MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT INDIAN RESERVATION, Conn. — Things are different now for the Hayward family, who took this tiny tribal nation on a dizzying odyssey two decades ago from virtual dust to startling wealth and power.
With Haywards at the helm, the Pequots built one of the most profitable casinos in the world here, a teal and lavender fortress known as Foxwoods that looms like Xanadu above the rustic woods.
Within a few years, the tribe traded in a life of pig farming and maple sugaring for one of lavish homes, expensive cars and private school educations.
But 15 years after Foxwoods opened, the family that brought the Pequots back from the brink, that repopulated an almost empty reservation and rebuilt its economic soul, says the tribe has cast it aside in recent years.
Richard A. Hayward, a former pipefitter who led the tribe for 23 years, has rarely been seen on the reservation since being deposed as the Pequot leader several years ago.
The rest of the 70-member Hayward clan say they, too, have been shunned by the Pequot family that now controls the tribal government.
After years of infighting, the Haywards say they have been demoted, fired, pushed out of jobs. Several say it has gotten so bad that they are thinking of moving away from land they fought to reclaim.
“We gave them everything on a platter,” said Theresa H. Bell, 55, a Hayward who resigned in September from running the Pequot museum, a Hayward dream financed by casino profits. “And they just slapped us in the face.”
Other members of the 800-person tribe see it differently.
They say the Haywards withdrew from tribal affairs after their leader, Mr. Hayward, fell from power several years ago. They say it was the Haywards who had wielded power unfairly.
John L. Holder, who helped rebuild the tribe and is now executive assistant to the tribal chairman, said Mr. Hayward became rude and undemocratic as chairman.
“He ridiculed people to the point of tears," Mr. Holder said.
Despite the internal tribal feuding, Foxwoods remains a major economic force in Connecticut, with 10,000 employees and annual revenues of more than $1 billion. Its success has served as a model, a tonic, for impoverished tribes across the country who followed the Pequots’ lead, embraced gambling and made their own fortunes.
But the Haywards say that that success is increasingly threatened by the dissension and by the inability of their successors, the Sebastian family, to adapt to a crowded gambling market.
They point to a slip in revenues from slot machines, the workhorses of megacasinos like Foxwoods. Slot revenues fell last year after more than a decade of skyrocketing growth, in part because of competition from Mohegan Sun, a rival Indian casino five miles west.
Current tribal leaders described the Pequots’ finances as sound and said any disagreements were routine. “We are no different than other large families in terms of diverse opinions,” the tribal chairman, Michael J. Thomas, wrote in an e-mail message. He added, “There is no pattern of any disagreement that runs along family or ethnic lines.”
Mr. Holder said that while the Haywards had some legitimate concerns, many stemmed from bitterness and misunderstanding. “The tribe is not doomed,” he said.
The Haywards, however, are undeniably disillusioned. One Hayward sister walks the reservation in a sweatshirt advertising Foxwoods’ gambling rival, the Mohegan Sun. Five of Mr. Hayward’s eight siblings spoke out about their disagreements this spring with a reporter, rare moments of openness for a private people who seldom speak to the press.
The Haywards described the tribe as deeply troubled. They say they worry, for example, that too many young Pequots, their own children included, are increasingly idle and drawn to drugs because they are given lots of money at an early age.
“It’s going to break up,” Loretta Libby, 76, who has spent most of her life on the reservation, said of her tribe. “We are breaking up.”
Friday, June 22, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Native Soices symposium
The Native Voices Symposium at the University of Arizona begins tomorrow, June 14. The keynote speech, given by Leslie Marmon Silko, will be available via a live stream through this website (Link on title) beginning at 7PM MST. The symposium program can be downloaded also. If you are in the vicinity, be sure to come by for the public sessions.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Powells.com Interviews - Sherman Alexie
Darkly funny, sharply observant, Flight lays bare the experience of a teenaged outsider circa 2007. Alternately heartbreaking and wondrous, Sherman Alexie's first novel in ten years tells the story of an orphan careening through foster homes until finally, not long after we meet him, he walks into a bank and comes unstuck in time. Gritty, intense, and especially timely, it's a lightning-fast read besides. Sherman Alexie
And according to Alexie, the story bound in these paperback pages is only a start. "Flight has been so extensively rewritten in my mind," he says, "that we think I'm going to rewrite it extensively and republish it in a year and a half."
Say what?
Having written seventeen books (prose and lots of poetry) and several screenplays, the Washington native is not afraid to flaunt convention. Sometimes at his readings, for example, he never quite gets around to reading. Or he'll simply use the book to get started. "My performances are a process of rewriting," Alexie explains.
Before his event downtown, Alexie stopped by to discuss the new book, slobbering on Stephen King, potlatch culture, pile of crap novels, and more.
And according to Alexie, the story bound in these paperback pages is only a start. "Flight has been so extensively rewritten in my mind," he says, "that we think I'm going to rewrite it extensively and republish it in a year and a half."
Say what?
Having written seventeen books (prose and lots of poetry) and several screenplays, the Washington native is not afraid to flaunt convention. Sometimes at his readings, for example, he never quite gets around to reading. Or he'll simply use the book to get started. "My performances are a process of rewriting," Alexie explains.
Before his event downtown, Alexie stopped by to discuss the new book, slobbering on Stephen King, potlatch culture, pile of crap novels, and more.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
With Tuition Waiver, Maine Invests in Its ‘First People’
ORONO, Me. — By the time she was 32, Karen Carrion was living in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., working for a concert promoter and looking for a change. She had never attended college and considered it out of the question because of the cost.
That changed when Ms. Carrion’s mother, a Maine native and a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, urged her to apply to the University of Maine and its North American Indian Waiver and Scholarship Program.
“I probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all if not for this,” Ms. Carrion, a sophomore majoring in women’s studies, said between classes at the university’s flagship campus in Orono, about eight miles north of Bangor.
The scholarship pays for tuition, fees, room and board for any undergraduate or graduate student who can prove membership in a state or federally recognized tribe or can prove direct descent from a member.
Members of recognized Canadian tribes are also eligible, though students from outside Maine must first live in the state for one year to establish residency.
About 500 students throughout the University of Maine system are enrolled in the program. About 160 of them, 40 of whom are from out of state, are enrolled at Orono, said John Bear Mitchell, coordinator of the waiver program.
The program dates to 1934, when university trustees voted to grant full scholarships to five students who were members of the Penobscot or Passamaquoddy tribes. In 1971, the criteria were broadened to include all North American Indians, but few took advantage. In 2001, the university appointed Mr. Mitchell to streamline the program, and enrollment has increased.
“I think it’s our responsibility as a land grant university to work together with the state’s first people and ensure they not only have access, but succeed in higher education,” said Edna Mora Szymanski, the senior vice president and provost.
Mr. Mitchell said the program cost the state about $2 million last year.
Other colleges and universities around the country offer similar programs. Among them are the University of Minnesota-Morris and Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., which give qualified American Indians free tuition, and the University of Massachusetts system, which offers tuition waivers to Indians who are state residents. Michigan waives tuition at all public colleges and universities for students who prove their tribal lineage or membership and reside in the state for a year or more.
Syracuse University offers free tuition, fees, room and board to first-year and transfer students from local tribes.
According to a 2005 report by the American Council on Education, the number of American Indian students attending college doubled from 1977 to 2002. Mr. Mitchell, a member of the Penobscot Nation, said the Maine program helped empower its students and gave them a chance to return to their communities and give back.
Mr. Mitchell is also a co-director of the Wabanaki Center at the university, which studies the four largest tribes in Maine: the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot. According to the 2000 census, six-tenths of 1 percent of Maine residents, or about 7,000 people, are American Indian.
The center is a gathering place for Indian students, many of whom lived on small reservations before coming to college. “It’s a safe place. It provides students with a set of relations within the university community,” said Shaerri Mitchell, 36, a graduate student whose grandfather founded the center. “It models the communal structure of a reservation.” She and Mr. Mitchell are cousins.
Sonya Lacoute, who attended the university as an undergraduate and will receive her master’s in social work next May, came to Orono from Pleasant Point Indian Reservation, which is home to about 2,000 people in far eastern Maine.
Ms. Lacoute, who works now in the tribal court for the Penobscot Nation on Indian Island, about four miles from campus, said the scholarship allowed her to attend college and the center helped her adjust to life in a more urban setting than she was used to.
“To me, this was the big city,” she said. “In that very different environment, it was nice to know that there were other natives here in a very welcoming environment.”
Mr. Mitchell said he hoped to bring more out-of-state students to the program. He does not have much of a recruiting budget, he said, and news of the scholarship travels mainly by word of mouth. Students are going to high school classrooms around Maine to publicize the program.
“We’re still underrepresented in the University of Maine system,” Mr. Mitchell said. “For a long time the public thought we were needy, and we want to show them that we’re not. We want to educate students, graduate them, and give the state more tax money and a return on their investment.”
That changed when Ms. Carrion’s mother, a Maine native and a member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, urged her to apply to the University of Maine and its North American Indian Waiver and Scholarship Program.
“I probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all if not for this,” Ms. Carrion, a sophomore majoring in women’s studies, said between classes at the university’s flagship campus in Orono, about eight miles north of Bangor.
The scholarship pays for tuition, fees, room and board for any undergraduate or graduate student who can prove membership in a state or federally recognized tribe or can prove direct descent from a member.
Members of recognized Canadian tribes are also eligible, though students from outside Maine must first live in the state for one year to establish residency.
About 500 students throughout the University of Maine system are enrolled in the program. About 160 of them, 40 of whom are from out of state, are enrolled at Orono, said John Bear Mitchell, coordinator of the waiver program.
The program dates to 1934, when university trustees voted to grant full scholarships to five students who were members of the Penobscot or Passamaquoddy tribes. In 1971, the criteria were broadened to include all North American Indians, but few took advantage. In 2001, the university appointed Mr. Mitchell to streamline the program, and enrollment has increased.
“I think it’s our responsibility as a land grant university to work together with the state’s first people and ensure they not only have access, but succeed in higher education,” said Edna Mora Szymanski, the senior vice president and provost.
Mr. Mitchell said the program cost the state about $2 million last year.
Other colleges and universities around the country offer similar programs. Among them are the University of Minnesota-Morris and Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., which give qualified American Indians free tuition, and the University of Massachusetts system, which offers tuition waivers to Indians who are state residents. Michigan waives tuition at all public colleges and universities for students who prove their tribal lineage or membership and reside in the state for a year or more.
Syracuse University offers free tuition, fees, room and board to first-year and transfer students from local tribes.
According to a 2005 report by the American Council on Education, the number of American Indian students attending college doubled from 1977 to 2002. Mr. Mitchell, a member of the Penobscot Nation, said the Maine program helped empower its students and gave them a chance to return to their communities and give back.
Mr. Mitchell is also a co-director of the Wabanaki Center at the university, which studies the four largest tribes in Maine: the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot. According to the 2000 census, six-tenths of 1 percent of Maine residents, or about 7,000 people, are American Indian.
The center is a gathering place for Indian students, many of whom lived on small reservations before coming to college. “It’s a safe place. It provides students with a set of relations within the university community,” said Shaerri Mitchell, 36, a graduate student whose grandfather founded the center. “It models the communal structure of a reservation.” She and Mr. Mitchell are cousins.
Sonya Lacoute, who attended the university as an undergraduate and will receive her master’s in social work next May, came to Orono from Pleasant Point Indian Reservation, which is home to about 2,000 people in far eastern Maine.
Ms. Lacoute, who works now in the tribal court for the Penobscot Nation on Indian Island, about four miles from campus, said the scholarship allowed her to attend college and the center helped her adjust to life in a more urban setting than she was used to.
“To me, this was the big city,” she said. “In that very different environment, it was nice to know that there were other natives here in a very welcoming environment.”
Mr. Mitchell said he hoped to bring more out-of-state students to the program. He does not have much of a recruiting budget, he said, and news of the scholarship travels mainly by word of mouth. Students are going to high school classrooms around Maine to publicize the program.
“We’re still underrepresented in the University of Maine system,” Mr. Mitchell said. “For a long time the public thought we were needy, and we want to show them that we’re not. We want to educate students, graduate them, and give the state more tax money and a return on their investment.”
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Engulfed by Climate Change, Town Seeks Lifeline
NEWTOK, Alaska — The sturdy little Cessnas land whenever the fog lifts, delivering children’s bicycles, boxes of bullets, outboard motors and cans of dried oats. And then, with a rumble down a gravel strip, the planes are gone, the outside world recedes and this subarctic outpost steels itself once again to face the frontier of climate change.
“I don’t want to live in permafrost no more,” said Frank Tommy, 47, standing beside gutted geese and seal meat drying on a wooden rack outside his mother’s house. “It’s too muddy. Everything is crooked around here.”
The earth beneath much of Alaska is not what it used to be. The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean. Sea ice that would normally protect coastal villages is forming later in the year, allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline.
Erosion has made Newtok an island, caught between the ever widening Ninglick River and a slough to the north. The village is below sea level, and sinking. Boardwalks squish into the spring muck. Human waste, collected in “honey buckets” that many residents use for toilets, is often dumped within eyeshot in a village where no point is more than a five-minute walk from any other. The ragged wooden houses have to be adjusted regularly to level them on the shifting soil.
Studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade. Along with the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther to the north, it has been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some degree of erosion.
Some villages plan to hunker down behind sea walls built or planned by the Army Corps of Engineers, at least for now. Others, like Newtok, have no choice but to abandon their patch of tundra. The corps has estimated that to move Newtok could cost $130 million because of its remoteness, climate and topography. That comes to almost $413,000 for each of the 315 residents.
Not that anyone is offering to pay.
After all, climate change is raising questions about how to deal with drought, wildfires, hurricanes and other threats that affect so many more people and involve large sums of money.
“We haven’t sat down as a society and said, ‘How are we going to adapt to this?’ ” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a lead author of a recent report by a United Nations panel on the impacts and vulnerability presented by climate change. “Just like we haven’t sat down and said, ‘How are we going to reduce emissions?’ And both have to be done.”
Amid the uncertainty, the residents of Newtok hear the skeptics, who question the price tag for moving such a small, seemingly inconsequential place. But residents here emphasize that they are a federally recognized American Indian tribe, and they shudder when asked why they cannot just move to an existing village or a city like Fairbanks.
They say their identity is rooted in their isolation, however qualified it has become over the last century by outside influences. It was the government, they say, that insisted decades ago that they and so many other villages abandon their nomadic ways and pick a place to call home. The current village site was once only a winter camp, and the people of Newtok say they are not to blame just because they are now among the first climate refugees in the United States.
“The federal government, they’re the ones who came into our lives and took away some of our values,” said Nick Tom Jr., 49, the former Newtok tribal administrator. “They came in and said, ‘You aren’t civilized. We’re going to educate you.’ That was hard for our grandparents.”
“I don’t want to live in permafrost no more,” said Frank Tommy, 47, standing beside gutted geese and seal meat drying on a wooden rack outside his mother’s house. “It’s too muddy. Everything is crooked around here.”
The earth beneath much of Alaska is not what it used to be. The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean. Sea ice that would normally protect coastal villages is forming later in the year, allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline.
Erosion has made Newtok an island, caught between the ever widening Ninglick River and a slough to the north. The village is below sea level, and sinking. Boardwalks squish into the spring muck. Human waste, collected in “honey buckets” that many residents use for toilets, is often dumped within eyeshot in a village where no point is more than a five-minute walk from any other. The ragged wooden houses have to be adjusted regularly to level them on the shifting soil.
Studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade. Along with the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther to the north, it has been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some degree of erosion.
Some villages plan to hunker down behind sea walls built or planned by the Army Corps of Engineers, at least for now. Others, like Newtok, have no choice but to abandon their patch of tundra. The corps has estimated that to move Newtok could cost $130 million because of its remoteness, climate and topography. That comes to almost $413,000 for each of the 315 residents.
Not that anyone is offering to pay.
After all, climate change is raising questions about how to deal with drought, wildfires, hurricanes and other threats that affect so many more people and involve large sums of money.
“We haven’t sat down as a society and said, ‘How are we going to adapt to this?’ ” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a lead author of a recent report by a United Nations panel on the impacts and vulnerability presented by climate change. “Just like we haven’t sat down and said, ‘How are we going to reduce emissions?’ And both have to be done.”
Amid the uncertainty, the residents of Newtok hear the skeptics, who question the price tag for moving such a small, seemingly inconsequential place. But residents here emphasize that they are a federally recognized American Indian tribe, and they shudder when asked why they cannot just move to an existing village or a city like Fairbanks.
They say their identity is rooted in their isolation, however qualified it has become over the last century by outside influences. It was the government, they say, that insisted decades ago that they and so many other villages abandon their nomadic ways and pick a place to call home. The current village site was once only a winter camp, and the people of Newtok say they are not to blame just because they are now among the first climate refugees in the United States.
“The federal government, they’re the ones who came into our lives and took away some of our values,” said Nick Tom Jr., 49, the former Newtok tribal administrator. “They came in and said, ‘You aren’t civilized. We’re going to educate you.’ That was hard for our grandparents.”
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Pope: Injustices Done in Colonization
VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI, who has been criticized by Indian rights groups, said Wednesday the church does not gloss over the injustices that accompanied the Christian colonization of Latin America and lamented that indigenous peoples' basic rights were often trampled upon by missionaries.
