By N. BRUCE DUTHU
Published: August 10, 2008
White River Junction, Vt.
ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show. But the odds of the crimes against them ever being prosecuted are low, largely because of the complex jurisdictional rules that operate on Indian lands. Approximately 275 Indian tribes have their own court systems, but federal law forbids them to prosecute non-Indians. Cases involving non-Indian offenders must be referred to federal or state prosecutors, who often lack the time and resources to pursue them.
The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes — burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.
Rapes against American Indian women are also exceedingly violent; weapons are used at rates three times that for all other reported rapes.
Congress should step in and clearly establish the authority of Indian tribes to investigate and prosecute all crimes occurring on Indian lands — no matter whether tribal members or nonmembers are involved.
Historically, Indian tribes have exercised full authority over everyone within Indian lands. A number of the early federal treaties expressly noted a tribe’s power to punish non-Indians. Toward the latter part of the 19th-century, however, federal policy shifted away from tribal self-government in favor of an effort to dismantle tribal government systems. Criminal law enforcement, especially in cases involving non-Indians, increasingly came to be viewed as a federal or state matter.
Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court formalized the prohibition against tribes prosecuting non-Indians with its decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. In this case, a Pacific Northwest tribe was attempting to try two non-Indian residents of the Port Madison Reservation for causing trouble during the annual Chief Seattle Days celebration — one for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest and the other for recklessly endangering another person and harming tribal property. The court held that the tribe, as a “domestic dependent nation,” did not possess the full measure of sovereignty enjoyed by states and the national government, especially when it came to the affairs of non-Indian citizens.
Then in 1990, the court extended its Oliphant ruling to cases involving tribal prosecution of Indian offenders who are not members of that tribe. Congress subsequently passed new legislation to reaffirm the power of tribes to prosecute non-member Indian offenders, but it left the Oliphant ruling intact.
This means that when non-Indian men commit acts of sexual violence against Indian women, federal or state prosecutors must fill the jurisdictional void. But law enforcement in sexual violence cases in Indian country is haphazard at best, recent studies show, and it rarely leads to prosecution and conviction of non-Indian offenders. The Department of Justice’s own records show that in 2006, prosecutors filed only 606 criminal cases in all of Indian country. With more than 560 federally recognized tribes, that works out to a little more than one criminal prosecution for each tribe.
Even if outside prosecutors had the time and resources to handle crimes on Indian land more efficiently, it would make better sense for tribal governments to have jurisdiction over all reservation-based crimes. Given their familiarity with the community, cultural norms and, in many cases, understanding of distinct tribal languages, tribal governments are in the best position to create appropriate law enforcement and health care responses — and to assure crime victims, especially victims of sexual violence, that a reported crime will be taken seriously and handled expeditiously.
Congress should enact legislation to overrule the Oliphant decision and reaffirm the tribes’ full criminal and civil authority over all activities on tribal lands. This law should also lift the sentencing constraints imposed in 1968 that restrict the criminal sentences that tribal courts can impose to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine. In cases of rape, state court sentences typically exceed 8 years, while federal sentences are more than 12 years. Tribes should have the latitude to impose comparable sanctions. (A bill pending in Congress would extend tribal sentencing authority to three years, with more latitude in cases of domestic violence, but its prospects of passage are uncertain.)
Congress recently allocated $750 million for enhancing public safety in Indian country. This money will help tribes hire and train more police, build detention facilities and augment federal investigative and prosecutorial capacity for Indian country crimes. Ideally, the grant process will be efficient enough to make sure that this money reaches the places most in need.
But financial aid will not be enough to stop sexual violence against Indian women. Tribal courts have grown in sophistication over the past 30 years, and they take seriously the work of administering justice. Congress must support their efforts by closing the legal gaps that allow violent criminals to roam Indian country unchecked.
N. Bruce Duthu, a professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth, is the author of “American Indians and the Law.”
Monday, August 11, 2008
Friday, August 08, 2008
Indians Gain a Slim Victory in Suit Against Government - NYTimes.com
DENVER — For decades, American Indians have argued that the federal government swindled them under a trust account system created in the closing days of the American frontier more than 120 years ago.
On Thursday, a federal judge agreed, up to a point.
The judge, James Robertson of Federal District Court in Washington, ruled that the plaintiffs, however much they had prevailed in proving government failure, were entitled to only a fraction of the billions of dollars they sought. Judge Robertson said that trust law is applied differently to government trustees than it would be to private citizens, and that instead of the $48 billion that the descendants of the original trust holders claimed, the government was only liable for about $455 million.
“He basically accepted the government’s argument that not that much money is missing,” said Bill McAllister, a spokesman for the plaintiffs, who are led by a member of the Blackfoot tribe in Montana, Elouise Pepion Cobell. “He rejected our methodology and our theory of the case.”
Ms. Cobell said in a statement that lawyers were studying whether to appeal. Lawyers representing the Interior Department, the defendant, did not return a telephone call.
Judge Robertson did not actually order the government to pay; hearings on that question are scheduled for later this month. And he was scathing at times in describing how the case had illuminated government mismanagement, including a long trail of lost or destroyed records about money owed to Indians for timber leases, oil leases and other activities.
“Historical wrongs,” the judge wrote, “could have been — and should have been — settled by the same political branches in recognition of their own failure.”
But the judge disagreed with the argument by lawyers for an estimated 500,000 descendants of the original trust holders, who argued that the accounting should factor in how much the government improperly gained — by using the Indian money for its own benefit, in lower borrowing costs or interest earned, for example — over decades.
The class-action suit was filed in 1996 after other suits by Indian descendants were dismissed.
On Thursday, a federal judge agreed, up to a point.
The judge, James Robertson of Federal District Court in Washington, ruled that the plaintiffs, however much they had prevailed in proving government failure, were entitled to only a fraction of the billions of dollars they sought. Judge Robertson said that trust law is applied differently to government trustees than it would be to private citizens, and that instead of the $48 billion that the descendants of the original trust holders claimed, the government was only liable for about $455 million.
“He basically accepted the government’s argument that not that much money is missing,” said Bill McAllister, a spokesman for the plaintiffs, who are led by a member of the Blackfoot tribe in Montana, Elouise Pepion Cobell. “He rejected our methodology and our theory of the case.”
Ms. Cobell said in a statement that lawyers were studying whether to appeal. Lawyers representing the Interior Department, the defendant, did not return a telephone call.
Judge Robertson did not actually order the government to pay; hearings on that question are scheduled for later this month. And he was scathing at times in describing how the case had illuminated government mismanagement, including a long trail of lost or destroyed records about money owed to Indians for timber leases, oil leases and other activities.
“Historical wrongs,” the judge wrote, “could have been — and should have been — settled by the same political branches in recognition of their own failure.”
But the judge disagreed with the argument by lawyers for an estimated 500,000 descendants of the original trust holders, who argued that the accounting should factor in how much the government improperly gained — by using the Indian money for its own benefit, in lower borrowing costs or interest earned, for example — over decades.
The class-action suit was filed in 1996 after other suits by Indian descendants were dismissed.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Energy Boom in West Threatens Indian Artifacts - NYTimes.com
DOLORES, Colo. — The dusty documentation of the Anasazi Indians a thousand years ago, from their pit houses and kivas to the observatories from which they charted the heavens, lies thick in the ground near here at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.
Or so archaeologists believe. Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.
Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park’s eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument’s 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.
The consequences of energy exploration for wildlife and air quality have long been contentious in unspoiled corners of the West. But now with the urgent push for even more energy, there are new worries that history and prehistory — much of it still unexplored or unknown — could be lost.
At Nine Mile Canyon in central Utah, truck exhaust on a road to the gas fields is posing a threat, environmentalists and Indian tribes say, to 2,000 years of rock art and imagery. In Montana, a coal-fired power plant has been proposed near Great Falls on one of the last wild sections of the Lewis and Clark trail. In New Mexico, a mining company has proposed reopening a uranium mine on Mount Taylor, a national forest site sacred to numerous Indian tribes.
“We’re caught in the middle between traditional culture and archaeological research and the valid existing rights of the oil and gas leaseholders,” said LouAnn Jacobson, an archaeologist by training and the manager of both the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Anasazi Heritage Center here in the four-corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico touch.
Nationally, only about 20 percent of the 193-million-acre national forest system has been surveyed for historical or cultural content, according to a recent report by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. At the federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 261 million acres, including the monument here, the figure is only 3 percent.
Heightened awareness of the risk to historic sites has been fueled in part by the growing number of retirees like John Gwin who have flocked to retreats like Durango and Pagosa Springs in Colorado. Mr. Gwin, a burley former F.B.I. agent who has dedicated his retirement to the study and stewardship of the Anasazi landscape, said the region’s mix of ancient past and verdant nature was unmatched anywhere in his travels.
“I enjoy being out there, being quiet and appreciating the people who lived there 1,000 years ago — imagining what Chimney Rock meant to them,” said Mr. Gwin, who leads tours as an unpaid volunteer for the federal Forest Service at the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area, about an hour east of here.
But population growth has also brought people who are not so reverent. Instances of vandalism and illegal raids for relics — as more footprints are found leading out into once-silent Indian mounds — have risen sharply in the last few years, though few offenders are caught.
Federal land managers, tribal leaders and archaeologists call it piling on. Energy companies build roads for access to their drill pads. But then expanding populations, many of them riding off-road vehicles, use those roads for exploration or exploitation. What was once remote becomes less so, and harder than ever to defend for future generations.
“Multiple use worked for a while, but now the uses are in the same place,” said Terry Morgart, a legal researcher for the Hopi tribe in Arizona. “You can’t have recreation, cultural resources, energy development and cell towers all on the same spot. I think the agencies are aware of these conflicts, but because they’re stuck with these archaic laws, they’re between a rock and a hard place.”
Indian leaders, who link modern tribal populations in the Southwest to the ancestral Anasazi, have mounted a campaign to stop the local exploration for carbon dioxide, which would be used to help rejuvenate old oil fields that are now stirring to life in Texas and elsewhere as oil prices soar.
“Fencing dozens of sites for the facilitation of energy development is not what we had in mind when we supported the designation of the monument,” said Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, the director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, in a letter in April to federal agencies.
Or so archaeologists believe. Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.
Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park’s eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument’s 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.
The consequences of energy exploration for wildlife and air quality have long been contentious in unspoiled corners of the West. But now with the urgent push for even more energy, there are new worries that history and prehistory — much of it still unexplored or unknown — could be lost.
At Nine Mile Canyon in central Utah, truck exhaust on a road to the gas fields is posing a threat, environmentalists and Indian tribes say, to 2,000 years of rock art and imagery. In Montana, a coal-fired power plant has been proposed near Great Falls on one of the last wild sections of the Lewis and Clark trail. In New Mexico, a mining company has proposed reopening a uranium mine on Mount Taylor, a national forest site sacred to numerous Indian tribes.
“We’re caught in the middle between traditional culture and archaeological research and the valid existing rights of the oil and gas leaseholders,” said LouAnn Jacobson, an archaeologist by training and the manager of both the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Anasazi Heritage Center here in the four-corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico touch.
Nationally, only about 20 percent of the 193-million-acre national forest system has been surveyed for historical or cultural content, according to a recent report by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. At the federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 261 million acres, including the monument here, the figure is only 3 percent.
Heightened awareness of the risk to historic sites has been fueled in part by the growing number of retirees like John Gwin who have flocked to retreats like Durango and Pagosa Springs in Colorado. Mr. Gwin, a burley former F.B.I. agent who has dedicated his retirement to the study and stewardship of the Anasazi landscape, said the region’s mix of ancient past and verdant nature was unmatched anywhere in his travels.
“I enjoy being out there, being quiet and appreciating the people who lived there 1,000 years ago — imagining what Chimney Rock meant to them,” said Mr. Gwin, who leads tours as an unpaid volunteer for the federal Forest Service at the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area, about an hour east of here.
But population growth has also brought people who are not so reverent. Instances of vandalism and illegal raids for relics — as more footprints are found leading out into once-silent Indian mounds — have risen sharply in the last few years, though few offenders are caught.
Federal land managers, tribal leaders and archaeologists call it piling on. Energy companies build roads for access to their drill pads. But then expanding populations, many of them riding off-road vehicles, use those roads for exploration or exploitation. What was once remote becomes less so, and harder than ever to defend for future generations.
“Multiple use worked for a while, but now the uses are in the same place,” said Terry Morgart, a legal researcher for the Hopi tribe in Arizona. “You can’t have recreation, cultural resources, energy development and cell towers all on the same spot. I think the agencies are aware of these conflicts, but because they’re stuck with these archaic laws, they’re between a rock and a hard place.”
Indian leaders, who link modern tribal populations in the Southwest to the ancestral Anasazi, have mounted a campaign to stop the local exploration for carbon dioxide, which would be used to help rejuvenate old oil fields that are now stirring to life in Texas and elsewhere as oil prices soar.
“Fencing dozens of sites for the facilitation of energy development is not what we had in mind when we supported the designation of the monument,” said Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, the director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, in a letter in April to federal agencies.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Ways and (Russell) Means - washingtonpost.com
Over four decades, Russell Means has led an insurrection, posed for Andy Warhol, aspired to be an assassin and been arguably the most influential public figure in fighting racism against the American Indian. Now, in his quest to start his own country, the road to success might run down Embassy Row.
By Bill Donahue
Sunday, June 29, 2008; Page W08
The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom, wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room. "If you excuse me a moment," said Russell Means, "I'm going to braid my hair."
I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film "The Last of the Mohicans," and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.
Means's life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence -- a warrior.
On this visit to the nation's capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation -- the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory -- a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
Means was here in Washington seeking diplomatic recognition from the world community so that he could ultimately finagle a seat at the United Nations, whether the U.S. of A. likes it or not. His motto, borrowed from Gandhi, is, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
The plan was to barnstorm Embassy Row. He hoped to visit ambassadors from several U.S. adversaries (Venezuela and Serbia, for instance) as well as from a few other countries he deemed likely allies -- for instance, Bolivia, which has an indigenous president in Evo Morales, and Finland, which, in Means's view, "appreciates freedom because it's always been an independent ally of Russia."
It would be a four-day mission, and Means was traveling with an attache, Lakotah's volunteer attorney general, Jerry Collette. A Libertarian activist and a paralegal who recently emigrated to Lakotah from his longtime home in North Carolina, Collette is most renowned for the intricate, loopholing legal work he did last winter to enable the supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul to fly a campaign blimp up and down the East Coast. Ethnically French-Canadian, Collette is 56 years old, with long gray hair and a shaggy gray beard. In contrast to Means, he is a meager physical presence -- slender and only 5-foot-4. On this road trip, as Means luxuriated on the hotel's single queen bed, Collette was sleeping on the floor. "I'm a guerrilla," he explained, "and if you're a guerrilla, you just don't grumble about little discomforts."
At the moment, Collette was standing outside the bathroom, valet-like, reporting on the progress he'd made that morning, canvassing embassies on his cellphone. "I called Iceland," he said, "and they can't meet with us. They're busy. They said to just drop off a petition."
"They're busy?" Means asked. "What does Iceland have to be busy about?"
Collette paused a moment, and then, without answering, he said, "But can we just drop off the petition?"
"We're too busy," Means said, his voice laced with a larksome, sardonic swagger, and Collette went back to his phone, squaring away the logistics for a full afternoon of visiting embassies.
After a few minutes, Means emerged. His braids were done, and now he reached for his sunglasses -- Dolce & Gabbanas.
By Bill Donahue
Sunday, June 29, 2008; Page W08
The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom, wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room. "If you excuse me a moment," said Russell Means, "I'm going to braid my hair."
I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film "The Last of the Mohicans," and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.
Means's life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence -- a warrior.
On this visit to the nation's capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation -- the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory -- a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
Means was here in Washington seeking diplomatic recognition from the world community so that he could ultimately finagle a seat at the United Nations, whether the U.S. of A. likes it or not. His motto, borrowed from Gandhi, is, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
The plan was to barnstorm Embassy Row. He hoped to visit ambassadors from several U.S. adversaries (Venezuela and Serbia, for instance) as well as from a few other countries he deemed likely allies -- for instance, Bolivia, which has an indigenous president in Evo Morales, and Finland, which, in Means's view, "appreciates freedom because it's always been an independent ally of Russia."
It would be a four-day mission, and Means was traveling with an attache, Lakotah's volunteer attorney general, Jerry Collette. A Libertarian activist and a paralegal who recently emigrated to Lakotah from his longtime home in North Carolina, Collette is most renowned for the intricate, loopholing legal work he did last winter to enable the supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul to fly a campaign blimp up and down the East Coast. Ethnically French-Canadian, Collette is 56 years old, with long gray hair and a shaggy gray beard. In contrast to Means, he is a meager physical presence -- slender and only 5-foot-4. On this road trip, as Means luxuriated on the hotel's single queen bed, Collette was sleeping on the floor. "I'm a guerrilla," he explained, "and if you're a guerrilla, you just don't grumble about little discomforts."
At the moment, Collette was standing outside the bathroom, valet-like, reporting on the progress he'd made that morning, canvassing embassies on his cellphone. "I called Iceland," he said, "and they can't meet with us. They're busy. They said to just drop off a petition."
"They're busy?" Means asked. "What does Iceland have to be busy about?"
Collette paused a moment, and then, without answering, he said, "But can we just drop off the petition?"
"We're too busy," Means said, his voice laced with a larksome, sardonic swagger, and Collette went back to his phone, squaring away the logistics for a full afternoon of visiting embassies.
After a few minutes, Means emerged. His braids were done, and now he reached for his sunglasses -- Dolce & Gabbanas.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Young American Indians Find Their Voice in Poetry - NYTimes.com
SANTA FE, N.M. — The memories of long summers spent on Navajo land as a little boy have stayed with Nolan Eskeets, like the words his grandfather spoke from his deathbed.
