were already expressing impatience about the pace of progress. At the annual salmon festival on Aug. 19, the tribe’s biggest event of the year, one parade float included a large sign reading: “Lump sum for all tribal members — 100 percent of settlement, 100 percent of interest!”

Various per capita proposals being floated include adults-only allotments, as well as payments for all members, plans that could result in payments of roughly $15,000 to $20,000.

That sort of opinion infuriates tribe members like Tom Willson, who works at the town fishery and said the settlement should be “seed money, to buy some of our lands back, to run programs, to ensure that the Yurok people go on forever.”

“If we squander that money, we’ll be in bad shape in a couple of years,” Mr. Willson said. “We’ll be nowhere.”

It was not always this way. Tribal lore holds that the Yurok were once one of the most prosperous tribes in the West. Their lands were — and still are — spectacular: lush green mountains reflected in the placid waters of the Klamath, which flows into the Pacific through a narrow sand channel. Legend has it that the passage is guarded by Oregos, an outcropping of rock resembling a mother with a child on her back, and that the Klamath beyond her was once so full of salmon a person could walk across the river on the backs of the fish.

And sure enough, for many generations, the fish and the redwoods provided jobs and prosperity, members say.

Cherokees flee the moral high ground over Freedmen - News From Indian Country

by Robert Warrior

Cherokee Chief Chad Smith is wrong and Representative Melvin Watt (D-North Carolina) is right. As those who follow the American Indian political world know, earlier this year an overwhelming majority of Cherokee voters decided to deny descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen, freed slaves who trod the Trail of Tears with their Native American owners, rights to political enfranchisement guaranteed to them in an 1866 treaty the Cherokees signed with the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War.

In June, Chief Smith campaigned on this popular issue and won a new term as elected leader of the largest Native nation within the border of the United States.

Watt is among a group of Congressional Democrats that also includes Maxine Waters and Diane Watson who are responding by calling into question whether or not United States taxpayers ought to be funding Cherokee programs. Most recently, the House Financial Services Committee decided to give the Cherokees a month to clear up the Freedmen issue before voting on Rep. Watt’s amendment to an affordable housing bill that would exclude the Cherokees until they are in compliance with the 1866 treaty. Smith and the Cherokees must respond by the time Congress comes back from its current recess.

The politics of this issue are certainly interesting—the embarrassingly low number of Cherokees, for instance, who participate in their nation’s electoral process (less than 8000 in a group of well over 150,000), the predictable way that this decision by one group exposes all American Indian nations to alienating people who have been important, reliable friends (the Congressional Black Caucus most visibly). Morality, however, has been the missing topic in the wrangling thus far, and I would argue is the basis for why it is important for everyone, especially American Indian people who have been silent thus far, to support efforts like those of Representative Watt.

The moral case against the Cherokees is straightforward. As a duly constituted nation in the nineteenth century, they legally embraced and promoted African slavery, a position they maintained after Removal to Indian Territory in the 1830s. The vast majority of Cherokees could not afford slaves, as was also the case throughout the American South, and historians of Cherokee slavery have demonstrated that some aspects of the Cherokee social world gave a different, less negative character to being enslaved by wealthy Cherokees rather than wealthy whites. Make no mistake, though. No one is on record as having volunteered to become a Cherokee slave. History records plenty of Cherokee slaves attempting to escape to freedom, as well as Cherokee slave revolts.

The institution of slavery was for Cherokees, as it has been for all people who practice it, morally and politically corruptive, and many citizens of this Native slaving nation knew it. Stories like that of the children of Shoeboots and Doll, a Cherokee slaveowner and his black concubine/wife, whose father risked his reputation as a war hero in petitioning for their recognition as Cherokees provides a picture of this ambiguity, but the cruelty, sexual violence, and physical degradation of modern slavery under Cherokees like James Vann is just as unambiguous (both are captured magnificently by University of Michigan scholar Tiya Miles in her 2005 book Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom).

