Webmaster's Blog - Native American Resources

Woods to Play Exhibition to Help Begay Charity

2009-07-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

BETHESDA, Md. (AP) -- Tiger Woods is helping out longtime friend Notah Begay III, agreeing to play in his charity Skins Game at Turning Stone Resort next month to support Native American youth.

Begay declined to comment and kept his head down when asked if Woods was playing in his event, then stopped 20 yards later and said with a smile, ''I need to win some skins.''

Woods' agent at IMG confirmed he would be playing Aug. 24 in the Notah Begay III Foundation Challenge. The world's No. 1 player will join Stanford teammate Begay, former Masters champion Mike Weir and Camilo Villegas.

A year ago, the event raised $180,000 for Begay's foundation, which supports youth sports and wellness programs for Native Americans in New Mexico and other states.

Begay, a Navajo, is the only Native American on the PGA Tour. He has four PGA Tour victories, none since 2000, and earned his card for this year by returning to Q-school.

He and Woods have remained closed, however, and Begay received an exemption to the AT&T National, where he opened with rounds of 70-72 at Congressional.

Woods had planned to play in Begay's event a year ago until he was forced to miss the second half of the season with knee surgery.

Turning Stone Resort in upstate New York has held a Fall Series event on the PGA Tour the last two years, and its $6 million purse is larger than some regular-season events.

Woods is not expected to play in the PGA Tour event, as it follows the conclusion of the FedEx Cup. Begay's charity event is the Monday of The Barclays in New Jersey, the start of the PGA Tour Playoffs for the FedEx Cup. Woods has never played The Barclays since it became part of the playoffs.
Mark Steinberg, his agent at IMG, said Woods has not decided on his schedule for the playoffs.

Scientist Tries to Connect Migration Dots of Ancient Southwest

2009-06-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

CASAS GRANDES, Mexico — From the sky, the Mound of the Cross at Paquimé, a 14th-century ruin in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, looks like a compass rose — the roundish emblem indicating the cardinal directions on a map. About 30 feet in diameter and molded from compacted earth and rock taken near the banks of the Casas Grandes River, the crisscross arms point to four circular platforms. They might as well be labeled N, S, E and W.

Steve Lekson, shown at Chimney Rock, Colo., has a theory tying Casas Grandes to Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins.
“It’s a hell of a long way from here to Chaco,” says Steve Lekson, an archaeologist from the University of Colorado, as he sights along the north-south spoke of the cross. Follow his gaze 400 miles north and you reach Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, a major cultural center occupied from about A.D. 900 to A.D. 1150 by the pueblo people known as Anasazi. Despite the distance, Dr. Lekson believes the two sites were linked by an ancient pattern of migration and a common set of religious beliefs.

But don’t stop at Chaco. Continue about 60 miles northward along the same straight line and you come to another Anasazi center called Aztec Ruins. For Dr. Lekson the alignment must be more than a coincidence.

A decade ago in “The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest,” he argued that for centuries the Anasazi leaders, reckoning by the stars, aligned their principal settlements along this north-south axis — the 108th meridian of longitude. In an article this year for Archaeology magazine, he added two older ruins to the trajectory: Shabik’eschee, south of Chaco, and Sacred Ridge, north of Aztec. Each in its time was the regional focus of economic and political power, and each lies along the meridian. As one site was abandoned, because of drought, violence, environmental degradation — the reasons are obscure — the leaders led an exodus to a new location: sometimes north, sometimes south, but hewing as closely as they could to the 108th meridian.

“I think the reason is ideological,” Dr. Lekson said on a recent visit to Paquimé. “The cultural response to something not working is to move north, and when that doesn’t work you move south. And then you move north again and then you move south again, and then you finally say the hell with it, I’m out of here, and you go down to Chihuahua.”

For many of Dr. Lekson’s colleagues that is an awfully big leap. With all the ambiguities involved in interpreting patterns of dirt and rock — the Anasazi left no written history — archaeologists have been more comfortable focusing on a particular culture or a particular ruin. Dr. Lekson is constantly reaching — some say overreaching — to make connections between isolated islands of thought. Scheduled for publication this summer, his new book, “A History of the Ancient Southwest,” will go even further, offering a kind of unified theory of the Native American population movements that have puzzled Southwest archaeologists for many years.

“Steve has definitely been the one who has dragged us kicking and screaming into ‘big picture’ archaeology,” said William D. Lipe, emeritus professor of archaeology at Washington State University. “In many ways, Steve’s ideas and publications have driven much of the intellectual agenda for Southwestern archaeology over the last 20 or more years.” That does not mean, Dr. Lipe added, that he buys the idea of the Chaco meridian.

On a walk around Paquimé, Dr. Lekson points out his evidence. Casas Grandes, the Spanish name for the ruins, means “big houses,” and the multistory structures remind him of the palatial “great houses” at Chaco and Aztec. Inside the structures, people moved from room to room through T-shaped passages like those at Anasazi sites. At the House of the Pillars, a row of three colonnades formed a grand entranceway. “No one around here had colonnades except at Chaco,” Dr. Lekson says. A coincidence or a connection?

Paquimé also hints at other influences. Ball courts, used for ceremonial games, are typical of those found in southern Mexico and Central America. Effigy mounds, in which dirt was shaped to form birds and other figures, resemble those built long ago by Native Americans in the Ohio Valley. A long sinuous row of mud and stone called the Mound of the Serpent seems to undulate like a snake.

“This thing runs north and south,” Dr. Lekson says. “I love it.” He points toward a prominent hill on the horizon called Cerro de Moctezuma. Barely visible on its summit are the remains of a centuries-old stone watchtower. Nearby, he says, is another snakelike mound running north and south.

“It’s not as easy to see,” he says. “You have to believe it.”

Tension Roils Peru After Deadly Amazon Clashes

2009-06-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

YURIMAGUAS, Peru (Reuters) - Indigenous protesters and Peru's army refused to back down and a truce looked distant on Saturday, after two battles in the Amazon jungle killed some 50 people in the worst crisis of President Alan Garcia's term.

Protesters said 30 of their own died and the government said 22 members of the security forces perished in two days of clashes over Garcia's drive to bring foreign companies to the rainforest to open mines and drill for oil.

The bloodshed has prompted widespread calls for Garcia's prime minister to quit, underscored divisions between elites in Lima and the rural poor and threatened to derail the government's push to further open Peru to foreign investors.

Garcia lashed out at the protesters, saying they had attacked their own country, acted like terrorists and may have been incited by foreigners. A fierce critic of leftist leaders elsewhere in Latin America, Garcia did not say who he meant.

The army imposed curfews, but thousands of Indians with wooden spears vowed to dig in at blockades along remote Amazon highways and keep protesting if government forces did not halt efforts to break up their demonstrations.

"We are fighting because we fear our land will be taken away," said Denis Tangoa 38, a protester at one blockade.

About 10 police officers kidnapped by protesters were killed and nearly two dozen were freed when troops moved in to end a hostage crisis, National Police Chief Miguel Hidalgo told Peru's RPP radio on Saturday. Several hostages were reported missing.

BATTLE AT 'DEVIL'S CURVE'

In a clash on Friday, 11 police died when they broke up a roadblock, about 870 miles north of Lima along a stretch of highway known as "Devil's Curve" the government said.

At least thirty protesters were killed, according to Champion Nonimgo from AIDESEP, Peru's leading indigenous rights group. "We are talking about more than 30 indigenous deaths so far," Nonimgo said.

The government put the number of protesters killed in Friday's clash at nine.

Garcia blamed leftist opponents for the violence and his office issued a statement saying protesters had "carefully planned an attack against Peru" and used "methods identical those of the Shining Path."

The Shining Path was a brutal insurgency that waged war against the state in the 1980s and 1990s, until
its leaders were caught and holdouts went into cocaine trafficking.

"Shame on those politicians who can't win elections so they get together irrational groups to do what they did," said Garcia.

Indigenous tribes, worried they will lose control over natural resources, have protested since April seeking to force Congress to repeal new laws that encourage foreign mining and energy companies to invest billions of dollars in the rain forest.

"We are not going to give up until they reverse these laws that will damage us. They want to take away our lands and forest and make our traditions disappear," said Luis Huansi, a leader of the Shawi tribe at a roadblock between the towns of Tarapoto and Yurimaguas.

Men, women and children from the subsistence farming region had occupied the highway. Some were dressed in long red tunics, wore headbands and carried wooden spears. Families have set up tents of plastic sheeting along the roadside.

DEVELOPMENT LAGS

Though Garcia is a favorite of investors, his approval rating is 30 percent and he is especially unpopular in the Amazon, where development has lagged.

Critics say he has not done enough to reduce the poverty rate from 36 percent and that economic boom times failed to reach the poor before the current downturn.

They also fault Garcia's policies favoring free markets and foreign investment as mainly benefiting urban elites.

Garcia claims he will cut poverty faster than a new wave of leftist presidents that he often trades barbs with: Bolivia's Evo Morales and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. But he has yet to win support from the poor.

Indigenous groups oppose laws passed last year as Garcia moved to bring Peru's regulatory framework into compliance with a free-trade agreement with the United States.

Tribes said Garcia's allies acted in bad faith when they blocked a motion in Congress on Thursday to open debate on a law they want overturned. Violence erupted the next day.

New Group Is Formed to Sponsor Native Arts

2009-04-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: April 21, 2009

Even as arts groups around the country are cutting back because of declining endowments and donations, a new foundation to support the work of American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native artists is being established with an initial $10 million from the Ford Foundation.

Called the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the organization, formally opened on Tuesday, says it will be the first permanently endowed national foundation of its kind.

“We needed our own endowment for native arts and culture in this country in the coming century,” said Elizabeth Theobald Richards, the program officer at Ford who has overseen the project and is a Cherokee. “The indigenous peoples of this country have an incredible wealth of cultural heritage and cultural expression that very few people know about. And it’s also incredibly underfunded.”

The foundation has been in the works since 2007, when it obtained incorporation papers and established charity status. Only now has the organization hired a president and staff and begun the grant-making process.

The new foundation will provide direct grants to artists and arts organizations, support native arts leadership and team up with other native-led efforts to increase financial support for indigenous arts and cultures.

“Arts and culture and traditional languages and religions have been the glue that held Native Americans together — often in the face of great adversity,” said Walter Echo-Hawk, chairman and creator of the foundation, in a telephone interview.

