first americans
The American Indian Holocaust, known as the “500 year war” and the “World’s Longest Holocaust In The History Of Mankind And Loss Of Human Lives.”
october 2023
*current events*
Life Expectancy for Indigenous Americans Drops by 6.6 Years
BY Chris Walker, Truthout
PUBLISHED September 9, 2022
Life expectancy declined for Americans overall over the past two years due primarily to the coronavirus pandemic. But for Indigenous Americans, the decline was far worse, exacerbated by conditions and inequities that existed prior to the virus’s emergence.
Native Americans and Alaska Natives saw their life expectancy rates drop by 6.6 years over the past two years. Their life expectancies — which were already low compared to the rest of the U.S. population before the pandemic began — fell to 65 years old in 2021, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts say there isn’t a singular cause for the dramatic decline, which was more than twice the decline for Americans overall (a 2.75 years drop over the two-year period).
The suffering is inextricably bound to a long history of poverty, inadequate access to health care, poor infrastructure and crowded housing, much of it the legacy of broken government promises and centuries of bigotry,” The New York Times reported late last month.
Researchers were initially surprised at the precipitous drop.
“When I saw a 6.6 year decline over two years, my jaw dropped…I made my staff re-run the numbers to make sure,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics.
But for Indigenous people throughout the country, the numbers — though horrifying — weren’t shocking.
“This is simply what happens biologically to populations that are chronically and profoundly stressed and deprived of resources,” said Ann Bullock, former director of diabetes treatment at federal Indian Health Services, and a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, in an interview with The Times.
In fact, it’s highly probable that the decline is even worse than what researchers have discovered.
“It is not uncommon for a Native person to be identified as Native on their birth certificate but listed differently on their death certificates, usually listed as white,” noted Jennie R. Joe, a professor emerita at the University of Arizona’s Wassaja Carlos Montezuma Center for Native American Health. “It is therefore safe to say that the current life expectancy reported for Native Americans is probably a case of undercounting.”
“Discrimination is deadly,” noted Cindy Blackstock, a Canadian Gitxsan activist for child welfare and the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. “With unequal public services and colonial traumas, COVID took a shocking toll” on Indigenous populations, she said.
Notably, life expectancy rates were not uniform across Native American communities, Spiro M. Manson, director of the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health at the University of Colorado, told Boise State Public Radio News.
“These rates of lowered life expectancy vary enormously by region, and they vary enormously by tribes,” said Manson, who is Pembina Chippewa.
But it’s clear that institutional racism and the ongoing effects of colonialism played a role, experts say.
“I was perusing the recent CDC Vital Statistics report on life expectancy, and one thing struck me this time as a clear indicator of structural racism: On average, white people live *a whole decade* longer than Indigenous people,” said Joseph M. Pierce, a Cherokee Nation Citizen and associate professor at Stony Brook University.
Native Americans and Alaska Natives saw their life expectancy rates drop by 6.6 years over the past two years. Their life expectancies — which were already low compared to the rest of the U.S. population before the pandemic began — fell to 65 years old in 2021, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts say there isn’t a singular cause for the dramatic decline, which was more than twice the decline for Americans overall (a 2.75 years drop over the two-year period).
The suffering is inextricably bound to a long history of poverty, inadequate access to health care, poor infrastructure and crowded housing, much of it the legacy of broken government promises and centuries of bigotry,” The New York Times reported late last month.
Researchers were initially surprised at the precipitous drop.
“When I saw a 6.6 year decline over two years, my jaw dropped…I made my staff re-run the numbers to make sure,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics.
But for Indigenous people throughout the country, the numbers — though horrifying — weren’t shocking.
“This is simply what happens biologically to populations that are chronically and profoundly stressed and deprived of resources,” said Ann Bullock, former director of diabetes treatment at federal Indian Health Services, and a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, in an interview with The Times.
In fact, it’s highly probable that the decline is even worse than what researchers have discovered.
“It is not uncommon for a Native person to be identified as Native on their birth certificate but listed differently on their death certificates, usually listed as white,” noted Jennie R. Joe, a professor emerita at the University of Arizona’s Wassaja Carlos Montezuma Center for Native American Health. “It is therefore safe to say that the current life expectancy reported for Native Americans is probably a case of undercounting.”
“Discrimination is deadly,” noted Cindy Blackstock, a Canadian Gitxsan activist for child welfare and the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. “With unequal public services and colonial traumas, COVID took a shocking toll” on Indigenous populations, she said.
Notably, life expectancy rates were not uniform across Native American communities, Spiro M. Manson, director of the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health at the University of Colorado, told Boise State Public Radio News.
“These rates of lowered life expectancy vary enormously by region, and they vary enormously by tribes,” said Manson, who is Pembina Chippewa.
But it’s clear that institutional racism and the ongoing effects of colonialism played a role, experts say.
“I was perusing the recent CDC Vital Statistics report on life expectancy, and one thing struck me this time as a clear indicator of structural racism: On average, white people live *a whole decade* longer than Indigenous people,” said Joseph M. Pierce, a Cherokee Nation Citizen and associate professor at Stony Brook University.
dakota war
Ruth H. Hopkins, B.S., M.S., J.D. - thread reader
12/26/2020
158 years ago today, the largest mass execution in U.S. history took place under the orders of Abraham Lincoln. On Dec 26, 1862, the day after Christmas, 38 Dakota warriors were hanged in Mankato, MN. #Dakota38
The execution happened at the culmination of the Dakota War, which started because the U.S. government unilaterally breached 2 treaties it made with the Dakota. The Dakota gave up land in exchange for $ and food. They weren't given neither & were starving.
U.S. Congress purposely breached treaty by omitting an article in it that set aside lands for Dakota, without telling them. Then the agent charged with providing Dakota with rations said, “Let them eat grass or their own dung,” while Dakota children were dying of starvation.
The Dakota were still abiding by Treaty Law & couldn’t go hunting as they would have before. The war began when some Dakota stole eggs to eat and fighting broke out. Andrew Myrick, the dung-loving agent, was among the first to die. He was found with grass in his mouth. #Dakota38
The warriors didn’t receive due process. ‘Trials’ were held in English, a foreign language— they had no legal representation and argument about broken Treaties wasn’t allowed. 38 men, many innocent, were hanged anyway, on a custom made scaffold, in front of a bloodthirsty mob.
---
Dakota women and children were forced to watch the hanging. A Dakota infant was snatched from the arms of their mother by the settler mob and murdered on the spot during the execution. If Dakota women and children defended themselves they could’ve also be killed. #Dakota38
Around 1700 Dakota, mostly women and children, were imprisoned at Fort Snelling. Disease & death were rampant. They buried children every day. This is Chief Little Crow’s wife and children at Fort Snelling. He was later killed by settlers, his body grossly mutilated. #Dakota38
Before the hanging, the warriors prayed with the canupa (pipe) and sang songs. Among them were underaged minors and the mentally disabled. One of them was also a white man who had been adopted and raised by the Dakota. During the execution, some were holding hands. #Dakota38
After the hanging, Dakota were exiled from their Minnesota homelands. The state put out a bounty on the scalps of every Dakota man, woman and child.
The execution happened at the culmination of the Dakota War, which started because the U.S. government unilaterally breached 2 treaties it made with the Dakota. The Dakota gave up land in exchange for $ and food. They weren't given neither & were starving.
U.S. Congress purposely breached treaty by omitting an article in it that set aside lands for Dakota, without telling them. Then the agent charged with providing Dakota with rations said, “Let them eat grass or their own dung,” while Dakota children were dying of starvation.
The Dakota were still abiding by Treaty Law & couldn’t go hunting as they would have before. The war began when some Dakota stole eggs to eat and fighting broke out. Andrew Myrick, the dung-loving agent, was among the first to die. He was found with grass in his mouth. #Dakota38
The warriors didn’t receive due process. ‘Trials’ were held in English, a foreign language— they had no legal representation and argument about broken Treaties wasn’t allowed. 38 men, many innocent, were hanged anyway, on a custom made scaffold, in front of a bloodthirsty mob.
---
Dakota women and children were forced to watch the hanging. A Dakota infant was snatched from the arms of their mother by the settler mob and murdered on the spot during the execution. If Dakota women and children defended themselves they could’ve also be killed. #Dakota38
Around 1700 Dakota, mostly women and children, were imprisoned at Fort Snelling. Disease & death were rampant. They buried children every day. This is Chief Little Crow’s wife and children at Fort Snelling. He was later killed by settlers, his body grossly mutilated. #Dakota38
Before the hanging, the warriors prayed with the canupa (pipe) and sang songs. Among them were underaged minors and the mentally disabled. One of them was also a white man who had been adopted and raised by the Dakota. During the execution, some were holding hands. #Dakota38
After the hanging, Dakota were exiled from their Minnesota homelands. The state put out a bounty on the scalps of every Dakota man, woman and child.
OP-ED RACIAL JUSTICE
The Catholic Church Is Responding to Indigenous Protest With Exorcisms
BY Charles Sepulveda, Truthout
PUBLISHED November 26, 2020
On this day, Indigenous activists in New England and beyond are observing a National Day of Mourning to mark the theft of land, cultural assault and genocide that followed after the anchoring of the Mayflower on Wampanoag land in 1620 — a genocide that is erased within conventional “Thanksgiving Day” narratives.
The acts of mourning and resistance taking place today build on the energy of Indigenous People’s Day 2020, which was also a day of uprising. On October 11, 2020, also called “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage,” participants around the country took part in actions such as de-monumenting — the toppling of statues of individuals dedicated to racial nation-building.
In response to Indigenous-led efforts that demanded land back and the toppling of statues, Catholic Church leaders in Oregon and California deemed it necessary to perform exorcisms, thereby casting Indigenous protest as demonic.
The toppled statues included President Abraham Lincoln, President Theodore Roosevelt and Father Junípero Serra, who founded California’s mission system (1769-1834) and was canonized into sainthood by the Catholic Church and Pope Francis in 2015.
What do these leaders whose statues were toppled have in common? They perpetrated and promoted devastating violence against Native peoples.
Abraham Lincoln was responsible for the largest mass execution in United States history when 38 Dakota were hanged in 1862 after being found guilty for their involvement in what is known as the “Minnesota Uprising.”
Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in 1886 in New York that would have made today’s white supremacists blush when he declared: “I don’t go as far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are…” This was not his only foray in promoting racial genocide.
Junípero Serra is known for having committed cruel punishments against the Indians of California and enslaved them as part of Spain’s genocidal conquest.
Last month, “Land Back” and “Dakota 38” were scrawled on the base of the now-toppled Lincoln statue in Portland, Oregon. The political statements and demands for land return reveal a Native decolonial spirit based in resistance continuing through multiple generations.
The “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage” came after months of protests in Portland in support of Black Lives Matter. The resistance enacted in Portland coincides with demands for both abolition (the end of racialized policing and imprisonment) and decolonization (the return of land and regeneration of life outside of colonialism). Both of these notions encompass a multifaceted imagining of life beyond white supremacy.
In San Rafael, California, Native activists gathered at the Spanish mission that had been the site of California Indian enslavement. Activists, who included members of the Coast Miwok of Marin, first poured red paint on the statue of Serra and then pulled it down with ropes, while other protesters held signs that read: “Land Back Now” and “We Stand on Unceded Land – Decolonization means #LandBack.” The statue broke at the ankles, leaving only the feet on the base.
What was even more provocative than the toppling of the statues by Native activists and their accomplices, was the response by the Catholic Church, which not only condemned the actions of the Native activists, but also spiritually chastised them. In both Portland and San Rafael, the reaction by the Church was to perform exorcisms.
The purpose of an exorcism, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is to expel demons or “the liberation from demonic possession through the spiritual authority which Jesus entrusted to his Church.”
In other words, Native activism and demands for land back were deemed blasphemous and evil by two archbishops and were determined to require exorcism.
In Portland, Archbishop Alexander K. Sample led 225 members of his congregation to a city park where he prayed a rosary for peace and conducted an exorcism on October 17, six days after the “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage.” Archbishop Sample stated that there was no better time to come together to pray for peace than in the wake of social unrest and on the eve of the elections. His exorcism was a direct response to Indigenous-led efforts that demanded land back.
San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone held an exorcism on the same day as the one performed in Portland and after the toppling of Saint Junipero Serra’s statue in San Rafael. In his performance of the exorcism, he prayed that God would purify the mission of evil spirits as well as the hearts of those who perpetrated blasphemy. Was he responding to a “demonic possession” or was he exorcising the political motivations of those he did not agree with? Perhaps both, as he also stated that the toppling of the statue was an attack on the Catholic faith that took place on their own property. However, the mission is only Church property because of Native dispossession through conquest and missionization.
The conquest of the Americas by European nations was, as Saint Serra had deemed his own work, a “spiritual conquest.” From the doctrine of discovery to manifest destiny, the possession of Native land was rationalized as divine – from God. Those who threaten colonial possession are attacking the theological rationalization of possession, not their faith.
Demands for land back interfere with the doctrine that enabled Native land to be exorcised from them. Archbishop Cordileone’s exorcism was in the maintenance of property that had been stolen from Indigenous people long ago, and Archbishop Sample’s was in the maintenance of peace and the status quo of Native dispossession.
With a majority-Christian population in the United States and other nations in the Americas, demands for the return of land and decolonization have more to reckon with than racial injustice and white supremacy. Christians must also consider how dominant strains of Christian theology rationalized conquest and its ongoing structures of dispossession. Can a religion, made up of many sects, shift its framework to help end continued Native dispossession and its rationalization? Can we come together to overturn a racialized theological doctrine that functioned through violence and was adopted into a nation’s legal system? Can we imagine life beyond rage and the racialized spiritual possession of stolen land?
The Doctrine of Discovery was the primary international law developed in the 15th and 16th centuries through a series of papal bulls (Catholic decrees) that divided the Americas for white European conquest and authorized the enslavement of non-Christians. In 1823 the Doctrine of Discovery was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh. Chief Justice John Marshall declared in his ruling that Indians only held occupancy rights to land — ownership belonged to the European nation that discovered it. This case further legalized the theft of Native lands. It continues to be a foundational principal of U.S. property law and has been cited as recently as 2005 by the U.S. Supreme Court (City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians) to diminish Native American land rights.
In 2009 the Episcopal Church passed a resolution that repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. It was the first Christian denomination to do so and has since been followed by several other denominations, including the Anglican Church of Canada (2010), the Religious Society of Friends/Quakers (2009 and 2012), the World Council of Churches (2012), the United Methodist Church (2012), the United Church of Christ (2013) and the Mennonite Church (2014).
Decolonization and land return are as possible as repudiating the legal justification of land theft. Social, cultural, governmental and economic systems are constantly changing, but the land remains — in the hands of the dispossessors. When our faith is held above what we know is true — we will prolong doing what is right.
Native peoples are not ancient peoples of the past only remembered on days such as Thanksgiving, just as our mourning is not all that we are. Native peoples are a myriad of things, including activists who demand land back — which is not a demonic request. Our land can be returned, and we can work together to heal and imagine a future beyond white supremacy and dispossession.
The acts of mourning and resistance taking place today build on the energy of Indigenous People’s Day 2020, which was also a day of uprising. On October 11, 2020, also called “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage,” participants around the country took part in actions such as de-monumenting — the toppling of statues of individuals dedicated to racial nation-building.
In response to Indigenous-led efforts that demanded land back and the toppling of statues, Catholic Church leaders in Oregon and California deemed it necessary to perform exorcisms, thereby casting Indigenous protest as demonic.
The toppled statues included President Abraham Lincoln, President Theodore Roosevelt and Father Junípero Serra, who founded California’s mission system (1769-1834) and was canonized into sainthood by the Catholic Church and Pope Francis in 2015.
What do these leaders whose statues were toppled have in common? They perpetrated and promoted devastating violence against Native peoples.
Abraham Lincoln was responsible for the largest mass execution in United States history when 38 Dakota were hanged in 1862 after being found guilty for their involvement in what is known as the “Minnesota Uprising.”
Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in 1886 in New York that would have made today’s white supremacists blush when he declared: “I don’t go as far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are…” This was not his only foray in promoting racial genocide.
Junípero Serra is known for having committed cruel punishments against the Indians of California and enslaved them as part of Spain’s genocidal conquest.
Last month, “Land Back” and “Dakota 38” were scrawled on the base of the now-toppled Lincoln statue in Portland, Oregon. The political statements and demands for land return reveal a Native decolonial spirit based in resistance continuing through multiple generations.
The “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage” came after months of protests in Portland in support of Black Lives Matter. The resistance enacted in Portland coincides with demands for both abolition (the end of racialized policing and imprisonment) and decolonization (the return of land and regeneration of life outside of colonialism). Both of these notions encompass a multifaceted imagining of life beyond white supremacy.