The Cherokee Nation officially emancipated all slaves in 1863. The 1866 treaty that subsequently enfranchised these former slaves resulted in an amendment to the Cherokee Constitution that same year. That amendment reads: “All native born Cherokees, all Indians, and whites legally members of the Nation by adoption, and all freedmen who have been liberated by voluntary act of their former owners or by law, as well as free colored persons who were in the country at the commencement of the rebellion, and are now residents therein, or who may return within six months from the 19th day of July, 1866, and their descendants, who reside within the limits of the Cherokee Nation, shall be taken and deemed to be, citizens of the Cherokee Nation.” All of this was as a moral victory for those Cherokees who understood that institutionalizing slavery created moral implications that could only be addressed on moral grounds. That is, formal slaves need not just freedom, but also the protection of citizenship. How else, after all, can those who have lost so much expect to gain their lives without a context in which they can rebuild their lives?

More, though, is going on here, which is the sometimes heart-stopping recognition on the part of leaders of a slave-owning nation that many of those slaves who are so easy to think of as being THEM are in fact US. To be blunt, a history of modern slavery is also a history of rape. To be a slave among the Cherokees was to be sexually available to those who controlled your life. By the 1890s, a legal distinction between the Freedmen and those who were Cherokee “by blood” emerged, but in the moral universe such a distinction was hard to make, and even today the claim of those in the Cherokee majority who say they are primarily interested in maintaining their nation for those who can verify that they have Cherokee lineage rings hollow alongside the murky history of violence that Cherokee slaves and their descendants have inhabited. Such claims fail to rise to the level of those earlier Cherokees who understood that the tragic absurdity of reconciling a nation to its history of slavery requires wisdom and compassion, not insulting and ridiculous appeals to faulty membership requirements and the poses of victimhood.

In spite of being egged on and provoked by the legislated racism of the Cherokee Nation, the vast majority of Freedmen descendants have reacted with impressive dignity befitting their proud history. Melvin Watt and other black members of Congress have likewise responded in a measured, but active way. It remains for more people, including Native American writers, scholars, and artists, not to mention elected leaders, presidents, and chiefs, to stand up and be counted on the right moral side of this question. Better yet, Chad Smith could save us all the trouble by following some of the best examples of Cherokee history rather than the morally corrupting and exclusionary ones he and his supporters have chosen thus far.

Robert Warrior’s most recent book is American Indian Literary Nationalism (co-written with Jace Weaver and Craig Womack). He is Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Far-Reaching Policy for Aborigines Draws Their Fury

PAPUNYA, Australia, Aug. 18 — Since he walked out of the vast Gibson Desert in Australia in 1934 at the age of 12, Long Jack Phillipus has spent a lifetime helping his Aboriginal people slowly win rights from the white leadership. Then, this month, he saw the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard abruptly throw the process into reverse. And he is angry.

“We should be the boss of our land, not that fellow from Parliament House,” Mr. Phillipus said.

Mr. Phillipus’s land is the sun-baked heart of Australia. His home is in Papunya, 170 miles from the regional center, Alice Springs, and more than 60 miles from the nearest paved road. For 40,000 years his people roamed free across the surrounding red sand scrub, and ties to the land still run deep.

Like many other towns in the wide reaches of central Australia, Papunya was set up by the government in the 1950s as a distribution point for the rations it gave to Aboriginal people. For its residents, there is still a sense of their being unwilling subjects in a cultural experiment.

There is a temporary feel to the town, with succeeding generations of government housing lying derelict, and plastic bottles and abandoned cars strewn about. Along with the trash, other ills — drug addiction, domestic violence, poor health and lack of education — have grown and festered, magnified by the isolation.

Now the government has decided to address the ills, but critics say it is doing so in the paternalistic fashion it was supposed to have discarded decades ago. On Aug. 17, Parliament completed approval of legislation that, among other measures, requires welfare recipients to spend half their income on food, fines them if their children do not attend school, bans alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal areas in the Northern Territory and clears the way for the government to purchase five-year leases on Aboriginal town land.

