The Sioux received the rights to the Black Hills and other lands claimed by the Northern Cheyenne.

Signing the treaty for the Yankton Sioux was Smutty Bear who complained about the destruction of grass and trees by travelers on the Overland Trail and about the subsequent scarcity of game. Smutty Bear's complaint turned out to be prophetic. Over the next decade more tribes were pushed out onto the Plains where they were supposed to depend on the buffalo for subsistence. At the same time the buffalo herds decreased due to a combination of over-hunting, destruction of grazing by cattle herds and immigrant wagon trains, and the destruction of the environment by the railroads. Consequently, the Sioux had to hunt in lands farther west. The tyranny of the map laid down by the Americans during the Treaty of Fort Laramie was soon obsolete and did not reflect the new reality of the need to find food and clothing.

The United States has always maintained a working policy of transferring potential wealth-minerals, petroleum, timber, good farmlands-from Indians to non-Indians. Thus in 1862, when gold was discovered on Grasshopper Creek in Montana, all treaty agreements about keeping non-Indians out of Indian territory were ignored. Soon the miners were invading Indian territories with the support of the United States government. The gold discovery resulted in heavy traffic along the Montana Trail between Salt Lake City and the gold fields. The Trail passed through Shoshone territory in Utah and Idaho. On the one hand, the Indians resented the new intrusion, but they were also intrigued by the possibilities for plunder of the relatively small and unprotected miners' parties.

In 1863, American miners and others seeking a faster way to the Montana gold fields created the Bozeman trail. The trail started from the Oregon Trail near present-day Douglas, Wyoming and ran north into Montana. While livestock grazing and water were scarce along this route, it was the fastest way to the gold fields. The Americans were unconcerned that it cut through the buffalo hunting grounds of the Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne. The Indians, however, found this illegal incursion into their prime hunting grounds to be intolerable. In response they began a series of sporadic raids against the American emigrants.

In 1865, the gold fields of Virginia City, Montana were connected with points east through the Niobrara-Virginia City Wagon Road. The road cut through the hunting grounds of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes.

That same year, the Sawyers Expedition-a civilian road-building group with military escort-entered the Powder River country in Wyoming. The group of 143 men, including 118 cavalry, reached Pumpkin Buttes near present-day Wright without any Indian opposition. Here they were attacked by a war party of 600 Southern Cheyenne, Northern Cheyenne, and Sioux warriors.

After several hours of fighting, the Indians called for a truce. Dull Knife, Bull Bear, Red Cloud, and Charlie Bent met with the Americans and George Bent acted as interpreter. The Cheyenne explained to the Americans that peace would be possible on only one condition: the hanging of Colonel Chivington, the American leader in the Sand Creek massacre. The Cheyenne felt that they were strong enough to fight the U.S. troops.

Over the objections of the military officer, the civilian leader of the expedition offered the Indians bacon, sugar, coffee, flour, and tobacco in exchange for safe passage. The peace was short-lived as two troops were killed when they wandered out among the Indians.

The 12th Missouri Cavalry and the 2nd Missouri Light Artillery then entered the Powder River Country from Nebraska to wage war against the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The cavalry was armed with Spencer repeating carbines which had an effective range of 900 yards. Camped in the area, but unknown to the army, were 1,000 Sioux and Cheyenne lodges with 6,000 people.

After several encounters with Indian war parties in which the army had the advantage of superior fire power, the army decided to turn back and head for Fort Laramie. For several days a running battle was fought with Cheyenne warriors armed with bows, lances, and a few trade guns. Roman Nose, riding a white war horse, rode in front of the troops, demonstrating his bravery and prowess. While his horse was hit, Roman Nose escaped injury and the fight became known as "Roman Nose's Fight."

Roman Nose is shown above.

In 1865, an army force of 558 soldiers and 179 Indians (95 Pawnee and 84 Winnebago and Omaha) set out to attack the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho in the Powder River area where the Indians were holding their traditional summer ceremonies.

The army encountered an Arapaho village under the leadership of Black Bear and Medicine Man. By the time the army reached the village most of the warriors were mounted on their horses and the women and children had already begun their march to a new camp. For an hour, the army howitzers pounded the village and the Indian scouts killed Arapaho men, women, and children indiscriminately. As the soldiers entered the village to engage in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, the Arapaho women fought beside the men. Many of the Arapaho reached a high point near the village. The army destroyed the Arapaho village and their supplies. Eight Arapaho women and 13 children were captured; 65 Arapaho were killed; 250 lodges burned; and 500 horses captured.  

In 1866, Sioux leader Red Cloud and others met with U.S. officials at Fort Laramie to discuss the Bozeman Trail.  General Sherman provided the Indians with goodwill gifts of gunpowder, lead, and food. The Government asked permission for emigrants to cross Sioux and Cheyenne lands. In addition, General Sheridan sought permission for three forts to be built on the Bozeman Trail connecting the Platte River with Montana's mines. Red Cloud broke off negotiations because the United States had brought in soldiers to use as a threat of force. In the months that followed, the Oglala and other Sioux tribes engaged in guerrilla war along the Bozeman Trail, making it dangerous to travel.

Red Cloud is shown above.

The army, under orders to protect the gold seekers, established Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C.F. Smith along the Bozeman Trail. The army was determined to make the Bozeman Trail a major thoroughfare to the Montana gold fields. The United States government was reeling under the immense financial strain of the Civil War and saw the Montana gold fields as one answer to the financial problems.

In one battle near Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming, Captain William J. Fetterman and 80 soldiers were killed by Oglala and Cheyenne warriors. The Cheyenne were under the leadership of Little Horse, a contrary. The soldiers in the fort prepared to blow it up if the Indians broke through their defenses and the message from the fort was

"We are fighting a foe that is the devil."

Montana Territorial Governor Thomas Meagher wrote in 1866:

"As for the Sioux, and their allies and accomplices, it is my clear and positive conviction that they will never be reduced to friendly and reliable relations with the whites but by the strong and crushing hand of the military power of the nation."

In Montana, Oglala leader Red Cloud visited the Crow, bringing them gifts of tobacco, horses, and ammunition. The Oglala asked the Crow to join them in their fight against the Americans. The Crow, who had long been Oglala enemies, declined to join them.

A war party of 3,000 Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors was formed to attack the army station on the Platte River Bridge, near present-day Casper, Wyoming. The army station was protected by a wooden stockade and a company of soldiers.

The Cheyenne warriors were led by Dull Knife, White Bull, and Roman Nose. The Sioux warriors were led by Old Man Afraid of His Horses, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and Red Cloud. A small group of warriors acted as decoys and a detachment of soldiers was sent out to drive them off. Before the ambush trap could be closed, however, the soldiers were ordered back and returned without loss.  

The following morning 25 soldiers were sent out to escort a military wagon train back to the fort. They were attacked and four soldiers killed. The war party then attacked the wagon train, killing over 20 soldiers. At least seven Cheyenne were killed.

From the Indian perspective, these limited attacks were worthwhile as individual warriors accomplished heroic deeds. The war party had attained sufficient glory for one day and the warriors returned home without attacking the army station.

In 1867, the Sioux and Cheyenne continued their battles against the building of the Bozeman Trail. Dull Knife and Two Moon led the Cheyenne against soldiers near Fort C. F. Smith. Red Cloud attacked woodcutters near Fort Phil Kearny. In Montana, a war party of 700 Sioux warriors attacked a group of 19 soldiers and six civilians who were working in a hayfield. The Americans had the advantage of newer and better guns-rapid-firing, breech-loading 50 caliber Springfield rifles and repeating rifles. After several hours of battle, the Sioux withdrew.

In 1867, the Northern Arapaho under the leadership of Medicine Man met with the Americans at Fort Fetterman in an attempt to reestablish peaceful relations. Medicine Man told the Americans that they did not want to be involved in the Sioux and Cheyenne raids, nor did they want to go to the Sioux Reservation or to Indian Territory. He told them that the Arapaho wanted to stay in the north, in Montana and Wyoming.

The war over the Bozeman Trail, also known as Red Cloud's War, officially ended in 1868 with the Treaty of Fort Laramie which established the Great Sioux Reservation and preserved the Powder River and Big Horn country as un-ceded Indian territory. The reservation, according to article 2, was

"set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians".

No cession of the reservation would be valid without the signatures of three-fourths of the adult males.

The treaty was signed with 10 Sioux tribes - Brulé, Oglala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arcs,  Santee- and with the Arapaho.

The Indians were promised that they could continue to use their hunting grounds outside of the reservation for "so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase." The American government, however, was confident that the buffalo would soon be exterminated and thus the Sioux would be confined to the reservation.

The Indians promised that they would withdraw all opposition to the construction of railroads; that they would not attack the people of the United States; that they would not capture white women or children; that they would not kill or scalp white men.

From a Sioux perspective, the treaty was a success as it forced the abandonment of the Bozeman Trail through their hunting grounds and the three forts that guarded the trail.

The Arapaho felt that they had little choice but to sign the treaty. They agreed to settle on a reservation within one year: either with the Sioux or with the Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho in Oklahoma or with the Crow in Montana. Signing the treaty for the Arapaho were Black Bear, Medicine Man, Little Wolf, Littleshield, and Sorrel Horse.

Following the treaty council the army abandoned all of its forts except for Fort Fetterman in Wyoming. The Sioux burned all of the abandoned forts. The burning of the forts was a symbol of their victory against the American invasion of their country.

About a thousand years ago-approximately 1000 CE-Mississippian people established the site of Etowah in Georgia. This became a dominant regional center with massive earthen platform mounds, elaborate ritual objects, and an extensive trading network. Etowah was a planned community made possible by a productive maize-based agriculture. Archaeologists have determined that at least 140 buildings were constructed at the site. Politically, Etowah was a chiefdom with a hierarchical social organization.

Reconstruction of a house at Etowah is shown above.

One of the primary characteristics of Mississippian sites is the earthen mounds or pyramids: At Etowah there are three main platform mounds and three smaller mounds. The largest of these mounds, Mound A (sometimes called the Temple Mound) stands 19 meters (63 feet) in height and covers about three acres at its base. The construction of this mound began early in the site's history and it continued to be expanded and reconstructed over the next several centuries. There is some archaeological evidence that ritual feasting accompanied the building and rebuilding of the mound.

The summit of Mound A contained a complex of Mississippian buildings separated by open spaces. Some of these buildings were screened from public view. The largest of these buildings was 18 meters on a side. The screening of the sacred space on top of Mound A may be an indication that spiritual power was not egalitarian, but reserved for an elite group. Access to this power was controlled.

Mound A is shown above.

The earthen ramp on the front of Mound A originally had clay steps. Logs were placed on the tread of each stair. The original staircase was about 17 feet wide.

Mound B is 25 feet (7.6 meters) high while Mound C, rises to just 10 feet (3.0 meters). Mound C was created as an elite mortuary facility which emphasized the genealogical links of certain subgroups in the society.

Mound B is shown above.

Adjacent to the mounds, the Mississippian occupants of Etowah constructed a raised ceremonial plaza. This was used for ceremonies, as well as for chunkey games (which were often ceremonial in nature), and as a commercial trading area.

Some evidence of warfare or conflict can be seen in the fortification system which surrounded the town. There was both a palisade and a moat. The moat was 9 to 10 feet (2.7 to 3.0 meters) deep. The moat also functioned as a drainage system during major floods.

The palisade was built using logs. As with other Mississippian sites, the palisade was constructed by first digging a ditch and then standing logs into it. Finally it was backfilled to support the wall. The wall would have been about 12 feet (3.7 meters) high. About every 80 feet (24 meters) there were guard towers for archers.

One of the distinctive features of Mississippian culture and iconography were the distinctive paint palettes (sometimes called sun disks) which were found at Etowah. These were locally made ritual paraphernalia which were kept in sacred bundles. The palettes were generally round, about 23-33 centimeters in diameter and 2.5 centimeters thick, and made from a greenish-gray rock. All of the palettes were decorated in a similar fashion: a scalloped, notched, or rayed edge and a band of one to four lines incised on the top of the rim. These were common decorative themes in Mississippian art.

The palettes were used to mix kaolinite (a clay mineral that is pure white in color), calcite (a whitish powder obtained from burned mussel shells), hematite (a mineral known for its bright red color), graphite (a black pigment), galena (a crystalline lead ore with a shiny, silvery appearance), and resin (a yellow-brown material that was used as a liquid).

With regard to art, archaeologists have found numerous clay figurines and ten stone statues at Etowah. Some of these are paired in which there is a man seated cross-legged and a woman kneeling. The females are wearing wrap-around skirts. Both figures have elaborate hair styles. Some people interpret these figures as representing lineage founders. The stone effigies can weigh up to 125 pounds.

Etowah was abandoned about 1200 and then re-occupied just before 1300. The re-establishment of the Etowah chiefdom involved an introduction of a foreign symbol set. This included a set of copper plates depicting the Birdman. The Birdman is a decorative style and religious theme whose home probably lies at Cahokia.

The peak of building and occupation at Etowah appears to have been from 1325 to about 1375. About 1325, a residential ruler's compound was constructed on top of Mound A . The compound included four large buildings, including one 3,000-square-foot structure.

The first scientific archaeology at Etowah was carried out in the 1880s by the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. In the 1920s, excavations were carried out by Phillips Academy of Andover, Massachusetts. Many of the artifacts were distributed to various museums throughout the United States. Both the U.S. National Museum and the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, have exhibits of artifacts from Etowah.

In 1953, the Etowah site was purchased by the Georgia Historical Commission. In 1965, the Etowah Mounds Archaeological Area was designated as a National Historic landmark by the Department of the Interior and is considered the most intact Mississippian culture site in the Southeast. The site is considered to be ancestral to the Creek people. Today the Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site is managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The current park covers 54 acres.

The museum and some museum displays are shown above.  

Welcome to the 13th edition of First Nations News & Views. This weekly series is one element in the "Invisible Indians" project put together by navajo and me, with assistance from the Native American Netroots Group. Our last edition is here. In this edition you will find an exploration the Elizabeth Warren imbroglio, a look at the years 1877, 1916 & 1969 in American Indian history, three news briefs and some linkable bulleted news briefs. Click on any of the headlines below to take you directly to that section of News & Views or to any of our earlier editions.

This Week in American Indian History in 1877, 1916 & 1969

UN Special Rapporteur Calls for Restoration of Some Indian Lands  ~  "Ramp It Up" Exhibit Opens at the San Diego Museum of Man  ~  Navajo Band and Jemez Pueblo Plan Major Solar Installations  ~  

All Previous Editions

Cross Posted from Native American Netroots

Rendering by Dennis Joseph Weber

The outpouring of right-wing outrage over the revelation that Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had checked the "Native American" box in directories of the Association of American Law Schools has followed a familiar trajectory. No surprise since it's election campaign season. Given the right's modern efforts to destroy or at least undermine tribal sovereignty and extinguish Indianness altogether, the racist hypocrisy exhibited in the accusations that Warren was lying and, in the words of Japanese internment praiser Michelle Malkin, playing "oppression Olympics" sent more than one Indian on a hunt for a barf bag.

On the other hand, Warren's stated reasons for having made professional note of her Native heritage are hard to swallow. Other than that Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother listed on a 19th Century marriage certificate, her connection to Indians is tenuous. There is a cousin deeply involved in Cherokee affairs and Native causes in general. Warren, however, isn't enrolled in any of the Cherokee bands, she doesn't speak the language, she doesn't go to ceremonies or otherwise practice the culture, she never made an attempt to discover who that three-greats grandmother really was, she doesn't hang around other Indians, she apparently has never attended a conference on Native law to network with Indians as she has said was trying to do when she checked that box, and she has made no effort that anyone has unearthed to speak to Indians about their legal and political concerns or for them in public forums. The reality for her seems to be that a mantle photo of her grandfather showed him with "high cheekbones." Well, I have those, too. But it is hard to call someone with that background an Indian, Cherokee or otherwise.

What Warren did is widely known as "box checking." Assigning oneself Native heritage on job applications and elsewhere even if that heritage is no more than family legend. For some, and this is especially true in Oklahoma, making note of an American Indian in the family tree is perfectly innocent and accurate even if there is no real evidence and no current connection. Some individuals lie outright and go further. The tribe-shopping Ward Churchill made claims to be Creek and Cherokee - claims he made to my face in the late 1970s - but could provide no evidence of Indian ancestors in any tribes back the six generations that investigators could trace documents.

He and others falsely claiming such ancestry, by checking boxes or more elaborate means, may do so for personal benefit. That is, of course, what Warren's detractors say. Others may make the claim out of real pride, in remembrance of a grandparent or more distant ancestor whom they know for sure was Indian or have been told was so in family lore.

[Box-checking] was precisely what the Coalition of Bar Associations of Color was getting at when they passed a "Resolution on Academic Ethnic Fraud" last July. The resolution, signed by the presidents of the Hispanic, Asian, Native American and National bar associations, states, among other things, that "fraudulent self-identification as Native American on applications for higher education ... is particularly pervasive among undergraduate and law school applicants."

It goes on to say the phenomenon is "so pervasive, it is commonly understood and referred to within the Native American Community as 'box-checking.'"

It's clear that Warren didn't lie. She does have a Cherokee ancestor. And, if that long-dead woman was a full-blood, that makes Warren 1/32nd Cherokee, the same as the current Principal Chief Bill John Baker of the Cherokee Nation, which has some 317,000 enrolled members. But Baker has never been disconnected from his heritage, which includes well-known Cherokees. His great-great-grandmother was orphaned when her parents died on the "Trail of Tears," the infamous death-march of the Cherokees from their homes in the Southeast to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma where both he and Warren were born.

Rendering by Dennis Joseph Weber

His ancestors are on the Dawes Rolls, on which Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Oklahoma Seminole and some Florida Seminoles were enumerated. So far, nobody has found a Warren ancestor on the Dawes Roll. That doesn't mean there isn't one there. And it doesn't mean More than a quarter-million people applied to be included. Fewer than a 100,000 actually made it. People were chosen to be listed by whites who inspected their appearance. In some cases a brother was included and another was not. One unstated goal of the rolls was to exterminate Indian identity after the period of actual slaughter had ended. Thus, many who legitmately claimed Indian blood were denied a listing. Warren's ancestor could easily have been one of those. If one is found, she could apply for membership in Cherokee Nation. Any amount of "blood quantum" is acceptable to those on the Dawes Rolls. Without that connection, however, she is not legally an Indian.

What's unclear is whether Warren checked the "Native American" box solely out of pride or because it might perhaps give her a one- or two-percent edge over some other job candidate without that heritage. She says she didn't. She says, in fact:

"I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am," she said. "Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off."

This sounds like after-the-fact excuse-making to me. But there is no evidence contradicting her. And Warren has a record for being a straight-shooter. So one either takes her at her word on this or not, assigning it small or great significance depending on one's point of view about the rest of her career.

What Warren also didn't do, however, was step up in 1996 when it became clear that Harvard, under pressure from students and others about the lack of diversity on its law faculty, was touting her Native heritage in order to be able to claim another minority professor. What Harvard did was despicable. What Warren didn't do enabled Harvard to get away with it. She was wrong, very wrong, to let that pass. It was an error in judgment, the kind of thing many, many people make in their lives. Was it also a moral lapse? Perhaps.

But the fact of the matter is Warren is a pre-eminently qualified person to be a Harvard professor of law. And she has demonstrated repeatedly and courageously against elected politicians and political appointees that she stands up for the average American, the ones on the precarious edge of economic existence today, against the austerity-mongers and New Deal-dismantlers and tax-cuts-for-the wealthy/program-cuts-for-everybody-else crowd that have grasped the nation by the short hairs and refuses to let go. Her opponent is a lite version of that crowd. Which is why - my finger-wagging over her box-checking and clumsy campaign response to its revelation aside - I was glad to see her enter the Senate race, have contributed money to her and will continue to do so, and would vote for her enthusiastically if I lived in Massachusetts.

The focus on Warren has done something that always has some value: made us invisible Indians visible. Of course, that has elicited gobs of the usual racism, like this putrid column by Howie Carr in the Boston Herald, whose only redeeming feature is that it didn't actually make a joke about "injuns" or "Redskins." But the Warren affair also provides the opportunity to explain to non-Indians what Indianness is about.

What it is not about is appearance. Not about skin tone. Not about high cheekbones. Not about looking like somebody in an Edward Curtis photograph. As I wrote previously in a comment in Joan McCarter's excellent diary about what Warren should do campaign-wise regarding this flare-up, I am a white-looking tribally enrolled Seminole, with about 3/8s Indian blood. At reunions when the older generation of my extended family was alive, people went from lighter than me to as dark as Michelle Obama. All of us Seminole, all of us related by blood. Many tribal chiefs today, are light-skinned with a mix of Indian and European or Indian, European and African blood. In fact, most tribally enrolled Indians today, on and off the reservations, are mixed bloods. They can look very non-Indian but be thoroughly Indian culturally.

Most of us, on or off the reservation, are cultural hybrids. We may or may not have an Indian-sounding name. When we do, it is typically a translation, like Deborah White Plume (Oglala-Lakota). We, or our ancestors may have adopted a non-Indian religion. Or, there too, we may practice a hybrid, or stick exclusively to a clearly defined Native religion. Or we may, like a significant portion of other Americans, practice no religion at all. My partner in this series, navajo, as she has written, was raised a Mormon. I was raised a Catholic and subsequently a Lutheran. We both abandoned those religions decades ago.

Rendering by Dennis Joseph Weber

About half of people identifying themselves as American Indian today were born on or near reservations, but many of us who were not have a strong connection to reservation life. But others were not and do not. Yet they maintain a strong Indian identity. A modern identity. One shaped by our unique personal stories, by our tribal history and the entangling interactions of both these with others of our own tribe and the tribes of people whose histories are far different, and with the dominant culture and other sub-cultures of the American populace.

Whether we live on or off the reservation, in an urban or rural setting, whether we speak the language or not, whether we're tribally enrolled or for various reasons not, we have one thing in common, we are connected to other Indians and we are appalled at how dreadful the existence of so many of our brothers and sisters remain 120 years after the last massacre of our people. We seek a better life for us all, on our collective and individual terms, blending or separating, but never forgetting how we can to be who we are 20 generations after Columbus arrived.

^{By Meteor Blades}

On May 5, 1877, nearly a year after Lakota and Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho warriors stunned the United States by wiping out five of the seven companies Lt. Col. George A. Custer's regiment at the Battle of the Greasy Grass, the man who saw a vision of it beforehand - "soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky" - Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, Sitting (Buffalo) Bull (Lakota-Hunkpapa) - led his beleaguered people across the border into Canada.

Knowing full well that their victory against the 7th Cavalry would bring down the Army's wrath, the various bands making up the great encampment in Medicine Tail Coulee had scattered within 48 hours, hoping to make the job of revenge more difficult. In the next months, the Army clashed mercilessly with these bands and forced thousands of Indians back onto reservations at gunpoint. It was the beginning of the end of the Indian wars, and these POWs were treated in ways that would make the drafters of the Geneva Conventions shudder.

Sitting Bull, his mother, his daughter and granddaughter,
seated, and two of his wives (date unknown)

That caused Miles, who had defeated the Kiowa and Southern Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne two years earlier, to step up his actions. Sitting Bull decided to strike out for what the Indians called the "grandmother's land," named for Queen Victoria.

They remained there for four years. At first, all went well. The Canadian government was not on a campaign to wipe out the buffalo as a means to destroy Indian culture and game was plentiful. But his warriors got tired and started needling other tribes in the area. That brought the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into the picture. They pressured Sitting Bull to go home and take his young troublemakers with him. With the nomadic buffalo falling prey to hunters and habitat shrinkage from ever more white settlers in the States, the effect of their extermination soon became felt farther and farther north, and times became tougher. Many of the band gave in to emissaries who said reservation life in the U.S. was better than what was becoming a hand-to-mouth existence in Canada.

By 1881, Sitting Bull's band was made up mostly of the old and sick, and he reluctantly surrendered in July, with just 187 others. After a few transfers, he the rest were incarcerated at Fort Randall in southeastern South Dakota for the next two years. They were allowed to return to the Standing Rock Agency (the Lakota reservation that now straddles North and South Dakota) in mid-1883.

On May 5, 1916, U.S. Army Indian Scouts, all of them Apaches, were part of what some claim is the "last cavalry charge" against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa at Ojos Azules ranch in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. They were an element of the 11th Cavalry, which had entered Mexico as part of Gen. John J. Pershing's Punitive Expedition.

Indian Scouts Andrew Paxton, Charley Shipp and Joe Quintero
with Dr. McCloud, on horseback, at Fort Apache in 1918.

In Mark Van de Logt's 2010 book, War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army, Pawnee Scout leader Luther H. North is quoted as saying, "Neither the Wild Tribes, nor the Government Indian Scouts ever adopted any of the white soldier's tactics. They thought their own much better." Apache scouts were no different.

The Indian Scouts were not officially deactivated until the last member retired in 1947. Their memory lives in the cross-arrows insignia still worn on the uniforms of U.S. Army Special Forces with the motto: de oppresso liber, which in bad Latin has been taken to mean, "to free from oppression," but more accurately means, "from the captured man is one made free," rather ironic given the origin of the insignia.

Col. H.B. Wharfield, a lieutenant at the time of the Punitive Expedition, later wrote:

During my service in 1918 at Fort Apache the scouts wore cavalry issue clothing shoes and leggin[g]s, but some retained the wide car[tridge] belt of their own construction and design. An emblem U.S.S. for United State Scouts was fastened on the front of the issue campaign hat. The regulation emblem was crossed arrows on a disc with the initials U.S.S.; but I never saw such a design on the scouts' uniform nor in the Quartermaster supply room.

On May 5, 1969, Navarre Scott Momaday (Kiowa-Cherokee) became the first American Indian to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his House Made of Dawn. That same year, "he was initiated into the Gourd Dance Society, the ancient fraternal organization of the Kiowas." He went on to have a highly distinguished career as a writer and professor, having obtained his doctorate in 1965.

Navarre Scott Momaday

His 1971 essay "The American Land Ethic" drew public attention to the tradition of respect for nature practiced by the native peoples and its significance to modern American society in an era of environmental degradation. It was partly written while he was lecturing in Moscow in 1974. At the same time, he took up drawing and painting seriously for the first time in his life. Since then his work has been exhibited throughout the United States. His newer books are frequently illustrated with his own paintings and etchings.

He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Arizona. President George W. Bush awarded Momaday the National Medal of Arts in 2007 "for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition."

UN Special Rapporteur Calls for Restoration of Some Indian Lands

^{By Meteor Blades}

James Anaya

Before he departed on Friday, Anaya said that restoring some lands, such as the Black Hills, to Indian control could help build reconciliation between Indians and non-Indians.

"The sense of loss, alienation and indignity is pervasive throughout Indian country," Anaya said in a statement released Friday.

"It is evident that there have still not been adequate measures of reconciliation to overcome the persistent legacies of the history of oppression, and that there is still much healing that needs to be done."

He pointed to the loss of tribal lands as a particularly sore point, naming the Black Hills of South Dakota and the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona as places where indigenous peoples feel they have "too little control."

"Securing the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands is of central importance to indigenous peoples' socio-economic development, self-determination, and cultural integrity," Anaya said.

You can learn more about his mission and what he did on his first visits at his web site here.

What follows is testimony given by several Indians at various meetings with Anaya.

Debra White Plume's (Oglala Lakota) testimony:

Debra White Plume

There are uranium, oil, and gas corporations here now, and more want to come. We did not invite them. America welcomes Canadian-owned Cameco uranium corporation, TransCanada oil pipeline corporation, and PowerTech uranium corporation to come and obtain permits to mine uranium and slurry oil in our Territory against our wishes, this extraction and pipeline threatens our [Ogallala] Aquifer, which gives 2 million people drinking water and irrigates the world's bread basket. We have not given our free, prior and informed consent as required by the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, we know not everyone is satisfied with the Declaration, but it is a minimum standards document.

Mr. Anaya, I ask you to keep this message clear, do not pretty up my testimony. I am saying that America is committing ethnocide against our way of life, eco-cide against our Mother Earth, and genocide in our Lakota Homelands. Our Human Rights are being violated and our Inherent Right to live as Lakota People and Nation is being violated as well. Without access to our lands and waters we cannot live our collective Inherent Rights to be who we are.

We must have our lands. Share this message with the world. The United States Supreme Court agreed our Territory was stolen by the United States and was the ripest, rankest case of land theft in the United States of America's history and thus awarded us millions of dollars. Tell the world we refused the money. We want our lands and our waters. We want our Treaties upheld. We must have our lands.

In Tucson, Damon Watahomigie (Havasupai) testified: "As the first born warriors of the Grand Canyon we refuse to become the next millennium's world terrorists by allowing mega nuclear industrial complex mining industries to mine in the Grand Canyon."

As did Leonard Benally (Navajo):

Leonard Benally

Ben Shelly [president] of the Navajo Nation is working with Senator Kyl and McCain to pass legislation for the Little Colorado River Water Rights Settlement that gives away our water rights to Peabody Coal Company and Navajo Generating Station. We believe the Settlement is a tragedy not only due to the minimizing [of] Navajo rights but is waiving hundreds of millions of dollars in potential compensation for rights waived.

Our liberty is being sacrificed for an economic bonanza based on fraud and corruption. Our justice has been prostituted by hand-outs, hopelessness, and conformity elevated to the status of the national security doctrines. We are the historical lot of the dispossessed. Democracy has been whitewashed with imported detergent that allows reclaimed sewer water to get dumped on our sacred San Francisco Peaks.

Peabody's collusion with the U.S. government has resulted in a dark infamy of genocide and crimes against my people and the environment - relocation, the Bennett Freeze, uranium mining, all in the pursuit of energy resource development fueled by corporate and governmental greed and collusion.

Glenna Begay with
Fern Benally translating

From Glenna Begay (Navajo):

"Residents in the mining area have been jailed or threatened with jail for trying to protect their burial and sacred sites. Other residents have watched the unearthing of graves."

From Hathalie [Medicine Man] Norris Nez (Navajo):

"In Big Mountain, Black Mesa, on Hopi Partition Land (HPL) there were many sacred sites where offerings were given.The Holy People, the Star People recognize us by these sites that are sacred where we Diné, five fingered humans give offerings. They acknowledge that we are doing our duty to give our offerings to the Holy People. These places are for the wellness of the people, not only the Diné. Our prayers are said for all mankind."

"Ramp It Up" Exhibit Opens at the San Diego Museum of Man

By navajo

4-Wheel Warpony skateboarders, 2008
From left to right, White Mountain Apache skaters Armonyo Hume, Jess Michael Smith, Aloysius Henry, Ronnie Altaha and Lee Nash. The skate team was founded by award-winning filmmaker Dustinn Craig (White Mountain Apache/Navajo), who got his start making skateboarding videos in Arizona.
-Photo Courtesy Dustinn Craig (White Mountain Apache/Navajo)

Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America

Bryant Chapo (Navajo),
Minneapolis, Minn., 2007
Discovered by a local skateboard shop
in his hometown of Fort Hall, Idaho,
Bryant Chapo's win at a 2006 Utah
skateboarding competition brought
him to national attention and his
first major sponsor. Chapo trains
and skates full-time and makes it
a point to participate in as many
Native skateboarding competitions
as he can. Here he performs a
varial heel flip.
-Photo Courtesy Brandon Flyg

Owing its origin to the surfboard of Native Hawaiians, the modern skateboard, or deck, grew in popularity on the mainland beginning in the 1960s. Since that time, skateboarding has become one of the most popular sports on Indian reservations and has inspired and influenced Native American and Native Hawaiian communities. Today, skateboarding is a five-billion-dollar industry that includes shoes, apparel, camps, music tours, reality TV, and worldwide competitions.

The lessons learned in a skatepark speak to the inner strength of each skater and are a metaphor for the Native experience: When you fall, get up and try again. Push yourself higher and faster. Never give up. Skateboarding has grown to become a true phenomenon, integrating physical exertion with design, graphic art, videography, and music. The result is a unique and dynamic culture all its own.

Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America reveals the rich world of skateboarding and celebrates the vibrancy, creativity, and history of Native American skateboarding culture. Showing for the first time outside of the Smithsonian, this new traveling exhibition features rare images, video of Native American skaters, and over twenty skate decks created by Native artists.

Highlights include a never-before-seen 1969 image taken by skateboarding icon Craig R. Stecyk III of a skate deck depicting traditional Native imagery, as well as 1973 home-movie footage of Zephyr surf team members Ricky and Jimmy Tavarez (Gabrielino-Tongva tribe). The exhibition features the work of visual artists Bunky Echo-Hawk (Yakama / Pawnee), Joe Yazzie (Navajo), Traci Rabbit (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) and Dustinn Craig (White Mountain Apache / Navajo) and highlights young Native skaters such as Bryant Chapo (Navajo) and Augustin and Armondo Lerma (Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians).

Lee Nash (White Mountain Apache) of the 4-Wheel Warpony skate crew, 2008
4-Wheel Warpony skater Lee Nash tucks a skate deck into his belt.
-Photo Courtesy Dustinn Craig (White Mountain Apache/Navajo)

Navajo Band and Jemez Pueblo Plan Major Solar Installations

^{By Meteor Blades}

To'Hajiilee, N.M., home of a non-contiguous part of the Navajo Nation formerly known as the Cañoncito Indian Reservation, may soon be home to the largest commercial solar photovoltaic farm in the United States. if so, it will be 50 percent larger than the one Apple plans for its data center in North Carolina. Environmental reviews have been completed and found no significant negative impacts. All that remains before construction begins is getting contracts signed for power purchases

The 30-megawatt Shandiin operation on 250 acres of the 77,000-acre reservation will provide electricity for more than 6,000 homes. Shandiin means "sunbeams" in Diné, the language of the Navajo. With a population of only some 1700, the To'Hajiilee band will have plenty of extra electricity to sell power to the Public Service Company of New Mexico, which serves Albuquerque just 22 miles away. A major transmission line in close proximity to the site greatly reduces the cost of the project, but it is still estimated at $124 million. The band is thinking of selling electricity to municipalities, the federal government and directly to the PSCo.

Each solar project recently received for pre-construction purposes about $300,000 in federal grants from the U.S. Department of Energy's Tribal Energy Program, sharing with other tribes their portion of a $6.5-million appropriation for 19 projects. Financing for construction of the solar farm will come from grants, private investors, tribal and pueblo resources, and loan guarantees. No completion dates have been set. But once power purchase agreements are arranged, construction could take as few as nine months. That means the Shandiin project could be generating electricity by May 2013.

"I think if we're able to find a power buyer fairly quickly, we certainly ought to be breaking ground this fall. That's our goal," said Rob Burpo, president of First American Financial Advisors, Inc., one of the consulting groups working with To'Hajiilee.[...]

Her boots covered in fine yellow dust, Delores Apache, (To'Hajiilee band of Navajo) president of To'Hajiilee Economic Development Inc., walks across the spot where the solar panels will be situated.

Delores Apache

For her, the project is about more than gaining a foothold in a new industry. She ticks off a list of what revenue from the plant would mean for her community: a daycare center, programs for senior citizens and veterans, better roads, more efficient wells for drawing water, language preservation programs and scholarships for youngsters.

"It's going to mean a whole lot," Apache said. "We have no means of economic development. No dollars. We don't have anything at all."

To'Hajiilee isn't the only place Navajos hope to put up solar. The Navajo Nation, whose overall reservation spreads across 27,400 square miles, the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and New Jersey combined, is using its share of the recent DOE grant to explore the possibility of building solar farms totaling 4,000 megawatts on its lands in northwest New Mexico. That would double the existing level of commercial solar photovoltaic electricity operations in the entire United States and generate enough power for 800,000 homes.

In a Washington and Lee Law Review article last year, attorney Ryan Dreveskracht wrote:

"Solar projects can be a rallying point, allowing tribes to come together collectively to pursue their own objectives in their own way, promoting cultural awareness, and creating a self-image that has been missing in many communities for years."

But there are profound concerns among leaders and other members of tribes that have been screwed for centuries by outsiders who told Indians what their best interests were and then proved self-interest was the real motive by ripping off the tribes. So when the talk is about outside investors putting up money for energy projects, the bullshit antennae start vibrating like crazy. For this reason, "Tribes need to ... establish clear business plans, and create knowledgeable workforces of their own," Dreveskracht wrote.

The Department of Interior hopes to open more public land for wind and solar projects, but these often run into opposition, sometimes from environmentalists worried about damage to endangered fauna and flora, sometimes from residents for NIMBY reasons. These objections can generate lawsuits that take years to wind their way to settlements or court judgments. Tribal lands, however, are governed under different rules and an increasing focus on Indian sovereignty has meant tribes have more latitude to make their own decisions in the matter of energy and other projects.

A new Department of Interior rule will fast-track leasing agreements on Indian trust lands, giving more power to the tribes and curtailing oversight by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But it is seen as a double-edged dagger. While it is designed to slice through red tape that has stalled tribal decision-making, it can also lead to corruption and yet more rip-offs.

While Indian lands hold the potential to supply four times as much electricity as needed by the entire nation, most of that land is in the West and Far West, putting it out of reach of Eastern markets, at least until low-leakage Ultra-High Voltage transmission lines are in place, which could be a long time. And so far, politics and other foot-dragging have kept solar projects from happening. Now, however, with prices for solar cells continuing to make steep drops and the financial and other support of the Obama administration, projects like those at To'Hajiilee and the Jemez Pueblo aren't the only ones likely to come on line in the next decade.

And solar isn't the only renewable source making headway. The Kumeyaay of Campo in southern California have installed 25 wind turbines that on a good day generate 50 megawatts of electricity, far more than the small tribe needs for its own use. It plans to install an additional series of turbines capable of generating another 160 megawatts or electricity. The total would be enough to provide power for 50,000 homes.

• Colorado Legislature Opts for "Atrocity" Instead of "Genocide": State Sen. Suzanne Williams (Comanche) thought that the resolution she introduced in the Colorado legislature would be met with the same strong support given to resolutions condemning Jewish, Armenian and Darfurian genocides. Hers, however, being about American Indian genocide, "hit a little too close to home." That spurred a debate among legislators that went largely along party lines. Williams is a Democrat. Republican Sen. Ellen Roberts and others argued that there had been no Hitler-like extermination plan and Indians aren't extinct, so "genocide" was inappropriate. But Williams argued that there was an extermination plan, one that stretched from the nation's origin through the Trail of Tears, massacres like that in 1864 at Sand Creek in Colorado and confinement on barren reservations where thousands of Indians died from harsh conditions. She said the resolution described "a history of what happened in North America." She couldn't convince her colleagues. Amendment after amendment was offered to substitute another word for "genocide." Eventually, it could be said a middle ground was chosen by nixing both "tragedy" and "genocide" in favor of "atrocity." Even so, nine of the 33 senators present opposed the resolution.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Honor the Treaties Campaign Hurt by Poster Giant's Negligence: Aaron Huey of the Honor the Treaties campaign hired Poster Giant to paste up posters in the Seattle streets last year. The company reported more than four months ago that all posters had been put up and its stock depleted. Recently, numerous complaints from alternative street artists in Seattle revealed that Poster Giant did have inventory of Honor the Treaties posters because it had pasted over several existing murals, causing an uproar. Honor the Treaties and Aaron Huey's reputation was damaged and is as much a victim as are all the street artists who lost their original artworks as a result of Poster Giant's mismanaged services. Huey is considering what he can do to rectify the situation.

On a positive note for Honor the Treaties, the posters are getting righteous visibility around the nation being used by activists at the XL Pipeline protests.
^-navajo

• Blind Lakota Man Scarred with "KKK" at Hospital: Sixty-eight-year-old Vernon Traversie (Cheyenne River Sioux), had heart surgery in Rapid City Regional Hospital in South Dakota. He spent two weeks in recovery. He said that during this time a nurse named "Greg" refused to give him pain medication. After he was discharged, a co-worker told him he should have photographs taken of his stomach because someone had carved or burned the "K's" on him, the acronym of the racist Ku Klux Klan. Tribal police took their own photos and sent copies to Rapid City police. They investigated but filed no charges. The FBI told him they were going to take a statement, but Traversie says he hasn't heard from them in months. He plans to file a lawsuit. The chairman of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation has written a scathing letter regarding the incident.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Obama Replaces Kimberly Teehee with Jodi Gillette in Native American Affairs Post

Jodi Gillette

Gillette was previously the Deputy Assistant Secretary to the Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs for Policy and Economic Development in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Earlier she served as Deputy Associate Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Associate Director of Public Engagement, where she was responsible for the communication and interaction between tribal nations and the White House. She played a key role in the White House Tribal Nations Conference in 2009 and 2010, where the president hosted tribal leaders from across the U.S. She has also served as executive director of the Native American Training Institute in Bismarck, N.D., a nonprofit offering technical assistance and training to tribal, state and local governments in the area of human service delivery systems. She also had served as an economic development planner for her tribe in Fort Yates, N.D. Gillette holds a BA in government and Native American Studies from Dartmouth and a Master's in public Policy from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs in Minneapolis.
^-navajo

• Professors File Lawsuit to Stop Transfer of Bones: The Kumeyaay tribe of southern California has been seeking to have the bones of a human male and female found buried in 1976 on a cliff in their traditional territory returned to them under provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The University of California, San Diego was prepared to do so, but a lawsuit has been filed to stop the transfer. Three anthropology professors claim that collagen taken from skeletons, dated to about 10,000 years ago, indicates that the individuals ate ocean fish and mammals different than traditional fare eaten by ancestors of the tribe. James McManis, a lawyer for the trio said: "These are not Native Americans. We're [not] sure where they're from. They had primarily a seafood diet, not the diet of any way of these tribes. They were a seafaring people. They could be traveling Irishmen who touched on the continent. The idea that we're going to turn this incredible treasure over to some local tribe because they think it's Grandma's bones is crazy." Of the skeletons, one of the professors, anthropologist Tom Bettinger, says "No other set of New World remains holds such a high degree of research potential." (You can read our previous coverage of the issue here.)
^{-Meteor Blades}

• CSU-San Marcos Honors 24 Indian Graduates: The California State University campus celebrated the two dozen students, the most in the school's 21-year history, who will complete undergraduate or masters degrees this year. The university has made a goal of increasing enrollment of American Indian students by reaching out to tribal schools, recruiting high school students from area tribes, and adding the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center in November.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Navajo Student Improves Indian Sustainability Program with Her Dissertation: Fonda Walters (Navajo) and her five siblings are first-generation college graduates who now include two with a PhD after their names. She graduates in June after having worked on a dissertation focused on "First Innovations" a collaboration between the American Indian Policy Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., and the American Indian Studies program at Arizona State University that combines an intensive internship with classes focused on developing innovation and entrepreneurial skills for American Indian sustainability. It wasn't easy. She had children ranging from age 8 to 17 when she started her doctorate in 2009. "I went to my family for guidance and help. We held traditional ceremonies to get me through while we were doing this," she said. "This is my family's degree ... They stayed up all night for me."
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Eight Lakota Students Warn Against Delays in Nickname Lawsuit: The students at the University of North Dakota have urged a federal court "move as expeditiously as possible to prevent further violations of (their) civil rights." They oppose the university's continued use of the "Fighting Sioux" nickname and logo for its sports teams. The lawsuit is one of two. On May 2, a federal judge dismissed the second suit brought by the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe, which favors keeping the nickname. The lawsuits were brought as part of a longstanding battle over the use of Indian nicknames, mascots and logos on sports teams. The NCAA has forbidden their use unless relevant tribes give their approval.
^{-Meteor Blades}

Arby Little Soldier

• New Mexico Indians Have Substantial Voting Clout: The question is whether they will use it. Alvin Warren (Santa Clara Pueblo), principal and executive vice president of Blue Stone Strategy Group, was a panelist at the recent WK Kellogg Foundation's grantee conference for America Healing in New Orleans. Warren noted that American Indians can have significant voting clout in New Mexico, which is an important swing state in presidential elections. "In New Mexico, he said, we actually have had very similar experiences to the South when it comes to discriminative, active and intentional, systemic and institutional, with regard to native voting." The American Indian population in New Mexico increased from 134,000 in 1990 to almost 220,000 in 2010, approximately 11 percent of the state's population. With this percentage of the total population, American Indians can have tremendous impact and influence, according to Warren.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Malkin's Demeaning of Indians Catch Native Journalists' Ire: Michelle Malkin has made a living attacking people of color, so it was no surprise that she would take on the controversy surrounding the Indian heritage of Elizabeth Warren with her usual sensitivity. Taking a far gentler approach than Malkin deserved, the Native American Journalists Association issued a statement saying it was "disappointed" that she had written a piece under the headline "Sacaja-whiner: Elizabeth Warren and the Oppression Olympics" and ridiculed the Senate candidate with denigrating puns and other put-downs: "Call her 'Pinocchio-hontas,' 'Chief Full-of-Lies,' 'Running Joke' or 'Sacaja-whiner.'" NAJA stated: "While allegations surrounding [Warren's] claims are unsettling, making fun of Native names that have history, respect, and honor is worse." Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly on Fox News told Shepard Smith that she would like to interview Warren and knew exactly the way she would begin. She then raised her hand and said "How." Afterward, she broke into laughter and said she had been drinking. At least she didn't say, "Firewater very powerful."
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Map Gives Possible Clues to Roanoke's 'Lost Colony': The disappearance of the English colonists who first tried to settle on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina has been an unsolved mystery since 1590. The disappeared include Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America. Theories abound as to what happened to the 118 colonists between the time their governor sailed for England in 1587 to obtain new supplies and 1590 when he returned to find them all gone and their village and fortifications dismantled. Theories abounded for years: starvation; disease; lost at sea; wiped out by local Indian tribes; captured, enslaved and/or assimilated by local tribes. The Lost Colony DNA Project seeks to test these latter possibilities. Now, the British Museum's use of 21st Century imaging methods to reexamine a 16th-century map has found hidden markings "that show an inland fort where the colonists could have resettled after abandoning the coast. [...] The analysis suggests that the symbol marking the fort was deliberately hidden, perhaps to shield it from espionage in the spy-riddled English court. An even more tantalizing hint of dark arts tints the map: the possibility that invisible ink may have marked the site all along."
^{-Meteor Blades}

• The Book of Mormon: The Whiter the Skin, the Closer to God: Tim Giago (Oglala Lakota), founder of the Native American Journalists Association and Indian Country Today, and widely considered to be an enemy of Indian militance, points out in a recent article racist quotes of past presidents of the Mormon Church regarding Native Americans. From Brigham Young: "There is a curse on these aborigines of our country who roam the plains and are so wild that you cannot tame them. They are of the House of Israel; they once had the Gospel delivered to them, they had oracles of truth; Jesus came and administered to them after his resurrection and they received and delighted in the Gospel until the fourth generation when they turned away and became so wicked that God cursed them with this dark and benighted and loathsome condition." Giago's conclusion was the same as ours in FNN&V two weeks ago. "And I will continue to ask myself why any sensible Native American would belong to a Church that will not fully accept them until they become white."
^-navajo

Indians have often been referred to as the "Vanishing Americans." But we are still here, entangled each in his or her unique way with modern America, blended into the dominant culture or not, full-blood or not, on the reservation or not, and living lives much like the lives of other Americans, but with differences related to our history on this continent, our diverse cultures and religions, and our special legal status. To most other Americans, we are invisible, or only perceived in the most stereotyped fashion.

First Nations News & Views is designed to provide a window into our world, each Sunday reporting on a small number of stories, both the good and the not-so-good, and providing a reminder of where we came from, what we are doing now and what matters to us. We wish to make it clear that neither navajo nor I make any claim whatsoever to speak for anyone other than ourselves, as individuals, not for the Navajo people or the Seminole people, the tribes in which we are enrolled as members, nor, of course, the people of any other tribes.

"There is no question of national dignity, be it remembered, involved in the treatment of savages by a civilized power. With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question whether in a given situation one shall fight, coax, or run, is a question merely of what is easiest and safest."

With regard to the Comanche and Kiowa in Oklahoma, Indian Commissioner Francis A. Walker reported:

"The United States have (sic) given them a noble reservation, and have provided amply for all their wants."

The Comanche, however, felt that the United States had not "given" them a reservation: they felt that the United States had only recognized their claim to a small portion of their traditional territory.

To pressure the Indians to stay on the reservations, the United States waged an active war against the buffalo. By 1873, non-Indian buffalo hunters (known as "runners") were crossing into Comanche territory to hunt and the army did nothing to stop them. Instead, the army took a proactive role by providing protection for the runners and by supplying them with both equipment and ammunition.

In 1874, the Comanche held a Sun Dance. This is not a traditional Comanche ceremony, but was borrowed from the Cheyenne. This Sun Dance coincided with the emergence of a new medicine man:  Eschiti (Coyote Droppings; also spelled Esa-tai). Unlike most Comanche medicine men, he did not wear a buffalo skull cap or ceremonial mask. He was attired only in breechclout and moccasins. He wore a wide sash of red cloth around his waist. A red-tipped hawk feather was in his hair and from each ear hung a snake rattle.

Eschiti had been given strong powers in a vision quest. In his vision, Eschiti ascended to the home of the Great Spirit, a place which is far above the Christian Heaven. It was reported that Eschiti was capable of vomiting up all the cartridges which might be needed for any gun; that he could raise the dead; that he was bulletproof and could make others bulletproof; that he could control the weather. His messianic message to the people was that he had been sent by the Great Spirit to deliver them from oppression.

In 1874, in the panhandle of Texas, buffalo hunters armed with high powered telescopic rifles capable of killing buffalo at 600 yards, set up camp at the abandoned trading post of Adobe Walls. The camp was attacked by an intertribal war party of about 300 made up of Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho warriors. War party leaders included Tabananaka, Wild Horse, Mowaway, Black Beard, and a rising new leader, Quanah. The Indians were confident that Eschiti's power would render the hunters' guns useless.

Eschiti had warned the warriors not to kill a skunk on their way to Adobe Walls. His medicine had foreseen that the hunters would be asleep when attacked; they would not use their big guns, and his anti-bullet protection would never be put to the test.

Just as the war party prepared to attack the sleeping buffalo hunters, there was a loud crack which awakened them. The hunters, fearing that the ridge pole had snapped, were suddenly awake and scrambling around.

The hunters settled down for the siege, and with plenty of ammunition and good marksmanship, they repelled the war party. Eschiti blamed the failure of his medicine on the actions of a Cheynne member of the war party who had killed a skunk. Since skunk meat was a favorite of many of the southern plains Indians, killing a skunk was not unusual. Hungry members of a large war party would eat whatever strayed into their path.

One of those who was wounded in the battle was Quanah Parker. After his horse was shot out from under him, he crawled to a buffalo carcass for protection and was shot in the side. He then crawled to a thicket where he remained until another warrior rescued him.

This was the second battle of Adobe Walls-the first battle of Adobe Walls had taken place in 1864 when American troops under Colonel Kit Carson fought against Comanche and Kiowa warriors. The second battle of Adobe Walls marked the beginning of an Indian war known as the Red River War or the Buffalo War.

Army troops were called in to capture the war party, but their movement was hampered by drought and by temperatures well over 100 degrees. Eschiti took credit for arranging the weather. The troops, however, were relentless and managed to destroy lodges and capture horses.

In the battle of Palo Duro Canyon, an American force of 700 was attacked by 75 Cheyenne warriors. The Indians were driven back to a steep wall of the canyon where the full force of about 500 warriors made their stand. The army had superior firepower, including Gatling guns and artillery. The Army troops at this time were armed with .45-caliber single-shot Springfield rifles. Many of the Indians had repeating rifles, such as the 16-shot, lever-action Henry and the .50-caliber Spencer. While the Spencers could fire more rounds in less time than the Springfields, the single-shot army rifles could reach farther across the plains to keep the enemy at bay. It may well have been the better weapon for its time and place.

The Indian warriors under the command of Iron Shirt (Cheyenne), Poor Buffalo (Comanche), and Lone Wolf (Kiowa) were scattered by the superior firepower of the Americans. There were few Indian casualties (it is estimated that only 25 Indians were killed), but the Americans killed more than 1,000 horses and destroyed the Indians' winter food supply.

This was the last major conflict fought by the Indians of the Southern Plains. It was a last desperate and hopeless resistance to the new order which the United States was to impose upon them.    

Welcome to the 14th edition of First Nations News & Views. This weekly series is one element in the "Invisible Indians" project put together by Meteor Blades and me, with assistance from the Native American Netroots Group. Last week's edition is here. In this edition you will find my personal account of living in two worlds, a look at the years 1541 and 1885 in American Indian history, four news briefs and some linked bulleted briefs. Click on any of the headlines below to take you directly to that section of News & Views or to any of our earlier editions.

This Week in American Indian History in 1541 and 1885

~

Killing of White Buffalo Seen As Possible Hate Crime  ~  Indians Plan Rally Over Racist Attack on Blind Lakota Man  ~  Samuel Tso, VP of the Navajo Code Talkers Association Has Walked On  ~  U. of Minnesota Students Produce Film Calling for Apology to Dakota Indians  ~  

All Previous Editions

Cross Posted from Native American Netroots

I am trying to live in two worlds.

I was born in Utah. My white father descended from the Mormon pioneers. His grandparents were polygamists. My full-blood Navajo mother - who was taken from her family at age five to be assimilated into white culture at the Tuba City Boarding School - joined the Mormon church in her 20s.

Mom had the typical boarding school experience. Overwhelming homesickness, having her mouth washed out with soap for accidentally speaking forbidden Navajo, witnessing others endure severe punishment for being incorrigible in some Navajo way and a constant curriculum of You Need to Become White Now. My mom was smart, she learned fast to conform, to survive. She excelled at the school and even skipped grades.

Many of her supervisors there were Mormon and the church also had a strong presence on the rest of the Navajo reservation. It was everywhere. Mom eventually served a two-year mission for the church, doing her work among the Zuni. When she completed her mission, the local paper, the Richfield Reaper, reported her accomplishment. Someone mailed the announcement to my father because he had an interest in Indians and a strong love of the church. He was so impressed that she had devoted two years of her life to the church while leaving her three-year-old son with friends. Her first husband, another Navajo, had been killed at a young age. My dad wrote her a letter and asked to meet her. Later they married and started a family in rural Utah.

1959. As you can see, we assimilated quite well with our modern hairstyles and contemporary dress in the dominant culture's approved fashions. From left to right: My little brother Spence, (named after Spencer W. Kimball, who was an apostle of the Mormon church at that time), my mom Flora, my older half-brother Tom, my dad Rulon, and me, age four.

Being Indian, being Navajo, is one world. I'll get to that shortly.

The majority of my life was spent living in the world of white where I often hid my real blood by altering my appearance as best I could. All around me was a common attitude that my brown skin made me inferior to the white townfolk. See my essay Born Evil for my experience growing up as a "Lamanite." That's what the Mormon church still calls Indians. In those days not so long ago, it went further and called us fierce, bloodthirsty, lazy, idolatrous and loathsome because God cursed us with dark skin. In that essay you can read about my being told in public that I was not preferred by God the way my white Sunday school classmates were. And that I must work hard to make up for it.

The common belief system supported directly by the Book of Mormon and emphasized by public comments from the leaders of the church fostered an attitude that being "white and delightsome" was superior in the eyes of God. Thus white was the preferred skin color in the community as well.

It was hard growing up where I was considered a second-class citizen, even by Utahns who were non-Mormon.

There are two reasons my memories have come flooding back now. The news about Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren in which her alleged "Indianness" has been made an issue and the bullying by presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The right-wing's instant response regarding Warren's claims of a Native heritage was to make fun of her by slurring Indians with a flurry of insults using stereotypes and calling her "Pinocchio-hontas," "Faux-hontas," "Chief Full-of-Lies," "Running Joke" "Sacaja-whiner" and "Spreading Bull." A name like Sitting Bull should be treated with respect. Why is this the first thing people think to do when they want to make fun of Indians?

The slurs reminded me of the same sad treatment I received as I was growing up.

In 1973, after the American Indian Movement and Oglalas on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota took over the village of Wounded Knee, my bully of a high school political science teacher, who was also the football coach, took to calling me Wounded Knee in class. Every time I raised my hand to ask a question he would say, "Oh, Wounded Knee has a question!" I was deeply annoyed but did not want to draw more attention to myself, so I did not respond publicly with anger or sadness. I went on as though nothing had happened. Fortunately, the majority of my classmates were fond of me and did not themselves adopt this racist dig of a nickname. They also never used the slur "half breed" to me.

But when I was nominated to be homecoming queen the next year, I knew that that fondness had its limits. No way would I be chosen since I was running against two of the prettiest and most popular girls in my class. White girls. I was certain one of them would win. I was honored just to have been nominated. That was enough for me. The three of us were called on stage during an assembly to announce the new queen. I wondered which of them would be chosen. Then my name was announced! I couldn't believe it. The other two burst into tears. Like me, neither of them thought I would be chosen. As I looked out into the cheering audience, I saw why the three of us had misjudged. All the Navajo Dormitory students were jumping up and down with huge grins. They were the students separated from their families and brought to town from all over the Navajo Nation to have the Indian taken out of them in the Richfield schools. My mother worked in the cafeteria at the Navajo Dormitory. I had forgotten the alliance I would have with those students. I had the swing vote!

Another time I felt very unsafe. The sheriff's son, who was a senior when I was a sophomore, said harshly and menacingly close to my face, "Ho." For NavaHO. That's what jerks like him called all Indian students in town: Hos. This was well before the word was slang for "whore," as it is today, so that was not his intent. But it was meant to be derogatory. I stayed away from him after that. Fifteen years later I was in my hometown with my young daughters at a restaurant. In walks the guy, and I see that he's now the sheriff! I quietly grabbed my girls, got in the car and left town. I saw his gaze follow me as we left. He seemed to being trying to place me. I checked my rearview mirror several times on the way to the freeway. I'm always afraid of lawmen in small towns.

When I finally started to pursue a career, I found I advanced faster if I didn't dress to match like my ethnic background. Dressing with Indian elements was viewed as a caricature, as if I were wearing a costume rather than expressing ethnic pride. In the workplace my ethnic clothing and jewelry were met with raised eyebrows. I got the distinct impression I needed to dress more conservatively, to fit in better. And I did. I tried to look as white as possible. I cut my long brown hair very short. I didn't wear any Navajo jewelry.

Decades later, I finally took a break from working as a result of too much travel and burnout. It was during that quiet interlude I found that I regretted not having embrace my Indianness and especially regretted that my daughters didn't know much about their heritage. I made a concerted effort after that to take regular road trips to the reservation with my daughters so they could meet their relatives and taste the wonderful, rich culture. I wanted them to feel a part of the reservation even though they are assimilated.

I'm also assimilated. Born and raised off the reservation, never taught my Native language and existing more or less comfortably within the dominant culture. I'm invisible to non-Indians, so we get along well. In the past few years, I have made strong statements with my appearance, but no one ever asks if I'm Indian. They just assume I'm of the hippie culture that is very much alive and well here in urban Northern California.

Now for that other world.

In spite of my Navajo grandparents having to give up their children to the government-run boarding schools to have the Indian removed from each child, our extended family miraculously retained its culture. My grandparents plotted to hide half their children from the Bureau of Indian Affairs kidnappers in the deep canyons of Inscription House on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. Those kids did not learn English and they kept to the traditional lifestyle of living in hogans without electricity or plumbed water. Shi cheii (the term meaning "my maternal grandfather" in Navajo) was a renowned medicine man. He passed on his hathalie (healing and spiritual) knowledge to his eldest son Robert. I became very close with my Uncle Robert in his last few years. That's another story I'll tell another day.

In the previous century, my mother's ancestors defeated one of the myriad government actions meant to destroy our culture. In 1864, thousands of Navajo were forcefully removed from their lands and force-marched almost 300 miles away to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. Fortunately, the tribe was able to return four years later, but it was devastated by the trauma of incarceration. Our family was lucky. They were able to hide deep in the canyons and high on top of Navajo Mountain. They did not go on The Long Walk. But it was still difficult for them to endure this wartime atmosphere and recover from it. In order for the Navajo to return to their lands they had to sign a treaty with many demands. One was that all the children would be given up to the government boarding schools to be assimilated. That led to the boarding school experience my mother survived. Her older sister Zonnie didn't survive.

Because this family culture wasn't destroyed, my mom's Navajo roots remained strong. She visited her family on vacations and she remained steeped in the culture. She maintained fluency in the language. She took us along for several weeks every summer to herd sheep, enjoy the wonderful food, play with our cousins and live in the traditional style. We watched shi cheii perform ceremonies. I treasured every moment on the Rez.

1958. My father took this photograph of us all standing next to the hogan where my grandparents lived. My mother is to the far right holding my little brother Spence. I'm the little one at her feet in the red moccasins. Next to me is my grandfather (shi cheii) who was a medicine man. He's the one in the tobacco-colored trousers. I loved sitting on his lap. He was so accepting of me, as was my grandmother (shi choi) who is to his right.

However, years earlier when my mom was at boarding school, she was advised to marry a white man and not teach her children the Navajo language. She was told this would raise her out of poverty and not hold her children back from advancing in the white world. It was curious that with such a strong cultural background that my mom followed this terrible advice. I think it points to how forceful the directives were from the government and how much of a survival instinct my mom had.

She felt that she was doing the right thing for us.

I admire non-English speakers who immerse their children in their mother tongue. As a result, as adults they can communicate more broadly and understand other cultures in ways monolingual people cannot. Sadly, neither I nor my siblings are fluent in Navajo, a result of the government assimilation policy and a compliant Indian woman who took the path of least resistance in her struggle to get by, to fit in.

I pay a price for not knowing the language when I visit my relatives on the Rez. Every time I go, I'm completely left out as my relatives converse in Navajo. I have to patiently wait for someone to translate for me. I can't tell you how many times I've asked for a translation and no one could go back that far in the conversation to help me out. And then the talk forges on while I sit in the dark.

Once, a few years ago at a family reunion for a traditional Navajo marriage, my cousin said deliberately within earshot of me, "Well, we are certainly getting whiter and whiter every time we get together ..." I felt unwelcomed by him. The same cousin later laughed when I tried to pronounce a word in Navajo. Another time I asked a question of my Uncle Robert and this cousin interrupted: "We don't share our stories with outsiders. You can ask all the questions you want but we won't answer them."  

So here I was, again in the same situation I dreaded in the white world. Not fully accepted in either world. Half breed.

But my uncle Robert, who usually sat quietly and merely observed, slowly started to speak, in Navajo. He spoke a long time with many hand gestures indicating distance, of travel. When he finished, this cousin, his son, sat silent. Everyone sat silent. When I realized no one was going to fill me in without prompting I asked what had just been said. My cousin Judy said that Uncle Robert had told his son that I was not an outsider. He had described the story of how I found him and reunited him with my mother, his sister he had not seen for 30 years. There's much more to that story, one I'll tell another day. Uncle Robert told his son I was blood and that I should be included. His son stood down and sat quietly the rest of the visit.

So in both worlds, there are inclusive people and exclusive people. Fortunately for my mental health there were many more nice people than mean ones. But the adverse experiences take a toll, especially on a young heart and mind.

One tends to never forget them.

Hernando de Soto

Another Spaniard took his place and continued the expedition. But the Spaniards had lost more than half their number, including their translator, a slave whose death made communication difficult with the Indians they encountered everywhere they went. They were harried by warriors constantly. They could not find enough food after having consumed most of their horses and all of the 200 pigs they had brought with them (except for those that escaped to form the ancestors of the razorback population of wild hogs now prevalent throughout the South). Most of all they could find no gold or silver. It was decided to pack it in and head back to the Mississippi and eventually to Mexico City. When a further expedition into North America was announced there in 1545, almost none of them signed on.