“For many years the government policy was to assimilate native people into mainstream society and essentially stamp out attributes of native culture,” he added. “It’s a testament to the tenacity of our people that we have any native cultures or religions left in the United States. We are seeing a remarkable cultural renaissance in the tribal communities. But the support of the arts has been almost nil. It’s been very difficult for Indian tribes to also support their own arts and cultures.”

The organization is to be based in Portland, Ore., and recently selected Tara Lulani Arquette, a Native Hawaiian, as its president and chief executive. With 20 years of experience leading organizations and advocating on behalf of native groups, Ms. Arquette has served for the last four years as chief executive and executive director of the Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association, a private, nonprofit organization that works with the tourism industry.

“In a sense, it’s part of our quest for self-determination and restoring our sovereignty,” Ms. Arquette said in an telephone interview.

She acknowledged the challenge of starting a new foundation in the current economic downturn. “The mission of the foundation can’t be accomplished in one year or even five years,” Ms. Arquette said. “But there is a sense of urgency. Our elders — our wisdom keepers — are passing away in large numbers.”

The foundation, which will start with an annual operating budget of $500,000 and a staff of four, hopes to provide about $4 million in grants and program services over the next five years.

In establishing the new organization, the Ford Foundation reached out across the Native American world.

A leadership circle was made up of four advisers from different tribes — Mr. Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), Joy Harjo (Creek Muskogee), Jayne Fawcett (Mohegan) and Elizabeth Woody (Navajo/Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama). All five members of the foundation’s board of directors are Native Americans.

The Ford Foundation made an initial $5 million contribution to endow the new foundation permanently, with an additional $5 million promised if new partners brought $3 million more to the table. The Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians, based near Sacramento, then made a grant of $1.5 million, while announcing a challenge to other tribal nations to match its gift. Once the challenge is met, Rumsey has promised an additional $1.5 million, which would bring the tribes’ contribution to $4.5 million.

The Ford Foundation has supported similar efforts to bolster native arts and culture in the past. “The community has the need,” Ms. Richards said. “But I really feel the country has the need.”

W. Richard West Jr., the founding director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum and a Ford trustee, said: “There need to be agencies and institutions that support native contemporary art and artists. For the most part, those agencies and institutions don’t exist.”

“We never separate art and life,” added Mr. West, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. “Art is part of our everyday life.”

The foundation hopes to begin making grants at the end of this year or early next year, Mr. Echo-Hawk said.

The foundation’s goal is to establish a permanent endowment of about $20 million over the next five years or so, he said, and to increase that figure over time.

“Culture, even though it is central to our identity, is the last to be nurtured,” Mr. Echo-Hawk said. “There is a need to inject resources into the perpetuation of these profound and beautiful art forms.”

Fired Colorado Professor Is Cross-Examined in Lawsuit

2009-03-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

By DAN FROSCH
Published: March 24, 2009

DENVER — A former University of Colorado professor spent nearly six hours defending his scholarly work on Tuesday during cross-examination in his lawsuit contending that he was fired for an essay he wrote about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

After spending much of Monday explaining his political opinions, the former professor, Ward L. Churchill, faced extensive cross-examination by the university’s lawyer, Patrick O’Rourke.

A faculty committee concluded that Mr. Churchill had plagiarized and fabricated sections of his work on the persecution of American Indians, leading to his dismissal in July 2007, the university says.

But Mr. Churchill maintains that he was forced out because of the controversial essay, in which he characterized workers in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns.”

In a back-and-forth that was intermittently cutting and congenial, Mr. O’Rourke delved into the details of Mr. Churchill’s work, much of which focused on the spread of smallpox among Americans Indians and assorted aspects of law affecting Indian country.

Mr. O’Rourke said Mr. Churchill’s admission that he had ghostwritten works for other scholars and occasionally cited them to support his own theories clearly violated academic standards, as the faculty committee had concluded.

“The only evidence we’ve heard from anyone other than you about this scholarly practice is from 20 people tenured at C.U., all of whom say this is wrong,” Mr. O’Rourke said.

Mr. Churchill said the practice violated no academic standard at the university. And he argued that it was acceptable for one scholar to ghostwrite for another and then cite that work in other writings as long as the second scholar embraced the original premise.

Mr. O’Rourke acknowledged that the university and Mr. Churchill had drawn extensive criticism over the essay, with Mr. Churchill facing “half a million” accusations and the university under enormous pressure to discipline him.

But even after firing Mr. Churchill, the university allowed him to continue lecturing when invited by students — proof, Mr. O’Rourke said, that his dismissal had nothing to do with limiting his First Amendment rights to free speech.

“The same university that fired you for speaking out is the same university that let you come back and talk on any subject that you wanted, whenever you were asked to,” Mr. O’Rourke said.

Mr. Churchill responded, “I don’t see how the point you’re making actually changes the situation at all.”

Mr. Churchill conceded that parts of an essay written by Prof. Fay G. Cohen of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia on Indian fishing rights appeared without permission in a book he helped edit and write. But Mr. Churchill denied that he was responsible for lifting any part of the essay, which he had worked on with Ms. Cohen.

When asked by his lawyer, David Lane, what he hoped to gain from his lawsuit, Mr. Churchill said: “I want my job back. I want the university to acknowledge that the entire process by which I was terminated from the university was fraudulent.”

Throughout the day, Mr. Churchill argued that he had done nothing wrong and that he had been railroaded by the university.

Mr. O’Rourke questioned that premise. “All of these fully tenured faculty members went along with a fraudulent and fictional report just to get you out of the university?” he asked.

Mr. Churchill said he believed that outside influences had helped seal his fate. “It’s just wrong,” he said.

Mr. O’Rourke responded, “It’s just wrong to put somebody else’s name on your work and then to cite it.”

After Mr. Churchill’s testimony, a juror submitted a question, asking him if the accusations of academic misconduct would have arisen had it not been for his essay.

“I think the easy answer on that one is no, they would not,” Mr. Churchill replied.

Native Voices at the Autry’s World Premiere of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light

2009-03-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Native Voices at the Autry’s World Premiere of
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light by Joy Harjo

March 12 - 29, 2009

From musician, poet, and now playwright Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) comes a deeply compelling personal journey of struggle, displacement, self-discovery, and ultimately healing. Invoking spoken word, storytelling, and song, Harjo reflects on life stories, the tales and traditions of her people, and takes a few turns blowing a mean jazz saxophone. An allegorical work of tremendous power, Wings demonstrates how theater and art can bring life full circle.

Performances:

(Preview Shows — March 10 & 11)

Thursdays – March 12, 19, and 26 -- 8pm
Fridays – March 13, 20, and 27 – 8 pm
Saturdays – March 14, 21, and 28 – 2 and 8 pm
Sundays – March 15, 22, and 29 – 2 pm

Editorial - Justice for American Indians - NYTimes.com

2009-02-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

Published: February 22, 2009
The federal government has a long history of cheating American Indians, and not all of this dirty dealing is in the distant past. On Monday, the Supreme Court hears arguments in a suit by the Navajo, who lost millions of dollars’ worth of coal royalties because the government helped a coal company underpay for their coal. A lower court ruled for the Navajo Nation. The Supreme Court should affirm that well-reasoned decision.

The Navajo’s huge reservation spreads across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The United States holds the lands in trust and manages their large coal deposits. Peabody Coal had a lease to mine on that land. The terms provided that in 1984, the interior secretary could make a reasonable adjustment in the royalty rates paid to the tribe.

That year the department increased the royalty rate to 20 percent of gross proceeds. After Peabody protested, the Reagan administration’s interior secretary met with a Peabody lobbyist, without informing the Navajo. The secretary then signed a memo blocking the increase and called for the Navajo to negotiate with Peabody. The tribe, already under severe economic pressure, ended up agreeing to a rate of just 12.5 percent. The Navajo eventually sued, arguing that the government violated its duty to look out for their interests, and that it cost them as much as $600 million in royalties.

They lost in the Supreme Court on one set of legal theories, but are now relying on other laws. The Washington-based United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled for the Navajo. In a unanimous ruling, the three-judge panel concluded that several federal laws impose the sort of fiduciary duty the Indians assert.

The appeals court also made clear that the government did not live up to this duty. The ruling found that the Interior Department met “secretly with parties having interests adverse to” the Navajo, adopted those parties’ “desired course of action in lieu of action favorable to” the Navajo, and misled the Navajo about its actions.

The government’s behavior was “indefensible,” according to four former interior secretaries, who submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court. The Obama administration, which has inherited the Bush administration’s position in the case, should not continue to stand up for these misdeeds.

Crow Tribal Chairman Carl Venne Dies at Age 62

2009-02-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

HARDIN, Mont. (AP) -- Crow Tribal Chairman Carl Venne, praised by President Barack Obama as a leader who engaged in a ''fervent quest for a better life for his people,'' has died. He was 62.

Venne was found dead Sunday in his sister's home, according to the Big Horn County Sheriff's Office. He apparently died in his sleep of natural causes, the office said in a statement.

''I was honored to have worked with Chairman Venne, a strong tribal leader, who implored us to uphold treaties and honor Native ancestors,'' Obama said in a statement released by the White House.

Venne greeted Obama last summer during a campaign stop in Crow Agency. The Crow adopted Obama as a member of the Black Eagle family. Last month, Obama watched Venne lead Crow horsemen during the inaugural parade in Washington.

Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana issued statements praising Venne as a man dedicated to his people. Baucus said Venne was a progressive leader who ''always pushed the envelope when fighting for better health care and economic prosperity'' on the Crow reservation.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Venne was one of the great leaders of the Crow Nation.

Venne, a Vietnam veteran and former counselor at Little Big Horn Community College, became tribal chairman in 2002. The Crow Tribe has about 11,000 members.

Throughout his chairmanship, he supported programs against use of methamphetamine and encouraged a healthful way of life on the reservation. He was instrumental in the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee's selection of Crow Agency as the place for a 2007 hearing on Indian health care.>

Mystery of Ancient Pueblo Jars Is Solved

2009-02-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

By MICHAEL HAEDERLE
Published: February 3, 2009
ALBUQUERQUE — For years Patricia Crown puzzled over the cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon, the great complex of multistory masonry dwellings set amid the arid mesas of northwestern New Mexico. They were utterly unlike other pots and pitchers she had seen.

Some scholars believed that Chaco’s inhabitants, ancestors of the modern Pueblo people of the Southwest, had stretched skins across the cylinders and used them for drums, while others thought they held sacred objects.

But the answer is simpler, though no less intriguing, Ms. Crown asserts in a paper published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the jars were used for drinking liquid chocolate. Her findings offer the first proof of chocolate use in North America north of the Mexican border.