''While we do not overlook the various injustices and sufferings which accompanied colonization, the Gospel has expressed and continues to express the identity of the peoples in this region and provides inspiration to address the challenges of our globalized era,'' Benedict told English-speaking pilgrims in St. Peter's Square as he talked about his trip to Brazil earlier this month.
Benedict said that his visit to Brazil, his first papal voyage to Latin America, ''embraced not only that great nation, but all Latin America, home to many of the world's Catholics.'' He described the trip as being ''above all, a pilgrimage of praise to God for the faith which has shaped their cultures for over 500 years.''
''Certainly, the memory of a glorious past cannot ignore the shadows that accompanied the work of evangelizing the Latin American continent,'' the pope said.
Benedict's remarks to Italian-speaking pilgrims at his general audience in the square were even stronger than the comments in English.
''It is not possible, indeed, to forget the sufferings and injustices inflicted by colonizers on the indigenous populations, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled on,'' Benedict said.
The pontiff said he was making a ''dutiful mention of such unjustifiable crimes'' and said some missionaries and theologians in the past had condemned them.
Indian rights groups in Brazil criticized Benedict for his insistence that Latin American Indians wanted to become Christian before European conquerors arrived centuries ago.
During the trip, the pontiff told a regional conference of bishops in Brazil that pre-Columbian people of Latin America and the Caribbean were seeking Christ without realizing it.
Paulo Suess, an adviser to the church-backed Brazil's Indian Missionary Council, said at the end of the trip that Benedict's comments failed to take into account that Indians were enslaved and killed by the Portuguese and Spanish settlers who forced them to become Catholic.
Marcio Meira, in charge of Brazil's federal Indian Bureau, said Indians were forced to convert to Catholicism as the result of a ''colonial process.''
The pope in Brazil told the bishops that, ''the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.''
In 2000, during the Vatican's Holy Year, the Catholic Church apologized to Brazil's Indians and blacks during a ceremony in Brazil for the ''sins and errors'' committed by its clergy and faithful in the past 500 years. A Vatican cardinal representing Pope John Paul II participated in the ceremony, which saw the head of Brazil's bishops conference ask God for forgiveness for the sins committed against brothers, especially the Indians.
''While we do not overlook the various injustices and sufferings which accompanied colonization, the Gospel has expressed and continues to express the identity of the peoples in this region and provides inspiration to address the challenges of our globalized era,'' Benedict told English-speaking pilgrims in St. Peter's Square as he talked about his trip to Brazil earlier this month.
Benedict said that his visit to Brazil, his first papal voyage to Latin America, ''embraced not only that great nation, but all Latin America, home to many of the world's Catholics.'' He described the trip as being ''above all, a pilgrimage of praise to God for the faith which has shaped their cultures for over 500 years.''
''Certainly, the memory of a glorious past cannot ignore the shadows that accompanied the work of evangelizing the Latin American continent,'' the pope said.
Benedict's remarks to Italian-speaking pilgrims at his general audience in the square were even stronger than the comments in English.
''It is not possible, indeed, to forget the sufferings and injustices inflicted by colonizers on the indigenous populations, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled on,'' Benedict said.
The pontiff said he was making a ''dutiful mention of such unjustifiable crimes'' and said some missionaries and theologians in the past had condemned them.
Indian rights groups in Brazil criticized Benedict for his insistence that Latin American Indians wanted to become Christian before European conquerors arrived centuries ago.
During the trip, the pontiff told a regional conference of bishops in Brazil that pre-Columbian people of Latin America and the Caribbean were seeking Christ without realizing it.
Paulo Suess, an adviser to the church-backed Brazil's Indian Missionary Council, said at the end of the trip that Benedict's comments failed to take into account that Indians were enslaved and killed by the Portuguese and Spanish settlers who forced them to become Catholic.
Marcio Meira, in charge of Brazil's federal Indian Bureau, said Indians were forced to convert to Catholicism as the result of a ''colonial process.''
The pope in Brazil told the bishops that, ''the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.''
In 2000, during the Vatican's Holy Year, the Catholic Church apologized to Brazil's Indians and blacks during a ceremony in Brazil for the ''sins and errors'' committed by its clergy and faithful in the past 500 years. A Vatican cardinal representing Pope John Paul II participated in the ceremony, which saw the head of Brazil's bishops conference ask God for forgiveness for the sins committed against brothers, especially the Indians.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site dedicated
LA JUNTA, Colo. - Tribal leaders from the Northern Cheyenne, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, along with the National Park Service and nearly 500 others, gathered April 28 to dedicate the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.
After a prayer from Cheyenne Chief Gordon Yellowman, various Indian and non-Indian dignitaries spoke on the tragic event.
''Imagine a place of where families eat, sleep, learn; a place where people share knowledge, live in peace and where children run and play; a place where flags are flown to represent protection; a place of safety and security,'' said Northern Cheyenne President Eugene Little Coyote. ''Now imagine this place disturbed by chaos, gunshots, cries and pleas from the innocent; peace disrupted by attacks of inhumanity. I could be describing the violent events that occurred a few weeks ago on a college campus; an event described as 'the most tragic event in American history,' but I am not. I am talking about the Sand Creek Massacre.''
On Nov. 29, 1864, the Colorado Territory Militia, under the command of Methodist minister Col. John Chivington, attacked the camp of Southern Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle. Although Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white flag of peace, the militia were instructed by Chivington to ''kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.'' Nearly 240 Cheyenne and Arapaho people were murdered, mostly women and children. Women were raped and the dead were mutilated. Body parts of the slain Indians were paraded though Denver in celebration of the massacre.
''The Cheyenne witnessed unimaginable acts of savagery from the volunteers that cold November day. Our people still remember what happened and still brings tears to our eyes,'' said William Walks Along, executive administrator of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.
Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., was also present. Campbell worked for more than 25 years with the Northern and Southern Cheyenne tribes to gain more public attention as well as federal recognition of the site and event. James Druck eventually purchased nearly 1,500 acres of land on the site as a gift for the tribes. Campbell was also prominent in passing congressional legislation to protect the site and eventually establish it as a national historic site, which now can manage nearly 2,500 acres of the 12,500-acre Sand Creek Massacre site.
''Most Americans during this time perceived American Indians to be savages,'' Campbell said. ''But if there were any savages that day, it was not the Indians.''
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., made a formal apology of the atrocities committed by the United States.
''I acknowledge and admit the wrongs that were done and tolerated by the federal government here and across the nation. They were wrong and they were deadly. As a senator from a Plains state, I deeply apologize and I'll work to right this wrong,'' Brownback said.
Northern Cheyenne Tribal Councilman Jace Killsback said, ''The Northern Cheyenne are proud and thankful that Sand Creek has been made into a national historic site. It shows that the U.S. and the state of Colorado are taking responsibility and recognizing their past acts of genocide and policies of oppression against American Indians, as well as working to protect and preserve this site.
''Today, the Cheyenne people are currently fighting to protect another site, Noavose or Bear Butte, the birthplace of our nation and the center of our worldview and philosophy. We hope and pray that it will not take the lives of 200 Cheyenne people and 150 years for the U.S. and the state of South Dakota to afford the same responsibility, recognition and protection to Noavose.''
After a prayer from Cheyenne Chief Gordon Yellowman, various Indian and non-Indian dignitaries spoke on the tragic event.
''Imagine a place of where families eat, sleep, learn; a place where people share knowledge, live in peace and where children run and play; a place where flags are flown to represent protection; a place of safety and security,'' said Northern Cheyenne President Eugene Little Coyote. ''Now imagine this place disturbed by chaos, gunshots, cries and pleas from the innocent; peace disrupted by attacks of inhumanity. I could be describing the violent events that occurred a few weeks ago on a college campus; an event described as 'the most tragic event in American history,' but I am not. I am talking about the Sand Creek Massacre.''
On Nov. 29, 1864, the Colorado Territory Militia, under the command of Methodist minister Col. John Chivington, attacked the camp of Southern Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle. Although Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white flag of peace, the militia were instructed by Chivington to ''kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.'' Nearly 240 Cheyenne and Arapaho people were murdered, mostly women and children. Women were raped and the dead were mutilated. Body parts of the slain Indians were paraded though Denver in celebration of the massacre.
''The Cheyenne witnessed unimaginable acts of savagery from the volunteers that cold November day. Our people still remember what happened and still brings tears to our eyes,'' said William Walks Along, executive administrator of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.
Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., was also present. Campbell worked for more than 25 years with the Northern and Southern Cheyenne tribes to gain more public attention as well as federal recognition of the site and event. James Druck eventually purchased nearly 1,500 acres of land on the site as a gift for the tribes. Campbell was also prominent in passing congressional legislation to protect the site and eventually establish it as a national historic site, which now can manage nearly 2,500 acres of the 12,500-acre Sand Creek Massacre site.
''Most Americans during this time perceived American Indians to be savages,'' Campbell said. ''But if there were any savages that day, it was not the Indians.''
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., made a formal apology of the atrocities committed by the United States.
''I acknowledge and admit the wrongs that were done and tolerated by the federal government here and across the nation. They were wrong and they were deadly. As a senator from a Plains state, I deeply apologize and I'll work to right this wrong,'' Brownback said.
Northern Cheyenne Tribal Councilman Jace Killsback said, ''The Northern Cheyenne are proud and thankful that Sand Creek has been made into a national historic site. It shows that the U.S. and the state of Colorado are taking responsibility and recognizing their past acts of genocide and policies of oppression against American Indians, as well as working to protect and preserve this site.
''Today, the Cheyenne people are currently fighting to protect another site, Noavose or Bear Butte, the birthplace of our nation and the center of our worldview and philosophy. We hope and pray that it will not take the lives of 200 Cheyenne people and 150 years for the U.S. and the state of South Dakota to afford the same responsibility, recognition and protection to Noavose.''
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Gone With the Wind by Matthew Fleischer
Sherman Alexie stands at the back of a dark, crowded theater at last month’s Palm Springs Native American Film Festival, scanning the audience for reactions. The festival is showing the film made from Alexie’s first screenplay, Smoke Signals, in honor of its 10th anniversary, and he’s keen to see how it has held up over time. “I don’t know if I can watch the whole thing,” he says, “too many flaws.” Onscreen, Alexie’s memorable road-trip buddies Victor (Adam Beach) and Thomas-Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams) sit in a trailer watching old cowboy-and-Indian movies. “The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV,” says Thomas, “is Indians watching Indians on TV.” The crowd erupts with laughter and Alexie smiles. It’s a great line, and at the time it was written it was certainly true. Despite the dawn of political correctness in the ’90s, depictions of Native Americans as either bloodthirsty savages or as the stoic, spiritual antecedents to hippie culture continued to dominate the big screen.
But Smoke Signals threatened to change all that. The first major film written, directed and acted by Native Americans, Smoke Signals was both a critical and commercial success. Selected for the dramatic competition at Sundance and winner of the festival’s Audience Award, it was bought by Miramax and went on to bank $6.8 million at the box office on a budget of less than $2 million. More importantly, it offered Native Americans starved for positive and accurate depictions of themselves something they could watch and be proud of.
The film’s success appeared to be a harbinger of a new wave of Native filmmaking. What’s happened since? “Absolutely nothing,” according to Alexie.
Indeed, a Native film with the cultural impact of Smoke Signals has yet to be replicated, and Alexie feels partly to blame. After their film took off, he and director Chris Eyre were bombarded with offers to work together again, but instead of capitalizing on the momentum, the two had a falling-out. Alexie, who was already well known in the literary world as the author of more than 17 books, drew the lion’s share of the film’s media attention and chose to roll with the praise, leaving Eyre feeling neglected.
“Basically we acted like typical Hollywood assholes,” says Alexie.
The two split ways with mixed results. In 2002, Alexie wrote and directed The Business of Fancydancing, which despite an interesting, semiautobiographical narrative about a reservation-born poet’s struggle to maintain his cultural roots in the white world, was missing Eyre’s directorial precision and went straight to DVD. Meanwhile, Eyre directed the thoroughly forgettable Skins, as well as several films for television (including 2003’s Edge of America), all of which lacked Alexie’s artistic edge.
If the creative duo who launched the Indian world’s first hit has sputtered, the world of Native film has continued to grow, albeit slowly. In 2001, Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk’s The Fast Runner won the Camera d’Or Prize at Cannes. This year, the Palm Springs Native American Film Festival received more than 360 submissions, up from 180 the year before. Perhaps most notably, Smoke Signals star Beach earned strong reviews and serious Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Ira Hayes in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.
Sundance, where Smoke Signals first began its amazing run, has also continued to provide a major outlet for Native filmmakers. This year, Creek director Sterlin Harjo’s Four Sheets to the Wind screened in the dramatic competition and went home with a Special Jury Prize for its leading lady, Tamara Podemski, who plays a reservation girl struggling to cope with city life and the loss of her father.
Yet despite a series of critical successes and the unwavering support of Sundance, which has used the festival as a showcase for Native films dating back to the first edition in 1985, commercial viability has remained elusive.
“Sundance shows around 120 feature films, and only a fraction get picked up and distributed,” says Bird Runningwater, associate director of the Sundance Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Initiative. “But it does seem that, most often, Native films fall into the category of those not being picked up.
Four Sheets to the Wind might be one of the best films out there that no one has ever seen. Despite drawing favorable comparisons to the box-office dynamo Garden State, and despite Podemski’s lauded performance, the film has yet to land a theatrical distribution deal. “It’s heartbreaking because we saw firsthand how audiences responded to the film,” says Podemski. “Someone just needs to get the balls to put it out there.”
Ironically, Podemski found out after talks with several high-level executives, the problem with the film is that it isn’t “Native enough.” “This is a regular film about a family that just happens to have a full Native cast,” she explains. “And I was told that the industry just doesn’t know what to do with that yet. They only know how to market something that is noticeably ‘Native.’”
That people can’t yet see the film is especially crushing for Podemski. For a Native actress, positive and challenging modern roles are difficult to come by. “There’s definitely a tendency to want to dress us up in buckskin,” she says.
Smoke Signals director Eyre agrees. “I don’t think a lot of people see value in telling stories about modern Indians,” he says. “But I don’t see the value in films that show the past. They all end the same way — the Indians die.”
The blame doesn’t fall entirely on the industry, however. Palm Springs Native American Film Festival programmer Thomas Harris, who screened all 360 of this year’s entries, says many Native filmmakers rely too heavily on the tragic realities of reservation life and not enough on substantive storytelling. “Right now, the ratio of documentaries to narratives is about 80/20,” he notes. “Which makes sense, because, with digital technology, documentaries can be made very cheaply. But there just aren’t enough narrative features out there.”
But Smoke Signals threatened to change all that. The first major film written, directed and acted by Native Americans, Smoke Signals was both a critical and commercial success. Selected for the dramatic competition at Sundance and winner of the festival’s Audience Award, it was bought by Miramax and went on to bank $6.8 million at the box office on a budget of less than $2 million. More importantly, it offered Native Americans starved for positive and accurate depictions of themselves something they could watch and be proud of.
The film’s success appeared to be a harbinger of a new wave of Native filmmaking. What’s happened since? “Absolutely nothing,” according to Alexie.
Indeed, a Native film with the cultural impact of Smoke Signals has yet to be replicated, and Alexie feels partly to blame. After their film took off, he and director Chris Eyre were bombarded with offers to work together again, but instead of capitalizing on the momentum, the two had a falling-out. Alexie, who was already well known in the literary world as the author of more than 17 books, drew the lion’s share of the film’s media attention and chose to roll with the praise, leaving Eyre feeling neglected.
“Basically we acted like typical Hollywood assholes,” says Alexie.
The two split ways with mixed results. In 2002, Alexie wrote and directed The Business of Fancydancing, which despite an interesting, semiautobiographical narrative about a reservation-born poet’s struggle to maintain his cultural roots in the white world, was missing Eyre’s directorial precision and went straight to DVD. Meanwhile, Eyre directed the thoroughly forgettable Skins, as well as several films for television (including 2003’s Edge of America), all of which lacked Alexie’s artistic edge.
If the creative duo who launched the Indian world’s first hit has sputtered, the world of Native film has continued to grow, albeit slowly. In 2001, Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk’s The Fast Runner won the Camera d’Or Prize at Cannes. This year, the Palm Springs Native American Film Festival received more than 360 submissions, up from 180 the year before. Perhaps most notably, Smoke Signals star Beach earned strong reviews and serious Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Ira Hayes in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers.
Sundance, where Smoke Signals first began its amazing run, has also continued to provide a major outlet for Native filmmakers. This year, Creek director Sterlin Harjo’s Four Sheets to the Wind screened in the dramatic competition and went home with a Special Jury Prize for its leading lady, Tamara Podemski, who plays a reservation girl struggling to cope with city life and the loss of her father.
Yet despite a series of critical successes and the unwavering support of Sundance, which has used the festival as a showcase for Native films dating back to the first edition in 1985, commercial viability has remained elusive.
“Sundance shows around 120 feature films, and only a fraction get picked up and distributed,” says Bird Runningwater, associate director of the Sundance Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Initiative. “But it does seem that, most often, Native films fall into the category of those not being picked up.