In San Rafael, California, Native activists gathered at the Spanish mission that had been the site of California Indian enslavement. Activists, who included members of the Coast Miwok of Marin, first poured red paint on the statue of Serra and then pulled it down with ropes, while other protesters held signs that read: “Land Back Now” and “We Stand on Unceded Land – Decolonization means #LandBack.” The statue broke at the ankles, leaving only the feet on the base.
What was even more provocative than the toppling of the statues by Native activists and their accomplices, was the response by the Catholic Church, which not only condemned the actions of the Native activists, but also spiritually chastised them. In both Portland and San Rafael, the reaction by the Church was to perform exorcisms.
The purpose of an exorcism, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is to expel demons or “the liberation from demonic possession through the spiritual authority which Jesus entrusted to his Church.”
In other words, Native activism and demands for land back were deemed blasphemous and evil by two archbishops and were determined to require exorcism.
In Portland, Archbishop Alexander K. Sample led 225 members of his congregation to a city park where he prayed a rosary for peace and conducted an exorcism on October 17, six days after the “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage.” Archbishop Sample stated that there was no better time to come together to pray for peace than in the wake of social unrest and on the eve of the elections. His exorcism was a direct response to Indigenous-led efforts that demanded land back.
San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone held an exorcism on the same day as the one performed in Portland and after the toppling of Saint Junipero Serra’s statue in San Rafael. In his performance of the exorcism, he prayed that God would purify the mission of evil spirits as well as the hearts of those who perpetrated blasphemy. Was he responding to a “demonic possession” or was he exorcising the political motivations of those he did not agree with? Perhaps both, as he also stated that the toppling of the statue was an attack on the Catholic faith that took place on their own property. However, the mission is only Church property because of Native dispossession through conquest and missionization.
The conquest of the Americas by European nations was, as Saint Serra had deemed his own work, a “spiritual conquest.” From the doctrine of discovery to manifest destiny, the possession of Native land was rationalized as divine – from God. Those who threaten colonial possession are attacking the theological rationalization of possession, not their faith.
Demands for land back interfere with the doctrine that enabled Native land to be exorcised from them. Archbishop Cordileone’s exorcism was in the maintenance of property that had been stolen from Indigenous people long ago, and Archbishop Sample’s was in the maintenance of peace and the status quo of Native dispossession.
With a majority-Christian population in the United States and other nations in the Americas, demands for the return of land and decolonization have more to reckon with than racial injustice and white supremacy. Christians must also consider how dominant strains of Christian theology rationalized conquest and its ongoing structures of dispossession. Can a religion, made up of many sects, shift its framework to help end continued Native dispossession and its rationalization? Can we come together to overturn a racialized theological doctrine that functioned through violence and was adopted into a nation’s legal system? Can we imagine life beyond rage and the racialized spiritual possession of stolen land?
The Doctrine of Discovery was the primary international law developed in the 15th and 16th centuries through a series of papal bulls (Catholic decrees) that divided the Americas for white European conquest and authorized the enslavement of non-Christians. In 1823 the Doctrine of Discovery was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh. Chief Justice John Marshall declared in his ruling that Indians only held occupancy rights to land — ownership belonged to the European nation that discovered it. This case further legalized the theft of Native lands. It continues to be a foundational principal of U.S. property law and has been cited as recently as 2005 by the U.S. Supreme Court (City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians) to diminish Native American land rights.
In 2009 the Episcopal Church passed a resolution that repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. It was the first Christian denomination to do so and has since been followed by several other denominations, including the Anglican Church of Canada (2010), the Religious Society of Friends/Quakers (2009 and 2012), the World Council of Churches (2012), the United Methodist Church (2012), the United Church of Christ (2013) and the Mennonite Church (2014).
Decolonization and land return are as possible as repudiating the legal justification of land theft. Social, cultural, governmental and economic systems are constantly changing, but the land remains — in the hands of the dispossessors. When our faith is held above what we know is true — we will prolong doing what is right.
Native peoples are not ancient peoples of the past only remembered on days such as Thanksgiving, just as our mourning is not all that we are. Native peoples are a myriad of things, including activists who demand land back — which is not a demonic request. Our land can be returned, and we can work together to heal and imagine a future beyond white supremacy and dispossession.
Regrowing Indigenous Agriculture Could Nourish People, Cultures and the Land
European settlement, government policies and monoculture have nearly eradicated Native American farming practices. A growing movement is reclaiming them.
CHRISTINA GISH HILL - IN THESE TIMES
NOVEMBER 21, 2020
Native American tribes in the Great Lakes region pre-European settlement. Map courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum CC BY-ND
Historians know that turkey and corn were part of the first Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. And traditional Native American farming practices tell us that squash and beans likely were part of that 1621 dinner too.
For centuries before Europeans reached North America, many Native Americans grew these foods together in one plot, along with the less familiar sunflower. They called the plants sisters to reflect how they thrived when they were cultivated together.
Today three-quarters of Native Americans live off of reservations, mainly in urban areas. And nationwide, many Native American communities lack access to healthy food. As a scholar of Indigenous studies focusing on Native relationships with the land, I began to wonder why Native farming practices had declined and what benefits could emerge from bringing them back.
To answer these questions, I am working with agronomist Marshall McDaniel, horticulturalist Ajay Nair, nutritionist Donna Winham and Native gardening projects in Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Our research project, “Reuniting the Three Sisters,” explores what it means to be a responsible caretaker of the land from the perspective of peoples who have been balancing agricultural production with sustainability for hundreds of years.
Abundant harvests
Historically, Native people throughout the Americas bred indigenous plant varieties specific to the growing conditions of their homelands. They selected seeds for many different traits, such as flavor, texture and color.
Native growers knew that planting corn, beans, squash and sunflowers together produced mutual benefits. Corn stalks created a trellis for beans to climb, and beans’ twining vines secured the corn in high winds. They also certainly observed that corn and bean plants growing together tended to be healthier than when raised separately. Today we know the reason: Bacteria living on bean plant roots pull nitrogen – an essential plant nutrient – from the air and convert it to a form that both beans and corn can use.
Squash plants contributed by shading the ground with their broad leaves, preventing weeds from growing and retaining water in the soil. Heritage squash varieties also had spines that discouraged deer and raccoons from visiting the garden for a snack. And sunflowers planted around the edges of the garden created a natural fence, protecting other plants from wind and animals and attracting pollinators.
Interplanting these agricultural sisters produced bountiful harvests that sustained large Native communities and spurred fruitful trade economies. The first Europeans who reached the Americas were shocked at the abundant food crops they found. My research is exploring how, 200 years ago, Native American agriculturalists around the Great Lakes and along the Missouri and Red rivers fed fur traders with their diverse vegetable products.
Displaced from the land
As Euro-Americans settled permanently on the most fertile North American lands and acquired seeds that Native growers had carefully bred, they imposed policies that made Native farming practices impossible. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which made it official U.S. policy to force Native peoples from their home locations, pushing them onto subpar lands.
On reservations, U.S. government officials discouraged Native women from cultivating anything larger than small garden plots and pressured Native men to practice Euro-American style monoculture. Allotment policies assigned small plots to nuclear families, further limiting Native Americans’ access to land and preventing them from using communal farming practices.
Native children were forced to attend boarding schools, where they had no opportunity to learn Native agriculture techniques or preservation and preparation of Indigenous foods. Instead they were forced to eat Western foods, turning their palates away from their traditional preferences. Taken together, these policies almost entirely eradicated three sisters agriculture from Native communities in the Midwest by the 1930s.
Reviving Native agriculture
Today Native people all over the U.S. are working diligently to reclaim Indigenous varieties of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and other crops. This effort is important for many reasons.
Improving Native people’s access to healthy, culturally appropriate foods will help lower rates of diabetes and obesity, which affect Native Americans at disproportionately high rates. Sharing traditional knowledge about agriculture is a way for elders to pass cultural information along to younger generations. Indigenous growing techniques also protect the lands that Native nations now inhabit, and can potentially benefit the wider ecosystems around them.
But Native communities often lack access to resources such as farming equipment, soil testing, fertilizer and pest prevention techniques. This is what inspired Iowa State University’s Three Sisters Gardening Project. We work collaboratively with Native farmers at Tsyunhehkw, a community agriculture program, and the Ohelaku Corn Growers Co-Op on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin; the Nebraska Indian College, which serves the Omaha and Santee Sioux in Nebraska; and Dream of Wild Health, a nonprofit organization that works to reconnect the Native American community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, with traditional Native plants and their culinary, medicinal and spiritual uses.
We are growing three sisters research plots at ISU’s Horticulture Farm and in each of these communities. Our project also runs workshops on topics of interests to Native gardeners, encourages local soil health testing and grows rare seeds to rematriate them, or return them to their home communities.
The monocropping industrial agricultural systems that produce much of the U.S. food supply harms the environment, rural communities and human health and safety in many ways. By growing corn, beans and squash in research plots, we are helping to quantify how intercropping benefits both plants and soil.
By documenting limited nutritional offerings at reservation grocery stores, we are demonstrating the need for Indigenous gardens in Native communities. By interviewing Native growers and elders knowledgeable about foodways, we are illuminating how healing Indigenous gardening practices can be for Native communities and people – their bodies, minds and spirits.
Our Native collaborators are benefiting from the project through rematriation of rare seeds grown in ISU plots, workshops on topics they select and the new relationships they are building with Native gardeners across the Midwest. As researchers, we are learning about what it means to work collaboratively and to conduct research that respects protocols our Native collaborators value, such as treating seeds, plants and soil in a culturally appropriate manner. By listening with humility, we are working to build a network where we can all learn from one another.
For centuries before Europeans reached North America, many Native Americans grew these foods together in one plot, along with the less familiar sunflower. They called the plants sisters to reflect how they thrived when they were cultivated together.
Today three-quarters of Native Americans live off of reservations, mainly in urban areas. And nationwide, many Native American communities lack access to healthy food. As a scholar of Indigenous studies focusing on Native relationships with the land, I began to wonder why Native farming practices had declined and what benefits could emerge from bringing them back.
To answer these questions, I am working with agronomist Marshall McDaniel, horticulturalist Ajay Nair, nutritionist Donna Winham and Native gardening projects in Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Our research project, “Reuniting the Three Sisters,” explores what it means to be a responsible caretaker of the land from the perspective of peoples who have been balancing agricultural production with sustainability for hundreds of years.
Abundant harvests
Historically, Native people throughout the Americas bred indigenous plant varieties specific to the growing conditions of their homelands. They selected seeds for many different traits, such as flavor, texture and color.
Native growers knew that planting corn, beans, squash and sunflowers together produced mutual benefits. Corn stalks created a trellis for beans to climb, and beans’ twining vines secured the corn in high winds. They also certainly observed that corn and bean plants growing together tended to be healthier than when raised separately. Today we know the reason: Bacteria living on bean plant roots pull nitrogen – an essential plant nutrient – from the air and convert it to a form that both beans and corn can use.
Squash plants contributed by shading the ground with their broad leaves, preventing weeds from growing and retaining water in the soil. Heritage squash varieties also had spines that discouraged deer and raccoons from visiting the garden for a snack. And sunflowers planted around the edges of the garden created a natural fence, protecting other plants from wind and animals and attracting pollinators.
Interplanting these agricultural sisters produced bountiful harvests that sustained large Native communities and spurred fruitful trade economies. The first Europeans who reached the Americas were shocked at the abundant food crops they found. My research is exploring how, 200 years ago, Native American agriculturalists around the Great Lakes and along the Missouri and Red rivers fed fur traders with their diverse vegetable products.
Displaced from the land
As Euro-Americans settled permanently on the most fertile North American lands and acquired seeds that Native growers had carefully bred, they imposed policies that made Native farming practices impossible. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which made it official U.S. policy to force Native peoples from their home locations, pushing them onto subpar lands.
On reservations, U.S. government officials discouraged Native women from cultivating anything larger than small garden plots and pressured Native men to practice Euro-American style monoculture. Allotment policies assigned small plots to nuclear families, further limiting Native Americans’ access to land and preventing them from using communal farming practices.
Native children were forced to attend boarding schools, where they had no opportunity to learn Native agriculture techniques or preservation and preparation of Indigenous foods. Instead they were forced to eat Western foods, turning their palates away from their traditional preferences. Taken together, these policies almost entirely eradicated three sisters agriculture from Native communities in the Midwest by the 1930s.
Reviving Native agriculture
Today Native people all over the U.S. are working diligently to reclaim Indigenous varieties of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and other crops. This effort is important for many reasons.
Improving Native people’s access to healthy, culturally appropriate foods will help lower rates of diabetes and obesity, which affect Native Americans at disproportionately high rates. Sharing traditional knowledge about agriculture is a way for elders to pass cultural information along to younger generations. Indigenous growing techniques also protect the lands that Native nations now inhabit, and can potentially benefit the wider ecosystems around them.
But Native communities often lack access to resources such as farming equipment, soil testing, fertilizer and pest prevention techniques. This is what inspired Iowa State University’s Three Sisters Gardening Project. We work collaboratively with Native farmers at Tsyunhehkw, a community agriculture program, and the Ohelaku Corn Growers Co-Op on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin; the Nebraska Indian College, which serves the Omaha and Santee Sioux in Nebraska; and Dream of Wild Health, a nonprofit organization that works to reconnect the Native American community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, with traditional Native plants and their culinary, medicinal and spiritual uses.
We are growing three sisters research plots at ISU’s Horticulture Farm and in each of these communities. Our project also runs workshops on topics of interests to Native gardeners, encourages local soil health testing and grows rare seeds to rematriate them, or return them to their home communities.
The monocropping industrial agricultural systems that produce much of the U.S. food supply harms the environment, rural communities and human health and safety in many ways. By growing corn, beans and squash in research plots, we are helping to quantify how intercropping benefits both plants and soil.
By documenting limited nutritional offerings at reservation grocery stores, we are demonstrating the need for Indigenous gardens in Native communities. By interviewing Native growers and elders knowledgeable about foodways, we are illuminating how healing Indigenous gardening practices can be for Native communities and people – their bodies, minds and spirits.
Our Native collaborators are benefiting from the project through rematriation of rare seeds grown in ISU plots, workshops on topics they select and the new relationships they are building with Native gardeners across the Midwest. As researchers, we are learning about what it means to work collaboratively and to conduct research that respects protocols our Native collaborators value, such as treating seeds, plants and soil in a culturally appropriate manner. By listening with humility, we are working to build a network where we can all learn from one another.
How Native Americans’ right to vote has been systematically violated for generations
In the new book Voting in Indian Country, Jean Reith Schroedel weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts as the election nears
Nina Lakhani in New York
the guardian
Fri 16 Oct 2020 08.00 EDT
oter suppression has taken centre stage in the race to elect potentially the 46th president of the United States. But we’ve heard little about the 5.2 million Native Americans whose ancestors have called this land home before there was a US president.
The rights of indigenous communities – including the right to vote – have been systematically violated for generations with devastating consequences for access to clean air and water, health, education, economic opportunities, housing and sovereignty. Voter turnout for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives is the lowest in the country, and about one in three eligible voters (1.2 million people) are not registered to vote, according to the National Congress of American Indians.
In a new book, Voting in Indian County: The View from the Trenches, Jean Reith Schroedel, professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University, weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts.
Is the right to vote struggle for Native Americans distinct from the wider struggle faced by marginalized groups in the US?
One thing few Americans understand is that American Indians and Native Alaskans were the last group in the United States to get citizenship and to get the vote. Even after the civil war and the Reconstruction (13th, 14th and 15th) amendments there was a supreme court decision that said indigenous people could never become US citizens, and some laws used to disenfranchise them were still in place in 1975. In fact first-generation violations used to deny – not just dilute voting rights – were in place for much longer for Native Americans than any other group. It’s impossible to understand contemporary voter suppression in Indian Country without understanding this historical context.
Why didn’t the American Indian Citizenship Act 1924 nor the Voting Rights Act (VRA) 1965 guarantee Native Americans equal access to the ballot box?
The motivation for the VRA was the egregious treatment of black people in the south, and for the first 10 years there was a question over whether it even applied to American Indian and Native Alaskan populations. It wasn’t really discussed until a civil rights commission report in 1975 which included cases from South Dakota and Arizona that showed equally egregious discrimination and absolute denial of right to vote towards Native Americans – and also Latinos.
When voter suppression is discussed by politicians, advocates and journalists, it’s mostly about African American voters, and to a lesser degree Latinos. Why are Native Americans still excluded from the conversation?
Firstly they are a small population and secondly most of the most egregious abuses routinely occur in rural isolated parts of Indian Country where there is little media focus. But it’s happening – take Jackson county in South Dakota, a state where the governor has done little to protect people from Covid. The county council has just decided to close the legally mandated early voting centre on the Pine Ridge Reservation, citing concerns about Covid, but not in the voting site in Kadoka, where the white people go. Regardless of the intent, this will absolutely have a detrimental effect on Native people’s ability to vote. And South Dakota, like many other states, is also a very hard place for Native people to vote by mail. In the primary, the number of people who registered to vote by mail increased by 1,000% overall but there was no increase among reservation communities. In Oglala county, which includes the eastern part of Pine Ridge, turnout was about 10%.