How did the ancient Pueblos come to have cacao beans in the desert, more than 1,200 miles from the nearest cacao trees? Ms. Crown, a University of New Mexico anthropologist, noted that maize, beans and corn spread to the Southwest after being domesticated in southern Mexico. Earlier excavations at Pueblo Bonito, the largest structure in the Chaco complex, had found scarlet macaws and other imported items.

Dorie Reents-Budet, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a Smithsonian Institution research associate specializing in Mayan cylinder vases, said that a sophisticated Mesoamerican trade network extended to Chaco in the north and as far south as Ecuador and Colombia.

The Mayan vessels, decorated with court scenes and hieroglyphics, were used to ceremonially consume chocolate at sumptuous feasts, Ms. Reents-Budet said. An expensive luxury, the cacao beans were fermented, roasted and ground up, then mixed with water and flavorings before being whipped into froth. It made sense to present the beverage in a special vessel, she said.

“It’s as if you were having a dinner party and serving Champagne,” said Ms. Reents-Budet. “You serve Champagne in really nice glasses.”

After an exchange with Ms. Reents-Budet in October 2007 about the resemblances between the Chacoan and Mayan earthenware, Ms. Crown said she thought about having the Chacoan cylinders checked for cacao residue.

Ms. Crown turned to W. Jeffrey Hurst, a senior bioanalytical chemist for the Hershey Company, the giant chocolate maker, whose bosses have been allowing him to test Mesoamerican ceramics for cacao for two decades. In 2002, he co-published a paper in Nature showing that early Maya were using cacao by 600 B.C., pushing back the earliest chemical evidence for their cacao use by 1,000 years.

Ms. Crown submitted five fragmentary shards to Mr. Hurst’s laboratory, which subjected the samples to high performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry testing, which confirmed the presence of theobromine — a bio marker for cacao — in three shards.

“The results were unequivocal,” said Mr. Hurst, who wrote the new paper with Ms. Crown.

The shards were among 200,000 artifacts excavated from trash heaps next to the 800-room Pueblo Bonito. They date from 1000 to 1125, when Chaco civilization was at its height.

An earlier expedition had uncovered 111 cylinder jars beneath a room in Pueblo Bonito. The jars, of native clay, are about 10 inches high with black geometric designs over a white background, said Ms. Crown, an expert on Pueblo ceramics.

Ms. Crown speculated that the Chacoans might well have followed Mayan ritualized chocolate drinking practices, given the similarity of the drinking vessels.

“It’s likely that this was not something everybody consumed,” she said. “It’s likely it was intended for only this one segment of society.”

She next plans to look for implements that might have been used in the ritual preparation of the beverage and determine whether it was enjoyed elsewhere in the Southwest. For now, she is gratified to have added to the store of knowledge about Chaco’s long-ago residents.

“Most of what we do in archaeology is interpretive, and the interpretations can change,” she said. “It’s rare that you get to find anything this definite and answer a question. It felt great.”

Bolivians Vote on a New Constitution

2009-01-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

MOROCOLLO, Bolivia (AP) -- Bolivian Indians on Sunday threw their support behind a new constitution aimed at increasing their strength while allowing leftist President Evo Morales a shot at staying in power through 2014.

Voters were expected to easily approve the measure in a country whose Indian majority has been long oppressed.

But opposition from Bolivia's white and mestizo populations and disputes over the document's wording foreshadowed yet more political turmoil in a divided nation where tensions over race and class have recently turned deadly.

Bolivia's first Indian president, Morales says the charter will ''decolonize'' South America's poorest country by recovering indigenous values lost under centuries of oppression dating back to the Spanish conquest.

The proposed document, for example, would create a new Congress with seats reserved for Bolivia's smaller indigenous groups and eliminates any mention of The Roman Catholic Church, instead recognizing and honoring the Pachamama, an Andean earth deity.

''Here, we're all voting yes,'' said Pascual Choque, 64, an Aymara Indian who left home on foot before dawn to vote in the tiny town of Morocollo, on the shores of Lake Titicaca.

''There's not a single 'no' here. No mestizos, no white faces -- all 'yes,''' he said, drawing a chuckle from fellow Aymaras lined up in a schoolyard to cast their ballots.

Opposition forces worry the president's proposal ignores the country's growing urban population, which mixes both Indian blood and tradition with a new Western identity.

''The constitution's idea is to make the indigenous no longer invisible,'' said Bolivian historian Fernando Cajias, himself a mestizo. ''But it creates a whole new invisible world'' of mixed-heritage Bolivians.

The proposed charter calls for a general election in December in which Morales could run for a second, consecutive five-year term. The current constitution permits two terms, but not consecutive.

One of the key features of the proposed constitution is a provision granting autonomy for 36 indigenous ''nations'' and several opposition-controlled eastern states. But both are given a vaguely defined ''equal rank'' that fails to resolve their rival claims over Bolivia's fertile eastern lowlands and open land that sits atop Bolivia's natural gas reserves. The development of those reserves drives much of the country's economy.

With an eye to redistributing territory in the region, the constitution also would limit future land holdings to either 12,000 or 24,000 acres (5,000 or 10,000 hectares), depending which voters choose. Current landholders are exempt from the cap -- a nod to the east's powerful cattle and soy industries, which fiercely oppose the proposal.

Morales, an Aymara Indian, has married his mission to improve life for Bolivia's indigenous with what ally and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls ''21st century socialism.''

Elected in 2005 on a promise to nationalize Bolivia's natural gas industry, Morales has increased the state's presence throughout the economy and expanded benefits for the poor.

Morales also booted Bolivia's U.S. ambassador and several federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents after claiming they had conspired against his government last year. The U.S. government has denied the allegations.

Morales' reforms remain widely popular, winning him 67 percent support in an August recall election. But his biggest project nearly failed in 2006, when an assembly convened to rewrite the constitution broke apart along largely racial lines.

The constitutional dispute has erupted in violence on several occasions: Three college students were killed in anti-government riots in 2007, and 13 mostly indigenous Morales supporters were killed in a remote jungle clash in September when rioters seized government buildings to prevent a draft constitution from going to a vote.

In an October deal, Congress approved holding the referendum only after Morales agreed to seek one more term instead of two.

Return of the Natives - Timothy Egan Blog

2009-01-15T08:04:00.000-07:00

January 14, 2009, 10:00 PM
Return of the Natives
SALT RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. — Nearly 50 years ago, a Pima native took a Greyhound bus from this sun-roasted redoubt of Indian land to the winter chill of Washington, D.C.,to witness the first day of a young American president.

“When he came home, my father was so excited because John Kennedy stood up for him when he walked by him in the parade,” said Diane Enos. “The president stood up for an Indian! He couldn’t stop talking about that.”

Next week, Diane Enos will make the same trip, along with hundreds of other American Indians who hope that Barack Obama’s inauguration will bring the wind of possiblity to Indian Country.

In less than a week’s time, the Great White Father will be black. Amidst the euphoria and stirring of fresh ideas, there remains some suspicion.

“He’s still a politician and I’m still an Indian,” said Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning writer, a Spokane and Coeur d’Alene native.

“They all look like treaty-makers to me,” said Alexie, paraphrasing the native musician, John Trudell. “I guess that’s the puzzling and I suppose lovely thing about Indians’ love of Obama. Many have suspended their natural suspicion of politicians for him.”

So often, they are invisible, these first Americans, or frozen in iconic images of the past. We see them in Curtis prints and Remington poses, or hear something attributed to them in New Age spiritual circles. Cool, Indians.

And then a new casino opens off the interstate or a pottery exhibit is unveiled, and we realize: ah yes, they’re with us still.

With Obama’s rise, Indians have allowed themselves to dream — some, even to fall in love. He was adopted into an Indian family in Montana last May, given the name “Barack Black Eagle” by the Crow Nation.

When asked about immigration concerns in New Mexico, Obama pointed to a handful of elderly natives in the front row of a high school gym.

“He said, ‘The only real native people in this country are sitting right in front of me,’ ” recalled Joe Garcia, who is president of the National Congress of American Indians. “You should have heard the applause.”

The epic struggle for natives has been to avoid getting washed away by the flood of dominant culture, where Indians make up less than 2 percent of more than 300 million Americans.

That, and the physical toll that losing this big land has taken on them. Indians die younger than most other Americans, suffer from higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, debilitating dietary problems.

The Pimas, who hold to this 52,000-acre homeland amidst the predatory sprawl of 4.2 million people here in the Phoenix metro area, have one of the world’s highest rates of type 2 diabetes — a consequence of the rough adjustment from their world to one handed down by Europeans.

Presidents come and go. They promise to uphold treaty rights and appoint somebody to oversee Indian affairs who understands that history did not end when Custer fell to his hubris. It’s ho-hum, usually, with a mournful shrug on the reservations.

But on the most recent Election Day, on the Navajo Rez, which spills into three states and is the size of West Virginia, high school kids held up Obama signs at intersections in the town of Window Rock, and cheered themselves hoarse as returns came in.

“I feel very elated,” said Joe Shirley, Jr., president of the Navajo Nation. “All of Navajo Country came out strong for Obama.”

Shirley says nearly half of Navajo families heat their homes with wood they cut themselves, drink water hauled into their homes in barrels and light their rooms with kerosene lamps.

Talk about stimulus: a billion dollars, one-seven-hundredth of what taxpayers are giving the financial institutions that caused the Crash of 2008, could bring much of Navajo land into the modern age, Shirley said.

But beyond the desire for urgent, fundamental infrastructure help, Indians look to Obama as a powerful narrative. People who were subjugated, with near-genocidal brutality, feel a kinship with people who were first brought here in chains, even though Obama is an immigrant’s son.

“There’s a bond there,” said Shirley. “Birds of a feather flock together. We try to teach that there are no impossibilities to Navajo people. His election speaks to the young especially.”

Cynicism is the poison of so many young people. In Indian Country, where despair is often woven into the landscape, it takes hold even earlier.

So when Diane Enos, who is president of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, arrives in the festive capital next week she will have a teenage tribal leader with her.

“Obama’s life has been a journey to find identity,” she said. “That’s the Indian stuggle. And it starts with children.”

On Inauguration Day, the capital will host the likes of Ludacris and Chaka Khan, corporate titans and political giants, and balls too numerous to count.

Among the sea of Americans ushering in the president will be a small contingent of people who have clung to this continent longer than any other. And for once — if only for a January moment — they will feel like they belong.