The catalyst for the legislation was a government report that uncovered widespread sexual abuse and neglect of children in indigenous Australian communities. But critics note that the problems the legislation is intended to address are not unique to indigenous communities and argue that the fact that it applies only to Aboriginal communities makes it racist.

Aboriginal leaders have made similar accusations in the past. Relations were poisoned by a policy formally abandoned in 1969 in which Aboriginal children, the so-called stolen generation, were forcibly taken from their parents in an effort to assimilate them into white society.

In part because of lingering guilt over those practices, the government has been reluctant to take forceful action about the social problems in indigenous communities.

“It has always been too hard, there were no votes in it, and they were scared of creating another stolen generation,” said Alison Anderson, Mr. Phillipus’s granddaughter, who represents Papunya in the Northern Territory Assembly.

Indigenous people account for 2.7 percent of the Australian population, and by almost every measure they are worse off than the mainstream. Life expectancy is 17 years lower than the average Australian’s. They are 13 times as likely to be incarcerated, three times as likely to be unemployed and twice as likely to be victims of violence or to be threatened with violence. Almost all these indicators have gotten steadily worse since 1967, when indigenous Australians won citizenship.

“It’s good to have rights, but you’ve got to have responsibility too, and I think we lost sight of that,” Ms. Anderson said.

In the dusty streets of Papunya there is a palpable lassitude that many attribute to inadequate education and a scarcity of jobs for those who can read and write. The school has been upgraded, but on a recent Thursday only 25 of the 125 enrolled children turned up.

Many children are being reared by their struggling grandparents, because their parents have moved to Alice Springs, often to feed their alcohol or drug addictions. Of Papunya’s 360 residents, the overwhelming majority are entirely dependent on government money.

Despite these problems, the new legislation has stirred deep misgivings.

“John Howard’s trying to make us into white men,” said Sammy Butcher, a founder of Aboriginal Australia’s most successful rock group, the Warumpi Band.

Indigenous leaders are particularly critical of the stipulation that the government will purchase five-year leases on town lands. That issue, they say, has struck a particularly raw nerve among people whose ownership of the lands their people lived on for thousands of years was only recognized in 1967.

“I feel very sad that land is being taken away from Aboriginal society again and I don’t know why,” Mr. Phillipus said. “We don’t have a fight with John Howard.”

Sue Gordon, who leads the task force overseeing the government intervention, said the government needed the leases to build new schools, health clinics and police stations and upgrade existing facilities.

Almost everyone in the Northern Territory seems to agree that significant intervention is needed. And even if some of the policies are misguided, Ms. Anderson said, having the government engaged is better than the neglect of recent years. “We’re on a merry-go-round,” she said. “Every 30 years we seem to get off in the same place.”

Discovering How the Maya Fed the Multitude

An enduring question about the Maya civilization in its heyday in the first millennium A.D. has been: How did they feed so many people?

As studies have found much higher Maya population densities than previously estimated, scholars suspected that the farmers grew more than corn, beans and squash and developed more large-scale agriculture to feed the multitude. Perhaps they mastered the cultivation of manioc, a root crop common today in the American tropics.

But archaeologists and paleobotanists, hard as they tried, failed to discover direct and compelling evidence for manioc cultivation by the pre-Columbia Maya of Central America and Mexico, or any other ancient American cultures — until now.

Archaeologists at the University of Colorado, excavating this summer at a buried Maya village in El Salvador, reported yesterday the discovery of remains of a field of cultivated manioc that grew 1,400 years ago. They said this was the earliest evidence for domestication of the carbohydrate-rich tuber in the Americas.

The manioc field was found at Cerén, an archaeological site 20 miles northwest of San Salvador that is sometimes called the Pompeii of the New World. Around the year 600, the eruption of a nearby volcano buried Cerén’s buildings, artifacts and landscape under deep ash.

“This field was a jackpot of sorts for us,” said Payson D. Sheets, an anthropology professor at Colorado. “Manioc’s extraordinary productivity may help explain how the Classic Maya at huge sites like Tikal in Guatemala and Copán in Honduras supported such dense populations.”