Even in that era, de Soto was considered a brutal man. Born and raised in the northwest Spanish province of Extremadura, a region of poverty that spawned many conquistadors, he first came to the "New World" in 1514 at age 17. He gained a reputation for loyalty and cleverness in the conquest of Central America and became wealthy in the Indian slave trade. He was made governor of Cuba and gained estates in Nicaragua and Guatemala worked by Indian slaves. But he longed for greater success and finally was sent on his own expedition to Yucatan in 1530 to hunt for a passage to China, the quest that Spain had been on for four decades. He did not succeed. But in 1532 joined Francisco Pizarro for the conquest of Peru. From the loot of that slaughter, de Soto became fabulously wealthy and returned to Spain, married well beyond his social station to a relative of someone close to the queen and seemed set for life.

But he was soon restless and champing at the bit for another adventure and more gold. That's when the North American expedition was hatched. And, according to what we know now, that was when the fate of the Mississippian culture of the Southeast was sealed. De Soto's three-year trek from village to village, sometimes trading peacefully, sometimes fighting, as they did at the Battle of Mabila - Mobile, Ala., takes its name from that one - under Chief Tuskaloosa. They won the battle and burned Mabila. But it was a Pyrhhic victory. By the time they reached the Mississippi, de Soto's original expedition was in a bad way, its crossbows no longer working, the horses gone, the heavy armor cast off and most of the survivors of the trek weakened and diseased.

They were spreading disease, too. The populace in towns and forts throughout the region was dense and diverse, agriculture abundant, culture sophisticated. The next time Europeans would encounter the region, it was depopulated, having been wiped out by the germs the Spaniards brought with them. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who had never seen a European lost their lives to them as smallpox and other diseases against which they had no immunity took out as much as 90 percent of village after village. That kind of plague destroys more than people. It obliterates entire societies, which is exactly what happened.

Because de Soto had assured the Indians he was an immortal deity related to the sun, when he died of fever on May 21, 1542, his men weighed his body down with sand and secretly deep-sixed him in the Mississippi.

On May 12, 1885, the Metís of Canada surrendered and brought an end to the Second Riel Rebellion. The Metís were people of mixed European and Indian blood, often with French (sometimes Scottish or English) fathers, and mothers of one of several First Nations tribes, mostly Cree, Ojibwe, Saulteaux or Miqmaq.

The Francophone Metís were increasingly upset about an influx of Anglophone settlers and the impending transfer of land from control by the Hudson Bay Company to Canadian sovereignty. They had no title to the land and feared they would lose their de facto control of it under the new arrangement. They were led by Louis Riel. He first spoke out publicly in early October 1869 - saying that nothing should be done before Ottawa negotiated with the Metís. Ottawa was not listening. So the Metís blocked the arrival of the new lieutenant governor and seized Fort Garry on Nov. 6. Thus began the Red River Rebellion or the First Riel Rebellion. The Metís soon set up a provisional government, the Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia, with Riel as president, to handle affairs in the North-West Territory and Rupert's Land. They established their own newspaper, New Nation.

Louis Riel statue on Manitoba
Legislative Building Grounds, Winnipeg.

Ultimately, in 1875, he was given amnesty but only if he agreed to remain in exile in New York for the next five years. During that time, his already strong religious obsession took such fierce hold of him that he was given to outbursts of irrational behavior and speech that he was finally committed for some time to an asylum.

Meanwhile, the Metís had moved west. With the buffalo herds rapidly dwindling from the U.S. government-backed assault on them as part of its cultural genocide against the Plain Indians, and with Canadian government assistance reduced in violation of treaties, the Metís found themselves forced to take up agriculture but faced the old problems of land titles.

In early 1885, emissaries were sent to Ottawa to work out some arrangement. Instead, more troops of the North-West Mounted Police were sent and rumor had it, wrongly, that still more would come. Once again, a provisional government was established, this time for Saskatchewan and once again led by Riel, now back in Canada and recovered from his mental aberrations.

In March, a militia of the provisional government clashed with mounted police they encountered by accident while on patrol, a battle ensued, and the militia won. The Metís soon were in open rebellion. They were joined by other First Nations. Some hit-and-run battles were won, but Riel chose to concentrate his forces in Batoche, and after a three-day battle it became clear all was lost. Riel surrendered and was incarcerated. After a trial for treason, he was hanged in November 1885.

He remains a popular hero in Quebec and Manitoba.

Killing of White Buffalo Seen As Possible Hate Crime

^{By Meteor Blades}

Lightning Medicine Cloud and his mother
(Photo by Kathy Old Crow)

Arby Little Soldier

Said rancher Arby Little Soldier (Three Affiliated Tribes-Fort Berthold): "Local people here are pushing for this to be considered a hate crime. They're contacting their senators, their congressmen. There is no penalty for killing a buffalo in the state of Texas. If you kill a horse, you get hung. If you kill a buffalo, nothing happens. So some people around here would like to see this classified as a hate crime, which would make it a federal crime." Investigators say they have no suspects so far.

Meanwhile, Cynthia Hart-Button, president of the Sacred World Peace Alliance, has donated a white 7-year-old buffalo bull to Little Soldier from the group's own herd in Oregon. He is named Chief Hiawatha, and Hart-Button said she is sending him to Texas "to protect not only the buffalo but to protect him (Little Soldier) and his family."

Hart-Button said her organization doesn't open its sanctuary up to the public because of safety concerns. "We've been threatened, people have offered me millions of dollars for their heads and hides," she said. "I've even been offered money for their meat. These are the rarest animals in the world."

The peace organization's bull may not carry the same spiritual significance, as Little Soldier said it was bred to be a white buffalo. But he said he's grateful and excited for the gift.

Indians Plan Rally Over Racist Attack on Blind Lakota Man

^{By Meteor Blades}

The American Indian Movement, LastRealIndians.com and Lakota elders and others are planning a rally May 21 in Rapid City, S.D., to protest a racist hate crime. As we reported in the 13th edition of First Nations News & Views, Vernon Traversie (Cheyenne River Sioux) had the letters "KKK" carved or burned into his abdomen while recovering from heart surgery in a Rapid City, S.D., hospital. The 68-year-old is blind. He spent two weeks in recovery at the hospital. During this time, he said, a nurse named "Greg" refused to give him pain medication and otherwise treated him disrespectfully.

When Traversie was discharged, a co-worker, shocked at what she saw, told him he should have photographs taken of his stomach because someone had used a knife or some other means to put three "K's" on his stomach. That's the acronym of the racist Ku Klux Klan. Tribal police investigated and took their own photos. They sent copies to Rapid City police. They investigated but filed no charges. FBI agents told Traversie they were going to take a statement from him, but Traversie says he hasn't heard from the bureau in months.

Traversie said he plans to file a lawsuit.

Harry Smiskin, the chairman of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation wrote a scathing letter regarding the incident. It reads, in part:

As a former tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs police officer, I am particularly disturbed by what has not taken place in the aftermath of the assault upon Mr. Traversie. Upon the Yakama Nation's inquiry of his tribal leaders and other relatives, I understand that there has been a complete failure of any federal, state or local law enforcement agency to take any initiative on the matter - despite that the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Police have determined conclusively that a hate crime has been committed against Mr. Traversie. In particular, the United States seems to ignore the trust responsibility it owes Mr. Traversie as a Sioux Indian. Like the assault itself, this federal and state inaction is grossly unjust. [...]

Rapid City Hospital and its medical and convalescent "care providers" seem to have violated Mr. Traversie's civil rights as an American and his fundamental freedoms as a human being. If everything is as it seems, there could be no clearer case of discriminatory treatment, depravation of the equal protection of law, and violation of human rights than here: "KKK" was somehow etched across Mr. Traversie's abdomen - literally etched in his own blood - because he is a Sioux Indian. Our Lakota Brother was viciously violated because he cannot see. This simply would not have happened to an Anglo American elder or an affluent patient, or to any non-Indian person with sight.

Based on Mr. Traversie's account and the corroboration of photographs, it appears that Rapid City Regional Hospital allowed a hate crime and a racially motivated attack to take place, at the hands of its "health care professionals." It does not take a medical professional to observe that three separate incisions across his abdomen that read "KKK" were not the result of open-heart surgery or post-operative care. [...]

Again, I have been told that federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have been formally notified of the attack, but have failed to investigate the crime, obtain a search warrant, or apprehend any suspects. This inaction, too, stands as a clear violation of Mr. Traversie's federal civil rights and his basic human rights. Were Mr. Traversie an Anglo American, we can be sure that federal and state law enforcement would not have handled the referral from the Cheyenne River Police with such disregard.

We urge the United States Department of Justice and the South Dakota U.S. Attorney's Office to immediately cause an investigation of this hate crime. Anything less would be a violation of the trust responsibility that the United States owes to Mr. Traversie.

Samuel Tso, VP of the Navajo Code Talkers Association Has Walked On

^{By navajo}

Samuel Tso
Photo Courtesy of the Navajo Nation

Samuel Tso, 89, of Lukachukai, Ariz. died at San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, N.M. on May 9th after battling cancer.

Tso was Vice President of the Navajo Code Talkers Association whose president, Keith Little died this past January at the age of 87.

Navajo Nation President Ben Shelley said, "The Navajo Nation has lost another Code Talker and that saddens my heart. The Code Talkers have brought great pride to our Nation and the loss of Samuel Tso saddens not only myself, his loss saddens the Navajo Nation. On behalf of the First Lady, the Vice President, and the Navajo people, we offer our prayers, condolences and words of encouragement to the Tso family. Samuel Tso was a true Navajo warrior."

The Navajo Nation flag was flown at half staff from May 10th through May 14th to honor  the Code Talker for his service to the Navajo Nation and his country in World War II.

Tso enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 17 by claiming to be 21 years old. He was sent to Camp Pendleton where he mastered the second version of the code as the original 29 code talkers were being deployed. Tso had to learn both versions.

Tso was of the Zuni Tachii'nii clan and born for the Naakai Dine'e clan on June 22, 1922, at Black Mountain near Many Farms, Ariz. The Navajo introduce themselves first by naming their mother's clan, since they're a matrilineal society, and then they say they are born for their father's clan.

See our previous coverage of Code Talker history here.

U. of Minnesota Students Produce Film Calling for Apology to Dakota Indians

Indian Jail

For a dozen years, Carter Meland has taught American Indian literature in the University of Minnesota's American Indian Studies program. This term 60 students in his "American Indians in Minnesota" class explored an issue we too have examined in FNN&V here and here: the 1862 Dakota War. They came away so appalled that they made a video.

The Dakotas (also known as Santee Sioux or Eastern Dakota) had been promised 1.4 million acres in perpetuity in exchange for giving up 23 million acres. Cut off from their hunting grounds, faced with two bad harvests, encroached on all sides by white settlers and having their treaty-guaranteed food distributions delayed, they sought confirmation of the land deal. They also asked for a loan so they could buy food to hold them over to the next season. The government-appointed Indian agent, Andrew Myrick, said, "If they are hungry, let them eat grass." Five days later, the long-standing tensions exploded and white settlers were attacked. Myrick was soon found dead, his mouth stuff with grass.

President Lincoln's advisors and the president himself thought perhaps this uprising was engineered by the Confederacy, speculation which was found to be false later. Lincoln at one point contemplated sending 10,000 Rebel prisoners of war under Union command to "Attend to the Indians." Congress set a $25 bounty for each scalp of an Indian killed in the state. More than 1600 Dakota were placed in a concentration camp where hundreds starved. When the conflict was over, an estimated 500 whites and more than a 1000 Dakota were dead, although the actual numbers will be forever unknown. Several months after the six-week the conflict ended, 38 Dakota were executed on Lincoln's orders in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

That, however, was not the end of the maltreatment the state dealt to the Dakota and Ojibwe. A good portion of this was delivered in the cultural genocide that was the mission of the residential boarding schools which many Indian children were forced into after being grabbed from their parents.

When the UofM students were done with their exploration of this history, they decided that a government apology to the Dakota and Ojibwe people was in order. To make their case, they put together a five-part, one-hour video, An Overdue Apology,offering a brief history of those people and their interactions with non-Indians and the U.S. and state governments.

Video will not embed, Part 1 here:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/f...  

As you can see, it is an amateur film, created by non-historians, and it suffers from the speed with which it had to be produced. As the Minnesota Post's Paul Udstrand writes, "it's not as polished as a Robert Redford documentary." But it covers the ground and provides the kind of information that ought to be taught about local tribes in every middle school, high school and college across the nation.

As Udstrand says:

The demand for an apology is quite provocative, but it shouldn't be. In many ways it's simply a request that history be recognized and accounted for. Nevertheless many people seem to take reflexive offense at the proposal, as if it's a personal attack of some kind. This is a request for an apology from the US government and Government of MN, not a request for a personal apology from people who obviously did not participate in historical crimes or injustices. A president or governor may be the voice of that apology, but no one is claiming that they are personally responsible. This is not a bizarre concept, Government[s] are durable entities that are accountable for the duration of their existence.  [...]

Before you declare an apology to be "meaningless" you need give those requesting the apology a chance to explain what it means to them. And since any consequences of an apology are created by the apology, one cannot declare an apology that has not been rendered to be inconsequential. Obviously an apology could be a meaningless gesture, but it could also be a bridge to a better understanding of history and more respectful relationships among people. You may be able to argue that an apology is useless as long as it's theoretical, but once an actual apology is issued, it may well create a powerful significance.

Part 2: The Dakota War's atrocities, Dakota and Ojibwe traditions and daily life.

Part 3: Land allotment, blood quantum issues, the boarding schools and renaming of Indian children with Christian names.

Part 4: Economic revitalization, Indian gaming, interviews with UofM students on their knowledge of the tribes.

Part 5 : Gaining justice, the rationale behind an apology, nine UofM students from Meland's class express support for Minnesota Indians by giving their own apologies for the injustices that have occurred in the state:

"The fight for indigenous rights fits into a larger struggle for social justice. Social justice is the upholding of the natural law that all persons irrespective of ethnic origin, gender, possessions, race, religion, etc. are to be treated with equity and without prejudice. The path to justice for American Indians in Minnesota starts with recognizing the implications that these historical events have on relations between Native and non-Native communities. Things like the Dakota War and the dispossession of White Earth are part of a colonialist system that damages Native sovereignty and identity."

An apology isn't the end-all, be-all of reconciliation. But it's always a good start.

• Lakota Farmers Reluctantly Join Loggers In Beetle-Infested Forest: The last thing Joe Shark (Oglala-Lakota) wants to be doing is cutting down trees in the forests of the Black Hills sacred to the Lakota. In fact, he has been opposed to logging there for a long time. But the Pine Beetle has killed many trees throughout the West, and the Black Hills are no exception. Left uncut, the infested trees provide an incubator for another generation of the destructive pests. So now Shark and other Oglalas have joined the Lakota Logging Project to cut the infested trees as a means of rescuing the still-healthy ones. Dave Ventimiglia, who co-founded the Lakota Logging Project, said he hopes to eventually raise $150,000 to build a saw mill on the Pine Ridge reservation. Oglala loggers could take the downed trees there and perhaps replace the run-down mobile homes occupied by so many of the tribe.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Government Cannot Satisfy Indian Need for Eagle Feathers : Officials at the National Eagle Repository in Denver say they cannot keep up with the demand for carcasses needed by American Indians for bald and golden eagle carcasses used in ceremonies. The repository is the only place Indians can legally obtain the carcasses because the birds are heavily protected and their killing outlawed. Nobody can keep eagle feathers or other parts of the birds without a federal permit.  
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Federally Recognized Tribes Worry About State-Recognized Tribes: Kerry Holton, president of the Delaware Nation (aka Western Delaware) based in Anardarko, Okla., fears that state recognition of tribes could hurt tribes that are only recognized by the federal government. About half the states, mostly east of the Mississippi, give recognition to tribes based on widely varying rules. At an Indian business group luncheon recently, Holton said of federal aid to the tribes from Washington: "They're taking some of our pie. That's our money." The problem, he said, is that "nobody has defined what that means, to be state-recognized. There are 800 to 1,000 unrecognized entities out there," he said. He noted that the Lumbee, a state-recognized tribe in North Carolina, recently got $13 million through an Indian Housing Block Grant. The Western Delawares, on the other hand, only received $87,051 for that purpose. The Lumbee population is 55,000; the Western Delawares have 1440 enrolled members, which means that on a per capita basis the Lumbees got four times what the Delawares received. At the request of U.S. Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.), the Government Accountability Office drafted a report on the issue of state-recognized tribes. Boren has seen it, but it hasn't been released to the public. The Lumbees have protested, saying the GAO report was written from the point of view of opponents to state recognition.
^{-Meteor Blades}

(Photo by Kent Eanes)

Sanford "Redskin" logo

• Boston-Area Indian Center Asks Elizabeth Warren to Come Visit: The head of the North American Indian Center of Boston has extended an invitation to Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren to come visit the center in Jamaica Plain, an historic urban area of the city where she has made many campaign stops. Warren came under fire two weeks ago after it was revealed she listed herself as Native American in a widely circulated law school directory starting in the 1980s. Also, Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania both listed her as a minority professor. No record exists of her objecting to this claim. The right-wing Boston Herald, Republican Sen. Scott Brown and several conservative political pundits have attacked Warren, who is campaigning for Brown's seat. The attacks have included racial slurs and stereotypes and displayed profound ignorance about Indians. But the critics' implications that Warren may have used her Indian heritage to gain a hiring or matriculation advantage over other students have not been borne out by records from several universities she attended or was employed by, including Harvard. A reference to Warren's great-great-great grandmother being listed on a 19th Century marriage certificate as Cherokee was found by a genealogist. But no copy of the marriage certificate itself has been uncovered. "We've never heard from Elizabeth Warren, unfortunately," said NAICOB Executive Director Joanne Dunn in an interview. "We would like to see her. It would be nice if she reached out to us. She can come on down. We'll make her some frybread."
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Is 'One Drop' Rule Overruled for Indians? Columnist Clarence Page weighs in on the Elizabeth Warren controversy:

If Warren was claiming Indian ancestry when it worked to her benefit, she was following another American tradition, writes David Treuer, an Ojibwe Indian from northern Minnesota and author of Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life.

"An Indian identity has become a commodity," he recently wrote in the Washington Post, "though not one that is openly traded. It has real value in only a few places; the academy is one of them. And like most commodities, it is largely controlled by the elite."

You can read our take on the Warren affair in the 13th edition of First Nations News & Views.

• Mother's Day Native American Powwow Celebrates 21st Year: Mittie Wood started the powwow in Dade City, Fla., when her twin grand-daughters were 5 years old in 1991. She did it to honor the Muscogee (Creek) ancestry her mother had quietly inculcated in her and other young kin since she was a young girl. But when she decided to go public with the powwow in Withlacoochee River Park, her mother, then 78, spoke of her fear that exposure would mean the whole family would be shipped off to Oklahoma. Wood's great-great grandmother had been one of the 70,000 Indians of several tribes forced at gunpoint to go to what is now Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears in the 1830s. Thousands died on the trip. Eventually, Wood's mother became comfortable with the powwow, which brings out up to 3000 visitors each year. The park on the river (whose Muscogee name means "crooked river") includes an authentic replica of a Creek village built years ago specifically for the powwow, as well as an arena where storytelling, demonstrations, drumming and performances are held. "It's like you're stepping back in time," said the powwow's organizer Sharon Thomas, Wood's daughter.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Native Kids Participate in Solar-Powered Drag Race: In Albuquerque last Friday, some American Indian elementary students raced drag cars they built with solar technology. It was the 18th Annual Zia Solar Car Race. The goal, besides having fun, is to prepare kids to be future alternative energy leaders. Students from the Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, Cochiti, Tesuque and Isleta Pueblos participated in the event along with a group from Mesa Elementary School on the Navajo Nation.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Eco-Advocates, Tribes and Others Fight Wind Project: A coalition of environmentalists, tribal representatives, recreational vehicle users, hunters and community residents are calling for a national moratorium on the "fast-tracking" of large energy projects on federal lands. The coalition's action was kindled by local approval of the Ocotillo Wind Energy Facility, a massive project that will cover 12,500 acres of desert in Imperial County, Calif. In a press release, Terry Weiner, Imperial County Projects Coordinator for the Desert Protective Council, said: "This industrial wind project is symbolic of what's wrong with the current federal fast-tracking process. We are the canaries in the coal mine. If this is not stopped here, destruction of millions of acres of public lands across the Southwest will likely soon follow." Unless blocked, the project on Bureau of Land Management land will be going forward under new executive-ordered rules that open up previously protected lands. It will consist of 112 wind turbines-each perched atop a 450-foot-high pillar-with a total generating capacity of 465 megawatts, the 12th largest wind farm in the United States, enough to power 140,000 homes.

In a letter to President Obama in February, Anthony Pico, chairman of the Viejas
band of Kumeyaay Indians, wrote: "We believe that the Department of the Interior is poised to violate the law and our rights to religious freedom and our cultural identities guaranteed by DOI's own policies, the United States Constitution, and international declarations. We need your help."
^{-Meteor Blades}

Curley Youpee in ceremonial dress

Indians have often been referred to as the "Vanishing Americans." But we are still here, entangled each in his or her unique way with modern America, blended into the dominant culture or not, full-blood or not, on the reservation or not, and living lives much like the lives of other Americans, but with differences related to our history on this continent, our diverse cultures and religions, and our special legal status. To most other Americans, we are invisible, or only perceived in the most stereotyped fashion.

First Nations News & Views is designed to provide a window into our world, each Sunday reporting on a small number of stories, both the good and the not-so-good, and providing a reminder of where we came from, what we are doing now and what matters to us. We wish to make it clear that neither navajo nor I make any claim whatsoever to speak for anyone other than ourselves, as individuals, not for the Navajo people or the Seminole people, the tribes in which we are enrolled as members, nor, of course, the people of any other tribes.

Fish were a major portion of the Indian diet. The archaeological record shows that Indian people in the western Great Lakes area used a wide variety of different kinds of fish. These included suckers, catfish, and sunfish.

Among the Algonquian-speaking Indian nations in this area, fishing was a year-round occupation, but at certain times the fish were more plentiful than at others. During the spring and fall, when the fish crowded into shallow water, the Indians caught them by the thousands. During this time, when there were plenty of fish to catch, the bands lived in fairly large groups on the shores of the Great Lakes.

Among the Anishinabe of Minnesota, families would move to their fishing grounds in mid-October. Here they would catch fish to last them over the winter. At some sites, such as Sault Sainte Marie, where fish were abundant, the Anishinabe would remain at the fishing site during the winter. One of the important fish at this site was the whitefish. Some groups would make regular or irregular trips to the fishery at Sault Sainte Marie in the fall.

Fish were taken with fishhooks, nets, spears, traps, lures, and bait. It is important to understand that this was not sport fishing: it was a subsistence activity which was vital to the survival of the people. The focus was on harvesting as many fish as possible in a relatively short time.

Many tribes, such as the Chippewa and Ottawa, used gill nets for fishing. Working with basswood, nettle, and other natural fibers, the women would fashion mesh nets. The men would then make cedar floats for the net and they would cut grooves in small stones which would serve as sinkers.

In many of the tribes, the women would set nets made of basswood and twine. With this system, they would catch as many as 200 fish in a night. The nets would then be washed and cleaned with a sumac leaf solution to get rid of the fish odor. Herbal medicines would then be applied to the net to attract the fish.

On the rivers, the Indians would often fish from a canoe using a dip net. Two men working from a canoe could harvest several hundred pounds of fish in just a few hours. The man in the bow would handle the net while the man in the stern would guide the boat in a backward drift downstream. At Sault Sainte Marie, a bark canoe would be paddled out into the rapids. One individual would then stand up and thrust a dip net deep into the water to catch the fish. Typically, six or seven large fish would be obtained with each dip. The fish would be dumped into the canoe and the operation repeated until a full canoe-load of fish had been obtained.

On the Great Lakes, the fishermen would take their canoes far offshore and set their nets in deepwater.

In addition to using the nets, fish would also be speared at night using a birch-bark or pine-pitch torch. The light from the torch would draw the fish to the area around the canoe where they could be easily speared. The fishing spear was usually tipped with a bone or horn point.

In some places, the Anishinabe used fish traps. Rocks would be piled across a small stream to form a V. This would form a trap to bring the fish into the small area of the V where they could be easily caught. John Rogers, recalling his Anishinabe boyhood during the 19th century, writes:

"Later, when we had no use for the trap, it was removed from the river. The fish must not be caught except for eating, for such is the belief of the Chippewa and other Indian tribes."

During the winter, Indians would spear trout and sturgeon through the ice. They would first cut a hole in the ice and then build a small hut so that the fisherman would be out of the light, hidden from the fish. The fisherman would drop a small lure into the water and use it to decoy the curious fish into spear range. In some instances, they would use spears up to forty feet in length to reach into the depths of the water. Sometimes they would use gill nets when fishing through the ice.

The fish would be processed by smoking and drying. In colder weather, the fish would be frozen for later use.

One of the ways of preparing the fish among the Anishinabe was to carefully pack the fish in clay and then bury it in the coals of the fire. After several hours the fish would be ready to eat. John Rogers, writing in the 19th century, recalls:

"...when they were taken from the fire and clay, the scales would cling to the clay, so the fish were all ready to eat. And, oh, how delicious they were!"

Welcome to the 15th edition of First Nations News & Views. This weekly series is one element in the "Invisible Indians" project put together by navajo and me, with assistance from the Native American Netroots Group. Last week's edition is here. In this edition you will find a condensed history of the Narragansetts, the tribe whose ancient lands Netroots Nation participants will be holding their conference on in early June, a look at the year 1895 in American Indian history, two news briefs and some linked news bullets. Click on any of the headlines below to take you directly to that section of News & Views or to any of our earlier editions.

This Week in American Indian History in 1895

~ Navajo Artist Tony Abeyta is a "Living Treasure"  ~  Day and Time for American Indian Caucus at Netroots Nation is Announced ~

All Previous Editions

Cross Posted from Native American Netroots

Fanciful view of Roger Williams meeting the Narragansett in 1636.

When participants at the Netroots Nation annual conference head out for dinner in Providence, R.I., less than three weeks from now, one of the menu items they'll see everywhere will be quahog chowder and, for the really adventurous, exotic dishes like jalapeño-stuffed quahogs. These delicious clams can be found elsewhere, from Prince Edward Island to the Yucatán peninsula. But they got their name from the people who lived in Rhode Island ages before the colony was a gleam in Roger Williams's eye - the Narragansetts.

Though there are some 2400 tribally enrolled Narragansetts living in Rhode Island today, many of them feel they are, like Native people elsewhere in the United States, invisible. Small wonder. Just 20 miles south of Providence, in Exeter, is a museum devoted to the culture of the Narragansetts and Wampanoags, who also live in Rhode Island, just as they did before the first Europeans stepped onshore. Seventy percent of the museum's visitors are surprised to learn that neither tribe is extinct. Despite hundreds of years of prodigious work to extinguish them - to take their land, their culture, their language - they live on. But I'll get to all that momentarily.

Quahog comes from the
Narragansett word poquauhock

All around Rhode Island, Narragansett words name towns, bodies of water, islands and streets. The word "Narragansett" itself, which is an apparent English corruption of Nanhigganeuck, means "small point of land." There's Pawtuxet ("Little Falls") Village, which will commemorate its 375th birthday next year, one of the oldest villages in New England. The Hotel Manisses on Block Island takes its name from what the Narragansetts called that island, the "little god place." A ride to the north edge of the city will take you to Wanskuck ("the steep place") Park.

Succotash comes from the
Narragansett word msíckquatash

Today, the descendants of the Narragansetts live throughout Rhode Island. Their tiny reservation is at Charlestown, just 1800 acres (2.8 square miles) surrounding the three acres that was once all the tribe had left. Some 60 tribal members reside there now. That in itself is practically a miracle given the more than three centuries settlers and militias and government bureaucrats spent trying to obliterate the tribe. In addition to the 2400 enrolled members, there are perhaps another 2000 or so people in Rhode Island and the rest of the United States who can trace their line to a Narragansett ancestor.

The inevitably flattened nuance that is a consequence of compressing the tribe's long past into a few paragraphs no doubt would make historians cringe. But even a few words can help bring the invisible into the light. Readers interested in something more thorough can find it here, here, in The Narragansetts and in Robert Geake's A History of the Narragansett Tribe of Rhode Island: Keepers of the Bay, just out last year in paperback. Except for Simmons's book, which I've only just begun reading, I've adapted the next dozen paragraphs freely from these and the linked sources in the text.

First Encounters

The Narragansetts were fortunate. They were barely affected by the plague. Already strong before the illness struck down their rivals, by the time the Mayflower landed its passengers at Plymouth in 1620, they were the most powerful tribe in southern New England, comprising perhaps 10,000 people. They were enemies of the Wampanoag, the "Thanksgiving" Indians, and the Pequot, with whom they fought  regularly. The English, who they called ciauquaquock ("people of the knife"), would not trade with them directly.

In 1636, Roger Williams, who openly said colonists had no right to take Indian land was forced out of Massachusetts. He bought land from the Narragansett and ushered in a period of trust between him and the Narragansett that lasted until his death near half a century later.

That trust was early on reinforced when the Narragansett briefly joined the Puritans in a three-year war against the Pequot. In the last year of that war, 1637, the English slaughtered hundreds of Pequot women, children and the elderly by burning them alive inside their palisade fort at Mystic River and selling the survivors into Caribbean slavery. In disgust, the Narragansett went home. Although they gained some benefit from the war, their Mohegan rivals under the sachem Uncas, who had also allied with the English, got the most.

The Narragansett sought to maintain their superiority in southern New England, but events ran out of their control. Over the years of shifting alliances and steady English immigration, many skirmishes occurred, there were a couple of real battles, and the Narragansett wound up paying annual tribute to the English. But they remained good friends with Williams. He was still considered a radical outsider by the Puritans, who excluded Rhode Island from the New England Confederation in 1643. Isolated, their traditional turf threatened by a tribe the English protected, the Narragansett grew weaker every passing year.

The sachem began his attacks and the English countered. Surrounded on all sides by people they did not trust, the Narragansett remained neutral for the first six months of what we call King Philip's War. But they took Wampanoag refugees into a fort they had constructed for themselves and waited things out. The English in pursuit of Metacomet left them alone. But he managed to elude them and make his way back to the fort, soon departng with most of the Wampanoag refugees. The English saw this as a violation of neutrality and sent 1,000 colonial troops and 150 Mohegan scouts to lay siege. In the fighting, the Narragansetts lost 600 warriors and 20 sachems.

The principal Narragansett sachem, Canonchet, continued to fight in alliance with Metacomet. But returning on a mission to obtain seed corn he was captured by Mohegans and handed over to the English who promptly sent him to a firing squad.

King Philip's War was at first a close thing. Some scholars say the allied Indians had a narrow possibility of driving the English out altogether. But after nine months, the insurgent tribes, outnumbered from the beginning, were running short of food, gunpowder and warriors. Metacomet was hunted down, shot in the heart, hanged and then decapitated. His head was sold for 30 shillings.

The Narragansett Fight to Keep Their Identity

Bella Machado-Noka, reigning champion
of the Eastern Blanket Dance

In 1830 the state sought to portray the them as unworthy of being called Indians. "Forty years ago this was a nation of indians now it is a medly [sic] of mongrels in which the African blood predominates," read a report from a committee of the legislature. The real motivation behind this claim could be found in the recommendation that a white overseer be appointed and the land be sold for "publick uses" as soon as the tribe was deemed extinct.

The legislature tried again in 1852. A report stated: "While there are no Indians of whole blood remaining, and nearly all have very little of the Indian blood, they still retain all the privileges which belonged to the Tribe in ancient times." And those, it said, should be extinguished. The Narragansetts successfully resisted.

In 1866, they resisted again. This time, that resistance against the effort to break up their tribe and make them citizens was couched in language that explicitly attacked racial prejudice:

"We are not negroes, we are the heirs of Ninagrit, and of the great chiefs and warriors of the Narragansetts. Because, when your ancestors stole the negro from Africa and brought him amongst us and made a slave of him, we extended him the hand of friendship, and permitted his blood to be mingled with ours, are we to be called negroes? And to be told that we may be made negro citizens? We claim that while one drop of Indian blood remains in our veins, we are entitled to the rights and privileges guaranteed by your ancestors to ours by solemn treaty, which without a breach of faith you cannot violate."