The right to vote by mail is a hot political and civil rights issue in the 2020 election – could it help increase turnout in Indian Country?
No, voting by mail is very challenging for Native Americans for multiple reasons. First and foremost, most reservations do not have home mail delivery. Instead, people need to travel to post offices or postal provide sites – little places that offer minimal mail services and are located in places like gas stations and mini-marts. Take the Navajo Nation that encompasses 27,425 square miles – it’s larger than West Virginia, yet there are only 40 places where people can send and receive mail. In West Virginia, there are 725. Not a single PO box on the Navajo Nation has 24-hour access.
Preliminary data from my new research shows that all the mail sent from post offices off-reservation arrived at the election office within one to three days. Whereas around half sent from the reservation took three to 10 days. Rural whites are doing a whole lot better than rural Native Americans. This isn’t the only challenge: South Dakota requires mail ballots to be notarized but there are no notaries on reservations. And the level of trust in voting is generally low among Native Americans, but drops dramatically when asked about voting by mail.
Are Native Americans denied the right to vote because of ID requirements mandated by some states, supposedly to curtail voter fraud?
It can make it very difficult for people who live on reservations where many roads don’t have names or numbers – so-called non-standard addresses, which are very problematic in states requiring IDs with residential addresses. A number of states like South Dakota have chosen to make it a felony offense with prison terms and fines if someone votes using an address different to the one given to register, even though unstable housing is a big issue on reservations, and people crash in different places all the time.
Will Native Americans who only have tribal ID be refused the vote?
Tribal ID has not been accepted in a number of states in the past, including North Dakota and Minnesota. In some places the problem is that the tribal ID may not have a residential street address, because those do not exist on many reservations, or that government entities have in their records an address that was arbitrarily assigned to people with non-standard addresses, and that address does not match another assigned address on a different government list. But with respect to the upcoming election, we honestly won’t know how big an issue it is until people try to vote.
We’ve heard about felony disenfranchisement in black communities, especially in states like Florida. Does this impact Native Americans too?
It’s a major unstudied issue but what we do know is that laws passed after Reconstruction and the VRA specifically to disenfranchise African Americans were also passed in places which didn’t have black people. For example, Idaho put in place felony disenfranchisement around when it became the state, at a time when census data shows there were only 88 black people – it was designed to disenfranchise Native people. Half the states with harshest felony disenfranchisement don’t have many black people, but have big Native Americans or Latino populations.
Why are the Dakotas so important in the struggle for equality at the ballot box?
The Dakotas are the heart of what was the great Sioux Nations, who put together a cross-nation resistance to the incursion by Europeans, US military and militias. It’s a flashpoint where some of the worst massacres took place and it’s been one of the worst places for suppression of the Native American vote. North Dakota has passed one law after another that made it harder and harder for people to vote, which I think [most recently] was a retaliation to further disenfranchise Native people for standing up against the Dakota Access pipeline.
In South Dakota, more than a quarter of the 2016 registered voters in Todd county – which is the Rosebud Sioux – had been purged by 2020. This is huge. Todd county is an unorganized county, so the administration of elections is handled by an adjacent white county. These are red states, so little donor money goes into voting rights, but the white population is ageing, and younger whites are leaving the state. It’s going to be fascinating to watch how the Dakotas deal with the much larger Native American voting populations over the next 10 years.
Which are the states to watch in this election for potential voter suppression of Native American votes?
Arizona because it is a swing state and has all of the above issues; Montana, which can be considered a success story with regards to Native American representation in recent years, but where a lack of in-person voting could have a big impact. Alaska and Nevada have issues, and of course the Dakotas.
The rights of indigenous communities – including the right to vote – have been systematically violated for generations with devastating consequences for access to clean air and water, health, education, economic opportunities, housing and sovereignty. Voter turnout for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives is the lowest in the country, and about one in three eligible voters (1.2 million people) are not registered to vote, according to the National Congress of American Indians.
In a new book, Voting in Indian County: The View from the Trenches, Jean Reith Schroedel, professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University, weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts.
Is the right to vote struggle for Native Americans distinct from the wider struggle faced by marginalized groups in the US?
One thing few Americans understand is that American Indians and Native Alaskans were the last group in the United States to get citizenship and to get the vote. Even after the civil war and the Reconstruction (13th, 14th and 15th) amendments there was a supreme court decision that said indigenous people could never become US citizens, and some laws used to disenfranchise them were still in place in 1975. In fact first-generation violations used to deny – not just dilute voting rights – were in place for much longer for Native Americans than any other group. It’s impossible to understand contemporary voter suppression in Indian Country without understanding this historical context.
Why didn’t the American Indian Citizenship Act 1924 nor the Voting Rights Act (VRA) 1965 guarantee Native Americans equal access to the ballot box?
The motivation for the VRA was the egregious treatment of black people in the south, and for the first 10 years there was a question over whether it even applied to American Indian and Native Alaskan populations. It wasn’t really discussed until a civil rights commission report in 1975 which included cases from South Dakota and Arizona that showed equally egregious discrimination and absolute denial of right to vote towards Native Americans – and also Latinos.
When voter suppression is discussed by politicians, advocates and journalists, it’s mostly about African American voters, and to a lesser degree Latinos. Why are Native Americans still excluded from the conversation?
Firstly they are a small population and secondly most of the most egregious abuses routinely occur in rural isolated parts of Indian Country where there is little media focus. But it’s happening – take Jackson county in South Dakota, a state where the governor has done little to protect people from Covid. The county council has just decided to close the legally mandated early voting centre on the Pine Ridge Reservation, citing concerns about Covid, but not in the voting site in Kadoka, where the white people go. Regardless of the intent, this will absolutely have a detrimental effect on Native people’s ability to vote. And South Dakota, like many other states, is also a very hard place for Native people to vote by mail. In the primary, the number of people who registered to vote by mail increased by 1,000% overall but there was no increase among reservation communities. In Oglala county, which includes the eastern part of Pine Ridge, turnout was about 10%.
The right to vote by mail is a hot political and civil rights issue in the 2020 election – could it help increase turnout in Indian Country?
No, voting by mail is very challenging for Native Americans for multiple reasons. First and foremost, most reservations do not have home mail delivery. Instead, people need to travel to post offices or postal provide sites – little places that offer minimal mail services and are located in places like gas stations and mini-marts. Take the Navajo Nation that encompasses 27,425 square miles – it’s larger than West Virginia, yet there are only 40 places where people can send and receive mail. In West Virginia, there are 725. Not a single PO box on the Navajo Nation has 24-hour access.
Preliminary data from my new research shows that all the mail sent from post offices off-reservation arrived at the election office within one to three days. Whereas around half sent from the reservation took three to 10 days. Rural whites are doing a whole lot better than rural Native Americans. This isn’t the only challenge: South Dakota requires mail ballots to be notarized but there are no notaries on reservations. And the level of trust in voting is generally low among Native Americans, but drops dramatically when asked about voting by mail.
Are Native Americans denied the right to vote because of ID requirements mandated by some states, supposedly to curtail voter fraud?
It can make it very difficult for people who live on reservations where many roads don’t have names or numbers – so-called non-standard addresses, which are very problematic in states requiring IDs with residential addresses. A number of states like South Dakota have chosen to make it a felony offense with prison terms and fines if someone votes using an address different to the one given to register, even though unstable housing is a big issue on reservations, and people crash in different places all the time.
Will Native Americans who only have tribal ID be refused the vote?
Tribal ID has not been accepted in a number of states in the past, including North Dakota and Minnesota. In some places the problem is that the tribal ID may not have a residential street address, because those do not exist on many reservations, or that government entities have in their records an address that was arbitrarily assigned to people with non-standard addresses, and that address does not match another assigned address on a different government list. But with respect to the upcoming election, we honestly won’t know how big an issue it is until people try to vote.
We’ve heard about felony disenfranchisement in black communities, especially in states like Florida. Does this impact Native Americans too?
It’s a major unstudied issue but what we do know is that laws passed after Reconstruction and the VRA specifically to disenfranchise African Americans were also passed in places which didn’t have black people. For example, Idaho put in place felony disenfranchisement around when it became the state, at a time when census data shows there were only 88 black people – it was designed to disenfranchise Native people. Half the states with harshest felony disenfranchisement don’t have many black people, but have big Native Americans or Latino populations.
Why are the Dakotas so important in the struggle for equality at the ballot box?
The Dakotas are the heart of what was the great Sioux Nations, who put together a cross-nation resistance to the incursion by Europeans, US military and militias. It’s a flashpoint where some of the worst massacres took place and it’s been one of the worst places for suppression of the Native American vote. North Dakota has passed one law after another that made it harder and harder for people to vote, which I think [most recently] was a retaliation to further disenfranchise Native people for standing up against the Dakota Access pipeline.
In South Dakota, more than a quarter of the 2016 registered voters in Todd county – which is the Rosebud Sioux – had been purged by 2020. This is huge. Todd county is an unorganized county, so the administration of elections is handled by an adjacent white county. These are red states, so little donor money goes into voting rights, but the white population is ageing, and younger whites are leaving the state. It’s going to be fascinating to watch how the Dakotas deal with the much larger Native American voting populations over the next 10 years.
Which are the states to watch in this election for potential voter suppression of Native American votes?
Arizona because it is a swing state and has all of the above issues; Montana, which can be considered a success story with regards to Native American representation in recent years, but where a lack of in-person voting could have a big impact. Alaska and Nevada have issues, and of course the Dakotas.
Oklahoma is – and always has been – Native land
Dwanna L. McKay, Colorado College - the conversation
July 16, 2020 8.12am EDT
A 1951 painting by artist Blackbear Bosin of people on the Trail of Tears. Al Moldvay/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Some Oklahomans are expressing trepidation about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that much of the eastern part of the state belongs to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. They wonder whether they must now pay taxes to or be governed by the Muscogee.
In alarmist language, Sen. Ted Cruz of neighboring Texas tweeted that the Supreme Court “just gave away half of Oklahoma, literally. Manhattan is next.”
In fact, the landmark July 9 decision applies only to criminal law. It gives federal and tribal courts jurisdiction over felonies committed by tribal citizens within the Creek reservation, not the state of Oklahoma.
Any shock that tribal nations have sovereignty over their own land reflects a serious misunderstanding of American history. For Oklahoma – indeed, all of North America – has always been, for lack of a better term, Indian Country.
‘Indian Country’
As both an educator and scholar, I work to correct the erasure of Indigenous histories through my research and teaching.
North America was not a vast, unpopulated wilderness when white colonizers arrived in 1620. Up to 100 million people of more than 1,000 sovereign Indigenous nations occupied the area that would become the United States. At the time, fewer than 80 million people lived in Europe.
America’s Indigenous nations were incredibly advanced, with extensive trade networks and economic centers, superior agricultural cultivation, well developed metalwork, pottery and weaving practices, as historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has comprehensively detailed.
Unlike Europe, with its periodic epidemics, North America had little disease, Dunbar-Ortiz says. People used herbal medicines, dentistry, surgery and daily hygienic bathing to salubrious effect.
Historically, Indigenous nations emphasized equity, consensus and community. Though individualism would come to define the United States, my research finds that Native Americans retain these values today, along with our guiding principles of respect, responsibility and reciprocity.
Broken promises and stolen lands
European and American colonizers did not hold these same values. From 1492 to 1900, they pushed inexorably westward across the North American continent, burning Native villages, destroying crops, committing sexual assaults, enslaving people and perpetrating massacres. The government did not punish these atrocities against Indigenous Nations and their citizens.
Citing the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” and Manifest Destiny, U.S. policymakers argued that the federal government had a divine duty to fully develop the region. Racist in language and logic, they contended that “Indians” did not know how to work or to care for the land because they were inferior to whites.
Oklahoma was born of this institutionalized racism.
Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole nations – known as the Five Tribes – were forced from their ancestral homelands in the southeast and relocated to “Indian Territory,” as Oklahoma was then designated. Half of the Muscogee and Cherokee populations died from brutal and inhumane treatment as they were forcibly marched 2,200 miles across nine states to their new homelands in what most Americans call the Trail of Tears.
Indian Territory, which occupied all Oklahoma minus the panhandle, was almost 44 million acres of fertile rolling prairies, rivers and groves of enormous trees. Several Indian nations already lived in the area, including the Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage and Wichita.
Legally, Indian Territory was to belong to the tribal nations forever, and trespass by settlers was forbidden. But over the next two centuries, Congress would violate every one of the 375 treaties it made with Indian tribes as well as numerous statutory acts, according the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
By 1890, only about 25 million acres of Indian Territory remained. The Muscogee lost nearly half their lands in an 1866 Reconstruction-era treaty. And in 1889, almost 2 million acres in western Oklahoma were redesignated as “Unassigned Lands” and opened to “white settlement.” By 1890, the U.S. Census showed that only 28% of people in Indian Territory were actually “Indian.”
With statehood in 1907, Oklahoma assumed jurisdiction over all its territory, ultimately denying that the Muscogee had ever had a reservation there. That is the historic injustice corrected by the Supreme Court on July 9.
Respect, responsibility and reciprocity
Despite all the brutality and broken promises, the Five Tribes have contributed socially, culturally and economically to Oklahoma far beyond the shrinking bounds of their territories, in ways that benefit all residents.
The public school system created by the Choctaws shortly after their arrival became the model for Oklahoma schools that exists today. Last year, Oklahoma tribes contributed over US$130 million to Oklahoma public schools.
Oklahoma tribes also enrich Oklahoma’s economy, employing over 96,000 people – most of them non-Native – and attracting tourists with their cultural events. In 2017, Oklahoma tribes produced almost $13 billion in goods and services and paid out $4.6 billion in wages and benefits.
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, in particular, invests heavily in the state, creating businesses, building roads and providing jobs, health care and social services in 11 Oklahoma counties.
Still our homelands
Citizens of the Five Tribes have also contributed to broader American society.
Before the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, the Choctaw Code Talkers used their language as code for the United States in World War I. Lt. Col Ernest Childers, a Muscogee, won the Medal of Honor for his service in World War II. U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, also a Muscogee, is the first Indigenous poet laureate. Mary Ross, a Cherokee, was the first known Indigenous woman engineer. And John Herrington, Chickasaw, was a NASA astronaut. These are but a few examples.
The strong collaborative leadership of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation was apparent after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Principal Chief David Hill’s official response.
“Today’s decision will allow the Nation to honor our ancestors by maintaining our established sovereignty and territorial boundaries,” Hill said, adding: “We will continue to work with federal and state law enforcement agencies to ensure that public safety will be maintained.”
In alarmist language, Sen. Ted Cruz of neighboring Texas tweeted that the Supreme Court “just gave away half of Oklahoma, literally. Manhattan is next.”
In fact, the landmark July 9 decision applies only to criminal law. It gives federal and tribal courts jurisdiction over felonies committed by tribal citizens within the Creek reservation, not the state of Oklahoma.
Any shock that tribal nations have sovereignty over their own land reflects a serious misunderstanding of American history. For Oklahoma – indeed, all of North America – has always been, for lack of a better term, Indian Country.
‘Indian Country’
As both an educator and scholar, I work to correct the erasure of Indigenous histories through my research and teaching.
North America was not a vast, unpopulated wilderness when white colonizers arrived in 1620. Up to 100 million people of more than 1,000 sovereign Indigenous nations occupied the area that would become the United States. At the time, fewer than 80 million people lived in Europe.
America’s Indigenous nations were incredibly advanced, with extensive trade networks and economic centers, superior agricultural cultivation, well developed metalwork, pottery and weaving practices, as historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has comprehensively detailed.
Unlike Europe, with its periodic epidemics, North America had little disease, Dunbar-Ortiz says. People used herbal medicines, dentistry, surgery and daily hygienic bathing to salubrious effect.
Historically, Indigenous nations emphasized equity, consensus and community. Though individualism would come to define the United States, my research finds that Native Americans retain these values today, along with our guiding principles of respect, responsibility and reciprocity.
Broken promises and stolen lands
European and American colonizers did not hold these same values. From 1492 to 1900, they pushed inexorably westward across the North American continent, burning Native villages, destroying crops, committing sexual assaults, enslaving people and perpetrating massacres. The government did not punish these atrocities against Indigenous Nations and their citizens.
Citing the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” and Manifest Destiny, U.S. policymakers argued that the federal government had a divine duty to fully develop the region. Racist in language and logic, they contended that “Indians” did not know how to work or to care for the land because they were inferior to whites.
Oklahoma was born of this institutionalized racism.
Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole nations – known as the Five Tribes – were forced from their ancestral homelands in the southeast and relocated to “Indian Territory,” as Oklahoma was then designated. Half of the Muscogee and Cherokee populations died from brutal and inhumane treatment as they were forcibly marched 2,200 miles across nine states to their new homelands in what most Americans call the Trail of Tears.