Violet Taq Se Blu (Anderson) Hilbert - Upper Skagit Elder

2008-12-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

July 24, 1918-Dec. 19, 2008

Violet was preceded in death by parents, Louis Jimmy and Charlie Anderson; husband, Henry Don Hilbert; sons, Denny Woodcock and Ron Hilbert-Coy.
She is survived by daughter, Lois Schluter and her husband, Walter; grandson, Jay Samson and wife, Bedelia; granddaughter, Jill La Pointe and husband, John; great-grandchildren, Sasha, Beau, Shain and Stacy La Pointe, Jermaine Wade, Damas and Lillian Samson; great-great-grandchildren, Oryian, Skyler and Shawn La Pointe. She is also survived by countless friends, colleagues and adopted relations. Taq Se Blu was a world renowned story-teller and language teacher.
A wake will be held at 6 p.m., Friday, December 26, 2008, at the Upper Skagit Gym, and the Funeral Service will be at 10 a.m., Saturday, December 27, 2008, at the Upper Skagit Gym. Arrangements are under the care of Hawthorne Funeral Home, 1825 E College Way, Mount Vernon.

Ex-Tribal Head in Mass. To Plead Guilty to Fraud - NYTimes.com

2008-12-15T14:42:00.000-07:00

BOSTON (AP) -- The former chairman of a Massachusetts tribe agreed to plead guilty to violating campaign finance laws while working with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the U.S. attorney's office said Monday.

Glenn Marshall, 59, of Mashpee, agreed to plead guilty to five counts including making illegal campaign contributions to members of Congress, embezzling tribal funds, filing false tax returns and fraudulently receiving Social Security disability benefits.

He is former chairman of the Cape Cod-based Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, members of which attended what is historically considered the first Thanksgiving. It sought and received federal recognition in 2007 and had been buying land and pushing plans to build a casino.

Among other charges, investigators alleged Marshall used individuals including members of his family and council members as ''straw contributors'' to make political contributions. They said he then reimbursed himself and them with money from an account funded by a company hoping for a stake in any casino the tribe might build.

Federal law prohibits corporations, including the tribal council, from making contributions to federal campaigns.

He also was accused of misusing $380,000 for personal expenses including groceries, vacations, tuition for his daughter, restaurant tabs, home repairs and jewelry.

Marshall stepped down in 2007, after it became public that he was a convicted rapist and had lied about his military past.

A call to Marshall's lawyer, Robert Craven, was not immediately returned Monday. Tribal Council spokeswoman Gayle Andrews said the tribe was ''deeply saddened'' by the news.

''For the past year and a half, the Tribal leadership has worked successfully to get the government up and running and will continue to work on behalf of its 1,600 members for benefits including health, education and other renumerations granted federally recognized tribes,'' Andrews said in a written statement.

Investigators said a Michigan company called AtMashpee LLC agreed in 1999 to underwrite the tribe's efforts at federal recognition and provided millions of dollars for operating and lobbying expenses. In return, the company hoped for a stake in any future casino.

AtMashpee also helped cover legal costs, including a lawsuit the tribe filed against the Department of the Interior to pressure it to act on the tribe's petition.

In 2003, Marshall turned to Abramoff, who allegedly told them the tribe needed to make big political contributions to certain members of Congress.

A political consultant and others hired by the tribe said they preferred to be paid directly by the tribal council rather than AtMashpee. To make the payments, Marshall allegedly arranged to have AtMashpee deposit money into the account of the Mashpee Fisherman's Association, a defunct corporation in which Marshall and another tribal officer were signatories.

Investigators said that between 2003 and 2007, AtMashpee paid about $4 million into the account and that Marshall failed to report the funds on the tribal council's federal tax returns.

Investigators said that the tribe hired lobbyists who consulted with Abramoff's team and suggested which state and federal officials should receive contributions -- and that Marshall used the Fisherman's Association's fund to make the donations.

Investigators said Marshall asked the ''straw contributors'' to make contributions and then promised to reimburse them. Between 2003 and 2007, Marshall reimbursed straw contributors a total of nearly $50,000 in political donations using the fund, investigators said.

Marshall faces 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for four of the charges and a 20-year prison sentence and a $1 million fine for the wire fraud charge.

Indian Chief Leads Fight to Keep Selling Cigarettes - NYTimes.com

2008-12-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

By COREY KILGANNON
Published: December 13, 2008

MASTIC, N.Y. — Down by the lapping waters of Great South Bay, the Indian chief stared up at the trees swaying in the wind. Then he squinted: Was that a surveillance camera on top of that utility pole?

Probably not, but Harry Wallace, chief of the Unkechaug Nation, says he has good reason to be watching his back — and his tribe’s — closely.

He and several other owners of shops that sell cigarettes on the tiny Poospatuck reservation on the South Shore of Long Island, where the Unkechaugs are based, have been sued by the City of New York. The city claims that this Indian enclave — the closest reservation to New York City — has become a “tax evasion haven” and a drain on the city’s coffers.

The Bloomberg administration says the city and the state lose more than $1 billion a year in tax revenue because of what it calls bootleg cigarettes distributed on Indian reservations in New York. Of that amount, the administration contends, $195 million represents the city’s share, and officials blame the Unkechaug Nation reservation for most of that.

New York City officials say millions of cartons of untaxed cigarettes are sold every year by Poospatuck retailers to bootleggers who smuggle them into the city to resell for about $5 a pack, not the $8 or $9 charged by New York retailers who pay the state and city taxes of $4.25 a pack.

As part of their legal challenge, city lawyers have asked a federal judge to block the smoke shops from selling untaxed cigarettes to non-Indians without collecting state and city taxes from them.

Answering these claims is the Unkechaug chief, Mr. Wallace, 55, who was born in Queens, went to Dartmouth and was a lawyer in private practice in Manhattan before moving to the reservation and opening the Poospatuck smoke shop.

But he has been outspoken in defending his tribe, arguing that cigarette sales are the only viable economic engine on the 55 acres of sovereign territory. He calls the city’s suit an attack on legitimate Indian livelihood, and the result of elected officials feeling the economic pinch and blaming budget woes on the smallest reservation in the state.

“They’re picking on us because they think we’re this little tribe with no means to defend ourselves,” he said. “Bloomberg needs a scapegoat, so he blames us for the city’s deficit, instead of criticizing the financial markets.”

Lawyers for the smoke shop owners have requested a dismissal of the suit, arguing that the court does not have jurisdiction in sovereign territory, Mr. Wallace said. He is not a defendant in the suit, though he was named in a similar suit that was filed in 2006 by the owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain.

Though Mr. Wallace grew up in the Bayside and Little Neck sections of Queens, his family nurtured his Indian identity, taking him often to visit his uncles on the reservation. He chose Dartmouth, he said, because it had as its founding mission the education of Indians, and he helped establish a group on campus called Native Americans at Dartmouth.

Later, at New York Law School in Manhattan, he helped found the Indian Law Committee and wrote a thesis on Indian land claims. In the 1980s, he worked as a lawyer concentrating on cases involving landlord-tenant disputes, real estate, personal injury and American Indian discrimination issues.

Mr. Wallace said he grew more interested in Indian issues after marrying Margo Thunderbird, a daughter of Chief Thunderbird of the Southampton-based Shinnecock Nation. The couple have two daughters. In 1991, he moved to a plot of land belonging to his mother on the Poospatuck reservation, nestled on the banks of the Mastic River. “It changed my life because I knew I was going to get into issues affecting the reservation,” he said.

Mr. Wallace opened the reservation’s first full-service smoke shop, to “show the community that we could develop an economy separate and distinct from the state and that it could be done the right way.”

Other reservation residents followed his lead and also opened shops, transforming cigarette sales into a booming business as state and local taxes have driven up the cost to smokers. Of the 450 Poospatuck tribe members, 275 live on the reservation, a network of narrow streets with small houses, tidy modular homes and ramshackle trailers.

On a recent weekday, the reservation looked like a bustling cigarette shopping outlet. Signs for smoke shops were posted everywhere, and discounted cartons were sold from drive-through windows. An employee held a huge sign and directed a line of traffic to parking spots.

According to state law, nontribe members who buy cigarettes on reservations are supposed to report and pay the taxes on those purchases. Legislators have been trying for years to force tribal smoke shops to collect taxes on sales to non-Indians, but the tribes have refused, citing their status as sovereign nations.

The State Department of Taxation and Finance says the Poospatuck cigarette trade grew to 11.3 million cartons in 2007, from 406,000 cartons in 1996.

Mr. Wallace calls the estimates by the city and state drastically inflated.

Mr. Wallace, who said the number of smoke shops on the reservation has increased to 14 from 6 in the past couple of years, said he could not provide specific sales and revenue figures for the shops because he does not monitor each store’s accounting.

Mr. Wallace said his own sales of untaxed cigarettes had declined in recent years, but would not provide specific numbers.

Eric Proshansky, the city’s lead lawyer on the lawsuit, said the city’s estimates were “absolutely solid.”

Mr. Wallace said he and the tribal council are working to establish ground rules to curb abuses, such as barring phone or Internet cigarette sales and prohibiting residents of the reservation from selling cigarettes unless they have a store. He has also proposed setting sales limits and monitoring sales volume by working with the cigarette wholesalers that sell to the reservation.

But in the end, he says, tribal leaders lack strong enforcement powers over the smoke shops, partly because they do not have their own police department.

While he has called the Suffolk County Police to help with lawbreakers on the reservation in the past, he said he is reluctant to do so now because of heightened tensions between the tribe and the county. “We can’t ask them help us enforce our council decisions, because now all they care about is tobacco and taxation — they just want to come in and shut everything down,” he said.

As he spoke, Mr. Wallace moved aside a candle he lights to mask the smell of cigarettes. Though he himself is a smoker perpetually trying to quit, he explained that cigarettes are helping to breathe economic life back into his tribe. The tribal leaders require cigarette retailers to pay into a fund that goes to improve housing for tribal members and to provide money for college.

Mr. Wallace calls the challenges to cigarette sales the latest in the historical shortchanging of his tribe and its attempts at economic self-sufficiency. Though hundreds of acres of land has been taken from the Unkechaug Nation, he said, it has managed to retain a foothold because of longstanding political and cultural ties and strong trading and intertribal relationships.

As other commercial enterprises have fallen away, about the only things tribe members have left are their sovereignty and the right to conduct tax-free business, he said. “For Bloomberg, this is about his budget deficit, but for us, this is survival,” he said. “This is sovereign territory, and they are not going to collect a nickel without our consent.”