The Narragansett had responded that they were a multiracial nation, culturally Indian, thereby turning the emerging "one-drop" rule on its head. Once more, their resistance succeeded.

But in 1880, just as the federal government would seek to do with all the tribes, Rhode Island detribalized the Narragansetts. This was illegal under federal law, but Washington did not intervene. At the time, there were 324 people the state considered part of the "mongrel" tribe. The government broke up the reservation, sold the remaining 15,000 acres at auction using most of the money to cover incurred debts, and leaving only the three acres around the Indian church founded in 1744. The state ended all treatment of the tribe as a political entity.

Despite detribalization, however, the Narragansetts took great pains over the next half century to continue meetings and ceremonies, maintaining the customs as best it could under trying circumstances. In 1900, it incorporated. After the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Narragansetts began the long process of regaining tribal status.

Modern Times

It was not until 1975, however, that the tribe filed a federal lawsuit seeking restoration of 3200 of the acres taken nearly a century before, five square miles. Three years later, it signed an agreement with Rhode Island, the muncipality of Charlestown and white property owners for 1800 acres to be turned over to the tribal corporation and held in trust for the descendants of the 1880 Narragansett Rolls.

Narragansett Sachem Matthew Thomas, right,
tries to hold back a Rhode Island State Police officer
from entering the Narragansett Indian Smoke Shop
in Charlestown, R.I., in 2003. The tribe claimed it had
the sovereign right not to collect taxes there.

The lack of sovereignty was punctuated in 2009, when U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Narragansetts and other tribes in the case of Carcieri v. Salazar. The tribe had purchased 31 acres that it wished to have brought into federal trust lands governed by the Department of Interior. The department agreed to do so. Rhode Island appealed administratively and then in the courts, losing until the case reached the Supreme Court. The state argued that the vague wording of the Indian Reorganization Act did not allow the federal government to transfer land into federal trust for tribes that were not recognized before 1934. The Court agreed in a decision affecting not just the Narragansetts but 30 other tribes. Since then, bills have been drafted for a legislative "fix," but none has yet emerged from committee. President Obama has made a statement hinting that the Department of Interior should be able to transfer land to tribes recognized after 1934, but the executive branch cannot take unilateral action. Meanwhile, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance and the RI Statewide Coalition continue to oppose anything that would give the Narragansett more control over their own affairs.

Thus, politically, the Naragansetts remain in a kind of tribal limbo, without the full rights of other tribes, but better off than the many unrecognized tribes with no rights at all.

Culturally, it's a different matter. The Narragansett know who they are. All that resistance in the face of great odds has bound them together in pride over the generations. While their blood mingled, their spirit and unforgotten traditions has kept them united.

Lorén Spears, curator of Tomaquag Museum

The museum's exhibits focus on the Narragansetts' past, both distant and recent, but its mission is educate everyone, including Waumpeshau (white people), about Native history, culture, art and philosophy:

[Visitors can explore] Narragansett history through The Pursuit of Happiness: An Indigenous View, which reflects on the denial of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The exhibit focuses on Education, Spirituality, Political and Economic Sovereignty, Love and Family, and the importance of traditional language.

Citing the marathon historian Tom Derderian, Gary David Wilson writes of Brown:

He was regarded by most as a freak - undisciplined and uncontrollable, a child of nature, an awesome natural talent - and if he won or lost it was because of his unalterable nature. Thus, as an Indian with physical gifts, he would never get personal credit for what he accomplished. It was expected he could run - he was an Indian, after all - so he got no credit for character, courage or work ethic. If he succeeded it was because he did what his handlers prepared him to do, like a thoroughbred racehorse. When he failed, it was his own fault, because he was "just an Indian."

As Wilson says, few even in the running community know of him today, though there is now a book on his life.

The museum is only part of Spears's work. Her teaching background with at-risk kids spurred her to establish the Nuweetoun School adjacent to the museum to teach kindergarten through 8th grade children in a supportive environment that adds Native culture and history to all areas of study. For her work, she was chosen as one of 11 Extraordinary Woman honorees for 2010 in Rhode Island. Writes Leslie Rovetti:

The building that houses the school used to be her grandparent's business, the Dove Crest Restaurant, which served raccoon pot pie, cornmeal pudding, cod cakes, succotash, venison and native clam bakes, in addition to more common foods like steaks and "the most amazing double-stuffed potatoes," Spears said. When the building that was the restaurant's gift shop became the museum, she said her grandmother was on the founding board.

Because of flooding, the school is on hiatus. But Spears is busy with a new grant-funded project, building a curriculum the tribe would like to be used throughout all schools in Rhode Island. The curriculum would be used together with the film, Places, Memories, Stories & Dreams: The Gifts of Inspiration. Spears says she  remembers "being in a history class during my elementary days and actually reading that I supposedly didn't exist, that my family didn't exist, that my people didn't exist."

The film features traditional Narragansett stories and an oral history presented by tribal elder Paulla Dove-Jennings (aka SunFlower), a renowned Indian storyteller. Once the project is complete, the film's six segments narrated by Dove-Jennings will be organized within the 43-page curriculum. That will be available for downloading from the museum's website, free to teachers who want to use it for lessons.

If the curriculum comes to be widely used in Rhode Island schools, it might go a long way toward ending the Narragansetts' invisibility in the very place they lived for so many milleniums. That would be a very good thing.

Indeed, no reason exists why such a curriculum couldn't be developed for every school district where Native people once lived and many still do, even if nobody notices until there's trouble. But widespread adoption of such curriculums tailor-made to local circumstances means discomfort for many people when Indians and all we represent in this country - culturally, politically, historically - emerge from invisibility. Strong opposition could be expected. What are they afraid of after all these years?  

On May 23, 1895, the smallest and last federally approved land rush in Oklahoma Territory got under way as "surplus lands" of the Kickapoo were thrown open for settlers to homestead. That rip-off had begun in 1889.

The Kickapoo had fled their homeland in southwestern Wisconsin after the Blackhawk War in 1832. By a circuitous route over many years, they had wound up in Indian Territory. The territory had been the turf of Caddo, Osage, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Wichita and Comanche. But in the 1830s, it became the new home of the "Five Civilized Tribes" who were removed at gunpoint from their east of the Mississippi homelands. Over the next several decades, 20 more tribes were shipped to what became Oklahoma.

In 1889, there were in the western part of the territory areas originally meant to be filled with other removed tribes, two million acres of so-called "Unassigned Lands." As part the Indian Appropriation Act of that year, those lands were set aside for white settlement. Out of that came the first Oklahoma land rush.

A Kickapoo family photo taken in 1898 by Rinehart

The corruption involved - with sheriffs, their deputies, minor federal officials and others getting a head start on the best land, the so-called "Sooners - is a story for another time. For the Indians, that part is irrelevant. It was all over for them when they were agreed or were forced to sign away their rights. By June 1890, agreements had been "obtained" from the hold-outs, the Iowas, Sacs and Foxes, Pottawatomies, and Absentee Shawnees. Only the stubborn Kickapoo remained.

After a commission visit with the Kickapoos, Jerome wrote to his superiors on July 1:

The Kickapoos are altogether the most ignorant and degraded Indians that we have met, but are possessed of an animal cunning, and obstinacy in a rare degree. We were prepared, by what we had heard before our coming for an exhibition of these qualities. [...]

The Commission, each member in turn, made speeches to them, explained our business with them, told them of the impending changes in their mode of living, earning a living &c, and submitted to them a proposition in writing, which is hereto attached and made a part hereof, and placed a copy of it in the hands of the Chief, and asked them to go with their Interpreter and consider it. [...]

When the paper, containing the proposition, was placed in the hands of the Chief, the Kickapoos seemed to become somewhat uneasy-a little Indian jargon was exchanged-when he, the Chief, handed back the paper and refused to keep it. They then took their leave, and promised to return in the afternoon. At the time appointed they came back, and promptly told us, that they would not make any contract, because it would offend the Great Spirit.

Jerome went on to say that if the president were to set a deadline for allotting land, this would speed the process with recalcitrant tribes.

A year later, the commission met with the Kickapoos again, this time letting them know that the allotment process was going to happen whether they wished it or not. So, they should sell and get the best deal they could. Hence it was considered better to let the white crowds overrun the reservation than to sell it. Ock-qua-noc-a-sey was the chief speaker of the Kickapoo. He had a lot to say about the land being given by the Great Spirit who would be angry if the Kickapoos sold it. The allotment deal was something that came "someone under the earth," he said, adding that the Kickapoos would be better off to let the whites overrun it than sell it. "Whenever the white people take all the land from the Indians," he said, "we believe the land will be destroyed. [...] We have a small reservation here and you have the biggest part of the United States; and you should be satisfied and we are doing well."

Dissident Indians from the tribes that had already been forced to sign came to warn the Kickapoos not to "touch the pen." And Ock-qua-noc-a-sey and others who had been speaking did not. On June 18, they got up from the negotiations and went home.

Later, all but three of the adult male Kickapoos showed up for another meeting. Four had already signed the allotment agreement. Others seemed ready to sign. But then Chief Wape-mee-shay-waw showed up, and after some talk, all but the signers came to the chief's side. The commission had failed.

But, in August, at the instigation of John T. Hill - who, wrote Berlin B. Chapman in 1939, was probably as much Kickapoo as David Jerome - Ock-qua-noc-a-sey and Kish-o-corn-me signed the allotment deal and used dubious power-of-attorney to sign for 51 other Kickapoos, the adult male population of the tribe in September 1891. So seven men, one of doubtful heritage made a deal for the whole tribe. Washington considered the document binding. The majority of Kickapoos did not, and they continued to resist right up until the allotments were handed out three years later.

Of 206,080 acres on the reservation, 22,640 acres were allotted to 283 Kickapoos, 80 acres each by March 27, 1895. The remaining 183,440 acres purchased by the federal government were opened to settlers in a land run. The Kickapoo lands were added to Lincoln, Oklahoma and Pottawatomie Counties.

Today, the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, federally recognized since 1936, has 2,720 enrolled members, some 1800 of whom live in the state. About 400 Kickapoo, including children, speak the tribe's Algonquian language. Two other federally recognized Kickapoo tribes totaling a few hundred enrolled members live in Kansas and Texas.

Navajo Artist Tony Abeyta is a "Living Treasure"

Tony Abeyta
-Photo by Jennifer Esperanza

At age 46, Abeyta finds it a little strange to be considered a living treasure. He was selected for "his style, his time spent mentoring other young Native American artists and his refusal to fall back on formulas when it comes to creating art. Abeyta is among the artists who are pushing the envelope when it comes to redefining American Indian art."

Abeyta grew up in Gallup, N.M., but left at age 16 to attend the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe. He has studied art across the nation as well as in France and Italy. He now has studios in Santa Fe and in Chicago. In addition to oil paintings, Abeyta also works on large-scale drawings, large sculptures and designing jewelry.

Thumbnails of Tony Abeyta's art

Narciso Abeyta

His father, Narciso Abeyta, was also an artist. Born in 1918, he began his art career at the early age of 11 by drawing his first creations on canyon walls on the land of the Navajo Nation. By 32 he was published in Art in America. During World War II, he was one of the famed Code Talkers. He walked on in 1998.

The festival opens May 26. More than 200 native artists from some 40 tribes and pueblos have been invited to the two-day festival. A wide range of art forms -  pottery, carvings, jewelry and more - will be on display, much of it for sale. There will also be an "Emerging Artist" section to showcase new talent.

Thumbnails of Narciso Abeyta's art

Day and Time for American Indian Caucus at Netroots Nation is Announced

Meteor Blades and navajo are pleased to announce the date and time for the American Indian Caucus, which has been held every year since 2006 at Yearly Kos/Netroots Nation. Please join us! In light of the Elizabeth Warren controversy, we will be discussing and answering questions about what it is to be Indian, voter suppression on and near Native reservations and what can be done about it, and our experience in building First Nations News & Views.

navajo (aka Neeta Lind) will be giving a presentation again this year during the Promoting People of Color in the Progressive Blogosphere panel.
Friday, June 8, at 4:30 PM to 5:45 PM

This panel will address the needs, successes and obstacles to having greater participation from people of color in the blogosphere. Using the models of  Native American Netroots and Black Kos as a beginning point for the discussion, we'll cover topics such as color blindness vs. representation and how to get historically underrepresented groups and their views heard. We'll discuss how to organize outreach between the larger blogosphere and blogs that are specific to communities of color and how to form stronger connections to ongoing organizing efforts and activism in communities of color. We'll also focus on how organizations can promote diversity within new grassroots organizations.

Another panel that was created to house the numerous proposals for voter suppression panels:

Protecting Voting Rights in Communities of Color in 2012
Thursday, June 7, at 4:30 PM to 5:45 PM

Black and brown voters turned out in record numbers in 2008. However, the introduction of voter ID initiatives in many states creates a new barrier for many Americans, particularly in traditionally disenfranchised communities of color. Voters in these communities-as well as students, seniors, the working poor and those with disabilities-will be most impacted. What coalitions and campaigns are underway to ensure these voters have equal access to the polls? How can we ensure that their voting rights are safeguarded and their voices counted? Panelists will provide case studies of campaign strategies and community solutions and tackle tough questions concerning voter ID laws.

• BIA Disputes GOP Claim About Violence Against Women: In their truncated reauthorization of Violence Against Women Act, House Republicans have relied on a House Judiciary Committee report which claims non-Indian offenders commit a "very small percentage" of domestic violence crimes on reservations. Citing this as a reason not to include better protection for Indian women on reservations as part of the VAWA renewal, Republicans last week rejected a proposed revision of the VAWA to allow tribal jurisdiction in cases of violence against women by non-Indian men on reservations. Since domestic violence on reservations is poorly handled by non-reservation jurisdictions, the women are pretty much left to fend for themselves. Michael S. Black (Oglala), acting director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said of the "small percentage" claim, "This is not true." Black wrote: "...the BIA recognizes that over half of all Indian married women have non-Indian husbands and that Indian women experience some of the highest domestic-violence victimization rates in the country. There can be no doubt that there is a very real problem of non-Indian on Indian domestic violence in Indian Country today. Nonetheless, and regardless of any arguments over the verifiability of statistics in any studies or reports, we should not lose sight of the simple fact that there is no acceptable rate of domestic violence by non-Indian men on Indian women. To argue otherwise is an assault on our national conscience."
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Tribes Contribute More Than $1 Million to Obama: American Indian tribes have generally been quite pleased with how Barack Obama has treated Native matters since arriving in Washington. Consequently, they have collectively contributed more than $1 million to his re-election campaign compared with $264,000 in 2008. They've given Mitt Romney just $3,000. In addition to establishing a Senior Advisor on Native Affairs, pushing to get the Tribal Law and Order Act passed, settling the long-standing Elouise Cobell lawsuit to the tune of $3.4 billion, and settling another $1.1 billion multi-tribal conflict with the federal government over royalties due the tribes, Obama is seen as having achieved a lot for the tribes and, most important, done a lot of listening. He "has done more for Indian country than any president I can remember," said Chief James Allan, chairman of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in northern Idaho, which donated $35,800 this year to Obama and his joint fundraising committee.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Important Navajo Taboo, Don't Look at the Sun Today:

Painting by Bahe Whitethorne

An annular solar eclipse will be in full view over the Navajo Nation today (Sunday) because it lies directly in the eclipse path. In addition to the common warning not to look directly at the sun's eclipse, Navajos have more rules to follow. Bahe Whitethorne Sr. (Navajo) wrote and illustrated in one of his many children's books called Sunpainters: Eclipse of the Navajo Sun about the taboos to observe while the sun is being eaten.

"The Navajo word for eclipse is 'eating the sun.' In the Navajo tradition it is believed that the 'sun dies' during a solar eclipse and that it is an intimate event between the Earth, Sun and Moon.

"People are told to stay inside and keep still during the dark period. There's no eating, drinking, sleeping, weaving or any other activity. Traditionalists believe that not following this practice could lead to health problems and misfortune to the family."

Once the Na'ach'aabii - the Little People - have repainted the sun and all the colors of the earth, you can resume your activities.
^-navajo

• Tribe Works to Resurrect Game of Cherokee Marbles:

Nan Davis and her daughter Andrea Cochran compete in an elimination round of Cherokee Marbles in 2011. (Photo by Will Chavez)

• Indian Students Touch Their Culture in Wyoming Museum: Twice a year, students from the 128-year-old St. Labre Indian School next to the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Ashland, Montana, travel to Cody, Wyoming, to get a first-hand look at Native items housed at the Plains Indian Museum. In addition to their teachers, three Cheyenne elders accompany the students to Cody to pray for them and protect them on their journey. Many of the items the students see and touch have never been on public display. Levi Bixby (Northern Cheyenne) said he recognized the tribal colors on a horse ornament because he had learned beadwork from his grandmother. "I've learned, over the years, the difference between Cheyenne, Crow and Lakota, and I've kinda picked up on other things like Cree; they use flowers, and I do find it interesting, and I do love it because it's part of my heritage." He wants to learn as much as he can about his tribal history and culture, so he can pass along his heritage to his kids and grandkids, "...so we don't fade away."
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Oregon Bans Indian Mascots at Schools:

Banks High School (Oregon) "Brave"

• Ethnic Studies Ban in Arizona Not Keeping Indians Out Native Classes: Arizona's public and charter schools now prohibit ethnic studies. But students in the state can still enroll in classes that include Indian content because both federal and state statutes require it. The state specifically bars classes that are said to promote the overthrow of the U.S. government or create resentment toward a race or class of people, those meant to create ethnic solidarity or designed for specific ethnic groups. Debora Norris (Navajo), director of the Arizona Department of Education's Office of Indian Education, says that since the law passed 17 months ago, she has received calls, letters and e-mails from Indian parents worried about how the it will affect their children. The influx of questions was so great that her office issued a statement pointing out the statute's exemption for Native students as long as the classes are open to all students and do not incite a rebellion against the federal government or hatred toward races or classes. She pointed out that another state law requires school boards to "incorporate instruction on Native American history into appropriate existing curricula." But she concedes that she doesn't know how many schools are in compliance. Of the more than one million students enrolled in Arizona, about 65,000 are Indian, mostly Navajo. About 100 of the 2200 schools in the state are all-Indian.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• School Board Nixes Lakota Honor Song at Graduation:

(Photo by Ardis McCrae/Native Sun News)

• University of Denver Funds Student Powwow to Improve Inclusiveness Image: The University of Denver and Lambda Chi Alpha are making efforts to ameliorate the damage caused by the "Cowboys and Indians"-themed party two Greek houses threw last February. Members of the Native Student Alliance were offended by the party that encouraged participants to wear "Indian" costumes and makeup. The NSA declared this to be yet one more offense to add to DU's lengthy pattern of racial insensitivity toward its American Indian community. As we reported, a pro forma apology was made by Lambda Chi Alpha and Delta Delta Delta to the NSA in March. A hundred NSA and local Indian community members gathered, but only the two Greek house representatives showed up to deliver the apology.

The DU administration recently allocated $6,500 to the NSA for its 2nd annual powwow. It was designated as a DU Presidential Debate signature event under the name New Beginnings Spring Powwow.

The Lambda Chi Alpha hosted an information booth during the powwow to show its support of the NSA as well as the greater American Indian community. Members passed out flyers giving background information and a history of the powwow.

This large donation raised the powwow to competition status, which, it was hoped, would encourage larger turnout and more contestants. Vendors were given free booth space.
^-navajo

• American Indian Population Increases: The Census Bureau has estimated there are 6.3 million people designating themselves as American Indian in the United States as of 2011. That's up 2.1 percent from 2010. The problem with the count is that it is self-designation. The total is far more than the number of Americans who are enrolled or otherwise associated with a recognized or unrecognized tribe. The report stated California had the highest number of American Indians with about 1,050,000. Alaska had the highest ratio of Natives, at 19.6 percent. At 93.6 percent, Shannon County, S.D., home to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, had the highest percentage of Indians of any county. And Los Angeles County, larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, had the highest number of Indians, with around 231,000.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• 'Twilight' Star Chaske Spencer Pushes American Indian Vote: Spencer (Fort Peck-Lakota/Nez Perce/Cherokee/Creek), known for his work to improve Indian lives, has with Native Vote in a new video. Native Vote is a non-partisan initiative of the National Congress of American Indians.

Video will not embed here.
Visit http://www.youtube.com/embed/w...
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Oglala Sioux Tribe Veterans Cemetery Approved: A $6 million tribal veterans cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation will allow Oglalas to hold traditional ceremonies for military veterans beginning in the spring or summer of 2013. The burial grounds will allow for Lakota ceremonial rites that aren't permitted at other veterans cemeteries. Talli Naumann of Native Sun News reports that Lakota traditions such as horseback escorts of the deceased and the ritual of taking food to the interment site to feed the dead will be kept in mind by the architects in their design. In addition, the cemetery will include provisions for burial scaffolds that allow traditional blessings to be offered before interment and a shelter designed as a medicine wheel. In keeping with custom, the cemetery's entrances and all its buildings will be located on the east side.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Native Language Advocate Dies at 88: Tim Parsons, the first director of Humboldt State University's Community Development Center, which became the Indian Community Development Center at the California university, has died. Over several decades he tirelessly sought to keep American Indian languages alive in the Pacific Northwest. Among other things, Parsons helped develop a phonetic alphabet for the Hupa, Karuk, Tolowa and Yurok languages that had previously been passed down solely through the spoken word. He also developed textbooks and curriculums to facilitate formal teaching of the languages.
^{-Meteor Blades}

Indians have often been referred to as the "Vanishing Americans." But we are still here, entangled each in his or her unique way with modern America, blended into the dominant culture or not, full-blood or not, on the reservation or not, and living lives much like the lives of other Americans, but with differences related to our history on this continent, our diverse cultures and religions, and our special legal status. To most other Americans, we are invisible, or only perceived in the most stereotyped fashion.

First Nations News & Views is designed to provide a window into our world, each Sunday reporting on a small number of stories, both the good and the not-so-good, and providing a reminder of where we came from, what we are doing now and what matters to us. We wish to make it clear that neither navajo nor I make any claim whatsoever to speak for anyone other than ourselves, as individuals, not for the Navajo people or the Seminole people, the tribes in which we are enrolled as members, nor, of course, the people of any other tribes.

tags:
Native American Netroots, First Nations News, American Indian, Civil Rights, First Nations, First Nations News & Views, Invisible Indians,  Native American, Racism, Indians 101,  

Welcome to the 16th edition of First Nations News & Views. This weekly series is one element in the "Invisible Indians" project put together by Meteor Blades and me, with assistance from the Native American Netroots Group. Our last edition is here. In this edition you will find a new project by Aaron Huey, a special storyteller attending our caucus, veterans using sweat lodges for PTSD, a look at the year 1637 in American Indian history, two news briefs and some linkable bulleted briefs. Click on any of the headlines below to take you directly to that section of News & Views or to any of our earlier editions.

This Week in American Indian History in 1637

~  American Indian Caucus at Netroots Nation will feature Paulla Dove-Jennings  ~  VA Recognizes Benefit of Sweat Lodge Ceremonies for Veterans  ~  

All Previous Editions

Cross Posted at Daily Kos

Aaron Huey has a new project. It's another one born out of the frustration of "trying" to tell the complex story of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He is currently a Stanford Knight Fellow for which he developed a new project to "explore how photojournalism, through radical collaboration, can grow to include more voices from the community." It's a spectacular project. But, first, for those unfamiliar with our alliance with the photographer, let me give you some background.

Huey is a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and has gone on numerous assignments for National Geographic around the world. Huey emailed me in 2010 to share his TED talk. I was so moved by it that I featured it in a diary, Pine Ridge: American Prisoner of War Camp #334.

Huey's TED talk was a result of getting to know the Lakota people on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and photographing them to raise awareness of their continuing fight for survival. In the talk he recounts the history of the Lakota starting with 1824. He details the devastating massacres and "more than a century later, the current condition of Pine Ridge reveals the legacy of colonization, forced migration, and treaty violations." His powerful video is embedded at the link above, I urge you to watch it.

Huey created the website Honor the Treaties to house this video and educate visitors about the history of broken promises. Then he started The Pine Ridge Billboard Project. A collaboration with the street artists, Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena. Three beautiful posters were created and links were provided so anyone could download the images, and print and post them in their own cities.

The posters went up in numerous cities. The most impressive installation of this project was a billboard on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Meteor Blades and I watched for five hours as the work was completed by Huey, Fairey and some of their helpers.

Enough background. In the video below, Huey makes a powerful announcement about his new project:

Video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/s... frameborder="0"

Transcript:

"So I have a confession.  

When I tell stories -- when we, as journalists tell stories -- we miss most of the good stuff. Some of the best stories end up on the cutting room floor because they aren't "newsworthy," or flashy, or violent enough. Or because there just isn't space. The communities we report on know this, and when we leave they are often are left wondering if they will be misrepresented. This is the nature of our business.  We have to cut and simplify and flatten incredibly complex worlds so they can fit between car advertisements in ever shrinking print publications.

I know that when I am telling a story about a place or a people my job as a journalist is not to tell EVERY story of every person in a community, but when I go really deep, when I return enough times to see beyond the statistics and obvious stories, when I have to look back into the eyes of the same people after they have seen themselves on our websites or in the pages of our magazines, I want so badly to give them more of a voice.

As a photojournalist who has been working on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota for the past 7 years I have struggled with this.

I think that I now I have a solution for this dilemma of representation, a solution for both the communities and for the publications.

I have been lucky to find collaborators in this endeavor in Jonathan Harris and his Editorial Director Annie Correal.  Jonathan is the creator of influential Internet projects like We Feel Fine, I Want You to Want Me, the Whale Hunt, and most recently the online community called Cowbird.

Together we plan to connect collections of community-generated stories to mainstream media publications through Cowbird.com, a visionary storytelling platform that can be customized and embedded in big media websites.

The key word here is "embedded." Ultimately, for me, this project is more about redesigning a relationship - between communities and big media - than it is about designing a digital platform. Crowd-sourced and community-generated story sites already exist, but none thus far have been designed to plug directly into multiple Big Media websites. That relationship has not yet been established, and that is where we stand out.

We plan to create networks of local storytellers on Cowbird and connect them to powerful, popular idea-makers starting with National Geographic and moving on to other news and feature publications. These pairings can be started from the inception of a story.

Our first test case is my story about the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge that will run as a cover story in National Geographic this summer. These are a people who have always felt misrepresented by the media.

National Geographic has been visionary in allowing us to co-launch a community story collection on their website. We have already gathered over 50 stories from the Red Cloud High School on Pine Ridge.  More schools and story-tellers will follow with a community collection of 100-200 stories ready to accompany my piece when it launches July 15th.

Imagine the power - of involving communities in telling their own stories - and giving them a platform to publish their own unedited voices along side the story done by a journalist.    

That new relationship, between those formerly known as the "subject," and the publication will open up a new kind of transparency and dialogue rarely seen in mainstream journalism.  

Launch THEIR stories together with OURS and you have something truly revolutionary.

This is the plug-in interface that will be launched at National Geographic mid-July:

I'm looking forward to exploring all the stories from Pine Ridge this July.

On a related subject, a new short film has been produced about Huey. Once it has premiered in Seattle I'll provide viewing details for you.

Here's the trailer:

Honor the Treaties | Trailer from eric becker on Vimeo.A portrait of photographer Aaron Huey's powerful advocacy work for Native American rights on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Official Selection, Seattle International Film Festival, 2012

Directed by Eric Becker / weareshouting.com/
Produced by Scott Everett

1889 Statue of Captain John Mason
was moved in 1996 to Windsor, Conn.,
from its original location on Pequot Hill,
in Mystic, where he led the 1637 slaughter
of hundreds of women and children.

It was a turning point in the Pequot War, which had been going on since 1634. The roots of the conflict were deep, a product of growing Puritan immigration into New England and the inevitable friction between them and people whose land was being settled. But the spark that set it off was the slaying of the principal Pequot sachem Tatobem by Dutch traders.

Historians disagree about who responded, the Pequot or the Niantic, who were tributary to the Pequot. Whichever it was attacked Capt. John Stone, an English privateer and smuggler whom the Puritans called "a drunkard, lecher, braggart, bully, and blasphemer." He and seven of his crew were killed and two Indian captives freed. The Niantic did not realize Stone was English, not Dutch.

The Pequots got the blame. Even though the Puritans had previously ordered Stone out of Plymouth Plantation upon penalty of death after he had threatened the governor with a knife, the death of one of their own by "savages" could not be left to stand. Repeatedly ordered to turn over the killers, the Pequot repeatedly refused. The English retaliated by burning some outlying villages and corn stores. By 1636, the Pequot had begun raiding English settlements with a good deal more seriousness than in years past. In response, a militia was raised and the war was full on. It was fought mostly as skirmishes, nobody getting the upper hand, and both sides seeking to put wedges between traditional allies of the other.

That changed at Mystic. In the days after the massacre, the surviving Pequot were hunted down, killed, sold into Caribbean slavery or forced to join their enemies, the tribe being obliterated until it gained federal recognition three centuries later, in 1983, as the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut.

Historian Alden T. Vaughan wrote in New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620-1675:

"The effect of the Pequot War was profound. Overnight the balance of power had shifted from the populous but unorganized natives to the English colonies. Henceforth [until King Philip's War in 1675-6] there was no combination of Indian tribes that could seriously threaten the English. The destruction of the Pequots cleared away the only major obstacle to Puritan expansion. And the thoroughness of that destruction made a deep impression on the other tribes."

The general attitude about the massacre was reflected in the declaration of William Bradford, in his History of the Plymouth Plantation:

"Those that [escaped] the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escapted. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie."

American Indian Caucus at Netroots Nation will feature Paulla Dove-Jennings

^{By Meteor Blades and navajo}

We also hope those of you who make it to Providence will attend our reinvented American Indian Caucus. We're excited to have a special guest this year. Her name is Paulla Dove-Jennings, née Tabautne (aka SunFlower). She's a member of the Turtle clan of the Narrangansett Tribe of Rhode Island. Her ancestors were the people who lived there for thousands of years before it was Rhode Island. You can read about them in more detail at Invisible Indians at Netroots Nation.

Jennings is an oral historian and story-teller who has spoken all over the nation, including Alaska. She has never spoken in Hawaii or Europe because her grandmother told her never to cross the big waters. At our caucus she will speak about politics and women in the light of the traditional views of her tribe.

In her own words:

Members of the Turtle clan are the keepers of tribal History, family history, and
traditional legends. I am a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.

Working as curator of museum Native collections, Tribal Council member, oral  
historian, story-teller, and published author have all enhanced my confidence
and knowledge of true story-telling. A story-teller never uses another tribe's story without permission.

I grew up with my parents, grandparents, and other family elders telling tribal history, family history, and legends in the 1940s, 1950s, and '60s.  I have passed some of my stories on to nieces and nephews as well as my own grandchildren.

Several years ago I invited my mother, Eleanor Spears Dove, to Brown University
to a story-telling event. Seven well-known Rhode Island storytellers of various
ethnic groups presented their stories. All of the presenters used props such as
instruments, music, scarves, sticks, etc. They were wonderful. I told the story of
how the bear lost his tail. My props were the tone of my voice, the shift of my
body, movements of my hands, eye contact, and the lift of my head, leaning
toward the audience and pulling back. I try to build the scene, the weather, the
wind, the sky, the earth, the water, the forest, and the animals.

When the event was over, my mother surprised me by saying she actually saw the bear!  
I have told stories from Maine to Alaska, to the young and the old, in cultural
institutions, colleges, universities, schools, powwows, organizations, and private
and social events. I thank the Creator for this gift.

At the caucus, the two of us will also very briefly discuss our rationale and progress with First Nations News & Views and summarize voter suppression against Native people. As many of you know, our proposal for a Netroots Nation panel on the latter subject was rejected for the second time this year. We have not given up trying to make this panel a reality because we strongly believe that our story in this regard is unique and has impacts on the progressive agenda that go well beyond keeping a few thousand American Indians from voting.