Indian Territory, which occupied all Oklahoma minus the panhandle, was almost 44 million acres of fertile rolling prairies, rivers and groves of enormous trees. Several Indian nations already lived in the area, including the Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage and Wichita.
Legally, Indian Territory was to belong to the tribal nations forever, and trespass by settlers was forbidden. But over the next two centuries, Congress would violate every one of the 375 treaties it made with Indian tribes as well as numerous statutory acts, according the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
By 1890, only about 25 million acres of Indian Territory remained. The Muscogee lost nearly half their lands in an 1866 Reconstruction-era treaty. And in 1889, almost 2 million acres in western Oklahoma were redesignated as “Unassigned Lands” and opened to “white settlement.” By 1890, the U.S. Census showed that only 28% of people in Indian Territory were actually “Indian.”
With statehood in 1907, Oklahoma assumed jurisdiction over all its territory, ultimately denying that the Muscogee had ever had a reservation there. That is the historic injustice corrected by the Supreme Court on July 9.
Respect, responsibility and reciprocity
Despite all the brutality and broken promises, the Five Tribes have contributed socially, culturally and economically to Oklahoma far beyond the shrinking bounds of their territories, in ways that benefit all residents.
The public school system created by the Choctaws shortly after their arrival became the model for Oklahoma schools that exists today. Last year, Oklahoma tribes contributed over US$130 million to Oklahoma public schools.
Oklahoma tribes also enrich Oklahoma’s economy, employing over 96,000 people – most of them non-Native – and attracting tourists with their cultural events. In 2017, Oklahoma tribes produced almost $13 billion in goods and services and paid out $4.6 billion in wages and benefits.
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, in particular, invests heavily in the state, creating businesses, building roads and providing jobs, health care and social services in 11 Oklahoma counties.
Still our homelands
Citizens of the Five Tribes have also contributed to broader American society.
Before the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, the Choctaw Code Talkers used their language as code for the United States in World War I. Lt. Col Ernest Childers, a Muscogee, won the Medal of Honor for his service in World War II. U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, also a Muscogee, is the first Indigenous poet laureate. Mary Ross, a Cherokee, was the first known Indigenous woman engineer. And John Herrington, Chickasaw, was a NASA astronaut. These are but a few examples.
The strong collaborative leadership of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation was apparent after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Principal Chief David Hill’s official response.
“Today’s decision will allow the Nation to honor our ancestors by maintaining our established sovereignty and territorial boundaries,” Hill said, adding: “We will continue to work with federal and state law enforcement agencies to ensure that public safety will be maintained.”
Eastern Oklahoma was granted by Congress to Native tribes in the 19th century. Kmusser/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
more environmental racism and screwing the poor!!!
US Environmental Protection Agency
Wood heaters too dirty to sell are clean enough to give to tribes, says EPA
Stoves that produce pollutants known to make people sick can be donated to tribes and Appalachian communities
Emily Holden in Washington
thew guardian
Thu 18 Jun 2020 06.00 EDT
Wood heaters that US regulators have deemed too dirty to sell can now be donated to tribal nations and Appalachian communities, under a program organized by a trade group and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Public health experts warn the donations could force more pollution on already vulnerable populations amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Wood-burning devices emit pollutants known to make people sick, including fine particle pollution and chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, acrolein and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
“What’s disappointing is there have been efforts to really find solutions that help these areas in need, understanding they are looking to reduce home-heating costs,” said Lisa Rector, policy director of a non-profit association of north-eastern air quality agencies.
“It’s especially concerning that in this time when we’re dealing with a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system that we’re not really carefully thinking through this.”
But the industry and the communities set to receive the heaters argue they will replace much worse alternatives that are in use.
The divide highlights how environmental inequities persist in the US. Decisions about which Americans are best protected from pollution often come down to cost, with environmental racism dictating which communities get investments and which ones are subjected to more pollution and worse healthcare.
Billie Toledo, an environmental technician who co-leads the National Tribal Air Association working group on wood smoke, praised the program while acknowledging the donated stoves don’t meet the more updated rigorous standards for pollution.
“There might be an individual out there in a tribe within Indian country that is using a 55-gallon metal burn barrel,” Toledo said, and the replacement will be much safer despite the health risks.
Some tribes and non-profits have been working to replace the dirtiest stoves and educate people about best practices, including only burning dry wood to create less smoke. Sufficient funds are often not available, though.
Rachel Feinstein, government affairs manager at the industry trade group the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, said the donations are going to communities in need where “the products that are in people’s homes are pretty much manufactured and installed before 1990 when the first EPA regulation for wood stoves came into effect.”
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said: “without this donation program, it is likely that these older, higher-emitting stoves would continue to operate and would not be changed out with [newer] appliances in the near future.”
The EPA in 2015 began to phase in standards to require new wood heaters, also called stoves, to burn more efficiently and create less smoke and soot that people inhale as particle pollution.
Breathing in those fine particles can worsen asthma and trigger heart attacks, stroke, irregular heart rhythms and heart failure, especially in people already at risk for these conditions, according to the EPA. Other pollutants from wood stoves are known carcinogens.
For the first five years, retailers could sell wood heaters that emitted no more than 4.5 grams per hour of particulate matter (PM). After that, the heaters would need to be even cleaner, emitting no more than 2 grams per hour of PM.
As a 15 May deadline to switch to cleaner heaters was approaching this year, businesses complained they hadn’t been able to sell all their older stoves, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. The EPA declined to extend the deadline and instead agreed to a plan from the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association to set up the donation program. Companies donating the older stoves would be able to take tax deductions to offset their losses. Ahead of the deadline, 15 retailers donated 66 stoves.
But then the EPA reversed its position. On 15 May, the agency proposed to let retailers sell the older stoves through November – leaving further donations in limbo. the EPA said it would temporarily relax enforcement of the standard.
Environmental groups are opposing the extension, saying the industry has had plenty of time to sell its non-compliant stoves. They say the donation program could also be misguided, particularly because of the communities it targets.
“Five years was a very generous amount of time to make this transition. The industry has moved on – the leading manufacturers got there a long time ago,” said Timothy Ballo, a staff attorney for Earthjustice. “There’s no reason to reward manufacturers and retailers who decided to bank on the prospect of getting the extension.”
Ballo said it was not “a great option” to burden struggling communities with more pollution.
Tribal communities and indigenous Alaskans have “long experienced lower health status when compared to other Americans”, according to the Indian Health Service. That includes a lower life expectancy and disproportionate disease burden.
Appalachia also has higher mortality rates than the nation in seven leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), injury, stroke, diabetes and suicide, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.
“I understand for a family that needs a source of heat, having that stove as an option through a donation program is probably better than nothing, but it is inflicting harm on their neighbors and that’s something you have to weigh as a countervailing concern,” Ballo said.
Public health experts warn the donations could force more pollution on already vulnerable populations amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Wood-burning devices emit pollutants known to make people sick, including fine particle pollution and chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, acrolein and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
“What’s disappointing is there have been efforts to really find solutions that help these areas in need, understanding they are looking to reduce home-heating costs,” said Lisa Rector, policy director of a non-profit association of north-eastern air quality agencies.
“It’s especially concerning that in this time when we’re dealing with a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system that we’re not really carefully thinking through this.”
But the industry and the communities set to receive the heaters argue they will replace much worse alternatives that are in use.
The divide highlights how environmental inequities persist in the US. Decisions about which Americans are best protected from pollution often come down to cost, with environmental racism dictating which communities get investments and which ones are subjected to more pollution and worse healthcare.
Billie Toledo, an environmental technician who co-leads the National Tribal Air Association working group on wood smoke, praised the program while acknowledging the donated stoves don’t meet the more updated rigorous standards for pollution.
“There might be an individual out there in a tribe within Indian country that is using a 55-gallon metal burn barrel,” Toledo said, and the replacement will be much safer despite the health risks.
Some tribes and non-profits have been working to replace the dirtiest stoves and educate people about best practices, including only burning dry wood to create less smoke. Sufficient funds are often not available, though.
Rachel Feinstein, government affairs manager at the industry trade group the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, said the donations are going to communities in need where “the products that are in people’s homes are pretty much manufactured and installed before 1990 when the first EPA regulation for wood stoves came into effect.”
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said: “without this donation program, it is likely that these older, higher-emitting stoves would continue to operate and would not be changed out with [newer] appliances in the near future.”
The EPA in 2015 began to phase in standards to require new wood heaters, also called stoves, to burn more efficiently and create less smoke and soot that people inhale as particle pollution.
Breathing in those fine particles can worsen asthma and trigger heart attacks, stroke, irregular heart rhythms and heart failure, especially in people already at risk for these conditions, according to the EPA. Other pollutants from wood stoves are known carcinogens.
For the first five years, retailers could sell wood heaters that emitted no more than 4.5 grams per hour of particulate matter (PM). After that, the heaters would need to be even cleaner, emitting no more than 2 grams per hour of PM.
As a 15 May deadline to switch to cleaner heaters was approaching this year, businesses complained they hadn’t been able to sell all their older stoves, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. The EPA declined to extend the deadline and instead agreed to a plan from the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association to set up the donation program. Companies donating the older stoves would be able to take tax deductions to offset their losses. Ahead of the deadline, 15 retailers donated 66 stoves.
But then the EPA reversed its position. On 15 May, the agency proposed to let retailers sell the older stoves through November – leaving further donations in limbo. the EPA said it would temporarily relax enforcement of the standard.
Environmental groups are opposing the extension, saying the industry has had plenty of time to sell its non-compliant stoves. They say the donation program could also be misguided, particularly because of the communities it targets.
“Five years was a very generous amount of time to make this transition. The industry has moved on – the leading manufacturers got there a long time ago,” said Timothy Ballo, a staff attorney for Earthjustice. “There’s no reason to reward manufacturers and retailers who decided to bank on the prospect of getting the extension.”
Ballo said it was not “a great option” to burden struggling communities with more pollution.
Tribal communities and indigenous Alaskans have “long experienced lower health status when compared to other Americans”, according to the Indian Health Service. That includes a lower life expectancy and disproportionate disease burden.
Appalachia also has higher mortality rates than the nation in seven leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), injury, stroke, diabetes and suicide, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.
“I understand for a family that needs a source of heat, having that stove as an option through a donation program is probably better than nothing, but it is inflicting harm on their neighbors and that’s something you have to weigh as a countervailing concern,” Ballo said.
Longtime police brutality drove American Indians to join the George Floyd protests
Who were the American Indian Movement activists at the Minneapolis protests?
Katrina Phillips (Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is an assistant professor of history at Macalester College. - washington post
June 6, 2020 at 3:00 a.m. PDT
The nationwide protests roiling the country ignited in Minneapolis where people gathered to protest the long history of racial violence by the Minneapolis Police Department and the killing of George Floyd. On those first nights of protest, there was a noticeable indigenous presence among the protesters: a person in beaded earrings and a red and black mask calling attention to the violent acts perpetrated against indigenous women, someone carrying a hand drum and another protester wearing a “Free Leonard Peltier” shirt with a sign that read “Derek Chauvin is a murderer.” Protesters flew the flag of the American Indian Movement and wore shirts, jackets or vests that bore the organization’s insignia.
Why was it important that American Indians joined the protests in solidarity with African Americans? Because their presence underscores Minneapolis’s ongoing hostilities against indigenous people and people of color, and highlights the long history of weaponized state violence against American Indians.
But this is not the first time community members, activists and organizations have called for an end to police brutality in the Twin Cities, nor is it the first time calls like this have resonated across the country. Those who are calling for justice are echoing similar calls from the era of the civil rights movements. In fact, it was police brutality against native people in the Twin Cities that led to the creation of the American Indian Movement in 1968. AIM is most famous — or infamous — for its public demonstrations. However, AIM’s national demonstrations and its often polarizing tactics tend to overshadow and obscure the roots of its foundation.
In the 1950s, federal Indian policy shifted from the revitalization efforts of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act to the twinned policies of termination (under the 1953 House Concurrent Resolution 108) and relocation (through the 1956 Indian Relocation Act). Termination was as ominous as it sounds: It severed the treaty-guaranteed relationship between more than 100 Native nations and the federal government, eradicated tribal sovereignty and dissolved reservations, effectively stripping over 12,000 indigenous people of their tribal birthrights. Under relocation, the federal government hoped to assimilate American Indians by moving them to larger cities like Denver, Chicago and the Bay Area and cutting social, cultural and political ties to reservations.
While Minneapolis was not an official relocation city, it had a relocation office and effectively became a de facto destination throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Those who relocated to larger cities were promised jobs and housing but instead found inadequate living situations and insufficient opportunities for employment. As Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior have shown, the Twin Cities had native populations “large enough to register on the radar of city government, the press, and the public.” This visibility, though, came at a cost. Native people in Minneapolis, like African Americans, became targets of police violence because of the city’s entrenched racism.
During the “long hot summer” of 1967 racial tensions erupted, and yet little changed. The following summer, Minneapolis Indians organized against ongoing discrimination, racism, police brutality and civil rights violations. An oft-repeated story says that their first choice for a name was the Concerned Indian Americans, but that acronym (CIA) was already taken. An elder suggested the American Indian Movement, and the name stuck.
In the 1950s, federal Indian policy shifted from the revitalization efforts of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act to the twinned policies of termination (under the 1953 House Concurrent Resolution 108) and relocation (through the 1956 Indian Relocation Act). Termination was as ominous as it sounds: It severed the treaty-guaranteed relationship between more than 100 Native nations and the federal government, eradicated tribal sovereignty and dissolved reservations, effectively stripping over 12,000 indigenous people of their tribal birthrights. Under relocation, the federal government hoped to assimilate American Indians by moving them to larger cities like Denver, Chicago and the Bay Area and cutting social, cultural and political ties to reservations.
While Minneapolis was not an official relocation city, it had a relocation office and effectively became a de facto destination throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Those who relocated to larger cities were promised jobs and housing but instead found inadequate living situations and insufficient opportunities for employment. As Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior have shown, the Twin Cities had native populations “large enough to register on the radar of city government, the press, and the public.” This visibility, though, came at a cost. Native people in Minneapolis, like African Americans, became targets of police violence because of the city’s entrenched racism.
During the “long hot summer” of 1967 racial tensions erupted, and yet little changed. The following summer, Minneapolis Indians organized against ongoing discrimination, racism, police brutality and civil rights violations. An oft-repeated story says that their first choice for a name was the Concerned Indian Americans, but that acronym (CIA) was already taken. An elder suggested the American Indian Movement, and the name stuck.
In its early years, AIM advocated for native civil rights and helped create community programs. The AIM patrol, focused on the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis, was among its first endeavors. Akin to the tactics used by Black Panther “copwatching” patrols in California, the AIM patrol sought to minimize interactions between natives and the police and to serve as a “crisis-resolution alternative.” Volunteers in red shirts or red jackets with the AIM logo watched for differences in police arrest procedures but never physically interfered.
In addition to the patrols, AIM was instrumental in the creation of two survival schools, one in Minneapolis and one in St. Paul. Native students in the Twin Cities faced pervasive anti-indigenous hostility, cultural discrimination and marginalization, which led to higher dropout rates and lower levels of academic success. Community members led the push for these schools, and in 1972 the Red School House opened in St. Paul and Heart of the Earth opened in Minneapolis.
AIM soon became a national movement with chapters in cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco, and each chapter tended to focus on local issues. Some demonstrations, however, took the original chapter of AIM out of Minneapolis and into the national spotlight to draw attention to more widespread native concerns. AIM members protested at Mount Rushmore and Plymouth Rock in 1970, and a 1972 protest after the brutal murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder in Gordon, Neb. (just across the South Dakota state line from the Pine Ridge Reservation), drew almost 1,500 people.
When the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties, a cross-country caravan, stopped in Minneapolis, AIM activists drew up a 20-point position paper to present to the federal government. The caravan later took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs in D.C. In 1973 a 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee in South Dakota — the site of an 1890 massacre where a U.S. Army cavalry unit slaughtered several hundred Lakota — drew media coverage from around the world.
The creation of AIM was neither the beginning nor the end of Native calls to action, but it stands as a marker in this long history. As American Indians across the country pushed back against repressive policies and as activists, organizers and community members called for greater attention to indigenous issues, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 in an attempt to mediate the devastating effects of termination. This authorized tribes to contract with the federal government for programs that would serve tribal members and rejuvenated tribal governments.
Over the next decades, indigenous activism continued as Native nations across the country fought for their treaty-guaranteed rights to hunt and fish (see United States v. Washington, Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Chippewa Indians v. Voigt and Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, among other cases). More recent demonstration include protests against the Dakota Access pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline.