Four Sheets to the Wind might be one of the best films out there that no one has ever seen. Despite drawing favorable comparisons to the box-office dynamo Garden State, and despite Podemski’s lauded performance, the film has yet to land a theatrical distribution deal. “It’s heartbreaking because we saw firsthand how audiences responded to the film,” says Podemski. “Someone just needs to get the balls to put it out there.”
Ironically, Podemski found out after talks with several high-level executives, the problem with the film is that it isn’t “Native enough.” “This is a regular film about a family that just happens to have a full Native cast,” she explains. “And I was told that the industry just doesn’t know what to do with that yet. They only know how to market something that is noticeably ‘Native.’”
That people can’t yet see the film is especially crushing for Podemski. For a Native actress, positive and challenging modern roles are difficult to come by. “There’s definitely a tendency to want to dress us up in buckskin,” she says.
Smoke Signals director Eyre agrees. “I don’t think a lot of people see value in telling stories about modern Indians,” he says. “But I don’t see the value in films that show the past. They all end the same way — the Indians die.”
The blame doesn’t fall entirely on the industry, however. Palm Springs Native American Film Festival programmer Thomas Harris, who screened all 360 of this year’s entries, says many Native filmmakers rely too heavily on the tragic realities of reservation life and not enough on substantive storytelling. “Right now, the ratio of documentaries to narratives is about 80/20,” he notes. “Which makes sense, because, with digital technology, documentaries can be made very cheaply. But there just aren’t enough narrative features out there.”
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - TV - Dee Brown - HBO
LOS ANGELES, May 8 — When the historian Dee Brown published “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” in 1971, it became an instant sensation. In an age of rebellion, this nonfiction book told the epic tale of the displacement and decline of the American Indian not from the perspective of the winners, but from that of the Indians.
But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience. When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white woman.
“Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.
The added character is based on a real person: Charles Eastman, part Sioux and descended from a long line of Santee chiefs but who was sent away by his father to boarding school and then held up as a model of the potential assimilation of 19th-century Native Americans. But the film fictionalizes significant portions of his life. In the HBO version he dodges bullets at the Battle of Little Bighorn. In reality he was far away, in grade school in Nebraska.
Fictionalizing history has long been standard in Hollywood. But rarely do filmmakers directly hitch their historically inaccurate projects to revered works of nonfiction. Dick Wolf, an executive producer of the film who is best known for the “Law & Order” television franchise, defended the fabrications.
“This was not an attempt to do the Ken Burns version of the Indian experience,” Mr. Wolf said in an interview. “It is a dramatization, and we needed a protagonist.”
(The chief executive of HBO, Chris Albrecht, announced yesterday that he was taking a leave of absence after being charged with assaulting a girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot early on Sunday.)
At the time it was published, Mr. Brown’s epic, subtitled “An Indian History of the American West,” struck a chord in a country embroiled in a divisive war in Vietnam and still shuddering from the American military’s massacre in the village of My Lai. Segregation was dying hard in the South, and the American Indian Movement was ascending.
The story is a relentless tragedy, tracing the history of American Indian nations from 1860, shortly after the first new states extended into the “permanent Indian frontier,” through 1890 and the massacre at Wounded Knee, in what is now South Dakota. It became a blockbuster best seller and helped shape the way the history of the American Indians has been interpreted ever since.
For decades the book eluded attempts to turn it into a film, partly because of Mr. Brown’s distrust of Hollywood. At least two attempts by potential moviemakers to adapt the book failed. When the current producers optioned the book five years ago, Mr. Brown was in the last years of his life and, according to his grandson, did not believe anything would come of the project. (Mr. Brown died in 2002 at 94.)
Tom Thayer, the executive producer who originated the project, said the HBO team wrestled for months with how to boil down a book that spans 30 years and dozens of tribes into a 130-minute film.
“The book is basically an editorialized textbook,” Mr. Thayer said. “It doesn’t have a single narrative; it’s anthropological and episodic.” Therefore, he added, “we felt that to tell a story of that size, the Eastman character would be a great hand-holder for the audience.”
Many literary critics, and millions of readers, however, had little trouble following Mr. Brown’s story. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in March 1971, N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, emphasized that the book was a story, “a whole narrative of singular integrity and precise continuity; that is what makes the book so hard to put aside, even when one has come to the end.”
The film largely restricts itself to the late 1880s, the time of the Ghost Dance, a messianic movement that swept through the Plains Indian tribes. Within that period it weaves together three strands: the story of Sitting Bull, the legendary chief of the Sioux, who fought against Custer’s forces at Little Bighorn in 1876; that of Henry L. Dawes, the Massachusetts senator who pushed into law a plan to allocate portions of Indian land to individual tribe members; and Eastman, who was taken from his tribe by his father and attended Dartmouth and then Boston University School of Medicine.
It is in the last two stories that the film begins to bend history.
“Eastman was the most well-known, well-educated Indian at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Raymond Wilson, a professor of history at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan., who wrote what is considered to be the definitive biography of Eastman. “When I heard they were doing the film,” he said, “I joked with a couple of people that I hoped they didn’t have Charles Eastman shaking hands with Sitting Bull at Pine Ridge.”
But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience. When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white woman.
“Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.
The added character is based on a real person: Charles Eastman, part Sioux and descended from a long line of Santee chiefs but who was sent away by his father to boarding school and then held up as a model of the potential assimilation of 19th-century Native Americans. But the film fictionalizes significant portions of his life. In the HBO version he dodges bullets at the Battle of Little Bighorn. In reality he was far away, in grade school in Nebraska.
Fictionalizing history has long been standard in Hollywood. But rarely do filmmakers directly hitch their historically inaccurate projects to revered works of nonfiction. Dick Wolf, an executive producer of the film who is best known for the “Law & Order” television franchise, defended the fabrications.
“This was not an attempt to do the Ken Burns version of the Indian experience,” Mr. Wolf said in an interview. “It is a dramatization, and we needed a protagonist.”
(The chief executive of HBO, Chris Albrecht, announced yesterday that he was taking a leave of absence after being charged with assaulting a girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot early on Sunday.)
At the time it was published, Mr. Brown’s epic, subtitled “An Indian History of the American West,” struck a chord in a country embroiled in a divisive war in Vietnam and still shuddering from the American military’s massacre in the village of My Lai. Segregation was dying hard in the South, and the American Indian Movement was ascending.
The story is a relentless tragedy, tracing the history of American Indian nations from 1860, shortly after the first new states extended into the “permanent Indian frontier,” through 1890 and the massacre at Wounded Knee, in what is now South Dakota. It became a blockbuster best seller and helped shape the way the history of the American Indians has been interpreted ever since.
For decades the book eluded attempts to turn it into a film, partly because of Mr. Brown’s distrust of Hollywood. At least two attempts by potential moviemakers to adapt the book failed. When the current producers optioned the book five years ago, Mr. Brown was in the last years of his life and, according to his grandson, did not believe anything would come of the project. (Mr. Brown died in 2002 at 94.)
Tom Thayer, the executive producer who originated the project, said the HBO team wrestled for months with how to boil down a book that spans 30 years and dozens of tribes into a 130-minute film.
“The book is basically an editorialized textbook,” Mr. Thayer said. “It doesn’t have a single narrative; it’s anthropological and episodic.” Therefore, he added, “we felt that to tell a story of that size, the Eastman character would be a great hand-holder for the audience.”
Many literary critics, and millions of readers, however, had little trouble following Mr. Brown’s story. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in March 1971, N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, emphasized that the book was a story, “a whole narrative of singular integrity and precise continuity; that is what makes the book so hard to put aside, even when one has come to the end.”
The film largely restricts itself to the late 1880s, the time of the Ghost Dance, a messianic movement that swept through the Plains Indian tribes. Within that period it weaves together three strands: the story of Sitting Bull, the legendary chief of the Sioux, who fought against Custer’s forces at Little Bighorn in 1876; that of Henry L. Dawes, the Massachusetts senator who pushed into law a plan to allocate portions of Indian land to individual tribe members; and Eastman, who was taken from his tribe by his father and attended Dartmouth and then Boston University School of Medicine.
It is in the last two stories that the film begins to bend history.
“Eastman was the most well-known, well-educated Indian at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Raymond Wilson, a professor of history at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan., who wrote what is considered to be the definitive biography of Eastman. “When I heard they were doing the film,” he said, “I joked with a couple of people that I hoped they didn’t have Charles Eastman shaking hands with Sitting Bull at Pine Ridge.”
Monday, May 07, 2007
How the Inca Leapt Canyons
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.
Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.
So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century. One of the last of these, over the Apurimac River, inspired Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”
Although scholars have studied the Inca road system’s importance in forging and controlling the pre-Columbian empire, John A.Ochsendorf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here said, “Historians and archaeologists have neglected the role of bridges.”
Dr. Ochsendorf’s research on Inca suspension bridges, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, illustrates an engineering university’s approach to archaeology, combining materials science and experimentation with the traditional fieldwork of observing and dating artifacts. Other universities conduct research in archaeological materials, but it has long been a specialty at M.I.T.
Students here are introduced to the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient technologies as applied in transforming resources into cultural hallmarks from household pottery to grand pyramids. In a course called “materials in human experience,” students are making a 60-foot-long fiber bridge in the Peruvian style. On Saturday, they plan to stretch the bridge across a dry basin between two campus buildings.
In recent years, M.I.T. archaeologists and scientists have joined forces in studies of early Peruvian ceramics, balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; and also the casting of bronze bells in Mexico. They discovered that Ecuadoreans, traveling by sea, introduced metallurgy to western Mexico. They even found how Mexicans added bits of morning-glory plants, which contain sulfur, in processing natural rubber into bouncing balls.
“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”
Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist of ancient technology who helped develop the M.I.T. program, said that in learning “how objects were made, what they were made of and how they were used, we see people making decisions at various stages, and the choices involve engineering as well as culture.”
From this perspective, she said, the choices are not always based only on what works well, but also are guided by ideological and aesthetic criteria. In the casting of early Mexican bells, attention was given to their ringing tone and their color; an unusually large amount of arsenic was added to copper to make the bronze shine like silver.
“If people use materials in different ways in different societies, that tells you something about those people,” Professor Lechtman said.
In the case of the Peruvian bridges, the builders relied on a technology well suited to the problem and their resources. The Spanish themselves demonstrated how appropriate the Peruvian technique was.
Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building. The Peruvians, knowing nothing of the arch or iron metallurgy, instead relied on what they knew best, fibers from cotton, grasses and saplings, and llama and alpaca wool.
The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.
Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.
So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century. One of the last of these, over the Apurimac River, inspired Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”
Although scholars have studied the Inca road system’s importance in forging and controlling the pre-Columbian empire, John A.Ochsendorf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here said, “Historians and archaeologists have neglected the role of bridges.”
Dr. Ochsendorf’s research on Inca suspension bridges, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, illustrates an engineering university’s approach to archaeology, combining materials science and experimentation with the traditional fieldwork of observing and dating artifacts. Other universities conduct research in archaeological materials, but it has long been a specialty at M.I.T.
Students here are introduced to the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient technologies as applied in transforming resources into cultural hallmarks from household pottery to grand pyramids. In a course called “materials in human experience,” students are making a 60-foot-long fiber bridge in the Peruvian style. On Saturday, they plan to stretch the bridge across a dry basin between two campus buildings.
In recent years, M.I.T. archaeologists and scientists have joined forces in studies of early Peruvian ceramics, balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; and also the casting of bronze bells in Mexico. They discovered that Ecuadoreans, traveling by sea, introduced metallurgy to western Mexico. They even found how Mexicans added bits of morning-glory plants, which contain sulfur, in processing natural rubber into bouncing balls.
“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”
Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist of ancient technology who helped develop the M.I.T. program, said that in learning “how objects were made, what they were made of and how they were used, we see people making decisions at various stages, and the choices involve engineering as well as culture.”
From this perspective, she said, the choices are not always based only on what works well, but also are guided by ideological and aesthetic criteria. In the casting of early Mexican bells, attention was given to their ringing tone and their color; an unusually large amount of arsenic was added to copper to make the bronze shine like silver.
“If people use materials in different ways in different societies, that tells you something about those people,” Professor Lechtman said.
In the case of the Peruvian bridges, the builders relied on a technology well suited to the problem and their resources. The Spanish themselves demonstrated how appropriate the Peruvian technique was.
Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building. The Peruvians, knowing nothing of the arch or iron metallurgy, instead relied on what they knew best, fibers from cotton, grasses and saplings, and llama and alpaca wool.
The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.
Sale of Carbon Credits Helping Land-Rich, but Cash-Poor, Tribes
LAPWAI, Idaho — On the Nez Perce reservation here, land that was cleared in the 19th century for farming is being converted back to forest, in part to sell the trees’ ability to sequester carbon.
“These forests are a carbon crop,” Brian Kummett, a forester for the Nez Perce tribal forestry division, said as he surveyed a vast field studded with recently planted ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and larch saplings. “We can sell the rights from the time the forest is planted to the time it’s harvested, 80 or 120 years down the road.”
The market for carbon credits promises to be a boon for some land-rich but cash-poor tribes. Selling carbon sequestration credits early in the growth of a forest lets the tribe realize some money more quickly, rather than waiting for decades for the harvest.
Carbon is a constituent of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. Trees can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their tissue. Companies may be able to offset the carbon dioxide they send into the atmosphere by paying for projects that pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
The Nez Perce are participating in an Indian tribe “carbon portfolio” being created by the National Carbon Offset Coalition in Butte, Mont., an organization supported largely by the Energy Department.
“They have a long-term management, large acreage and trained staff,” said Ted Dodge, executive director of the coalition.
Bob Gruenig, senior policy analyst for the National Tribal Environmental Council in Albuquerque, said the tribes “see climate change as a really big issue.”
“They are seeing changes in the land, changes in plants and changes in the migration of wildlife,” he said.
New forests are just part of the carbon credits that are being sold on reservations and at other places. In the last few weeks, the Chicago Carbon Exchange has approved selling carbon sequestration credits on rangeland and no-till agricultural fields.
An acre of pine forest captures and holds one to two metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which it uses for photosynthesis. Untilled cropland holds a third of a ton of carbon per acre, and rangeland holds up to a fifth of a ton. The sequestered carbon dioxide is measured by soil tests before and after the planting.
The market for carbon sequestration in the United States is voluntary. As a result, the demand has been low compared with Europe, where emissions are now restricted by law. The market also lacks uniform standards, prompting some environmental campaigners to question its credibility. Tribal carbon sales have had mixed results since the first such sale in the 1990s, when the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington sold rights to its land for 25 cents a metric ton.
The Nez Perce had a major deal fall through a few years ago. It would have paid the tribe $1.50 a ton for 200,000 tons over 50 years and would have been worth nearly $500,000. Experts estimate that a project of that size would offset carbon equivalent to a year’s emission from 500,000 cars.
Other tribes have found reason to grow carbon crops. In Washington and Oregon, new coal-fired power plants are required to offset their emissions. So the Lummi in northwestern Washington bought 1,700 acres that had been logged, reforested the land and sold sequestration rights to a power company.
Officials say studies showing that recent warming is almost certainly caused by accumulating greenhouse gases are increasing support for “cap and trade” rules that limit the carbon dioxide a site can emit. If a factory produces less than the cap, it can sell the surplus rights to emit carbon to other companies. If a plant exceeds the limit, it has to buy the right to emit more gases from another company or find other methods to sequester carbon equal to what it is releasing.
“These forests are a carbon crop,” Brian Kummett, a forester for the Nez Perce tribal forestry division, said as he surveyed a vast field studded with recently planted ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and larch saplings. “We can sell the rights from the time the forest is planted to the time it’s harvested, 80 or 120 years down the road.”
The market for carbon credits promises to be a boon for some land-rich but cash-poor tribes. Selling carbon sequestration credits early in the growth of a forest lets the tribe realize some money more quickly, rather than waiting for decades for the harvest.
Carbon is a constituent of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. Trees can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their tissue. Companies may be able to offset the carbon dioxide they send into the atmosphere by paying for projects that pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
The Nez Perce are participating in an Indian tribe “carbon portfolio” being created by the National Carbon Offset Coalition in Butte, Mont., an organization supported largely by the Energy Department.
“They have a long-term management, large acreage and trained staff,” said Ted Dodge, executive director of the coalition.
Bob Gruenig, senior policy analyst for the National Tribal Environmental Council in Albuquerque, said the tribes “see climate change as a really big issue.”
“They are seeing changes in the land, changes in plants and changes in the migration of wildlife,” he said.
New forests are just part of the carbon credits that are being sold on reservations and at other places. In the last few weeks, the Chicago Carbon Exchange has approved selling carbon sequestration credits on rangeland and no-till agricultural fields.
An acre of pine forest captures and holds one to two metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which it uses for photosynthesis. Untilled cropland holds a third of a ton of carbon per acre, and rangeland holds up to a fifth of a ton. The sequestered carbon dioxide is measured by soil tests before and after the planting.
The market for carbon sequestration in the United States is voluntary. As a result, the demand has been low compared with Europe, where emissions are now restricted by law. The market also lacks uniform standards, prompting some environmental campaigners to question its credibility. Tribal carbon sales have had mixed results since the first such sale in the 1990s, when the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington sold rights to its land for 25 cents a metric ton.
The Nez Perce had a major deal fall through a few years ago. It would have paid the tribe $1.50 a ton for 200,000 tons over 50 years and would have been worth nearly $500,000. Experts estimate that a project of that size would offset carbon equivalent to a year’s emission from 500,000 cars.