There is a panel on voter suppression in general that deserves people's attention:

Protecting Voting Rights in Communities of Color in 2012
Thursday, June 7, at 4:30 PM to 5:45 PM

Black and brown voters turned out in record numbers in 2008. However, the introduction of voter ID initiatives in many states creates a new barrier for many Americans, particularly in traditionally disenfranchised communities of color. Voters in these communities-as well as students, seniors, the working poor and those with disabilities-will be most impacted. What coalitions and campaigns are underway to ensure these voters have equal access to the polls? How can we ensure that their voting rights are safeguarded and their voices counted? Panelists will provide case studies of campaign strategies and community solutions and tackle tough questions concerning voter ID laws.

In addition to leading our caucus, navajo will be giving a presentation again this year:

Promoting People of Color in the Progressive Blogosphere panel.
Friday, June 8, at 4:30 PM to 5:45 PM

This panel will address the needs, successes and obstacles to having greater participation from people of color in the blogosphere. Using the models of  Native American Netroots and Black Kos as a beginning point for the discussion, we'll cover topics such as color blindness vs. representation and how to get historically underrepresented groups and their views heard. We'll discuss how to organize outreach between the larger blogosphere and blogs that are specific to communities of color and how to form stronger connections to ongoing organizing efforts and activism in communities of color. We'll also focus on how organizations can promote diversity within new grassroots organizations.

VA Recognizes Benefit of Sweat Lodge Ceremonies for Veterans

^{By navajo}

Veteran Steve Rich prays before placing
a log in the fire pit. (Photo byTaki Telonidis/NPR)

One new treatment is an old tradition, the sweat house, used to cleanse American Indian warriors of the bad spirits of war and death. Many tribes believe that in war a part of the soldier is left on the battlefield and when veterans return home they need a special ceremony to bring back that part of their spirit, to become complete again. Sweat lodges are common on many reservations. Today they are being used by a special group of American Indian veterans in Utah at the Veterans Administration center in Salt Lake City.

We can't just walk away from war. The lasting effects of the exposure are real. We go into war knowing that a price has to be paid for going there, for engaging in the taking of lives. If the war is unjust ... so much more the cognitive dissonance as well as the reasoning and emotional turmoil as we deal with the conflict in our psyche.

Native veterans are finding relief from anxiety in participating in the sweat ceremony as well as a spiritual connection to their heritage.

A sweat is a ceremony conducted by an Indian spiritual leader, or medicine man, in a dome-shaped structure. A fire is built and about 50 large stones are heated and then placed in the lodge. Water is poured over the hot stones, creating steam. The medicine man sings prayer songs and then, using eagle feathers, he blesses the troubled veterans. Using a scraping motion with the feathers he cleanses them of war.

• Native Swimmer Hopes for Olympic Gold in London:

Maria Koroleva and Mary Killman

Killman says:

"It's not as easy as it looks [...] Synchro is a theatrical sport, like figure skating, where we have the pretty makeup and the big smiles. But under all that-under water-it's chaos. We're kicking each other like crazy and trying to hold each other up."

[For] Koroleva, the most challenging part of the sport-and one of synchro's biggest misconceptions-is not ever touching the bottom of the pool. "The pools we swim in are at least nine feet deep," Koroleva says. "There are underwater cameras and referees watching the routine to make sure we never touch the bottom, even by accident."

• Jim Thorpe Native Games Anticipating 4000 Competitors: Six weeks before Killman has her chance in London, American Indians from across the nation will compete in Oklahoma City, Okla., in the Jim Thorpe Native Games in honor of the 100th anniversary of victories of the great runner. The games, running from today through next Sunday, June 17, comprise 11 competitive sports: baseball, softball, basketball, tennis, stickball, golf, track and field, cross country, wrestling, beach volleyball and martial arts. The week-long event will also include an American Art Exhibition and traditional cultural exhibitions. There will also be an NFL Punt, Pass and Kick competition and a 5-kilometer run. All participants must have a valid Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Wyoming County Balks Over Fees in Voter Suppression:
Under fire for discrimination against Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Fremont County proposed a partial replacement for the at-large districting system that a federal district court ruled in 2010 violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the Indian vote. The new system, part of the county's appeal, would have created an Indian district but kept the rest of the districts at charge. In rejecting the county's plans, Judge Alan Johnson wrote that county officials "appear to be devised solely for the purpose of segregating citizens into separate voting districts on the basis of race without sufficient justification, contrary to the defendants' assertions." The Ten Circuit Court agreed and ruled against the appeal.

Lawyers for the five tribal members who brought the suit have now asked Johnson to award more than $85,000 for their work on the appeal. The plaintiffs' 2010 request for more than $880,000 for legal work for the original trial is still pending with the same judge. Fremont County, however, says the legal fees are too high and they have filed papers asked the judge to reduce them.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Children bring joy to prison powwows:

Powwow visitors, including children for the first
time in years, enter the state penitentiary
in Walla Walla last Tuesday.
(Photo by Matthew Zimmerman Banderas/
Walla Walla Union-Bulletin)

It had been at least five years since some prison superintendents-each one decided individually-last allowed minors to attend Native American powwows inside the state's 12 correctional facilities. And it's been two years since the Department of Corrections (DOC) implemented sweeping changes that deemed as contraband the "sacred tobacco" used in Native American ceremonies, authorized hands-on property searches of ceremonial items that were reclassified as "nonsacred," and curtailed sweat-lodge ceremonies due to the cost of firewood. As part of the change, barring children from religious or cultural events was codified in DOC policy. [...]

"DOC, with basically a sweep of a pen, erased all these religious, tribal, spiritual and ceremonial rights," said Gabe Galanda, a Seattle attorney who worked on behalf of Native inmates. [...]

"It's taken us two years, through a lot of diplomatic effort and patience, to get everything back," Galanda said. The one thing still missing, however, was the inclusion of children - often referred to as "shorties" - at powwows. [...]

A few weeks ago, the DOC - after months of discussions about security and the need to protect children, especially from incarcerated sex offenders - decided to allow children to attend the first powwow of the summer season at the prison in Walla Walla. As a result of tribal leaders' efforts, other religious groups - be they Catholics or Muslims - now can also request that children be allowed to participate in their annual religious or cultural events, Galanda said.

• Oglala Ready to Take Control of First Tribal National Park:

Badlands National Park (Courtesy NPS)

The South Unit of Badlands National Park is an oddity, having been born of an administrative decision that incorporated a large tract of Indian-owned land into a national park in a rather heavy-handed manner. A gunnery and bombing range was established on [Lakota] land in 1942 shortly after America entered World War II. When the range was declared excess and closed in the 1960s, it was returned to the Oglala Sioux in the form of a government-held trust, and with the provision that it be part of the expanded Badlands National Monument. A Memorandum of Agreement stipulated that the OST-owned land was to be managed by the National Park Service.

Translation: The government took the land and the Oglala were told to shove it. Once the government gave up using the land for target practice, the Oglala and the Park Service reached a new agreement to govern the park and, in 1978, Congress redesignated the monument as Badlands National Park. Scroll forward another 25 years to 2003 and the Oglala requested government-to-government negotiations over future management of the South Unit. The Park Service is ready to go wholly to tribal management, but that will take an act of Congress..

"Our National Park System is one of America's greatest story tellers," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said: "As we seek to tell a more inclusive story of America, a tribal national park would help celebrate and honor the history and culture of the Oglala Sioux people. Working closely with the Tribe, Congress, and the public, the Park Service will work to develop a legislative proposal to make the South Unit a tribal national park." A map of the park can be found here.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Poll: N.D. Voters Will Reject 'Fighting Sioux' Nickname:

• USDA Chief Names 11 to Native Council: As part of the 2010 settlement in the Keepseagle v. Vilsack lawsuit, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has appointed 11 American Indians to two-year terms on the Council on Native American Farming and Ranching. The lawsuit alleged discrimination against Indians by the USDA in its farm loan program. The council, which is only advisory in nature, will suggest changes to Farm Service Agency regulations, make suggestions for ways to boost participation of Native farmers and ranchers in all other USDA programs and support government-to-government relations between USDA and tribal governments. In the modern era, the government-to-government approach dates back to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, to President Richard Nixon's 1971 formal ending of the tribal termination acts of '50s and '60s and to an executive order on such matters by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Making the government-to-government approach with the tribes across all U.S. executive departments actually happen obviously loses something from the signed paper to actual implementation. The council, The 11 councilmembers are Gilbert Harrison (Navajo Nation), rancher; Henry Holder (Choctaw Nation), farmer/rancher; Michael Jandreau (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe), tribal chairman; Gerald Lunak, natural resources director (Blackfeet Nation); Jerry McPeak, (Muscogee Nation), farmer/rancher and Oklahoma state legislator; Lance Morgan (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska), CEO of Ho-Chunk, Inc.; Angela Sandstol,  (Native Tribe of Tyonek), natural resources and conservation official; Edward Soza (Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians), farmer/rancher; Mary Thompson (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), farmer/rancher; Sarah Vogel (civil rights attorney and former agricultural commissioner for North Dakota); Mark Wadsworth, (Shoshone-Bannock Tribes).
^{-Meteor Blades}

Indians have often been referred to as the "Vanishing Americans." But we are still here, entangled each in his or her unique way with modern America, blended into the dominant culture or not, full-blood or not, on the reservation or not, and living lives much like the lives of other Americans, but with differences related to our history on this continent, our diverse cultures and religions, and our special legal status. To most other Americans, we are invisible, or only perceived in the most stereotyped fashion.

First Nations News & Views is designed to provide a window into our world, each Sunday reporting on a small number of stories, both the good and the not-so-good, and providing a reminder of where we came from, what we are doing now and what matters to us. We wish to make it clear that neither navajo nor I make any claim whatsoever to speak for anyone other than ourselves, as individuals, not for the Navajo people or the Seminole people, the tribes in which we are enrolled as members, nor, of course, the people of any other tribes.

In 1882, Apache warriors under the leadership of Juh and Geronimo raided the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona to capture the Chiricahua Apache band led by Loco. This band had stayed on the reservation when the Chiricahua had broken free the year before. Loco and his people were forced to the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico. The army struck the Apaches near the Arizona-New Mexico border and then battled them again 20 miles into the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Nineteen Apache, primarily women and children, were killed in the two battles.

A war party of 25 Chiricahua Apache warriors, under the leadership of Chatto, crossed into Arizona from their stronghold in the Mexican Sierra Madre Mountains in 1883 and raided a charcoal camp near Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The raiding party then moved northeast across the southeastern corner of Arizona, covering 75-100 miles a day. They crossed into New Mexico where they killed a federal judge and his wife and kidnapped their young son to be raised as an Apache warrior. During their raids, the Apaches killed 26 Americans. They managed to escape back into Mexico without being seen by any American soldier.

In response to the raids, an American army unit of 320 men under the command of General George Crook crossed the boundary with Mexico in search of "hostile" Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache. The expedition's principal guide was Tzoe (called "Peaches" by the Americans), a Cibecue Apache who had been a part of the hostile bands. In addition, a number of Apache and Yavapai scouts accompanied the Americans.

The Americans managed to surprise the Apache in their mountain stronghold. Consequently, a number of the Apache leaders-Geronimo, Naiche, Chihuahua, Chato, Bonito, Nana, Loco, Mangas, and Kahtennay-agreed to return to the reservation in Arizona.

In 1885, two bands of Chiricahua Apache left the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona.  Tiswin was a traditional Native alcoholic beverage which had been forbidden by the American government. In open defiance of the government's prohibition, the Apache had brewed up the tiswin (a kind of beer or wine), got drunk and had fled into Mexico. One of the bands was led by Naiche and the other one by Chihuahua. There were about 140 people in the two bands, including 35 men and 8 boys old enough to fight.

One raiding party of ten warriors slipped back into the United States, carried out raids for a month in an area patrolled by 83 companies of soldiers. They killed 38 Americans, captured a number of horses, and escaped back into Mexico with the loss of only one warrior.  

In the Bavispe Mountains of Sonora, Mexico, Chihuahua's band encountered U.S. troops. While the warriors diverted the troops, the women and children hid in a cave. However, the army found the women and children. They killed some, and then forced the survivors, including the wounded, to walk several hundred miles to Fort Bowie, Arizona. At the Fort, food was simply thrown on the ground for the women and children, implying that the prisoners were no more than animals. The women, including the wounded, were forced to dig latrines.

What many histories record as the final intrusion into Mexico during the 1880s Apache Wars came in 1886 when the Chiricahua Apache surrendered to the United States Army in Mexico on the condition that they would be held as prisoners for two years and would then be allowed to return to their own land. Instead, they spent the next 27 years as prisoners of war in prisons in Alabama, Florida, and Oklahoma.

Political appointments during the 19th century were often made as payments for political debts: they were based on political loyalty rather than on any real administrative talent or understanding of the areas to be administered. This was particularly true with regard to Indian Affairs. By the time of the 1876 Presidential elections, American government was notoriously corrupt and inefficient and within this government, the Office of Indian Affairs was regarded as the most corrupt. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, was elected on a platform that promised civil service reform. Upon taking office in 1877, Hayes appointed Carl Schurz, a strong supporter of civil service reform and a Republican politician, as Secretary of the Interior.

President Rutherford B. Hayes is shown above.  
Both Hayes and Schurz strongly supported the assimilation of American Indians into mainstream America, preferring to ignore the racial barriers that prevented this. They stressed educational training to make Indians into loyal, patriotic laborers and servants; the breaking up of Indian reservations into individually owned parcels which then could be more easily transferred to wealthier non-Indians; the dissolution of tribal governments which they felt stood in the way of total assimilation; and the Christianization of Indians through cultural laws which suppressed Native religious traditions and required Christianity.

Upon taking office in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes told Congress:

"The faithful performance of our promises is the first condition of a good understanding with the Indians. I can not too urgently recommend to Congress that prompt and liberal provisions be made for the conscientious fulfillment of all engagements entered into by the Government with the Indian tribes."

Meetings With Indians:

As with most Presidents, Hayes met with a number of different Indian delegations and Indian leaders during his term in office. These meetings were often more ceremonial than substantive. Since Indians were not citizens and could not vote, there was little political reason to consult with them about Indian policies.

One of his first meetings with an Indian delegation came in 1877 when a group of Sioux and Northern Arapaho leaders from the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska travelled to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Rutherford B. Hayes and the Secretary of the Interior. Representing the Arapaho were Black Coal, Sharp Nose, and Friday. Representing the Sioux were Red Cloud, Big Road, Little Wound, Little Big Man, Iron Crow, Three Bears, American Horse, Young Man Afraid of His Horse, Yellow Bear, Spotted Tail, Swift Bear, Touch the Clouds, Red Bear, White Tail, He Dog, and Little Bad Man.

Black Coal asked that his tribe be allowed to join the Shoshone in Wyoming. He reminded the President of the assistance which his tribe had given the military. He said:

"We want a good place in which to live. We are a small tribe; our village is 170 lodges; we would like to join the Snakes."

"Snakes" referred to the Shoshone and comes from their sign language symbol for themselves.

Sharp Nose presented a pipe to the President. He reiterated Black Coal's request to live in Shoshone Country.  At the end of the conference, the Americans agreed to send the Arapaho to the Shoshone country in Wyoming. Sharp Nose asked that they be given two black wagons-one for himself and one for Black Coal-in which to transport provisions. The color black symbolizes victory in an encounter with an enemy.

In 1881, a Paiute delegation which included Sarah Winnemucca met with President Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes entered the room, pontificated about the need for Indians to assimilate into American culture, then left after about five minutes. There was little information exchanged.

Not all of the meetings with Indians took place in the White House. In 1880, President Hayes visited Port Townsend, Washington. Among those who were introduced to the President was Chet-ze-moka (Duke of York), the leader of the Klallam.

Indian Wars:

During the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes there were a number of Indian wars. In 1877, America's Christian General, O. O. Howard, was sent to Oregon to force the non-treaty Nez Perce bands who were followers of the pagan Dreamer Religion to resettle on the Christian-run Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. The result was the Nez Perce war, a conflict that caught the attention of the media and made a war hero out of Chief Joseph, a peace chief who had nothing to do with the battles.

The Nez Perce War was followed by the Bannock War (1878), the Ute War (1879), and the White River War (1879). All of these wars came at a time when there was political pressure to move the Indian Office from the Department of the Interior to the Department of War.

Indian Reservations:

Among the Presidential powers in the nineteenth century was the ability to issue Executive Orders to create new Indian reservations as well as to change the boundaries of reservations. Such Presidential orders did not require authorization or approval from Congress. During his term in office, President Hayes used this power a number of times.

In 1878, President Hayes issued an executive order withdrawing land adjacent to the Navajo Reservation from public domain and making it available for Indian use. The boundary of the reservation was moved 20 miles to the west in order to provide more grazing land for Navajo herds.

A council was held with the Navajo leaders to explain the extension to them. The chiefs complained that they were being crowded by American settlers on all sides. They asked for a similar extension to the east. In 1880, Present Hayes issued an executive order expanding the Navajo reservation in New Mexico 15 miles to the east. There was also an extension of the southern boundary. The executive order forced some American settlers to vacate their farms which heightened resentment against the Navajo.

In 1879, the Salt-River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation in Arizona was created by executive order. The community was composed of two tribes: Onk Akimel Au-Authm (Pima) and Xalchidom Pii-pash (Maricopa).

Also in 1879, President Hayes issued an executive order creating the Columbia or Moses Reservation for the non-treaty peoples of the mid-Columbia River area. Sinkiuse chief Moses was considered the leader of these people - Wenatchee, Entiat, Chelan, Methow, Okanagan -even though several of the tribes did not recognize or acknowledge his leadership and authority. Moses collected rent from the American cattle ranchers on the reservation, but he and his band never actually lived on the reservation.

The non-Indian response to the Columbia Reservation was to condemn it as a "barbarous kingdom" for "King Moses" which provided "asylum for renegades to swoop down on the whites to steal horses, rob houses, and murder citizens."

The Fort Mohave Reservation was established by Presidential executive order in 1880. The reservation was situated along both sides of the Colorado River and included parts of Arizona, California, and Nevada.

In New Mexico, a reservation is established for the Jicarilla Apache by executive order in 1880. While the intent of the order was to provide the Jicarillas with a permanent home, the ink on the order was not even dry before special interest groups began pressuring the Department of the Interior to consolidate the Jicarillas with the Mescalaros and open up the newly created reservation for non-Indian development.

In 1880, it was reported to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that silver-bearing ore had been discovered in Carbonate Canyon in Arizona and that the only access to this silver would be through the Havasupai village. It was recommended that a reservation be established for the Havasupai which would move their village and prevent trouble. Within a week President Rutherford B. Hayes issued an executive order which reserved lands for the "Suppai" (Havasupai) Indians. However, a few months latter this order was rescinded and different lands was set aside for them. The original order had inadvertently reversed the north and south compass directions. The new reservation was a five mile by twelve mile parallelogram which enclosed the Havasupai farms in Havasu Canyon.

While Presidential executive orders could be used to create and expand Indian reservations, they could also be used to reduce the size of the reservation. In 1880 President Hayes issued an executive order reducing the size of the Fort Berthold Reservation (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) in North Dakota from 7.8 million acres to 1.2 million acres.

The Indian Office:

When Hayes took office in 1877, the Indian Office was notoriously corrupt. Indian Service positions, such as that of Indian Agent, Indian Farmer, and Indian Teacher, were based on political patronage and were used as vehicles for using reservation resources for personal enrichment. It was not uncommon for the Indian Agent, for example, to have an off-reservation store where he sold the annuity goods that were intended for the Indians on the reservation.

Political cartoons regarding Schurz and the corruption at the Indian Bureau are shown above.

Secretary Schurz attempted to clean up the Indian Office by instituting a wide-scale inspection of the service and by attempting civil service reforms in which positions and promotions were to be based on merit rather than patronage.

Within the Department of the Interior, the Indian Office was under the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, another political appointee. During the Hayes administration there were two Commissioners of Indian Affairs: Ezra Hayt (1877-1880) and Rowland E. Trowbridge (1880-1881). In 1877, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs felt that the best policy for Indians was to gather them on reservations, make them become Christians, compel them to attend school, have Indian police enforce the laws, and assign them to individual plots of land.

In 1878, following the recommendations of the Secretary of the Interior and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Congress authorized the establishment of Indian police. During the next two years Indian police forces were established on 48 of the 60 reservations in the United States. The new Indian policemen were to be role models for the assimilated Indian: they were to have short hair, wear Euro-American clothing, have only one wife, and accept allotments.

Associated with the Indian police were the Courts of Indian Offenses which were intended to deal with polygamy, the practice of traditional religion, and other activities deemed inappropriate to Anglo ideals.

The Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1879 issued an order which prohibited the sale of beads and body paint to Indians. These were seen as barriers to their assimilation and ties to their pagan past.

The Ponca:

Newspaper publisher Henry Tibbles promoted the grievances of the Ponca through a series of newspaper articles, a book, and a speaking tour which included Ponca chief Standing Bear. The tour drew packed audiences five to seven nights a week. At a presentation in Worchester, Massachusetts, U.S. Senator George F. Hoar was moved by what he heard. He wrote to President Rutherford B. Hayes expressing his concern at the wrong done to the Ponca by the American government. The President replied that he would give the matter attention.

Rutherford B. Hayes appointed a commission chaired by General George Crook to look into the grievances of the Ponca. Politically, Crook was given the chairmanship in exchange for a promise that the final report would avoid criticizing the government or its individual employees. The final report was to simply determine if the Poncas' grievances were legitimate and, if so, recommend what should be done to redress those grievances. The Commission report found that the Ponca had been removed without lawful authority and advocated returning all who wanted to return to their old reservation on the Niobrara.  The Commission also recommended allotting Ponca land at both reservation sites and paying the Ponca compensation for their mistreatment.

President Hayes presented the report to Congress in 1881. In his memorandum to Congress regarding the Ponca, President Hayes wrote:

"In short, nothing should be left undone to show the Indians that the Government of the United States regards their rights as equally sacred with those of its citizens"

He went on to say:

"The time has come when the policy should be to place the Indians as rapidly as possible on the same footing as the other permanent inhabitants of our country."

Welcome to the 17th edition of First Nations News & Views. This weekly series is one element in the "Invisible Indians" project put together by navajo and me, with assistance from the Native American Netroots Group. Last week's edition is here. In this edition you will find a recap of our American Indian Caucus at Netroots Nation, a look at the year 1873 in American Indian history and some linkable bulleted briefs. Click on link below to read our earlier editions.

All Previous Editions

Cross Posted from Native American Netroots

The American Indian Caucus of Netroots Nation, spurred into existence in 2006 by navajo, had its best attendance ever this year in Providence, R.I. Competition from simultaneously occurring panels makes it tough. (We even wanted to see a couple of those panels.) Fifty-five people attended ours. But talk of the caucus went a lot further than our little room because we attracted a right-wing troll whose only interest was in making points against Elizabeth Warren. She has made a much-discussed claim to Cherokee heritage that is being used against her in her Senate campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts. (You can read diaries about the troll here and here.)

The highlight of our caucus was the presentation of our guest, 72-year-old story-teller Paulla Dove-Jennings, a Niantic-Naragansett Indian whose ancestors have lived in what is now Rhode Island for several thousand years. The 2400-member tribe, which was once reduced to a three-acre plot of land where the Episcopal Indian Church had stood since 1744, regained federal recognition in 1983 and now holds 1800 acres of additional land. You can read FNN&V's condensed but more detailed history here.

In addition to our story-teller's wonderful weaving of tribal history, family life, politics and Niantic-Naragansett tales, navajo and I also briefly discussed the progress of FNN&V and quickly summarized what would have been a full hour's discussion of Indian voting rights and voter suppression if our proposal for such a panel had not been rejected by the Netroots Nation screening committee. Because I know most readers would prefer to watch Jennings' presentation in the video below than read my abbreviated version of what that panel would have covered, I'm saving that for next week's FNN&V.

For those who are video impaired, there is a transcript of Jennings' talk at the end of this edition of FNN&V. Thanks to oke and rfall for videotaping the session and transcribing it.

Here's an introduction to Jennings in her own words followed by the video:

Members of the Turtle clan are the keepers of tribal History, family history, and
traditional legends. I am a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.

Working as curator of museum Native collections, Tribal Council member, oral  
historian, story-teller, and published author have all enhanced my confidence
and knowledge of true story-telling. A story-teller never uses another tribe's story without permission.

I grew up with my parents, grandparents, and other family elders telling tribal history, family history, and legends in the 1940s, 1950s, and '60s.  I have passed some of my stories on to nieces and nephews as well as my own grandchildren.

Several years ago I invited my mother, Eleanor Spears Dove, to Brown University
to a story-telling event. Seven well-known Rhode Island storytellers of various
ethnic groups presented their stories. All of the presenters used props such as
instruments, music, scarves, sticks, etc. They were wonderful. I told the story of
how the bear lost his tail. My props were the tone of my voice, the shift of my
body, movements of my hands, eye contact, and the lift of my head, leaning
toward the audience and pulling back. I try to build the scene, the weather, the
wind, the sky, the earth, the water, the forest, and the animals.

When the event was over, my mother surprised me by saying she actually saw the bear!  
I have told stories from Maine to Alaska, to the young and the old, in cultural
institutions, colleges, universities, schools, powwows, organizations, and private
and social events. I thank the Creator for this gift.

http://vimeo.com/44174290

The Nez Perce were the largest tribe on the Columbia River Plateau when Lewis and Clark encountered them in 1805. The two Americans weren't the first white people the Nez Perce had seen. They got their name - "pierced nose," even though they didn't pierce their noses-from French fur traders. A half-century later, vastly reduced in numbers by war with white men and European diseases, they stood in the way of America's inexorable Manifest Destiny.

In 1855, some Nez Perce bands agreed to a treaty with most of their traditional hunting grounds, including the Wallowa, set aside for them "permanently" in exchange for giving up some land and right of way. All the bands agreed, including the Wallowa band led by Tuekakas, known to the whites as Joseph after his Christian baptism in 1839, and later, Old Joseph. However, in 1861, gold was discovered on Nez Perce land in Idaho and 10,000 white settlers poured in. Conflict naturally arose. The government called for another treaty. This reduced the original land promised in 1855 by 90 percent.

Tuekakas opposed the deal because his band's beloved Wallowa Valley would have to be surrendered. Because he and the leaders of four other bands opposed the deal, the divisions were henceforth labeled treaty and nontreaty Nez Perce. Tuekakas staked out the valley with poles and declared "Inside this boundary all our people were born. It circles the graves of our fathers, and we will never give up these graves to any man." He died in 1871, and his son, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat (Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain), also known as Young Joseph, became leader of the Wallowa band. His father is reported to have said before his death:

My son, my body is returning to my mother earth, and my spirit is going very soon to see the Great Spirit Chief. When I am gone, think of your country. You are the chief of these people. They look to you to guide them. Always remember that your father never sold his country. You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.

For four years, they stayed put, as President Grant had said they could. But relations with whites were tense. Settlers continued to move into the Wallowa and this led to inevitable clashes and a few killings on both sides.

In May 1877, the one-armed Gen. Oliver O. Howard arrived. Without ceremony, discussion or advance notice, told Chief Joseph that his band would be moved immediately. The first thought of many non-treaty Indians was to fight, but Joseph knew this was a losing proposition. The band pulled up stakes, literally, from the Wallowa and crossed the Snake River, joining the other non-treaty bands and a small group of Palouse Indians. They wer headed for the reservation, heartsick. Before they could move to the reservation, however, a small group of young warriors joined the band to say they had killed some whites and taken their horses. The 800 or so people in the allied bands soon learned the Army was coming after them.

Nez Perce photographed after their capture in 1877

The Wallowa Nez Perce and their allies went on a nearly 1200-mile, three-month-long zig-zag trek, out-maneuvering the Army, white volunteers and Indian scouts, which included some of the non-treaty Nez Perce. Small clashes were won and lost throughout the summer. But attrition was catching up with the band. Its cohort of battle-ready warriors dwindled week after week. Ultimately, after a five-day battle in the freezing cold, with the remnants of the band starving and more than 150 warriors dead, Chief Joseph surrendered just 40 miles from Canada on Oct. 5, 1877.

There, he was said to give a stirring speech ending with "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." Scholars now believe it was a later invention of a lieutenant colonel and poet under Howard's command.

The Nez Perce repeatedly promised they could return to the Wallowa. But it never happened. Chief Joseph died in 1904 at the Colville Reservation, living with the other 11 bands assigned there. And, despite there being numerous bridges, dams, streets, a mountain pass, a highway, a town, a creek and a canyon named after their leader, the Chief Joseph Band of Nez Perce still live at Colville.

In the Wallowa Valley that the band never agreed to surrender, there is today the 160-acre Wallowa Band Nez Perce Trail Interpretive Center. The mission is to tell the story of the band's trek and "to assist in assembling the Wallowa Band Nez Perce culture and history in order to provide interpretation, knowledge and understanding to those who visit the grounds." Still there, near Lake Wallowa, lies the grave of Old Joseph. His valley is no longer surrounded by poles but, unlike his living kin, he remains forever in the land of his fathers.

•••

Sources:
• The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story by Elliott West (2009).
• Treaty of 1863.
• Nez Perce Joseph: An Account of His Ancestors, His Lands, His Confederates, His Enemies, His Murders, His War, His Pursuit and Capture by O. O. Howard (1881).

• Complaints Gain Invisible Indians a Spot on Obama Campaign Website: The Obama-Biden campaign website had outreach pages for African Americans, Latinos, Asians, gays and women. Notably missing until Friday, however, was a page for American Indians despite the fact the election is less than five months away. Thanks to complaints, Native Americans for Obama was posted June 15 with a logo and the tag-line "A place for Native Americans to organize and speak out in support of President Obama and his accomplishments."

But Indians from several tribes who met last week in Chicago with members of the campaign team say they are concerned that not as much seems to be being done with Indians as was done in 2008. And they expressed disappointment that the Obama campaign apparently plans to depend on the efforts of state Democratic Party apparatuses to handle voter outreach to the tribes. In the past, Indians have been ignored-or treated with hostility-by state parties.  
^{-Meteor Blades}

Jihan Gearon

Approval by the Navajo, the Hopi and 30 other entities are required before the pact can be finalized. The 24 Navajo delegates to the Tribal Council will vote sometime this month, possibly as soon as this week. The settlement, introduced in February, is the swan song of Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl and backed by Sen. John McCain. Foes encompass numerous grassroots Navajo groups cooperating as the Dine Water Rights Committee, Dine being what the Navajo people call themselves in their own tongue. Members include the Forgotten People Corporation, Black Mesa Water Coalition, To Nizhoni Ani, Dine Citizens Against Ruining the Environment, Hada'asidi, Next Indigenous Generation and the Council Advocating an Indigenous Manifesto. Jihan Gearon, executive director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition said:

"It's obvious that the grassroots people of the Navajo Nation reject the settlement agreement. We have collected hundreds of petition signatures from concerned citizens opposed to the settlement as well as hundreds of letters against the settlement. Furthermore, there was overwhelming opposition at each of the eight educational forums organized by the grassroots organizations, not to mention the overwhelming opposition voiced against the settlement at each of the seven town hall meetings sponsored by the president's office under direction from the council."

Sarana Riggs of Next Indigenous Generation said: "Our vision for the future includes a just transition away from the coal-based economy, a diverse and sustainable economy based on traditional values, and true self-sufficiency for the Navajo Nation. We will sign these things away if we agree to the settlement."

In a open letter, Anna Rondon (Navajo) wrote:

I also serve on the Navajo Nation Green Economy Commission. I question why our leaders cater to the very federal government that has time and time again under-funded us, to design internal fighting among ourselves. Our leaders turn the other way when real Dine' ideas lead the way for a healthier and sustainable economy. But, our leaders are selling us out. I cannot believe the Navajo Nation is setting precedence that is not only unruly for us as a People, but for our other tribal nations that will also feel the negative impacts of this legislation.

• North Dakota Voters Say Goodbye to 'Fighting Sioux' Nickname: After six years of acrimony, countervailing actions by politicians, university officials and the NCAA, plus national media attention, the University of North Dakota will no longer use the "Fighting Sioux" nickname and logo for its sports teams. The name had deeply divided citizens across the state, but two-thirds of them voted down the nickname in a primary election June that had three other measures on the ballot.