Audio: Tito Naranjo on the Pueblo world view — High Country News

2008-12-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

Tito Naranjo, a lifelong member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, is a writer, hunting guide, sculptor, social worker, community activist and college teacher. He holds a bachelor's degree from New Mexico Highlands University in sociology and psychology, a master’s degree in social work from the University of Utah, and has served on the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s Native American Advisory Group. You can listen to an excerpt from the audio interview, and read a transcript of the full interview.

(You may hear the interview by following the link on the title to the original article.)

High Country News: When did you first become aware of archaeology?

Tito Naranjo: I grew up in Santa Clara Pueblo until my late teen years. We were dry-farming behind Puje Pueblo and the Pajarito Plateau, about seven miles north of Los Alamos as the crow flies. Santa Clara claims all the ruins around Puje, including Garcia Canyon, across from Santa Clara on the plateau, across the creek, and so I was always aware that was where our people lived. The planting fields were passed on from generation to generation, ever since our ancestors lived at Puje Pueblo. … I was always aware that those were the ruins of our grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers, the people who came before us. The whole landscape on the Pajarito Plateau is still known by the names that were given by the people who preceded us. …. I didn’t call it archaeology, but I knew that the whole place belonged to us. Because I knew the names of the mountains, the names of the landscape and canyons and so on, before I knew the word “archaeology.” The spirits of our ancestors still dwell there, even to this day. After I got an education, I learned about archaeology, and I was able to use both. I was able to use the Tewa perception of those places, including places clear up and down the Rio Grande, up to Mesa Verde and the Four Corners area. Because the stories of where we came from go right up there to the Four Corners area, I was aware we came from that place before we arrived on the Pajarito Plateau.

HCN: You chose to live outside the boundaries of tribal land. Why?

TN: The tribe, when I was growing up, had no economy, except for tribal jobs. And the Bureau of Indian Affairs during that time was funding all the tribal programs, and it was so limited that one couldn’t get a job on the reservation. So we were eligible for jobs off the reservation. … And so, you know, it was a natural pull. There was always a pull off the reservation because of the wage economy, and always a pull to go back to the reservation. So I was doing both – I was working off the reservation for the money it brought in to support a family, and also able to go back and participate in the life of the Pueblo, ceremonies and religious activities and so on.

HCN: About four years ago, you wrote an essay about the Taos Pueblo deer dance, and as a result you were banned from Taos Pueblo – they felt you had exposed private, sacred rites. What happened with that? Are you still banned?

TN: Well, I was there last Thursday; I drove into Taos Pueblo. Since I was banned in December of 2003, administrations have changed, and younger people have taken over. Many of the elders have died who initiated the action – they don’t have the same feelings toward me as those people about my age had when they banished me.

HCN: How do you walk that line between honoring what’s sacred to your people and illuminating that art and culture for other people?

TN: Taos Pueblo has a different viewpoint than my own pueblo. I lived in Taos Pueblo, I lived around Taos Pueblo and spent some 54 years in Taos Pueblo, on the reservation, back in their mountains. I participated in their ceremonies, and I was accepted by the people there until I wrote the story of the Taos Pueblo deer dance. … And what I wrote about was what hundreds of thousands of people have seen happening in the Taos Pueblo deer dance, except that I understand it much deeper than outsiders do. What I wrote about was primarily secular, it wasn’t of a sacred nature. There’s very much more to the Taos Pueblo deer dance than what I wrote. ... I do realize that those people who believe in the power of the word, the power of the song and the power of the ceremony, are correct in their belief, because that’s how it’s been for hundreds and thousands of years. So I respect the people for their beliefs. … My father-in-law was the leader of one of the kivas, and so I understood from him that they considered everything that was written -- the written word -- killed the power of the spoken word. It relegates it to death. … The Bureau of Indian Affairs forbid Taos Pueblo people to practice their ceremonies, just like the Spaniards did to all of the pueblos along the Rio Grande. In 1921, the commissioner strode into Taos Pueblo and said, you can’t do a dance until we let you, until you ask permission and we give that permission. Well, that doesn’t work when you’re practicing religion. So that was one of the turning points in history, when people began to hide everything. Prior to that, the Deer Dance was painted and drawn, and numbers of sculptures done of the Deer Dance.

HCN: How do you think this will play out ultimately? Do you think the tribe will open up further, or do you think white people can ever understand the culture and history and appreciate it?

TN: Non-Indian, non-natives of a particular pueblo are not able to understand the rules and integrated culture and the history of any particular pueblo. That is impossible, because they don’t speak the language fluently, and they were also never raised from childhood in the pueblos. In order to know the worldview of a pueblo, you have to have lived within the context of (it). And each of the pueblos have different dialects. … Archaeologists and anthropologists cannot understand the worldview unless they grew up in the context of the pueblo. That’s absolutely clear in my mind.

HCN: How do you think the tensions between Native Americans and archaeologists and anthropologists will play out?

TN: In some cases, there’s no tension. I’ve visited Mesa Verde, and especially when the tour leaders are Native Americans, they allow Native Americans into the kiva, to pray in the kiva, because there’s a belief that the spirits of the people are still there in that particular place. And so we give them thanks for allowing us to visit that place. Some Navajo tour guides are also sensitive to that. Pueblo tour guides are very sensitive to that. Non-Indians aren’t so sensitive, and they won’t let you go to places that give the whole place meaning. So sometimes there’s tension and sometimes there’s no tension. I served on the board of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, and Crow Canyon has a Native American Advisory Board, and Canyons of the Ancients advisory group, which has now done its work, were also good about inviting Native Americans onto the advisory board. When one knows about the methods they are using, it’s clear that there’s an underlying tension. … They never consider those places that are sacred to us, and bones on the surface of the ground that they never take care of -- they have no respect for that. I’ve seen it. All they want to know is, what’s the meaning of this? What’s the meaning of that? Native Americans have a lot to offer to both anthropologists and archaeologists, and archaeologists and anthropologists seemingly -- some do -- think that they always know better, because they’re literate in the anthropological and archaeological method, and they consider that research, while we don’t think in the same terms. There’s always that tension there, the underlying tension. For example, the Native American Advisory Board at Crow Canyon does not want sacred places to be excavated. But archaeology is coming up with new means (such as) radiology, that they can draw the outlines of a pueblo or outlines of an arroyo, whatever it might be. Noninvasive methods are quite acceptable.

HCN: So maybe that’s finally how it will be resolved, through new technologies that will allow noninvasive ways of discovery.

TN: If archaeologists and anthropologists give up their high-and-mighty status of doing scientific research and begin to understand that we’re not dead, you know? We haven’t gone away, we’re still here. I talk the same language. I could talk to my ancestors, although I’m sure the language has changed over the years -- many hundreds of thousands of years -- basically, the language is still the same. That’s very clear, in the example of the Hopi Tewa, when they come to visit their original homeland, over here in what they call the White Striped Place, where they lived, their sacred homeland. Well, now it’s owned by non-Indians. All the villages throughout the area belong to BLM.
Americans sometimes are just totally impervious to the knowledge of the Pueblo people, who still know of the history of their people, because they’ve kept their beliefs and their stories alive over the centuries. A lot of anthropologists and archaeologists disregard the knowledge of Pueblo people.

HCN: Thank you very much for speaking with us.

This transcript of the audio interview with Tito Naranjo was slightly edited for clarity.

Native Hunters - Climate Is Thinning Caribou Herds

2008-12-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

POZNAN, Poland (AP) -- Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene nation in northern Canada brought a stark warning about the climate crisis: The once abundant herds of caribou are dwindling, rivers are running lower and the ice is too thin to hunt on.

Erasmus raised his concerns in recent days on the sidelines of a U.N. climate conference, seeking to ensure that North America's indigenous peoples are not left out in the cold when it comes to any global warming negotiations.

Erasmus, the 54-year-old elected leader of 30,000 native Americans in Canada, and representatives of other indigenous peoples met with the U.N.'s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, and have lobbied national delegations to recognize them as an ''expert group'' that can participate in the talks like other nongovernment organizations.

''We bring our traditional knowledge to the table that other people don't have,'' he said.

Nearly 11,000 national and environmental delegates from 190 countries are negotiating a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which regulates emissions of carbon dioxide that scientists blame for global warming. The protocol expires in 2012.

The alliance of native peoples include groups from the forests of Borneo to the depths of the Amazon.

De Boer said he advised the alliance to draw up a proposal and muster support among the national delegations to have their group approved by the countries involved in the talks.

''To give indigenous people and local communities a voice in these discussions is very important,'' said Kim Carstensen, the climate change director for WWF International.

Erasmus, from Yellow Knife in Canada's Northwest Territories about 300 miles (480 kilometers) south of the Arctic Circle, brings firsthand experience of climate change.

The caribou, or reindeer, herds are declining across North America and northern Europe, he said.

''We can't hunt because the ice is not frozen yet. Our hunters are falling through the ice, and lives are being lost,'' Erasmus told The Associated Press. This winter the normally dry area has been covered by thick, wet snow, further hampering hunting, he said.

Petroleum extraction from the Canadian tar sands is draining the underground water table and reducing the flow of the rivers northward, and the effects are felt hundreds of miles away, he said.

He is concerned that warmer winters will mean less luxurious fur on the muskrat and beaver that his people sell.

Nearly 40 years ago, he said, tribal elders noticed changes in the annual migrations of animals. The weather, which they could forecast three weeks in advance from animal behavior and the appearance of the sunsets, is now unpredictable.

Scientists have warned that conditions in the Arctic are a barometer of climate change. The region is warming faster than more temperate zones, and the seas are ice-free for longer periods. The melting of the permafrost threatens to release stored methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, U.N. scientists have reported.

Tradition Counts More Than Beauty at a Pageant

2008-12-01T20:42:00.000-07:00

By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: December 1, 2008
JAYUYA, P.R. — The seven girls posed, preened and smiled with all the energy of Miss Universe contestants, but this was no ordinary pageant.

Students practicing a folk dance at a cultural center in Jayuga, Puerto Rico. More Photos >
The competitors, from about 6-years-old to 16, had just paraded through a downpour to a small stage surrounded by mountains, where they displayed elaborate outfits handmade from wood, plants or, in one case, jingling shells. And the judges also sought a special kind of beauty: those who most resembled Puerto Rico’s native Indian tribe, the Taíno, received higher marks.

“It’s different,” said Félix González, president of the National Indigenous Festival of Jayuya, of which the pageant is a part. “It’s not white culture and blue eyes; it says that the part of our blood that comes from indigenous culture is just as important.”