In previous research at Cerén, just one manioc plant, also commonly called cassava, was found in a kitchen garden. Dr. Sheets said this led everyone to think that manioc must have had a minor place in the diet.

“How wrong we were,” he said, and he was not alone. A 1996 anthology on ancient Maya agriculture made only one reference to manioc, stating that “the role of root crops in the Maya diet is unknown.”

The team led by Dr. Sheets used ground-penetrating radar, drills and test pits to uncover the neat rows of manioc plantings 10 feet deep. Hollows left by decomposed plant material were cast in dental plaster to preserve their shapes and were subsequently identified as manioc tubers. The bush grows as high as six feet, and some of its roots, or tubers, are three feet long. They are usually ground into a high-carbohydrate flour.

The Colorado researchers are working with scientists at the Smithsonian Institution to develop techniques to detect starch grains like those from manioc in the soil of village ruins. “We don’t want to find out that Cerén was unique in manioc cultivation,” Dr. Sheets said.

Far From the Reservation, but Still Sacred?

Yuma, AZ

Squinting against the harsh desert sun, Mike Jackson, leader of the Quechan Indians, looks out past his tribe’s casino and the modern sprawl of Yuma and points to the sandy flatlands and the rust-colored Gila mountain range shimmering in the distance. “They came this way,” he says, describing how his ancestors followed the winding course of the Colorado River and ranged over hundreds of miles of what is now western Arizona and southeastern California. “There’s a lot of important history here, both for the Quechan and the U.S.”

And if it’s up to him, that history will go a long way in determining the future of this corner of the West, one of the fastest-growing parts of the country and a place where developers are increasingly running up against newly powerful but tradition-minded American Indian leaders like Mr. Jackson.

As president of the Quechans over the last decade, Mr. Jackson is leading a new kind of Indian war, this time in the courts. The battlegrounds are ancient sites like the religious circles, burial grounds and mountaintops across the West that Indians hold sacred and are protected by federal environmental and historic preservation laws. After successful smaller battles, Mr. Jackson is now challenging a bigger project, arguing that the construction of a planned $4 billion oil refinery in Arizona could destroy sites sacred to his tribe.

What makes this case different from more traditional fights between Indians and developers is that the refinery isn’t on the Quechan reservation or even next to it. In fact, the refinery is planned for a parcel of land some 40 miles to the east of the reservation, on the other side of Yuma and the Gila mountain range. But Mr. Jackson and the tribe’s lawyers argue that before the land can be transferred to the company building the refinery, Arizona Clean Fuels, or construction can start, an exhaustive archaeological and cultural inventory must take place.

The Quechans are not a large tribe. Also known as the Yuma Indians (they prefer the name Quechan, which means “those who descended”), they number about 3,300 and their reservation on the California-Arizona border covers roughly 70 square miles. That is a small fraction of the size of lands the federal government set aside more than a century ago to better-known nations like the Apaches or Navajos. Mr. Jackson has already stopped two planned projects — a low-level nuclear dump and a $50 million gold mine on the California side of the border — both also well away from the Quechan reservation. This year, he helped defeat the nomination of a Bush administration official who favored the mine to a federal appellate court.

LIKE the land itself, the fight over the refinery reflects a tangle of cultures and centuries of bitterness between Indians and newcomers. Mr. Jackson says it’s about respect for Quechan culture, and a new willingness on the part of Indians to stand up to the local establishment after centuries of not having a say. Business and political leaders in Yuma argue that it’s little more than a land grab by Mr. Jackson, a dubious attempt by the tribe to block much-needed development and assert claims to territory lost long ago.

What’s more, says Glenn McGinnis, chief executive of Arizona Clean Fuels, a preliminary inspection failed to turn up evidence of ruins near the site, which was privately owned for decades by local farmers but was later bought by the federal government to acquire water rights.

In any case, Mr. McGinnis says he’s committed to protecting any sacred remains that turn up once construction begins. But doing the more extensive survey sought by Mr. Jackson and the Quechans now would not only delay the project by months, it would also cost about $250,000, which Arizona Clean Fuels would be obligated to cover.