“Up, little one,” his grandfather said to him in Navajo, a language Nolan did not understand.
Now a barrel-chested 18-year-old, with a rush of long brown hair, Nolan summons these memories — the days herding sheep through the valleys, the redolence of fresh fry bread, the unfamiliar language of his grandfather — whenever he picks up a pen.
Nolan will use that pen and his baritone when he competes this summer in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington, D.C. He and a group of fellow students at the Santa Fe Indian School are part of a growing program that has won a slew of local and regional poetry slams and twice earned an invitation to the festival, which pits teams of the country’s top young spoken word poets against one another.
While Nolan and his teammates do not hail from the gritty urban surroundings that are often a breeding ground for slam poetry, where poets are judged on both performance and writing, their team is drawing national attention for its decidedly American Indian take on an art form that has grown increasingly popular with young people over the last decade.
The success of the Indian School’s poetry program has particular importance in New Mexico, where 10 percent of the population is American Indian and where Indian students from grades 3 to 11 lag behind all other groups in reading proficiency, according to a 2007 state report.
Teachers and administrators at the Indian School say the program counters any perception that Indian students cannot excel in English and writing.
“Tears dance down my cheeks in the rhythm of Santo Domingo’s corn dance/Tattered textbooks and Presbyterian Bibles bark violent incantations and shriek curses of assimilation,” thundered April Chavez, a senior reciting her poem “Indian Education” at a recent rehearsal.
April, whose family comes from the Santo Domingo pueblo and the Navajo nation, plans to attend Stanford in the fall. Like other students on the Santa Fe team, she often wraps her poems in the pulsing staccato of Indian words.
“For the kids, spoken word is a reconnection with the oral tradition, a return to the origin of language, its sound, its music,” said Tim McLaughlin, a creative writing teacher at the school and the team’s coach.
Mr. McLaughlin began the program at the Indian School, a sprawling Indian-run boarding institution with some 700 students in grades 7 through 12, many from New Mexico’s 19 pueblos and the Navajo nation.
He remembers well the challenge of getting his students, many more reserved than the typical teenager and “brought up to be listeners first,” to write about their lives at home.
Topics that might make for powerful poetry — ceremonies, families, the complexities of their identity — seemed off limits.
“The kids wanted to build awareness about issues that are confronting native people, but they had to balance that by not violating things that are considered sacred and are to be left sacred,” Mr. McLaughlin said
Mr. McLaughlin, who is white and from Virginia, said he occasionally found himself on the phone with a student’s parent or grandparent, to make sure it was acceptable for a particular subject to be addressed in a poem.
Gradually, as the students grew emboldened by their work, themes began to emerge — the loss of language, the legacy of the reservation and pueblo and, especially, their relationship with their grandparents.
Soon, students were bellowing poems about what it was like to grow up Indian. “Nali,” a poem by Santana Shorty, a bubbly freshman mostly raised by her white mother and with little connection to reservation life before Indian School, recalls Santana’s worn memory of her grandmother, who spoke no English, speaking to her in Navajo, which Santana did not understand.
“Her words nourish and sting me simultaneously,” Santana recited. “I struggle and cry to her with my eyes/A crease of ‘I’m sorry’ spreads across her forehead.”
The poems impressed James Kass, the founder and executive director of Youth Speaks, which produces the festival. Mr. Kass invited the team to participate in 2007 after hearing about them from Mr. McLaughlin, and he recalled seeing the students mesmerize a packed crowd at a San Francisco slam last year.
“They did a good portion of their poems in their native languages, which was amazing,” he said. “They weren’t trying to mimic poets from New York or Chicago.”
After failing to advance past the quarterfinal round last year, the Santa Fe team is poised for a stronger showing next month. They will be the only exclusively American Indian team among the 44 competing. An HBO camera crew has been following the students as they prepare and will be there to record the final competition as part of a documentary.
For the students, though, there is something more meaningful at stake: the expression of who they are to all who will listen.
At a recent performance in Santa Fe, Nolan Eskeets performed a poem, “Letter to Grandpa.” In it, he speaks of never learning Navajo, despite a promise to his grandfather, and of his painful struggle to pronounce his own Indian name.
In the end, Nolan writes that the poem itself has finally allowed him to use his language in a way that would have made his grandfather proud.
“Grandpa,” Nolan concludes, “Let me sing for you.”
After the performance, Nolan’s usually stoic father grew emotional. He strode up to Nolan and clasped his hand.
“Thank you,” he told his son in Navajo.
Be sure to see the Multimedia feature of the students reciting their poetry at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/06/17/us/20080617_SLAM_FEATURE.html
“Up, little one,” his grandfather said to him in Navajo, a language Nolan did not understand.
Now a barrel-chested 18-year-old, with a rush of long brown hair, Nolan summons these memories — the days herding sheep through the valleys, the redolence of fresh fry bread, the unfamiliar language of his grandfather — whenever he picks up a pen.
Nolan will use that pen and his baritone when he competes this summer in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington, D.C. He and a group of fellow students at the Santa Fe Indian School are part of a growing program that has won a slew of local and regional poetry slams and twice earned an invitation to the festival, which pits teams of the country’s top young spoken word poets against one another.
While Nolan and his teammates do not hail from the gritty urban surroundings that are often a breeding ground for slam poetry, where poets are judged on both performance and writing, their team is drawing national attention for its decidedly American Indian take on an art form that has grown increasingly popular with young people over the last decade.
The success of the Indian School’s poetry program has particular importance in New Mexico, where 10 percent of the population is American Indian and where Indian students from grades 3 to 11 lag behind all other groups in reading proficiency, according to a 2007 state report.
Teachers and administrators at the Indian School say the program counters any perception that Indian students cannot excel in English and writing.
“Tears dance down my cheeks in the rhythm of Santo Domingo’s corn dance/Tattered textbooks and Presbyterian Bibles bark violent incantations and shriek curses of assimilation,” thundered April Chavez, a senior reciting her poem “Indian Education” at a recent rehearsal.
April, whose family comes from the Santo Domingo pueblo and the Navajo nation, plans to attend Stanford in the fall. Like other students on the Santa Fe team, she often wraps her poems in the pulsing staccato of Indian words.
“For the kids, spoken word is a reconnection with the oral tradition, a return to the origin of language, its sound, its music,” said Tim McLaughlin, a creative writing teacher at the school and the team’s coach.
Mr. McLaughlin began the program at the Indian School, a sprawling Indian-run boarding institution with some 700 students in grades 7 through 12, many from New Mexico’s 19 pueblos and the Navajo nation.
He remembers well the challenge of getting his students, many more reserved than the typical teenager and “brought up to be listeners first,” to write about their lives at home.
Topics that might make for powerful poetry — ceremonies, families, the complexities of their identity — seemed off limits.
“The kids wanted to build awareness about issues that are confronting native people, but they had to balance that by not violating things that are considered sacred and are to be left sacred,” Mr. McLaughlin said
Mr. McLaughlin, who is white and from Virginia, said he occasionally found himself on the phone with a student’s parent or grandparent, to make sure it was acceptable for a particular subject to be addressed in a poem.
Gradually, as the students grew emboldened by their work, themes began to emerge — the loss of language, the legacy of the reservation and pueblo and, especially, their relationship with their grandparents.
Soon, students were bellowing poems about what it was like to grow up Indian. “Nali,” a poem by Santana Shorty, a bubbly freshman mostly raised by her white mother and with little connection to reservation life before Indian School, recalls Santana’s worn memory of her grandmother, who spoke no English, speaking to her in Navajo, which Santana did not understand.
“Her words nourish and sting me simultaneously,” Santana recited. “I struggle and cry to her with my eyes/A crease of ‘I’m sorry’ spreads across her forehead.”
The poems impressed James Kass, the founder and executive director of Youth Speaks, which produces the festival. Mr. Kass invited the team to participate in 2007 after hearing about them from Mr. McLaughlin, and he recalled seeing the students mesmerize a packed crowd at a San Francisco slam last year.
“They did a good portion of their poems in their native languages, which was amazing,” he said. “They weren’t trying to mimic poets from New York or Chicago.”
After failing to advance past the quarterfinal round last year, the Santa Fe team is poised for a stronger showing next month. They will be the only exclusively American Indian team among the 44 competing. An HBO camera crew has been following the students as they prepare and will be there to record the final competition as part of a documentary.
For the students, though, there is something more meaningful at stake: the expression of who they are to all who will listen.
At a recent performance in Santa Fe, Nolan Eskeets performed a poem, “Letter to Grandpa.” In it, he speaks of never learning Navajo, despite a promise to his grandfather, and of his painful struggle to pronounce his own Indian name.
In the end, Nolan writes that the poem itself has finally allowed him to use his language in a way that would have made his grandfather proud.
“Grandpa,” Nolan concludes, “Let me sing for you.”
After the performance, Nolan’s usually stoic father grew emotional. He strode up to Nolan and clasped his hand.
“Thank you,” he told his son in Navajo.
Be sure to see the Multimedia feature of the students reciting their poetry at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/06/17/us/20080617_SLAM_FEATURE.html
Friday, June 13, 2008
Winona LaDuke on the Colbert Report
Watch Winona LaDuke endorse Barack Obama on the Colbert Report. She also gives him a White Earth flag and $24 to reclaim Manhattan and an Ojijbwe name. Watch and find out what it means!
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Canada Offers an Apology for Native Students’ Abuse
OTTAWA — The government of Canada formally apologized on Wednesday to Native Canadians for forcing about 150,000 native children into government-financed residential schools where many suffered physical and sexual abuse.
The system of schools, which began shutting down in the 1970s, after decades of operations, was dedicated to eradicating the languages, traditions and cultural practices of Native Canadians and has been linked to the widespread incidence of alcoholism, suicide and family violence in many native communities.
“The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history,” Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, said in a speech in the House of Commons, where a small group of former students and native leaders sat in front of him. “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm and has no place in our country.”
An apology from the prime minister had been sought by native groups for years and was part of a broad, court-sanctioned settlement with the government and the church organizations that operated the schools. The federal government also agreed to pay 1.9 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.85 billion) to surviving students and to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to document the experiences of children who attended the schools.
Harry S. LaForme, a Mississauga Indian and a justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal who will oversee the commission, said the schools program was responsible for making the relationship between native people and other Canadians “so unworkable, so filled with mistrust.”
“The policy of the Canadian residential schools wasn’t to educate Indian children,” he said in an interview. “It was to kill the Indian in the child, it was to erase the culture of Indian people from the fabric of Canada.”
In a rare break with parliamentary tradition, several native leaders were allowed to speak from the floor of the House of Commons. Some spoke in their native languages. All praised Mr. Harper for offering the apology, though native groups remain at odds with the government on several issues, including spending on native communities.
“The memories of residential schools sometimes cuts like merciless knives at our souls,” Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, the national association of native groups, told the House of Commons. He wore a ceremonial feathered headdress. “Never again will this House consider us ‘the Indian problem’ just for being who we are,” he said.
In 1990, Mr. Fontaine, an Ojibway, became one of the first native leaders to disclose that he had been sexually abused while attending the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba.
The federal government has admitted that sexual and physical abuse in the schools was widespread. In his speech, Mr. Harper acknowledged that “while some former students have spoken positively about their experiences at residential schools, these stories are far overshadowed by tragic accounts of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children.”
Attendance at residential schools was made mandatory by the government in 1920 for native children between the ages of 7 and 16 as part of a program it called “aggressive assimilation.” Children were forced to leave their parents and were harshly punished for speaking their own languages or practicing their religions.
All but a small number of the approximately 130 schools were run by Christian denominations that operated them as missionary schools, some as far back as the 19th century. Those denominations were the Anglican, United, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian Churches.
Although the history of the program has been reviewed by various government commissions and courts, many details are still unknown, including the number of children who died from abuse or neglect. The commission run by Justice LaForme will have access to previously closed church and government archives to fill in some of those blanks. The commission also plans to hold hearings around the country to question former students and others familiar with the operation of the schools.
Mr. Harper and many fellow members of the Conservative Party initially resisted offering an apology, suggesting that it would be applying current cultural values to the past. Mr. Fontaine said in an interview that he believed that Mr. Harper changed his mind after the government of Australia formally apologized to its aboriginal people earlier this year for its policy of forced assimilation.
The system of schools, which began shutting down in the 1970s, after decades of operations, was dedicated to eradicating the languages, traditions and cultural practices of Native Canadians and has been linked to the widespread incidence of alcoholism, suicide and family violence in many native communities.
“The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history,” Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, said in a speech in the House of Commons, where a small group of former students and native leaders sat in front of him. “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm and has no place in our country.”
An apology from the prime minister had been sought by native groups for years and was part of a broad, court-sanctioned settlement with the government and the church organizations that operated the schools. The federal government also agreed to pay 1.9 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.85 billion) to surviving students and to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to document the experiences of children who attended the schools.
Harry S. LaForme, a Mississauga Indian and a justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal who will oversee the commission, said the schools program was responsible for making the relationship between native people and other Canadians “so unworkable, so filled with mistrust.”
“The policy of the Canadian residential schools wasn’t to educate Indian children,” he said in an interview. “It was to kill the Indian in the child, it was to erase the culture of Indian people from the fabric of Canada.”
In a rare break with parliamentary tradition, several native leaders were allowed to speak from the floor of the House of Commons. Some spoke in their native languages. All praised Mr. Harper for offering the apology, though native groups remain at odds with the government on several issues, including spending on native communities.
“The memories of residential schools sometimes cuts like merciless knives at our souls,” Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, the national association of native groups, told the House of Commons. He wore a ceremonial feathered headdress. “Never again will this House consider us ‘the Indian problem’ just for being who we are,” he said.
In 1990, Mr. Fontaine, an Ojibway, became one of the first native leaders to disclose that he had been sexually abused while attending the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba.
The federal government has admitted that sexual and physical abuse in the schools was widespread. In his speech, Mr. Harper acknowledged that “while some former students have spoken positively about their experiences at residential schools, these stories are far overshadowed by tragic accounts of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children.”
Attendance at residential schools was made mandatory by the government in 1920 for native children between the ages of 7 and 16 as part of a program it called “aggressive assimilation.” Children were forced to leave their parents and were harshly punished for speaking their own languages or practicing their religions.
All but a small number of the approximately 130 schools were run by Christian denominations that operated them as missionary schools, some as far back as the 19th century. Those denominations were the Anglican, United, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian Churches.
Although the history of the program has been reviewed by various government commissions and courts, many details are still unknown, including the number of children who died from abuse or neglect. The commission run by Justice LaForme will have access to previously closed church and government archives to fill in some of those blanks. The commission also plans to hold hearings around the country to question former students and others familiar with the operation of the schools.
Mr. Harper and many fellow members of the Conservative Party initially resisted offering an apology, suggesting that it would be applying current cultural values to the past. Mr. Fontaine said in an interview that he believed that Mr. Harper changed his mind after the government of Australia formally apologized to its aboriginal people earlier this year for its policy of forced assimilation.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Museum Returns the Remains of a Canadian Tribe’s Forebears
A hushed group of people, nearly four dozen strong, slipped into the American Museum of Natural History early Monday, ahead of the crowds. Their cheeks were smeared with rust-colored dye, red and white woven bands encircled their heads, the men wore ceremonial vests and the women were wrapped in shawls, fringed with red.
They were at the end of a roughly 3,000-mile journey that has, in its way, taken years. Unlike the thousands of fidgety schoolchildren and harried parents that filled the museum’s halls to view its storied exhibits on Monday, these 46 visitors were there for an altogether different purpose: to take their ancestors home.
“Our people are humans; we aren’t tokens,” said Chief Vern Jacks, who heads the Tseycum First Nation, a tiny native tribe from northern Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.
With the museum’s full consent, the Tseycum tribe will be repatriating the remains of 55 of their ancestors to Canada this week. On Monday morning, in a quiet first-floor auditorium away from the museum’s crowds, tribe members performed an emotionally charged private ceremony over the 15 sturdy plastic boxes that contained the remains. The ceremony lasted two and a half hours, and the tribe members and elders from related tribes prayed, spoke, wept and sang, saying they wanted to soothe their ancestors’ spirits and prepare them for a return trip from a journey that, the tribe leaders say, should never have happened at all.
“And then we said, ‘Now we’re going to take you home,’ ” Chief Jacks said, moments after the ceremony ended. “These people we are taking here have knowledge, respect, wisdom,” he added. “We live by today’s society, but our history walks with us.”
The remains, guessed to be at least 2,000 years old, have been at the museum for about 100 years but have almost certainly never been on display, said Steve Reichl, a museum spokesman. The museum has repatriated other remains to Canada at least once before, in 2002, according to Mr. Reichl, and remains have also been returned numerous times to American Indians.
Mr. Reichl said the museum worked to streamline the Tseycums’ trip. “The end result was a successful visit,” he said, “and a moving ceremony.”
For the Tseycum people, Monday’s events marked a singular culmination of years of painstaking, and painful, detective work.
The tribe’s quest to reclaim their ancestors began seven years ago, when Chief Jacks’s wife, Cora Jacks, found documents and papers relaying the life story of a 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologist, Harlan Ingersoll Smith. Ms. Jacks said she learned that Mr. Smith had robbed the graves of Tseycum ancestors, who were buried on Vancouver Island under giant boulders, and sold them to major American museums, and most likely others worldwide.
Mrs. Jacks grew nearly obsessed with tracking down the remains, Chief Jacks said, poring over books, researching government archives and spending late nights searching for clues online.
Mr. Smith’s selling price, said Chief Jacks, was $5 a skull, $10 for a body.
“He dug our people up and sold them to museums on all four corners of the earth,” said Chief Jacks, 63, who is hoping that the Canadian government will help defray the costs of the trip. “What happened to ‘rest in peace’?”