But the community building efforts in Minneapolis were also enduring, and what’s now known as the American Indian Cultural Corridor has become a gathering spot for those who set out at night to protect their communities in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. AIM Executive Director Lisa Bellanger’s call for support brought people from Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas. Muck-Wa Roberts, a grandson of AIM co-founder Dennis Banks, told a reporter about past incidents between police and community members and explained, “There’s been police brutality toward us, so we understand and we know that justice needs to be served.”
The police brutality that galvanized American Indians in Minneapolis more than 50 years ago is part of the same police brutality that killed Floyd. The protesters marching in Minneapolis who carried burning sage, AIM flags and hand drums in a powerful demonstration of solidarity and support, the people mobilizing to provide resources, the jingle dress dancers who honored Floyd the next week and the protectors who stand guard every night draw on decades and centuries of indigenous resistance against state violence aimed at their communities and their neighbors. Police violence against indigenous people and people of color won’t end without a recognition of this history of racism, and change won’t happen without recognizing the historical roots of the city’s racially driven violence. But the native community’s mobilization in Minneapolis underscores the rallying cry of many indigenous activists, scholars, organizers and community members: We are still here.
Why was it important that American Indians joined the protests in solidarity with African Americans? Because their presence underscores Minneapolis’s ongoing hostilities against indigenous people and people of color, and highlights the long history of weaponized state violence against American Indians.
But this is not the first time community members, activists and organizations have called for an end to police brutality in the Twin Cities, nor is it the first time calls like this have resonated across the country. Those who are calling for justice are echoing similar calls from the era of the civil rights movements. In fact, it was police brutality against native people in the Twin Cities that led to the creation of the American Indian Movement in 1968. AIM is most famous — or infamous — for its public demonstrations. However, AIM’s national demonstrations and its often polarizing tactics tend to overshadow and obscure the roots of its foundation.
In the 1950s, federal Indian policy shifted from the revitalization efforts of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act to the twinned policies of termination (under the 1953 House Concurrent Resolution 108) and relocation (through the 1956 Indian Relocation Act). Termination was as ominous as it sounds: It severed the treaty-guaranteed relationship between more than 100 Native nations and the federal government, eradicated tribal sovereignty and dissolved reservations, effectively stripping over 12,000 indigenous people of their tribal birthrights. Under relocation, the federal government hoped to assimilate American Indians by moving them to larger cities like Denver, Chicago and the Bay Area and cutting social, cultural and political ties to reservations.
While Minneapolis was not an official relocation city, it had a relocation office and effectively became a de facto destination throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Those who relocated to larger cities were promised jobs and housing but instead found inadequate living situations and insufficient opportunities for employment. As Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior have shown, the Twin Cities had native populations “large enough to register on the radar of city government, the press, and the public.” This visibility, though, came at a cost. Native people in Minneapolis, like African Americans, became targets of police violence because of the city’s entrenched racism.
During the “long hot summer” of 1967 racial tensions erupted, and yet little changed. The following summer, Minneapolis Indians organized against ongoing discrimination, racism, police brutality and civil rights violations. An oft-repeated story says that their first choice for a name was the Concerned Indian Americans, but that acronym (CIA) was already taken. An elder suggested the American Indian Movement, and the name stuck.
In the 1950s, federal Indian policy shifted from the revitalization efforts of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act to the twinned policies of termination (under the 1953 House Concurrent Resolution 108) and relocation (through the 1956 Indian Relocation Act). Termination was as ominous as it sounds: It severed the treaty-guaranteed relationship between more than 100 Native nations and the federal government, eradicated tribal sovereignty and dissolved reservations, effectively stripping over 12,000 indigenous people of their tribal birthrights. Under relocation, the federal government hoped to assimilate American Indians by moving them to larger cities like Denver, Chicago and the Bay Area and cutting social, cultural and political ties to reservations.
While Minneapolis was not an official relocation city, it had a relocation office and effectively became a de facto destination throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Those who relocated to larger cities were promised jobs and housing but instead found inadequate living situations and insufficient opportunities for employment. As Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior have shown, the Twin Cities had native populations “large enough to register on the radar of city government, the press, and the public.” This visibility, though, came at a cost. Native people in Minneapolis, like African Americans, became targets of police violence because of the city’s entrenched racism.
During the “long hot summer” of 1967 racial tensions erupted, and yet little changed. The following summer, Minneapolis Indians organized against ongoing discrimination, racism, police brutality and civil rights violations. An oft-repeated story says that their first choice for a name was the Concerned Indian Americans, but that acronym (CIA) was already taken. An elder suggested the American Indian Movement, and the name stuck.
In its early years, AIM advocated for native civil rights and helped create community programs. The AIM patrol, focused on the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis, was among its first endeavors. Akin to the tactics used by Black Panther “copwatching” patrols in California, the AIM patrol sought to minimize interactions between natives and the police and to serve as a “crisis-resolution alternative.” Volunteers in red shirts or red jackets with the AIM logo watched for differences in police arrest procedures but never physically interfered.
In addition to the patrols, AIM was instrumental in the creation of two survival schools, one in Minneapolis and one in St. Paul. Native students in the Twin Cities faced pervasive anti-indigenous hostility, cultural discrimination and marginalization, which led to higher dropout rates and lower levels of academic success. Community members led the push for these schools, and in 1972 the Red School House opened in St. Paul and Heart of the Earth opened in Minneapolis.
AIM soon became a national movement with chapters in cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco, and each chapter tended to focus on local issues. Some demonstrations, however, took the original chapter of AIM out of Minneapolis and into the national spotlight to draw attention to more widespread native concerns. AIM members protested at Mount Rushmore and Plymouth Rock in 1970, and a 1972 protest after the brutal murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder in Gordon, Neb. (just across the South Dakota state line from the Pine Ridge Reservation), drew almost 1,500 people.
When the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties, a cross-country caravan, stopped in Minneapolis, AIM activists drew up a 20-point position paper to present to the federal government. The caravan later took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs in D.C. In 1973 a 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee in South Dakota — the site of an 1890 massacre where a U.S. Army cavalry unit slaughtered several hundred Lakota — drew media coverage from around the world.
The creation of AIM was neither the beginning nor the end of Native calls to action, but it stands as a marker in this long history. As American Indians across the country pushed back against repressive policies and as activists, organizers and community members called for greater attention to indigenous issues, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 in an attempt to mediate the devastating effects of termination. This authorized tribes to contract with the federal government for programs that would serve tribal members and rejuvenated tribal governments.
Over the next decades, indigenous activism continued as Native nations across the country fought for their treaty-guaranteed rights to hunt and fish (see United States v. Washington, Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Chippewa Indians v. Voigt and Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, among other cases). More recent demonstration include protests against the Dakota Access pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline.
But the community building efforts in Minneapolis were also enduring, and what’s now known as the American Indian Cultural Corridor has become a gathering spot for those who set out at night to protect their communities in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. AIM Executive Director Lisa Bellanger’s call for support brought people from Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas. Muck-Wa Roberts, a grandson of AIM co-founder Dennis Banks, told a reporter about past incidents between police and community members and explained, “There’s been police brutality toward us, so we understand and we know that justice needs to be served.”
The police brutality that galvanized American Indians in Minneapolis more than 50 years ago is part of the same police brutality that killed Floyd. The protesters marching in Minneapolis who carried burning sage, AIM flags and hand drums in a powerful demonstration of solidarity and support, the people mobilizing to provide resources, the jingle dress dancers who honored Floyd the next week and the protectors who stand guard every night draw on decades and centuries of indigenous resistance against state violence aimed at their communities and their neighbors. Police violence against indigenous people and people of color won’t end without a recognition of this history of racism, and change won’t happen without recognizing the historical roots of the city’s racially driven violence. But the native community’s mobilization in Minneapolis underscores the rallying cry of many indigenous activists, scholars, organizers and community members: We are still here.
Native American tribes’ pandemic response is hamstrung by many inequities
June 1, 2020
By The Conversation - raw story
American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) experience higher rates of chronic diseases than non-Hispanic Whites.
Urban Indian Health Institute; data from CDC, CC BY-ND
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is novel, but pandemic threats to indigenous peoples are anything but new. Diseases like measles, smallpox and the Spanish flu have decimated Native American communities ever since the arrival of the first European colonizers.
Now COVID-19 is having similarly devastating impacts in Indian country. Some reservations are reporting infection rates many times higher than those observed in the general U.S. population.
We are social scientists who study many aspects of environmental justice, including the politics of food access and food sovereignty, the impacts of extractive resource industries like uranium and fossil fuels, and how Indigenous communities navigate relationships with state and federal governments to maintain their traditional practices. As we see it, Native American communities face structural and historical obstacles related to settler colonial legacies that make it hard for them to counter the pandemic, even by drawing on innovative indigenous survival strategies.
History reverberates on Native lands
Native communities in North America have been disrupted and displaced for centuries. Many face long-standing food and water inequities that are further complicated by this pandemic.
On the Navajo reservation, which covers more than 27,000 square miles in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, 76% of households already have trouble affording enough healthy food, and the nearest grocery store is often hours away. COVID-related restrictions have further curtailed access to food supplies.
Clean water for basic sanitary measures like hand-washing is also scarce. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack indoor plumbing than whites in the U.S. Nearly one-third of Navajo households lack access to running water.
Many health issues that can increase COVID-19 mortality rates occur at high levels among Native Americans. These underlying and preexisting conditions – things like hypertension, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease – are linked to diet and stem from disruption and replacement of Indigenous food systems.
Meanwhile, housing shortages on reservations and homelessness in urban Native communities make social distancing to reduce COVID-19 transmission impossible.
High exposure rates
These factors have clear health impacts. On the Navajo reservation, for instance, through May 27, 2020, 4,944 people out of a population of 173,000 had tested positive for COVID-19, and 159 had died.
This infection rate per capita exceeds those in hot spots such as New York and New Jersey. Importantly, however, it may also reflect a much more proactive approach to testing on reservations than in many other jurisdictions.
The fact that elderly people are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 could worsen the pandemic’s effects in Indian Country. Elders are the keepers of traditional knowledge, tribal languages and culture – legacies whose loss already threatens the persistence of indigenous communities.
Elders also play key roles in preserving traditional plant and medicine knowledge. In the absence of COVID-19 interventions from Western medicine, many elders have been called on to perform healing practices, which increases their exposure risk.
Little help from federal and state governments
Many tribal members rely on the federal government’s Indian Health Service for health care. But lack of capacity at the agency has hampered its response. Budget shortfalls, inaccurate data, the challenges of providing rural health care and ongoing personnel shortages in IHS clinics are compounded by staff being pulled away to fight the virus in large cities.
And while many states have raised frustrations with the Trump administration’s unwillingness to distribute protective supplies from the dwindling national stockpile, IHS and tribal health care authorities never had access to the stockpile at all.
Although the federal government has begun distributing relief funds to IHS agencies, there have been serious problems with the accompanying supplies. The Navajo Nation has received faulty masks, and a Seattle Native health center asked for tests but received body bags instead.
Meanwhile, federally imposed limits on tribal sovereignty have obstructed tribal governments’ efforts to deal with the pandemic themselves. Federal and state governments are challenging tribes’ jurisdictional authority to close borders to tourists who may carry the virus. South Dakota’s governor has threatened legal action against two tribes who set up checkpoints to monitor incoming traffic on their reservations.
Environmental injustices on Native land
Energy development and resource extraction have had disproportionate impacts on tribes for many years. Today, many Native American leaders worry that ongoing energy production – an “essential” activity under federal guidelines will bring outsiders into close contact with reservation communities, worsening COVID risks.
The owners of the Keystone XL oil pipeline have announced that they intend to continue construction, which will bring an influx of workers along the proposed route through Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and Fort Belknap Indian community in Montana have filed for a temporary restraining order, and a key permit for the pipeline was revoked in April 2020, but work continues at the U.S.-Canada border.
Construction is accelerating on the southern border wall, which bisects the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona and Mexico. The Trump administration has increased patrols at the border, despite the tribe’s concern that the patrols’ presence is spreading coronavirus on the reservation.
And in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a salmon fishing season that brings in thousands of temporary workers is set to open in June because the federal government has also deemed commercial fishing “essential critical infrastructure.” Many local Native villages depend on the fishery for income, but have nonetheless pleaded with state regulators to cancel the season. The regional hospital has just four beds for possible COVID-19 patients.
Bold action in Native communities
Native communities are taking decisive action to reduce the spread of COVID-19. They’re imposing aggressive quarantine measures like lockdowns, curfews and border closures. Communities are ramping up health care capacity and elder support services, and banishing nontribal members who violate travel restrictions.
Other strategies include helping hunters provide traditional foods to their communities, mobilizing to support tribal health care workers, and linking the pandemic and the climate crisis. Looking ahead to a post-COVID future, we believe one priority should be attending to front-line environmental justice struggles that center tribes’ sovereignty to act on their own behalf at all times, not just during national crises.
Now COVID-19 is having similarly devastating impacts in Indian country. Some reservations are reporting infection rates many times higher than those observed in the general U.S. population.
We are social scientists who study many aspects of environmental justice, including the politics of food access and food sovereignty, the impacts of extractive resource industries like uranium and fossil fuels, and how Indigenous communities navigate relationships with state and federal governments to maintain their traditional practices. As we see it, Native American communities face structural and historical obstacles related to settler colonial legacies that make it hard for them to counter the pandemic, even by drawing on innovative indigenous survival strategies.
History reverberates on Native lands
Native communities in North America have been disrupted and displaced for centuries. Many face long-standing food and water inequities that are further complicated by this pandemic.
On the Navajo reservation, which covers more than 27,000 square miles in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, 76% of households already have trouble affording enough healthy food, and the nearest grocery store is often hours away. COVID-related restrictions have further curtailed access to food supplies.
Clean water for basic sanitary measures like hand-washing is also scarce. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack indoor plumbing than whites in the U.S. Nearly one-third of Navajo households lack access to running water.
Many health issues that can increase COVID-19 mortality rates occur at high levels among Native Americans. These underlying and preexisting conditions – things like hypertension, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease – are linked to diet and stem from disruption and replacement of Indigenous food systems.
Meanwhile, housing shortages on reservations and homelessness in urban Native communities make social distancing to reduce COVID-19 transmission impossible.
High exposure rates
These factors have clear health impacts. On the Navajo reservation, for instance, through May 27, 2020, 4,944 people out of a population of 173,000 had tested positive for COVID-19, and 159 had died.
This infection rate per capita exceeds those in hot spots such as New York and New Jersey. Importantly, however, it may also reflect a much more proactive approach to testing on reservations than in many other jurisdictions.
The fact that elderly people are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 could worsen the pandemic’s effects in Indian Country. Elders are the keepers of traditional knowledge, tribal languages and culture – legacies whose loss already threatens the persistence of indigenous communities.
Elders also play key roles in preserving traditional plant and medicine knowledge. In the absence of COVID-19 interventions from Western medicine, many elders have been called on to perform healing practices, which increases their exposure risk.
Little help from federal and state governments
Many tribal members rely on the federal government’s Indian Health Service for health care. But lack of capacity at the agency has hampered its response. Budget shortfalls, inaccurate data, the challenges of providing rural health care and ongoing personnel shortages in IHS clinics are compounded by staff being pulled away to fight the virus in large cities.
And while many states have raised frustrations with the Trump administration’s unwillingness to distribute protective supplies from the dwindling national stockpile, IHS and tribal health care authorities never had access to the stockpile at all.
Although the federal government has begun distributing relief funds to IHS agencies, there have been serious problems with the accompanying supplies. The Navajo Nation has received faulty masks, and a Seattle Native health center asked for tests but received body bags instead.
Meanwhile, federally imposed limits on tribal sovereignty have obstructed tribal governments’ efforts to deal with the pandemic themselves. Federal and state governments are challenging tribes’ jurisdictional authority to close borders to tourists who may carry the virus. South Dakota’s governor has threatened legal action against two tribes who set up checkpoints to monitor incoming traffic on their reservations.
Environmental injustices on Native land
Energy development and resource extraction have had disproportionate impacts on tribes for many years. Today, many Native American leaders worry that ongoing energy production – an “essential” activity under federal guidelines will bring outsiders into close contact with reservation communities, worsening COVID risks.
The owners of the Keystone XL oil pipeline have announced that they intend to continue construction, which will bring an influx of workers along the proposed route through Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and Fort Belknap Indian community in Montana have filed for a temporary restraining order, and a key permit for the pipeline was revoked in April 2020, but work continues at the U.S.-Canada border.
Construction is accelerating on the southern border wall, which bisects the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona and Mexico. The Trump administration has increased patrols at the border, despite the tribe’s concern that the patrols’ presence is spreading coronavirus on the reservation.
And in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a salmon fishing season that brings in thousands of temporary workers is set to open in June because the federal government has also deemed commercial fishing “essential critical infrastructure.” Many local Native villages depend on the fishery for income, but have nonetheless pleaded with state regulators to cancel the season. The regional hospital has just four beds for possible COVID-19 patients.