Other tribes have found reason to grow carbon crops. In Washington and Oregon, new coal-fired power plants are required to offset their emissions. So the Lummi in northwestern Washington bought 1,700 acres that had been logged, reforested the land and sold sequestration rights to a power company.
Officials say studies showing that recent warming is almost certainly caused by accumulating greenhouse gases are increasing support for “cap and trade” rules that limit the carbon dioxide a site can emit. If a factory produces less than the cap, it can sell the surplus rights to emit carbon to other companies. If a plant exceeds the limit, it has to buy the right to emit more gases from another company or find other methods to sequester carbon equal to what it is releasing.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Chief Illiniwek video segment on Comedy Central's Daily Show
You can now download and view the Chief Illiniwek segment on the Daily Show featuring an interview with LeAnne Howe and their unique outlook on the Indian mascot culture.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
First Native Woman to Become a University President Joins Antioch Seattle
Dr. Cassandra Manuelito-Kerkvliet, chosen to be president of Antioch University Seattle this week, is believed to be the first Native American woman to ascend to the presidency of an accredited university outside the tribal college system.
Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet served as the first woman president of Diné College, the first tribally controlled community college, located in Tsaile, Ariz. While there, she successfully negotiated with the Navajo Nation a 242 percent increase in tribal appropriations for the college. She founded and directed the Indian Education Office at Oregon State University and has worked in various student service and counseling positions at Oregon State University, University of Oregon, University of New Mexico and University of Wyoming. Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet is the great, great granddaughter of Navajo Chief Manuelito.
Recently, she served on the Biological Sciences advisory board for the National Science Foundation and as a consultant for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and Alliance for Equity in Higher Education's initiative to train future administrators in the Minority Serving Institution's Leadership Fellows Institute. She received her B.A. in Social Work and M.S. in Counselor Education from the University of Wyoming and her Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Management with a specialization in higher education administration from the University of Oregon.
Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet was selected from a pool of more than 40 candidates for the top post at Antioch Seattle. She moves from Bozeman, Mont., to become Antioch president July 15. She replaces Interim President Mark Hower, who took over the position last year after Dr. Toni Murdock, former Seattle campus president, stepped into the role as Antioch University's chancellor. Murdock now oversees six Antioch campuses across the nation.
When she announced Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet had accepted the presidency, Dr. Murdock noted, "She will be a great asset to the Seattle campus and wonderful addition to the University Leadership Council. She brings with her presidential experience and a strong commitment to higher education."
Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet served as the first woman president of Diné College, the first tribally controlled community college, located in Tsaile, Ariz. While there, she successfully negotiated with the Navajo Nation a 242 percent increase in tribal appropriations for the college. She founded and directed the Indian Education Office at Oregon State University and has worked in various student service and counseling positions at Oregon State University, University of Oregon, University of New Mexico and University of Wyoming. Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet is the great, great granddaughter of Navajo Chief Manuelito.
Recently, she served on the Biological Sciences advisory board for the National Science Foundation and as a consultant for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and Alliance for Equity in Higher Education's initiative to train future administrators in the Minority Serving Institution's Leadership Fellows Institute. She received her B.A. in Social Work and M.S. in Counselor Education from the University of Wyoming and her Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Management with a specialization in higher education administration from the University of Oregon.
Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet was selected from a pool of more than 40 candidates for the top post at Antioch Seattle. She moves from Bozeman, Mont., to become Antioch president July 15. She replaces Interim President Mark Hower, who took over the position last year after Dr. Toni Murdock, former Seattle campus president, stepped into the role as Antioch University's chancellor. Murdock now oversees six Antioch campuses across the nation.
When she announced Dr. Manuelito-Kerkvliet had accepted the presidency, Dr. Murdock noted, "She will be a great asset to the Seattle campus and wonderful addition to the University Leadership Council. She brings with her presidential experience and a strong commitment to higher education."
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Flight - Sherman Alexie - Books - Review
Echoing the tragic events last week at Virginia Tech, Sherman Alexie’s latest novel, “Flight,” features a young, edgy outcast named Zits on the verge of colossal violence. Mr. Alexie is no stranger to this brand of gutsy writing. With 17 volumes of fiction and poetry to his name, he has established an impressive literary reputation as a bold writer who goes straight for the aorta. He is in the business of making his readers laugh and cry. And his most recent novel is no exception.
At its beginning, Mr. Alexie invokes the most famous opening line of literature: “Call me Zits.” Instead of a perilous hunt for a great white whale, this 15-year-old orphaned half-American-Indian pyromaniac undertakes a voyage of an entirely different dimension.
The reader meets Zits one morning when he is counting the pimples on his face (47 in all) in front of the bathroom mirror at the home of his newest set of foster parents. From the get-go, Mr. Alexie lets the reader in on the messy interior life of this marginalized teenager: “I’m dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame. I’m ashamed of being fifteen years old. And being tall. And skinny. And ugly. I’m ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick. I wonder if loneliness causes acne. I wonder if being Indian causes acne.”
Zits’s Indian father abandoned him shortly after birth. His mother, a fun-loving Irishwoman who sang Blood, Sweat & Tears tunes to Zits as an infant, died of breast cancer when he was only 6. Since then, Zits has been bouncing from foster home to foster home, school to school. “My entire life fits into one small backpack,” he says. At 8, he ran away for the first time. At 15, he is already a self-described drunk.
After Zits lands in a juvenile jail in the Central District of Seattle for the umpteenth time, he meets a white, pretty-boy anarchist named Justice, who schools him on how to take his sorry life into his own hands. Instead of opening fire on bystanders in a crowded bank, as Justice wanted, Zits finds himself on a time-traveling journey that traverses multiple centuries and transforms his worn-out soul in unexpected ways.
First Zits arrives in the compact body of Hank Storm, a white, blue-eyed F.B.I. agent who meets up with two Indian radicals on a dark backwoods road on the Nannapush Indian reservation in Red River, Idaho, about 1975. Then he resurfaces as a speechless Indian kid at the brink of the bloody battle led by Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn in 1876. Zits’s next conversion of flesh is as Augustus (or Gus) Sullivan, an aging, expert Indian tracker employed by the Army in the same era.
Mr. Alexie fast-forwards in time: his mouthy narrator inhabits Jimmy, a flight instructor who has to deal with the guilt-ridden aftermath when one of his students carries out a terrorist act in Chicago. And then, finally, Zits reincarnates into his father’s image, a homeless drunk who roots through trash bins for leftovers and, as it turns out, some bits and pieces of respect.
Many of these allegorical, action-packed vignettes tread familiar thematic territory — the continuing fight for survival, the anger of racial divides, the absence of fathers — of Mr. Alexie’s earlier works, like “Indian Killer” and “Ten Little Indians.” But with “Flight,” he takes these themes a step further: he skillfully explores both sides of the proverbial war. Zits witnesses brutal violence through the eyes of whites and Indians, fathers and sons, and he begins to understand what it means to be the hero, the villain and the victim.
Given the far-reaching scope of Mr. Alexie’s narrative, a reader might expect an epic of Melvillian proportions. Instead, in this slim volume (making it more novella than novel), Mr. Alexie manages to move effortlessly in and out of centuries like a person moving between waking and sleep.
Rather than getting bogged down in the details of seminal historical events, he telescopes to the most intimate moments, when his characters rise and fall. To sustain a compressed narrative continuum, recurring details — like the smell of beer and onions on a character’s breath or smashed-up model airplanes — surface in Zits’s consciousness.
Also, Mr. Alexie, a four-time World Poetry Bout champion, demonstrates his keen ear for voice; Zits rarely strays from the lively, sad incantations of his former 15-year-old self, regardless of whose skin he is in. “I miss my mother,” he says as he pilots a small plane as Jimmy. “I miss her all the time. I want to see her again. And now here I am in the body of a pilot as he flies. It makes sense. The last time my mother was happy she was on an airplane. So maybe this is my last place to be happy.”
By the novel’s conclusion, Mr. Alexie returns full circle to one of the subordinate themes of “Moby-Dick”: how human love and sympathy can save a life (found in the relationship of Ishmael and Queequeg). By offering perspectives from both sides of the battle, Mr. Alexie convincingly illustrates how no one can live alone, no matter what the situation.
“I open my eyes,” says Zits when he wakes up for the last time in the novel. “I think all the people in this bank are better than I am. They have better lives than I do. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe we’re all lonely. Maybe some of them also hurtle through time and see war, war, war. Maybe we’re all in this together.”
Right up to the novel’s final sentence, Mr. Alexie succeeds yet again with his ability to pierce to the heart of matters, leaving this reader with tears in her eyes.
At its beginning, Mr. Alexie invokes the most famous opening line of literature: “Call me Zits.” Instead of a perilous hunt for a great white whale, this 15-year-old orphaned half-American-Indian pyromaniac undertakes a voyage of an entirely different dimension.
The reader meets Zits one morning when he is counting the pimples on his face (47 in all) in front of the bathroom mirror at the home of his newest set of foster parents. From the get-go, Mr. Alexie lets the reader in on the messy interior life of this marginalized teenager: “I’m dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame. I’m ashamed of being fifteen years old. And being tall. And skinny. And ugly. I’m ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick. I wonder if loneliness causes acne. I wonder if being Indian causes acne.”
Zits’s Indian father abandoned him shortly after birth. His mother, a fun-loving Irishwoman who sang Blood, Sweat & Tears tunes to Zits as an infant, died of breast cancer when he was only 6. Since then, Zits has been bouncing from foster home to foster home, school to school. “My entire life fits into one small backpack,” he says. At 8, he ran away for the first time. At 15, he is already a self-described drunk.
After Zits lands in a juvenile jail in the Central District of Seattle for the umpteenth time, he meets a white, pretty-boy anarchist named Justice, who schools him on how to take his sorry life into his own hands. Instead of opening fire on bystanders in a crowded bank, as Justice wanted, Zits finds himself on a time-traveling journey that traverses multiple centuries and transforms his worn-out soul in unexpected ways.
First Zits arrives in the compact body of Hank Storm, a white, blue-eyed F.B.I. agent who meets up with two Indian radicals on a dark backwoods road on the Nannapush Indian reservation in Red River, Idaho, about 1975. Then he resurfaces as a speechless Indian kid at the brink of the bloody battle led by Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn in 1876. Zits’s next conversion of flesh is as Augustus (or Gus) Sullivan, an aging, expert Indian tracker employed by the Army in the same era.
Mr. Alexie fast-forwards in time: his mouthy narrator inhabits Jimmy, a flight instructor who has to deal with the guilt-ridden aftermath when one of his students carries out a terrorist act in Chicago. And then, finally, Zits reincarnates into his father’s image, a homeless drunk who roots through trash bins for leftovers and, as it turns out, some bits and pieces of respect.
Many of these allegorical, action-packed vignettes tread familiar thematic territory — the continuing fight for survival, the anger of racial divides, the absence of fathers — of Mr. Alexie’s earlier works, like “Indian Killer” and “Ten Little Indians.” But with “Flight,” he takes these themes a step further: he skillfully explores both sides of the proverbial war. Zits witnesses brutal violence through the eyes of whites and Indians, fathers and sons, and he begins to understand what it means to be the hero, the villain and the victim.
Given the far-reaching scope of Mr. Alexie’s narrative, a reader might expect an epic of Melvillian proportions. Instead, in this slim volume (making it more novella than novel), Mr. Alexie manages to move effortlessly in and out of centuries like a person moving between waking and sleep.
Rather than getting bogged down in the details of seminal historical events, he telescopes to the most intimate moments, when his characters rise and fall. To sustain a compressed narrative continuum, recurring details — like the smell of beer and onions on a character’s breath or smashed-up model airplanes — surface in Zits’s consciousness.
Also, Mr. Alexie, a four-time World Poetry Bout champion, demonstrates his keen ear for voice; Zits rarely strays from the lively, sad incantations of his former 15-year-old self, regardless of whose skin he is in. “I miss my mother,” he says as he pilots a small plane as Jimmy. “I miss her all the time. I want to see her again. And now here I am in the body of a pilot as he flies. It makes sense. The last time my mother was happy she was on an airplane. So maybe this is my last place to be happy.”
By the novel’s conclusion, Mr. Alexie returns full circle to one of the subordinate themes of “Moby-Dick”: how human love and sympathy can save a life (found in the relationship of Ishmael and Queequeg). By offering perspectives from both sides of the battle, Mr. Alexie convincingly illustrates how no one can live alone, no matter what the situation.
“I open my eyes,” says Zits when he wakes up for the last time in the novel. “I think all the people in this bank are better than I am. They have better lives than I do. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe we’re all lonely. Maybe some of them also hurtle through time and see war, war, war. Maybe we’re all in this together.”
Right up to the novel’s final sentence, Mr. Alexie succeeds yet again with his ability to pierce to the heart of matters, leaving this reader with tears in her eyes.
Author Erdrich rejects UND honors over 'Fighting Sioux' nickname
Minnesota author Louise Erdrich has rejected an honorary degree from the University of North Dakota because it continues to use the "Fighting Sioux" team name and logo -- a contentious and litigious issue in Grand Forks.
In a letter to university President Charles Kupchella, Erdrich -- who has American Indian roots -- said that the offer means "a great deal" to her and that she would happily accept, were it not for the logo.
With that, the award-winning Minneapolis author of 11 novels and numerous other works joined a battle over whether the university should drop its logo and nickname. Last fall, university officials sued the National Collegiate Athletic Association over its finding that use of the logo and name is "hostile" and "abusive." A trial is set for December.
Kupchella expressed surprise and disappointment Thursday night, saying Erdrich's nomination came from some of the faculty members in Indian programs. He defends the logo as a beautiful symbol designed by a respected Indian artist. The university uses the name Fighting Sioux with "consummate respect" and the nearest Sioux tribe has given written permission, he has said.
Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, a state she says she still loves and where her nieces and nephew still live. The University of North Dakota educated members of her family and of her tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.
"I hate to do something like this," she said Thursday night. "It goes against my grain. But I do feel strongly about this symbol."
In a letter to university President Charles Kupchella, Erdrich -- who has American Indian roots -- said that the offer means "a great deal" to her and that she would happily accept, were it not for the logo.
With that, the award-winning Minneapolis author of 11 novels and numerous other works joined a battle over whether the university should drop its logo and nickname. Last fall, university officials sued the National Collegiate Athletic Association over its finding that use of the logo and name is "hostile" and "abusive." A trial is set for December.
Kupchella expressed surprise and disappointment Thursday night, saying Erdrich's nomination came from some of the faculty members in Indian programs. He defends the logo as a beautiful symbol designed by a respected Indian artist. The university uses the name Fighting Sioux with "consummate respect" and the nearest Sioux tribe has given written permission, he has said.
Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, a state she says she still loves and where her nieces and nephew still live. The University of North Dakota educated members of her family and of her tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.
"I hate to do something like this," she said Thursday night. "It goes against my grain. But I do feel strongly about this symbol."
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
For Indian Victims of Sexual Assault, a Tangled Legal Path
As a Cherokee woman charging rape by a non-Indian, Jami Rozell could not go to the tribal court, which handles only crimes by Indians against Indians in Indian country. So after five months of agonizing, she went to the district attorney in Tahlequah, Okla., and testified at a preliminary hearing.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, get up there in front of my family with all these men I’ve grown up with all my life,” said Ms. Rozell, now 25 and a first grade teacher in another town. But that was not the worst of it. The police, she said she was soon told, had cleaned up the evidence room and thrown out her rape kit, and with it all chances of prosecution.
However, Chief Stephen Farmer of the Tahlequah police says the department had received permission to destroy the evidence after Ms. Rozell initially declined to press charges.
Human rights advocates say such troubled cases involving Indian victims are common. And, American Indian women are voicing growing anger at what they call their disproportionate victimization in crimes of sexual assault, most often committed by non-Indians, and attitudes and laws that they say deter many from even reporting an attack.
“Indian women suffer two and a half times more domestic violence, three and a half times more sexual assaults, and 17 percent will be stalked — and I’m a victim of all three,” said Pauline Musgrove, executive director of the Spirits of Hope Coalition, an advocacy group in Oklahoma.
Now Amnesty International has taken up the issue, calling on Congress to extend tribal authority to all offenders on Indian land, not just Indians, and to expand federal spending on Indian law enforcement and health clinics.
In a report released yesterday, the American arm of the organization said sexual violence against American Indians had grown out of a long history of “systematic and pervasive abuse and persecution.”
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, get up there in front of my family with all these men I’ve grown up with all my life,” said Ms. Rozell, now 25 and a first grade teacher in another town. But that was not the worst of it. The police, she said she was soon told, had cleaned up the evidence room and thrown out her rape kit, and with it all chances of prosecution.
However, Chief Stephen Farmer of the Tahlequah police says the department had received permission to destroy the evidence after Ms. Rozell initially declined to press charges.
Human rights advocates say such troubled cases involving Indian victims are common. And, American Indian women are voicing growing anger at what they call their disproportionate victimization in crimes of sexual assault, most often committed by non-Indians, and attitudes and laws that they say deter many from even reporting an attack.
“Indian women suffer two and a half times more domestic violence, three and a half times more sexual assaults, and 17 percent will be stalked — and I’m a victim of all three,” said Pauline Musgrove, executive director of the Spirits of Hope Coalition, an advocacy group in Oklahoma.