In 2004, Mrs. Jacks wrote to both the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where she believes the remains of 70 ancestors who are from Coast Salish, a designation for tribes in the Pacific Northwest, are also being stored. In 2005, Mrs. Jacks and Chief Jacks’s son, Vern Jacks Jr., visited both museums, and then began the arduous, paperwork-heavy process for repatriating remains, first from New York.
In 2006, tribe members began raising money to cover their trip. They held fund-raisers, auctioned art and gathered donations for their quest, which they called “Our Journey Home,” and the tribe contributed $55,000.
(Helen Robbins, the repatriation director at the Field Museum, said the tribe had yet to begin the required process in Chicago. Mrs. Jacks said they planned to begin that effort next, after more money is raised.)
Finally, in November 2007, Mrs. Jacks said, she received the good news from the American Museum of Natural History. “They told us we could now come to New York and get our ancestors,” she said. Then the tribe began the process of speaking to elders and leaders in the Tseycum tribe, which has just 150 members, and other area tribes.
“And then we waited for better weather in New York,” said Mrs. Jacks, 52. “We didn’t want to be here in the snow.”
In the end, Chief Jacks said, the entire trip cost $150,000, with 46 people from the Tseycum and related tribes making it.
Chief Jacks flew into Kennedy Airport on June 4, with seven other tribe members. The rest of the group arrived on Saturday. They were staying in the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street, where they booked 24 rooms.
In addition to preparing for Monday’s ceremony, Chief Jacks said tribe members visited the Statue of Liberty and took double-decker bus tours of the city.
They were taken off guard by the heat wave. “But I can’t complain,” Chief Jacks said, shrugging. “It won’t do any good to complain.”
The tribe planned to fly back to Victoria on Vancouver Island on Wednesday with their ancestors’ remains. Shortly after dawn on Wednesday, Chief Jacks said, the remains will be transported by van to Kennedy Airport and flown in the cargo hull back to Victoria. “A lot of our people will be waiting there,” he said.
And then the remains will be driven in the back of two pickup trucks to Tseycum land on Vancouver Island, transferred into 55 plain cedar boxes and reburied on native land, this time, the tribe vows, for good.
They were at the end of a roughly 3,000-mile journey that has, in its way, taken years. Unlike the thousands of fidgety schoolchildren and harried parents that filled the museum’s halls to view its storied exhibits on Monday, these 46 visitors were there for an altogether different purpose: to take their ancestors home.
“Our people are humans; we aren’t tokens,” said Chief Vern Jacks, who heads the Tseycum First Nation, a tiny native tribe from northern Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.
With the museum’s full consent, the Tseycum tribe will be repatriating the remains of 55 of their ancestors to Canada this week. On Monday morning, in a quiet first-floor auditorium away from the museum’s crowds, tribe members performed an emotionally charged private ceremony over the 15 sturdy plastic boxes that contained the remains. The ceremony lasted two and a half hours, and the tribe members and elders from related tribes prayed, spoke, wept and sang, saying they wanted to soothe their ancestors’ spirits and prepare them for a return trip from a journey that, the tribe leaders say, should never have happened at all.
“And then we said, ‘Now we’re going to take you home,’ ” Chief Jacks said, moments after the ceremony ended. “These people we are taking here have knowledge, respect, wisdom,” he added. “We live by today’s society, but our history walks with us.”
The remains, guessed to be at least 2,000 years old, have been at the museum for about 100 years but have almost certainly never been on display, said Steve Reichl, a museum spokesman. The museum has repatriated other remains to Canada at least once before, in 2002, according to Mr. Reichl, and remains have also been returned numerous times to American Indians.
Mr. Reichl said the museum worked to streamline the Tseycums’ trip. “The end result was a successful visit,” he said, “and a moving ceremony.”
For the Tseycum people, Monday’s events marked a singular culmination of years of painstaking, and painful, detective work.
The tribe’s quest to reclaim their ancestors began seven years ago, when Chief Jacks’s wife, Cora Jacks, found documents and papers relaying the life story of a 19th- and early 20th-century archaeologist, Harlan Ingersoll Smith. Ms. Jacks said she learned that Mr. Smith had robbed the graves of Tseycum ancestors, who were buried on Vancouver Island under giant boulders, and sold them to major American museums, and most likely others worldwide.
Mrs. Jacks grew nearly obsessed with tracking down the remains, Chief Jacks said, poring over books, researching government archives and spending late nights searching for clues online.
Mr. Smith’s selling price, said Chief Jacks, was $5 a skull, $10 for a body.
“He dug our people up and sold them to museums on all four corners of the earth,” said Chief Jacks, 63, who is hoping that the Canadian government will help defray the costs of the trip. “What happened to ‘rest in peace’?”
In 2004, Mrs. Jacks wrote to both the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where she believes the remains of 70 ancestors who are from Coast Salish, a designation for tribes in the Pacific Northwest, are also being stored. In 2005, Mrs. Jacks and Chief Jacks’s son, Vern Jacks Jr., visited both museums, and then began the arduous, paperwork-heavy process for repatriating remains, first from New York.
In 2006, tribe members began raising money to cover their trip. They held fund-raisers, auctioned art and gathered donations for their quest, which they called “Our Journey Home,” and the tribe contributed $55,000.
(Helen Robbins, the repatriation director at the Field Museum, said the tribe had yet to begin the required process in Chicago. Mrs. Jacks said they planned to begin that effort next, after more money is raised.)
Finally, in November 2007, Mrs. Jacks said, she received the good news from the American Museum of Natural History. “They told us we could now come to New York and get our ancestors,” she said. Then the tribe began the process of speaking to elders and leaders in the Tseycum tribe, which has just 150 members, and other area tribes.
“And then we waited for better weather in New York,” said Mrs. Jacks, 52. “We didn’t want to be here in the snow.”
In the end, Chief Jacks said, the entire trip cost $150,000, with 46 people from the Tseycum and related tribes making it.
Chief Jacks flew into Kennedy Airport on June 4, with seven other tribe members. The rest of the group arrived on Saturday. They were staying in the Holiday Inn on West 57th Street, where they booked 24 rooms.
In addition to preparing for Monday’s ceremony, Chief Jacks said tribe members visited the Statue of Liberty and took double-decker bus tours of the city.
They were taken off guard by the heat wave. “But I can’t complain,” Chief Jacks said, shrugging. “It won’t do any good to complain.”
The tribe planned to fly back to Victoria on Vancouver Island on Wednesday with their ancestors’ remains. Shortly after dawn on Wednesday, Chief Jacks said, the remains will be transported by van to Kennedy Airport and flown in the cargo hull back to Victoria. “A lot of our people will be waiting there,” he said.
And then the remains will be driven in the back of two pickup trucks to Tseycum land on Vancouver Island, transferred into 55 plain cedar boxes and reburied on native land, this time, the tribe vows, for good.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Dems woo Native American vote - Carrie Budoff Brown
THORNTON, Colo. — Sen. Barack Obama has done it in city after city, privately and quietly. Before or after his appearances in front of crowds of thousands, he retreats to a holding room with a dozen or more Native American tribal leaders.
The rarely publicized meetings are one piece of what Indian Country leaders describe as an unprecedented effort this year by the presidential field to pay heed to this small and historically overlooked voting bloc. In the past two weeks alone, Obama, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaigned on Indian reservations across South Dakota and Montana as Sen. John McCain met with tribal leaders in New Mexico.
Making up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population and concentrated mostly outside key primary states in past election years, Native Americans are seeing an uptick in prominence because of political and geographic realities.
The prolonged primary season has pushed the contest into states with larger Native communities — states that typically voted too late to attract much attention from presidential candidates. With the emergence of the Mountain West as the newest general election battleground, the Native vote is more highly sought after than ever since it has proven to be mobilized and instrumental in recent statewide races.
“This has never, ever happened before,” said Jacqueline Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, which is neutral in the race. “In 2004, we thought it was a landmark when we got a majority of the candidates to make a statement to Indian Country and come to our conference.”
Native Americans traditionally and overwhelmingly vote Democratic, but leaders said they expect some in their community to at least consider McCain because of his history working on their issues as a past chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
Clinton, too, has a track record as first lady and as a New York senator, which both she and her husband emphasized on separate tours through reservations in the run-up to Tuesday’s last-in-the nation primaries in South Dakota and Montana.
“I will be your champion,” Clinton told a crowd on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Kyle, S.D. “I will fight for you. I will stand up for you, and I will work my heart out for you.”
Yet it’s the level of engagement from Obama — a senator from a state with no federally recognized tribes, a city guy with a limited legislative record on Native issues — that has surprised some in the community.
“Obama we weren’t so sure about,” Johnson said.
But from the start, Obama built an inner circle of advisers that included one of the community’s most revered advocates, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. The Illinois senator hired former Daschle operatives with connections to Indian Country and an understanding of its power to swing elections.
Native Americans have built clout in recent years, playing a key role in an Arizona congressional race and assisting in the 2002 victory of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) by 524 votes. Controversial late returns from Shannon County, which includes the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, put Johnson ahead of Republican challenger John Thune. In 2004, Shannon County delivered 85 percent of the vote to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, making it his top county in the nation. The Native American vote was also considered key in Montana’s 2006 Senate race when Democrat Jon Tester defeated Republican incumbent Conrad Burns.
“I would like to believe these efforts reaching into Indian Country are truly altruistic — and for the large part, they are — but these candidates know that in order to win, Indian Country can be a deciding factor,” said Kalyn Free, an Oklahoma superdelegate and founder of the Indigenous Democratic Network’s List, a political organization that mobilizes the Indian vote and recruits, trains and funds Native American candidates.
The rarely publicized meetings are one piece of what Indian Country leaders describe as an unprecedented effort this year by the presidential field to pay heed to this small and historically overlooked voting bloc. In the past two weeks alone, Obama, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaigned on Indian reservations across South Dakota and Montana as Sen. John McCain met with tribal leaders in New Mexico.
Making up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population and concentrated mostly outside key primary states in past election years, Native Americans are seeing an uptick in prominence because of political and geographic realities.
The prolonged primary season has pushed the contest into states with larger Native communities — states that typically voted too late to attract much attention from presidential candidates. With the emergence of the Mountain West as the newest general election battleground, the Native vote is more highly sought after than ever since it has proven to be mobilized and instrumental in recent statewide races.
“This has never, ever happened before,” said Jacqueline Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, which is neutral in the race. “In 2004, we thought it was a landmark when we got a majority of the candidates to make a statement to Indian Country and come to our conference.”
Native Americans traditionally and overwhelmingly vote Democratic, but leaders said they expect some in their community to at least consider McCain because of his history working on their issues as a past chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
Clinton, too, has a track record as first lady and as a New York senator, which both she and her husband emphasized on separate tours through reservations in the run-up to Tuesday’s last-in-the nation primaries in South Dakota and Montana.
“I will be your champion,” Clinton told a crowd on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Kyle, S.D. “I will fight for you. I will stand up for you, and I will work my heart out for you.”
Yet it’s the level of engagement from Obama — a senator from a state with no federally recognized tribes, a city guy with a limited legislative record on Native issues — that has surprised some in the community.
“Obama we weren’t so sure about,” Johnson said.
But from the start, Obama built an inner circle of advisers that included one of the community’s most revered advocates, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. The Illinois senator hired former Daschle operatives with connections to Indian Country and an understanding of its power to swing elections.
Native Americans have built clout in recent years, playing a key role in an Arizona congressional race and assisting in the 2002 victory of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) by 524 votes. Controversial late returns from Shannon County, which includes the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, put Johnson ahead of Republican challenger John Thune. In 2004, Shannon County delivered 85 percent of the vote to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, making it his top county in the nation. The Native American vote was also considered key in Montana’s 2006 Senate race when Democrat Jon Tester defeated Republican incumbent Conrad Burns.
“I would like to believe these efforts reaching into Indian Country are truly altruistic — and for the large part, they are — but these candidates know that in order to win, Indian Country can be a deciding factor,” said Kalyn Free, an Oklahoma superdelegate and founder of the Indigenous Democratic Network’s List, a political organization that mobilizes the Indian vote and recruits, trains and funds Native American candidates.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Canada's Aboriginals Slam "Third - World" Conditions
TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada cares less and less about the "third-world" living conditions faced by many of its native peoples, protesters said on Thursday in the second annual aboriginal National Day of Action.
"The Canadian government turns around and tells foreigners that are coming to this country that native people in Canada are very well taken care of -- that they have money, that they have houses, that that have jobs," said Gary Wassaykeesic from the Mishkeegogamang Indian reserve in northwestern Ontario.
"But in all reality, when you go into your own backyard, you're going to find third-world conditions."
Natives' frustrations have grown in recent years over the issues of poverty, health care and living conditions on many of the country's reserves. Increasingly, there have been road blockades and standoffs between native protesters and police, and sometimes violence.
But Thursday's National Day of Action was peaceful, police said, unlike 2007, when protesters east of Toronto shut down Canada's busiest highway.
"There's no violence. We're trying to get our message across without breaking windows or smashing cars," Wassaykeesic told Reuters on the sidelines of the march through Toronto, where obvious signs of support from onlookers were scarce.
More than any other group in Canada by far, aboriginals face poverty, crime, and poor health and housing. Unemployment and suicide levels are also highest among natives, especially on the remote reserves that dot the country's north.
Asked why conditions are still so bad for aboriginals, federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl told reporters in Ottawa: "There's lots to do, I admit that, and I don't claim that it's all done."
He added: "All these things are expensive, they've got to be done, and we're working through a list of priorities."
A theme at this year's protest was the effect that mining and forestry have had on native land, with damage from the extraction of resources leading to clashes between business, government and aboriginal communities.
"A lot of non-native people don't understand our issues. They think we're just a bunch of radicals or terrorists," said Maria Swain, who is from Ontario's Grassy Narrows reserve, about 200 km (120 miles) east of Winnipeg.
"They don't understand our spirituality and our connection with the earth."
In Ottawa, a crowd of around 1,000 people, led by drummers and dancers in traditional colored dress, held a protest outside the main Parliament buildings to air their grievances.
Phil Fontaine, head of the Association of First Nations, complained that while Ottawa was going to spend billions of dollars on new tanks, planes and ships for the armed forces over the next 20 years, it could not find the money to improve aboriginal schools.
"It's shameful, absolutely shameful," he said.
"The Canadian government turns around and tells foreigners that are coming to this country that native people in Canada are very well taken care of -- that they have money, that they have houses, that that have jobs," said Gary Wassaykeesic from the Mishkeegogamang Indian reserve in northwestern Ontario.
"But in all reality, when you go into your own backyard, you're going to find third-world conditions."
Natives' frustrations have grown in recent years over the issues of poverty, health care and living conditions on many of the country's reserves. Increasingly, there have been road blockades and standoffs between native protesters and police, and sometimes violence.
But Thursday's National Day of Action was peaceful, police said, unlike 2007, when protesters east of Toronto shut down Canada's busiest highway.
"There's no violence. We're trying to get our message across without breaking windows or smashing cars," Wassaykeesic told Reuters on the sidelines of the march through Toronto, where obvious signs of support from onlookers were scarce.
More than any other group in Canada by far, aboriginals face poverty, crime, and poor health and housing. Unemployment and suicide levels are also highest among natives, especially on the remote reserves that dot the country's north.
Asked why conditions are still so bad for aboriginals, federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl told reporters in Ottawa: "There's lots to do, I admit that, and I don't claim that it's all done."
He added: "All these things are expensive, they've got to be done, and we're working through a list of priorities."
A theme at this year's protest was the effect that mining and forestry have had on native land, with damage from the extraction of resources leading to clashes between business, government and aboriginal communities.
"A lot of non-native people don't understand our issues. They think we're just a bunch of radicals or terrorists," said Maria Swain, who is from Ontario's Grassy Narrows reserve, about 200 km (120 miles) east of Winnipeg.
"They don't understand our spirituality and our connection with the earth."
In Ottawa, a crowd of around 1,000 people, led by drummers and dancers in traditional colored dress, held a protest outside the main Parliament buildings to air their grievances.
Phil Fontaine, head of the Association of First Nations, complained that while Ottawa was going to spend billions of dollars on new tanks, planes and ships for the armed forces over the next 20 years, it could not find the money to improve aboriginal schools.
"It's shameful, absolutely shameful," he said.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
On the Reservation and Off, Schools See a Changing Tide
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: May 25, 2008
HARDIN, Mont. — One of the last traditional chiefs of the Crow Indian tribe, named Plenty Coups, had a vision as the Old West was fading. Education would be the way of the future, he said — a choice to be either the “the white man’s victim” or “the white man’s equal.”
Roberta Walks Over Ice was among those who heard that message, from her grandfather. She then continued the tradition, preaching the value of education to her daughter, Jasmine, 15.
But the zeal for learning that took root in such families is now coming with a cost. Many families like the Walks Over Ices are deciding that off-reservation public schools in this small, mostly white ranching town are a better choice than schools on the reservation.
Hardin High School, 55 percent white in 2000, is now 70 percent American Indian. On the reservation, at Lodge Grass High School, more than a third of the student enrollment in 2000 has melted away.
The stigma that was once attached to sending a child off the reservation — the legacy of forced boarding-school programs in the early 1900s that tried to strip Indians of their culture and language in the name of assimilation — has faded as elders who remember the old days die off.
“If they had all the same resources, programs, assistance, whatever, I would have said, ‘O.K., yeah,’ but I didn’t want her to struggle,” Ms. Walks Over Ice said about her daughter. “Jasmine was falling through the cracks. I asked them to help her at Lodge Grass, and she didn’t improve.”
Home games for the Hardin Bulldogs football team — majority Indian this season for the first time — now begin with traditional Indian drumming, and the Crow language is studied alongside French and Spanish. There is an unofficial line in the school parking lot, one side for whites, the other for Crow. Indian pottery-making is so well established in the art department that schools from other parts of the state now come to learn.
Even the principal at Lodge Grass, John Small — whose Crow pedigree extends back to an Indian scout for George Armstrong Custer named White Man Runs Him (who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought about 15 miles from Hardin) — feels the winds of change blowing in his own family.