The dispute is about more than money, though. It has also brought resentment of the tribe’s newfound clout to the surface. David Treanor, vice president of Arizona Clean Fuels, calls the Quechans’ stance “psychological imperialism” and compares Mr. Jackson to Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s left-wing leader.

Casey Prochaska, chairwoman of the Yuma County Board of Supervisors, adds: “My grandmother probably went across here in a covered wagon. This country didn’t stop because they walked over this land.”

Indeed, the refinery isn’t even the main issue for some business leaders. “It’s a question of how far does their sphere of influence go,” says Ken Rosevear, executive director of the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce. “Does it go clear to Phoenix? To Las Vegas? The whole West?”

Casey Prochaska, chairwoman of Yuma County’s Board of Supervisors, is skeptical of the tribe’s contentions that relics are on a proposed refinery site.
Mr. Rosevear may be exaggerating, but his fear illustrates just what’s at stake. If the Quechans’ lawsuit succeeds, it would bolster the efforts of other, larger tribes to block development on territory where they also once lived and prayed.

Navajos and Environmentalists Split on Power Plant

BURNHAM, N.M. — For the Navajo nation, energy is the most valuable currency. The tribal lands are rich with uranium, natural gas, wind, sun and, most of all, coal.

But two coal-fired power plants here, including one on the reservation, belch noxious fumes, making the air among the worst in the state. Now the tribe is moving forward with plans for a bigger plant, Desert Rock, that Navajo authorities hope will bring in $50 million a year in taxes, royalties and other income by selling power to Phoenix and Las Vegas.

The plan has stirred opposition from some Navajos who regard the $3 billion proposal as a lethal “energy monster” that desecrates Father Sky and Mother Earth and from environmental groups that fear global warming implications from its carbon dioxide emissions.

New Mexico, which has no authority over the tribal lands, has also expressed misgivings and has refused to grant the plant tax breaks.

The struggle is a homegrown version of the global debate on slowing climate change.

Developed countries are trying to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous gas usually linked to climate change, and argue that rapidly growing nations like India and China should avoid building coal-fired power plants. The critics’ targets say it is unfair to keep them from powering their way to prosperity with cheap and abundant coal.

The Navajo president, Joe Shirley Jr., said his tribe felt similar pressure. Mr. Shirley said the plant here would mean hundreds of jobs, higher incomes and better lives for some of the 200,000 people on the reservation. The tribe derives little direct financial benefit from the operation of the existing coal-fired plants and it has not yet invested heavily in casinos.

“Why pick on the little Navajo nation, when it’s trying to help itself?” he asked.

The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, teaming with local groups like the San Juan Citizens’ Alliance, point to environmental shortcomings in the federal government’s tentative blessing of the plant, as laid out in a 1,600-page draft environmental impact statement and an analysis by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The staff of Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential aspirant, recently issued a statement saying that the plant “would be a significant new source of greenhouse gases and other pollution in the region” and that Mr. Richardson “believes, as planned, it would be a step in the wrong direction,” undoing his proposed reductions in emissions.

In 2003, the Navajo invited Sithe Global Power, a merchant power company based in New York, to build the $3 billion 1,500-megawatt plant with the Navajo-owned Dine (pronounced dee-NAY) Power Authority.

In most respects, the plant would be relatively clean, with emissions of mercury, soot and smog-forming pollutants lower than most such operations. But each year, it would emit 12 million tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of adding 1.5 million average cars to the roads.

Coal-fired electricity contributes more than half of the 57 million tons of annual carbon-dioxide emissions in New Mexico. Together, the two existing plants emit 29 million tons.

Tom Johns, a vice president of Sithe Global Power, said he, too, was concerned about climate change. Desert Rock, Mr. Johns said, would be part of the solution.

“Carbon is emitted when we use energy,” Mr. Johns said. “By not building one plant but another or by using older inefficient plants instead of new ones, we don’t solve the problem. The solution to carbon issues is to be more efficient in how we use energy.”