Now Amnesty International has taken up the issue, calling on Congress to extend tribal authority to all offenders on Indian land, not just Indians, and to expand federal spending on Indian law enforcement and health clinics.
In a report released yesterday, the American arm of the organization said sexual violence against American Indians had grown out of a long history of “systematic and pervasive abuse and persecution.”
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Tribe Puts Bridge on Grand Canyon's Edge
PHOENIX (AP) -- An Indian tribe fastened a massive glass-bottomed walkway to the edge of the Grand Canyon on Wednesday as part of an ambitious tourism center that has angered environmentalists and some tribal members.
The Hualapai (pronounced WALL-uh-pie), an impoverished tribe of about 2,200 people at the canyon's remote western edge, allowed a private developer to construct the $30 million Skywalk in hopes of luring tourists to the region.
The tribe will open it to the public later this month, charging $25 per person in addition to other entry fees. Organizers expect the Skywalk to become the main draw in a community of tribal attractions that includes a cowboy town, an Indian village, helicopter tours and Hummer rides through the outback.
''The Grand Canyon has name appeal, and since part of the reservation lies in that, it only seems natural that we use the attraction to the benefit of the tribe,'' Hualapai Chairman Charlie Vaughn said.
At 1.07 million pounds, the Skywalk is about as heavy as four Boeing 757 jets stacked atop one another. It was perched at the canyon's edge using an elaborate system of pulleys connected to four tractor-trailers.
Underneath, hydraulic ''shoes'' lifted the Skywalk above a cement track, rolled it across a bed of metal rods, and set it onto four steel anchors that were drilled deep into the canyon rock. Workers then welded the walkway to the anchors.
While it was pushed out, the walkway was not anchored to the canyon wall. To keep it from tipping over the side, engineers loaded the back end with a half-million pounds of steel cubes as counterweight.
Debra Wilkerson, an assistant operations manager for Grand Canyon West, the agency that supervises the Skywalk, said Wednesday that the rollout was finished without any problems. ''Just smooth as glass,'' she said. ''It's awesome.''
The Skywalk extends about 75 feet over the rim and about 4,000 feet over the canyon floor. It's designed to withstand 100 mph winds and has shock absorbers to keep the walkway from wobbling as people walk through.
Construction began in April 2005.
David Jin, a Las Vegas developer, came up with the idea for the Skywalk a decade ago. He approached the Hualapai in 1996 with a plan to build it using his own money.
The tribe agreed on the condition that it will own the walkway. Jin will get a cut of the profits.
As it was being built this year, some Hualapai elders said they began to question the wisdom of the project. The tribe considers the canyon sacred ground, and the construction cut into land scattered with Hualapai burial sites.
''You have to be real gentle with the land,'' said Hualapai spiritual leader Frank Mapatis. ''It's a living being, and it can feel those things.''
Environmentalists also have criticized the project for diminishing the canyon's majesty.
The Hualapai (pronounced WALL-uh-pie), an impoverished tribe of about 2,200 people at the canyon's remote western edge, allowed a private developer to construct the $30 million Skywalk in hopes of luring tourists to the region.
The tribe will open it to the public later this month, charging $25 per person in addition to other entry fees. Organizers expect the Skywalk to become the main draw in a community of tribal attractions that includes a cowboy town, an Indian village, helicopter tours and Hummer rides through the outback.
''The Grand Canyon has name appeal, and since part of the reservation lies in that, it only seems natural that we use the attraction to the benefit of the tribe,'' Hualapai Chairman Charlie Vaughn said.
At 1.07 million pounds, the Skywalk is about as heavy as four Boeing 757 jets stacked atop one another. It was perched at the canyon's edge using an elaborate system of pulleys connected to four tractor-trailers.
Underneath, hydraulic ''shoes'' lifted the Skywalk above a cement track, rolled it across a bed of metal rods, and set it onto four steel anchors that were drilled deep into the canyon rock. Workers then welded the walkway to the anchors.
While it was pushed out, the walkway was not anchored to the canyon wall. To keep it from tipping over the side, engineers loaded the back end with a half-million pounds of steel cubes as counterweight.
Debra Wilkerson, an assistant operations manager for Grand Canyon West, the agency that supervises the Skywalk, said Wednesday that the rollout was finished without any problems. ''Just smooth as glass,'' she said. ''It's awesome.''
The Skywalk extends about 75 feet over the rim and about 4,000 feet over the canyon floor. It's designed to withstand 100 mph winds and has shock absorbers to keep the walkway from wobbling as people walk through.
Construction began in April 2005.
David Jin, a Las Vegas developer, came up with the idea for the Skywalk a decade ago. He approached the Hualapai in 1996 with a plan to build it using his own money.
The tribe agreed on the condition that it will own the walkway. Jin will get a cut of the profits.
As it was being built this year, some Hualapai elders said they began to question the wisdom of the project. The tribe considers the canyon sacred ground, and the construction cut into land scattered with Hualapai burial sites.
''You have to be real gentle with the land,'' said Hualapai spiritual leader Frank Mapatis. ''It's a living being, and it can feel those things.''
Environmentalists also have criticized the project for diminishing the canyon's majesty.
In Arizona Desert, Indian Trackers vs. Smugglers
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — A fresh footprint in the dirt, fibers in the mesquite. Harold Thompson reads the signs like a map.
They point to drug smugglers, 10 or 11, crossing from Mexico. The deep impressions and spacing are a giveaway to the heavy loads on their backs. With no insect tracks or paw prints of nocturnal creatures marking the steps, Mr. Thompson determines the smugglers probably crossed a few hours ago.
“These guys are not far ahead; we’ll get them,” said Mr. Thompson, 50, a strapping Navajo who follows the trail like a bloodhound.
At a time when all manner of high technology is arriving to help beef up security at the Mexican border — infrared cameras, sensors, unmanned drones — there is a growing appreciation among the federal authorities for the American Indian art of tracking, honed over generations by ancestors hunting animals.
Mr. Thompson belongs to the Shadow Wolves, a federal law enforcement unit of Indian officers that has operated since the early 1970s on this vast Indian nation straddling the Mexican border.
Tracking skills are in such demand that the Departments of State and Defense have arranged for the Shadow Wolves to train border guards in other countries, including some central to the fight against terrorism. Several officers are going to train border police in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which border Afghanistan, and in several other countries.
In the renewed push to secure the border with Mexico, the curbing of narcotics trafficking often gets less public attention than the capturing of illegal immigrants.
But the 15-member Shadow Wolves unit, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is recruiting members to reach the congressionally authorized complement of 21. And the immigration agency is considering forming a sister unit to patrol part of the Canadian border at the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, where concern about drug trafficking is growing.
“Detecting is one thing, and apprehending is something entirely different,” said Rodney Irby, a special agent in Tucson for the immigration agency who helps supervise the Shadow Wolves. “I applaud the technology; it will only make the border more secure. But there are still going to be groups of people who penetrate the most modern technology, and we need a cadre of agents and officers to apprehend them.”
The Shadow Wolves have seized nearly 30,000 pounds of illegal drugs since October, putting them on pace to meet or exceed previous annual seizure amounts. They routinely seize some 100,000 pounds of illegal drugs a year, Mr. Irby said.
They home in on drug smugglers, who use less-traveled cattle tracks, old wagon-wheel trails and barely formed footpaths to ferry their loads to roads and highways about 40 miles from the border.
The Tohono land, which is the size of Connecticut and the third-largest reservation in area in the country, has long vexed law enforcement. Scores of people die crossing here every year in the searing, dry heat of summer or the frigid cold of winter. And its 76-mile-long border with Mexico, marked in most places with a three- or four-strand barbed-wire fence that is easy to breach, is a major transshipment point for marijuana, Mexico’s largest illicit crop.
TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — A fresh footprint in the dirt, fibers in the mesquite. Harold Thompson reads the signs like a map.
They point to drug smugglers, 10 or 11, crossing from Mexico. The deep impressions and spacing are a giveaway to the heavy loads on their backs. With no insect tracks or paw prints of nocturnal creatures marking the steps, Mr. Thompson determines the smugglers probably crossed a few hours ago.
“These guys are not far ahead; we’ll get them,” said Mr. Thompson, 50, a strapping Navajo who follows the trail like a bloodhound.
At a time when all manner of high technology is arriving to help beef up security at the Mexican border — infrared cameras, sensors, unmanned drones — there is a growing appreciation among the federal authorities for the American Indian art of tracking, honed over generations by ancestors hunting animals.
Mr. Thompson belongs to the Shadow Wolves, a federal law enforcement unit of Indian officers that has operated since the early 1970s on this vast Indian nation straddling the Mexican border.
Tracking skills are in such demand that the Departments of State and Defense have arranged for the Shadow Wolves to train border guards in other countries, including some central to the fight against terrorism. Several officers are going to train border police in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which border Afghanistan, and in several other countries.
In the renewed push to secure the border with Mexico, the curbing of narcotics trafficking often gets less public attention than the capturing of illegal immigrants.
But the 15-member Shadow Wolves unit, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is recruiting members to reach the congressionally authorized complement of 21. And the immigration agency is considering forming a sister unit to patrol part of the Canadian border at the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, where concern about drug trafficking is growing.
“Detecting is one thing, and apprehending is something entirely different,” said Rodney Irby, a special agent in Tucson for the immigration agency who helps supervise the Shadow Wolves. “I applaud the technology; it will only make the border more secure. But there are still going to be groups of people who penetrate the most modern technology, and we need a cadre of agents and officers to apprehend them.”
The Shadow Wolves have seized nearly 30,000 pounds of illegal drugs since October, putting them on pace to meet or exceed previous annual seizure amounts. They routinely seize some 100,000 pounds of illegal drugs a year, Mr. Irby said.
They home in on drug smugglers, who use less-traveled cattle tracks, old wagon-wheel trails and barely formed footpaths to ferry their loads to roads and highways about 40 miles from the border.
The Tohono land, which is the size of Connecticut and the third-largest reservation in area in the country, has long vexed law enforcement. Scores of people die crossing here every year in the searing, dry heat of summer or the frigid cold of winter. And its 76-mile-long border with Mexico, marked in most places with a three- or four-strand barbed-wire fence that is easy to breach, is a major transshipment point for marijuana, Mexico’s largest illicit crop.
Stone Towers Are Decoded as Earliest Solar Observatory in the Americas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler’s power.
Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.
This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.
In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from 6 to 20 feet and extending 1,000 feet, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings. They said the position of the towers in relation to observation points inside the walled complex was firm evidence that this was a place for solar study in calendar-making and ritual ceremonies and feasts of sun cults.
The observatory, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, is in the Casma-Sechin River Basin of the coastal Peruvian desert, 240 miles north of Lima. Since the 19th century, archaeologists have speculated on the function of the walls and towers, whether the complex was a temple, the setting for ceremonial battles or a fort, the most common explanation.
Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who is studying ancient Peruvian warfare, visited Chankillo to investigate its battlements. Part of the complex did appear to be fortifications.
“In the first hours of measurements,” Mr. Ghezzi said in a telephone interview from Lima, “we realized the nature and importance of the towers.”
Clive Ruggles, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Leicester in England, joined Mr. Ghezzi, who is also director of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru, in the investigation. They concluded that Chankillo provided “evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated sun cults,” beginning in the fourth century B. C.
Clark Erickson, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said he was convinced by the new findings. They are important, he said, because they reveal “what was going on in the heads of these people.”
Early people in Peru, like others in antiquity, went to great lengths to track the rising and setting of the sun through the seasons as a guide for agriculture, an object of worship and a mystical demonstration of a ruler’s power.
Archaeologists have now discovered that a line of elaborate stone towers erected on a low ridge by Peruvians 2,300 years ago formed an artificial toothed horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals for making alignments almost exactly spanning the annual arc of the sun.
This is the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas. The site precedes by several centuries similar monuments by the Maya in Central America and by almost two millenniums solar observatories of the Inca civilization in Peru.
In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, a Peruvian archaeologist and a British archaeoastronomer wrote that the 13 towers, varying in height from 6 to 20 feet and extending 1,000 feet, are clearly visible from an imposing complex of concentric circles of relatively well-preserved walls enclosing ceremonial buildings. They said the position of the towers in relation to observation points inside the walled complex was firm evidence that this was a place for solar study in calendar-making and ritual ceremonies and feasts of sun cults.
The observatory, known as the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, is in the Casma-Sechin River Basin of the coastal Peruvian desert, 240 miles north of Lima. Since the 19th century, archaeologists have speculated on the function of the walls and towers, whether the complex was a temple, the setting for ceremonial battles or a fort, the most common explanation.
Ivan Ghezzi, a doctoral student at Yale University who is studying ancient Peruvian warfare, visited Chankillo to investigate its battlements. Part of the complex did appear to be fortifications.
“In the first hours of measurements,” Mr. Ghezzi said in a telephone interview from Lima, “we realized the nature and importance of the towers.”
Clive Ruggles, an archaeoastronomer at the University of Leicester in England, joined Mr. Ghezzi, who is also director of the National Institute of Culture, in Peru, in the investigation. They concluded that Chankillo provided “evidence of early solar horizon observations and of the existence of sophisticated sun cults,” beginning in the fourth century B. C.
Clark Erickson, an Andean archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said he was convinced by the new findings. They are important, he said, because they reveal “what was going on in the heads of these people.”
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Inuits Blame U.S. for Climate Change
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States has come under heavy criticism, including from people who live almost on top of the world.
The Inuits of Northern Canada and beyond are taking their case against the United States on Thursday to an international human rights commission. They have scant chance of a breakthrough but still hope to score moral and political points against the U.S. and its carbon spewers.
''The point here is that our way of life is at stake,'' says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who was nominated with former Vice President Al Gore for a Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change.
She was preparing to make the Inuit case at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the 34-member Organization of American States.
The Inuit population hails from Canada, Russia and Greenland, as well as Alaska, where they are known as Eskimos. They have been trying to tell the world for more than a decade about the shifting winds and thinning ice that have damaged the hunting grounds the Northern peoples have used for thousands of years.
Watt-Cloutier spoke earlier this week in Iqaluit, the capital of Canada's Arctic Nunavut Territory about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, before leaving for Washington.
Simon Nattaq, a hunter, blames climate change for the loss of his feet in February 2001. He says his snow mobile and all his gear plunged through unusually thin ice, leaving him stranded for two days. He now walks -- and still hunts -- with prosthetic feet and believes God kept him alive to warn the world about global warming.
Many researchers believe the world likely is growing warmer because of the heat-trapping, or ''greenhouse,'' properties of carbon dioxide and other human-generated gases that are being emitted into the atmosphere.
Scientists generally agree the Arctic is the first place on Earth to be impacted by rising global temperatures. They say that unless developed nations such as the United States -- responsible for one-fourth of world's greenhouse gases -- do not dramatically reduce their emissions within the next 15 years, the Arctic ice likely will melt by the end of the century.
The Inuits of Northern Canada and beyond are taking their case against the United States on Thursday to an international human rights commission. They have scant chance of a breakthrough but still hope to score moral and political points against the U.S. and its carbon spewers.
''The point here is that our way of life is at stake,'' says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who was nominated with former Vice President Al Gore for a Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change.
She was preparing to make the Inuit case at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the 34-member Organization of American States.
The Inuit population hails from Canada, Russia and Greenland, as well as Alaska, where they are known as Eskimos. They have been trying to tell the world for more than a decade about the shifting winds and thinning ice that have damaged the hunting grounds the Northern peoples have used for thousands of years.
Watt-Cloutier spoke earlier this week in Iqaluit, the capital of Canada's Arctic Nunavut Territory about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, before leaving for Washington.
Simon Nattaq, a hunter, blames climate change for the loss of his feet in February 2001. He says his snow mobile and all his gear plunged through unusually thin ice, leaving him stranded for two days. He now walks -- and still hunts -- with prosthetic feet and believes God kept him alive to warn the world about global warming.
Many researchers believe the world likely is growing warmer because of the heat-trapping, or ''greenhouse,'' properties of carbon dioxide and other human-generated gases that are being emitted into the atmosphere.
Scientists generally agree the Arctic is the first place on Earth to be impacted by rising global temperatures. They say that unless developed nations such as the United States -- responsible for one-fourth of world's greenhouse gases -- do not dramatically reduce their emissions within the next 15 years, the Arctic ice likely will melt by the end of the century.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
One Nation, Under Fire High Country News - February 19, 2007:
Illegal drugs and immigrants pour across an open frontier. The government responds with helicopters and ATVs. And the once-quiet desert homeland of the Tohono O’odham Nation becomes a nerve-wracking police state.
TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, ARIZONA
A five-strand barbed-wire fence is all that separates the United States and Mexico in this remote southeastern corner of America’s second-largest Indian nation.
On a warm Sunday afternoon in early January, no one from U.S. law enforcement is checking documents as people move back and forth at a crossing — really, just a steel cattle guard in a gap in the fence — known as the San Miguel Gate. There are no signs of Mexican border officials keeping tabs on the gate. Tohono O’odham tribal police are nowhere to be seen.
On this day, in fact, the only suggestion of government control is a Border Patrol officer, posted several hundred yards north of the gate. The officer does not stop a High Country News reporter in a Chevy Suburban (a vehicle prized by the border area’s smugglers) from driving southbound, on the dirt road leading to the gate.