All five of Mr. Small’s children graduated from Lodge Grass, as did he. But five of his nine grandchildren attend Hardin schools, and his daughter, Roxanne Not Afraid, is a teacher there. This spring, the Hardin district nominated Ms. Not Afraid to be Montana Indian Teacher of the year.
The turning tide of students has rippled far beyond education, to culture and the delicate economic balance of an area where resources like student head counts and the government dollars that come with them are highly coveted assets.
Since the early 1990s, Montana has lost about 1.5 percent of its public student population every year, according to state figures, with even deeper hits here in the eastern half of the state, an area largely untouched by the second-home culture that is transforming places like Bozeman and Missoula.
At the same time, the national demographic groove of people moving from rural to less rural places — for jobs, choices and lifestyle — has accelerated, with Indians participating like everyone else.
While schools on many reservations continue to thrive, those in places like Hardin — a small community struggling in its own way as the economics in this dry, rural corner of the West erode — or in Parker, Ariz., adjoining the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation south of the Grand Canyon, have caught some of the surge. A housing shortage and lack of jobs on reservations account for some of the shift too, as does the simple fact that many Indians have come to see the public schools as better than reservation schools.
For the Crow or Apsáalooke Nation — about 11,000 people, three-fourths of whom live on a reservation the size of Connecticut in Montana’s southeast corner — the intertwined arcs of Hardin and Lodge Grass have made for a bittersweet experience. Positive things, like ambition, hope and expression of free choice, are countered against the harm to an institution that many people look back on with fondness and nostalgia.
At Lodge Grass, teachers have been let go and the number of paraprofessionals who once could help students has been slashed. There are only 357 students in all grades of the Lodge Grass schools, down from 559 in 2000, and the small community of Lodge Grass itself has stumbled, too, residents say, with burned-out and abandoned homes lining the road to the hilltop school.
“We’ve had to tighten our belts, and that hurts enrollment and money — it’s a vicious circle,” said Dennis Maasjo, the superintendent of Lodge Grass schools.
Published: May 25, 2008
HARDIN, Mont. — One of the last traditional chiefs of the Crow Indian tribe, named Plenty Coups, had a vision as the Old West was fading. Education would be the way of the future, he said — a choice to be either the “the white man’s victim” or “the white man’s equal.”
Roberta Walks Over Ice was among those who heard that message, from her grandfather. She then continued the tradition, preaching the value of education to her daughter, Jasmine, 15.
But the zeal for learning that took root in such families is now coming with a cost. Many families like the Walks Over Ices are deciding that off-reservation public schools in this small, mostly white ranching town are a better choice than schools on the reservation.
Hardin High School, 55 percent white in 2000, is now 70 percent American Indian. On the reservation, at Lodge Grass High School, more than a third of the student enrollment in 2000 has melted away.
The stigma that was once attached to sending a child off the reservation — the legacy of forced boarding-school programs in the early 1900s that tried to strip Indians of their culture and language in the name of assimilation — has faded as elders who remember the old days die off.
“If they had all the same resources, programs, assistance, whatever, I would have said, ‘O.K., yeah,’ but I didn’t want her to struggle,” Ms. Walks Over Ice said about her daughter. “Jasmine was falling through the cracks. I asked them to help her at Lodge Grass, and she didn’t improve.”
Home games for the Hardin Bulldogs football team — majority Indian this season for the first time — now begin with traditional Indian drumming, and the Crow language is studied alongside French and Spanish. There is an unofficial line in the school parking lot, one side for whites, the other for Crow. Indian pottery-making is so well established in the art department that schools from other parts of the state now come to learn.
Even the principal at Lodge Grass, John Small — whose Crow pedigree extends back to an Indian scout for George Armstrong Custer named White Man Runs Him (who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought about 15 miles from Hardin) — feels the winds of change blowing in his own family.
All five of Mr. Small’s children graduated from Lodge Grass, as did he. But five of his nine grandchildren attend Hardin schools, and his daughter, Roxanne Not Afraid, is a teacher there. This spring, the Hardin district nominated Ms. Not Afraid to be Montana Indian Teacher of the year.
The turning tide of students has rippled far beyond education, to culture and the delicate economic balance of an area where resources like student head counts and the government dollars that come with them are highly coveted assets.
Since the early 1990s, Montana has lost about 1.5 percent of its public student population every year, according to state figures, with even deeper hits here in the eastern half of the state, an area largely untouched by the second-home culture that is transforming places like Bozeman and Missoula.
At the same time, the national demographic groove of people moving from rural to less rural places — for jobs, choices and lifestyle — has accelerated, with Indians participating like everyone else.
While schools on many reservations continue to thrive, those in places like Hardin — a small community struggling in its own way as the economics in this dry, rural corner of the West erode — or in Parker, Ariz., adjoining the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation south of the Grand Canyon, have caught some of the surge. A housing shortage and lack of jobs on reservations account for some of the shift too, as does the simple fact that many Indians have come to see the public schools as better than reservation schools.
For the Crow or Apsáalooke Nation — about 11,000 people, three-fourths of whom live on a reservation the size of Connecticut in Montana’s southeast corner — the intertwined arcs of Hardin and Lodge Grass have made for a bittersweet experience. Positive things, like ambition, hope and expression of free choice, are countered against the harm to an institution that many people look back on with fondness and nostalgia.
At Lodge Grass, teachers have been let go and the number of paraprofessionals who once could help students has been slashed. There are only 357 students in all grades of the Lodge Grass schools, down from 559 in 2000, and the small community of Lodge Grass itself has stumbled, too, residents say, with burned-out and abandoned homes lining the road to the hilltop school.
“We’ve had to tighten our belts, and that hurts enrollment and money — it’s a vicious circle,” said Dennis Maasjo, the superintendent of Lodge Grass schools.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Barack in Crow Agency, MT 5/19/08
Follow this link to see more images of Barack Obama at Crow Agency, Montana.
Barack in Crow Agency, MT 5/19/08 -
Monday, May 19, 2008
Obama Joins American Indian Tribe, Eyes Policy Change
CROW AGENCY, Montana (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama became an honorary member of an American Indian tribe on Monday and promised a proactive policy to help tribal people if he wins the White House in November.
The Illinois senator who is leading rival Hillary Clinton in their race for the party's presidential nomination, joined the Crow Nation, a tribe of some 12,100 members in Montana, taking on a native name and honorary parents in a traditional ceremony.
Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, was "adopted" by Hartford and Mary Black Eagle and given a name which means "one who helps all people of this land."
"I was just adopted into the tribe, so I'm still working on my pronunciation," Obama told a crowd after stumbling over some of the native names.
"I like my new name, Barack Black Eagle," he said. "That is a good name."
Many in the audience wore traditional feather headdresses and some banged drums ahead of Obama's visit, the first by a presidential candidate to the Crow Nation.
Obama held rallies throughout Montana, which holds its primary election on June 3.
The state is home to some 60,000 American Indians, making them a key swing vote, according to Dale Old Horn, 62, a spokesman for the Crow Nation.
Obama said he would appoint a Native American adviser to his senior White House staff if he wins and would work on providing better health care and education to reservations across the country.
"Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans, the first Americans," Obama said.
Old Horn said the tribal members related to Obama because of his background.
"His heritage of being poor, of being an outsider, you know those two things are the commonalities that he has with us," he said. "We've always been treated like outsiders when it comes to government policy. In addition to that, we all grew up poor."
The Illinois senator who is leading rival Hillary Clinton in their race for the party's presidential nomination, joined the Crow Nation, a tribe of some 12,100 members in Montana, taking on a native name and honorary parents in a traditional ceremony.
Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, was "adopted" by Hartford and Mary Black Eagle and given a name which means "one who helps all people of this land."
"I was just adopted into the tribe, so I'm still working on my pronunciation," Obama told a crowd after stumbling over some of the native names.
"I like my new name, Barack Black Eagle," he said. "That is a good name."
Many in the audience wore traditional feather headdresses and some banged drums ahead of Obama's visit, the first by a presidential candidate to the Crow Nation.
Obama held rallies throughout Montana, which holds its primary election on June 3.
The state is home to some 60,000 American Indians, making them a key swing vote, according to Dale Old Horn, 62, a spokesman for the Crow Nation.
Obama said he would appoint a Native American adviser to his senior White House staff if he wins and would work on providing better health care and education to reservations across the country.
"Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans, the first Americans," Obama said.
Old Horn said the tribal members related to Obama because of his background.
"His heritage of being poor, of being an outsider, you know those two things are the commonalities that he has with us," he said. "We've always been treated like outsiders when it comes to government policy. In addition to that, we all grew up poor."
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Obama Endorsed by Crow Nation and Fort Peck Tribes
HELENA, MT – The Obama campaign announced today the endorsements of the Crow Nation and the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Ft. Peck Reservation. Tribal leaders cited Sen. Obama’s commitment to Indian Country and to the issues facing its residents.
Sen. Obama’s leadership qualities and commitment to issues of importance to Indian country distinguish him from his opponents” said Chairman A.T. Stafne of the Ft. Peck Tribes“ Our twelve voting members in the Tribal Council passed this endorsement resolution unanimously. I was personally impressed with his commitment to a true government-to-government relationship and his promise to appoint a Native American policy advisor in his White House. ”
“Senator Obama understands the challenges facing Native Americans in Montana,” said Crow Nation Chairman Carl Venne. “His record as a US Senator shows that he cares about Indian communities. He respects Indian sovereignty and is a strong advocate for Indian healthcare and education.
Sen. Obama’s leadership qualities and commitment to issues of importance to Indian country distinguish him from his opponents” said Chairman A.T. Stafne of the Ft. Peck Tribes“ Our twelve voting members in the Tribal Council passed this endorsement resolution unanimously. I was personally impressed with his commitment to a true government-to-government relationship and his promise to appoint a Native American policy advisor in his White House. ”
“Senator Obama understands the challenges facing Native Americans in Montana,” said Crow Nation Chairman Carl Venne. “His record as a US Senator shows that he cares about Indian communities. He respects Indian sovereignty and is a strong advocate for Indian healthcare and education.
Ways of Ancient Mexico Reviving Barren Lands - New York Times
SAN ISIDRO TILANTONGO, Mexico — Jesús León Santos is a Mixtec Indian farmer who will soon plant corn on a small plot next to his house in time for the summer rains. He plows with oxen and harvests by hand.
Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains.
But to him, that is beside the point.
The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most barren earth in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.
Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms instead of leaving for jobs in cities and in the United States.
“We migrate because we don’t think there are options,” Mr. León said. “The important thing is to give options for a better life.”
Viewed against the backdrop of rising food prices in a global marketplace, Mr. León’s fight to keep farmers from abandoning their land is much more than a refusal to give up a millennial way of life.
As Mexico imports more corn from the United States, the country’s reliance on outside supplies is drawing protests among nationalists, farmers’ groups and leftist critics of Mexico’s free trade economy. Earlier this year, as the last tariffs to corn imports were lifted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, farmers’ groups marched against the accord in Mexico, asking for more aid.
Mr. León and the farmers’ group he helped found, the Center for Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca, or Cedicam, have reached into the past to revive pre-Hispanic practices. To arrest erosion, Cedicam has planted trees, mostly native ocote pines, a million in the past five years, raised in the group’s own nurseries.
Working communally, the villagers built stone walls to terrace the hillside, and they dug long ditches along the slopes to halt the wash of rainwater that dragged the soil from the mountains. Trapped in canals, the water seeps down to recharge the water table and restore dried-up springs.
As the land has begun to produce again, Mr. León has reintroduced the traditional milpa, a plot where corn, climbing beans and squash grow together. The pre-Hispanic farming practice fixes nutrients in the soil and creates natural barriers to pests and disease.
Along the way, the farmers have modernized the ancient techniques. Mr. León has encouraged farmers to use natural compost as fertilizer, introduced crop rotation, and improved on traditional seed selection.
Mr. León plows with oxen by choice. A tractor would pack down the soil too firmly.
In the eight villages in the region where Cedicam has worked, yields have risen about three or fourfold, to between 16 to 24 bushels a hectare, Mr. Leon said. Unlike the monocultures of mechanized farming, these practices help preserve genetic diversity.
Mr. León’s work is a local response to the dislocation created by open markets in the countryside. “The people here are saying that we have to find a way to produce our food and meet our basic needs and that we can do it in a way that is sustainable,” said Phil Dahl-Bredine, a Maryknoll lay workers and onetime farmer who has worked with Cedicam for seven years and written a book about the region.
The key to determining the project’s success, and that of similar projects in these highlands, will be if it can produce enough to sustain families during the bad years, said James D. Reynolds, an expert on desertification at Duke University who visited Cedicam last month. The land of the Mixteca region is so degraded that “the overall potential is not that high,” he said.
Over the past two decades, the Mexican government has steadily dismantled most support for poor farmers, arguing that they are inefficient. About two-thirds of all Mexican corn farmers, some two million people, are small-scale producers, farming less than 12 acres, but they harvest less than a quarter of the country’s production.
Rising demand for animal feed has spurred soaring imports of subsidized corn from the United States. Mexico now buys about 40 percent of its corn from the United States.
Increased subsistence farming is not the answer to the global food crisis. But people skeptical about the idea that free trade is the best way to reduce hunger point to small-scale projects like Cedicam’s as alternatives to industrialized farming, which is based on costly energy use, chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains.
But to him, that is beside the point.
The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most barren earth in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.
Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms instead of leaving for jobs in cities and in the United States.
“We migrate because we don’t think there are options,” Mr. León said. “The important thing is to give options for a better life.”
Viewed against the backdrop of rising food prices in a global marketplace, Mr. León’s fight to keep farmers from abandoning their land is much more than a refusal to give up a millennial way of life.
As Mexico imports more corn from the United States, the country’s reliance on outside supplies is drawing protests among nationalists, farmers’ groups and leftist critics of Mexico’s free trade economy. Earlier this year, as the last tariffs to corn imports were lifted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, farmers’ groups marched against the accord in Mexico, asking for more aid.
Mr. León and the farmers’ group he helped found, the Center for Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca, or Cedicam, have reached into the past to revive pre-Hispanic practices. To arrest erosion, Cedicam has planted trees, mostly native ocote pines, a million in the past five years, raised in the group’s own nurseries.
Working communally, the villagers built stone walls to terrace the hillside, and they dug long ditches along the slopes to halt the wash of rainwater that dragged the soil from the mountains. Trapped in canals, the water seeps down to recharge the water table and restore dried-up springs.
As the land has begun to produce again, Mr. León has reintroduced the traditional milpa, a plot where corn, climbing beans and squash grow together. The pre-Hispanic farming practice fixes nutrients in the soil and creates natural barriers to pests and disease.
Along the way, the farmers have modernized the ancient techniques. Mr. León has encouraged farmers to use natural compost as fertilizer, introduced crop rotation, and improved on traditional seed selection.
Mr. León plows with oxen by choice. A tractor would pack down the soil too firmly.
In the eight villages in the region where Cedicam has worked, yields have risen about three or fourfold, to between 16 to 24 bushels a hectare, Mr. Leon said. Unlike the monocultures of mechanized farming, these practices help preserve genetic diversity.
Mr. León’s work is a local response to the dislocation created by open markets in the countryside. “The people here are saying that we have to find a way to produce our food and meet our basic needs and that we can do it in a way that is sustainable,” said Phil Dahl-Bredine, a Maryknoll lay workers and onetime farmer who has worked with Cedicam for seven years and written a book about the region.
The key to determining the project’s success, and that of similar projects in these highlands, will be if it can produce enough to sustain families during the bad years, said James D. Reynolds, an expert on desertification at Duke University who visited Cedicam last month. The land of the Mixteca region is so degraded that “the overall potential is not that high,” he said.
Over the past two decades, the Mexican government has steadily dismantled most support for poor farmers, arguing that they are inefficient. About two-thirds of all Mexican corn farmers, some two million people, are small-scale producers, farming less than 12 acres, but they harvest less than a quarter of the country’s production.
Rising demand for animal feed has spurred soaring imports of subsidized corn from the United States. Mexico now buys about 40 percent of its corn from the United States.
Increased subsistence farming is not the answer to the global food crisis. But people skeptical about the idea that free trade is the best way to reduce hunger point to small-scale projects like Cedicam’s as alternatives to industrialized farming, which is based on costly energy use, chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Count one more superdelegate for Barack Obama - New Mexico Independent
By DAVID ALIRE GARCIA 05/09/2008
SANTA FE -- If Sen. Barack Obama needs a mere 170 more delegate votes to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination outright, he just got one vote closer.
That's because Laurie Weahkee, New Mexico's newest -- and most coveted -- superdelegate, just threw her support behind Obama.
"After the primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina, it is now absolutely clear that Barack Obama will be our nominee," Weahkee, lead organizer for the Native American Voters Alliance, writes in a statement e-mailed to the Independent. She adds, "Obama has proven that he can campaign in a difficult environment and still inspire thousands of new voices to take part in the democratic process."
Weahkee also had good things to say about Hillary Clinton -- "I’d like to recognize Senator Clinton for her many years of service to this country, and for laying the groundwork for women across this country to run for office" -- but in the end that wasn't enough to push the long-time New Mexico activist into her corner.
With Weahkee now a committed Obama vote, that leaves U.S. Rep. Tom Udall as the only Democratic superdelegate from New Mexico who remains neutral in the race. Clinton won the popular vote in New Mexico on Feb. 5 by a slim margin just north of 1,000 votes -- the closest presidential primary or caucus anywhere in the country except Guam. As a result, she netted 14 of the state's 26 pledged delegates. On the New Mexico superdelegate front, Clinton now leads by a margin of six to five.
Weahkee, a 42-year-old Cochiti and Zuni Pueblo member, was elected to be superdelegate amid some controversy on April 26. Since then she's kept mum on coming to a decision. But in an exclusive interview with the Independent, Weahkee explains how she made up her mind.