Puerto Ricans have long considered themselves a mix of African, European and Native American influences. But since the 1960s, the Taíno — a tribe wiped from the Antilles by European conquest, disease and assimilation — has come to occupy a special place in the island’s cultural hierarchy.

The streets of Old San Juan are lined with museums and research centers dedicated to unearthing Taíno artifacts and rituals. Children are taught from a young age that “hurricane” is Taíno in origin, from the word “huracán,” while no Latin pop music concert is complete without a shout out to Boricuas — those from Borinquen, the Taíno name for Puerto Rico, which means “land of the brave noble lord.”

The ties may be more than cultural. In 2003, Juan Martinez Cruzado, a geneticist at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, found that at least 61 percent of Puerto Ricans possess remnants of Taíno DNA — and nearly all seem to believe they belong in that group.

“The Indian heritage is very important because it unites the Puerto Rican community,” said Miguel Rodríguez López, an archaeologist with the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, an independent graduate school in San Juan. “There is a feeling that it represents our primary roots.”

He added, “It is our symbolic identity.”

In Jayuya, a town of a few thousand people in the mountains north of Ponce, Taíno celebrations began decades ago. When local leaders discovered in the mid-60s that the town was named for a Taíno chief, they commissioned a sculpture to honor him. It was dedicated in November 1969 at the first indigenous festival, and every year since, the chief’s stern eyes have looked out over the event from a perch above the central plaza.

At times, he has been forced to share space with the more modern forces that decimated his people. One of the city’s major archaeological sites, discovered here two years ago, sits across from a Burger King. And before the pageant began on Saturday night, a performance of traditional Taíno dance competed with a pop song from Maná, Latin America’s biggest rock band.

Mostly though, the Taíno influence in Jayuya seems to have merged with its surroundings. The standard Taíno sun symbol, called a guanin, is now carved into the Spanish-style plaza. Many of the crafts being sold at the festival, like jewelry, purses and soap, also included Taíno symbols.

And even the pageant is a hybrid. Actual Taíno women wore only loincloths. But with the influence of local teenagers, the costumes have become exponentially more extravagant A few years ago, organizers had to limit their size to 8 feet high by 6 feet wide.

Even with those boundaries, which, of course, the teenagers tried to push, the costumes amounted to a mix of homecoming queen, Halloween, “Last of the Mohicans” and Las Vegas showgirl.

Mr. Rodríguez, the archaeologist and a former judge of the pageant, compared it to Brazil’s carnival. “It’s a sincretismo,” he said, using the Spanish word for “syncretism.” “They mix different cultures, different beliefs.”

Some scholars have scoffed at the concept, saying it is more a reflection of the joke that Puerto Ricans love festivals enough to have one for every cause or crustacean. But Mr. Rodríguez defended the idea. “You have to enjoy it because it’s for the people,” he said.

The contestants clearly love it. Natalia Fernandez, 16, said she had spent a month and half building her outfit, which required her to carry on her back a wooden Taíno dancer weighing at least 25 pounds, with a sprout above his head the size of a small coffee table.

Her bangs had been cut, her dark hair was straight (in a nod to what is considered Taíno style) and her naturally copper-colored skin made her appear as Native American as Chief Jayuya. But she was also 100 percent teenager. Asked before the contest how she thought she would do, she fiddled with her cellphone and said, “I’m going to win.”

The event started an hour late, and the rain and competition seemed to surprise Natalia. She frowned under the downpour, looking chilled with a bare midriff and no shoes, as she glanced nervously at the girl with shells and starfish netted in a four-foot-high headdress.

But her fears were unfounded. After all the girls introduced themselves and explained their outfits, the judges called Natalia’s name last, like all great pageant winners. Her friends and family cheered loudly from beneath umbrellas as she smiled and twirled for the digital cameras.

“It’s about a beautiful culture,” she said before taking the stage. “It’s not about just beauty.”

Obama appoints Native officials to transition team

2008-11-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

By JODI RAVE of the Missoulian

As President-elect Barack Obama appoints a new team of cabinet members and fills other key federal work posts, he's named six Native people to his transition team - half of them assigned to assist in Interior Department policy, budget and personnel changes.

“We're lucky to have such stellar representatives with people with whom Indian Country has really good relationships,” said Jacqueline Johnson-Pata, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, a nonprofit organization that represents more than 250 tribes.

So far, Mary Smith, Mary McNeil and Yvette Robideaux have been assigned to work on justice, agriculture and health issues, while three current and former attorneys with the Native American Rights Fund - John Echohawk, Keith Harper and Robert Anderson - will advise Obama on changes proposed within the Interior Department.

As advisers to the Interior transition team, the Indian law experts could inspire a significant transformation within the department's Indian trust fund system, an organizational debacle that has been subject to 12 years of litigation during the Cobell vs. Kempthorne suit.

“This is our last big chance to get a lot of things done,” said Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff from Montana's Blackfeet Nation in the class action lawsuit. “It's like a broken record every time we have a hearing. Nothing really happens. Maybe if we get the right people in these positions, we can all work together: the tribes, Congress and the administration.”

The Native American Rights Fund, a tribal justice and legal rights organization based in Boulder, Colo., has helped represent a half-million Native landowners in the Cobell suit. Landowners claim Interior Department agency officials - including the Office of Special Trustee, Bureau of Land Management, Minerals Management Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs - have mismanaged billions of dollars of their income earned from sales of timber, oil and gas, and grazing leases.

Echohawk, NARF's executive director of more than 30 years, also served as a transition adviser for former President Bill Clinton.

Harper was the lead NARF attorney in the Cobell case. He remains the only Native representative assigned to the highest ranks of the Obama transition, where he has been named a “team lead” for the Interior Department. Harper also served as the Native policy adviser during the Obama campaign.

He currently heads up Native affairs for the Washington, D.C., law firm Kilpatrick Stockton. He was named as one of the 50 “Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America” by the 2008 National Law Journal. And he is a lead attorney in the Cobell suit.

Rounding out the Interior advisers to the Obama transition team, Anderson worked 12 years as a senior staff attorney for NARF, where he litigated state, tribal and federal jurisdiction cases, including water, hunting and fishing rights cases.

Transition team updates are being made at www.change.gov.

“President-elect Obama has set a high bar for the transition team to execute the most efficient, organized and transparent transfer of power in American history,” said John Podesta, co-chairman of the presidential transition team, in a news release.

“First, we adopted the strictest ethics guidelines ever applied to any transition team. President-elect Obama pledged to change the way Washington works, and that begins with shifting influence away from special interests and restoring it to the everyday Americans who are passionate about fixing the problems facing our country.”

Job seekers are being encouraged to submit their resumes, and many Native people have already done so.

“The team expands constantly as they look for gaps and bring in other people, said Johnson-Pata. “Every time I look at the list, I see new names on it. We're lucky. We have several Native Americans in a variety of different places.”

Spoken Word Club Explores Indian Identity, History

2008-11-20T08:15:00.000-07:00

Through verse, members of the Spoken Word Club at the Santa Fe Indian School articulate identities both modern and traditional, and maintain links to the past through native language and culture.

After Stevens, Questions for the Alaska Native Corporations

2008-10-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Published: October 29, 2008
The Alaska Native corporations have had Senator Ted Stevens to thank nearly every step of the way.

In 1971, a few years after he was first elected to the Senate, Mr. Stevens helped write the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Also known as the “Billion Dollar Deal,” the act established more than 200 corporations to manage almost 45 million acres and gave $962 million to Alaska Natives in return for their ceding of all aboriginal land rights.

When the Alaska Native corporations struggled in their early years as they tried to turn people who had survived on fishing and hunting into business managers and to teach thousands of villagers to call themselves shareholders, Senator Stevens was there, too.

He helped corporations with financial difficulties by persuading Congress to approve a provision in the 1986 Tax Reform Act allowing the corporations to sell their accumulated tax losses to profitable companies seeking tax write-offs.

That same year, Senator Stevens introduced legislation that allowed Alaska Native corporations to participate in a Small Business Administration 8(a) contracting program, a provision that has proven lucrative to many of them.

And just a month ago, in the wake of questions that some of the corporations were misusing the contracting program, he successfully pushed Congress to remove a provision from the 2009 Defense Authorization Act that would have limited their access.

After his conviction on Monday on charges he violated federal ethics laws by failing to report tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and services he had received from friends, Senator Stevens’s future in Congress is uncertain.

But Louis A. Thompson, 72, who has run one of the corporations, Kavilco Inc., for 36 years, said the companies had grown into sophisticated operations that could stand on their own. “Senator Stevens was very helpful early on and not just to Alaska Native corporations, to all Alaskans,” he said. “But times have changed.”

Indeed, the Alaska Native corporations have made strides since the early days, when they built seafood plants before negotiating for fish deliveries and constructed hotels in remote villages that had never seen tourists. Today, they consistently rank among state’s largest businesses. The small-business 8(a) contracting program has been important to that success.

As of May, 187 Alaska Native-owned companies were participating in the 8(a) program, according to a report by the Small Business Administration’s Office of Inspector General. From 2000 to 2006, Alaska Native corporations won nearly $13 billion in federal contracts.

Maver E. Carey, 41, the leader of one of those corporations, sees the federal contracts as the future of her business. And other small corporations are looking to her to help them navigate the complicated and expensive path to federal business.

Her enterprise, the Kuskokwim Corporation, represents Aniak and nine other remote Alaska communities. Its responsibilities cover a geographic area larger than New England, but without cellphone towers, major road systems or many jobs. “In Kalskag, one of our largest villages, there are 80 homes and 40 of them don’t have running water,” Ms. Carey said.

Kuskokwim’s 2,903 shareholders want regular corporate dividends, and many also seek educational and employment opportunities from the corporation.

Kuskokwim was founded in 1977 when 10 village corporations decided that they did not have the staff or resources to build businesses alone. The merged entity formed a headquarters in Anchorage and eked out dividends primarily through investments in Alaska real estate and a conservative portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Ms. Carey, whose maternal grandparents are Yupik Eskimo and Athabascan Indian, turned to Kuskokwim in 1994 after earning a college degree, working for an engineering firm and being laid off. “My village corporation offered me $9 an hour and I took it thinking I’d continue to look for a real job,” she said. By 2003, after she had worked in every corporate department, the board asked her to become the chief executive.