Worries about pollution from a new plant build on lingering concerns about the ill effects of previous energy exploitation on the tribal lands. Navajos have been sickened and killed by uranium tailings, leading the tribal government to ban uranium mining. Mercury contamination has led New Mexico to warn children and pregnant women against eating large carp and catfish from much of the San Juan River, which passes through the northeastern end of the 26,600-square-mile reservation. And the ozone levels in San Juan County, which includes the eastern part of the reservation, have exceeded suggested new federal standards.

Elouise Brown, a Navajo whose family is from the area around the proposed plant, has led a group called Dooda (pronounced dough-DAH) Desert Rock, Navajo for “No to Desert Rock,” in a seven-month protest at the site.

The tribal council voted overwhelmingly to back the project, but Navajos are divided, with each side claiming to speak for the majority.

“It’s not just that it’s so close to my house or my family,” Ms. Brown said. “It’s the pollution and what the impacts are going to be from the pollution to all the people that live there. Not only the people that live there, but it adds to global warming. So it’s going to be a worldwide issue.”

The fight, in one of the emptiest regions, echoes in many respects the debates over the more than 100 proposals to build coal-fired power plants.

Aboriginal Art Industry Booming In Outback

ALICE SPRINGS, Australia (Reuters) - Aboriginal art in Australia is booming and improving the lives of poor black communities, but unscrupulous dealers are ripping off artists and fraud from China and India is undermining the industry.

Artwork of ancient "Dreaming" stories, painted on canvases in the outback dirt and hung from trees to dry, regularly fetch thousands of dollars in urban galleries and sometimes millions.

"Earth's Creation" by the late artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye's, a vivid painting recounting a "Dreaming" creation myth, set a world record for an aboriginal artwork in May, selling for A$1.056 million (US$910,345).

Sotheby's in Australia will this month auction up to A$9.8 million worth of aboriginal art, with Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's 1977 masterwork "Warlugulong" expected to fetch A$1.8 million to A$2.5 million.

But while well-known artists are reaping the rewards, some aboriginal artists are being targeted by "carpetbaggers" -- dealers out to make easy money.

Some dealers are paying only a fraction of the retail price to artists who often speak very little English and have never ventured off their remote traditional lands, said a recent Australian parliamentary report.

"Carpetbagging has become a problem through the combination of the great success of indigenous art and the weak economic bargaining position in which indigenous people frequently find themselves," said the report on the indigenous art industry.

One dealer reportedly paid A$150 for a painting that took a week to produce and was worth A$1,500, it said, while others paid for funerals in return for relatives producing art, sometimes worth A$30,000 or 15 times the cost of a funeral.

In one incident, aboriginal artists were forced to live in "squalid conditions" in a motel in the outback town of Alice Springs and produce paintings, said the Senate report.

The artists were paid very little and charged rent they could not afford, keeping them in a "debt-trap obligating them to produce more paintings," it said.

FAKE ART FROM CHINA, INDIA

Australia's aboriginal art industry is worth an estimated A$100 to A$300 million, with about 6,000 artists in more than 80 remote outback communities, said the Senate report.

The value of aboriginal art has risen 40 to 50 percent a year for a decade and mass-produced fake aboriginal paintings were now entering the market to cash in on the boom, it said.

One Indian dealer drove a hire car to the remote Yuendumu aboriginal community, 600km (372 miles) northeast of Alice Springs, and bought every piece of art he could find. He then shipped the artwork back to India to be reproduced and sold the fakes on Australia's tourist Gold Coast, said the Senate report.

Paintings labelled "aboriginal styled" art and craft were being imported to Australia from China and Taiwan and sold in capital cities with fake certificates of authenticity, it said.

"It is obviously worrying. Fraudulent work is coming in from China," said Josh van Haaren, manager of the Mbantua Gallery in Alice Springs which bought "Earth's Creation."

Concerns over the authenticity of aboriginal artwork has led the Mbantua Gallery to introduce micro-chipping of artwork.