NMI: Why Obama?
LW: Well, I really believe it's highly unlikely that Clinton can catch up with Obama at this point. I think she would have to win all the rest of the six races with a high margin of victory and I don't think that's gonna happen. Even her fundraising efforts are now waning and that concerns me especially since she's been pushing this idea that she's the viable candidate. Those are, I guess, additional reasons behind why I think it's clear that Obama will be our nominee.
NMI: When exactly did you reach your decision?
LW: Well, I've been talking with family and close friends since Tuesday of this week. I also really believe we need to get on with the campaign against McCain. And so, I kind of felt it was the appropriate time to make my decision. So since Tuesday I started really asking people for input in terms of what is her viability and I've been saying that to different media outlets. And my own research showed that she's really unlikely to catch up and I decided to do it now so I can get on with my regular work. This has kind of been all consuming.
NMI: Which medial outlets have been calling you lately?
LW: The big one was ABC News and, of course, AP. But a lot of native newspapers, Native Times is one. And there's just a lot of people that have been really calling and asking where I was standing as a super delegate. In terms of just people, I've got a list of 500 Democratic women sending me an e-mail petition for Hillary Clinton. All kinds of people from California and many other places, just different places. I've been getting email and actual letters asking me to consider one candidate over the other. I've been keeping a little tally about where people are going and by my tally Barack Obama is slightly ahead (laughing).
NMI: Was it a hard decision?
LW: It actually was. Because I think both Hillary and Barack have a lot to offer the country. I'm extremely happy both are competent, which I think is very important. And so it was a hard decision, but I really feel that the turning point in my mind was the North Carolina and Indiana races and the fundraising. Those three factors really shifted my thinking.
NMI: Were you truly undecided when you were recently elected by the State Central Committee of the state Democratic Party on April 26 -- or were you leaning toward Obama then?
LW: I really was undecided. Even with in my own family we've been having debates about which candidate to support. And so, at that point in time I was really undecided. I understand it's a high stakes situation, but I was a little disappointed by the aggressive tone of the New Mexico Clinton campaign to challenge my selection as a delegate, because I really was at that time undecided. The aggressive tone from folks here locally just added into the my overall sense that the Clinton campaign was really aggressive. It was disappointing. I was truly undecided and they were already putting me in one camp or another. I just felt it was a bad representation on Hillary Clinton and her overall campaign.
NMI: You're half pueblo Indian and half Navajo... seems like being tugged in two different directions is nothing new for you?
LW: (laughs) No, it's not. Yeah, I deal with that pretty much on a daily basis. But I think a lot of Native people do. I don't think I'm special in that regard.
NMI: In an April 27 interview with the Albuquerque Journal you said you were most concerned with Native American issues as well as health care issues in terms of deciding between Clinton and Obama. What did you learn since then in those two areas that made you choose Obama?
LW: You know, throughout Obama's campaign he's proven to be an honest and genuine leader and to me that's key to improving relations between tribal nations and the U.S. government. I really believe that we need an honest and genuine leader who has realistic solutions for issues facing the native community and I really believe that he's going to follow through. One thing he's planning on doing is an annual tribal summit. To commit to doing that annually is really key to building a good relationship between the U.S. government and tribal nations because there's so much diversity on tribal issues and you can't really get that by one town meeting or lay it on one or two people to work those out. The other thing that was key for me making up my mind is that I believe he really looks at the root causes of issues and he understands the need for comprehensive solutions. I feel like that's real key as opposed to band-aids, not saying that Hillary is about band-aid type solutions, I really do appreciate Obama's willingness to dig in a lot deeper to the issues and recognizing structure and infrastructure as a part of the key to creating realistic solutions.
NMI: Did you ever feel any sense of obligation to go for Clinton since she narrowly won the popular vote here in New Mexico?
LW: Actually, (long pause) for me, I was selected to be a super delegate. Because as a native woman I'm representative of a voice that rarely gets heard. I truly believe that part of my responsibility is to give voice to the overlooked concerns of disenfranchised people. For someone who's from small native communities, we usually lose to majority rules and often times our communities get overrun and have to go with the majority when it's not good for the community. So I don't really feel like that was an argument as to why I was selected as a superdelegate.
NMI: Are you looking forward to casting your ballot in Denver?
LW: Actually I am. I'm not sure what to expect. I'm really honored by this opportunity and am excited to participate in this process. This will be my first time. I usually watch the (convention) news late at night but this time I'll actually be there.
SANTA FE -- If Sen. Barack Obama needs a mere 170 more delegate votes to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination outright, he just got one vote closer.
That's because Laurie Weahkee, New Mexico's newest -- and most coveted -- superdelegate, just threw her support behind Obama.
"After the primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina, it is now absolutely clear that Barack Obama will be our nominee," Weahkee, lead organizer for the Native American Voters Alliance, writes in a statement e-mailed to the Independent. She adds, "Obama has proven that he can campaign in a difficult environment and still inspire thousands of new voices to take part in the democratic process."
Weahkee also had good things to say about Hillary Clinton -- "I’d like to recognize Senator Clinton for her many years of service to this country, and for laying the groundwork for women across this country to run for office" -- but in the end that wasn't enough to push the long-time New Mexico activist into her corner.
With Weahkee now a committed Obama vote, that leaves U.S. Rep. Tom Udall as the only Democratic superdelegate from New Mexico who remains neutral in the race. Clinton won the popular vote in New Mexico on Feb. 5 by a slim margin just north of 1,000 votes -- the closest presidential primary or caucus anywhere in the country except Guam. As a result, she netted 14 of the state's 26 pledged delegates. On the New Mexico superdelegate front, Clinton now leads by a margin of six to five.
Weahkee, a 42-year-old Cochiti and Zuni Pueblo member, was elected to be superdelegate amid some controversy on April 26. Since then she's kept mum on coming to a decision. But in an exclusive interview with the Independent, Weahkee explains how she made up her mind.
NMI: Why Obama?
LW: Well, I really believe it's highly unlikely that Clinton can catch up with Obama at this point. I think she would have to win all the rest of the six races with a high margin of victory and I don't think that's gonna happen. Even her fundraising efforts are now waning and that concerns me especially since she's been pushing this idea that she's the viable candidate. Those are, I guess, additional reasons behind why I think it's clear that Obama will be our nominee.
NMI: When exactly did you reach your decision?
LW: Well, I've been talking with family and close friends since Tuesday of this week. I also really believe we need to get on with the campaign against McCain. And so, I kind of felt it was the appropriate time to make my decision. So since Tuesday I started really asking people for input in terms of what is her viability and I've been saying that to different media outlets. And my own research showed that she's really unlikely to catch up and I decided to do it now so I can get on with my regular work. This has kind of been all consuming.
NMI: Which medial outlets have been calling you lately?
LW: The big one was ABC News and, of course, AP. But a lot of native newspapers, Native Times is one. And there's just a lot of people that have been really calling and asking where I was standing as a super delegate. In terms of just people, I've got a list of 500 Democratic women sending me an e-mail petition for Hillary Clinton. All kinds of people from California and many other places, just different places. I've been getting email and actual letters asking me to consider one candidate over the other. I've been keeping a little tally about where people are going and by my tally Barack Obama is slightly ahead (laughing).
NMI: Was it a hard decision?
LW: It actually was. Because I think both Hillary and Barack have a lot to offer the country. I'm extremely happy both are competent, which I think is very important. And so it was a hard decision, but I really feel that the turning point in my mind was the North Carolina and Indiana races and the fundraising. Those three factors really shifted my thinking.
NMI: Were you truly undecided when you were recently elected by the State Central Committee of the state Democratic Party on April 26 -- or were you leaning toward Obama then?
LW: I really was undecided. Even with in my own family we've been having debates about which candidate to support. And so, at that point in time I was really undecided. I understand it's a high stakes situation, but I was a little disappointed by the aggressive tone of the New Mexico Clinton campaign to challenge my selection as a delegate, because I really was at that time undecided. The aggressive tone from folks here locally just added into the my overall sense that the Clinton campaign was really aggressive. It was disappointing. I was truly undecided and they were already putting me in one camp or another. I just felt it was a bad representation on Hillary Clinton and her overall campaign.
NMI: You're half pueblo Indian and half Navajo... seems like being tugged in two different directions is nothing new for you?
LW: (laughs) No, it's not. Yeah, I deal with that pretty much on a daily basis. But I think a lot of Native people do. I don't think I'm special in that regard.
NMI: In an April 27 interview with the Albuquerque Journal you said you were most concerned with Native American issues as well as health care issues in terms of deciding between Clinton and Obama. What did you learn since then in those two areas that made you choose Obama?
LW: You know, throughout Obama's campaign he's proven to be an honest and genuine leader and to me that's key to improving relations between tribal nations and the U.S. government. I really believe that we need an honest and genuine leader who has realistic solutions for issues facing the native community and I really believe that he's going to follow through. One thing he's planning on doing is an annual tribal summit. To commit to doing that annually is really key to building a good relationship between the U.S. government and tribal nations because there's so much diversity on tribal issues and you can't really get that by one town meeting or lay it on one or two people to work those out. The other thing that was key for me making up my mind is that I believe he really looks at the root causes of issues and he understands the need for comprehensive solutions. I feel like that's real key as opposed to band-aids, not saying that Hillary is about band-aid type solutions, I really do appreciate Obama's willingness to dig in a lot deeper to the issues and recognizing structure and infrastructure as a part of the key to creating realistic solutions.
NMI: Did you ever feel any sense of obligation to go for Clinton since she narrowly won the popular vote here in New Mexico?
LW: Actually, (long pause) for me, I was selected to be a super delegate. Because as a native woman I'm representative of a voice that rarely gets heard. I truly believe that part of my responsibility is to give voice to the overlooked concerns of disenfranchised people. For someone who's from small native communities, we usually lose to majority rules and often times our communities get overrun and have to go with the majority when it's not good for the community. So I don't really feel like that was an argument as to why I was selected as a superdelegate.
NMI: Are you looking forward to casting your ballot in Denver?
LW: Actually I am. I'm not sure what to expect. I'm really honored by this opportunity and am excited to participate in this process. This will be my first time. I usually watch the (convention) news late at night but this time I'll actually be there.
American Rancher Resists Land Reform Plans in Bolivia - New York Times
CARAPARICITO, Bolivia — From the time Ronald Larsen drove his pickup truck here from his native Montana in 1969 and bought a sprawling cattle ranch for a song, he lived a quiet life in remote southeastern Bolivia, farming corn, herding cattle and amassing vast land holdings.
But now Mr. Larsen, 63, has suddenly been thrust into the public eye in Bolivia, finding himself in the middle of a battle between President Evo Morales, who plans to break up large rural estates, and the wealthy light-skinned elite in eastern Bolivia, which is chafing at Mr. Morales’s land reform project to the point of discussing secession.
After armed standoffs with land-reform officials at his ranch this year, Mr. Larsen made it clear which side he was on, emerging as a figure celebrated in rebellious Santa Cruz Province and loathed by Mr. Morales’s government, which wants to reduce ties to the United States.
“I just spent 40 years in this country working my land in an honest fashion,” said Mr. Larsen, who resembled Clint Eastwood with his weathered features and lanky frame. “They’re taking it away over my dead body.”
Mr. Larsen’s standoffs with the central government, replete with rifles, cowboys and Guaranà Indians, might sound like something out of the Old West. In fact, the battle playing out in the cattle pastures and gas-rich hills of his ranch, amid claims of forced servitude of Guaranà workers in the remote region, exemplifies Bolivia’s wild east.
Tensions here erupted one day in February when Alejandro Almaraz, the deputy land minister, arrived before dawn at the entrance to Mr. Larsen’s Hacienda Caraparicito to carry out an inspection, a step usually taken before the government seizes ranches and redistributes them among indigenous farmers.
Both sides differ as to what happened, but everyone agrees that some violence ensued. “I didn’t want this guy making any trouble, so I shut him up with a shot at one of his tires,” Mr. Larsen was quoted as saying last month by La Razón, Bolivia’s main daily newspaper.
Mr. Almaraz said he was kidnapped and held for a day on Mr. Larsen’s ranch. He responded to the incident by identifying the American rancher and his son Duston in a criminal complaint for “sedition, robbery and other crimes.”
Faced with a legal tussle over the standoff, Mr. Larsen now claims that he did not shoot at Mr. Almaraz’s vehicle. “The tires were punched out with sharpened screwdrivers,” Mr. Larsen said. “If I’d have been shooting at people that day, there would have been dead and injured.”
At stake is the 37,000-acre Caraparicito ranch, which Mr. Larsen bought in 1969 for $55,000, and other holdings of more than 104,000 acres, the government estimates. Mr. Larsen, who as a protective measure transferred ownership of almost all his land to his three sons, who are Bolivian citizens, declined to say how much land his family owned.
With his reserved demeanor, Mr. Larsen, a descendant of Danish immigrants to the Midwest, made it seem as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have moved to Bolivia in the 1960s, after he got bored working as a department store manager.
“A buddy of mine in the Peace Corps told me Bolivia was a good place to invest,” he said.
His quiet style contrasts with that of his oldest son, Duston, born in Bolivia, reared in Nebraska and educated at Montana State University. While Mr. Larsen prefers to lie low at the family home in Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, Duston, 29, has been in the spotlight since moving here in 2004.
Within months of his arrival, he won the Mr. Bolivia beauty pageant. He compensated for his American-accented Spanish at the finale by shouting, “Viva Bolivia!” before the stunned judges. Shortly afterward, he was cast as himself in a Bolivian comedy about cocaine smuggling entitled “Who Killed the White Llama?”
Now Duston Larsen is focused on guarding the family’s land, ahead of his marriage to Claudia Azaeda, a talk show host and former beauty pageant winner. Depicted in newspaper cartoons as a gun-slinging “Mr. Gringo Bolivia,” he basks in the showdown with Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian who as Bolivia’s first indigenous president has made land reform a top priority in his efforts to reverse centuries of subjugation of the indigenous majority.
“Evo Morales is a symbol of ignorance, having never even finished high school,” Duston Larsen said.
But now Mr. Larsen, 63, has suddenly been thrust into the public eye in Bolivia, finding himself in the middle of a battle between President Evo Morales, who plans to break up large rural estates, and the wealthy light-skinned elite in eastern Bolivia, which is chafing at Mr. Morales’s land reform project to the point of discussing secession.
After armed standoffs with land-reform officials at his ranch this year, Mr. Larsen made it clear which side he was on, emerging as a figure celebrated in rebellious Santa Cruz Province and loathed by Mr. Morales’s government, which wants to reduce ties to the United States.
“I just spent 40 years in this country working my land in an honest fashion,” said Mr. Larsen, who resembled Clint Eastwood with his weathered features and lanky frame. “They’re taking it away over my dead body.”
Mr. Larsen’s standoffs with the central government, replete with rifles, cowboys and Guaranà Indians, might sound like something out of the Old West. In fact, the battle playing out in the cattle pastures and gas-rich hills of his ranch, amid claims of forced servitude of Guaranà workers in the remote region, exemplifies Bolivia’s wild east.
Tensions here erupted one day in February when Alejandro Almaraz, the deputy land minister, arrived before dawn at the entrance to Mr. Larsen’s Hacienda Caraparicito to carry out an inspection, a step usually taken before the government seizes ranches and redistributes them among indigenous farmers.
Both sides differ as to what happened, but everyone agrees that some violence ensued. “I didn’t want this guy making any trouble, so I shut him up with a shot at one of his tires,” Mr. Larsen was quoted as saying last month by La Razón, Bolivia’s main daily newspaper.
Mr. Almaraz said he was kidnapped and held for a day on Mr. Larsen’s ranch. He responded to the incident by identifying the American rancher and his son Duston in a criminal complaint for “sedition, robbery and other crimes.”
Faced with a legal tussle over the standoff, Mr. Larsen now claims that he did not shoot at Mr. Almaraz’s vehicle. “The tires were punched out with sharpened screwdrivers,” Mr. Larsen said. “If I’d have been shooting at people that day, there would have been dead and injured.”
At stake is the 37,000-acre Caraparicito ranch, which Mr. Larsen bought in 1969 for $55,000, and other holdings of more than 104,000 acres, the government estimates. Mr. Larsen, who as a protective measure transferred ownership of almost all his land to his three sons, who are Bolivian citizens, declined to say how much land his family owned.
With his reserved demeanor, Mr. Larsen, a descendant of Danish immigrants to the Midwest, made it seem as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have moved to Bolivia in the 1960s, after he got bored working as a department store manager.
“A buddy of mine in the Peace Corps told me Bolivia was a good place to invest,” he said.
His quiet style contrasts with that of his oldest son, Duston, born in Bolivia, reared in Nebraska and educated at Montana State University. While Mr. Larsen prefers to lie low at the family home in Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, Duston, 29, has been in the spotlight since moving here in 2004.
Within months of his arrival, he won the Mr. Bolivia beauty pageant. He compensated for his American-accented Spanish at the finale by shouting, “Viva Bolivia!” before the stunned judges. Shortly afterward, he was cast as himself in a Bolivian comedy about cocaine smuggling entitled “Who Killed the White Llama?”
Now Duston Larsen is focused on guarding the family’s land, ahead of his marriage to Claudia Azaeda, a talk show host and former beauty pageant winner. Depicted in newspaper cartoons as a gun-slinging “Mr. Gringo Bolivia,” he basks in the showdown with Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian who as Bolivia’s first indigenous president has made land reform a top priority in his efforts to reverse centuries of subjugation of the indigenous majority.
“Evo Morales is a symbol of ignorance, having never even finished high school,” Duston Larsen said.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Native superdelegates support Obama - Rapid City Journal
Native Superdelegate Kalyn Free, one of the most influential women in Native American politics, announced on Monday her support for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
Her endorsement brings solid consensus in support of Obama among all Native superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention this August in Denver.
