On Navajo Reservation, a New Tool in the Fight Against Drugs

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. - The optimism generated by the Navajo Nation Tribal Council's vote to criminalize the sale, possession and manufacture of methamphetamine on the reservation here may be tempered by a lack of jail space to handle the expected increase in arrests, the authorities say.

Hope MacDonald-LoneTree, the chairwoman of the council's Public Safety Committee and sponsor of the methamphetamine legislation, said data showed that 40 percent to 90 percent of violent crime on the 25,000-square-mile Navajo Reservation involved the drug.

"We've seen users as young as 9 years old using meth," Ms. MacDonald-LoneTree said.

The authorities said gangs from Phoenix and the West Coast have organized the distribution of drugs on the reservation. Armed with the new law, officials said they expected an increase in arrests, which would further strain an overwhelmed justice system.

Native American College Shuts Down

DAVIS, Calif. — The state's only college run for and by Native Americans has been forced to close after it lost its accreditation and $1 million in federal funding less than a month into this spring's semester.

Officials at D-Q University shut down the community college, laid off more than two dozen faculty members and staff and sent 200 students home. And while a defiant group of students refused to leave, the beleaguered board of trustees split into two rival factions — with one firing the school's president.

"We're in mass chaos," said Cindy La Marr, chairwoman of one of the factions and executive director of Capitol Area Indian Resources Inc. in Sacramento. "I believe the founders of the school have lost their vision of what the school was for. They're dwelling on the past."

Incendiary in Academia May Now Find Himself Burned

BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 10 - Prof. Ward L. Churchill has made a career at the University of Colorado out of pushing people's buttons, colleagues and students say, clearly relishing his stance as radical provocateur and in-your-face critic.

Whether it is getting arrested by the Denver police for trying to disrupt Columbus Day, which Professor Churchill has described as a "celebration of genocide" because of the deaths of Indians that resulted from European colonization, or ruffling feathers in the faculty lounge, hyperbole and bombast have always been ready tools in the Churchill kit bag, people here say.

Now many of the offended are pushing back. The storm of controversy that has blown up around Professor Churchill over his essay about the Sept. 11 attacks, with its reference to the Nazi Adolf Eichmann - the "technocrats" at the World Trade Center were "little Eichmanns," Professor Churchill said - has turned the professor into a talking point and a political punch line. On conservative talk radio, on campuses across the country, and especially here in Boulder, debate about Professor Churchill means debate about freedom of speech, the solemnity of Sept. 11 and the supposed liberal bias of academia.

Blues & Gospel

Native musicians added today to the iTunes store are: Tracy Lee Nelson & the Native Blues Band, Bill Perry, Mary Youngblood, Robert Richmond and Glen Bonham. Have Fun.

Growing Meth Use on Navajo Land Brings Call for Tribal Action

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. - With no law on the books to criminalize the sale, possession or manufacture of methamphetamine on the Navajo reservation here, the largest reservation in the country, officials are fearing an explosion of the drug's use.

"We've seen more than a 100 percent increase in meth on the reservation in the past five years," said Greg Adair, a 26-year officer with the Navajo Nation police.

Under pressure from local and federal law enforcement officials, the Navajo Nation Tribal Council raised the issue of criminalizing methamphetamine during its summer meeting last year but was told that it needed to include other controlled substances.

New poet laureate for Sask. chosen

SASKATOON – An award-winning writer from Saskatoon has been named the province's new poet laureate.

Louise Bernice Halfe, who is also known as Sky Dancer, has written two books of poetry and has been published in anthologies and magazines.
Her first book, Bear Bones and Feathers, won the Milton Acorn Award in 1996.
Halfe was born in Two Hills, Alberta in 1953 and raised on the Saddle Lake First Nation in that province.

Professor Is Assailed by Legislature and Vandals

Colorado lawmakers yesterday denounced an embattled professor whose scheduled appearance at an upstate New York college was canceled amid protests over his writings on the Sept. 11 attacks, in which he compared the victims to Nazis.

The professor, Ward Churchill, meanwhile, rebuffed calls to resign and said yesterday that his truck had been painted with swastikas overnight as it sat in his driveway. The Boulder County Sheriff's Department said it was investigating.

Native Jazz and Swing

Today we added iTunes tracks from 2 classic Jazz & swing songbirds, both Native American, Mildred Bailey, Coeur d'Alene, and Keely Smith, Cherokee. Jazz and swing fans, enjoy!

College Cancels Event Amid Protests on Panelist's 9/11 Essay

The president of Hamilton College, citing "credible threats of violence," said today that she was canceling a campus forum whose panelists included a Colorado professor who had disparaged 9/11 victims as "little Eichmanns."

In a written statement, President Joan Hinde Stewart said that the college had done its best "to protect what we hold most dear, the right to speak, think and study freely," but that ensuring safety at the event scheduled for Thursday was "a higher responsibility."

Newly added to the iTunes Shop

The most recent additions to our iTunes shop are Rita Coolidge, Pura Fé, Lila Downs, Kinnie Starr, Link Wray, Paul Ortega, and Redbone. More good music!

Yet more artists added to the iTunes shop

There are now 31 recording artists in our iTunes shop. Those added today are Jerry Alfred and the Medicine Beat, Blackfire, Darren Geffre, Wade Fernandaz, Eagle Warrior, and The Fire This Time. Enjoy!