Officially, only members of the Tohono O’odham Nation are allowed to pass through the San Miguel Gate. But no signs warn non-members against crossing. The biggest obstacles to traversing the border at the San Miguel Gate, it seems, are the six-inch gaps between the steel rails of the cattle guard there.
And once you’re in Mexico, the party begins.
Vendors from the northern Sonora towns of Altar, Caborca and Sasabe sell tortillas, white cheese, sodas, water, beer and tequila from the sides of vans and backs of pickup trucks. A Yaqui musician strums his guitar and squeaks out a tune on a harmonica, entertaining six O’odham folks jammed into a sedan, downing quarts of beer and eating tamales.
For decades, O’odham tribal members have used the San Miguel Gate to enter Mexico and shop at the weekend flea market rather than face a lengthy drive to purchase traditional foods (and, for some, liquor, which is not sold on Indian lands) off-reservation. The mood at the bazaar is light-hearted and friendly, at least until an Anglo reporter approaches and tries to strike up a conversation. The vendors are eager to sell their wares, but they are reluctant to talk about what else goes on at the market, particularly when the sun goes down.
“This place is out of control,” says Francisco Bennett, leaning against the side of a pickup truck from which an old man is selling food and beer out of a cooler. Bennett says he’s been coming to the bazaar for years to shop, party and socialize with his O’odham friends, who live on both sides of the border. Years ago, he says, families with young children would gather for the day and stay well into the evening.
But those relaxed weekends are long gone.
[Continue the story at High Country News using the link on the title.]
TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, ARIZONA
A five-strand barbed-wire fence is all that separates the United States and Mexico in this remote southeastern corner of America’s second-largest Indian nation.
On a warm Sunday afternoon in early January, no one from U.S. law enforcement is checking documents as people move back and forth at a crossing — really, just a steel cattle guard in a gap in the fence — known as the San Miguel Gate. There are no signs of Mexican border officials keeping tabs on the gate. Tohono O’odham tribal police are nowhere to be seen.
On this day, in fact, the only suggestion of government control is a Border Patrol officer, posted several hundred yards north of the gate. The officer does not stop a High Country News reporter in a Chevy Suburban (a vehicle prized by the border area’s smugglers) from driving southbound, on the dirt road leading to the gate.
Officially, only members of the Tohono O’odham Nation are allowed to pass through the San Miguel Gate. But no signs warn non-members against crossing. The biggest obstacles to traversing the border at the San Miguel Gate, it seems, are the six-inch gaps between the steel rails of the cattle guard there.
And once you’re in Mexico, the party begins.
Vendors from the northern Sonora towns of Altar, Caborca and Sasabe sell tortillas, white cheese, sodas, water, beer and tequila from the sides of vans and backs of pickup trucks. A Yaqui musician strums his guitar and squeaks out a tune on a harmonica, entertaining six O’odham folks jammed into a sedan, downing quarts of beer and eating tamales.
For decades, O’odham tribal members have used the San Miguel Gate to enter Mexico and shop at the weekend flea market rather than face a lengthy drive to purchase traditional foods (and, for some, liquor, which is not sold on Indian lands) off-reservation. The mood at the bazaar is light-hearted and friendly, at least until an Anglo reporter approaches and tries to strike up a conversation. The vendors are eager to sell their wares, but they are reluctant to talk about what else goes on at the market, particularly when the sun goes down.
“This place is out of control,” says Francisco Bennett, leaning against the side of a pickup truck from which an old man is selling food and beer out of a cooler. Bennett says he’s been coming to the bazaar for years to shop, party and socialize with his O’odham friends, who live on both sides of the border. Years ago, he says, families with young children would gather for the day and stay well into the evening.
But those relaxed weekends are long gone.
[Continue the story at High Country News using the link on the title.]
Monday, February 19, 2007
Spitzer Approves Plan for Indian Casino in Catskills - New York Times
ALBANY, N.Y. -- A decades-old proposal for a casino in the Catskills took a major step Monday with Gov. Eliot Spitzer's agreement for the St. Regis Mohawk tribe to build and operate a gaming center at Monticello Raceway.
The Sullivan County casino that would be expected to draw gamblers from the nearby New York City area is also expected to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to state government, as well as help revive the economically hard-pressed region. The $600 million casino is expected to provide 3,000 permanent jobs and create a building boom in the area.
The casino would also mark a return of the region as an entertainment hot spot, where top comedians, bands, singers and boxers once made regular stops. The names of the now closed Catskills resorts and the stars who honed their craft there are part of American entertainment legend.
"By working together, we can establish a premier gaming facility that will produce significant revenues for the tribe and the state and help spark a resurgence of the Catskills region," Spitzer said.
Under the agreement, the state would receive 20 percent of the revenue from slot machines for the first two years, 23 percent for the next two years and 25 percent after that. Ending another major sticking point, the tribe agreed to comply with state tax, labor and health laws. For a sovereign tribe, the state couldn't simply require adherence to state laws.
"We commend Governor Spitzer's decisive action and commitment to our Sullivan County casino project which we believe will generate tremendous opportunities in and around the Catskills region," the Mohawk St. Regis Tribal Council said in a prepared statement. "We rejoice in the prospects this important project presents for the future of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, the people of Sullivan County, and New Yorkers across the state."
The 30-year effort, however, isn't over.
Spitzer and the tribe are now urging the secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior to make final approvals, including taking raceway land into a trust. The department includes the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The Democratic governor wouldn't predict how the Republican Bush administration will react.
"I will be in Washington and will certainly convey to the secretary how important this is for the economy of the Catskills and Sullivan County," Spitzer told The Associated Press.
Spitzer said local concerns over traffic are eased at Monticello because the roadways to handle heavy traffic are in place, but not used to their potential. He said the state will also address concerns about gambling addiction.
Spitzer stated, as he did during his campaign, that "casinos are not the totality of economic development," but they can be effective and lucrative especially in areas like the Catskills that have historically been tourist destinations.
In December, the U.S. Interior Department approved an environmental review of the St. Regis Mohawk Indian tribe's project. The agency found the proposed casino on 30 acres next to Monticello Gaming and Raceway would not have a significant environmental impact.
Last week, a group of farm and conservation groups sued the federal department to halt the project, arguing that a more thorough environmental review is needed. The case is in federal court in Manhattan.
The Mohawks, whose reservation straddles the U.S.-Canadian border, are among a number of groups that have been trying to build a casino in the Catskills for the past decade.
Construction cannot begin until the Interior Department puts the land into trust for the Mohawks.
The harness racing track is owned by Empire Resorts, which would build the new casino. The casino would offer blackjack, roulette, craps and traditional slot machines.
Empire spokesman Charles Degliomini has said construction could begin within the year at the site 75 miles north of New York City.
In January, a judge dealt at least a temporary blow to a casino proposal for Buffalo through the Seneca Indian Nation. The judge ruled that the a federal agency erred in 2002 when it approved the plan. The Senecas already have casinos in Niagara Falls and Salamanca, Cattaraugus County, and they hope to begin operating a temporary casino in Buffalo in April.
The Oneida tribe's Turning Stone casino near Utica opened more than a decade ago and has flourished, now covering more than 1,000 acres with hotels and golf courses.
While the casinos have made traditionally poor tribes rich, some communities have complained their tax-free trade and enterprises have hurt non-Indian business.
The Sullivan County casino that would be expected to draw gamblers from the nearby New York City area is also expected to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to state government, as well as help revive the economically hard-pressed region. The $600 million casino is expected to provide 3,000 permanent jobs and create a building boom in the area.
The casino would also mark a return of the region as an entertainment hot spot, where top comedians, bands, singers and boxers once made regular stops. The names of the now closed Catskills resorts and the stars who honed their craft there are part of American entertainment legend.
"By working together, we can establish a premier gaming facility that will produce significant revenues for the tribe and the state and help spark a resurgence of the Catskills region," Spitzer said.
Under the agreement, the state would receive 20 percent of the revenue from slot machines for the first two years, 23 percent for the next two years and 25 percent after that. Ending another major sticking point, the tribe agreed to comply with state tax, labor and health laws. For a sovereign tribe, the state couldn't simply require adherence to state laws.
"We commend Governor Spitzer's decisive action and commitment to our Sullivan County casino project which we believe will generate tremendous opportunities in and around the Catskills region," the Mohawk St. Regis Tribal Council said in a prepared statement. "We rejoice in the prospects this important project presents for the future of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, the people of Sullivan County, and New Yorkers across the state."
The 30-year effort, however, isn't over.
Spitzer and the tribe are now urging the secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior to make final approvals, including taking raceway land into a trust. The department includes the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The Democratic governor wouldn't predict how the Republican Bush administration will react.
"I will be in Washington and will certainly convey to the secretary how important this is for the economy of the Catskills and Sullivan County," Spitzer told The Associated Press.
Spitzer said local concerns over traffic are eased at Monticello because the roadways to handle heavy traffic are in place, but not used to their potential. He said the state will also address concerns about gambling addiction.
Spitzer stated, as he did during his campaign, that "casinos are not the totality of economic development," but they can be effective and lucrative especially in areas like the Catskills that have historically been tourist destinations.
In December, the U.S. Interior Department approved an environmental review of the St. Regis Mohawk Indian tribe's project. The agency found the proposed casino on 30 acres next to Monticello Gaming and Raceway would not have a significant environmental impact.
Last week, a group of farm and conservation groups sued the federal department to halt the project, arguing that a more thorough environmental review is needed. The case is in federal court in Manhattan.
The Mohawks, whose reservation straddles the U.S.-Canadian border, are among a number of groups that have been trying to build a casino in the Catskills for the past decade.
Construction cannot begin until the Interior Department puts the land into trust for the Mohawks.
The harness racing track is owned by Empire Resorts, which would build the new casino. The casino would offer blackjack, roulette, craps and traditional slot machines.
Empire spokesman Charles Degliomini has said construction could begin within the year at the site 75 miles north of New York City.
In January, a judge dealt at least a temporary blow to a casino proposal for Buffalo through the Seneca Indian Nation. The judge ruled that the a federal agency erred in 2002 when it approved the plan. The Senecas already have casinos in Niagara Falls and Salamanca, Cattaraugus County, and they hope to begin operating a temporary casino in Buffalo in April.
The Oneida tribe's Turning Stone casino near Utica opened more than a decade ago and has flourished, now covering more than 1,000 acres with hotels and golf courses.
While the casinos have made traditionally poor tribes rich, some communities have complained their tax-free trade and enterprises have hurt non-Indian business.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Diane Burns, Native American Lower East Side poet
By Sarah Ferguson
Slowly people drifted into the parish room at St. Mark’s Church on Jan. 27 to celebrate the life of Native American poet and longtime Lower East Side resident Diane Burns. They were reluctant, it seemed, to remember the light that burned inside Burns was gone, and that she drank herself to death at age 50, leaving behind a beautiful 15-year-old daughter with shy almond eyes and a scattering of poems so fierce they continue to churn up in literary anthologies two decades later.
Maybe the light inside Burns burned too brightly?
Consider the opening lines of her first and only book of poetry, “Riding the One-Eyed Ford,” published in 1981:
Our people
slit open the badger
to see the tomorrows
in its blood.
Now
look at me
and see what our
tomorrows hold
Illustrated with her own fine pen-and-ink drawings, that slim collection established Burns as a formidable presence in the New York poetry scene and beyond. Though she didn’t publish much more than that, her witty, sardonic takes on Native stereotypes are still cutting enough to be taught alongside more famous contemporaries like Sherman Alexie:
I am Tequila Mockingbird. Yes, I am related to Isaiah Mockingbird, and yes, I am that face in the moon on the cover of the Carson’s record album. And the Marshmallow beer girl, and that’s me on every stick of Land O’Lakes butter… I can trace my lineage back to the beginning of time when the world was nothing but a scrap of mud on the tip of a loon’s nose.
(from her 1993 essay
“Tequila Mockingbird”)
Born in 1956 in Lawrence, Kan., to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother, Burns was raised with her two brothers in Riverside, Cal., where her parents got work teaching at a Native American boarding school. When she was about 10 years old, the family moved to the Lac Corte Oreilles reservation in Hayward, Wis., then on to Wahpeton, N.D., when her parents began teaching at another boarding school there.
“Even in grade school, she was always writing and drawing,” recalls Diane’s mother, Rose Burns. “In third grade she won the first-place prize for her poem, ‘A Pencil Can Travel.’”
Evidently, Diane discovered early on that writing could be a ticket to elsewhere. She spent her senior year of high school at the American Indian Art Institute in Santa Fe, N.M., then got a scholarship from Barnard College, with the aim of becoming a lawyer.
She dropped out of Barnard her senior year — no one remembers why. Perhaps the life of a poet seemed more enthralling. In a videotaped interview with Emilio Murillo for his Manhattan cable show, “Earth Bird,” Burns described how she came into her profession somewhat by accident, when the American Indian Community House called up looking to book a Native American poet for an event they were hosting.
“I didn’t have anything, so I stayed up all night scribbling and ended up onstage with Audre Lorde,” Burns recalled. “I actually got paid $50. I’m the only poet I know who got into the field for money,” she joked.
The Bowery Poetry Club, at 308 Bowery at Bleecker St., is hosting a “Praise Day” for Diane Burns on Feb. 21 at 6 p.m., with readings by Joy Harjo and many others.
Slowly people drifted into the parish room at St. Mark’s Church on Jan. 27 to celebrate the life of Native American poet and longtime Lower East Side resident Diane Burns. They were reluctant, it seemed, to remember the light that burned inside Burns was gone, and that she drank herself to death at age 50, leaving behind a beautiful 15-year-old daughter with shy almond eyes and a scattering of poems so fierce they continue to churn up in literary anthologies two decades later.
Maybe the light inside Burns burned too brightly?
Consider the opening lines of her first and only book of poetry, “Riding the One-Eyed Ford,” published in 1981:
Our people
slit open the badger
to see the tomorrows
in its blood.
Now
look at me
and see what our
tomorrows hold
Illustrated with her own fine pen-and-ink drawings, that slim collection established Burns as a formidable presence in the New York poetry scene and beyond. Though she didn’t publish much more than that, her witty, sardonic takes on Native stereotypes are still cutting enough to be taught alongside more famous contemporaries like Sherman Alexie:
I am Tequila Mockingbird. Yes, I am related to Isaiah Mockingbird, and yes, I am that face in the moon on the cover of the Carson’s record album. And the Marshmallow beer girl, and that’s me on every stick of Land O’Lakes butter… I can trace my lineage back to the beginning of time when the world was nothing but a scrap of mud on the tip of a loon’s nose.
(from her 1993 essay
“Tequila Mockingbird”)
Born in 1956 in Lawrence, Kan., to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother, Burns was raised with her two brothers in Riverside, Cal., where her parents got work teaching at a Native American boarding school. When she was about 10 years old, the family moved to the Lac Corte Oreilles reservation in Hayward, Wis., then on to Wahpeton, N.D., when her parents began teaching at another boarding school there.
“Even in grade school, she was always writing and drawing,” recalls Diane’s mother, Rose Burns. “In third grade she won the first-place prize for her poem, ‘A Pencil Can Travel.’”
Evidently, Diane discovered early on that writing could be a ticket to elsewhere. She spent her senior year of high school at the American Indian Art Institute in Santa Fe, N.M., then got a scholarship from Barnard College, with the aim of becoming a lawyer.
She dropped out of Barnard her senior year — no one remembers why. Perhaps the life of a poet seemed more enthralling. In a videotaped interview with Emilio Murillo for his Manhattan cable show, “Earth Bird,” Burns described how she came into her profession somewhat by accident, when the American Indian Community House called up looking to book a Native American poet for an event they were hosting.
“I didn’t have anything, so I stayed up all night scribbling and ended up onstage with Audre Lorde,” Burns recalled. “I actually got paid $50. I’m the only poet I know who got into the field for money,” she joked.
The Bowery Poetry Club, at 308 Bowery at Bleecker St., is hosting a “Praise Day” for Diane Burns on Feb. 21 at 6 p.m., with readings by Joy Harjo and many others.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Illinois Retiring American Indian Mascot - New York Times
URBANA, Ill. (AP) -- The University of Illinois will retire its 81-year-old American Indian mascot, Chief Illiniwek, following the last men's home basketball game of the season on Wednesday.
The NCAA in 2005 deemed the buckskin-clad Illiniwek an offensive use of American Indian imagery and barred the university from hosting postseason events.
American Indian groups and others complained for years that the mascot, used since 1926, is demeaning. Supporters of the mascot say it honors the contributions of American Indians to Illinois.
School officials said they received a letter from the NCAA on Thursday that said the school will no longer be banned from hosting postseason events if it drops the mascot and related American Indian imagery. The NCAA's sanctions thus far have prevented Illinois from hosting postseason events in two low-profile sports.
''The Chief Illiniwek tradition inspired and thrilled members of the University of Illinois community for 80 years,'' board of trustees chairman Lawrence Eppley said Friday. ''It was created, carried on and enjoyed by people with great respect for tradition, and we appreciate their dedication and commitment. It will be important now to ensure the accurate recounting and safekeeping of the tradition as an integral part of the history of the university.''