"I'm seeing a rebirth and reawakening in this country to political activism," Free, a DNC at-large member, said Monday. "We're seeing something in this country we haven't seen since the late '60s. We're seeing record numbers of people getting involved. The catalyst for all this, the common denominator, is Sen. Barack Obama. He has lit a fire in many hearts across the country."
The Choctaw woman from Oklahoma said she embraces Obama's commitment to bring Native people into the national political discussion, including a pledge to invite tribes to an annual White House summit and to include Natives in his administration.
Free is one of only three Natives nationwide who have risen to the top voting ranks as a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention.
Nebraska's Frank LaMere, also a DNC superdelegate, announced his support of Obama in February. Superdelegate Margarett Campbell, vice chairwoman of the Montana Democratic Party, pledged support to Obama in April, but recanted after party rules prevented her from backing any candidate until after the state's June 3 primary.
Free, the founder of INDN's List, is at the forefront of mobilizing Native voters across the country. She created the Indigenous Democratic Network in 2005 as a way to bring Native people into local, state and national political races as candidates and voters.
"Kalyn is an effective and compassionate leader in the Native American community, and I'm proud to have her support," Obama said in a prepared statement. "I admire the work she has done to build a grass-roots movement, elect Native Americans to public office and mobilize voters in tribal communities to become part of the political process.
"And as president, I will work with tribal leaders and Kalyn to ensure that they have a true partner in the White House. With Kalyn's support, we're going to bring about real change -- not just for the Native American community, but for all Americans."
LaMere, a Winnebago from Nebraska, and Free have both said the Democratic Party is offering two good candidates.
"The party rules and our democracy allow us as superdelegates to choose who we will vote for, and we have chosen Barack Obama," LaMere said Monday. "I'm pleased to have done that for Indian people across the country who see Obama as the New Deal that we desperately need."
Obama will usher in a new era for all people, Free said.
"In order to win the White House, we clearly need to reach across party lines. He can clearly do that. He can attract Republicans. He can attract independents. But more importantly, he is bringing people who otherwise wouldn't be involved in the political process, to get out there and vote, to get organized and to do the work at the grass-roots level, whether it's in the inner cities, rural America, or in our case, on Indian reservations."
"The Indian vote alone in this election can swing the election," Free said. "I say 2008 can clearly be the year of the Indian. Indian Country can decide who is sitting in the White House."
Her endorsement brings solid consensus in support of Obama among all Native superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention this August in Denver.
"I'm seeing a rebirth and reawakening in this country to political activism," Free, a DNC at-large member, said Monday. "We're seeing something in this country we haven't seen since the late '60s. We're seeing record numbers of people getting involved. The catalyst for all this, the common denominator, is Sen. Barack Obama. He has lit a fire in many hearts across the country."
The Choctaw woman from Oklahoma said she embraces Obama's commitment to bring Native people into the national political discussion, including a pledge to invite tribes to an annual White House summit and to include Natives in his administration.
Free is one of only three Natives nationwide who have risen to the top voting ranks as a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention.
Nebraska's Frank LaMere, also a DNC superdelegate, announced his support of Obama in February. Superdelegate Margarett Campbell, vice chairwoman of the Montana Democratic Party, pledged support to Obama in April, but recanted after party rules prevented her from backing any candidate until after the state's June 3 primary.
Free, the founder of INDN's List, is at the forefront of mobilizing Native voters across the country. She created the Indigenous Democratic Network in 2005 as a way to bring Native people into local, state and national political races as candidates and voters.
"Kalyn is an effective and compassionate leader in the Native American community, and I'm proud to have her support," Obama said in a prepared statement. "I admire the work she has done to build a grass-roots movement, elect Native Americans to public office and mobilize voters in tribal communities to become part of the political process.
"And as president, I will work with tribal leaders and Kalyn to ensure that they have a true partner in the White House. With Kalyn's support, we're going to bring about real change -- not just for the Native American community, but for all Americans."
LaMere, a Winnebago from Nebraska, and Free have both said the Democratic Party is offering two good candidates.
"The party rules and our democracy allow us as superdelegates to choose who we will vote for, and we have chosen Barack Obama," LaMere said Monday. "I'm pleased to have done that for Indian people across the country who see Obama as the New Deal that we desperately need."
Obama will usher in a new era for all people, Free said.
"In order to win the White House, we clearly need to reach across party lines. He can clearly do that. He can attract Republicans. He can attract independents. But more importantly, he is bringing people who otherwise wouldn't be involved in the political process, to get out there and vote, to get organized and to do the work at the grass-roots level, whether it's in the inner cities, rural America, or in our case, on Indian reservations."
"The Indian vote alone in this election can swing the election," Free said. "I say 2008 can clearly be the year of the Indian. Indian Country can decide who is sitting in the White House."
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
If They're Lost, Who Are We? - David Treuer
In the Washington Post, Sunday, April 6, 2008;
Follow link on title to read entire article.
LEECH LAKE, Minn. I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were supposed to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. And so it is with great discomfort that I am forced, in many ways, to live and write as a ghost in this haunted American house.
But perhaps I am not dead after all, despite the coldest wishes of a republic that has wished it so for centuries before I was born. We stubbornly continue to exist. There were just over 200,000 Native Americans alive at the turn of the 20th century; as of the last census, we number more than 2 million. If you discount immigration, we are probably the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. But even as our populations are growing, something else, I fear, is dying: our cultures.
Among my fellow Indians, this is not a popular thing to say. Most of us immediately sneer at warnings of cultural death, calling the very idea further proof that "The Man" is still trying to kill us -- this time with attitudes and arguments rather than discrimination and guns. Any Indian caught worrying that we might indeed vanish can expect to be grouped with the self-haters. While many things go into making a culture -- kinship, history, religion, place -- the disappearance of our languages suggests that our cultures, in total, may not be here for much longer.
For now, many Native American languages still exist, but most of them just barely, with only a handful of surviving speakers, all of them old. (On Jan. 21, Marie Smith Jones, the last living fluent speaker of Eyak, one of about 20 remaining Native Alaskan languages, died at the age of 89.) Linguists estimate that when Europeans first came to this continent, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken in North America. Today, there are only about 100. Within a century, if nothing is done, only a handful will remain, including my language, Ojibwe.
Another heartening exception is the Blackfoot language. The tribe dropped to a population of just over 1,000 in 1900, but they have grown again, and their language is on the upswing -- largely because of the efforts of the Piegan Institute, based on the Blackfoot reservation in northwest Montana, with a mission of promoting the tribe's language. Once moribund ceremonies are on the verge of flourishing again. But for many tribes -- who struggle to retain the remnants of their land, life ways, sovereignty and physical and mental health -- what is left can't really be called culture, at least not in the word's true sense.
Cultures change, of course. Sometimes they change slowly, in response to warming temperatures or new migration patterns. At other times, cultural changes are swift -- the result of colonialism or famine or migration or war. But at some point (and no one is too anxious to identify it exactly), a culture ceases to be a culture and becomes an ethnicity -- that is, it changes from a life system that develops its own terms into one that borrows, almost completely, someone else's.
My favorite example of this difference was the question posed to an Ojibwe man by the Indian agent whose job it was to put him down on the treaty rolls. "Who are you?" the Ojibwe was asked, through an interpreter. "Oshkinawe nindaw eta," he replied, puzzled ("Only a young man"). The Indian agent noted this, and the Ojibwe man's family still bears his Anglicized response, Skinaway. The man had no thoughts, really, about himself as an Indian or as an individual. The question -- who are you? -- didn't even make much sense to him because the terms of identity didn't make any sense to him; they were not his terms. Nowadays, unlike Skinaway, many of us have come to rely on ways of describing ourselves that aren't ours to begin with.
In the United States, we Natives now have sets of beliefs that we articulate to ourselves, mostly in English, about what being Indian means. We are from such and such a place; this and that happened to our ancestors; we eat such and such. Unlike the young man who was asked who he was, we think nowadays in English, and we forge our identities with those thoughts. (I am Indian because my parents are, because I live in a certain place, because I eat fry bread, because I go to powwows.)
Without our own languages, however, the markers we use to define ourselves can become arbitrary. One need only change the nouns to see the difference. Instead of "fry bread," insert "corned beef," and instead of harking back to smallpox-infested blankets, say "potato famine" -- and you arrive at a completely different ethnicity. American Indians are fast becoming ethnic Americans like the Irish and the Italians and the Scandinavians, to name a few.
The timing is strange: We find our cultures most imperiled just as some (though certainly not most) Indian communities are experiencing a kind of economic rebirth from casino money. Not only do we have some wealth -- the Seminoles of Florida own the Hard Rock Cafe franchise, and the Mashantucket Pequots own and operate probably the largest casino in the world -- we also have the basis of some political clout. In Great Plains states with dwindling populations such as North and South Dakota, Indians (who are not fleeing to the cities like rural non-Indians) have become a huge voting bloc that can sometimes determine the outcomes of state Senate and House races. Because Indians vote Democratic at a rate of about 90 percent, the power of Indian tribes is unsettling to many Republicans. In 2006, Republican Doug Lindgren ran for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives on what can only be called an "anti-treaty" platform that called into question the validity of northern Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation and its treaty rights. Lindgren hoped to use deep-seated anti-Indian sentiment to consolidate his base. He lost. But our growing wealth and power has in no way guaranteed our survival.
Curiously, it is in the field of "story" that the most ringing claims are made for the continued health and vibrancy of American Indian cultures and lives. But it's not clear why so many Indian critics and novelists suggest that stories, even great ones, in English by writers whose only language is English are somehow "Indian stories" that store the kernels of culture -- not unlike those fabulous caves in the Southwest where explorers found seeds thousands of years old that grew when planted. One Indian critic recently rather self-servingly suggested that "English is an Indian language." He's wrong. English is not a Native American language; for most of us, it is our only language -- through no fault of our own, owing to a federal policy aimed at wiping out Native American languages. Cultural eradication is a process, and it was precisely through the attempt to stamp out Native American languages that the U.S. government tried to stamp out Native American cultures. To claim that English is a Native language is to continue that process.
More often than not, English was forced on us, not chosen by us. Naturally, one can (and millions do) construct a cultural identity out of whatever is at hand, and no Indian should feel bad (though many of us do) about speaking English. But I don't kid myself that my writing reflects my culture -- or can save it. My novels are exercises in art, not cultural revitalization or anthropology. And if novels published by large publishing conglomerates, marketed to a general readership that doesn't know the first thing about our lives, written in English by university-educated writers who by and large live far away from their tribal communities, don't speak their tribal languages and probably earn two or three times as much as the rest of their people are our best defense against the threat of cultural death, we are in worse shape than I thought.
Follow link on title to read entire article.
LEECH LAKE, Minn. I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were supposed to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. And so it is with great discomfort that I am forced, in many ways, to live and write as a ghost in this haunted American house.
But perhaps I am not dead after all, despite the coldest wishes of a republic that has wished it so for centuries before I was born. We stubbornly continue to exist. There were just over 200,000 Native Americans alive at the turn of the 20th century; as of the last census, we number more than 2 million. If you discount immigration, we are probably the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. But even as our populations are growing, something else, I fear, is dying: our cultures.
Among my fellow Indians, this is not a popular thing to say. Most of us immediately sneer at warnings of cultural death, calling the very idea further proof that "The Man" is still trying to kill us -- this time with attitudes and arguments rather than discrimination and guns. Any Indian caught worrying that we might indeed vanish can expect to be grouped with the self-haters. While many things go into making a culture -- kinship, history, religion, place -- the disappearance of our languages suggests that our cultures, in total, may not be here for much longer.
For now, many Native American languages still exist, but most of them just barely, with only a handful of surviving speakers, all of them old. (On Jan. 21, Marie Smith Jones, the last living fluent speaker of Eyak, one of about 20 remaining Native Alaskan languages, died at the age of 89.) Linguists estimate that when Europeans first came to this continent, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken in North America. Today, there are only about 100. Within a century, if nothing is done, only a handful will remain, including my language, Ojibwe.
Another heartening exception is the Blackfoot language. The tribe dropped to a population of just over 1,000 in 1900, but they have grown again, and their language is on the upswing -- largely because of the efforts of the Piegan Institute, based on the Blackfoot reservation in northwest Montana, with a mission of promoting the tribe's language. Once moribund ceremonies are on the verge of flourishing again. But for many tribes -- who struggle to retain the remnants of their land, life ways, sovereignty and physical and mental health -- what is left can't really be called culture, at least not in the word's true sense.
Cultures change, of course. Sometimes they change slowly, in response to warming temperatures or new migration patterns. At other times, cultural changes are swift -- the result of colonialism or famine or migration or war. But at some point (and no one is too anxious to identify it exactly), a culture ceases to be a culture and becomes an ethnicity -- that is, it changes from a life system that develops its own terms into one that borrows, almost completely, someone else's.
My favorite example of this difference was the question posed to an Ojibwe man by the Indian agent whose job it was to put him down on the treaty rolls. "Who are you?" the Ojibwe was asked, through an interpreter. "Oshkinawe nindaw eta," he replied, puzzled ("Only a young man"). The Indian agent noted this, and the Ojibwe man's family still bears his Anglicized response, Skinaway. The man had no thoughts, really, about himself as an Indian or as an individual. The question -- who are you? -- didn't even make much sense to him because the terms of identity didn't make any sense to him; they were not his terms. Nowadays, unlike Skinaway, many of us have come to rely on ways of describing ourselves that aren't ours to begin with.
In the United States, we Natives now have sets of beliefs that we articulate to ourselves, mostly in English, about what being Indian means. We are from such and such a place; this and that happened to our ancestors; we eat such and such. Unlike the young man who was asked who he was, we think nowadays in English, and we forge our identities with those thoughts. (I am Indian because my parents are, because I live in a certain place, because I eat fry bread, because I go to powwows.)
Without our own languages, however, the markers we use to define ourselves can become arbitrary. One need only change the nouns to see the difference. Instead of "fry bread," insert "corned beef," and instead of harking back to smallpox-infested blankets, say "potato famine" -- and you arrive at a completely different ethnicity. American Indians are fast becoming ethnic Americans like the Irish and the Italians and the Scandinavians, to name a few.
The timing is strange: We find our cultures most imperiled just as some (though certainly not most) Indian communities are experiencing a kind of economic rebirth from casino money. Not only do we have some wealth -- the Seminoles of Florida own the Hard Rock Cafe franchise, and the Mashantucket Pequots own and operate probably the largest casino in the world -- we also have the basis of some political clout. In Great Plains states with dwindling populations such as North and South Dakota, Indians (who are not fleeing to the cities like rural non-Indians) have become a huge voting bloc that can sometimes determine the outcomes of state Senate and House races. Because Indians vote Democratic at a rate of about 90 percent, the power of Indian tribes is unsettling to many Republicans. In 2006, Republican Doug Lindgren ran for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives on what can only be called an "anti-treaty" platform that called into question the validity of northern Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation and its treaty rights. Lindgren hoped to use deep-seated anti-Indian sentiment to consolidate his base. He lost. But our growing wealth and power has in no way guaranteed our survival.
Curiously, it is in the field of "story" that the most ringing claims are made for the continued health and vibrancy of American Indian cultures and lives. But it's not clear why so many Indian critics and novelists suggest that stories, even great ones, in English by writers whose only language is English are somehow "Indian stories" that store the kernels of culture -- not unlike those fabulous caves in the Southwest where explorers found seeds thousands of years old that grew when planted. One Indian critic recently rather self-servingly suggested that "English is an Indian language." He's wrong. English is not a Native American language; for most of us, it is our only language -- through no fault of our own, owing to a federal policy aimed at wiping out Native American languages. Cultural eradication is a process, and it was precisely through the attempt to stamp out Native American languages that the U.S. government tried to stamp out Native American cultures. To claim that English is a Native language is to continue that process.
More often than not, English was forced on us, not chosen by us. Naturally, one can (and millions do) construct a cultural identity out of whatever is at hand, and no Indian should feel bad (though many of us do) about speaking English. But I don't kid myself that my writing reflects my culture -- or can save it. My novels are exercises in art, not cultural revitalization or anthropology. And if novels published by large publishing conglomerates, marketed to a general readership that doesn't know the first thing about our lives, written in English by university-educated writers who by and large live far away from their tribal communities, don't speak their tribal languages and probably earn two or three times as much as the rest of their people are our best defense against the threat of cultural death, we are in worse shape than I thought.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Why Do Writers Pretend To Be Indians?
By David Treuer
In 1930, shortly after the studio release of his movie The Silent Enemy, Buffalo Child Long Lance's Indian identity began to crumble. He was a celebrity by that time, having boxed Dempsey and dated movie stars, but he was not, it turned out, a full-blooded Blackfeet Indian who had been raised on the plains, as he had claimed. He had not hunted buffalo from horseback as the prairie winds blew through his hair. And his name was not actually Buffalo Child Long Lance. His real name was Sylvester Long. He was from Winston-Salem, N.C. He was African-American. And his father was not a chief but, rather, a janitor.
Margaret B. Jones, the author of Love and Consequences, is hardly the first person to have invented an Indian self and a past. Her memoir tells of her upbringing as a half-white, half-Indian foster child by a black family in South Central L.A. In fact, Jones' real name is Margaret Seltzer, she did not grow up in South Central, she's never been a foster child, and she's no more a Native American than Sylvester Long was.
By inventing a Native American heritage, Seltzer joins a long and distinguished list of fake Indians. In addition to Buffalo Child Long Lance, her tribe consists of Nasdijj (who fabricated a Native identity and passed it off in not one but three books: Geronimo's Bones, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping, and The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams), Forrest Carter (whose fake Cherokee boyhood is described in The Education of Little Tree), and Grey Owl (the persona of the Englishman Archibald Belaney, who wrote and toured on the strength of his Indian-inspired conservationism between the World Wars).