The NCAA ruled in 2005 that all university and colleges should drop Indian-themed mascots, logos and nicknames ranging from "Redskins" to "Braves" to just plain "Indians." Exceptions were allowed for schools that obtained tribal permission. Although some foes of eliminating Indian mascots and nicknames have claimed these are not degrading but respectful, images and attitudes expressed around these have historically been filled with ridiculous caricatures and racist stereotypes. One of those stereotypes is that so many of the logos and mascots choose Plains Indians as their image no matter what the local Indian culture was and is. Hundreds of universities, colleges and secondary schools have dropped the nicknames over the past 40 years as opposition has steadily grown. Oregon formally banned mascots and nicknames this year after some schools held out against the state school board's request several years ago that they do so voluntarily. Last month, Sanford became the last small school in Maine to drop the "Redskins" nickname from its high school sports teams.

While a dwindling number of schools retain the nicknames, two national franchises-the Cleveland Indians baseball team with their despicable Chief Wahoo, and the Washington Redskins- continue to thumb their noses at people who object to their racist depictions.

While many Indians say they have no objections to such nicknames, the National Indian Education Association passed a resolution in 2009 calling for getting rid of all the Indian-themed mascots, logos and nicknames. And the National Congress of American Indians has been campaigning for an end to mascots and nicknames since 1968.

Previous coverage of this issue in FNN&V can be found here and here and here.

^{-Meteor Blades}

Ed WindDancer

• Real Indians Protest Fakes: Sal "White Horse" Serbin (Oglala-Lakota) grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota. But he lives in Florida now and in 2010 established a group called the Fraudulent Native American Task Force. Its numbers are small. But Serbin is trying to make its impact greater by protesting fake Indians every chance he gets. That often puts him into conflict not only with wannabes and other frauds but with other Indians, too. Among the many frauds he has challenged are "healers" and performers and participants in phony sun dance ceremonies or moon worshipping and other whatnot, often charging fees for services they claim to be Indian in origin.

"The stealing and exploitation of the Native American culture," Sal said, "has become an epidemic."

At one event recently, the Chasco Fiesta Parade, Serbin and five other Indians of various tribal heritage held signs when the faux-Indian Krewe of Chasco danced past in "Mohawk" haircuts, feathers and beads, dressed as "Pocahontas" and other stereotypes. Serbin's sign read: "Having Fun Playing Indian? Grow Up!!"

He has links with other groups, including the Florida chapter of the American Indian Movement, the militant organization whose most famous confrontation occurred at Wounded Knee in 1973 on the reservation where Serbin was born nine years earlier. The 77-year-old leader of Florida AIM, Ruby Beaulieu, who has protested the Chasco parade's inclusion of fake Indians for many years, told Leonora LaPeter Anton at the Tampa Bay Times that her complaints had gotten rid of outrages like "Find the treasure in the Indian burial mound" and "Pin the tail on the Indian." But the parade remains.

At the Venice Community Center, the night before the parade, Serbin had another encounter:

There, a man named Ed WindDancer, a flute player and a carpenter, had put together a cast of Indian performers for a show called "Flight of the Red-Tailed Hawk." The cost to attend: $15. CDs of his music were on sale. The parking lot was filling up fast.

WindDancer said he was Cherokee, but Sal called the Cherokees. Sal said they had never heard of him. When WindDancer said he was Nanticoke, Sal said he called the group's chief in Delaware and learned WindDancer was not on their tribal rolls either. He knew that WindDancer had changed his last name from Pielert and that part of WindDancer's family had come from Germany four generations ago. He knew that WindDancer had received probation and a $5,000 fine for bartering eagle, hawk and great horned owl feathers with a wildlife officer, a violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

In another central Florida town recently, Serbin and some Indian allies confronted the New Age-style fake-Indian ritual midway. The participants, all sporting "Indian" names responded:

"In a past life, we were you," said Raven That Speaks With the Cloud People. "We were Indians."

"Let's just love each other," said Tiger Lily. [...]

"If you want to continue with this group, if you could just add 'style' or 'hobbyists' to the end of your advertisements," [Serbin] implored nicely. "This could be a wonderful thing if done properly."

Small battles, occasionally small victories. But he doesn't give up.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• American Indian Schools Get Solar, Wind Money from Arizona: After the expansion of a Tucson Electric Power company's 400-megawatt, coal-fired power plant in 2009, the Arizona Renewable Energy Investment Fund was given $5 million to support projects to reduce pollution and benefit Native American communities in Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. Several projects have now been selected to receive a share of those funds: $236,000 for a solar and wind power project at Little Singer, Dilkon Community, Leupp, Shonto Preparatory and NATIVE schools; $65,000 for a solar and wind power project at Moenkopi Day and Hopi Day schools; and $253,000 to provide wind power to an assisted-living facility for the Hopi Office of Elderly Services.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Montana's 40-year-old Indian Education Act Praised: Surviving delegates and other Montanans gathered in the state's House chambers Friday to commemorate the passage of Montana's constitution in 1972. They focused intently on the document's Education and Public Lands Article that changed how Montana relates to its American Indian populations. It says: "The state recognizes the distinct and unique cultural heritage of the American Indians and is committed in its educational goals to the preservation of their cultural heritage."

It wasn't until 1999 that this article was actually implemented. That took the prodigious efforts of Rep. Carol Juneau (Hidatsa and Mandan) to shepherd through the legislature. And it took several more years of lawsuits to get it funded, according to Montana Assistant Attorney General Andrew Huff (Cree-Rocky Boy Reservation). Juneau's daughter Denise (Hidatsa and Mandan) is now the state's superintendent of public instruction.

Because he didn't look obviously like an Indian or what other people thought an Indian should look like, many people thought Huff was Italian or Mexican or marveled at his apparent easy ability to tan.

"So by the time I had hit high school in Missoula, I'd heard just about it all with regard to Indians - all the Indian slurs, the stereotypes, the racial epithets," he said. "I'd heard that Indians were drunk, lazy, that we were a defeated people, that we should just blend in, that we should accept our fate and assimilate and that reservations should be done away with."

Many people in his life - his supportive family, many teachers and his friends - had fought against these stereotypes, Huff said. Many people wanted to help Indian children, but lacked the knowledge to counter the stereotypes, he said.

It took 40 years, but Montana at last is fulfilling the promise of that provision, Huff said.
Montana has a K-12 Indian Education for All curriculum, developed in consultation with Indians and their tribes, he said. Teachers are getting trained on how to teach it and learn about Indians and Indian tribes. And Montana children of all backgrounds are learning about Indians and their history.

^{-Meteor Blades}

• Indians Not Happy with IRS Meddling: The president of the executive board of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, John Yellowbird Steele (Oglala-Lakota) told members of a Senate committee Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service is stepping over the line of tribal sovereignty and violating treaties in its attempts to tax treaty-guaranteed government assistance for things such as housing, school clothes and burial aid that tribes provide their members.

"We fix houses, and they want us to put a value on how much that lumber cost to patch a hole in a roof or a floor, put shingling on, they want us to put a value on that and give the person a 1099" tax form to possibly be taxed on the help, Steele said. "The next year, where are those people going to find the money to pay the IRS?"

The agency has over the years cut back on what social benefits for tribal members can be exempted from taxes. It has been meeting with various tribes to clarify rules on what is taxable under the General Welfare Doctrine. But, Steele said, in th midst of those meetings, tribes are getting notices that they are being audited. He called this an IRS fishing expedition.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Indians Honor Owner of Cleaned-up Chickamauga Mound in Chattanooga: A Chattanooga burial mound dating back to perhaps 900 BCE was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1984. But it was overgrown with poison ivy, wisteria and 30 trees, practically invisible and, some in the American Indian community said, disrespected until the new owner of the industrial property where it sits decided to clean it up and give access to Native people. That owner, Kenny Wilhoit, was honored in a small ceremony today in conjunction with the National Days of Prayer to Protect Native Sacred Places. He was given a wooden bowl made from one of the trees removed from the mound.

Tom Kunesh (Standing Rock Sioux) of the Advisory Council on Tennessee Indian Affairs said that prior to 2010: "We would stand outside the fence, pray, offer tobacco and look forward to the day when we would be allowed access to it." Wilhoit says that access will continue for as long as he owns the property.
^{-Meteor Blades}

National Congress of American Indians, 1944. (Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological Archives

• National Congress of American Indians Meeting for First Time in Nebraska: It was 1944 when the 60 male and seven female delegates of the first-ever get-together of the National Congress of American Indians met in Denver. Today, the congress began its mid-year conference in Lincoln, Nebraska. There will be more than 800 representatives from scores of the 565 federally recognized tribes at the Cornhusker Hotel. The four-day event, which will cover a broad range of issues, including climate change and violence against Native women, will end the first day's events with a pow-wow. NCAI President Jefferson Keel (Chickasaw) will deliver an address Monday about "Uniting Tribes to Advance Our Shared Goals."

In an interview with the Lincoln Journal Star last week, Keel discussed the economics of the tribes, including his own. In the 1980s, the 40,000-member Chickasaw tribe's economic goal was $5 million. "If you look today, there's probably a billion dollars flowing through our businesses." These include a chocolate factory and a metal-fabrication factory. "Those create jobs," he said, "and the jobs then relate to raising the quality of life of Indian people across the country." One example is the 4,800-member Winnebago tribe of Nebraska, which went from zero revenue in 1995 and now has revenue of $226 million. But for many tribes, especially those in more remote areas, the economic conditions remain grim.

Keel noted that one major NCAI goal this year is getting out the Indian vote: "In 2008, there were probably one million Native American people who were not registered to vote." Although he didn't mention it, suppressing the Indian vote of those who are registered has been a key factor in keeping the numbers who vote at a low level relative to other ethnic groups.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• 'American Indian' Charter School Blasted: Despite a report ripping the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, California, the school board there approved renewal of the school's charter in April. Among the complaints about the school run by American Indian Models are that it has conflicts of interest, limited parent involvement and high teacher turnover. On a scale of 1-5 on 43 measures, the school received only as high as a "3" on one. But because its academic index was 990 out of 1000, a phenomenally high score that no other school in the Oakland system achieved, it retained its charter. Now some believe the index rating was inflated by cherry-picking transferring students, a violation of the law. Admissions are supposed to be "blind," but parents have been asked to submit their students' scores in their applications.

The school got its name from the fact that it was originally designed to serve the American Indian community in Oakland. In the 2010-2011 school-year, there were ZERO students who identified as Indian.  

That's a sticking point for some local American Indians, said one prominent member of the Bay Area American-Indian community, who asked to be anonymous for fear of making waves. "If anything, I just wish they would change their name - it's misleading, and potentially damaging to our community."

^{-Meteor Blades}

• Oglala College Students Work Against Youth Suicide: Suicide among young people is epidemic on many American Indian reservations. To raise awareness, generate hope and help reduce this terrible circumstance, some Oglala Lakota College business students, have begun a campaign using traditional advertising and social media. Students in the Introduction to Business class have passed out 200 disposable cameras to elementary and middle school students at the Loneman, Crazy Horse and Red Cloud schools. The assignment: Take the camera home and shoot photos to show what hope looks like.
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Photo Exhibits Focuses on the 1973-1976 'Reign of Terror in South Dakota':  From the time of the Wounded Knee siege in 1973, the FBI, government bureaucrats and corrupt tribal officials were at loggerheads with traditional Indians and the American Indian Movement. From now until the end of June, AIM-WEST, a non-profit community based inter-tribal organization in San Francisco, is hosting a photo and art exhibit about the "Reign of Terror in South Dakota" of that era. More than 60 AIM members were murdered in a three-year period. Included in the exhibit will be paintings by political prisoner Leonard Peltier, photos of AIM's past activities, including the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz and the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee, as well as Bay Area indigenous activism. The exhibit is at the Arte International Gallery, 963 Pacific St. More information is available at AIM-West.
^{-Meteor Blades}

A Tobacco Offering

I brought some tobacco with me today. A little here for the past, a little here for the present, a little here for the future. History and all the powers that be said that my people have been here ten, maybe fifteen thousand years, but my grandmother told me we've been here 30,000 years. When I started on this journey of talking about my people and learning about my people I went to anthropologists and mythologists, and I interned at a museum. And they said, "How do you know what you're saying is true, what's your primary source?" "My Grandmother." They said, "Where was it written?" Well, my grandmother writes beautiful letters but she never wrote down our history. I've converted a lot of educated PhD authorities and one day they're going to catch up and realize my people have been here 30,000 years.

I was going to sit down and talk but I like to see faces so I'm going to stand up so I can see faces.

My name is Paula Dove-Jennings, I have a brother who is a year older than me but on the day that I was born my father stood at the end of the street and said, "Today I am a man because I have a daughter, because women are the givers of life." And I tease my two younger sisters from all the time, saying they weren't necessary one sister is 9 years, the younger one is 18 years younger than me. I asked my father one night my after my first sister came along. "You had me, why her?" He said, "Well, you keep saying you wanted somebody else to play with." We lived out in the country, without electricity without running bath, that kind of stuff.  It was great, it was wonderful. When my baby sister came along my father said, "I thought it was a tumor." But I love them both. Women, not only being born make a man a man, just as a son makes a woman a woman, have always played an
important part in our nation.

Now if you look on this sheet here and other places you're going to see the word "Narragansett" correct spelling, or pronunciation, is Nah-ah-gansett because we didn't have the letter 'r'. If you're from Rhode Island or talk to other Rhode Islanders you'll often find they leave the 'r 'out. We like to say,  "they're trying to talk Narragansett."

My people have always been here, this land where this building is right now is part swampland, low-lying lands. If you go to Providence Place mall where the parking area is there's a sacred burial ground. And we were given about 350,000.00 dollars to allow them to bury our people on that land. My voice was not loud enough, the elders voice was not loud enough, the young people were not loud enough. So it's up to those of us today to speak up and be loud about it. Be courteous but be loud. People think it's amazing that women finally are running for President. We had women who led our people. Some more well known than others.

We also read in the paper now that women can fight in different battles in the United States Army, Marines, Navy. We had women warriors, we did all this and it's taken 400 years  of everything to come around full circle so people realize that when the creator made us, man and woman, it was to walk side by side.

Squaw Man

Now, that didn't always happen some people like my father's mother married an Englishman. My grandfather is about 6'4", 250 lbs; he went to college and became an engineer. But then he married my little 5'2" grandmother she was Niantic and in Rhode Island my grandfather was known as squaw man. He could only get a job as policeman  or fireman, that's what he did. He and my grandmother had eight children. His family disowned him, didn't want anything to do with him because he married this woman. My grandmother and grandmother lived in Westerly, Rhode Island which is in the southern part of the state, in an old Italian neighborhood. My grandmother would stand at the fence, a white picket fence, she'd be on one side of the picket fence, Mrs. Filosetti would be on the other side. Mrs. Filosetti was speaking in Italian, Calibrese, and my grandmother was speaking in Narragansett and they would understand each other. And my grandmother would send over baked fish and they would send over the most delicious sausage, and sauce, and they'd exchange.

Once a year, around Thanksgiving time, a news reporter from the Westerly Sun would come to interview my grandmother. My Grandmother had a front porch which we called a piazza, and we'd be on her front porch. In those days I didn't talk much. Grandmother would be out there, she'd have her apron on, the reporter would come to interview her. He'd ask what she was going to do for Thanksgiving, what she was going to cook. And my grandmother would say, "Well, we're going to have roast turkey." A truck would come by and it would have all these cages on it and my grandmother would reach up for the fattest one, she'd check them all out, pick out one that was 25 or 30 lbs. and take it out in the backyard, chop the head off, did what she had to do. She'd talk about the vegetables and so forth and the family members that would come in from wherever. But one year they sent a new reporter out and this reporter said,  "Mrs. Dove, do you people go hunting for your turkey?" My grandmother's sitting there and I'm holding onto her apron. I looked up at her and her eyes were getting blacker and blacker. She told him no, she had bought it from Mr. so-and-so." "Well, did your people live in tee-pees?" "No, we had long houses, we had wig-wams." I could feel my grandmothers body tense up and her eyes kept getting darker and darker. He went on in this way for quite awhile. Finally he said, "Well isn't it true that the women are not as good, well they're inferior to the men." Grandmother said, "No, that's not true." Then he said, "Well, I heard that Indian women always walk behind their men." By this time my Grandmother rolled those eyes up at him and said, "That's true." "Well see you are inferior then." My grandmother stood up, all 5'2" of her, holding onto her apron and she said, "We stand behind our men to tell them where to go." Still true, still true.

Now my grandmother said to my grandfather, "You have to vote, you have to get involved. It's not only your right, it's your responsibility." You have to make sure when your children come of age that they vote. Don't just vote for the President, or the national, or just for the Governor, remember who you're voting for in these small towns.

Now 1924, when the reorganization act was going, on a woman known as Princess Red Wing, a Wampanog-Narragansett, she designed the Tribal Seal. It's the peace pipe, the North Star and the sun. And she worked hard. So, we weren't Federally recognized, but we were recognized.

Now our people fought in all the wars, up to and including the Civil War and after the Civil War was over and we're back on our reservation in Charlestown , Westerley, all through the Southern coast, that was all our land but it slowly being stolen. It was taken away and we moved back in further and further. One of our elders called our people together and a man came down from the state house up here and said, "you fought in the civil war, you did well. We're going to make you citizens of the state of Rhode Island." He went on and on about the benefits of being a citizen of the state of Rhode Island. He didn't mention voting. Just as the black men were given the right to be citizens he said at that time. We sent him away. We do not want the citizenship. We are happy to be Narragansett. Why would we give up what we have? Yes, you claim the black man is now a citizen, but we will never see a black man running this country. And I wept when Obama won, I didn't vote for him, I voted for a woman. And then I prayed that he would be safe and not killed, or his children be harmed. Because I worry about this. Well time went on, 1924 we're now official citizens of the state of Rhode Island. But it wasn't until 1951 or '52 that Rhode Island made the law that allowed us to vote.

Now I lived in Charlestown and there were a lot of Native families there around us and the beginning of November a car would drive out the dirt roads, no electric, and drive to my cousin's house, to my cousin's father's house, to our house, and they would come out and say, "you vote for us, don't vote for anybody else." Then leave a pint of whiskey. My father's cousin and my father put all the whiskey up and my father would call them together and one of the elders, he was a young man then, would say, "you go and vote, and you vote for the person you think is going to be the most responsible for all our needs, not just a certain individual.' Then at Christmas time they'd all bring their pints and my father would take fresh whole cream and make the best eggnog you ever had and he shared it all.

My father tried to run for local town office in Charlestown, he could never get in. Sometimes he wasn't even allowed to get on the ballot. Then we moved to Exeter, Rhode Island. And when we moved there first, my father went to the PTA meetings, to the local town meetings, and in a few years he was the town moderator. He periodically came up to the state house. He would meet with the local politicians. He would call them up, he would draft a letter to whoever the local representative was. So when they heard the name 'Ferris Dove' they'd say, "ah, he's got some influence with the tribe."

His Native Name was Roaring Bull

His whole purpose was to help us get some of our land back. He was on the tribal council, and he also ended up after a couple of terms as town moderator they used to tell him he didn't have to use the mallet, his native name was Roaring Bull, that he could just raise his voice. He became a tax assessor for several years.

My father met my mother just before he got a scholarship from the DAR to go to Bacone Indian college in Oklahoma. The DAR said they were going to pay his way there. If he did well, it was a two-year college, they'd send him onto graduate school. When he left he had 2 outfits, 4 pairs of undies, 4 pairs of socks and 2 dollars. Took the Greyhound. He loved school, loved education. Now before he went they offered two or three other Native men. He had been out of school 3 or 4 years but his younger brother said, "no, I'm going in the Navy." This was in the thirties. My father went out there. My family is fortunate, we must be a bunch of pack rats because we still have the letters he sent. His greatest pain was they would go from Oklahoma to Texas and they walked to a store where they were going to get something to eat and a sign said, "No dogs or Indians." And my father wrote to my grandmother and said, "I want to come home, I want to come home, I can't live with this." And my grandmother said, "Your own Grandfathers and Grandmothers barely speak to you and you're going to worry about this sign? Stay. Get your education." My grandfather stayed. He went to school with Dick West. And he loved school. And when he came back, whenever he had a chance, he took courses at the University of Rhode Island. He died when he was sixty-eight, in 1983, and he was still taking courses. When he became town moderator he took some political courses. And when he was the tax assessor he took some financial courses.

My parents owned a restaurant, twenty years. It was my mother's idea. My mother worked in a factory called Kenyon Mill. She said, "I'm not coming back after summer vacation." We had this house with a building next door and my mother's father was a chef, her grandfather also owned a restaurant here in Providence. I think there's a Wendy's or McDonald's there now where it was located. My parents did catering work as well as my father working making submarines, and my mother working in this factory. And being a female daughter you get drafted whether you want to or not, working those days off from your regular job, you had to waitress or cook, or do something. And every week two or three people that would say, "are you a real Indian?" I'd wonder to myself, "what's an unreal Indian?" Oh, they mean what happens at Halloween, the stereotypes. They'd ask what tribe are you. "Narragansett." "Never heard of them." "But you're here in Rhode Island. How can it be you've never heard of them?" Then I thought back when I was in school, I was in grammar school. In our classes at Thanksgiving time it was the Indians that met the Pilgrims. We weren't heard again.No other Native nations were mentioned until in the spring when they talked about the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears. That was it. The rest of the time we didn't exist. And not talk about the names of the towns, the cities, words that they'd use, "hammock". [unintelligible 20:51] They'd go to the beach, names like Pawtucket. All this, this is ours.

And they'd talk about how wonderful Roger Williams was, how much he helped us. He fought for us to be able to use our own religious beliefs. But they don't talk about how after the battle at Great Swamp how he voted to send our ancestors, our people, to Barbados and to the islands of the Caribbean as slaves. And I grew older and had children and grandchildren and who comes from the islands to my nieces school as exchange, Narragansett, Niantic, Wampanoag, and Peuquot descendants from the slaves. And my niece and the schoolchildren, half of them went down there. We were shocked at how much we looked alike and at how many things their ancestors had passed on and had stayed the same. You always wonder who writes history. Red Wing always says the winner writes history. I look at history books, and you all can look at history books and you can see the biases,  and it's passed on to the children and it's passed on to the children's children. It's time that we speak the truth.

A Real Indian

At one time I was executive director of the commission for Indian Affairs for the state of Rhode Island. I had a window office and a secretary and the secretary's name was Lois San Antonio. A very pretty Italian woman. She was always peeking around the corner. After a month or so I said, "Lois, what's the problem?" She said, "I can't believe I'm working for a real Indian." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I said, "Lois, what's an unreal one?" She said, "I didn't think any lived in Rhode Island. I told her they may live on the same street you live on, you have this image in your mind. Don't let that fool you. Don't let that take away. Then I brought her down here to meet my parents, and my children and grandchildren and different siblings. After about two years she said, "I want to apologize for my stupidity, but it's not my fault, it's the school's."

And part of the schools is that you go and vote for your committees. You make sure that people are looking out for everybody. You have to remember that, it's important. You have to be able to think beyond what's right before you and see the rest.

I have a book that I found in a second hand bookstore and it has the native names that we use in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Place names, towns, rivers. How many of you know that half of our 50 states are named for the local indigenous people. People don't think about that. It's fact, not fiction. People don't say enough about Native people. There's a Vice-President that was half Native. They don't talk about the Native that went out into outer space. I don't even want to go into outer space, I'll be honest with you. The Creator made us here, we stay here. But my grandmother in another interview, different reporter, different paper, was asked about going to the moon because that was the big thing when President
Kennedy was here. And so she said, "Well, I have no desire to go, I wouldn't allow my children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren to go, but maybe everybody else will go!" And the reporter, and I was there, he was shocked, he was stunned, "What do you mean?" "If everyone goes we can reclaim the land, they won't chop down anymore trees, or put down pipelines here or there, they won't defile the water, they'll let things grow naturally."

People don't realize, when people came across that big water over here we had everything we needed. We had our food, clothing, shelter, our educational games. No it wasn't in a classroom with desks lined up in a row and rote memorizing. See, in the wintertime and the elders would tell stories and help you learn how to identify things, things that were necessary. Think about the things we didn't have before those ships got lost and landed here. We didn't have rats, the common housefly. We had good mosquitoes and other kinds of flies. We didn't have jails. We didn't have homes for the elderly, we took care of our own. We didn't have guns. guns are for food, not today. it's to kill to slaughter someone so they can't live again.

The British were astounded at the wars we would have. Whether I'll get your bag and take it home. I got whatever's in your back pocket and take it home, I won, I got it. I might even say that's a pretty young woman and I think I'll take her home to work in my garden. She might work there for a year or so, she might decide she wants to stay or she might want to go on. And these were all good things. So we had what we needed.

One of the first things that happened when this part of the country was invaded was the British chopped down the trees. Because in Europe and in England the biggest trees belonged to the Lords. High and mighty so they chopped down the biggest trees here to take back. Not for the poor people, not for the homeless. You got put in places, if you couldn't pay your debt you got thrown in jail. They took everything and they keep taking from Mother Earth, that's why you need to vote. And they put nothing back that's good in there. They keep putting stuff that's not good up in the air so people can't breath and have diseases and different things happen to them.

You have to vote, you have to remember. You got to start at the local level and keep going and going. And speak up. A lot of times in the newspaper or telephone books will say who your local representative is. Call them up even if you get a voicemail. Go on the computer, I'm not a computer person. But, go on it and let them know how you feel . So they'll hear more than those that they want to hear. They'll hear truth and they'll think about the people, and that's important. Gotta stand strong, stand together and you gotta speak up because it doesn't do a bit of good if you sit there and just say, "I don't really agree with that." You have to stand up. Go to your town meeting. I know, some of them are boring and some of them you say oh my god where did these people come from. But, if you don't speak up it's going to keep going the way it has been going.

If you don't recognize the racism in this country, you never will. I was born and raised in Rhode Island. I had one child born in Connecticut, my oldest one. On her birth certificate it says "American Indian.' My second child was born in Mississippi. My husband got out of the Air Force he was a tall cool drink of water and I said that was for me. He was black, Indian, and white. He looked like a white. We go to Mississippi, I have my first son and the doctor's and nurses are all running in there, "he looks like a white baby. He's not white." They put N on his birth certificate. I told them I'm American Indian, they still put down, N. This son I lost. He was ten years old when he died in an accident, and this was before we were going for Federal recognition. My youngest son was born here in Rhode Island, South County Hospital. Picked out a name, his name was Adam, the first man. I filled out his name, filled out race, and so forth. They called me into this little office when I was getting ready to come home. "You have American Indian on here, what tribe are you?" "Narragansett" She crossed it out. I called the doctor. He said he'd fill it. He did and I didn't see it, didn't worry about it, it was Dr. Barber. To go for Federal recognition you have to have birth certificates. The Health Department over here told my son they had him as white, Caucasian. I go to the Health Director. He looked at me and said, "Well, Mrs. Jennings, you know what they say." I said, "Sir?" "Momma's baby, father's maybe." I took my first Nitro pill less than a month after that. It angered me so, frustrated me so. I wrote a letter to the present Governor and told him about it. He called my father and apologized to my father, but I never forgot it. There's not one time I go into that health center that I don't remember the abuse of that man. It was small but it was painful. It was after that my father told me of his eight sisters and brothers, five were listed as white, three were listed as Indian and they all had the same mother and father.

To The Moon

Don't let anybody mistreat who you are. Respect it and love it. I have nieces and nephews that are half Chinese and half German, they love both sides of their culture. When they go to the Powwow or August Social they look as Narragansett as anybody else. At German beer festivals they're more German than anybody else. it all depends on who and what you are. But they all know that Grandfather said voting is not only a responsibility, it's a right. Do it. Don't complain. Do it. I expect each and every one of you to tell your young ones to do the same, otherwise I'm going to send you to the moon.

[applause]

I brought out my tribal ID card which does have a picture on it and a tribal seal. I wish on the back there was a little list of history that said when we got recognition, when we were de-tribalized, some more things about us. But after 911 I happened to be on the Tribal Council at that time and happened to be traveling across the country and remember in Nevada. I went to get on the plane and I showed this card and they took it. Next time, 3 weeks later, I had to go to Washington State. When I got there I pulled the card out, they refused to take it. They patted me down, went through all my things. Finally I get in line to go in and they pull me aside again. Well, I was so frustrated and so angry I said, "You're here in my country, why am I going to bomb it?" And they looked at me like who's this wild woman. There was a younger native woman with me and she said, "calm down, calm down." It is very frustrating when people don't recognize who and what and where we're at.

I wanted to go over this just a little because I wanted to make a few notes. If you look at this paper Verrazano said we were the tallest looking Indians he'd ever seen. We love to tease the people. We were taller than the English. We were always in the subservient area when you see these European drawings. I told you we'd been here 30,000 years. Many people were affected by plagues and disease. Do you realize, and this is documented, over 70% of the medicines used is medicine that derived from the Native people in North and South America? It's ours, we did it. I can remember when Pampers came out, they thought that was a big thing. Well, we took the inside of the milkweed and made Pampers. We had it all.

Remember Wampanoag and Narragansett only has an 's' on it when it's possessing something. It's just that way. We talked about Roger Williams, he bought land. Well we didn't have the concept of buying land. You could use the land till you didn't need it any longer and then you moved on.

The war with the Pequots, the Mohegans, well the war with the Pequots was the same nation but they split. They came from upstate New York and my people got angry because they kept fishing in our ponds and they wanted to make war. We didn't like that. King Philip decided to make war, it's on page 2. He didn't decide to make war he tried to preserve some land, culture and religious beliefs of our people. So, he didn't make war he was doing something to protect us.

When the battle of the Great Swamp my people took in Wampanoag, elders, young people, down in South County. The English came in and from CT and MS and slaughtered, burned. People that weren't sent into slavery were put on a ship and told they were going to Block Island when the boat got half way there they threw them overboard and it's not in the history book. But my grandmother told me because her grandmother told her. I have never been able to go to Block Island. Can't bear the thought that I would be floating over an ancestor. I'm the only member of my family that's never been to Europe or Asia. My grandmother told me don't go across the big water, your name is Sunflower, stay here. I've been up and down North and South America but not across the big water.

Then it says in 1782 it says only 500 Narrangansett were left to sign. They LOCATED 500, now others they didn't want to locate. At that time, and right up until 1924 the Native people from Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, were meeting right here in Providence. Meeting at various churches and venues trying to reclaim our land. This wasn't something that happened in the '60s and '70's after AIM. We'd been trying all that time.

None of our nations are perfect, the United States certainly isn't perfect, but I can't think of another place I'd rather live. I've lived in California, NY sate, miss, I've lived in CT. As far away as I get my heart keeps coming back to the cold winters, the lovely springs, the beautiful fall, the seafood.

This is it, this is it. And if you love wherever you're from, and if you love who your family has been and who they will be you will do the things that need to be done to help this world survive. I don't know you all but I can tell you I love you all because you're fellow humans.

Thank You.

Indians have often been referred to as the "Vanishing Americans." But we are still here, entangled each in his or her unique way with modern America, blended into the dominant culture or not, full-blood or not, on the reservation or not, and living lives much like the lives of other Americans, but with differences related to our history on this continent, our diverse cultures and religions, and our special legal status. To most other Americans, we are invisible, or only perceived in the most stereotyped fashion.

First Nations News & Views is designed to provide a window into our world, each Sunday reporting on a small number of stories, both the good and the not-so-good, and providing a reminder of where we came from, what we are doing now and what matters to us. We wish to make it clear that neither navajo nor I make any claim whatsoever to speak for anyone other than ourselves, as individuals, not for the Navajo people or the Seminole people, the tribes in which we are enrolled as members, nor, of course, the people of any other tribes.

 

Welcome to the 18th edition of First Nations News & Views. This weekly series is one element in the "Invisible Indians" project put together by Meteor Blades and me, with assistance from the Native American Netroots Group. Last week's edition is here. In this edition you will find a new documentary on the Navajo, a look at the year 1876 in American Indian history, The Doctrine of Discovery, some news briefs and a few linkable bulleted briefs. Click on any of the headlines below to take you directly to that section of News & Views or to any of our earlier editions.