Bold action in Native communities
Native communities are taking decisive action to reduce the spread of COVID-19. They’re imposing aggressive quarantine measures like lockdowns, curfews and border closures. Communities are ramping up health care capacity and elder support services, and banishing nontribal members who violate travel restrictions.
Other strategies include helping hunters provide traditional foods to their communities, mobilizing to support tribal health care workers, and linking the pandemic and the climate crisis. Looking ahead to a post-COVID future, we believe one priority should be attending to front-line environmental justice struggles that center tribes’ sovereignty to act on their own behalf at all times, not just during national crises.
Native Americans Wage War Against New Virus and a 400-year Disease of Bias, Ignorance
Will Bunch | the smirking chimp
May 16, 2020
Remi Bald Eagle wants the rest of America to know one thing about his people, the Cheyenne River Sioux of South Dakota, as their tribal nation battles both the coronavirus and the hostility of an open-for-business GOP governor who wants to stampede both the tribe’s sovereignty and the measures that have largely kept COVID-19 off the reservation.
“People think that we’re backward savages and now we’re putting a fence around ourselves,” Bald Eagle, the son of a revered Lakota chief and Army veteran of Afghanistan who now heads intergovernmental affairs for the Cheyenne River Sioux, told me by phone from Butte River, S.D. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
In the showdown over the right to operate highway coronavirus checkpoints pitting Bald Eagle’s people and other South Dakota tribes against Gov. Kristi Noem, each side has looked to a higher authority. Noem, a first-term Republican, has adopted the open-for-business mantra of her party’s leader, President Donald Trump—with whom she recently met with in the White House—by refusing to put her state on coronavirus lockdown even as one of the nation’s worst outbreaks festered at the Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls.
The Cheyenne River Sioux have instead chosen—since the first reports of COVID-19 in China began making headlines in January—to follow the path of science. Part of a broader strategy that included stockpiling food supplies early on and a stepped-up public health strategy, the roadside checkpoints allowed the Cheyenne River Sioux to identify the one instance, so far, of an infected individual returning to their reservation, treat that patient in quarantine, and prevent any new cases.
To echo Bald Eagle’s initial point, who exactly are the uncivilized peoples getting it all backward?
The fight over these checkpoints in South Dakota is much more than a local story. It carries the loud echo of this nation’s original and still ongoing sins — a four-century power play of brutality and forced relocation that has often brought death and disease to our continent’s indigenous people on a scale far worse than 2020′s coronavirus, amid a trail of tears and broken treaties.
Today, the story of Native Americans battling both the coronavirus and America’s warped politics is both a new chapter in that sordid history and also part of a bigger problem — that the pandemic and our shaky response has exposed the structural inequity throughout the United States. That stretches from the inadequate health care and preexisting conditions, or comorbidity, that have made marginalized people so much more prone to death from COVID-19 to the risk we impose on the low-wage employees who’ve been dubbed “essential workers” even as they remain cannon fodder for capitalism.
One reason that the Sioux tribal leaders in South Dakota are fighting so hard to use their aggressive, science-based methods is that Native Americans in other parts of the Lower 48 are suffering on reservations hampered by a lack of health care and nearby hospitals, high rates of underlying medical conditions, and a lack of internet access that makes it hard to share critical information.
In the American Southwest, where the Navajo Nation and its 350,000 people sprawl across several states, the number of known COVID-19 cases—closing in on 4,000—and a death toll of 119 people has become one of the country’s worst hot spots, and the caseload is continuing to rise.
“This is happening right in the middle of the most powerful nation in the world?” Jonathan Nez, the president of the Navajo Nation, told a Washington Post reporter recently as they toured the reservation. “We’re helping other nations with billions in aid, and the Navajo are still waiting on aid.” Nez complained that both long-term assistance to build water infrastructure was needed, but so was faster coronavirus relief — held up in Washington for weeks by bureaucratic red tape when it could have purchased ventilators and other critical aid. Touring remote corners of the reservation in New Mexico, Nez and the Post reporter met isolated residents who said it’s been a struggle to convince elder tribal members to stay at home or avoid religious gatherings because of lack of information.
If the story of Native Americans fighting a brutal outbreak of disease sounds familiar, it should. Throughout U.S. history, illnesses such as smallpox played a critical role as the population of indigenous people shrunk from more than two million to about 250,000 in 1890 at the end of white settlers’ frontier expansion (before rebounding in the 20th century). In a provocative recent essay in the Atlantic, University of Oregon professor Jeffrey Ostler argues that much of this death wasn’t because natives had no immunity to settlers’ germs—a concept that takes away moral culpability from the white frontiersmen — but because of the cruelty of forced migration and related crimes against humanity.
“The bigger story of disease and Native Americans is what happened as the process of—in the short-hand—colonialism advanced in various places,” Ostler told me by phone. He notes in his piece that during the notorious Trail of Tears forced march westward of Cherokee people in 1830, about one-fourth of the 16,000 migrants died from dysentery, measles, whooping cough, or malaria. Today, tribal members like the Navajo aren’t plagued so much by a lack of biological immunity as by poverty, a condition that afflicts too many Americans, native and nonnative.
That’s the backstory that led Sioux leaders to consult with doctors and scientific experts back in January, when Trump and many other pols in Washington and elsewhere where downplaying the coronavirus, or even predicting it would magically disappear. Bald Eagle said the turn to expertise occurred because his people are used to dealing with what he also considers to be epidemics--high rates of diabetes or asthma that he links to adopting a nonnative lifestyle—that could make the impact of COVID-19 even worse. But their checkpoints—where motorists who cross onto tribal reservations are interviewed about whether they’ve visited virus hot spots—have put the Sioux in conflict with Noem’s South Dakota government.
As late as April, Noem was bashing what she called the “herd mentality” of stay-at-home orders, declaring that “South Dakota is not New York City” and even touting the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug endorsed by Trump despite scientific evidence it’s not effective against this virus. The governor has stayed the course even as the disease outbreak at the Smithfield pork plant spiked to what one might call New York City proportions. Since then, Noem has aimed to shut down the tribal checkpoints—which she sees as a hindrance to free commerce, but also, like it or not, has proven much more effective in curbing the virus than her own freedom-fried approach.
Noem initially ordered the Cheyenne River Sioux and other tribes to remove all of the checkpoints, threatening to take the matter to federal court if tribal leaders refused to comply. So far, the Sioux have balked and Noem backed away slightly, calling for only the checkpoints on state highways to come down but not those on tribal roads.
Bald Eagle said there’s nothing to compromise over because Noem is blatantly ignoring the various treaties between the United States government and the Lakota nations granting sovereign powers over tribal lands, which they believe includes the power to establish their checkpoints. “Tribal nations are exactly that—we are nations with nation-to-nation agreements” with the United States. And yet, the trail of broken promises never ends.
Despite the great need that the coronavirus has caused on tribal lands, Trump—whose dim views on Native American affairs seem driven not by what’s right, but by his fights with tribal casinos in the 1990s — resisted relief money for their reservations. And when Congress inserted $8 billion into its package, his administration balked at writing those checks for weeks. Bald Eagle said the $20 million in relief dollars for the Cheyenne River Sioux just arrived—money that will not only help the tribe pay for its current health costs but to make plans for the next epidemic.
I asked Bald Eagle what he’d like other Americans to know about the Cheyenne River Sioux. “When we go to school on the reservation,” he said, “we have to learn English and about Christianity and other religions, and your forms of government and banking and your society. But our way is not taught to you, and we have to live among each other.”
When I look at the science-based approach to the coronavirus taken by Bald Eagle’s nation and compare it to the botched, politically toxic approach in the White House and the South Dakota governor’s mansion, I think we could learn a lot.
“People think that we’re backward savages and now we’re putting a fence around ourselves,” Bald Eagle, the son of a revered Lakota chief and Army veteran of Afghanistan who now heads intergovernmental affairs for the Cheyenne River Sioux, told me by phone from Butte River, S.D. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
In the showdown over the right to operate highway coronavirus checkpoints pitting Bald Eagle’s people and other South Dakota tribes against Gov. Kristi Noem, each side has looked to a higher authority. Noem, a first-term Republican, has adopted the open-for-business mantra of her party’s leader, President Donald Trump—with whom she recently met with in the White House—by refusing to put her state on coronavirus lockdown even as one of the nation’s worst outbreaks festered at the Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls.
The Cheyenne River Sioux have instead chosen—since the first reports of COVID-19 in China began making headlines in January—to follow the path of science. Part of a broader strategy that included stockpiling food supplies early on and a stepped-up public health strategy, the roadside checkpoints allowed the Cheyenne River Sioux to identify the one instance, so far, of an infected individual returning to their reservation, treat that patient in quarantine, and prevent any new cases.
To echo Bald Eagle’s initial point, who exactly are the uncivilized peoples getting it all backward?
The fight over these checkpoints in South Dakota is much more than a local story. It carries the loud echo of this nation’s original and still ongoing sins — a four-century power play of brutality and forced relocation that has often brought death and disease to our continent’s indigenous people on a scale far worse than 2020′s coronavirus, amid a trail of tears and broken treaties.
Today, the story of Native Americans battling both the coronavirus and America’s warped politics is both a new chapter in that sordid history and also part of a bigger problem — that the pandemic and our shaky response has exposed the structural inequity throughout the United States. That stretches from the inadequate health care and preexisting conditions, or comorbidity, that have made marginalized people so much more prone to death from COVID-19 to the risk we impose on the low-wage employees who’ve been dubbed “essential workers” even as they remain cannon fodder for capitalism.
One reason that the Sioux tribal leaders in South Dakota are fighting so hard to use their aggressive, science-based methods is that Native Americans in other parts of the Lower 48 are suffering on reservations hampered by a lack of health care and nearby hospitals, high rates of underlying medical conditions, and a lack of internet access that makes it hard to share critical information.
In the American Southwest, where the Navajo Nation and its 350,000 people sprawl across several states, the number of known COVID-19 cases—closing in on 4,000—and a death toll of 119 people has become one of the country’s worst hot spots, and the caseload is continuing to rise.
“This is happening right in the middle of the most powerful nation in the world?” Jonathan Nez, the president of the Navajo Nation, told a Washington Post reporter recently as they toured the reservation. “We’re helping other nations with billions in aid, and the Navajo are still waiting on aid.” Nez complained that both long-term assistance to build water infrastructure was needed, but so was faster coronavirus relief — held up in Washington for weeks by bureaucratic red tape when it could have purchased ventilators and other critical aid. Touring remote corners of the reservation in New Mexico, Nez and the Post reporter met isolated residents who said it’s been a struggle to convince elder tribal members to stay at home or avoid religious gatherings because of lack of information.
If the story of Native Americans fighting a brutal outbreak of disease sounds familiar, it should. Throughout U.S. history, illnesses such as smallpox played a critical role as the population of indigenous people shrunk from more than two million to about 250,000 in 1890 at the end of white settlers’ frontier expansion (before rebounding in the 20th century). In a provocative recent essay in the Atlantic, University of Oregon professor Jeffrey Ostler argues that much of this death wasn’t because natives had no immunity to settlers’ germs—a concept that takes away moral culpability from the white frontiersmen — but because of the cruelty of forced migration and related crimes against humanity.
“The bigger story of disease and Native Americans is what happened as the process of—in the short-hand—colonialism advanced in various places,” Ostler told me by phone. He notes in his piece that during the notorious Trail of Tears forced march westward of Cherokee people in 1830, about one-fourth of the 16,000 migrants died from dysentery, measles, whooping cough, or malaria. Today, tribal members like the Navajo aren’t plagued so much by a lack of biological immunity as by poverty, a condition that afflicts too many Americans, native and nonnative.
That’s the backstory that led Sioux leaders to consult with doctors and scientific experts back in January, when Trump and many other pols in Washington and elsewhere where downplaying the coronavirus, or even predicting it would magically disappear. Bald Eagle said the turn to expertise occurred because his people are used to dealing with what he also considers to be epidemics--high rates of diabetes or asthma that he links to adopting a nonnative lifestyle—that could make the impact of COVID-19 even worse. But their checkpoints—where motorists who cross onto tribal reservations are interviewed about whether they’ve visited virus hot spots—have put the Sioux in conflict with Noem’s South Dakota government.
As late as April, Noem was bashing what she called the “herd mentality” of stay-at-home orders, declaring that “South Dakota is not New York City” and even touting the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug endorsed by Trump despite scientific evidence it’s not effective against this virus. The governor has stayed the course even as the disease outbreak at the Smithfield pork plant spiked to what one might call New York City proportions. Since then, Noem has aimed to shut down the tribal checkpoints—which she sees as a hindrance to free commerce, but also, like it or not, has proven much more effective in curbing the virus than her own freedom-fried approach.
Noem initially ordered the Cheyenne River Sioux and other tribes to remove all of the checkpoints, threatening to take the matter to federal court if tribal leaders refused to comply. So far, the Sioux have balked and Noem backed away slightly, calling for only the checkpoints on state highways to come down but not those on tribal roads.
Bald Eagle said there’s nothing to compromise over because Noem is blatantly ignoring the various treaties between the United States government and the Lakota nations granting sovereign powers over tribal lands, which they believe includes the power to establish their checkpoints. “Tribal nations are exactly that—we are nations with nation-to-nation agreements” with the United States. And yet, the trail of broken promises never ends.
Despite the great need that the coronavirus has caused on tribal lands, Trump—whose dim views on Native American affairs seem driven not by what’s right, but by his fights with tribal casinos in the 1990s — resisted relief money for their reservations. And when Congress inserted $8 billion into its package, his administration balked at writing those checks for weeks. Bald Eagle said the $20 million in relief dollars for the Cheyenne River Sioux just arrived—money that will not only help the tribe pay for its current health costs but to make plans for the next epidemic.
I asked Bald Eagle what he’d like other Americans to know about the Cheyenne River Sioux. “When we go to school on the reservation,” he said, “we have to learn English and about Christianity and other religions, and your forms of government and banking and your society. But our way is not taught to you, and we have to live among each other.”
When I look at the science-based approach to the coronavirus taken by Bald Eagle’s nation and compare it to the botched, politically toxic approach in the White House and the South Dakota governor’s mansion, I think we could learn a lot.
Judge blocks Trump from giving coronavirus relief for Native American communities to corporations
April 30, 2020
By Igor Derysh, Salon - raw story
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration Monday from passing out coronavirus relief funds intended to help Native American communities to certain for-profit corporations owned by Natives.
The decision came after the Treasury Department made Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) eligible for $8 billion in funding allocated by Congress to help Native American tribes. ANCs serve as holding companies for businesses that benefit from Native lands. There are about 237 ANCs in Alaska.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin argued that Congress “expressly chose to include ANCs” in its definition of “Indian tribe” in the CARES Act. But in a letter to Mnuchin, 12 House Democrats, including all four Native American members of Congress, argued that the “spirit and language” of the bill was to allocate the money to tribal governments — not ANCs.
Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., the vice chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said in a separate letter to Mnuchin that Congress intended the funds solely for tribal governments so “they can continue essential government services.”
“Non-governmental tribal entities may well warrant relief under other CARES Act programs, but this funding in this title was intended for tribal governments and should not be diverted,” he said.
Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., joined the lawmakers in arguing that the administration’s decision “betrays Congressional intent & betrays Tribal nations.”
More than a dozen tribal governments sued the administration, arguing that the decision would dilute funds intended to help areas among the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta agreed Monday that giving “dollars to for-profit corporations does not jibe” with the law’s “general purpose of funding the emergency needs of ‘governments.’”
The administration argued that ANCs could deliver services to communities like a tribal government, but Mehta said there was no evidence that ANCs were providing public services during the crisis. He also took issue with the government’s claim that the Treasury Inspector General could simply take back the money if it was improperly distributed.
“That seems unlikely,” Mehta said.
Mehta issued a preliminary injunction blocking the department from giving the funds to ANCs but stopped short of the tribes’ request to immediately send the $8 billion to tribal governments.
“Plaintiffs easily satisfy their burden to show that they will suffer irreparable injury in the absence of immediate injunctive relief,” Mehta ruled. “The $8 billion dollars allocated by Congress for ‘tribal governments’ is a fixed sum that plaintiffs and other tribal governments are entitled to receive to cover costs of combatting the COVID-19 pandemic in their communities . . . Any dollars improperly paid to ANCs will reduce the funds to plaintiffs. And, once disbursed, those funds will not be recoverable by judicial decree.”
Tribal leaders celebrated their win as they vowed to continue to fight for the money that was already allocated to them.
“Our voices were heard and our people prevailed today!” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said. “I’m sure there will be other attempts to direct these funds away from tribes,” he added, vowing to continue to fight “for our fair share of the CARES Act funding.”
Congress clearly intended these governments — not Alaska corporate interests — to utilize the limited amount of CARES Act funds for recovery in Indian Country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement. “Tribes are leading the effort across the country to respond to COVID-19. Today’s win is a victory for these tribal governments, who will use this funding source as intended, to bravely lead and guide decisions best for our people in the midst of one of the greatest public health crisis in generations.”