IndenteArt is a three-tiered security label system which consists of a microdot, encrypted with multiple lines of code relating to the gallery name, artwork and artist, and a "chemical barcode" impregnated in label and glue.

"If you remove the label, which is quite hard to do, there will still be a trace element there on the painting," explains van Haaren, as he applies a security label to a painting.

The third level of security sees the label's serial number linked to a global database detailing a photograph of the artwork, its origin and buyer.

"If it gets stolen you can jump onto the IndenteArt website and red flag it. If it does turn up it will find its way back to you much more easily," said van Haaren.

ART IMPROVES HEALTH

For the past 21 years the Mbantua Gallery has sourced its artwork from Aborigines living in the Utopia lands northeast of Alice Springs. Every fortnight the gallery drives to 10 black communities, loaded with canvases, paints and brushes. Two weeks later they return and buy the artwork hanging from the trees.

There is no commissioning, the artists create whatever they like, from small artwork you hold in your hand to wall hangings.

"We deal direct with the artists. We know everyone we deal with very well. We negotiate a price with the owner and pay them straight away," said van Haaren, adding the gallery has created a foundation to improve the lives of the Utopian artists.

Australia's 460,000 Aborigines make up 2 percent of the 20 million population and are the most disadvantaged group in the nation. They have a life expectancy 17 years lower than white Australians and have higher rates of heart and kidney disease.

Aboriginal artists are paid about 60 percent of the sale price of their artwork, with much of the proceeds shared in extended-families. Often the sale of paintings is the only income in the community, as there are no jobs in these desert lands.

"The indigenous visual arts and craft sector provides very significant economic, social and cultural benefits," said the Senate report, citing jobs and funding of medical services.

In the past six years the Papunya Tula artists have funded a dialysis unit at the Kintore community and raised A$900,000 for the construction of a swimming pool, which helps reduce eye diseases amongst children who swim in the chlorinated water.

Aborigines do not view their art as a commodity, but more a communal asset to be shared. The "Dreaming" stories belong to all their people, passed down from father to child.

"To be an indigenous artists or artisan is quite a different calling than to be an artist in the European tradition," said the Senate report.

"For many indigenous artists, visual art and craft is not seen as a commodity but rather something akin to a family member -- it represents a multi-layered connection to the past, present and future."

Indians Widen Old Outlet in Youth Lacrosse

ONEIDA TERRITORY, N.Y., July 9 — Tim Glass’s mother tells him that he was born with a lacrosse stick in his hand, because his ancestors invented the game. Tim, 14, and his two younger brothers sometimes practice their chosen sport in T-shirts that say, “It’s in our blood.”

Here on Oneida land, roughly 25 miles east of Syracuse, they are part of a new generation of American Indians reasserting their heritage through a game that was invented by their ancestors but in recent decades has been perceived mainly as the province of prep schools and elite colleges.

Over the past four years, the North American Minor Lacrosse Association has grown into a league of six American Indian teams, each with different age divisions, in upstate New York, with 1,000 players ages 3 to 20. Some upstate Indian tribes, newly prosperous from gambling profits and keen to preserve their past, have hired coaches and referees, bought equipment and refurbished playing fields.

Last month, the Seneca tribe spent $97,000 on artificial turf to upgrade a lacrosse stadium on the Allegany Reservation, about 50 miles south of Buffalo. In Lewiston, just northeast of Niagara Falls, the Tuscaroras are building a lacrosse park with six playing areas. The popular contests often draw hundreds of spectators for daylong picnics and festivities, helping unite disparate tribes in a culture often splintered by ancient and modern rivalries.

“It’s not an elite sport to us, it’s a way of life,” said Randi Rourke, editor of Indian Country Today, a leading native newspaper, who pointed to a tradition in which fathers and grandfathers present lacrosse sticks to baby boys. “You play it the moment you can walk. We call it a ‘medicine game’ because it makes people happy to watch, so it’s a kind of medicine.”