This Week in American Indian History in 1876

 ~  The Doctrine of Discovery Still Plagues Native Peoples  ~  
 ~  NCAI President Seeks Voter Registration at Indian Health Services  ~  

All Previous Editions

Cross Posted from Native American Netroots

The sun greeted the children of Dorey and Yolanda Nez with the kiss of death when they born. The couple live in a trailer on the New Mexico part of the Navajo reservation. Their two children were born with a rare and deadly genetic disorder called Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP) that causes severe sunburn with blistering and vastly increased cancer risk upon exposure to any sunlight. While the incidence of the disorder is one in a million in the general population, the occurrence among Navajo is one in 30,000. Why?

Maya Stark and Adi Lavy have filmed a documentary about Dorey, Yolanda and their children called Sun Kissed. It premiered at the L.A. Film Festival on June 16.

Like so many living on remote reservations with limited financial resources, the Nez family had to learn about their plight and how to treat their children without professional help. Before much was known about the disorder, Indian Health Service authorities took some Navajo children away from their parents because they suspected negligence after seeing cases of severe sunburning.

The Nezes' son had died at age 11 and, before the filming ended, their daughter had died at age 16. The incredible burden of keeping their children out of the sun as much as possible and enduring the aftermath of any exposure was understandably overwhelming. Sun Kissed shows Dorey and Yolanda suffering along with their daughter as they shower her with love.

The filmmakers explore the conflict between ancient Navajo taboos and modern applications of science. Navajo traditionally do not to talk about death, disease and hardship. They rely on ancient healing methods. The Nezes natural need to know why this was happening to them and how to cure their children clashed with the rigid cultural rules guarded by their own parents.

Harmony matters in Navajo culture. When events disrupt harmony, the need - the requirement - to restore balance overrides everything. The pressure to harmonize is intense. And when people cannot achieve that, when the disruption continues despite their most vigorous effort, they often blame themselves and are blamed by others for their failure. That was where Yolanda and Dorey found themselves.

Enter the filmmakers...and science. The film's hook - One Gene Exposes a Nation's Dark Past - suggests that the reduced population caused by the infamous "Long Walk," the Navajo "Trail of Tears," may be a factor in the affliction that struck the Nezes' children.

Under orders from President Lincoln, in 1864, as part of the government's campaign to eradicate or assimilate Indian populations in the West, the Army captured thousands of Navajo and, in 53 separate actions, force-marched them hundreds of miles from their homelands in Arizona and New Mexico to Fort Sumner or Bosque Redondo (in Navajo: Hwéeldi). About 9000 Navajo were imprisoned there for four years along with their enemies, 400 Mescalero Apache. As you can imagine, many died during their incarceration.

Many Navajo quietly left Bosque Redondo and the government gave up its first attempt at creating a Native reservation west of Indian Territory. The two sides signed a treaty in June 1868, allowing the Navajo to return home but requiring them to send their children to government-run schools-the policy of taking the Indian out of the Indian. This marked one of the few instances where the government relocated a tribe to within its traditional boundaries. Marched to Bosque Redondo in dozens of groups, the Navajo returned to their sacred ground as one large band stretching 10 miles along the trail home.

The filmmakers suggest that the reduced population from the Long Walk may have allowed the Xeroderma Pigmentosum gene to express itself more. While this is interesting speculation, it raises many questions. The group that survived seems too large to have created this anomaly. If only a very few people who started on the Long Walk had survived, it might be evidence supporting the idea that the forced-march contributed to the prevalence of the disorder. But, in addition to the Navajo who were removed at gunpoint, thousands of Navajo who hid and weren't captured later mixed their genes with the returning population. My Navajo ancestors were among those who hid successfully from the army.

I consulted Kossack jotter, who has a doctorate in biochemistry, to help me understand the genetic speculation of the filmmakers. He responded with an email:

Having seen only the trailer for the documentary I can only speculate that they are invoking what is called "the founder effect," in which a gene rare in a parent population becomes more frequent when a very few survivors, or "founders" give rise to a new population after a population bottleneck (which is a nice way of saying an event which very few survive).

Whether or not this is a true interpretation of the events around the Long Walk, I have no idea.  If only a very few people who started on the Long Walk survived, it might give credence to the idea.

What I managed to read on line suggested that there were at least 9000 survivors of the Long Walk, but there may have been many fewer women who went on to have children.

This has been seen many times, in many populations, it is a consequence of a small population size. For example, Tay-Sachs is much more common in people of Ashkenazi (European Jewish) heritage than in other populations.

XP is actually a disease with many "causes," at least 8 different genes can, when they are damaged, give rise to XP.

I couldn't find anything about which type of XP is found in the Navajo, or if there is only one kind. If there is more than one kind, it would argue strongly against there being anything related to the Long Walk.

Without knowing what the incidence was before and after the Long Walk, it is kind of speculative to attribute the high incidence (relative to European populations) to that event.

I also wonder if the high incidence of XP isn't of a more ancient origin. XP has a higher frequency in Japan. What about Taiwan, or Polynesia? There is genetic evidence for a closer association between peoples of the Southwest and South America to Southeast Asians.

Genetic questions aside, the beautifully shot film appears to take an engaged look at the Navajo culture. It documents the traditional taboos and stigma of having a disabled child, depicts the limited resources available on the reservation and recounts the multi-generational trauma of the tragic history of genocide by the government against the Navajo.

The film's trailer can be seen here:http://www.youtube.com/embed/gz7Q4PQXZ74

Tȟatȟáŋka Ptéčela aka Grant Short Bull, an Oglala
Lakota witness to "Custer's Last Stand"

On June 25, 1876, the Custer myth got its start as Sioux and Cheyenne warriors clashed with the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry in Medicine Tail Coulee and the surrounding area on the Greasy Grass River (Little Big Horn) in Montana Territory. When the shooting was over, five companies of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's command had been wiped out, with 262 men dead and 55 wounded, half the battalion. So startling was the Indian victory that when Crow scouts who had been riding with Custer met up with Gen. Alfred Terry the day after the fight and told him what they had seen, he refused to believe them.

Since that June day 136 years ago, hundreds of books, most of them bad and some of them brimful of outright lies from beginning to end, and more than 50 movies, most of them dreadful, have kept that myth flourishing. A good deal of it was spun into being by Libby Bacon Custer, his widow, who wrote three books glorifying her husband and transforming him from a reckless, aggressively ambitious military politician into a heroic legend. This effort was assisted by two factors:

One was the classifying of the Official Record of the Court of Inquiry of 1879 until 1951. The inquiry was requested by Major Marcus Reno to clear his name for conduct he had been accused of during the battle. It was not until retired Col. William A. Graham wrote The Custer Myth: A Source Book of Custeriana (1953) that a book came close to telling the details of that bloody day on the Greasy Grass.

The second factor was President Theodore Roosevelt's persuading of Edward Curtis in 1906 to leave an account of the Crow scouts he had interviewed out of his photo-rich, 20-volume The North American Indian. The scouts' version was at odds with the image that Libby Custer had created over 30 years of books, lectures and interviews. Custer was Roosevelt's hero, and the president informed Curtis that Americans would not take kindly to having their "memory" of the "Last Stand" besmirched by a trio of Indians, who, of course, were untrustworthy just by being Indian. Curtis dutifully left out that part of the story. Indeed, despite ample opportunity, the Indian side did not fully emerge into the view of the general public until the 1970s. That, in part, came about because the murderous policies that led to the battle and hundreds of others throughout American history began then to be examined outside of scholarly circles.

Seventh Cavalry Guidon

As Graham wrote in reply to his publisher's pressure to ditch the word "myth" from the title:

Just what is a Myth? Ever since I began the study of history, many long years ago, I have been making the acquaintance of myths in one form or another. The exploits of the ancient gods of Greece and Rome come to one's mind instantly when one speaks of myths; but each of them, very probably, was founded in greater or less degree upon the accomplishments of some man, whose identity, once known, was lost in the maze of traditions, fictions and inventions that ascribed to him the attributes of a superman; and as the centuries passed, endowed him with the character of a supernatural person.

We have ourselves created myths in the course of our own short history, which spans less than two hundred years. Washington was in fact a very human person, as contemporary records prove; but the Washington the average American knows is not the real Washington. As "Father of his Country"; the all-wise leader, the military hero, the champion of freedom and foe of tyranny, his human qualities have all but disappeared. He has become a Myth.

So also with Lincoln, martyred savior of his country; about whom and around whom has been built so fantastic a structure of fictitious tales and absurd stores, that the real Lincoln has been obscured from view; and so in our own day with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who to millions of Americans was a selfless, immaculate latter-day Messiah, who gave his life on the altar of self sacrifice. Both these men were human beings-very human; but the Lincoln and the Roosevelt known to the average American are Myths.

And so with Custer, and so with nearly everyone involved in the Custer story. It began in controversy and dispute; but because a devoted wife so skilfully and so forcefully painted her hero as a plumed knight in shining armor-a "chevalier sans peur and sans reproche," that all who stood in the way of her appraisal were made to appear as cowards or scoundrels; and because her hero went out in a blaze of glory that became the setting for propaganda which caught and held, and still holds, the imagination of the American people, what began in controversy and dispute has ended in Myth; a myth built, like other myths, upon actual deeds and events, magnified, distorted and disproportioned by fiction, invention, imagination and speculation. The Custer known to the average Amercian is a Myth; and so is Reno; and so also in Benteen.

The Little Big Horn battle was neither the greatest nor most important fight in the Indian Wars that began in North America in 1540 when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado attacked the Tiwa in what is present-day New Mexico and ended in Bear Valley, Arizona, in 1918 in a clash between African American 10th Cavalry "Buffalo Soldiers" and a band of Yaqui. But the battle everyone can name has come down to us as the mythical "Custer's Last Stand" and has in a multitude of ways shaped the American psyche regarding the collision between Europeans and Natives. Although the myth has been under attack for decades, both by scholars and Indians alike, it refuses to yield completely.  

•••

SOURCES:
• The Custer Myth, W.A. Graham, 1953 and 1981.
• Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Big Horn, Evan S. Connell, 1991.

by Marty Two Bulls (Oglala Lakota)

In 1787, the United States adopted a Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 delegates to Congress the power "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes." Thus, dealings with the tribes were assigned to the federal government from the beginning. Most litigation regarding Indian matters derives from this clause. However, it has not been unusual for legal scholars, including one Supreme Court Chief Justice, and for many politicians and government leaders, to ignore it or otherwise get around it.

The "Doctrine of Discovery" is not well-known to Americans who are not historians, legal scholars or Natives. In brief, it is an ancient European legal concept which says that Christian nations have a right, if not an obligation, to rule over all non-Christian nations. Thus, the European nations, and the United States after 1787, felt that they had a legal right to govern American Indians. The Doctrine of Discovery accorded Christian nations the right to take land away from indigenous peoples, paying for it with the gift of religious conversion.

Pope Nicholas V in 1452 laid the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery by issuing the papal bull dum diversas. This instructed the Portuguese monarchy "to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ, to put them into perpetual slavery, and to take away all their possessions and property." The ideas found in this papal document were later woven into U.S. Indian law and, even today, is a shadow guiding U.S. Indian policy.

The original papal bull, technically still in force, was strengthened in 1455 with another, Romanus Pontifex. This sanctified the seizure of non-Christian lands and encouraged the slavery of native peoples wherever they were found.

Following the "discovery" of the Americas by Europeans, bulls by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 granted Spain and Portugal all the lands in the Americas which were not under Christian rule. His Inter Caetera Divina bull stated: "We trust in Him from whom empires, and governments, and all good things proceed." Thus began the European assumption that the Native people of the hemisphere didn't own the land they called their own because they were not Christian. The Pope decreed that: "barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself." In short, Christian-that is, Catholic-nations had the Pope's written blessing to wage a "just war" against Indian nations that failed to recognize the Doctrine of Discovery.  

Vine Deloria, Jr. (Yankton-Dakota) would write in the Afterword to Alvin Josephy, Jr.'s America in 1492: The World of Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus (1991): "Thus armed with a totally bogus title issued by God's representative on earth, the Spaniards then began a brutal conquest in the Americas which virtually obliterated the native populations in the Caribbean within a generation."

By 1513, Palacios Rubios, Spain's master jurist, had refined the Doctrine of Discovery into a document that was to be read aloud, in Spanish or in Latin, when new peoples and/or lands were encountered. The fact that the indigenous people might not speak Spanish or Latin was not seen as relevant. The document recited the Christian history of the world and then demanded that the Natives accept this version of history and submit themselves to the authority of the Spanish king, who ruled by "Divine Right."

The indigenous peoples were told that God has declared that the Pope rules all people, regardless of their law, sect or belief. This includes Christians, Moors, Jews, Gentiles, or any other sect. The Native Americans were to come forward of their own free will to convert to Catholicism or "with the help of God we shall use force against you, declaring war upon you from all sides and with all possible means, and we shall bind you to the yoke of the Church and Their Highnesses; we shall enslave your persons, wives, and sons, sell you or dispose of you as the King sees fit; we shall seize your possessions and harm you as much as we can as disobedient and resisting vassals."

Furthermore, Natives who resist are to be held guilty of all resulting deaths and injuries from the "just" war waged against them.

Pope Nicholas V

The Supreme Court's use of the Doctrine of Discovery in Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. McIntosh (1823) laid the foundation for Indian law that still continues, but without the brutal language of Palacio Rubios. The ruling reinforced the superiority of Christianity as a governing philosophy and paid little attention to either Indian history or Indian religions.

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States. The government argued that under international law Christian nations can acquire lands occupied by heathens and infidels. It was an argument made by the United States government on the basis of the Christian religion. In their argument before the Court, government attorneys not only cited the 19th Century case of Johnson v. M'Intosh, but also the papal bulls of the 15th Century and the Old Testament of the Bible.

In 1955, the Supreme Court announced its decision denying the Tee-Hit-Ton (a band of the Tlingit Indians) any compensation for the taking of timber from their land. According to the Court: "The Christian nations of Europe acquired jurisdiction over newly discovered lands by virtue of grants from the Popes, who claimed the power to grant Christian monarchs the right to acquire territory in the possession of heathens and infidels."

The Tee-Hit-Ton case reaffirmed the Doctrine of Discovery as the basis for U.S. law. It reaffirmed this Christian doctrine as the principle to be used in judging American Indians and discounted American Indian history and religious traditions. It denied that Indians had any legal rights as pagan nations.

In 2005, the Supreme Court once again cited the Discovery Doctrine in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote: "Under the 'doctrine of discovery,' fee title to the lands occupied by the Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign-first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States." The case ruled that tribal repurchase of land taken in the past does not restore Indian sovereignty over it.

In 2008, the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers traveled to the Vatican to ask Pope Benedict XVI to rescind the Discovery Doctrine that they said has encouraged the genocide of millions of indigenous people. Vatican police, however, claimed that the women were engaged in conducting anti-Catholic demonstrations.

In 2009, Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons asked Pope Benedict XVI to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery. The Pope declined, thus indicating that the doctrine continues as Church policy. However, that same year, the Episcopal Church adopted a resolution repudiating the doctrine. The resolution called on the United States to review its historical and contemporary policies that contribute to the continued colonization of Native peoples. The resolution also called for Queen Elizabeth II to repudiate publicly the validity of the Doctrine of Discovery.

In 2010, A Preliminary Study on the Doctrine of Discovery was presented to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues by Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga). According to the study, the Doctrine of Discovery has been used to justify indigenous genocide and is one of the underlying reasons for the worldwide violations of the human rights of indigenous peoples. In 2012, the 11th Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues discussed the Doctrine of Discovery.

On numerous other occasions, Indian leaders in the Americas have formally asked the Pope to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery. At the present time, it is still official policy of the Catholic Church and underlies part of American law.

NCAI President Seeks Voter Registration at Indian Health Services

Jefferson Keel

On reservations and in urban centers, the IHS provides members of federally recognized tribes health care and advocacy. It runs 142 hospitals, health centers and 50 health stations on reservations and about 30 urban Indian health projects where voter registration could be done, just as it is now done at public assistance agencies and local branches of the departments of motor vehicles in some states.

Only 40 percent of eligible Indians were registered to vote in 2008, meaning there are at least one million unregistered Indians. "This should be considered a civic emergency," Keel told NCAI members assembled for a mid-year meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, Tuesday. Many politicians believe the Indian vote is too small to care about. But boosting turnout can make a difference in the outcome of local, state and, very occasionally, congressional elections in several states where there are large concentrations of Indians.

For instance, in 2002, South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson won reelection to his U.S. Senate seat against challenger John Thune by 532 votes, less than one-tenth of one percent of the vote. That victory can be credited to the huge margin he won on the Pine Ridge reservation by virtue of an unprecedented voter registration drive there that turned out large numbers of Oglala Lakota at the polls. The Democrats typically get more than 80 percent of the vote at Pine Ridge.

A new report from Demos found the Indian Health Service voting registration idea completely in line with public assistance agency registration. It also found that American Indians have the lowest voter participation rate of any ethnic group in the nation.

Demos found that when the law was implemented tens of thousands of new voters were added in North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, Ohio and Illinois. "In Illinois, the number of public agency registration applications is now at levels 18 times the rate before re-implementation" of that voting registration law. That's exactly the kind of boost that would be needed to register a million American Indian and Alaska Native voters. This process would also be cost-effective voter registration, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the total cost at less than $500,000 over a four-year period.

"The Native community in the United States is increasingly making its voice heard in state and national elections," the Demos report said. "Unfortunately, most of our history has been one of state mistreatment and exclusion of indigenous peoples. There are still problems and tensions ... Making voter registration easier and more accessible through designation of Indian Health Service facilities as voter registration agencies will not solve all the problems that are causing low rates of participation among American Indians and Alaska Natives or fully address the ongoing mistrust. Nonetheless, it would be an important step that would have a significant positive impact on the voting rights of thousands of Americans."

Getting registered is, for Indians, just part of battle to get unfettered access at the polls. Since Indians gained citizenship in 1924, states and counties have tried all kinds of chicanery to keep them from exercising their rights. This ranges in recent years from denials based on tribal identity cards in Minnesota to at-large elections in Wyoming, from refusing to provide language assistance under the 1965 Voting Rights Act in New Mexico to discriminating against reservation-dwelling Indians by having fewer polling places per capita and fewer hours allowed for early voting in South Dakota.

• Navajo Code Talker Frank Chee Willeto Walks On:

• Supreme Court: Tribes Owed Millions in Reimbursements: In a major 5-4 ruling in Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter that saw an unusual mix of justices on each side, the Supreme Court has decided the government must reimburse American Indian tribes for millions of dollars they spent on federal programs. Although $1.6 billion was appropriated to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for "the operations of Indian programs" in 2000, only $120.2 million was paid out. The justices ruled that the government "was obligated to pay the tribes' contract support costs in full." Roger Martinez, president of the Ramah Navajo Chapter in New Mexico was a plaintiff in the case. He told journalists that the band was sad the case had had to go to the Supreme Court, but "happy that they sided with us."
^{-Meteor Blades}

• Tribes Start to Receive $1 Billion in Settlement Money:

T.J. Show, Blackfeet Chairman

- Minnesota: Leech Lake, $3 million; the Minnesota Chippewa, $1.99 million; the Bois Forte, $1 million

- Wisconsin: Lac Courte Oreilles, $8 million; Lac du Flambeau, $5 million; Bad River, $3 million.

- North Dakota: Spirit Lake, $6 million; Standing Rock Sioux, $48.9 million

Blackfeet Nation Chairman T.J. Show said that half of his tribe's $19 million will go for investment projects on its Montana reservation, including a 90-room hotel. The rest of the money will be distributed evenly to each of the tribe's approximately 17,000 members-$550 per person. Said Show:

We received an avalanche of responses with many, many great ideas. Some said it all should go to our youth, others said it should all go to per caps, some wanted debt paid down, others wanted to better fund programs and projects. After giving much consideration to all these great ideas and requests, we decided the fair and responsible thing to do was spend half on per caps and then stretch the other half as far as we can. [...]

I believe it will be an economic benefit to the tribal members to use as they see fit, whether it be for college kids going to school or parents just needing to feed their child.

• Indians Worry About Bill Relaxing Eco-Rules at Border: The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that eases environmental regulations along the Canadian and Mexican borders. The bill is meant to keep out drug smugglers. But the Department of Homeland Security has said it is unnecessary. It would allow the Border Patrol to have full access access to public and tribal lands within 100 miles of the borders. It would also waive dozens of protective laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act and others. The National Congress of American Indians, the nation's largest representative body of Indians, sent a letter to the Senate in opposition to the bill.

The House measure exempted tribes, but Kesner Flores [Wintun/Paute-Cortina Rancheria], interim director of the National Tribal Environmental Council, is concerned that the Senate version of the bill contains no such exemption. The House version affects swaths of land along both the northern and southern U.S. borders, which he says are home to numerous tribes.

"That actually are homelands to a lot of native nations, who have their sovereignty issues and the nations; endangered species, and habitat and other things that are there that might be impacted, or could be impacted and probably will be impacted by this bill."

Flores says the Obama administration and federal public lands rules require that tribes be consulted before making these types of major changes.

• The 20th Annual Lakota War Pony Races Will Be Held June 25: 

Each year, the Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota commemorate their victory over the U.S. Army at the Battle of the Greasy Grass, better known in American history as the Battle of Little Bighorn. Several horse races are held during the day, including one where the riders chase a volunteer dressed as George Armstrong Custer. I wrote about this event in 2010 with photos and a video. 
^-navajo

• 100 Trail of Tears Route Markers Dedicated:

Patsy Edgar (Cherokee) said that remembering the past is not done only to show the past but also "[t]o point out to people that we are still here as a nation, and we still actually, we thrive, so it's not all about the negative, it's also very much about the positive."

In a short speech, Aaron Mahr, the superintendent of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, said at the dedication ceremony:

"It's a tragic story from our past that reveals some of the darker forces," Mahr said.

"It speaks to the issue of racism, it speaks to the issue of forced relocation, removal, concentration camps on American soil.

"The dangers of extremism, issues that are part of our past."

Indians have often been referred to as the "Vanishing Americans." But we are still here, entangled each in his or her unique way with modern America, blended into the dominant culture or not, full-blood or not, on the reservation or not, and living lives much like the lives of other Americans, but with differences related to our history on this continent, our diverse cultures and religions, and our special legal status. To most other Americans, we are invisible, or only perceived in the most stereotyped fashion.

First Nations News & Views is designed to provide a window into our world, each Sunday reporting on a small number of stories, both the good and the not-so-good, and providing a reminder of where we came from, what we are doing now and what matters to us. We wish to make it clear that neither navajo nor I make any claim whatsoever to speak for anyone other than ourselves, as individuals, not for the Navajo people or the Seminole people, the tribes in which we are enrolled as members, nor, of course, the people of any other tribes.

In American society, part of the discussion about marriage is really about sex. While sex was a part of traditional Native American marriage, marriage was not about sex. Prior to marriage, young people were expected to engage in sexual activities. Sex was not confined to marriage. One of the things that upset many of the early Christian missionaries was the fact that Indian women were allowed to express their sexuality and to choose their own sexual partners.

Among some contemporary American commentators, there is a view that there are only two genders: male and female. Yet, in American Indian cultures people did not make this an either/or situation. They viewed gender (and sexuality) as a continuum. Many modern Indians talk about a third sex/gender often called a berdache or two-spirit. Yet in traditional cultures, it wasn't quite that simple. There was recognition of the feminine and masculine in all people. There was not an either/or concept of being heterosexual or homosexual. There were in traditional societies male and female homosexuals and transvestites who played important spiritual and ceremonial roles. These individuals were seen as being an important part of the community.

Traditional Native American cultures tended to be egalitarian: all people were equal. This is one of the things that bothered many of the early Christian Missionaries, particularly the Jesuits in New France, as they viewed marriage as a relationship in which the woman subjugated herself to the man. In Indian marriages, men and women were equals.

In Indian cultures marriage was neither religious nor civil. Marriage was viewed as a private matter or a family matter. There was usually no religious ceremony involved, only a public recognition of the fact of marriage. In most cases there was no actual ceremony, religious or civil.

In most Native American cultures, nearly all people were married, yet marriage was not seen as permanent. It was recognized that people would be together in a married state for a while and then separate. Divorce was neither a civil nor a religious concern-this was a private matter among the people involved. While some American commentators bemoan the negative impact of divorce upon children, in Native cultures each child had many fathers, many mothers, and many siblings. A child was not property but a member of a large family and thus had rights. (As an aside, in many Indian cultures it was unthinkable to strike a child.)

For many writers, one of the most confusing parts of Indian marriage was plural marriage. While most writers call this polygamy they are really referring to polygyny: that is, the marriage of a man to more than one woman at a time. To understand American Indian polygyny, we must begin with an understanding that marriage was an economic institution and that polygyny has to be understood in economic terms. It was not about sex.

First of all, individuals in many Indian societies had to be married to fully function in the economic system. Thus, if a woman's husband died, she had to be married and this meant that she would often marry one of her husband's brothers. While sex was not excluded from this new relationship, it was not the primary concern: the widow now became a part of her brother-in-law's economic household.

In the hunting and gathering societies, such as those of the Great Plains tribes during the 19th century, if a man was a good hunter, he needed more than one wife to process the hides. Thus he might take a second wife. Very often this second wife would be a sister to his first wife since it was understood that sisters don't fight and marriage to two sisters was seen as more harmonious. Sometimes the second or third wife would be a two-spirit, a man who had taken a woman's role.

Polyandry-the marriage of one woman to more than one man at the same time-was common among many American Indian cultures, but tended to be unseen by the patriarchic-oriented Europeans. From the perspective of European culture, the idea of polyandry was unthinkable and seemed unnatural and thus was invisible to European observers, including most anthropologists. Yet it was fairly common and occurred in a number of ways.

To understand polyandry, it must be understood that most Indian societies were egalitarian and that women were not owned by men. Thus, a woman could choose to be married to two or more men. In some instances, the second husband would be the younger brother of her first husband. In many tribes, the younger brother would live with his older brother and sexually share his older brother's wife as he matured into adulthood.  

The use of tobacco today, for smoking as well as other uses, is a global phenomenon, and a global health concern. Tobacco, however, is a plant which originated in the Americas and which was first used in a variety of ways by American Indians. Most importantly tobacco was, and continues to be, an integral part of Native American spirituality. The history of tobacco is partially a history of American Indians.

First, some information about the plant. Tobacco's genus, Nicotiana, contains 64 species. Today, the most frequently used tobaccos are Nicotiana tabacum (tall, annual, broad leafed plant) and Nicotiana rustica.

While tobacco grows wild in many parts of the Americas, the archaeological evidence suggests that Indian people in the Andes region of South America began to domesticate and cultivate tobacco about 7,000 years ago. The practice of growing tobacco as a crop then spread north into the tribal traditions of what is now the United States and Canada and also out to the Caribbean Islands. Shortly after the beginning of the European invasion in 1492, the use and cultivation of tobacco began to spread to other parts of the planet.

Tobacco can be used by humans in many different ways: it can be sniffed, chewed, eaten, smeared on the skin, drunk, used in eye drops and enemas, and smoked. Smoking is the quickest way of getting the drug into the blood stream other than using a hypodermic needle. Taken in small doses, tobacco has a mild effect on those who use it. However, taken in large doses it can produce hallucinations, trances, and death.

Smoking is an unusual way of ingesting a drug. At the time of the European invasion in the 1500s, smoking was found only in the Americas and in a few parts of Africa. Europeans were unfamiliar with this activity and were, at times, amazed when they encountered it.  

Tobacco was traditionally used by nearly all of the tribes of North America and the most common way of using tobacco was to smoke it in a pipe. Indians used pipes made from various materials in a variety of shapes. The most recognized is the Plains Indian "peace" pipe with its stone bowl and long wooden stem. The bowl of the "peace" pipe is often in an elbow shape or a T-shape.

The people whom archaeologists call Basketmaker in what is now the American Southwest were using a tube-like pipe about 3,500 years ago. For their smoking mixture they used wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) which was probably mixed with other materials. In a similar fashion, the Indian people around the Great Lakes area about 3,000 years ago were using tubular-shaped pipes for smoking tobacco. The pipes are flared on the tobacco end and narrowed on the mouth end.

While some pipes are left plain, others are elaborately carved. The designs can range from abstract patterns to realistic animal and human effigies. In some instances the animal effigies represent the guardian spirits of the pipe's owner. Human heads, which are often carved so that they face the smoker, sometimes represent an actual deceased individual and are smoked to facilitate spiritual communication with that person.

One interesting historical side note is the collection of effigy pipes of Toussaint Charbonneau, the guide for Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery expedition. Charbonneau collected pipes which realistically portrayed people in erotic situations.  

The Indian people in the eastern part of the United States frequently made pipes from clay. It was this clay pipe which the Europeans copied when they began to smoke tobacco.

In addition to using stone and clay for making pipes, Indian also made pipes from wood, bone, and antler.

Traditionally, the material smoked in the pipes was a mixture of tobacco and other plant materials. The Algonquian term "kinnekenick," which means "mixture" was often used to describe this mixture of smoking materials.

While smoking could be a social event or a solitary undertaking, the act of smoking always involved some ritual. When the pipe was first lit, smoke would be offered to the directions: four directions in some traditions, six in others, and often seven.

Often pipes were individual pipes: that is, they were privately owned. An individual pipe could be used ceremonially to aid in the owner's personal spiritual quest or the owner could use the pipe to help other people. In addition, an individual pipe might be used for recreational smoking. When the owner of the pipe died, the pipe was either buried with the owner's body or it was destroyed.

Sometimes pipes were communally owned: that is, they were a part of a bundle of spiritual objects. These pipes were used only ceremonially and were used to spiritually help the people.

Today, pipes are still commonly used by American Indian people. Many of the old bundles and their pipes still play an important role in the spiritual life of the people. Many individuals also have pipes and, as "pipe carriers," they are often asked to conduct spiritual ceremonies.

Note: for many traditional elders, photographing sacred pipes is offensive and therefore no photographs of pipes have been included in this essay.

Many Indian tribes traditionally cultivated tobacco, but cultivated tobacco was not always used for smoking. The Crow, a Northern Plains tribe, have a Tobacco Society (both men and women are members) which plants the sacred tobacco every spring and every fall they harvest it. In the spring, the members meet to discuss their dreams which give them instructions on the site for planting the seeds. The tobacco (Nicotiana multivalvis) raised by the Crow Tobacco Society was considered a holy plant associated with the stars and was not smoked. Some stories say that tobacco was given to the people at the time of creation: that Morning Star transformed himself from human into the tobacco plant in order to overcome their enemies. Other stories indicate that tobacco was the personal medicine of No Vitals, the chief who led the Crow away from the Hidatsa.  For the Crow, their destiny was linked to tobacco.

Tobacco is still used by American Indians as a spiritual offering. When asking the advice of an elder, for example, it is customary to give the elder tobacco. In gathering wild plants for ceremonial use, it is customary to leave a small offering of tobacco for the spirits of the plants. In preparing the fire for the sweat lodge, tobacco offerings are given to the fire. Ceremonially, tobacco is still an important part of Native American spirituality.

In the United States today, tobacco use-primarily cigarettes and chewing tobacco-is extremely high on Indian reservations and among Indian populations in urban areas. A report released in 2012 by the U.S. Surgeon General showed that American Indian youth (age group 12-17) and young adults (age group 18-25) are more likely to smoke tobacco than any other ethnic group. According to the report, nearly 50% of young adult Indians smoke.

Interestingly enough, there seems to be a correlation between Indian casinos and smoking: a study by the Institute on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that casinos reduce the probability of smoking by 9.6%.

Tobacco use is accompanied by the usual tobacco-related health problems. In many areas, the elders are attempting to tell the young people that tobacco should be used only in ceremonial context and not for recreation.