It's easy enough to imagine what motivates literary fakers—their inventions are a way to win attention and acclaim for work that would otherwise be dismissed as pedestrian. But why pretend to be an Indian? What is so appealing about stripping off one's own identity and donning a reddish one?
It's easy to get away with it, is one reason. Indians can, and do, look like anyone. And anyone can look like an Indian. After 500 years of intermarriage, Native American racial identities (as opposed to cultural identities) comprise a wide range. Among my three siblings, one of us looks like Opie Taylor, one like Tonto, and one is a dead ringer for the Karate Kid. (I'm Opie. Opie is my spirit guide.) Then there's my sister, who looks like herself. It's pretty hard to claim you're African-American or Chinese if you don't look black or Asian.
But looks are only part of it. Native Americans make up one half of 1 percent of the U.S. population. Most Americans will go their whole lives without meeting one of us. The result: What non-Indians know about Indians does not come from the kinds of daily interactions that typically shape their understandings of people different from them. We Native Americans are dwarfed by the ideas that abound about us, and this imbalance lends itself to invention. After all, who are you to say someone is or is not a thing they say they are if you've never had any experience of that thing?
But more important—more important than how we look or how invisible we are—the answer to why people fake being Indian is linked to how they fake it. Hemingway once wrote what he called the shortest story ever written: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." But I can think of one shorter by five words: "Indian." Wrapped up in that one word is a host of associations, images, and ideas, but primary among them is tragedy. It is no accident that all the fake books written by fake Indians (and most of the "real" books written by "real" Indians) are rife with tragedy.
Nabokov wrote that there are three kinds of stories that are utterly taboo as far as American publishers are concerned. In addition to the subject of Lolita, "the other two are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106." I would add to that list one more: relatively happy Indians going about living relatively happy lives. Sometimes people ask what I am and I say, "Native American." And they reply: "I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
Tragedy is a shortcut that sells, and the particular tragedy of being an Indian has an amazing ability to make readers lose their capacities to discern good writing from bad, interesting ideas from vapid ones. In Little Tree, for instance, the most commonplace things are elevated to the level of poetry by virtue of their perceived degree of Indian-ness: "They gave themselves to nature," he writes, "not trying to subdue it, or pervert it, but to live with it. And so they loved the thought, and loving it grew to be it, so that they could not think as the white man." Nasdijj and Carter truck in homilies, Jones in homies—as in, "I hated that they had taken my big homie and even more that they had taken my sense of security"—but the result is the same: awful, impossible writing. Once you remove the author's Indian identity, the bad writing reveals itself.
Sadly, until we break the habit of reading Indian lives as necessarily "Indian tragedies"—and see the shallow types and terrible prose and awkward, tragic poses for what they are—there will be more Indian fakes. The Education of Little Tree is still published by the University of New Mexico Press, the book's author still listed as Forrest Carter. Riverhead, at least, has pulled all the copies of Jones' fake. But they, and others, could do more. They could try to make sure this doesn't happen again.
It wouldn't be that difficult. If a publisher has an author who claims to be Native American, they could ask for documentation. And let this be a word of warning to publishers, agents, and editors: If the author does not say what tribe he or she is from or fails to claim an Indian community as home (either as a place of descent or youth or family), then something is wrong.
Seltzer did not commit a victimless crime. There are victims, and they are not Faye Bender, Seltzer's agent; or Sara McGrath, her editor at Riverhead; or Michiko Kakutani, who reviewed the book for the New York Times. They were taken advantage of, to be sure. But Bender will go on representing writers. McGrath will continue to find and publish wonderful books. Kakutani will continue to be a great reviewer. The real victims are Indian citizens and writers. People who have for so long been denied the opportunity to express themselves. There are many Indian writers with stories to tell that are ignored because they do not fit the preconceived notion of tragedy and cheap melodrama that make books like Love and Consequences so appealing. These writers, if they are published at all, are usually not profiled in the New York Times. As for Indian citizens, the more than 2 million of us living in the U.S. who are not fakes—our lives (especially if they are happy lives) will continue to go on unseen. This is the greater tragedy, I think, than the false ones outlined in Jones' false memoir.
In 1930, shortly after the studio release of his movie The Silent Enemy, Buffalo Child Long Lance's Indian identity began to crumble. He was a celebrity by that time, having boxed Dempsey and dated movie stars, but he was not, it turned out, a full-blooded Blackfeet Indian who had been raised on the plains, as he had claimed. He had not hunted buffalo from horseback as the prairie winds blew through his hair. And his name was not actually Buffalo Child Long Lance. His real name was Sylvester Long. He was from Winston-Salem, N.C. He was African-American. And his father was not a chief but, rather, a janitor.
Margaret B. Jones, the author of Love and Consequences, is hardly the first person to have invented an Indian self and a past. Her memoir tells of her upbringing as a half-white, half-Indian foster child by a black family in South Central L.A. In fact, Jones' real name is Margaret Seltzer, she did not grow up in South Central, she's never been a foster child, and she's no more a Native American than Sylvester Long was.
By inventing a Native American heritage, Seltzer joins a long and distinguished list of fake Indians. In addition to Buffalo Child Long Lance, her tribe consists of Nasdijj (who fabricated a Native identity and passed it off in not one but three books: Geronimo's Bones, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping, and The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams), Forrest Carter (whose fake Cherokee boyhood is described in The Education of Little Tree), and Grey Owl (the persona of the Englishman Archibald Belaney, who wrote and toured on the strength of his Indian-inspired conservationism between the World Wars).
It's easy enough to imagine what motivates literary fakers—their inventions are a way to win attention and acclaim for work that would otherwise be dismissed as pedestrian. But why pretend to be an Indian? What is so appealing about stripping off one's own identity and donning a reddish one?
It's easy to get away with it, is one reason. Indians can, and do, look like anyone. And anyone can look like an Indian. After 500 years of intermarriage, Native American racial identities (as opposed to cultural identities) comprise a wide range. Among my three siblings, one of us looks like Opie Taylor, one like Tonto, and one is a dead ringer for the Karate Kid. (I'm Opie. Opie is my spirit guide.) Then there's my sister, who looks like herself. It's pretty hard to claim you're African-American or Chinese if you don't look black or Asian.
But looks are only part of it. Native Americans make up one half of 1 percent of the U.S. population. Most Americans will go their whole lives without meeting one of us. The result: What non-Indians know about Indians does not come from the kinds of daily interactions that typically shape their understandings of people different from them. We Native Americans are dwarfed by the ideas that abound about us, and this imbalance lends itself to invention. After all, who are you to say someone is or is not a thing they say they are if you've never had any experience of that thing?
But more important—more important than how we look or how invisible we are—the answer to why people fake being Indian is linked to how they fake it. Hemingway once wrote what he called the shortest story ever written: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." But I can think of one shorter by five words: "Indian." Wrapped up in that one word is a host of associations, images, and ideas, but primary among them is tragedy. It is no accident that all the fake books written by fake Indians (and most of the "real" books written by "real" Indians) are rife with tragedy.
Nabokov wrote that there are three kinds of stories that are utterly taboo as far as American publishers are concerned. In addition to the subject of Lolita, "the other two are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106." I would add to that list one more: relatively happy Indians going about living relatively happy lives. Sometimes people ask what I am and I say, "Native American." And they reply: "I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
Tragedy is a shortcut that sells, and the particular tragedy of being an Indian has an amazing ability to make readers lose their capacities to discern good writing from bad, interesting ideas from vapid ones. In Little Tree, for instance, the most commonplace things are elevated to the level of poetry by virtue of their perceived degree of Indian-ness: "They gave themselves to nature," he writes, "not trying to subdue it, or pervert it, but to live with it. And so they loved the thought, and loving it grew to be it, so that they could not think as the white man." Nasdijj and Carter truck in homilies, Jones in homies—as in, "I hated that they had taken my big homie and even more that they had taken my sense of security"—but the result is the same: awful, impossible writing. Once you remove the author's Indian identity, the bad writing reveals itself.
Sadly, until we break the habit of reading Indian lives as necessarily "Indian tragedies"—and see the shallow types and terrible prose and awkward, tragic poses for what they are—there will be more Indian fakes. The Education of Little Tree is still published by the University of New Mexico Press, the book's author still listed as Forrest Carter. Riverhead, at least, has pulled all the copies of Jones' fake. But they, and others, could do more. They could try to make sure this doesn't happen again.
It wouldn't be that difficult. If a publisher has an author who claims to be Native American, they could ask for documentation. And let this be a word of warning to publishers, agents, and editors: If the author does not say what tribe he or she is from or fails to claim an Indian community as home (either as a place of descent or youth or family), then something is wrong.
Seltzer did not commit a victimless crime. There are victims, and they are not Faye Bender, Seltzer's agent; or Sara McGrath, her editor at Riverhead; or Michiko Kakutani, who reviewed the book for the New York Times. They were taken advantage of, to be sure. But Bender will go on representing writers. McGrath will continue to find and publish wonderful books. Kakutani will continue to be a great reviewer. The real victims are Indian citizens and writers. People who have for so long been denied the opportunity to express themselves. There are many Indian writers with stories to tell that are ignored because they do not fit the preconceived notion of tragedy and cheap melodrama that make books like Love and Consequences so appealing. These writers, if they are published at all, are usually not profiled in the New York Times. As for Indian citizens, the more than 2 million of us living in the U.S. who are not fakes—our lives (especially if they are happy lives) will continue to go on unseen. This is the greater tragedy, I think, than the false ones outlined in Jones' false memoir.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Native American Times Endorses Barak Obama
US Senator Barack Obama is the choice of the Native American Times to become the next president of the United States. This choice made before the all important super Tuesday election to get as many Native Americans to the polls as possible to push Obama to victory. This is not an anti-Hillary vote but a decision based on what is best for Native Americans.
Alaska will be caucusing; Colorado with the Ute Nation and large Native urban populations will have a primary; the Nez Perce will be voting in the all Democratic caucuses; The Kickapoo, and Prairie Band Potawatomi will be voting in the Kansas Caucuses; The Dakota and Ojibwa people will be voting in Minnesota’s Primaries; Republican Crows, Northern Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Cree and others will be voting in Montana’s caucuses; the Pueblos, Navajos, and Apaches will be voting in New Mexico Primaries; the Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and other tribes will voting in New York’s primaries; In North Dakota the three Affiliated tribes, Devil’s Lake Sioux, Standing Rock Sioux and Turtle Mountain Chippewa will be voting in their caucuses; Oklahoma with their over 300,000 Indians and over 30 federally recognized tribes will be heading to the polls for their primary; in Utah the Navajo, Ute’s, Shoshone, Paiutes and Goshute tribes will vote in their primaries. Over 1 million Indians will be voting on Super Tuesday and they can have a deciding say in who is the next president of the United States. And one man seems to know and care about that fact.
Obama has started to aggressively reach out to Native Americans in word and deed. In his words he has put together a policy which truly addresses Native problems. In his deeds he has actually gone to Indian reservations to seek our votes. He is also the co-sponsor of the all important Indian Health Care Improvement Act. And he continues to seek the Native vote.
As he explains it, he says he understands to be treated differently and unfairly. Part of the change he proposes is one of justice and equality. He is also proposing sweeping changes in health care for Native Americans that include mental health. While the economy is the driving issue on the national stage its ‘Health Stupid,’ in Indian Country. People are dying too soon, babies are not making it to adulthood, and diabetes is robbing our way of life in ways never imagined. It’s hard to worry about the paycheck when you are too sick to go anyway.
According to his advisors on Indian issues, he will address the nagging problem of criminal jurisdiction on Indian land. From runaway meth use to domestic violence to murder the problems on Indian land should be the providence of Indian governments where they are able. It is a significant distinction because it is clear some in the federal government doesn’t believe Indian governments are legitimate or evolved enough to handle a more expansive role in criminal jurisdiction. It is part of the change this campaign has represented.
Sen. Hillary Clinton is a force of nature and has been a voice for justice in her deliberations. She has become a polarizing figure in national politics and the republican party is licking its chops to get a shot at her. She also represents the past. And while I believe she is worthy of National office she is not the best choice.
Perhaps more than anything, Obama inspires us to want and dream of more. Indian Country has been waiting for someone like Barack for a long time. Now is the time for positive change and now is the time to vote Barack Obama on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 for President of the United States. Native Americans can make history next week if we all pull together and get behind the man who actually wants our vote.
Alaska will be caucusing; Colorado with the Ute Nation and large Native urban populations will have a primary; the Nez Perce will be voting in the all Democratic caucuses; The Kickapoo, and Prairie Band Potawatomi will be voting in the Kansas Caucuses; The Dakota and Ojibwa people will be voting in Minnesota’s Primaries; Republican Crows, Northern Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Cree and others will be voting in Montana’s caucuses; the Pueblos, Navajos, and Apaches will be voting in New Mexico Primaries; the Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and other tribes will voting in New York’s primaries; In North Dakota the three Affiliated tribes, Devil’s Lake Sioux, Standing Rock Sioux and Turtle Mountain Chippewa will be voting in their caucuses; Oklahoma with their over 300,000 Indians and over 30 federally recognized tribes will be heading to the polls for their primary; in Utah the Navajo, Ute’s, Shoshone, Paiutes and Goshute tribes will vote in their primaries. Over 1 million Indians will be voting on Super Tuesday and they can have a deciding say in who is the next president of the United States. And one man seems to know and care about that fact.
Obama has started to aggressively reach out to Native Americans in word and deed. In his words he has put together a policy which truly addresses Native problems. In his deeds he has actually gone to Indian reservations to seek our votes. He is also the co-sponsor of the all important Indian Health Care Improvement Act. And he continues to seek the Native vote.
As he explains it, he says he understands to be treated differently and unfairly. Part of the change he proposes is one of justice and equality. He is also proposing sweeping changes in health care for Native Americans that include mental health. While the economy is the driving issue on the national stage its ‘Health Stupid,’ in Indian Country. People are dying too soon, babies are not making it to adulthood, and diabetes is robbing our way of life in ways never imagined. It’s hard to worry about the paycheck when you are too sick to go anyway.
According to his advisors on Indian issues, he will address the nagging problem of criminal jurisdiction on Indian land. From runaway meth use to domestic violence to murder the problems on Indian land should be the providence of Indian governments where they are able. It is a significant distinction because it is clear some in the federal government doesn’t believe Indian governments are legitimate or evolved enough to handle a more expansive role in criminal jurisdiction. It is part of the change this campaign has represented.
Sen. Hillary Clinton is a force of nature and has been a voice for justice in her deliberations. She has become a polarizing figure in national politics and the republican party is licking its chops to get a shot at her. She also represents the past. And while I believe she is worthy of National office she is not the best choice.
Perhaps more than anything, Obama inspires us to want and dream of more. Indian Country has been waiting for someone like Barack for a long time. Now is the time for positive change and now is the time to vote Barack Obama on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 for President of the United States. Native Americans can make history next week if we all pull together and get behind the man who actually wants our vote.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Editorial - The Verdict: It’s Broken - New York Times
The case of the mismanaged American Indian trust funds is Dickensian both in length — now 11 years before the courts — and inequity. On Wednesday, Judge James Robertson of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Interior Department had “unreasonably delayed” its accounting for billions of dollars owed to American Indian landholders and that the agency “cannot remedy the breach.”
There is, of course, no full remedy — not for the historical wrongs or the cynical and shabby accounting or the years of frustration. And as Judge Robertson and others before him have noted, a meticulously accurate tally of what the American Indians are owed is almost certainly impossible. Yet that does not mean that a reasonable compromise cannot be reached or that the government should abandon efforts to find one. A study group set up by Gale Norton, the former interior secretary, in early 2001 was scrapped after less than two years. Simple justice requires a more sustained effort.
In 1996, Elouise Cobell, a Blackfoot Indian, filed a lawsuit claiming that the government had mismanaged billions of dollars in oil, timber and other royalties held in trust for some half-million Indians. The Indians were given land allotments between the end of the 19th century and 1934, a time when it was government policy to try to do away with tribal entities and reservations. The government held title to the land, and these accounts were meant to collect and disburse the revenues.
The simple question is this: can the government account for the money it held in trust? Judge Robertson’s judgment: “It is now clear that completion of the required accounting is an impossible task.” This, as he points out, is an “irreparable breach of fiduciary duty,” a breach that, in our opinion, is all the more galling because these individual trust accounts have come over time to look like a form of paternalistic fraud.
Even with meticulous oversight, monitoring them accurately would have been a tough assignment. But the government’s failure is not simply sloppy bookkeeping. It is willful neglect, including the active destruction of records and the failure to comply with court orders.
As Judge Robertson notes, the fact that the government cannot provide a full accounting for what may be billions of dollars “does not mean that a just resolution is hopeless.” He has scheduled a new hearing to try and find a remedy. We hope it will indeed mark the beginning of the end of this case and the beginning of real equity for the holders of these accounts.
There is, of course, no full remedy — not for the historical wrongs or the cynical and shabby accounting or the years of frustration. And as Judge Robertson and others before him have noted, a meticulously accurate tally of what the American Indians are owed is almost certainly impossible. Yet that does not mean that a reasonable compromise cannot be reached or that the government should abandon efforts to find one. A study group set up by Gale Norton, the former interior secretary, in early 2001 was scrapped after less than two years. Simple justice requires a more sustained effort.
In 1996, Elouise Cobell, a Blackfoot Indian, filed a lawsuit claiming that the government had mismanaged billions of dollars in oil, timber and other royalties held in trust for some half-million Indians. The Indians were given land allotments between the end of the 19th century and 1934, a time when it was government policy to try to do away with tribal entities and reservations. The government held title to the land, and these accounts were meant to collect and disburse the revenues.
The simple question is this: can the government account for the money it held in trust? Judge Robertson’s judgment: “It is now clear that completion of the required accounting is an impossible task.” This, as he points out, is an “irreparable breach of fiduciary duty,” a breach that, in our opinion, is all the more galling because these individual trust accounts have come over time to look like a form of paternalistic fraud.