On Thursday, two students who portray Illiniwek filed suit seeking to bar the university from ''capitulating to the NCAA by announcing the retirement of Chief Illiniwek.'' A hearing on the lawsuit was under way Friday morning
The NCAA in 2005 deemed the buckskin-clad Illiniwek an offensive use of American Indian imagery and barred the university from hosting postseason events.
American Indian groups and others complained for years that the mascot, used since 1926, is demeaning. Supporters of the mascot say it honors the contributions of American Indians to Illinois.
School officials said they received a letter from the NCAA on Thursday that said the school will no longer be banned from hosting postseason events if it drops the mascot and related American Indian imagery. The NCAA's sanctions thus far have prevented Illinois from hosting postseason events in two low-profile sports.
''The Chief Illiniwek tradition inspired and thrilled members of the University of Illinois community for 80 years,'' board of trustees chairman Lawrence Eppley said Friday. ''It was created, carried on and enjoyed by people with great respect for tradition, and we appreciate their dedication and commitment. It will be important now to ensure the accurate recounting and safekeeping of the tradition as an integral part of the history of the university.''
On Thursday, two students who portray Illiniwek filed suit seeking to bar the university from ''capitulating to the NCAA by announcing the retirement of Chief Illiniwek.'' A hearing on the lawsuit was under way Friday morning
Thursday, February 15, 2007
The Paula Gunn Allen Fund
Dr. Paula Gunn Allen, renowned author and scholar of Laguna Pueblo/Metis descent, lost her home and virtually all of her possessions in a fire in Fort Bragg, California this October. She barely escaped herself, requiring weeks of hospitalization.
This is an appeal for your help. We are trying to raise $20,000 and we ask you to meet her need with a monetary gift to help her re-establish a home. Please pass the word.
Paula is truly one of the founders of Native American Studies and her work in Literature and in Women's Studies will influence generations to come. Books like The Sacred Hoop, Grandmothers of the Light, and Pocahontas (a 2003 Pulitzer Prize nominee) give new visions; her poetry and fiction are equally powerful. She's an elder who brings us wisdom and laughter. She has given us much; this time of need is an opportunity to give back to her. Please help.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Louis W. Ballard, 1931-2007
The great Quapaw-Cherokee composer Louis Ballard passed just around midnight, Feb 9, at his home in Santa Fe, NM. He was 75. He was a dear man, and will be missed.
Sharing of Bison Range Management Breaks Down
MOIESE, Mont. — An effort to have two Indian tribes assist government officials in operating a federal wildlife refuge that is surrounded by their reservation has collapsed amid accusations of racism, harassment, intimidation and poor performance. But top federal officials say they are determined to resurrect it.
The plan for the tribes and the government to jointly run the National Bison Range in western Montana, just north of Missoula, had long been viewed as unworkable by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Interior branch that manages wildlife refuges.
But top Interior Department officials say that despite the objections, they are committed to transferring some responsibility for the range from the wildlife service to a tribal government.
“There’s a shared sense of mission between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the tribes,” said Shane Wolf, a department spokesman.
Representative Denny Rehberg, Republican of Montana, asked the Government Accountability Office and the House Resources Committee in late January to investigate the disagreement and the problems plaguing the range. Among them is whether political appointees at the Interior Department pressured the wildlife service into the pact. The department’s inspector general and its Office of Equal Opportunity are also investigating.
The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 allows tribal involvement in the management of federal lands, and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, which have strong cultural links to bison, wanted the authority to manage the refuge.
The Fish and Wildlife Service opposed ceding control over the bison range, and the Interior Department and tribal officials decided to split the mission. The federal government maintained management authority but hired members of the tribes to feed and care for the bison. Federal managers, who did not have authority over the tribal workers, had to ask a tribal manager to relay orders.
The project leader at the range, Steve Kallin of the wildlife service, said tribal employees failed to do their assigned tasks and that this led to the cancellation of the agreement.
For example, Mr. Kallin said, tribe members failed to feed the bison properly in preparation for their transfer to another refuge, at which point, he said, the wildlife service resumed responsibility for feeding.
Tribal employees also did not maintain fences, Mr. Kallin said, allowing bison to wander into pastures that were being rested from grazing.
Wildlife agency employees also said that relations grew strained and that tribal employees started to threaten them. They also said they felt excluded because tribal employees prayed together during work hours. The wildlife agency hired a retired special agent-in-charge of the National Park Service for the Rocky Mountain region, Jim Reilly, to look into the situation.
Mr. Reilly’s findings, which were not made public but appeared on a Web site run by a group opposed to tribal management, supported many of the federal employees’ accusations. Mr. Reilly wrote that work conditions at the range “were as bad as he had ever seen in his career,” according to a letter from the service’s deputy regional director, Jay Slack, to the regional director that cited the investigation.
Tribal officials denied many of the accusations and said they were surprised by the list of complaints. Cancellation of the agreement “came completely out of the blue,” said the chairman of the tribal confederation, James Steele Jr. “We didn’t know until the day that they did it.”
While he was aware of some problems, Mr. Steele said, he thought they were being dealt with.
A lawyer for the tribe, Brian Upton, said tribal officials did not allow Mr. Reilly to interview members who worked at the range “because they never told us why they were investigating us.”
“We do not have any corroborating details for any of the complaints,” Mr. Upton said.
The plan for the tribes and the government to jointly run the National Bison Range in western Montana, just north of Missoula, had long been viewed as unworkable by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Interior branch that manages wildlife refuges.
But top Interior Department officials say that despite the objections, they are committed to transferring some responsibility for the range from the wildlife service to a tribal government.
“There’s a shared sense of mission between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the tribes,” said Shane Wolf, a department spokesman.
Representative Denny Rehberg, Republican of Montana, asked the Government Accountability Office and the House Resources Committee in late January to investigate the disagreement and the problems plaguing the range. Among them is whether political appointees at the Interior Department pressured the wildlife service into the pact. The department’s inspector general and its Office of Equal Opportunity are also investigating.
The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 allows tribal involvement in the management of federal lands, and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, which have strong cultural links to bison, wanted the authority to manage the refuge.
The Fish and Wildlife Service opposed ceding control over the bison range, and the Interior Department and tribal officials decided to split the mission. The federal government maintained management authority but hired members of the tribes to feed and care for the bison. Federal managers, who did not have authority over the tribal workers, had to ask a tribal manager to relay orders.
The project leader at the range, Steve Kallin of the wildlife service, said tribal employees failed to do their assigned tasks and that this led to the cancellation of the agreement.
For example, Mr. Kallin said, tribe members failed to feed the bison properly in preparation for their transfer to another refuge, at which point, he said, the wildlife service resumed responsibility for feeding.
Tribal employees also did not maintain fences, Mr. Kallin said, allowing bison to wander into pastures that were being rested from grazing.
Wildlife agency employees also said that relations grew strained and that tribal employees started to threaten them. They also said they felt excluded because tribal employees prayed together during work hours. The wildlife agency hired a retired special agent-in-charge of the National Park Service for the Rocky Mountain region, Jim Reilly, to look into the situation.
Mr. Reilly’s findings, which were not made public but appeared on a Web site run by a group opposed to tribal management, supported many of the federal employees’ accusations. Mr. Reilly wrote that work conditions at the range “were as bad as he had ever seen in his career,” according to a letter from the service’s deputy regional director, Jay Slack, to the regional director that cited the investigation.
Tribal officials denied many of the accusations and said they were surprised by the list of complaints. Cancellation of the agreement “came completely out of the blue,” said the chairman of the tribal confederation, James Steele Jr. “We didn’t know until the day that they did it.”
While he was aware of some problems, Mr. Steele said, he thought they were being dealt with.
A lawyer for the tribe, Brian Upton, said tribal officials did not allow Mr. Reilly to interview members who worked at the range “because they never told us why they were investigating us.”
“We do not have any corroborating details for any of the complaints,” Mr. Upton said.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Restoring Dignity to Sitting Bull, Wherever He Is
STANDING ROCK RESERVATION, S.D.
One monument to Sitting Bull is in Mobridge, S.D. But Ron His Horse Is Thunder, above, does not believe the American Indian leader truly rests there. More Photos »
Here, on a snow-dusted bluff overlooking the Missouri River, rests Sitting Bull. Or so it is said.
Stand before the monument and see the pocks left in the granite by bullets. Notice where the nose was replaced after vandals with chains and a truck yanked the bust from its pedestal. Spot where the headdress feather was mended after being shot off. And wonder, along with the rest of the Dakotas:
Is Sitting Bull here?
The 12-foot monument rises where Sitting Bull is supposedly buried and where he certainly once felt at home; where the steel-blue clouds of winter press down upon the hills of dormant grass; where nothing moves but a solitary bird in flight, and the whinnies of a distant horse sound almost like an old man’s rueful laughter.
It all seems fitting, even the vandalism, given how this world-famous American Indian has never received the respect in death that was often denied him in life. Now two men are trying to pay that respect, in late but earnest installments.
As one of them, Rhett Albers, collects another beer bottle discarded near the base of the monument, the other, Bryan Defender, gazes up at the bust of Sitting Bull. As always, the face of stone gives away nothing.
Maybe in the end it does not matter where the holy man actually rests, says Mr. Defender, who is Hunkpapa Sioux. Like the man whose history he honors.
Sitting Bull. Distinguished as a warrior against rival tribes and American soldiers. Served as spiritual leader for the Indian victory at Little Bighorn. Refused to accept white encroachment. Surrendered. Was imprisoned. Toured briefly with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Then, at age 59, was killed during a botched arrest in 1890, an arrest rooted in the belief that he supported a growing movement of resistance among the Sioux.
The government buried him in Fort Yates, on the North Dakota side of this sprawling reservation that straddles the Dakotas. There, in what was then a predominantly white military community, his grave site became little more than a weedy lot.
Then, in 1953, some Chamber of Commerce types from the small South Dakota city of Mobridge executed a startling plan. With the blessing of a few of Sitting Bull’s descendants, they crossed into North Dakota after midnight and exhumed what they believed were Sitting Bull’s remains. One photograph from that strange night depicts a Mobridge mortician supervising the exhumation; he holds a cigarette in one hand and a human femur in the other.
The men raced back 55 miles to bury the remains on this bluff, across the river from Mobridge. They scoffed at North Dakota’s contention that they had taken the wrong bones, and justified their actions by saying that Sitting Bull had been born near here and that the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski would soon create a more fitting monument to him. And would having Sitting Bull’s remains help tourism in Mobridge? Well, of course.
Up in Fort Yates, the state eventually unveiled a plaque that left vague the whereabouts of Sitting Bull’s remains (“He was buried here but his grave has been vandalized many times”), while on this bluff across from Mobridge, the area around the monument became a place to dump used tires, to have a beer party, to shoot off a gun — sometimes into the granite.
“People would say, ‘Party at Sitting Bull!’ ” Mr. Albers recalls. “It was a joke.”
The site’s poor condition vexed Mr. Albers, 45, an environmental consultant, and Mr. Defender, 35, who runs the reservation’s solid-waste-removal operation. That irritation turned to embarrassment when a visiting foreign-exchange student asked Mr. Albers to see the monument dedicated to the famous Sitting Bull.
So, two years ago, the men bought the monument and its 40-acre parcel from a private owner for $55,000. They mowed the grass, trucked away 50 cubic yards of debris and established a nonprofit corporation with plans to recoup their expenses and establish a cultural and educational center.
They also came up against the still-emotional question of where the great Indian leader truly rests. Not long ago, someone scrawled a message across the granite pedestal: “Sitting Bull is not buried here!”
A drive through the reservation, from Mobridge to Fort Yates, is a drive through an undulant moonscape of stillness, disturbed only by the dance of an occasional horse. Here, unemployment among the 11,000 people is nearly 80 percent, and the challenge of restoring a sense of self-identity cannot be addressed alone by revenue from the two modest casinos.
In an office in Fort Yates sits Ron His Horse Is Thunder, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a great-great-great grandson of Sitting Bull. A lawyer by training, tall and lean, he expresses support for the Mobridge effort to honor his ancestor in a manner befitting the man. But when asked whether he believes Sitting Bull is buried on that bluff, he slowly shakes his head no.
Then where is Sitting Bull?
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a tribal historian and storyteller who is overseeing improvements to the Fort Yates grave site, tries to explain. “A person like Sitting Bull was never meant to just die and disappear,” she says.
Yes, but where is he?
Smiling patiently, the woman opens her arms and spreads her hands.
One monument to Sitting Bull is in Mobridge, S.D. But Ron His Horse Is Thunder, above, does not believe the American Indian leader truly rests there. More Photos »
Here, on a snow-dusted bluff overlooking the Missouri River, rests Sitting Bull. Or so it is said.
Stand before the monument and see the pocks left in the granite by bullets. Notice where the nose was replaced after vandals with chains and a truck yanked the bust from its pedestal. Spot where the headdress feather was mended after being shot off. And wonder, along with the rest of the Dakotas:
Is Sitting Bull here?
The 12-foot monument rises where Sitting Bull is supposedly buried and where he certainly once felt at home; where the steel-blue clouds of winter press down upon the hills of dormant grass; where nothing moves but a solitary bird in flight, and the whinnies of a distant horse sound almost like an old man’s rueful laughter.
It all seems fitting, even the vandalism, given how this world-famous American Indian has never received the respect in death that was often denied him in life. Now two men are trying to pay that respect, in late but earnest installments.
As one of them, Rhett Albers, collects another beer bottle discarded near the base of the monument, the other, Bryan Defender, gazes up at the bust of Sitting Bull. As always, the face of stone gives away nothing.
Maybe in the end it does not matter where the holy man actually rests, says Mr. Defender, who is Hunkpapa Sioux. Like the man whose history he honors.
Sitting Bull. Distinguished as a warrior against rival tribes and American soldiers. Served as spiritual leader for the Indian victory at Little Bighorn. Refused to accept white encroachment. Surrendered. Was imprisoned. Toured briefly with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Then, at age 59, was killed during a botched arrest in 1890, an arrest rooted in the belief that he supported a growing movement of resistance among the Sioux.
The government buried him in Fort Yates, on the North Dakota side of this sprawling reservation that straddles the Dakotas. There, in what was then a predominantly white military community, his grave site became little more than a weedy lot.
Then, in 1953, some Chamber of Commerce types from the small South Dakota city of Mobridge executed a startling plan. With the blessing of a few of Sitting Bull’s descendants, they crossed into North Dakota after midnight and exhumed what they believed were Sitting Bull’s remains. One photograph from that strange night depicts a Mobridge mortician supervising the exhumation; he holds a cigarette in one hand and a human femur in the other.
The men raced back 55 miles to bury the remains on this bluff, across the river from Mobridge. They scoffed at North Dakota’s contention that they had taken the wrong bones, and justified their actions by saying that Sitting Bull had been born near here and that the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski would soon create a more fitting monument to him. And would having Sitting Bull’s remains help tourism in Mobridge? Well, of course.
Up in Fort Yates, the state eventually unveiled a plaque that left vague the whereabouts of Sitting Bull’s remains (“He was buried here but his grave has been vandalized many times”), while on this bluff across from Mobridge, the area around the monument became a place to dump used tires, to have a beer party, to shoot off a gun — sometimes into the granite.
“People would say, ‘Party at Sitting Bull!’ ” Mr. Albers recalls. “It was a joke.”
The site’s poor condition vexed Mr. Albers, 45, an environmental consultant, and Mr. Defender, 35, who runs the reservation’s solid-waste-removal operation. That irritation turned to embarrassment when a visiting foreign-exchange student asked Mr. Albers to see the monument dedicated to the famous Sitting Bull.
So, two years ago, the men bought the monument and its 40-acre parcel from a private owner for $55,000. They mowed the grass, trucked away 50 cubic yards of debris and established a nonprofit corporation with plans to recoup their expenses and establish a cultural and educational center.
They also came up against the still-emotional question of where the great Indian leader truly rests. Not long ago, someone scrawled a message across the granite pedestal: “Sitting Bull is not buried here!”
A drive through the reservation, from Mobridge to Fort Yates, is a drive through an undulant moonscape of stillness, disturbed only by the dance of an occasional horse. Here, unemployment among the 11,000 people is nearly 80 percent, and the challenge of restoring a sense of self-identity cannot be addressed alone by revenue from the two modest casinos.
In an office in Fort Yates sits Ron His Horse Is Thunder, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a great-great-great grandson of Sitting Bull. A lawyer by training, tall and lean, he expresses support for the Mobridge effort to honor his ancestor in a manner befitting the man. But when asked whether he believes Sitting Bull is buried on that bluff, he slowly shakes his head no.
Then where is Sitting Bull?
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a tribal historian and storyteller who is overseeing improvements to the Fort Yates grave site, tries to explain. “A person like Sitting Bull was never meant to just die and disappear,” she says.
Yes, but where is he?
Smiling patiently, the woman opens her arms and spreads her hands.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Memorial Services for Harry Eugene Fonseca
Press Release January 6, 2007 from The Fonseca Studio, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Memorial Services for Harry Eugene Fonseca
Saturday, January 27, 2007
5:00 p.m.
New Mexico Room, La Fonda Hotel
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Acclaimed contemporary artist and Native American activist Harry Fonseca (Nisenan/Maidu/ Hawaiian/Portuguese) died early on the morning of Thursday, December 28, 2006, at the age of 60. Family and friends had surrounded Fonseca since he was hospitalized in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in early November.