The decision came after the Treasury Department made Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) eligible for $8 billion in funding allocated by Congress to help Native American tribes. ANCs serve as holding companies for businesses that benefit from Native lands. There are about 237 ANCs in Alaska.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin argued that Congress “expressly chose to include ANCs” in its definition of “Indian tribe” in the CARES Act. But in a letter to Mnuchin, 12 House Democrats, including all four Native American members of Congress, argued that the “spirit and language” of the bill was to allocate the money to tribal governments — not ANCs.
Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., the vice chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said in a separate letter to Mnuchin that Congress intended the funds solely for tribal governments so “they can continue essential government services.”
“Non-governmental tribal entities may well warrant relief under other CARES Act programs, but this funding in this title was intended for tribal governments and should not be diverted,” he said.
Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., joined the lawmakers in arguing that the administration’s decision “betrays Congressional intent & betrays Tribal nations.”
More than a dozen tribal governments sued the administration, arguing that the decision would dilute funds intended to help areas among the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta agreed Monday that giving “dollars to for-profit corporations does not jibe” with the law’s “general purpose of funding the emergency needs of ‘governments.’”
The administration argued that ANCs could deliver services to communities like a tribal government, but Mehta said there was no evidence that ANCs were providing public services during the crisis. He also took issue with the government’s claim that the Treasury Inspector General could simply take back the money if it was improperly distributed.
“That seems unlikely,” Mehta said.
Mehta issued a preliminary injunction blocking the department from giving the funds to ANCs but stopped short of the tribes’ request to immediately send the $8 billion to tribal governments.
“Plaintiffs easily satisfy their burden to show that they will suffer irreparable injury in the absence of immediate injunctive relief,” Mehta ruled. “The $8 billion dollars allocated by Congress for ‘tribal governments’ is a fixed sum that plaintiffs and other tribal governments are entitled to receive to cover costs of combatting the COVID-19 pandemic in their communities . . . Any dollars improperly paid to ANCs will reduce the funds to plaintiffs. And, once disbursed, those funds will not be recoverable by judicial decree.”
Tribal leaders celebrated their win as they vowed to continue to fight for the money that was already allocated to them.
“Our voices were heard and our people prevailed today!” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said. “I’m sure there will be other attempts to direct these funds away from tribes,” he added, vowing to continue to fight “for our fair share of the CARES Act funding.”
Congress clearly intended these governments — not Alaska corporate interests — to utilize the limited amount of CARES Act funds for recovery in Indian Country,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in a statement. “Tribes are leading the effort across the country to respond to COVID-19. Today’s win is a victory for these tribal governments, who will use this funding source as intended, to bravely lead and guide decisions best for our people in the midst of one of the greatest public health crisis in generations.”
Historic Injustices Against Native People Put Them at Greater Risk of COVID-19
BY Jen Deerinwater, Truthout
PUBLISHED April 3, 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the U.S., Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to this virus. On March 24, Indian Country Today reported there were 40 confirmed cases, 29 of which were on the Navajo Nation reservation. The first person to die of the virus in Oklahoma was a Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma citizen. On April 1, the number of cases in Indian Health Services (IHS) had risen to 276 with 14 confirmed deaths; 214 of these cases are on the Navajo Nation reservation.
The dire living conditions of many Native people and the lack of resources allocated to tribal nations is creating a higher likelihood of COVID-19 contraction rates and deaths. The American Indian and Alaska Native (AI and AN) population has only recently comprised 2 percent of the American population. This growth is a rebound from over 500 years of continual genocide, which has included pandemics and germ warfare. Additionally, 42 percent of AI and AN people are 24 or younger, making the conditions of youth of particular importance to Native nations.
Current conditions are bleak and could set tribal nations up for less resources and power for years to come.
Native people are more likely to live in poverty than non-Natives. In 2016, 26.2 percent of Native people were living in poverty while the overall U.S. poverty rate was 14 percent. These numbers can often vary across tribal nations. The Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation, for example, have significantly higher poverty rates. Ninety-seven percent of Pine Ridge residents live below the U.S. federal poverty line. The median household income on the reservation ranges between $2,600 and $3,500 per year with a 90 percent unemployment rate. With the exception of Haiti, the Pine Ridge reservation has the lowest life expectancy in the Western hemisphere at 48 years old for men and 52 years old for women.
On more rural tribal lands, access to food and supplies are lower and significantly more expensive, creating a scarcity. Out of the 574 federally recognized tribes, 229 are in Alaska. Kevin Allis, CEO of National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), said during a press briefing on March 20 that Alaskan villages are dependent on goods flown in on bush planes or trucked in over ice roads, which increases the likelihood of COVID-19 or other illnesses being brought into these remote communities. A lack of infrastructure on tribal lands is setting communities back during this crisis.
There are 183 Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools that serve 48,000 students. However, not all Indigenous students on tribal lands attend BIE schools and instead receive their education through tribal-run schools, making the number of students out of school higher than 48,000. Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) stated in the NCAI briefing that 37 percent of these students at BIE schools are without internet, making online distance learning impossible and “the school year a wash.”
“Without internet access, it doesn’t matter how hard they [students] work,” Cournoyer said. With the schools closed, many students may also go without food as the schools provide breakfast, lunch and a snack.
Dante Desiderio, executive director of the Native American Finance Officers Association, explained during the briefing that Native youth who have aged out of foster care and are now enrolled in college are being removed from university dorms and have nowhere to go.
---
Indian Health Service Underfunding and Lack of Preparedness Increase COVID-19 Risk
IHS is the “world’s first pre-paid health care system” said Stacy Bohlen, CEO of National Indian Health Board (NIHB) on the March 20 briefing. These services were paid for with Native lives, lands and resources. The U.S. government has a treaty and trust responsibility to provide this medical care.
IHS serves 2.5 million Native people, more than a quarter of whom are uninsured; double the national rate. The annual IHS budget is less than 1/6 of what tribal leaders estimate is needed to fully fund the health system. This amounts to over $10 billion.
Lack of funding is not the only problem IHS faces. It has a staff shortage and a lack of facilities, supplies, equipment, and COVID-19 tests and labs to process the tests. Piling on to the already over-worked staff, Indian Country has lost close to 200 Commissioned Corps officers to COVID-19 deployments. The Commissioned Corp officers of the U.S. Public Health Service provide additional medical help during times of public health crisis and have been an integral part of filling in the staff shortages at IHS facilities. Tribes still have to pay the salaries of these officers even though they’re no longer providing care to tribes.
Dr. Katherine Crocker (Kaw Nation), a biologist at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told Truthout that as a result of “medical racism,” Native people aren’t prioritized and this is shaping the lack of access to COVID-19 resources. IHS has claimed it is able to process test kits, yet tribal leaders are telling a different story.
In a press release on April 1, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez stated, “We’re two weeks into this pandemic and we need many more test kits, we need testing labs in our communities so we can get results much quicker.”
---
Why the Census Matters Even More During the Pandemic
Seventy-one percent of AI and AN people live in urban areas, but only 1 percent of the IHS budget is awarded to urban Indian health centers. Kerry Hawk Lessard, executive director of Native American Lifelines, told Truthout that these centers can’t rely on Massachusetts or Maryland health officials to accurately count Native people, so as a result, funds are rarely allocated for urban care.
Exacerbating future underfunding is the 2020 census. AI and AN people are the most undercounted racial group in the census and many live in what the Census Bureau considers hard-to-count tracts. Face-to-face enumeration is essential to an accurate count in Indian Country, but it has stopped due to COVID-19. The lack of internet and tech access on tribal lands excludes many people from completing the census online.
Even for urban Natives who may have the infrastructure to access internet and computers, high rates of poverty mean many have to use free resources at libraries and community centers, which are now closed.
The Census Bureau confirmed to Truthout that it’s working with tribes, but gave no specifics on what it is doing to support tribes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Allis said in the briefing that “Indian Country will be faced with another 10 years of bad census data.” This data is used in a multitude of ways, which include political representation and funding. A lack of accurate census data could continue the cycle of poverty many Native people experience. It could also lead tribes to remain under-prepared for any future pandemics.
This isn’t the first pandemic Indigenous people have faced, and the ancestral knowledge to survive is within tribal nations. Despite the position that Native people are currently in, Hawn wants to remind Native people to “focus on the brilliance of Natives and the things that Natives are always doing to survive.”
The dire living conditions of many Native people and the lack of resources allocated to tribal nations is creating a higher likelihood of COVID-19 contraction rates and deaths. The American Indian and Alaska Native (AI and AN) population has only recently comprised 2 percent of the American population. This growth is a rebound from over 500 years of continual genocide, which has included pandemics and germ warfare. Additionally, 42 percent of AI and AN people are 24 or younger, making the conditions of youth of particular importance to Native nations.
Current conditions are bleak and could set tribal nations up for less resources and power for years to come.
Native people are more likely to live in poverty than non-Natives. In 2016, 26.2 percent of Native people were living in poverty while the overall U.S. poverty rate was 14 percent. These numbers can often vary across tribal nations. The Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation, for example, have significantly higher poverty rates. Ninety-seven percent of Pine Ridge residents live below the U.S. federal poverty line. The median household income on the reservation ranges between $2,600 and $3,500 per year with a 90 percent unemployment rate. With the exception of Haiti, the Pine Ridge reservation has the lowest life expectancy in the Western hemisphere at 48 years old for men and 52 years old for women.
On more rural tribal lands, access to food and supplies are lower and significantly more expensive, creating a scarcity. Out of the 574 federally recognized tribes, 229 are in Alaska. Kevin Allis, CEO of National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), said during a press briefing on March 20 that Alaskan villages are dependent on goods flown in on bush planes or trucked in over ice roads, which increases the likelihood of COVID-19 or other illnesses being brought into these remote communities. A lack of infrastructure on tribal lands is setting communities back during this crisis.
There are 183 Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools that serve 48,000 students. However, not all Indigenous students on tribal lands attend BIE schools and instead receive their education through tribal-run schools, making the number of students out of school higher than 48,000. Diana Cournoyer, executive director of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) stated in the NCAI briefing that 37 percent of these students at BIE schools are without internet, making online distance learning impossible and “the school year a wash.”
“Without internet access, it doesn’t matter how hard they [students] work,” Cournoyer said. With the schools closed, many students may also go without food as the schools provide breakfast, lunch and a snack.
Dante Desiderio, executive director of the Native American Finance Officers Association, explained during the briefing that Native youth who have aged out of foster care and are now enrolled in college are being removed from university dorms and have nowhere to go.
---
Indian Health Service Underfunding and Lack of Preparedness Increase COVID-19 Risk
IHS is the “world’s first pre-paid health care system” said Stacy Bohlen, CEO of National Indian Health Board (NIHB) on the March 20 briefing. These services were paid for with Native lives, lands and resources. The U.S. government has a treaty and trust responsibility to provide this medical care.
IHS serves 2.5 million Native people, more than a quarter of whom are uninsured; double the national rate. The annual IHS budget is less than 1/6 of what tribal leaders estimate is needed to fully fund the health system. This amounts to over $10 billion.
Lack of funding is not the only problem IHS faces. It has a staff shortage and a lack of facilities, supplies, equipment, and COVID-19 tests and labs to process the tests. Piling on to the already over-worked staff, Indian Country has lost close to 200 Commissioned Corps officers to COVID-19 deployments. The Commissioned Corp officers of the U.S. Public Health Service provide additional medical help during times of public health crisis and have been an integral part of filling in the staff shortages at IHS facilities. Tribes still have to pay the salaries of these officers even though they’re no longer providing care to tribes.
Dr. Katherine Crocker (Kaw Nation), a biologist at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told Truthout that as a result of “medical racism,” Native people aren’t prioritized and this is shaping the lack of access to COVID-19 resources. IHS has claimed it is able to process test kits, yet tribal leaders are telling a different story.
In a press release on April 1, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez stated, “We’re two weeks into this pandemic and we need many more test kits, we need testing labs in our communities so we can get results much quicker.”
---
Why the Census Matters Even More During the Pandemic
Seventy-one percent of AI and AN people live in urban areas, but only 1 percent of the IHS budget is awarded to urban Indian health centers. Kerry Hawk Lessard, executive director of Native American Lifelines, told Truthout that these centers can’t rely on Massachusetts or Maryland health officials to accurately count Native people, so as a result, funds are rarely allocated for urban care.
Exacerbating future underfunding is the 2020 census. AI and AN people are the most undercounted racial group in the census and many live in what the Census Bureau considers hard-to-count tracts. Face-to-face enumeration is essential to an accurate count in Indian Country, but it has stopped due to COVID-19. The lack of internet and tech access on tribal lands excludes many people from completing the census online.
Even for urban Natives who may have the infrastructure to access internet and computers, high rates of poverty mean many have to use free resources at libraries and community centers, which are now closed.
The Census Bureau confirmed to Truthout that it’s working with tribes, but gave no specifics on what it is doing to support tribes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Allis said in the briefing that “Indian Country will be faced with another 10 years of bad census data.” This data is used in a multitude of ways, which include political representation and funding. A lack of accurate census data could continue the cycle of poverty many Native people experience. It could also lead tribes to remain under-prepared for any future pandemics.
This isn’t the first pandemic Indigenous people have faced, and the ancestral knowledge to survive is within tribal nations. Despite the position that Native people are currently in, Hawn wants to remind Native people to “focus on the brilliance of Natives and the things that Natives are always doing to survive.”
the thievery continues!!!
Trump administration revokes tribe’s reservation status in ‘power grab’
Sign of willingness to use discretionary powers to attempt to take lands away from Native American tribes, advocacy group says
Guardian staff and agency
Tue 31 Mar 2020 17.34 EDT
A tribe is losing reservation status for its more than 300 acres in Massachusetts, raising fears among Native American groups that other tribes could face the same fate under the Trump administration.
The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, which traces its ancestry to the Native Americans that shared a fall harvest meal with the Pilgrims in 1621, was notified late on Friday by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs that it will be rescinding its reservation designation and removing the land from federal trust, according to Cedric Cromwell, the tribe’s chairman.
He said the move is “cruel” and “unnecessary” as the tribe and others across the nation are struggling to respond to the coronavirus pandemic within their sovereign lands.
The decision, if allowed to stand, would destroy much of what the tribe has worked to build in recent years on its sovereign lands, Cromwell said. That includes establishing an independent judicial system, police force and Wampanoag-language school, as well as beginning construction on a roughly 50-unit tribal housing development and breaking ground on a $1bn resort casino
“Talk about being blindsided. It was a sucker punch in the face from the bully you thought was your friend,” Cromwell said. “I thought they were calling to see how we’re doing in all of this. To do it at 4pm on a Friday during a pandemic? That’s sneaky.”
The US Department of the Interior, which oversees Native American affairs, is obligated by a recent federal court decision to remove the special land designations, which were bestowed in 2015 under then President Barack Obama, according to Conner Swanson, an agency spokesman.
In February, the US court of appeals in Boston upheld a lower-court decision declaring the federal government had not been authorized to take land into trust for the Cape Cod-based tribe.
The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe declined to challenge that decision, but Cromwell argues a separate lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington DC, is still pending.
The decision is the latest concerning sign that the Trump administration is willing to use its discretionary powers to attempt to take lands away from tribes, said Jean-Luc Pierite, of the North American Indian Center, a Boston-based advocacy group.
“This is an existential crisis for tribes,” Pierite said. “It’s a power grab and a land grab by the Trump administration.”
Former vice-president and now 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden posted a protest on Twitter to the Trump move.
Last April, the interior department withdrew trust status from lands owned by the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians in California, citing the discovery of endangered bird species.
Congress eventually included a provision in a defense spending bill in December declaring that the more than 1,400 acres of land would be held in trust for the tribe to build housing.
Swanson stressed the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe retains its federal recognition, which it earned in 2007.
The tribe’s more than 300 acres – about half of which are located in the town of Mashpee and the other half in Taunton near the Rhode Island state line – also remain in the tribe’s ownership, as it had before the federal government took them into trust, he noted.
Cromwell promised the tribe would continue its decades-long land fight.
“These are the lands of our ancestors, and these will be the lands of our grandchildren,” he said. “We will not rest until we are treated equally with other federally recognized tribes and the status of our reservation is confirmed.”
The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, which traces its ancestry to the Native Americans that shared a fall harvest meal with the Pilgrims in 1621, was notified late on Friday by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs that it will be rescinding its reservation designation and removing the land from federal trust, according to Cedric Cromwell, the tribe’s chairman.
He said the move is “cruel” and “unnecessary” as the tribe and others across the nation are struggling to respond to the coronavirus pandemic within their sovereign lands.