Even with meticulous oversight, monitoring them accurately would have been a tough assignment. But the government’s failure is not simply sloppy bookkeeping. It is willful neglect, including the active destruction of records and the failure to comply with court orders.
As Judge Robertson notes, the fact that the government cannot provide a full accounting for what may be billions of dollars “does not mean that a just resolution is hopeless.” He has scheduled a new hearing to try and find a remedy. We hope it will indeed mark the beginning of the end of this case and the beginning of real equity for the holders of these accounts.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Australia to Apologize to Aborigines - New York Times
By TIM JOHNSTON
Published: January 31, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia — The new Australian government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will apologize for past mistreatment of the country’s Aboriginal minority when Parliament convenes next month, addressing an issue that has blighted race relations in Australia for years.
In a measure of the importance Mr. Rudd attaches to the issue, the apology will be the first item of business for the new government when Parliament first convenes on Feb. 13, Jenny Macklin, the federal minister for indigenous affairs, said Wednesday.
Ms. Macklin said she had consulted widely with Aboriginal leaders, but it was still not clear what form the apology would take. However, she said the government would not bow to longstanding demands for a fund to compensate those damaged by the policies of past governments.
The history of relations between Australia’s Aboriginal population and the broader population is one of brutality and neglect. Tens of thousands of Aboriginals died from disease, warfare and dispossession in the years after European settlement, and it was not until 1962 that they were able to vote in national elections.
But the most lasting damage was done by the policy of removing Aboriginal children and placing them either with white families or in state institutions as part of a drive to assimilate them with the white population.
A comprehensive 1997 report estimates that between one in three and one in 10 Aboriginal children, the so-called stolen generations, were taken from their homes and families in the century until the policy was formally abandoned in 1969.
“A national apology to the stolen generations and their families is a first, necessary step to move forward from the past,” Ms. Macklin said.
“The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people,” she said.
Marcia Langton, professor of Australian indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, said the apology was a good first step, but she added that it was hard to see where the government’s program would go from there.
“There can’t be any next step without a compensation fund,” Ms. Langton, who is also one of Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal advocates, said Wednesday.
She said she suspected that the apology was aimed more at pleasing the core voter base of Mr. Rudd’s Labor Party than Aboriginal people themselves.
“It’s difficult not to be cynical,” said Ms. Langton.
The previous government of Prime Minister John Howard, which was convincingly beaten in elections last November, had refused to apologize to the Aboriginal community for past wrongs.
“There are millions of Australians who will never entertain an apology because they don’t believe that there is anything to apologize for,” Mr. Howard told a local radio station last year.
“They are sorry for past mistreatment but that is different from assuming responsibility for it,” he said.
Many of Mr. Howard’s critics believed that he was unwilling to apologize because it would open the flood gates to potentially massive claims for compensation.
Ms. Langton estimated that some 13,000 members of the stolen generations still survive.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up some 2.5 percent of the overall population, but many eke out an existence on the margins of society.
Life expectancy for Aboriginal people is 17 years lower than the rest of the country; they are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated; three times more likely to be unemployed; and twice as likely to be victims of violence or threatened violence.
Successive governments have been wary of intervening in Aboriginal affairs, and many blame policies implemented in the 1970s as part of a drive to empower indigenous Australians for further marginalizing them.
The permit system, which bars outsiders from visiting Aboriginal communities without the permission of community leaders, has come in for particular criticism. It was designed to preserve indigenous culture, but critics say it has created ghettos and is partially responsible for an environment in many communities where alcoholism, violence and child abuse have become endemic.
A report issued by the government of the Northern Territory last year uncovered widespread evidence of child neglect and sexual abuse. The report triggered a wide-ranging and controversial intervention by the Howard government in the territory, which included removing the permit system from the Northern Territory and mandating that half of welfare payments could only be spent on food.
The Rudd government has committed itself to reviewing the intervention, but it has yet to come up with a comprehensive plan. Many indigenous Australians are distrustful of government interference in their lives, and although the plan for an apology has been broadly welcomed as an important symbolic step, designing acceptable practical measures will be more difficult.
Published: January 31, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia — The new Australian government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will apologize for past mistreatment of the country’s Aboriginal minority when Parliament convenes next month, addressing an issue that has blighted race relations in Australia for years.
In a measure of the importance Mr. Rudd attaches to the issue, the apology will be the first item of business for the new government when Parliament first convenes on Feb. 13, Jenny Macklin, the federal minister for indigenous affairs, said Wednesday.
Ms. Macklin said she had consulted widely with Aboriginal leaders, but it was still not clear what form the apology would take. However, she said the government would not bow to longstanding demands for a fund to compensate those damaged by the policies of past governments.
The history of relations between Australia’s Aboriginal population and the broader population is one of brutality and neglect. Tens of thousands of Aboriginals died from disease, warfare and dispossession in the years after European settlement, and it was not until 1962 that they were able to vote in national elections.
But the most lasting damage was done by the policy of removing Aboriginal children and placing them either with white families or in state institutions as part of a drive to assimilate them with the white population.
A comprehensive 1997 report estimates that between one in three and one in 10 Aboriginal children, the so-called stolen generations, were taken from their homes and families in the century until the policy was formally abandoned in 1969.
“A national apology to the stolen generations and their families is a first, necessary step to move forward from the past,” Ms. Macklin said.
“The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people,” she said.
Marcia Langton, professor of Australian indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, said the apology was a good first step, but she added that it was hard to see where the government’s program would go from there.
“There can’t be any next step without a compensation fund,” Ms. Langton, who is also one of Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal advocates, said Wednesday.
She said she suspected that the apology was aimed more at pleasing the core voter base of Mr. Rudd’s Labor Party than Aboriginal people themselves.
“It’s difficult not to be cynical,” said Ms. Langton.
The previous government of Prime Minister John Howard, which was convincingly beaten in elections last November, had refused to apologize to the Aboriginal community for past wrongs.
“There are millions of Australians who will never entertain an apology because they don’t believe that there is anything to apologize for,” Mr. Howard told a local radio station last year.
“They are sorry for past mistreatment but that is different from assuming responsibility for it,” he said.
Many of Mr. Howard’s critics believed that he was unwilling to apologize because it would open the flood gates to potentially massive claims for compensation.
Ms. Langton estimated that some 13,000 members of the stolen generations still survive.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up some 2.5 percent of the overall population, but many eke out an existence on the margins of society.
Life expectancy for Aboriginal people is 17 years lower than the rest of the country; they are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated; three times more likely to be unemployed; and twice as likely to be victims of violence or threatened violence.
Successive governments have been wary of intervening in Aboriginal affairs, and many blame policies implemented in the 1970s as part of a drive to empower indigenous Australians for further marginalizing them.
The permit system, which bars outsiders from visiting Aboriginal communities without the permission of community leaders, has come in for particular criticism. It was designed to preserve indigenous culture, but critics say it has created ghettos and is partially responsible for an environment in many communities where alcoholism, violence and child abuse have become endemic.
A report issued by the government of the Northern Territory last year uncovered widespread evidence of child neglect and sexual abuse. The report triggered a wide-ranging and controversial intervention by the Howard government in the territory, which included removing the permit system from the Northern Territory and mandating that half of welfare payments could only be spent on food.
The Rudd government has committed itself to reviewing the intervention, but it has yet to come up with a comprehensive plan. Many indigenous Australians are distrustful of government interference in their lives, and although the plan for an apology has been broadly welcomed as an important symbolic step, designing acceptable practical measures will be more difficult.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Kevin Gover - National Museum of the American Indian - Smithsonian
WASHINGTON — It was not exactly a welcome mat that greeted the new museum director. When Kevin Gover left his quiet life teaching American Indian law among the cactuses of Arizona to lead the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian here, he arrived during a storm of publicity about spending by his predecessor, W. Richard West Jr.
But in his first in-depth interview since settling into his new office, Mr. Gover, 52, seemed unconcerned about the scrutiny he might now encounter about his own spending habits, or about the long-term effects on the museum.
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” he said last week. “I took a few poundings in the past.”
Spending by Mr. West, the institution’s founding director, who retired last month after 17 years, has provoked two senators to call for independent investigations. Mr. West spent more than $250,000 on travel and hotels during his final four years in office and paid $48,500 to a New York artist to paint his museum portrait.
“I felt bad for Rick,” said Mr. Gover, who practiced in two of the same law firms as Mr. West. “I felt that it was unfair.”
The Smithsonian said in December that all of Mr. West’s travel had been approved and that he had raised $51 million in that period. In a Jan. 11 letter to Indian Country Today, a weekly newspaper, Mr. West disputed reports first published in The Washington Post, calling them mischaracterizations of travel that was within the scope of his duties. "I traveled as required by the job I had to do," he wrote.
Referring to Mr. West’s trips in Europe and Asia, Mr. Gover said: “I understand the visceral reaction some people have to what looks like living the life of Riley. But the fact is, the museum has to be present in those places. This is the museum world. This is how it’s done.”
But Mr. Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe of Oklahoma, described himself as a conservative person and less of a public figure. He said that he expected to conduct a more low-key operation at the museum.
“We took a little hit on our image,” he conceded. “I worry about that in connection with the tribes. But in a very few months I think very few people will remember this.”
Most recently a professor of Indian law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, Mr. Gover is no stranger to the rough and tumble of this political town. He spent three years as the assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the federal Interior Department, overseeing the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
That agency is responsible for the federal government’s relations with Indian tribes, and Mr. Gover said he was regularly pummeled over issues like tribal recognition, land trusts and casino ownership. Though at times constrained by a lack of funds or authority, he said, more often he needed to negotiate between two reasonable but opposing views.
“This being Washington, disappointment often turns into cynicism and accusations about the motives of the decision maker,” he said in a follow-up e-mail message.
Mr. Gover — his Pawnee name is Shield Chief — remains connected to his background, which includes Comanche ancestors. In anticipation of a nephew’s return from fighting in Afghanistan, for example, he is helping his family determine “how they welcome back a warrior,” he said.
“There is a lot of well-developed protocol around who cooks, who serves, where we sit, how the drum is handled, how the food is handled,” he said. “So much of this ritual survives. Only a few things are part of our daily lives. But the ceremonial life is very rich. I call it knowing your manners.”
At the Smithsonian Mr. Gover (rhymes with clover) also oversees the Indian Museum’s George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan and the American Indian Cultural Resources Center in Maryland.
Indians should feel that the museum belongs to them, Mr. Gover said. He wants the collection not only to reflect their history and culture, he said, but also to develop into a hub of Indian scholarship.
“I would love for this to be a place where the very best scholars on native issues wanted to work,” Mr. Gover said. “We’re not there yet. We’re not anywhere close to that. But I think we can get there.”
When the museum’s building here opened in 2004 — the institution was founded in 1989 — Edward Rothstein in The New York Times criticized its “studious avoidance of scholarship.”
Mr. Gover suggested that the exhibitions could be more topical, more daring and interactive. He plans to visit tribes around the country and ask what they want to see in the museum, he said, and hopes to expand the contemporary art collection.
“It’s time for this museum to renew and strengthen its relationship with its primary constituents, which are the Indian tribes in this country,” he said.
The museum has institutionalized this kind of input with its system of “community curators,” Indians who help shape exhibitions. Recently, for example, the Blackfeet Nation of Browning, Mont., and the Chiricahua Apache of Mescalero, N.M., added their stories and artifacts to a continuing exhibition called “Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories.”
Mr. Gover also sees Indians as potential donors. “Tribes have begun to have resources they never had before — disposable income,” he said, referring partly to casinos. “I would like to see if it’s possible to get the Indian community to adopt this museum.”
The museum’s annual operating budget is $40 million, with $32 million provided by the federal government. But last year the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lawrence M. Small, resigned after revelations about his extravagant personal spending, and Congress has recently pressured the Smithsonian and its museums to raise more of their own funds.
Mr. Gover says that he will have to do his share.
“It’s not my favorite thing, but I’m comfortable with it, and it has to be done,” he said. “I think we have a fabulous case to make to the philanthropic world.”
The Smithsonian has asked the Museum of the American Indian to increase its endowment to $100 million — from the current $18 million — by 2018. Because its building on the Washington Mall opened only three years ago, it does not yet face the repair needs that plague other Smithsonian buildings.
A tall man with a regal bearing, Mr. Gover grew up in Oklahoma, received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in public and international affairs and earned his law degree from the University of New Mexico. After practicing law for 15 years in Washington and Albuquerque, Mr. Gover joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 2003.
“I thought I had found my place,” he said, “that I was going to ride it out until I retired.”
If the next stage of his professional life promises to be less tranquil, Mr. Gover said he was energized by the tasks ahead and unperturbed by the museum’s recent controversies.
“I’m glad that I can play a role in navigating these difficulties,” he said. “I have no concern for the future of the Smithsonian. I never make apologies for things I didn’t do.”
But in his first in-depth interview since settling into his new office, Mr. Gover, 52, seemed unconcerned about the scrutiny he might now encounter about his own spending habits, or about the long-term effects on the museum.
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” he said last week. “I took a few poundings in the past.”
Spending by Mr. West, the institution’s founding director, who retired last month after 17 years, has provoked two senators to call for independent investigations. Mr. West spent more than $250,000 on travel and hotels during his final four years in office and paid $48,500 to a New York artist to paint his museum portrait.
“I felt bad for Rick,” said Mr. Gover, who practiced in two of the same law firms as Mr. West. “I felt that it was unfair.”
The Smithsonian said in December that all of Mr. West’s travel had been approved and that he had raised $51 million in that period. In a Jan. 11 letter to Indian Country Today, a weekly newspaper, Mr. West disputed reports first published in The Washington Post, calling them mischaracterizations of travel that was within the scope of his duties. "I traveled as required by the job I had to do," he wrote.
Referring to Mr. West’s trips in Europe and Asia, Mr. Gover said: “I understand the visceral reaction some people have to what looks like living the life of Riley. But the fact is, the museum has to be present in those places. This is the museum world. This is how it’s done.”
But Mr. Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe of Oklahoma, described himself as a conservative person and less of a public figure. He said that he expected to conduct a more low-key operation at the museum.
“We took a little hit on our image,” he conceded. “I worry about that in connection with the tribes. But in a very few months I think very few people will remember this.”
Most recently a professor of Indian law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, Mr. Gover is no stranger to the rough and tumble of this political town. He spent three years as the assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the federal Interior Department, overseeing the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
That agency is responsible for the federal government’s relations with Indian tribes, and Mr. Gover said he was regularly pummeled over issues like tribal recognition, land trusts and casino ownership. Though at times constrained by a lack of funds or authority, he said, more often he needed to negotiate between two reasonable but opposing views.
“This being Washington, disappointment often turns into cynicism and accusations about the motives of the decision maker,” he said in a follow-up e-mail message.
Mr. Gover — his Pawnee name is Shield Chief — remains connected to his background, which includes Comanche ancestors. In anticipation of a nephew’s return from fighting in Afghanistan, for example, he is helping his family determine “how they welcome back a warrior,” he said.
“There is a lot of well-developed protocol around who cooks, who serves, where we sit, how the drum is handled, how the food is handled,” he said. “So much of this ritual survives. Only a few things are part of our daily lives. But the ceremonial life is very rich. I call it knowing your manners.”
At the Smithsonian Mr. Gover (rhymes with clover) also oversees the Indian Museum’s George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan and the American Indian Cultural Resources Center in Maryland.
Indians should feel that the museum belongs to them, Mr. Gover said. He wants the collection not only to reflect their history and culture, he said, but also to develop into a hub of Indian scholarship.
“I would love for this to be a place where the very best scholars on native issues wanted to work,” Mr. Gover said. “We’re not there yet. We’re not anywhere close to that. But I think we can get there.”
When the museum’s building here opened in 2004 — the institution was founded in 1989 — Edward Rothstein in The New York Times criticized its “studious avoidance of scholarship.”
Mr. Gover suggested that the exhibitions could be more topical, more daring and interactive. He plans to visit tribes around the country and ask what they want to see in the museum, he said, and hopes to expand the contemporary art collection.
“It’s time for this museum to renew and strengthen its relationship with its primary constituents, which are the Indian tribes in this country,” he said.
The museum has institutionalized this kind of input with its system of “community curators,” Indians who help shape exhibitions. Recently, for example, the Blackfeet Nation of Browning, Mont., and the Chiricahua Apache of Mescalero, N.M., added their stories and artifacts to a continuing exhibition called “Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories.”
Mr. Gover also sees Indians as potential donors. “Tribes have begun to have resources they never had before — disposable income,” he said, referring partly to casinos. “I would like to see if it’s possible to get the Indian community to adopt this museum.”
The museum’s annual operating budget is $40 million, with $32 million provided by the federal government. But last year the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lawrence M. Small, resigned after revelations about his extravagant personal spending, and Congress has recently pressured the Smithsonian and its museums to raise more of their own funds.
Mr. Gover says that he will have to do his share.
“It’s not my favorite thing, but I’m comfortable with it, and it has to be done,” he said. “I think we have a fabulous case to make to the philanthropic world.”
The Smithsonian has asked the Museum of the American Indian to increase its endowment to $100 million — from the current $18 million — by 2018. Because its building on the Washington Mall opened only three years ago, it does not yet face the repair needs that plague other Smithsonian buildings.
A tall man with a regal bearing, Mr. Gover grew up in Oklahoma, received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in public and international affairs and earned his law degree from the University of New Mexico. After practicing law for 15 years in Washington and Albuquerque, Mr. Gover joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 2003.
“I thought I had found my place,” he said, “that I was going to ride it out until I retired.”
If the next stage of his professional life promises to be less tranquil, Mr. Gover said he was energized by the tasks ahead and unperturbed by the museum’s recent controversies.
“I’m glad that I can play a role in navigating these difficulties,” he said. “I have no concern for the future of the Smithsonian. I never make apologies for things I didn’t do.”
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