She pushed diversification, with a goal of building Kuskokwim’s shareholder equity to $100 million by 2015. Last year, it topped $18 million, up from $14 million in 2006. In 2005, the company started TKC Development Inc. to focus on federal contracting. TKC subsidiaries have won work from the United States Navy and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Last year, Ms. Carey started an Alaska Native village corporation association. Her inspiration came from conversations with other chief executives facing challenges similar to her own. A membership drive under way has registered about 50 Native corporation executives.

Their goal is to be as successful as the Afognak Native Corporation, one of Alaska’s largest businesses. Afognak is owned by 700 shareholders descended from the Alutiiq people of the Kodiak Archipelago. In 2006, its profits reached $18.8 million on revenue of $537.9 million, the latest figures available. That year, each shareholder received a dividend payment of $21,688. Afognak employs 5,000 people globally, and about 50 of them are shareholders.

Afognak is now run by a non-native chief executive with significant government experience. It won the first of its major contracts in 2000, when it secured a deal to operate Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. In recent years, it has won a contract to build a brigade combat team complex worth more than $100 million at Fort Bragg, N.C., and another worth more than $50 million to renovate the United States Embassy in São Paulo.

Still, there have been questions about the 8(a) contracts that have gone to Afognak and other Alaska Native companies. A 2006 study by the federal Government Accountability Office called for better S.B.A. supervision of Alaska Native corporations that hold 8(a) contracts. The agency’s inspector general is currently conducting an audit of S.B.A. oversight of 10 to 15 of the largest Alaska Native corporations engaged in federal contracting.

In August, it found that two companies, Goldbelt Raven L.L.C., owned by Goldbelt Inc. of Juneau, and APM L.L.C., a subsidiary of the Cape Fox Corporation of Ketchikan, violated terms of the contracting program by entering into agreements that resulted in millions of dollars in 8(a) revenues being paid to companies owned by non-native managers. The administration suspended them from the program and moved to end their eligibility. Both companies are appealing the move, according to officials representing Goldbelt and APM.

Steve Colt, the interim director at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at University of Alaska, who has studied Alaska Native corporations, said that many of the corporations struggled to stay afloat in their first two decades of operations and that Mr. Stevens and the rest of the Alaska delegation worked hard to keep them in business.

“If you look at the historical record, there were lots of incidents of Stevens being very helpful to Alaska Native corporations,” Mr. Colt said. “But I suspect that the number of assists has decreased over time.” He predicted that whoever holds the United States Senate seat for Alaska in the future will fight for legislation that protects Alaska Native corporations because they now have a major impact on the state’s economy.

Sherman Alexie on the Colbert Report

2008-10-29T06:43:00.003-07:00

If you don't see the embedded video, follow the link on the title to see Sherman Alexie's appearance on The Colbert Report.
A Must See!

Obama's Play for Indian Country

2008-10-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

Washington Dispatch: Barack Obama has vowed to expand the electoral map for the Dems. Turning out the politically neglected Native American vote may be the key to doing so.

By Nick Baumann

October 27, 2008

If Barack Obama wins New Mexico on November 4, he may want to thank Wizipan Garriott, the vote director of what the Obama campaign calls its "First Americans" voter outreach program. The effort targets the politically neglected but heavily Democratic Native American vote, which Obama strategists believe could be critical to putting some historically red states into play for Obama.

The Obama campaign is reluctant to discuss the details of its ground game, but it's clear the campaign's Native American outreach strategy is extensive. The campaign has two Chicago-based staffers devoted to coordinating the nationwide effort, and Garriott has recruited locals on reservations around the country to serve as paid organizers. Montana, Alaska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Mexico have all been targeted at points in the campaign.

"If you're going to compete in traditionally red states as a Democrat, if you're going to expand the electoral map, then you're going to have to compete in places where native voices are of some considerable significance," says Keith Harper, a member of the Cherokee Nation who serves as the chair of Obama's Native American Policy Committee. "From time to time has a Democratic candidate opened an office on a reservation? Yes. But we have native outreach directors in numerous states. Before, it was hit or miss, little bit here, little bit there. Right now it's a comprehensive effort."

One of Obama's signature promises during the primary was that he could expand the electoral map for Democrats. And the Obama campaign sees an opening to do so in several reliably red states in the American West that have sizable Native American populations. Native Americans make up only about 1 percent of the population in the crucial swing states of Nevada and Colorado. But they're a significant presence in North Dakota (4.8 percent) and Montana (6.4 percent). And Indian country comprises nearly 10 percent of the population of New Mexico, which George W. Bush won by only a few thousand votes in 2004.

"Within many of these western states, particularly those who have over the last couple decades elected Republicans, one of the ways in which Democrats have been competitive is to ensure that they have been responsive to tribal communities," Harper says. "Democrats who have made a concerted effort to reach out to Indian country have solidified their base."

Mary Bowannie, a lecturer in Native American studies at the University of New Mexico who teaches a course called "The Native Vote," says she's noticed the Obama campaign has placed more of an emphasis on Native American voters than past Democratic candidates. "There's really been a push to get out the vote in Native American communities," she says. "There's a lot of participation and excitement. When [John] Kerry ran, he had people on the ground, but it was very much focused on getting the tribal leadership behind them. They did have some focus on community and getting out the vote, but not as much as they have recently."

It seems that the Obama campaign may be making its move for the Indian vote at just the right time, too. George Hardeen, the communications director for Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr., who has endorsed Obama, says that Navajos appear to be paying more attention to politics this year than ever before: "Access to information in a place as geographically isolated as the Navajo Nation is as great as it ever has been, and that alone has moved the message in. So even traditional Navajo people like my mother-in-law, who speaks no English...she knows who Obama is, and she knows who John McCain is. They're not watching Fox and CNN, but they are forming opinions."

For observers of Native American politics, one race in particular exemplifies this bloc's ability to determine an election. Late on election night in 2002, Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) was losing, with only a few counties left to report. It was already a banner election year for Republicans, who would finish the night having regained control of the Senate and expanded their majority in the House. Among the last votes to come in that night were from the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, which includes Shannon County, the least white, most Native American, and second-poorest county in America. State Democrats' ambitious get-out-the-vote campaign had increased turnout among the state's Native Americans by more than 70 percent.

When all the votes were counted, more than 90 percent of Shannon County went for Johnson, who won by 524 votes over John Thune. (Republicans would later claim, falsely, that "phony Indian votes" stole the election for Johnson.)

"We swung that election," says Garriott. "And it was a huge win that reverberated around the nation. Since that time, there's been a lot more attention paid to the Indian vote."

Indian country has also been credited with delivering Montana to Bill Clinton in 1992 and a Senate seat for Democrat Maria Cantwell in Washington in 2000. In 2006, Montana Democrat Jon Tester unseated incumbent Conrad Burns due in part to vastly increased Native American turnout.

As Garriott notes, Indians' effectiveness as a voting bloc has traditionally been limited because Native Americans register to vote at far lower rates than the general population. So if the Democrats need Indian country to win in the West, they're also going to need to raise registration rates.

In concert with its outreach program, the Obama campaign began soliciting endorsements from tribal leaders as early as January 2007. It has thus far received public support from more than 100 tribal leaders and more than 20 tribes. Despite representing a state with no federally recognized tribes, Obama has put together a far-reaching Indian policy platform, calling for a White House senior adviser on Indian issues and a yearly "Tribal G8," which would bring leaders of different Indian nations together in Washington to meet with the president and help fashion the federal government's Native American policy agenda.

Sam Deloria, a long-time advocate of Native American causes, says endorsements are all well and good, but he's glad campaigns are no longer just focusing on tribal leaders. "Getting the tribal leadership to endorse you doesn't mean that they're going to put together a get-out-the-vote machine for you at their own expense," says Deloria, a lifelong independent. Both parties are starting to realize, he says, "If you want the votes, you're going to have to go out and get them."

So what about John McCain? If any Republican could have a shot at the Native American vote, it's the Arizona senator. McCain represents a state with 20 federally recognized tribes and is a former chair of the Senate Indian Affairs committee, where he oversaw the investigation that put Jack Abramoff in jail for defrauding the Native American tribes that were his clients. Hardeen, the Navajo president's spokesman, says McCain has a long history of maintaining good relationships with tribes. When Hardeen was a reporter, McCain spoke to him briefly about his relationship with tribes. "He told me his proudest moment in politics was receiving the endorsement of every Arizona tribe when he ran for reelection in the Senate. That's how well he was respected by tribes then," Hardeen says.

But for McCain the problem of history remains. Native Americans are traditionally Democratic voters, so he is automatically at a disadvantage when trying to convince a poor, rural population with scant access to information to back him. In many traditional homes (known as "hogans") in Navajo country, it's common to see pictures of John F. Kennedy. "I can't explain why John Kennedy resonated with traditional Navajo people going back all the way to the early '60s," Hardeen says. But he did. And Obama is poised to benefit from that.

On Thursday, the AP reported John McCain was drastically cutting his ad spending in Colorado. New Mexico has looked out of reach for the Republicans for some time. Kalyn Free, the head of the Indigenous Democratic Network, an organization that focuses on recruiting Native American candidates and mobilizing Indian voters, doesn't think it's over yet. But she's confident of one thing: "The next president of the United States will not win the White House without the Indian vote. We've come a long way."

Danny's gone, but he helped his O'odham culture live on

2008-10-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

By Tom Beal
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 10.22.2008

Danny Lopez, noted Tohono O'odham storyteller, was born beneath a mesquite tree in the Tohono O'odham village of Gu Oidak (Big Field).
As a boy, he helped his family water the fields by damming the arroyos as monsoon season approached.
As a young man, he moved to Tucson to work in the mines.
As an adult, he pursued his education and moved home to learn and teach his culture to a new generation.

As he lay dying in St. Mary's Hospital, his wife, Florence, held her cell phone to his ear as his students at Tohono O'odham Community College sang songs to him in the traditional tongue he had taught them.
Lopez died early Tuesday of stomach cancer. He was 71.

Lopez was a teacher, singer and storyteller who inspired his students with his own lifelong quest for knowledge.

Friend and colleague Ofelia Zepeda said Lopez, who held a master's degree in linguistics from Prescott College, was enrolled this semester in a linguistics course at the University of Arizona.
He continued to attend the UA's summer linguistics institute even as his eyesight deteriorated, said Zepeda, a noted poet and compiler of an O'odham dictionary, who is a Regents professor of linguistics at the UA.
It was part of his method of teaching, said friend Tristan Reader, co-director of Tohono O'odham Community Action.
"He felt it was one of the greatest things you can teach, that learning lasts through your life. It was his way of teaching. He didn't talk about the values . . . he lived them," said Reader.