Brian Patterson, president of the United South and Eastern Tribes, which represents 24 tribes primarily east of the Mississippi River, said the renewed interest in lacrosse was part of a broader movement to revive Indian languages and traditions in a younger generation. He said he had encouraged young people like his 11-year-old son, Schuyler, who plays for the Oneida Silverhawks, to draw strength and courage from lacrosse, as their ancestors did, to ward off modern-day pressures and problems like drugs and alcohol.

“It’s more than a game; it’s truly an identity for us,” Mr. Patterson said. “With new resources available to the tribal nations, we’re able to provide a future for our people by securing our past.”

Scientists Find Earliest Sign of Cultivated Crops in Americas

Scientists exploring the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have found seeds of domesticated squash from almost 10,000 years ago, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region.

The find in Peru and recent research in Mexico, anthropologists say, are evidence that farming developed in parts of the Americas nearly as early as it did in the Middle East, which has been considered the birthplace of the earliest agriculture.

Digging under house floors and grinding stones and in stone-lined storage bins, the archaeologist Tom D. Dillehey of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, uncovered the squash seeds at several places in the Ñanchoc Valley, near the Pacific coast about 400 miles north of Lima. The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively.

The new, more precise dating of the plant remains, some of which were collected two decades ago, are reported by Dr. Dillehey and colleagues in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and some unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period.

The researchers concluded that these beginnings in plant domestication “served as catalysts for rapid social changes that eventually contributed to the development of intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and towns in both the Andean highlands and on the coast between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago.”

The evidence at Ñanchoc, Dr. Dillehey’s team wrote, indicated that “agriculture played a more important and earlier role in the development of Andean civilization than previously understood.”

In an accompanying article on early agriculture, Eve Emshwiller, an ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was quoted as saying the reports of early dates for plant domestication in the New World were remarkable because the activity appeared to have occurred not long after humans first colonized the Americas, which is now thought to be at least 13,000 years ago.

The article also noted that 10,000-year-old cultivated squash seeds have recently been reported in Mexico, along with evidence of domesticated maize there by 9,000 years ago. Scholars now think that plants were domesticated independently in at least 10 “centers of origin;” those centers, in addition to the Middle East, Mexico and Peru, include places in Africa, southern India, China and New Guinea.

In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, an arc from modern-day Israel through Syria and southeastern Turkey to Iraq, wheat and barley were domesticated at least 10,000 years ago, and rye may have been domesticated 13,000 years ago. Experts in ancient agriculture suspect that the transition from foraging to cultivation started much earlier than that, and was not as abrupt a transformation as the archaeological record would seem to indicate.

Dr. Dillehey has devoted several decades to research on ancient cultures in South America. His most notable previous achievement was the discovery of a campsite of hunger-gatherers at Monte Verde, in Chile, which dates to about 13,000 years ago. Most archaeologists recognize this as the earliest well-documented human occupation site uncovered so far in the New World.

Other explorations in recent years have yielded increasing evidence of settlements and organized political societies that flourished in the coastal valleys of northern Peru, possibly as early as 5,000 years ago. Until now, the record of earlier farming in the region had been sparse.

Initial radiocarbon dating of the plant remains from Ñanchoc was based on wood charcoal buried at the sites, but the results varied widely and were considered unreliable. More recent radiocarbon dating, with a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry, relied on measurements from undisturbed buried charcoal and an analysis of the actual plant remains.

The distribution of building structures, canals and furrowed fields, Dr. Dillehey said, indicated that the Andean culture was moving beyond cultivation limited to individual households toward an organized agricultural society.

Botanists studying the squash, peanut and cotton remains determined that the specific strains did not grow naturally in the Ñanchoc area. The peanut, in particular, was thought to be better suited to cultivation in tropical forests and savannas elsewhere in South America. The wild ancestor of squash has yet to be identified, though lowlands in Colombia are thought to be a likely source.

So if the new research shows that the “horticultural economies in parts of the Andes took root by about 10,000 years ago,” Dr. Dillehey’s team said, it remains to be seen when and where the domestication of squash, peanuts and cotton took place.