More New iTunes Shop!

There are now tracks from 25 Native recording artist in our iTunes shop. Added today were Arvel Bird, Cherokee Rose, Coyote Zen, Alice Gomez, Gregg Howard, Kevin Locke, Martha Redbone, Jan Michael Looking Wolf Reibah, Shadowyze, Thunderbeat & Ulali. Visit the index to the iTunes store and have a ball!

New iTunes Shops

Today I have added new iTunes shops for Joy Harjo, Walela, Jim Boyd, Arigon Starr, Susan Aglukark, Bill Miller, Robert Mirabal , Indigenous, Joanne Shenandoah, John Trudell, Robbie Robertson, R. Carlos Nakai, and Robert Tree Cody. More such shops will follow soon.
Enjoy downloading the tracks you want.

American Indian relief team to tsunami disaster

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A team of American Indian physicians, educators and emergency professionals are readying to provide relief to victims of the Asian tsunami disaster. In the Native tradition of reaching out to those suffering, three friends are organizing an emergency response team.

Dr. Robert Lame Bull McDonald, Blackfeet and member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, will be serving as a volunteer with the World Health Organization in the disaster relief.

McDonald is organizing the emergency response team with Brock Albin, law professor already in Korea and involved in the relief effort, and Robert Free from Seattle, Indian rights activist and creator of the Native BEAR AIDS Project.

''The mission is to save lives,'' McDonald told Indian Country Today. ''Together we will constitute a civilian emergency medical relief team. My goal is to form an Emergency Air and Ground Lift and Evacuation Service Team.''

Sleaze in the Capitol

One of the sorriest chapters of American history, the gulling of native Indian tribes, is continuing apace in Washington, where two Capitol insiders close to the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, are being investigated for allegedly fleecing six tribes of more than $80 million with inflated promises of V.I.P. access. The shameful dealings of Jack Abramoff, a Republican power lobbyist, and Michael Scanlon, Mr. DeLay's former spokesman, are coming to light as Senate and Justice Department investigators follow leads from nouveau-riche tribes whose casino profits spurred a new category of lucre and greed in the hyperkinetic world of Washington lobbying.

Even as the two fast-talking political brokers banked large profits for three years of minimal labor, it was found, they were exchanging gleeful private messages mocking tribal leaders as "morons," "troglodytes" and "monkeys." "I want all their MONEY!!!" Mr. Scanlon exuberantly e-mailed in the midst of one deal.

Seattle Times: Indian policy comes under fire

Two national organizations — including a locally based group that emerged 15 years ago in a shellfish dispute with Western Washington tribes — have joined forces to push for reform of what they call the nation's flawed and fractured policy on Native people.

Redmond-based United Property Owners has merged with One Nation of Oklahoma, which includes oil producers and farm interests, and in its two years has aggressively challenged American Indian sovereignty.

The merger, effective Jan. 1, will form a megagroup called One Nation United, with 300,000 members in 50 states.

The combined group has taken aim at federal Indian policies, including tax allowances, which they say erode state and local tax bases and undermine free enterprise. They contend that a century and a half after many Indian treaties were negotiated, they are in need of review.

Critic's Notebook: Who Should Tell History: The Tribes or the Museums?

CHICAGO - Museums always make use of the past for the sake of the present. They collect it, shape it, insist on its significance. When that past is also prehistoric, when its objects come to the present without written history and with jumbled oral traditions, a museum can even become the past's primary voice.

But what if that prehistoric past is also claimed by some as a living heritage? Then disagreements about interpretation develop into battles over the museum's very function.

Interior, Indian Tribes Share Bison Range

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The only federal wildlife refuge set aside to protect bison -- the American buffalo -- will be managed by the Interior Department and Indian tribes in an unusual partnership that conservationists fear could lead to more development of public lands.

Under an agreement signed Wednesday, the department and the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribal Council will split the budget and management duties for Montana's 19,000-acre National Bison Range, which is within the tribal homeland on the Flathead Indian Reservation.

Training is to be provided to the tribes, which first must consult a federal manager with Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service before waiving any regulations on the range. The deal takes effect in three months if Congress does not object.

Eskimos Seek to Recast Global Warming as a Rights Issue

The Eskimos, or Inuit, about 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic, plan to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence.

The Inuit plan is part of a broader shift in the debate over human-caused climate change evident among participants in the 10th round of international talks taking place in Buenos Aires aimed at averting dangerous human interference with the climate system.

Inuit leaders said they planned to announce the effort at the climate meeting today.

Renaming 'Squaw' Sites Proves Touchy in Oregon

SISTERS, Ore. - It took two years for members of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to persuade Oregon lawmakers to remove the word "squaw" from the state's maps, which are filled with places like Squaw Meadow, Squaw Flat and, here in central Oregon, Squaw Creek.

Figuring out what to rename these places has proved more complicated. Around the Warm Springs reservation and the nearby town of Sisters, three years of pointed debate among local tribal leaders has produced 42 alternatives to Squaw Creek in three native languages.

Many of the suggestions are hard for English speakers and even some Indians to pronounce, like "ixwutxp." It means "blackberry" in the Wasco language. Other suggested Indian names are spelled using a lowercase "l" with a slash through it, signifying a guttural "tla" sound that does not exist in English.