Ethnohistorian Bunny Fontana devoted a chapter of his 1981 book, "Of Earth and Little Rain," to Danny Lopez. He called him an "exemplar of O'odham Himdag (the O'odham way of life)."
"He embodies all of those wonderful qualities that make up a traditional O'odham person," said Fontana.
"He was born under a mesquite tree in Big Field. He once pointed out the space, and I thought to myself: 'Most of us are born in a hospital or whatnot, but you talk about attachment to the earth, there it was.' "
Fontana visited Lopez in the hospital shortly before his death as he received a call from his students at the community college. Florence Lopez, Danny's wife, held up her cell phone so he could hear.
"They'd been practicing this song for two days. They wanted to sing a traditional song in O'odham to Danny. It went on for five minutes or more, and there was this angelic expression on Danny's face."

Lopez "could have run entire schools, he was such a competent educator," said naturalist and author Gary Paul Nabhan, a friend and sometime collaborator.
Instead, after he got his master's, he went back to teaching first- and second-graders because, "He thought if this language is going to keep among our people, we have to make sure the kids are comfortable with it.
"He cared so deeply about his culture and its traditions."

When he first met him, said Nabhan, Lopez was a dedicated student of his culture, interviewing elders and learning stories, songs and dances from the "great people" in the community who are considered important because of their knowledge of the culture.
Years ago, said Nabhan, he encouraged Lopez to write his own songs. "He said to me, 'The people that composed these songs aren't around anymore. You can't just pick it up. You have to dream your songs.' "
"He immersed himself so much in that tradition that he did become a singer and composer. . . . He became the 'great people,' " Nabhan said.

"He was a pretty extraordinary, wonderful, great guy," said fellow storyteller Jim Griffith.
Lopez formed a children's dance troupe that performed regularly at the San Xavier Festival, said Griffith. "His kids would always dance and he'd give a little talk."
Griffith said Lopez would tell the audience that O'odham culture had been devastated, their language was disappearing, their land was mostly occupied, and then say, "But we're very happy to have you here and we hope you enjoy the dance and the music."
There was no rancor in it, no bitterness at all in the man, Griffith said.
"He was a man who moved into Tucson, worked for the mine and apparently woke up one morning to realize he was in the process of losing something terribly important, and devoted the rest of his life to making sure that as little as possible of those important things disappeared.
"He worked very hard to make sure the kids, especially, had a chance to know who they are."

Lopez taught in the O'odham primary and middle schools and also at the community college level.
In addition, he had many students in the community.
Ronald Geronimo said he first approached Lopez when he wanted to enhance his knowledge of his culture.
"He said, 'Come back the next day' and he had a group of singers in his house. I read books and other things, but I realized that to really know, you have to live it. You can't just read it."
Geronimo, who is finishing up his master's thesis on Native American linguistics at the UA, is taking over one of Lopez's courses at the community college and plans to return when his studies are done "to pass on the knowledge I've gained and whatever I've learned and to try to keep the culture part of people's lives."

A viewing will be held at the San Xavier Elderly Center on Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m.
A wake and funeral will be held in the village of Gu Oidak, beginning with a 5 p.m. Mass Sunday. The funeral is scheduled for dawn on Monday.

Danny is survived by Florence, his wife of 46 years; his three children, Monica, Michael and Mark Lopez, all of Gu Oidak; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Scoundrels and scandals in the Interior Department — High Country News

2008-10-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

As the last vestiges of laissez-faire capitalism were being lowered into the ground on Wall Street last month, out on the Western edge of the high plains an administrative circus of a similar nature was unraveling. Its center was the Minerals Management Services (MMS) division of the Interior Department, in Lakewood, Colo.

On Sept.10, Earl Devaney, the Interior Department's Inspector General, released a report to Congress that documented -- in lurid and embarrassing detail -- the widespread use of sex, bribes and drugs by MMS employees to lubricate their professional relationships with officials of the oil and mineral industries.

What, you may ask, is the Minerals Management Service?

This is the office responsible for collecting royalties from energy companies that drill for oil and gas on public land owned by you and me. Last year alone, more than $14 billion in royalties was collected by MMS and deposited in our account. We cannot be sure of the real total, however, since MMS accounts are so bungled that no one can be sure if the reckoning is close to correct. Coincidentally, the MMS is also responsible for collecting royalties for resources taken from more than 11 million acres of Indian land.

It's a shame the Devaney report didn't stop with the drugs and orgies, since taxpayers deserve just a little vicarious entertainment along with all the bad news. But while the story's entertainment value was mostly swamped by the meltdown on Wall Street, few of its particulars were lost on the 400,000 plus plaintiffs in a lawsuit known as Cobell vs. Interior.

Indian plaintiffs have been waiting patiently to be paid $47 billion dollars in royalties they allege were stolen from Indian trust lands by government and industry officials since 1887, when Uncle Sam first began to manage Indian resources. For those who have not been following the American saga of Elouise Cobell, a community organizer for the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Mont., and the lead plaintiff in this case, here's a recap of the highlights of her quest.

* In 1996, Cobell filed a lawsuit against the federal government for failing to account for tens of billions of dollars in mineral royalties that were never credited to Indian trust accounts. The suit quickly grew into the largest class-action lawsuit in American history.

* Accountants for Price Waterhouse studied the records and concluded that $50 billion in absconded revenues was probably a conservative number. Cobell played it safe and sued for $47 billion.

* Federal District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, a conservative from Texas who was appointed by the senior George Bush, oversaw the case until 2006. During that decade, Lamberth cited foot-dragging Interior Secretaries three times for contempt of court.

* In 2006, Lamberth had heard enough from federal officials. He was irate, declaring the Interior Department to be "the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago… For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past…this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few."

A month after throwing down that gauntlet, Lamberth was removed from the case at the request of the second Bush administration.

On Aug. 7, 2008, Lamberth's replacement, Judge James Robertson, tried to end the case by awarding the Indians $455.6 million. Cobell scoffed at the figure and declared that Robertson's decision would not stand: "It's factually wrong and legally wrong, so we have to challenge it.” Attorneys for the Interior Department filed their own appeal, arguing that Robertson had no right to award the Indian landowners any money at all.

If you look hard enough, eventually you'll find a cool head who can make sense of all this. One such observer is Craig Miner, author of The Corporation and the Indian. He said that the real significance of the federal government's looting of Indian trust funds is this: The money was not only held back from its rightful owners, it was also used to help private industry exploit the mineral wealth on Indian lands.

An honorable people would have brought this shameful story to a just end long ago.

Paul VanDevelder is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Corvallis, Oregon, and is the author of several books. His latest, Savages and Scoundrels: the Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Country, is due out in 2009.

News from NM: Navajo Nation Rally for Obama

2008-10-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

The Navajo are the largest tribe in the United States, with something like 200,000 resident tribal members. Their reservation spans territory within the boundaries of three of the Four Corners states - Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.

Utah's safe Republican. Arizona probably is, too, especially since it's McCain's home state - with at least two of his many houses located there. Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr (elected) has already endorsed Barack Obama, and endorsed Barack Obama, in the New Mexico part of the reservation tomorrow - the day that early voting launches in New Mexico.

From today's Farmington Daily Times:

Mutton stew, fry bread, hamburgers and hotdogs will be served at the outdoor rally.

If you've ever read Tony Hillerman's novels (or if you've been there), you know the roads aren't exactly good. And that the people live scattered widely throughout the desert landscape, many without telephones or electricity. So GOTV is not a trivial undertaking in this corner of Indian Country. The Central Consolidated School District Center in Shiprock is serving as an Early Voting polling place.

Taos Pueblo

I've diaried about voting at Taos Pueblo before. Next Thursday, there will be a GOTV rally there - with a powwow drum group, musician Robert Mirabal, and frito pies for supper. (Looks like I'm gonna miss yet another of those Thursday night SNL extra shows.) In addition to NM-03 candidate Ben Ray Luján, Green candidate for Public Regulatory Commission Rick Lass will appear. There's no Republican on the ballot, so this race between a rather under-qualified Dem, and Rick Lass who got hustled onto the ballot as a Green at the last minute, could be interesting.

Musician Mirabal is registered Green himself. Taos Pueblo as a tribe has, for the first time ever this year, endorsed a Presidential candidate. Obama, of course.
Taos Pueblo voted about 94% for Kerry/Edwards in 2004. Other tribes vote predominantly Democratic for the most part, too. So GOTV efforts on-reservation make good sense. I don't know about events planned on the other 20 reservations in NM (18 other Pueblos, and two Apache groups - Jicarilla in the north and Mescalero in the south). But the Obama campaign's being pretty thorough, so I'm guessing there will be more events over the next couple of weeks, coupled with efforts to get voters to the polls early.

Nationwide
Obama has a First Americans vote director, Wizi Garriott from Rosebud Sioux. From a September interview in Indian Country Today, about why Obama has been received well in Indian Country:

I think there are a few reasons. One, of course, he is a very unique candidate and, I think, we as Indians really identify with him. He grew up in a single-parent household; his grandparents helped to raise him; he didn’t grow up with much wealth; and he knows what it’s like to struggle personally. For a lot of us in Indian country, that’s how we grew up. That’s our reality.

I think also, he’s the type of person who really listens. He doesn’t go in wanting to preach to tribal leaders about what he thinks should be done – he listens to Indian people and is willing to ask, "What are your ideas; what are your needs; how can we fix the government?"

That's a contrast with the Republicans of the Bush Administration. Dubya first ran for office saying he thought the federal trust relationship should end and what's left of the treaties be broken, and tribes become subject to state jurisdiction. Tribal leaders in this part of the world have complained that they couldn't even get anyone in this administration to have a meeting with them at all. To talk or to listen. (Unless, of course, for the few tribes who funneled a lot of money through Jack Abramoff.)

If you're interested in Indian affairs, I suggest reading the whole article on Indian Country Today (http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/politics/30714789.html). In brief, Obama's credited with being serious about nation-to-nation relations, giving more respect that the "government-to-government" practices of the feds since Nixon. Obama also promises to establish a White House staff position dedicated to Indian affairs. Plus as a constitutional lawyer, Obama understands that treaties are the highest form of law, and he's serious about honoring them.

One of the things I liked about Obama, early on in the primaries, was that he had thought out some good, substantial positions on Native America. Tom Daschle is credited with helping bring him up to speed.

Indian Country is already mostly Democratic. But this year, GOTV efforts might make the role of the country's indigenous population more important than ever. Lots of swing states have significant Indian populations - such as New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.