Europeans (and many modern Americans), coming from a socially stratified society saw this as natural and had difficulty perceiving and understanding any society which did not have stratification. They often assumed that people would feel insecure without stratification and so worked to change Indian societies. They often imagined stratification where there was none and also superimposed it on Indian societies through the treaty process.

While it was true that some Indian cultures had hierarchies, most did not have royalty. The present-day claims by some people that their grandmother, great-grandmother, or some other distant relative was an Indian "princess" is a reflection of Euro-American fantasies rather than any realities of Indian society.

Instead of being hierarchical, most Indian cultures tended to be egalitarian and democratic. In most American Indian societies there were no social classes and no-one had superior rights to others based on birth (i.e. the status of one's father or mother). With regard to government, all adults-both men and women-generally had input into most decisions.

The concept of the Indian "chief" is really a European concept. Europeans felt that it was natural that the leader of the society-designated with the title "king" or "chief"-had a right to tell other people what to do. Furthermore, this person should be immediately recognizable by their dress, by the behavior of their subordinates, and by the size of their dwellings. Since most Indian societies were egalitarian, the early Europeans were often confused when they could not readily identify the Indian leaders ("chiefs"): the leaders wore the same clothing as other people, were treated the same as other people, and lived in similar dwellings.

Unlike the hereditary basis of leadership found in European societies, leadership among Indian cultures was often based on the individual's ability to get other people to listen and follow. Oratory was one of the key elements of leadership. In addition, leaders were often expected to be generous (they often were required to feed and house all visitors).

It was common for Indian societies to have more than one leader. Among some tribes, there was a hunt leader, a war leader, a ceremonial leader, and so on. All of these leadership roles required different skills and there was no assumption that a single individual could fill all of these roles.

The Europeans, and later the American government, assumed that patrilineal descent was somehow natural, normal, and universal. That is, a son always inherited from his father. The matrilineal systems followed by many tribes, ranging from the Cherokee in the Southeast to the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Tlingit in the Northwest Coast to the Hopi in the Southwest, seemed to be beyond European comprehension. In a matrilineal system, a son would inherit from his mother's brother, not his father. Not understanding this system, the Europeans and Americans generally assumed that when a chief died, his son would automatically become chief. In most tribes, this did not happen.

With regard to government, Indian societies ranged from very loose democracies in which all discussed important decisions to the more formal confederacies, such as that of the League of Five Nations (also called the Iroquois Confederacy). In general, cross-cultural studies suggest that communities with 500 or fewer individuals tend to be egalitarian without formal leadership roles. Most of the so-called "hunting and gathering" tribes would fall into this category. However, as population increases there is a need for a more formal governmental structure. With a population of about 2,500, societies tend to have formal, political hierarchies. With regard to American Indians, many of the agricultural tribes would fall into this group.

The Nez Perce Tribe sums up traditional Indian law and government this way:

"Over many hundreds of years, tribal governments exercised their power by declarations of war, by defining and controlling territories, by managing and allocating resources, by punishing crimes, by regulating marriages, by adoption and by conducting various other aspects of their domestic relations. This form of government relied, not upon laws written in books or interpreted in courtrooms, but upon binding oral contracts and oral agreements. Such governments did not define their territories on maps and established no governmental offices."  

When  the European invasion began in the late 15th century, they encountered a land occupied by people who were not mentioned in their sacred book and who did not fit what they felt was the one and only creation story of the world. What they had to do is to somehow fit them into the Biblical stories of creation and that meant that these Native Americans had to somehow be connected with people known to the Europeans. By the seventeenth century European authors were promoting a number of different ideas to connect the Indians with the Biblical creation stories.

In 1622, English scholar Edward Brerewood in Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions, Through the Chief Parts of the World speculated that the Tartars (now known as Mongolians) were the first people to enter the Americas. While geographic knowledge at this time was somewhat inaccurate, there was an assumption that American Indians had had to somehow walk to North America. There was an assumption that North America was attached to Asia and thus the Indians could have walked from Asia.

Since Europeans assumed that American Indians were also immigrants, they had to come up with some reasons for this migration. In 1634, letters from well-known theologian Joseph Mede to New England ministers suggested that Indians had migrated to the Americas because the Devil had led them there. His logic was simple: the Devil was afraid of losing his dominance in Europe as the Gospel spread. This had provoked the Devil to gather together the hordes of barbarous northerners who had never heard of Christ. The Devil promised them an empty land superior to their own where they might thrive in a kingdom ruled by the Devil. Building on the fearsome tales of the pagan Northmen (known today as the Vikings) who had cruelly attacked Christians, Mede made it clear that Indians were ruled by the Devil.

So did Indians come to North America from China or from Northern Europe? One possibility was put forth in 1642 in On the Origins of the Native Races of America in which Hugo Grotius concluded that the Indians were the descendents of Germans and Chinese.

In order to place American Indians into the Christian creation stories, there were many people in the seventeenth century who believed that Indians were Jewish. This gave the Europeans an additional excuse for anti-Indian discrimination.

In 1650, Thomas Thorowgood in his book Jewes in America, or probabilities that the Americans are of that race made a comparison of Jewish and Indian culture in an attempt to prove that Indians were really Jewish. He suggested that Indians were descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. He writes:

"The rites, fashions, ceremonies, and opinions of the Americans are in many ways agreeable to the custome of the Jewes, not onely prophane and common usages, but such as be called solemn and sacred."

He cited the similarity between Indian and Jewish rites, knowledge of the flood, dancing, and circumcision.

Not everyone agreed with Thorowgood, however, and in 1652 Sir Marmon l'Estrange published his Americans no Jews, or improbabilities that the Americans are of that race. In this book he points out that the features mentioned by Thomas Thorowgood were general human customs and not evidence that Indians were Jews.

Books Favorable to Indians:

While there were no Indians who were writing books in European languages in the seventeenth century, there were some Europeans who wrote works which were not anti-Indian, but were based upon observations of Indian cultures.

In 1632, Roger Williams wrote a small treatise which questioned the English colonists' rights to appropriate Indian land under the authority of a royal patent. Colonial officials demanded a retraction. William's work is described as a "large book in Quatro" and no copies of it have survived. His fellow colonists apparently wanted it destroyed and the lack of existing copies today speaks to their success.

In Christenings Make Not Christians (published in 1645), Roger Williams provided an argument against converting Indians to Christianity. He felt that the majority of Christians were unconverted and were as heathen as Indians. He argued that Protestants should abstain from Indian missionary work until they succeeded among their own people.

Roger Williams is shown above.

The newspaper Publick Occurrences carried news about Christianized Indians who had a day of thanksgiving for a very comfortable harvest. The paper is suppressed after one issue in 1690.

Language:

Relatively few of the colonists, particularly the English-speaking colonists, learned any Native American languages. While communication with Native people was important, and at times vital, they arrogantly assumed that it was the responsibility of the Indians to learn to speak English. Some of the early books about Indians did, however, include some rather limited vocabulary lists.

New England's Prospects, written by William Wood, was published in 1634. The book contains a description of the region's natural history and native peoples. It includes a five-page vocabulary of words and phrases.

Perhaps the most ambitious seventeenth century work about Indian language is A Key Into the Language of America written by Roger Williams which was published in 1643. The book is a phrase book and guide to Indian customs based on his experience among the Narragansett in Rhode Island. The book is organized into three parts: (1) Narragansett words and phrases, (2) geography and natural history, and (3) an account of Indian cultural institutions. He saw the origin of Indians as either Jewish or Greek. This was the first extensive book on Native American language which is published in English.

Roger Williams and the Narragansett are depicted above.

In the book, Williams contrasted Indian culture with European culture. He often challenged the assumption of European superiority by pointing out that while Indians appear to lack civilization and Christianity, in actuality their culture is imbued with more civility and Christ-like spirit than European civilization.

John Eliot's The Indian Grammar Begun was published in 1666. In this work, Eliot noted that there were two kinds of Indian nouns: those which indicated something which was living or animate and those which indicated that something was inanimate.

John Elliot is shown is above.

Descriptions of Indian Customs:

During the past five centuries there have been lots of supposed descriptions of Indian customs written by people who have had no contact with Indians and whose descriptions are more the product of a vivid imagination than actual observations. During the seventeenth century, however, there began to appear some books with descriptions based on actual observation, either first hand or second hand.

New English Canaan, written by Thomas Morton, was published in 1637. It contained three parts: (1) "The Origins of the Natives; their Manners and Customs," (2) "A Description of the Beauty of the Country," and (3) "A Description of the People." In the book he mentioned the various powers of the Indian medicine men and the ways in which they had to prove their powers.

A Short Sketch of the Mohawk Indians by the Reverend Johannes Megapolensis was published in the Netherlands in 1644. It is not clear if he actually visited any of their villages or if he spoke any of the language. He wrote:

"There is no Christian here [at Fort Orange or Rensselaerswyck] who understands the language thoroughly; those who have lived here long can use a kind of jargon just sufficient to carry on trade with it, but they do not understand the fundamentals of the languages."

New-Englands Rarities Discovered, written by John Josselyn, was published in 1672. The book was based on Josselyn's observations of the Eastern Abenaki in Maine. He was critical of the Puritan policies and thus the work was criticized by his contemporaries.

Indians were portrayed as "children of the devil" in 1677 book The Present State of New-England, Being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians written by William Hubbard. The map which accompanied the book reduced the Indian presence in the area by assigning non-Indian names to the features shown. The book and its map were a litany of the various acts for which Indians were deemed responsible-burned barns, slaughtered stock, and human massacre.

While many of the descriptions of Indians published in the seventeenth century were based on rather superficial observations, there was one notable exception. In 1643, a young Dutchman, Adriaen van der Donck, set out to observe the countryside of New Netherlands (later called New York) and the Indian people. Van der Donck learned some of the Indian languages and classified the languages of the region as falling into four different language groups.

In the 1652, Adriaen van der Donck finished the manuscript for his book A Description of New Netherland. While he obtained a license to publish it, publication was delayed as the government did not want to draw attention to the colony, fearing that the English might invade.

Under the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, Indian tribes are domestic dependent nations and are not under the jurisdiction of the states.

At the national level, the new policy regarding Indians was announced in 1951 by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Dillon Meyer in a speech before the National Council of Churches. He announced that the private sector or state governments can better serve the Indian people and the time had come to weaken or dissolve the relationship between Indian tribes and the federal government. He asked that religious groups (meaning Christian) help Indians to assimilate into American society.

Two years later, in 1953, Congress passed Public Law 280 giving state governments the right to assume civil and criminal jurisdiction over Indian reservations in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Alaska. The law was created in part because of Congress's perception of the "lawlessness" of the reservations and a concern to protect non-Indians living near the reservations.  There was no concern for protecting the Indians. Indians were not consulted in creating this legislation.

At this same time, legislation was introduced to repeal the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Proponents of the appeal felt that the IRA had encouraged un-American socialistic tribal governments. Montana Senator George Malone put it this way:

"While we are spending billions of dollars fighting communism and Marxist socialism throughout the world, we are at the same time, through the Indian Bureau, perpetuating the systems of Indian reservations and tribal governments which are natural Socialist environments."

South Dakota, 1961

In 1961, lobbyists for the non-Indian Taxpayers League drafted a bill which was introduced in the South Dakota House of Representatives which assumed state jurisdiction over all criminal and civil matters in Indian country under the provisions of Public Law 280. The primary concern of the Taxpayers League was "lawlessness", especially drunken driving on the highway. Enforcing the proposed law, however, would entail increased costs to the state so the bill was amended to assume jurisdiction only over actions on the highways through Indian country. The bill passed and became law.

In 1990, the law was overturned by the Eighth Circuit Court. According to the Court:

"Absent tribal consent, we hold the State of South Dakota has no jurisdiction over highways running through Indian lands in the state."

The court found that the 1961 state law extending its jurisdiction over reservation highways was not responsive to Public Law 280.

South Dakota, 1963:

In 1963, South Dakota enacted a law which gave the state civil and criminal jurisdiction on reservations. While South Dakota had a fairly large Indian population, there were no Sioux representative in the legislature and the Sioux strongly opposed this law.
In signing the new law, the state governor stressed equal rights:

"We'll be giving the Indian equal protection under the law. We hear a lot about civil rights. But until all South Dakotans are treated the same, we'll never achieve the full potential of our state."

In response to the new law a new organization - United Sioux Tribes - was formed and a petition drive was started to allow state voters to vote on the issue. In two months they gathered the 14,000 signatures necessary to have the matter considered on a public referendum. In their campaign, the Sioux focus on the voters' sense of fairness: the state law was wrong simply because the Sioux never consented to it. The referendum passed with 79% of the vote and the law was thus overturned.

From the beginning of the English invasion of North America, the English colonists sought to expand English rule-English laws and English concepts of government-over the sovereign Indian nations which they encountered. With an arrogant ethnocentrism, the English viewed Indians as outsiders, living within English jurisdiction but without the full membership of citizenship. Among other things, this often meant that Indians could be punished for labor or play on the Sabbath, as well as other offenses toward the English religion.

One of the rationales used by the English for taking Indian land, or seeing it as "vacant," was the belief that the English could put the land to "higher use" by employing  European-style agriculture and livestock. It was important for the English to downplay or ignore Indian land usage and the ways in which Indians had "improved" the land. Since the Natives were already farming the land, particularly the best land, this meant that the English had to construct stereotypes of the Indians which portrayed them as nomadic hunters who did not modify or improve the land in order to justify taking the land away from them.

English policies toward Indians were based on segregation. Initially, the rationale for this segregation was based on religion: the English were Christian and the Indians were heathens. As some Indians converted to Christianity, however, that rationale for segregation became less valid. In order to continue segregation, the English came to develop the notion of "race": changing the initial meaning of this concept which was closer to the idea of a nation, the English began to view this as a biological imperative which justified English rule.

Background: Indians

The English invaders did not encounter a single Indian empire or nation: rather, the Atlantic coast was inhabited by a number of independent Indian tribes, speaking many different languages. These sovereign Indian nations were not unified and war, primarily in the form of raids, was not uncommon.

The Indians were farmers, raising many different varieties of maize (corn), beans, squash, and tobacco. The agricultural fields were owned by the villages (that is, they were lands held in common) and worked by the women.

Initial contact with the Europeans brought diseases which were deadly to American Indians-smallpox, measles, mumps, malaria, and others. As a consequence, by 1712 the population of Indians on the Atlantic coast had been greatly reduced. In addition, English warfare with its superior weapons and focus on genocide had further reduced the Indian populations. American Indian populations on the Atlantic coast by this time were a fraction of what they had been two centuries earlier. Many tribes had already vanished, their remaining descendents absorbed into the larger tribes.

The Indians of the Atlantic coast by 1712 had adopted many items of European manufacture, particularly metal objects and cloth, and had come to rely on these items. Consequently they were involved in a symbiotic relationship with the colonists to obtain these items. No longer were the tribes self-sustaining, but they were a part of a larger, more globalized, more capitalistic, market.

With the increased reliance on European goods, Indian leadership skills also changed. The Indian leaders of 1712 needed to be able to negotiate with the English. This meant that they had to have some knowledge of English customs, religion, and language.

The Indian relationship with the land and its animals had also changed. Two centuries earlier, their agricultural economies had been supplemented by hunting. Guided by animistic concepts of harmony, the hunters harvested the animals in a sustainable fashion, using every part of the animal. As the capitalistic concept of greed entered into Indian cultures via the desire for European trade goods, including alcohol, Indians abandoned their religious concerns regarding animals and over-hunted to obtain the furs and hides which they could trade to the English. Consequently many furbearing animals, such as the beaver, became rare and the landscape began to change.

Events of 1712:

Below are some of the events from 300 years ago that characterized the interactions between the English colonists and the American Indians.

In Connecticut, English colonists declared that the Pequot had no right to the shelling and crabbing rights on their traditional lands. Pequot leader Robin Cassicinamon complained to colonial authorities. The complaint was dismissed.

He filed a complaint with the General Assembly (also known as the General Court) stemming from a law passed by the town of Groton which allotted the Pequot land at Noank. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England joined in the complaint. In its initial response to the complaint, the General Assembly ordered the town of Groton to return the land or make restitution. It also appointed a committee to resolve the complaint. The committee reported that the Pequot had abandoned the lands at Noank and moved to Mashantucket. The General Assembly concluded that the tribe had abandoned the land while retaining the fishing and hunting rights.

In the southern English colonies, the colonists continued their efforts to capture Indians who would then be sold as slaves in New England and the Caribbean. The Indians sold into slavery by the British numbers in the thousands, perhaps as many as 20,000 in 1710-1715. In North Carolina, English colonists in violation of their peace treaty attacked the Tuscarora, killing hundreds and selling many into slavery.

The British war against the Tuscarora also involved a number of British allies. The British encouraged other tribes, such as the Yamasee, Creek, and Cherokee, to attack the Tuscarora and obtain slaves for them. As early as 1710, before there were any hostilities between the Tuscarora and the British, the Tuscarora had formally petitioned the British colonial authorities for peace. Their request for peace had not been given a favorable reception.

In New York, the Iroquois Five Nations received wampum belts from the Tuscarora in the Carolinas. The Tuscarora asked for help in fighting the Catawba and the Virginia and Carolina colonists. When the governor of New York heard of the request, he warned the Iroquois not to get involved. The Iroquois promised to ask the Tuscarora to stop fighting if the governor asked the colonists to put down their arms. The French, however, convinced the Iroquois to send some warriors to aid the Tuscarora.

The Crow were once a part of an ancestral tribe which included the Hidatsa which lived in the eastern woodlands. Archaeologists suggest that the Crow moved out onto the Great Plains of Montana and Wyoming in two migrations. The Mountain Crow moved out first, sometime in the 1500s. Then a century later, the River Crow followed them. Crow historian and elder Joseph Medicine Crow describes the migrations this way:

"Way back in the 1500s, what might be called our ancestral tribe, lived east of the Mississippi in a land of forests and lakes, possibly present day Wisconsin. They began migrating westward around 1580 until they crossed the Mississippi to follow the buffalo. As far as the Crows are concerned, they separated from this main band in about 1600-1625."

By the time the first Americans began to enter into Crow territory in the early 1800s, there were three separate and distinct groups. The two largest groups were the River Crow who ranged north of the Yellowstone River and the Mountain Crow who lived south of the Yellowstone and farther west. The third group, the Kicked-in-the-Bellies (also known as Home-Away-from-the-Center), lived in the same area as the Mountain Crow.

The name Kicked-in-the-Bellies came from an incident when the Crow first encountered horses and one of them was kicked by a colt.

A nineteenth century painting of Crow Indians is shown above.

The Crow Treaties:

The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution as meaning that Indian tribes are domestic dependent nations. Thus, in dealing with Indian tribes as sovereign nations, the United States negotiated treaties (i.e. international agreements) with them.

The first treaty signed by the Crow was in 1851 at the Fort Laramie Treaty Council. The purpose of the council and of the resulting treaty was to establish peace between the United States and the tribes, including a promise to protect Indians from European-Americans, and to stop the tribes from making war with one another. At the Fort Laramie Treaty Council, an area or territory for each tribe was defined. As there were no River Crow at the Council, the Mountain Crow version of their geographic rights and hunting areas was used and it was assumed by the Americans to be binding to all of the Crow tribes.

In 1864, Congress passed the Organic Act which organized the Territory of Montana. Section 1 of the act states:

"That nothing in this act contained shall be construed to impair the rights of person or property now pertaining to the Indians in said territory so long as such rights remain unextinguished by treaty between the United States and such Indians..."

Sidney Edgerton was appointed as territorial governor and ex-officio superintendent of Indian Affairs. The new territorial governor said:

"I trust that the Government will, at an early day, take steps for the extinguishment of the Indian title in this territory, in order that our lands may be brought into market."

One of the first actions of the newly formed Montana Territorial Assembly was to pass a resolution calling for the expropriation of all Crow lands. The acting governor attempted to negotiate a treaty in which the Crow would give up all of their lands in the new Montana Territory. An attempt to invite the Crow leaders to a treaty council failed when runners failed to locate any of the Crow tribes.

In 1867, two of the Crow tribes-the Mountain Crow and the Kicked-in-the-Bellies-once again met with American treaty negotiators at Fort Laramie. The Americans told the Crow leader:

"We wish to separate a part of your territory for your nation where you may live forever."

The Americans promise that non-Indians will not be allowed to settle on Crow lands. The principal Crow speaker was Blackfoot who reminded the commission of the promises made to them in 1851, but which were never kept by the Americans. He shouts at them:

"We are not slaves; we are not dogs!"

Bear's Tooth reminded the Americans:

"your  young men have devastated the country and killed my animals, the elk, the deer, the antelope, my buffalo. They do not kill them to eat them; they leave them to rot where they fall."

In 1868, the Mountain Crow, the Kicked-in-the-Bellies, and the Americans again met in council. The River Crow were not present. The Americans proposed a drastic reduction in the Crow tribal area which was established in 1851: from 38.5 million acres to 8 million acres. All of the Crow lands in the new state of Wyoming were to be ceded to the United States. Crow leader Blackfoot (Sits in the Middle of the Land) and ten others signed the treaty. The Crow leaders assumed that the United States would negotiate a separate treaty with the River Crow.

Two months after signing the treaty with the Mountain Crow and the Kicked-in-the-Bellies, the River Crow sign their own treaty with the United States. However, this treaty was buried and forgotten by Congress and was never voted on. Consequently, the treaty with the Mountain Crow and the Kicked in the Bellies was considered by the government to be the Crow treaty and the River Crow became invisible to the government.

In 1934, American Indian policy changed dramatically with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Under the IRA, tribes could decide to reorganize their tribal governments and adopt constitutions. The Crow, however, rejected reorganization under the IRA. In 1948, the Crow wrote their own constitution which established a general council in which every adult member of the tribe is a council member and is entitled to vote in council meetings.

The Dam:

American Indian policy in the United States is administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs which is a part of the Department of the Interior. Ultimately, the person responsible for Indian affairs is the Secretary of the Interior. While the Department of the Interior may have a trust responsibility with regard to Indian tribes, its primary focus has been (and some feel still is) administering Indian resources in the best interest of non-Indian commercial entities.

In 1951, the Department of the Interior offered the Crow $1.5 million for the Yellowtail Dam site. The Crow rejected the offer. Undaunted by the Crow refusal to sell the site, private interest groups, such as the Big Horn County Chamber of Commerce, Montana's Congressional delegation, and the Department of the Interior continued to seek support for the dam.

In 1955, the Department of the Interior began a condemnation suit to acquire the Yellowtail Dam site from the Crow. While the Crow had rejected an earlier offer of $1.5 million for the site, the Department of the Interior felt that it had a legal right to the land and intended to pay them only $50,000 for it. The Crow tribal council asked for a lease of $1 million per year for 50 years.

In 1956, under intense pressure from both the Department of the Interior and Montana's Congressional delegation, the Crow voted to sell the Yellowtail Dam site for $5 million. The vote took place after a 13-hour meeting and passed by less than 60 votes.

The Department of the Interior rejected the Crow offer and seemed committed to condemning the land. The Crow met and discussed the issue for two more weeks. The result was a resolution that still asked for $5 million. Congress accepted the $5 million offer, but President Dwight Eisenhower vetoed it.

In 1957, the Crow, angered by the rejection of their $5 million offer for the Yellowtail Dam site, rescinded the offer and replaced it with a proposal calling for a lease of $1 million per year for 50 years. The Crow were warned by the government and by private individuals that they had no chance of winning in court and that they would probably only get $15,000 to $35,000 for the site. Under pressure, the Crow returned to their original $5 million offer.

In Congress, the $5 million was reduced to $2.5 million plus the right to sue in court for additional compensation.  This was the final settlement with Congress dictating the amount rather than negotiating.

The debate over Yellowtail dam divided the Crow: the Mountain Crow opposed the dam, and the River Crow supported the dam. Robert Yellowtail, an outspoken critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was one of the main opponents of the dam and protested the decision to sell the dam site to the government.

Yellowtail Dam is shown above.

For thousands of years the 1,242-mile-long Columbia River has been central to the lives of the Indian people of the Columbia Plateau region. The river functioned as a superhighway facilitating trade from the Pacific to the Rocky Mountains. The river was also their supermarket providing abundant fish to support the Indian lifestyle. And finally, the river was an important part of Indian spirituality.  

Shown above was the Indian fishery at Celilo Falls.

During the nineteenth century there was a flow of Europeans, beginning with Lewis and Clark, who used the river as their highway. By the twentieth century, the Americans, who now claimed ownership of the river, looked at it in a different light. Obsessed with the idea of controlling and changing the natural environment, the Americans almost seemed to worship dams. They saw them as monuments to their engineering skills and to their manifest destiny to control nature. The dams also generated electricity which helped the growth of American businesses and contributed to the wealth of the business owners.

The Bonneville Dam (1937) was the first of 31 federal dams built on the Columbia River and its tributaries. The dams were built for power, irrigation, and to prevent flooding. There was little, if any, concern for the impact of these dams on the economic, social, cultural, and spiritual lives of the many Indian nations located along the river.

Congress authorized the construction of The Dalles Dam in 1950. No input from the Indians whose lives would be negatively impacted by the dam was sought by Congress. While the loss of fishing caused by the dam was deplored, it was felt that the commercial interests of irrigation, power, and shipping outweighed the fish. With regard to the Indians, Congress noted:

"Alternative fishing sites to replace those inundated must be established-by artificial means if necessary, or the Indians paid just compensation for the sites taken."

The dam was to be constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, an agency not known for its concern for or its empathy with American Indians.

In 1951, a Yakama tribal delegation-Thomas Yallup, Alex Saluskin, Gealge Seelatsee, and Watson Totus-testified before a Congressional committee about the importance of Celilo Falls on the Columbia River and the impact which the proposed The Dalles Dam would have on their people. When Thomas Yallup testified that Celilo Falls were sacred, he was asked why some other river wouldn't work as well. Yallup replied:

"The Christian people of the States of Oregon and Washington have recognized our holding the [salmon] ceremony for each year, and throughout the country I believe that the other religions, including the Christian religion, have also backed us up in asking the Government not to take a sacred place, a place that is held sacred by the Indians."

The Commissioner of Indian Affairs indicated that the Bureau of Indian Affairs would not oppose the construction of The Dalles dam because of the urgent national defense need for power brought on by the Korean War and the Cold War.

With regard to the impact of The Dalles Dam and the loss of Celilo Falls on the salmon in the Columbia River, the regional director of the federal Bureau of Commercial Fisheries stated:

"The Indian commercial fishery would be eliminated and more fish would reach the spawning grounds in better condition."

The director's opinion reflects the popular non-Indian belief that if Indian fishing were to be eliminated on the Columbia River, then there would be abundant fish for non-Indian sport fishing. It is estimated that only 10% of the salmon caught in the Columbia at this time were caught by Indians.

In 1952, the U.S. House of Representatives denied funding of The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River until the Army Corps of Engineers began negotiations with the Indians who would be impacted by the dam. Shortly afterwards, representatives from the Corps met with the Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes.

The Army Corps of Engineers was concerned with documenting and measuring the economic value of Indian fishing. The primary questions for which they sought answers were: Which Indians were fishing at Celilo? Did they have a treaty-supported right to the sites? How many fish did Indians catch to sell commercially? How many fish did they take for subsistence use? What did fish buyers and tourists pay for their fish? The answers to these questions would enable the Corps to determine the monetary value of the fishery. The Corps did not consider the cultural value of Celilo Falls or its historic and spiritual meaning to Indian people.

In 1952, the Army Corps of Engineers compiled a special report on the Indian fishery problem regarding the construction of The Dalles Dam. With regard to the desires of the Indians, the Corps reports: (1) the Indians do want The Dalles dam built, (2) if the dam is built, they want full compensation for their losses, (3) they would prefer in-lieu sites rather than monetary compensation, (4) they do not want the matter settled in the court system, (5) they would prefer a settlement prior to the construction of the dam, and (6) they do not want to give up their fishing rights.

In 1952, the Umatilla and the Warm Springs tribes accepted a settlement drafted by the Army Corps of Engineers regarding their losses from the construction of the proposed The Dalles Dam. The Warm Springs tribes accepted the settlement under protest. Both tribes relinquished the right to sue the federal government for further compensation. The settlement came to about $3,700 per enrolled tribal member.

In 1952, the members of the Warm Springs tribes reluctantly signed a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to cover the damages to the Celilo fishery on the Columbia River which the people suffered as a result of The Dalles Dam. After the deduction of attorney fees and other costs, each member was to receive $145.50. There was no mention of the loss of the fisheries at the Five Mile Rapids and the Spearfish fisheries.

In 1953, Chief Tommy Thompson of the River Indians at Celilo Falls found that Skuch-pa, a sacred stone, was missing. The stone is four feet across and six feet tall and had been used traditionally for ensuring good weather during fishing. Initially it was reported that it had been was removed by the Army Corps of Engineers as a part of its work preparing for The Dalles Dam, but then the Indians found out that a non-Indian had removed it and placed it on his property.

In 1954, the Army Corps of Engineers planned to purchase the Indian homes which would be flooded by The Dalles dam on the Columbia River. However, the Corps had no intention of relocating the displaced residents. The Corps felt that it had only a legal responsibility for paying the Indians the appraised value of their homes and their fish drying shed. This was usually a meager amount that would not cover the cost of an acceptable replacement.

In 1955, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a report documenting that the Nez Perce had no legal claim to fishing sites at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. The Corps invested a great deal of labor and money to avoid compensating the Nez Perce for their claims to the Celilo fishery. The Army Corps of Engineers met with the Nez Perce for two days to discuss their claims. The Corps then recommended an end to negotiations citing Nez Perce intransigence. As long as the Nez Perce insisted that they had traditionally fished at Celilo Falls and would not accept the Army Corps of Engineers version of Nez Perce history and tradition, then the Corps felt that negotiations were meaningless.

The gates of The Dalles Dam closed in 1957 and the waters of the Columbia River began rising to flood traditional Indian fishing sites, sacred areas, burial sites, and homes. Many Indians stood on the shore openly weeping as the river stopped flowing and began to rise. Celilo Falls, an important resource and spiritual site, disappeared beneath the rising waters. For more than 10,000 years the people had fished in the area between Celilo Falls and Threemile Rapids. The rising waters of the Columbia displaced some of the oldest continuously inhabited village sites in North America. Archaeological sites which had never been studied were destroyed.  

The Confederated Warm Springs Tribes received $4 million in indemnity and the Yakama received $15 million. Many non-Indians believed that this money had bought the tribes' fishing rights, but this was not the intent of the settlement.

In 1958, the salmon runs on the Columbia River plummeted following the completion of The Dalles Dam. The states of Oregon and Washington were determined to conserve the remaining fish, supplementing them with hatchery stocks, for the non-Indian commercial and sports fishers. The number of days for commercial fishing was reduced. The states argued that Indians could only sell the fish they caught during these same days and that they should be limited to selling only those caught with the traditional dip nets.

In 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) declared that all of the permanent residents of old Celilo Village in Oregon had been provided with comfortable homes at various places up and down the river and elsewhere. However, under the BIA rules only a small portion of the Indians who considered Celilo Village to be their home actually qualified as "permanent" residents. Part of the old village was given by the BIA to the state of Oregon to be used as a public park. The BIA had no concern for the possible Indian use of this land.

In 1959, Vice-President Richard Nixon pushed the button which started the generation of hydroelectricity at The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River. Senator Richard Neuberger reminded people that

"our Indian friends deserve from us a profound and heartfelt salute of appreciation...They contributed to its erection a great donation-surrender of the only way of life which some of them knew."

In other words, once again wealth was being transferred from Indians, the poorest people in the country, to wealthy non-Indians. With the construction of The Dalles Dam, Indian people-the Yakama, Warm Springs, Nez Perce, Umatilla, and others-lost an important cultural and economic center which had served them for thousands of years.

In 1959, Chief Tommy Thompson died at more than 100 years of age (some estimated that he was 104). His funeral held at the Celilo longhouse drew more than 1,000 people, both Indian and non-Indian. They came to pay their respects to this well-known leader who had defended Native fishing rights and who had vigorously opposed The Dalles Dam. His leadership of the River Indians who fished at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River had lasted for more than 80 years.