Fonseca is well known for his creation of the always-smiling, supremely self-confident “Coyote” and “Rose” over 30 years ago. Both have played a central role in Fonseca’s work and have become popular icons in the process. Fonseca’s Coyote and Rose can be found in restaurants, museums, opera houses and chamber music festivals the world over.
Throughout his life-long career as an artist, Harry Fonseca’s work went through a number of transformations but his open attitude towards new influences and sources of inspiration was constant. Fonseca was born in 1946 in Sacramento, California, and his earliest drawings, prints and paintings drew from his Maidu heritage. He was influenced by basketry designs, dance regalia, and by his participation as a traditional dancer.
Memorial Services for Harry Eugene Fonseca
Saturday, January 27, 2007
5:00 p.m.
New Mexico Room, La Fonda Hotel
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Acclaimed contemporary artist and Native American activist Harry Fonseca (Nisenan/Maidu/ Hawaiian/Portuguese) died early on the morning of Thursday, December 28, 2006, at the age of 60. Family and friends had surrounded Fonseca since he was hospitalized in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in early November.
Fonseca is well known for his creation of the always-smiling, supremely self-confident “Coyote” and “Rose” over 30 years ago. Both have played a central role in Fonseca’s work and have become popular icons in the process. Fonseca’s Coyote and Rose can be found in restaurants, museums, opera houses and chamber music festivals the world over.
Throughout his life-long career as an artist, Harry Fonseca’s work went through a number of transformations but his open attitude towards new influences and sources of inspiration was constant. Fonseca was born in 1946 in Sacramento, California, and his earliest drawings, prints and paintings drew from his Maidu heritage. He was influenced by basketry designs, dance regalia, and by his participation as a traditional dancer.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Bonding Over a Mascot
By JOE LAPOINTE
Published: December 29, 2006
A few new statues of a Seminole family in 19th-century clothing stand outside the football stadium at Florida State University. The father holds a long gun, the son a bow and arrow, and the mother an infant in her arms as she looks warily to her right.
The statues represent the era when the Seminoles and the United States were at war. The public art is part of a complex relationship between Seminole culture and sports at Florida State. This bond has strengthened since a crackdown by the National Collegiate Athletic Association last year against American Indian mascots, nicknames and imagery among sports teams.
Not every university enjoys a harmonious relationship with Indians. But a sense of cooperation seems to permeate the Florida State campus in Tallahassee, Fla., where Toni Sanchez was among 21 students to complete a new course this month called History of the Seminoles and Southeastern Tribes.
Sanchez, a senior majoring in English, called the N.C.A.A. edict “beyond idiotic” and offensive. She described the new statues as beautiful.
“I know what a real Seminole is,” she said. “This Anglo guilt and regret don’t affect me.”
Sanchez is from a family with Seminole and Hispanic ancestry. Her father, once a farm worker, is now a casino operator. Her mother is a teacher. Sanchez also plays trumpet at football games in a marching band that wears arrowheads on the back of its uniforms.
Of the tribal flag near the new statues, another recent addition, she said, “Every time I look at it, I get really giddy inside.” Of the use of the Seminole imagery for the university’s sports, she said, “I’m so proud of it.”
Florida State was one of 18 institutions cited by the N.C.A.A. in August 2005 for “mascots, nicknames or images deemed hostile or abusive in terms of race, ethnicity or national origin.” The institutions were forbidden to use the symbols in postseason events controlled by the N.C.A.A., like the national championship basketball tournament that begins in March.
Five programs have since received permission to continue using their imagery because they received approval from specific Indian groups, in Florida State’s case the 3,200-member Seminole Tribe of Florida. Five others have changed or are in the process of changing, said Bob Williams, an N.C.A.A. spokesman. The other eight, he said, remain on the list and are subject to the policy, including the Illinois Fighting Illini and the North Dakota Fighting Sioux.
Myles Brand, the president of the N.C.A.A., said in a telephone interview last week that his organization made the right decision but witnessed more negative reaction to the ruling than expected.
“What we’ve accomplished in part is to raise the level of awareness nationally about how we treat Native Americans,” Brand said. “If we don’t stand by our values, we lose our integrity.”
At times, Indians are reduced to casual caricature that would not be tolerated by other groups, he said, adding that the N.C.A.A. had been honored for its stance by Indian groups in Oklahoma and Indiana.
Less complimentary is T. K. Wetherell, the president of Florida State, who said the N.C.A.A. was “more interested in being politically correct” and did not consult the Seminole tribe before making its decision.
“The way they weaseled out was to say, ‘O.K., as long as the tribe continues to support it,’ ” he said.
Wetherell, a former Florida State football player who also teaches history, wore a hunting outfit when interviewed recently in his office. He pointed to a team logo of an Indian’s face that he said had elements of caricature. “That’s not really a Seminole-looking deal,” Wetherell said. “This is a marketing tool.” He said the university might “gradually let certain things fade.”
He said he told the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s council, “If you don’t want Florida State to be the Seminoles, we ain’t Seminoles anymore.” Wetherell said the tribe approved the use partly because the campus is in the capital and tribal leaders “are not only good businessmen, they are great politicians.”
He said the new history course was proposed before the N.C.A.A. edict.
But Neil Jumonville, the chairman of the history department, said the N.C.A.A. resolution accelerated the creation of the class and that his staff received advice from local Seminole leaders.
“These are people who are savvy about their place in the American myth,” Jumonville said. “And they are smart enough to manipulate the myth for their own good.”
The first class was taught by Christopher R. Versen, who recently earned his doctorate in American history.
“I wanted to challenge students to think about identity,” Versen said. “What is it inside us that makes us identify ourselves one way or another? What external factors play into identity?”
Published: December 29, 2006
A few new statues of a Seminole family in 19th-century clothing stand outside the football stadium at Florida State University. The father holds a long gun, the son a bow and arrow, and the mother an infant in her arms as she looks warily to her right.
The statues represent the era when the Seminoles and the United States were at war. The public art is part of a complex relationship between Seminole culture and sports at Florida State. This bond has strengthened since a crackdown by the National Collegiate Athletic Association last year against American Indian mascots, nicknames and imagery among sports teams.
Not every university enjoys a harmonious relationship with Indians. But a sense of cooperation seems to permeate the Florida State campus in Tallahassee, Fla., where Toni Sanchez was among 21 students to complete a new course this month called History of the Seminoles and Southeastern Tribes.
Sanchez, a senior majoring in English, called the N.C.A.A. edict “beyond idiotic” and offensive. She described the new statues as beautiful.
“I know what a real Seminole is,” she said. “This Anglo guilt and regret don’t affect me.”
Sanchez is from a family with Seminole and Hispanic ancestry. Her father, once a farm worker, is now a casino operator. Her mother is a teacher. Sanchez also plays trumpet at football games in a marching band that wears arrowheads on the back of its uniforms.
Of the tribal flag near the new statues, another recent addition, she said, “Every time I look at it, I get really giddy inside.” Of the use of the Seminole imagery for the university’s sports, she said, “I’m so proud of it.”
Florida State was one of 18 institutions cited by the N.C.A.A. in August 2005 for “mascots, nicknames or images deemed hostile or abusive in terms of race, ethnicity or national origin.” The institutions were forbidden to use the symbols in postseason events controlled by the N.C.A.A., like the national championship basketball tournament that begins in March.
Five programs have since received permission to continue using their imagery because they received approval from specific Indian groups, in Florida State’s case the 3,200-member Seminole Tribe of Florida. Five others have changed or are in the process of changing, said Bob Williams, an N.C.A.A. spokesman. The other eight, he said, remain on the list and are subject to the policy, including the Illinois Fighting Illini and the North Dakota Fighting Sioux.
Myles Brand, the president of the N.C.A.A., said in a telephone interview last week that his organization made the right decision but witnessed more negative reaction to the ruling than expected.
“What we’ve accomplished in part is to raise the level of awareness nationally about how we treat Native Americans,” Brand said. “If we don’t stand by our values, we lose our integrity.”
At times, Indians are reduced to casual caricature that would not be tolerated by other groups, he said, adding that the N.C.A.A. had been honored for its stance by Indian groups in Oklahoma and Indiana.
Less complimentary is T. K. Wetherell, the president of Florida State, who said the N.C.A.A. was “more interested in being politically correct” and did not consult the Seminole tribe before making its decision.
“The way they weaseled out was to say, ‘O.K., as long as the tribe continues to support it,’ ” he said.
Wetherell, a former Florida State football player who also teaches history, wore a hunting outfit when interviewed recently in his office. He pointed to a team logo of an Indian’s face that he said had elements of caricature. “That’s not really a Seminole-looking deal,” Wetherell said. “This is a marketing tool.” He said the university might “gradually let certain things fade.”
He said he told the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s council, “If you don’t want Florida State to be the Seminoles, we ain’t Seminoles anymore.” Wetherell said the tribe approved the use partly because the campus is in the capital and tribal leaders “are not only good businessmen, they are great politicians.”
He said the new history course was proposed before the N.C.A.A. edict.
But Neil Jumonville, the chairman of the history department, said the N.C.A.A. resolution accelerated the creation of the class and that his staff received advice from local Seminole leaders.
“These are people who are savvy about their place in the American myth,” Jumonville said. “And they are smart enough to manipulate the myth for their own good.”
The first class was taught by Christopher R. Versen, who recently earned his doctorate in American history.
“I wanted to challenge students to think about identity,” Versen said. “What is it inside us that makes us identify ourselves one way or another? What external factors play into identity?”
Diamonds Glitter Fades for a Brazilian Tribe
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: December 29, 2006
ROOSEVELT INDIGENOUS AREA, Brazil — Some of the world’s most abundant deposits of diamonds are embedded in the reddish soil of the Amazon jungle here. But for the Cinta-Larga Indians who live on this remote reservation, that discovery has brought more misfortune than riches.
In April, the Cinta-Larga tribe and Brazil’s environmental police agreed to close a diamond mining camp in the Roosevelt Indigenous Area.
Outside miners began prospecting in earnest in 1999 and soon overran the Indians’ lands, bringing with them drink, drugs, disease and prostitution. Dazzled by the promise of quick wealth from their dealings with the outsiders, tribal leaders have accumulated debts they cannot pay — especially now that the police have set up roadblocks on the reservation’s borders to prevent illegal diamond trafficking.
Cinta-Larga means Broad Belt in Portuguese, a reference to the tribe’s former habit of wearing bark sashes around the waist. For generations, the Cinta-Largas chose to live in isolation here along the banks of the Roosevelt River, named for Theodore Roosevelt, who led an expedition through this region of the southwestern Amazon some 90 years ago.
“Back then, we had no idea what diamonds were worth,” recalled Roberto Carlos Cinta-Larga, a tribal leader who, following tradition, uses the tribe’s name as his surname. “We didn’t have money in those days and didn’t even really know what money was, because our nature was to stay apart from everyone else and not cultivate friendships.”
But in the 1960s, a highway was built west of here, opening the jungle to exploitation by loggers. The discovery of gold, tin and finally diamonds increased the opportunities for the Cinta-Largas but also their resentment of white encroachments on land that the Brazilian government had set aside for them.
Two years ago, the tensions finally boiled over. In an episode that is still under investigation, and for reasons that remain unclear, the Cinta-Largas killed 29 miners who were working without their permission at the mine on the reservation.
Since then, the Cinta-Largas have become the most notorious of Brazil’s hundreds of Indian tribes, reviled in the press as bloodthirsty savages who want the diamonds for themselves and insulted when they leave their reservation for nearby towns. In hopes of countering those negative portrayals, tribal leaders recently invited this reporter to visit.
“We want it known that, despite what our enemies say, we are not mining diamonds,” Ita Cinta-Larga, another tribal leader, said as he inspected the mining pit and its collection of abandoned hoses and sluices. “We still catch miners trying to sneak in now and then, but it’s pretty calm here now, and that’s the way we want to keep it.”
In return for an $810,000 grant for community development from the Brazilian government, the Cinta-Largas agreed in April to shut down the mine, allow the state environmental police to patrol the site and refrain from killing intruders. But the money is now running out, and Pio Cinta-Larga, a tribal leader, warned that unless more help is forthcoming, “when the year ends, the truce expires with it.”
Mauro Sposito, director of the Brazilian Federal Police’s Amazon task force, said that in view of the tribe’s history, such threats must be taken seriously. “We know that they are violent and that something could occur, which is why the main principles of our activities from the start have been to try to negotiate and avoid the use of brute force,” he said.
Ivaneide Bandeira Cardozo works with an environmental and indigenous rights group, Kaninde. She cites another factor that the tribe is reluctant to discuss out of shame and embarrassment. “From what the Cinta-Larga women told me, they were tired of seeing the miners raping girls as young as 14 and bringing in drugs,” she said. “So they pressed their men to take a stand.”
Rômulo Siqueira de Sá, an official of the National Indian Foundation, the government agency that deals with indigenous affairs, said diamond money led many Cinta-Largas to buy cars, houses and other goods on credit through white intermediaries. With the mine shut and government funds running out, he said, they have fallen behind on payments and are facing repossession claims. As a result, the pressure to resume illicit diamond trading and reopen prospecting to outsiders is growing.
“The chiefs want government money so that they can pay private debts derived from illegal activities, and there is no possibility whatsoever that the government is going to do that,” Mr. Sposito said. “Brazilian law does not permit such a thing. What the government can do is support the development of the community and provide orientation, but not more than that.”
Published: December 29, 2006
ROOSEVELT INDIGENOUS AREA, Brazil — Some of the world’s most abundant deposits of diamonds are embedded in the reddish soil of the Amazon jungle here. But for the Cinta-Larga Indians who live on this remote reservation, that discovery has brought more misfortune than riches.
In April, the Cinta-Larga tribe and Brazil’s environmental police agreed to close a diamond mining camp in the Roosevelt Indigenous Area.
Outside miners began prospecting in earnest in 1999 and soon overran the Indians’ lands, bringing with them drink, drugs, disease and prostitution. Dazzled by the promise of quick wealth from their dealings with the outsiders, tribal leaders have accumulated debts they cannot pay — especially now that the police have set up roadblocks on the reservation’s borders to prevent illegal diamond trafficking.
Cinta-Larga means Broad Belt in Portuguese, a reference to the tribe’s former habit of wearing bark sashes around the waist. For generations, the Cinta-Largas chose to live in isolation here along the banks of the Roosevelt River, named for Theodore Roosevelt, who led an expedition through this region of the southwestern Amazon some 90 years ago.
“Back then, we had no idea what diamonds were worth,” recalled Roberto Carlos Cinta-Larga, a tribal leader who, following tradition, uses the tribe’s name as his surname. “We didn’t have money in those days and didn’t even really know what money was, because our nature was to stay apart from everyone else and not cultivate friendships.”
But in the 1960s, a highway was built west of here, opening the jungle to exploitation by loggers. The discovery of gold, tin and finally diamonds increased the opportunities for the Cinta-Largas but also their resentment of white encroachments on land that the Brazilian government had set aside for them.
Two years ago, the tensions finally boiled over. In an episode that is still under investigation, and for reasons that remain unclear, the Cinta-Largas killed 29 miners who were working without their permission at the mine on the reservation.
Since then, the Cinta-Largas have become the most notorious of Brazil’s hundreds of Indian tribes, reviled in the press as bloodthirsty savages who want the diamonds for themselves and insulted when they leave their reservation for nearby towns. In hopes of countering those negative portrayals, tribal leaders recently invited this reporter to visit.
“We want it known that, despite what our enemies say, we are not mining diamonds,” Ita Cinta-Larga, another tribal leader, said as he inspected the mining pit and its collection of abandoned hoses and sluices. “We still catch miners trying to sneak in now and then, but it’s pretty calm here now, and that’s the way we want to keep it.”
In return for an $810,000 grant for community development from the Brazilian government, the Cinta-Largas agreed in April to shut down the mine, allow the state environmental police to patrol the site and refrain from killing intruders. But the money is now running out, and Pio Cinta-Larga, a tribal leader, warned that unless more help is forthcoming, “when the year ends, the truce expires with it.”
Mauro Sposito, director of the Brazilian Federal Police’s Amazon task force, said that in view of the tribe’s history, such threats must be taken seriously. “We know that they are violent and that something could occur, which is why the main principles of our activities from the start have been to try to negotiate and avoid the use of brute force,” he said.
Ivaneide Bandeira Cardozo works with an environmental and indigenous rights group, Kaninde. She cites another factor that the tribe is reluctant to discuss out of shame and embarrassment. “From what the Cinta-Larga women told me, they were tired of seeing the miners raping girls as young as 14 and bringing in drugs,” she said. “So they pressed their men to take a stand.”
Rômulo Siqueira de Sá, an official of the National Indian Foundation, the government agency that deals with indigenous affairs, said diamond money led many Cinta-Largas to buy cars, houses and other goods on credit through white intermediaries. With the mine shut and government funds running out, he said, they have fallen behind on payments and are facing repossession claims. As a result, the pressure to resume illicit diamond trading and reopen prospecting to outsiders is growing.
“The chiefs want government money so that they can pay private debts derived from illegal activities, and there is no possibility whatsoever that the government is going to do that,” Mr. Sposito said. “Brazilian law does not permit such a thing. What the government can do is support the development of the community and provide orientation, but not more than that.”
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