The decision, if allowed to stand, would destroy much of what the tribe has worked to build in recent years on its sovereign lands, Cromwell said. That includes establishing an independent judicial system, police force and Wampanoag-language school, as well as beginning construction on a roughly 50-unit tribal housing development and breaking ground on a $1bn resort casino
“Talk about being blindsided. It was a sucker punch in the face from the bully you thought was your friend,” Cromwell said. “I thought they were calling to see how we’re doing in all of this. To do it at 4pm on a Friday during a pandemic? That’s sneaky.”
The US Department of the Interior, which oversees Native American affairs, is obligated by a recent federal court decision to remove the special land designations, which were bestowed in 2015 under then President Barack Obama, according to Conner Swanson, an agency spokesman.
In February, the US court of appeals in Boston upheld a lower-court decision declaring the federal government had not been authorized to take land into trust for the Cape Cod-based tribe.
The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe declined to challenge that decision, but Cromwell argues a separate lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington DC, is still pending.
The decision is the latest concerning sign that the Trump administration is willing to use its discretionary powers to attempt to take lands away from tribes, said Jean-Luc Pierite, of the North American Indian Center, a Boston-based advocacy group.
“This is an existential crisis for tribes,” Pierite said. “It’s a power grab and a land grab by the Trump administration.”
Former vice-president and now 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden posted a protest on Twitter to the Trump move.
Last April, the interior department withdrew trust status from lands owned by the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians in California, citing the discovery of endangered bird species.
Congress eventually included a provision in a defense spending bill in December declaring that the more than 1,400 acres of land would be held in trust for the tribe to build housing.
Swanson stressed the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe retains its federal recognition, which it earned in 2007.
The tribe’s more than 300 acres – about half of which are located in the town of Mashpee and the other half in Taunton near the Rhode Island state line – also remain in the tribe’s ownership, as it had before the federal government took them into trust, he noted.
Cromwell promised the tribe would continue its decades-long land fight.
“These are the lands of our ancestors, and these will be the lands of our grandchildren,” he said. “We will not rest until we are treated equally with other federally recognized tribes and the status of our reservation is confirmed.”
Native Activists Are Forging a Just Transition to Renewable Energy
BY Winona LaDuke, Truthout
PUBLISHED March 1, 2020
Native activists and youth are shaping a clear vision for the transition necessary to guide us toward an environmentally just future — and there are more of them coming. Nationally, the Sunrise Movement and Indigenous environmental justice groups are overtaking entrenched political power with a breath of fresh air. Democrats are even talking about it. The Green New Deal policy is in Congress, but underlying it is the broader need for a just transition strategy — a plan that supports workers in securing fair and meaningful jobs as deep structural changes are made to the way humans relate to the environment.
Transition is inevitable, but justice is not. That’s the basics. “Just transition” is a framework for a fair shift to an economy that is ecologically sustainable, equitable and just for all.
Fairbanks is a place where just transition may well be on the horizon. Yes, Fairbanks, Alaska — the heart of that state’s military industrial-complex and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. This is not Berkeley, California. But it is a multiracial town, largely because the military is more diverse than the Alaskan population itself. On the coldest day in a month in Fairbanks, a balmy -35 degrees Fahrenheit, the Indigenous social justice organization Native Movement gathered hundreds of Indigenous leaders with economists, planners, writers and visionaries to talk about the next economy, and has based their strategy on the traditional economy. After all, that was the original green new deal.
---
Native Movement is challenging the holy grail of oil and the military, and it’s about time. Frontier thinking has brought Alaska into continuous cultural, economic and environmental crisis. With the discovery of the largest oil field in North America, Alaska was forced to legally deal with Native people, creating the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, which created the largest Native land claims settlement in United States history. It was implemented to provide the oil industry with access to Native lands. ANCSA was intended to resolve long-standing issues surrounding aboriginal people’s land claims in Alaska. It created a boom for the oil industry and destruction of Native lifestyle. Exploiting oil released millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And that was not a good idea.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act transformed Indigenous politics and opened a door for Alaska to create its frontier economy full on. Prudhoe Bay, or Sagavanirktok, is the jewel of Alaska’s oil exploitation. Spanning 200,000 acres, the field is estimated to contain about 25 billion barrels of oil. It’s booming, and the Trump administration hopes to boom right along into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the Gwich’in and their allies have held off oil exploitation for a good 30 years. Trump’s plans amount to a big problem ecologically and in terms of the future of a people. After all, the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline system cause about 500 oil and toxic chemical spills annually on the North Slope, and the Arctic is melting. The Prudhoe Bay oil spill in 2006 leaked an estimated 27,000 gallons of oil.
For 30 years, Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit or “The Sacred Place Where Life Begins” (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the south of Prudhoe Bay) has been threatened by big oil companies. It is home to the largest remaining herd of caribou on the continent. The Gwich’in people have relied on the Porcupine caribou herd for thousands of years, for food, and cultural and spiritual needs. The Porcupine caribou herd migrates to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain every year where pregnant caribou will give birth.
This area is also home to the military. After Hawaii, Alaska is the most militarized state in terms of the Pentagon’s economic impact. Seven hundred active and abandoned military sites account for at least 1,900 toxic hot spots. Five out of seven Superfund sites in the state are a result of military contamination. The 700 formerly used defense sites in Alaska tell a history of the Cold War and every war since. The military holds over 1.7 million acres of Alaska, and it’s not going anywhere soon.
Finally, take the largest new boondoggle mining project in Alaskan history, the proposed Pebble Mine, a huge gold-mining complex at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, the most productive salmon fishery in the U.S. After rejections by the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and huge citizen opposition, the Trump EPA may try and permit another project which should never happen.
Yet, in the face of Alaska’s colonial environmental violence, Native people are shining a light on the path ahead. Many Native villages have been least served by the fossil fuel industry and first world infrastructure, in spite of the fact that Native wealth and resources built Alaska. Now tribes are leapfrogging into the next economy. Take the Pribilof Islands. The Aleut villages “where the wind is born” lie 900-plus air miles from Anchorage. The price of electricity generation is between 22 cents and 58 cents per kilowatt hour. That makes for some expensive power in a cold location. Aleuts have a complex gift of wind — class seven wind, the highest rating, with some big turbulence of l50 mph wind speeds in a gust at times. Necessity is the mother of invention, and for the past two decades the Pribilof Islands have been working with wind power, putting up some small- and medium-scale turbines to meet local needs, or at least offset diesel.
In a time of climate change, Alaska is hurting. Climate impacts are amplified in the Arctic; and Kivalina, Shishmaref and a number of other villages are melting into the ocean. The polar bears are starving. The ice is not good, meaning that polar bears cannot catch seals because the ice does not form or does not support the weight of the bears. They need thick ice, which is not being created because of climate change. The rising sea level is flooding villages along the Alaska sea coast. In the village of Newtok, the ocean has risen so much that the sea is within inches of the front doors of their homes. Strong winds bring the waves over their door sills. The price tag for the relocation of Native villages that have been there for a thousand years is in the hundreds of millions. That’s killer. There’s no time like the present to make a plan.
The basic food of Alaska is found in the bush or the ocean. That’s in total disarray with climate change. As Alaskan villages grapple with more food insecurity than they have ever known, climate change brings the possibility of Arctic agriculture. Fairbanks has two additional weeks of above-freezing growing time now, and as Norway, Iceland and other Scandinavian countries move toward larger agriculture, Alaska will follow. In Fairbanks, the number of frost-free days has almost doubled since the 1900s, said Milan Shipka, director of the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “The ability to work the ground occurred at least two weeks earlier than what anyone would have expected,” he said.
Alaska has more than 750 farms working 830,000 acres of farmland. The industry contributed more than $48 million to the economy in 2014. More than that, those farms can grow food for villages, not just for money. And that is part of just transition. Native villages are looking to year-round greenhouses, heating from natural hot springs, and working with the endless light to grow for the future.
Alaska is only one place where Indigenous leaders are moving toward the next economy. At a June 2018, gathering at Albuquerque’s Larry Casuse Freedom Center, Indigenous leaders unveiled core principles of the Red Deal, asking: “Imagine if we had over a trillion dollars to invest in healthcare for everyone? To increase teachers’ pay so they can provide quality, free education to everyone? To repair roads and provide safe and accessible public transportation for everyone? To invest in large-scale language revitalization programs in every Indigenous nation on the continent?”
From Lakota territory, born of the successful work of the Thunder Valley Community Development is the national NDN Collective. It’s a powerhouse of leading young Indigenous economists, architects and leaders. They call on the larger movement to not only divest from fossil fuels, but also to create an economic strategy that will “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers.” Further, the collective holds that “any Green New Deal project or program that impacts our lands and people must have Indigenous leadership and occur in transparent, and collaborative partnership.”
Similarly, Alaska’s Native Movement argues for an Indigenous-led transition rooted in Indigenous ecological practices and social values associated with long-term stability.
“If the purpose of the Regenerative Economy is ecological restoration, community resilience and social equity, then resources must be acquired through regeneration,” Native Movement wrote in a conference handout. “We must build rather than deplete soil. We must engage forests and rivers in ways that provide for our needs, but at a scale and pace aligned with living systems. In other words, we must remember and return to land-based ways of knowing.”
The Department of Energy estimates that wind power from tribal lands could satisfy 32 percent of the total U.S. electricity demand. And solar production from Native lands could generate enough energy to power the country two times over. That’s the next economy.
The implications are immense, as is the potential. A post-fossil fuel economy is being born across the continent. The Standing Rock reservation brought on line the largest solar project in North Dakota; the Blue Lake Rancheria leads northern California in solar power and storage; White Earth reservation is manufacturing solar thermal panels (8th Fire Solar) to heat cold homes; and in the Navajo Nation, a historic powerhouse of coal generation, the Kayenta II Solar Project, will provide solar energy using the grid built for coal. The beginning is near, and it’s a green, restorative economy, based on Indigenous values and knowledge.
Transition is inevitable, but justice is not. That’s the basics. “Just transition” is a framework for a fair shift to an economy that is ecologically sustainable, equitable and just for all.
Fairbanks is a place where just transition may well be on the horizon. Yes, Fairbanks, Alaska — the heart of that state’s military industrial-complex and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. This is not Berkeley, California. But it is a multiracial town, largely because the military is more diverse than the Alaskan population itself. On the coldest day in a month in Fairbanks, a balmy -35 degrees Fahrenheit, the Indigenous social justice organization Native Movement gathered hundreds of Indigenous leaders with economists, planners, writers and visionaries to talk about the next economy, and has based their strategy on the traditional economy. After all, that was the original green new deal.
---
Native Movement is challenging the holy grail of oil and the military, and it’s about time. Frontier thinking has brought Alaska into continuous cultural, economic and environmental crisis. With the discovery of the largest oil field in North America, Alaska was forced to legally deal with Native people, creating the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, which created the largest Native land claims settlement in United States history. It was implemented to provide the oil industry with access to Native lands. ANCSA was intended to resolve long-standing issues surrounding aboriginal people’s land claims in Alaska. It created a boom for the oil industry and destruction of Native lifestyle. Exploiting oil released millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And that was not a good idea.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act transformed Indigenous politics and opened a door for Alaska to create its frontier economy full on. Prudhoe Bay, or Sagavanirktok, is the jewel of Alaska’s oil exploitation. Spanning 200,000 acres, the field is estimated to contain about 25 billion barrels of oil. It’s booming, and the Trump administration hopes to boom right along into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the Gwich’in and their allies have held off oil exploitation for a good 30 years. Trump’s plans amount to a big problem ecologically and in terms of the future of a people. After all, the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline system cause about 500 oil and toxic chemical spills annually on the North Slope, and the Arctic is melting. The Prudhoe Bay oil spill in 2006 leaked an estimated 27,000 gallons of oil.
For 30 years, Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit or “The Sacred Place Where Life Begins” (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the south of Prudhoe Bay) has been threatened by big oil companies. It is home to the largest remaining herd of caribou on the continent. The Gwich’in people have relied on the Porcupine caribou herd for thousands of years, for food, and cultural and spiritual needs. The Porcupine caribou herd migrates to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain every year where pregnant caribou will give birth.
This area is also home to the military. After Hawaii, Alaska is the most militarized state in terms of the Pentagon’s economic impact. Seven hundred active and abandoned military sites account for at least 1,900 toxic hot spots. Five out of seven Superfund sites in the state are a result of military contamination. The 700 formerly used defense sites in Alaska tell a history of the Cold War and every war since. The military holds over 1.7 million acres of Alaska, and it’s not going anywhere soon.
Finally, take the largest new boondoggle mining project in Alaskan history, the proposed Pebble Mine, a huge gold-mining complex at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, the most productive salmon fishery in the U.S. After rejections by the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and huge citizen opposition, the Trump EPA may try and permit another project which should never happen.
Yet, in the face of Alaska’s colonial environmental violence, Native people are shining a light on the path ahead. Many Native villages have been least served by the fossil fuel industry and first world infrastructure, in spite of the fact that Native wealth and resources built Alaska. Now tribes are leapfrogging into the next economy. Take the Pribilof Islands. The Aleut villages “where the wind is born” lie 900-plus air miles from Anchorage. The price of electricity generation is between 22 cents and 58 cents per kilowatt hour. That makes for some expensive power in a cold location. Aleuts have a complex gift of wind — class seven wind, the highest rating, with some big turbulence of l50 mph wind speeds in a gust at times. Necessity is the mother of invention, and for the past two decades the Pribilof Islands have been working with wind power, putting up some small- and medium-scale turbines to meet local needs, or at least offset diesel.
In a time of climate change, Alaska is hurting. Climate impacts are amplified in the Arctic; and Kivalina, Shishmaref and a number of other villages are melting into the ocean. The polar bears are starving. The ice is not good, meaning that polar bears cannot catch seals because the ice does not form or does not support the weight of the bears. They need thick ice, which is not being created because of climate change. The rising sea level is flooding villages along the Alaska sea coast. In the village of Newtok, the ocean has risen so much that the sea is within inches of the front doors of their homes. Strong winds bring the waves over their door sills. The price tag for the relocation of Native villages that have been there for a thousand years is in the hundreds of millions. That’s killer. There’s no time like the present to make a plan.
The basic food of Alaska is found in the bush or the ocean. That’s in total disarray with climate change. As Alaskan villages grapple with more food insecurity than they have ever known, climate change brings the possibility of Arctic agriculture. Fairbanks has two additional weeks of above-freezing growing time now, and as Norway, Iceland and other Scandinavian countries move toward larger agriculture, Alaska will follow. In Fairbanks, the number of frost-free days has almost doubled since the 1900s, said Milan Shipka, director of the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “The ability to work the ground occurred at least two weeks earlier than what anyone would have expected,” he said.
Alaska has more than 750 farms working 830,000 acres of farmland. The industry contributed more than $48 million to the economy in 2014. More than that, those farms can grow food for villages, not just for money. And that is part of just transition. Native villages are looking to year-round greenhouses, heating from natural hot springs, and working with the endless light to grow for the future.
Alaska is only one place where Indigenous leaders are moving toward the next economy. At a June 2018, gathering at Albuquerque’s Larry Casuse Freedom Center, Indigenous leaders unveiled core principles of the Red Deal, asking: “Imagine if we had over a trillion dollars to invest in healthcare for everyone? To increase teachers’ pay so they can provide quality, free education to everyone? To repair roads and provide safe and accessible public transportation for everyone? To invest in large-scale language revitalization programs in every Indigenous nation on the continent?”
From Lakota territory, born of the successful work of the Thunder Valley Community Development is the national NDN Collective. It’s a powerhouse of leading young Indigenous economists, architects and leaders. They call on the larger movement to not only divest from fossil fuels, but also to create an economic strategy that will “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers.” Further, the collective holds that “any Green New Deal project or program that impacts our lands and people must have Indigenous leadership and occur in transparent, and collaborative partnership.”
Similarly, Alaska’s Native Movement argues for an Indigenous-led transition rooted in Indigenous ecological practices and social values associated with long-term stability.
“If the purpose of the Regenerative Economy is ecological restoration, community resilience and social equity, then resources must be acquired through regeneration,” Native Movement wrote in a conference handout. “We must build rather than deplete soil. We must engage forests and rivers in ways that provide for our needs, but at a scale and pace aligned with living systems. In other words, we must remember and return to land-based ways of knowing.”
The Department of Energy estimates that wind power from tribal lands could satisfy 32 percent of the total U.S. electricity demand. And solar production from Native lands could generate enough energy to power the country two times over. That’s the next economy.
The implications are immense, as is the potential. A post-fossil fuel economy is being born across the continent. The Standing Rock reservation brought on line the largest solar project in North Dakota; the Blue Lake Rancheria leads northern California in solar power and storage; White Earth reservation is manufacturing solar thermal panels (8th Fire Solar) to heat cold homes; and in the Navajo Nation, a historic powerhouse of coal generation, the Kayenta II Solar Project, will provide solar energy using the grid built for coal. The beginning is near, and it’s a green, restorative economy, based on Indigenous values and knowledge.
the genocide continues!!!
‘I gotta stay strong’: the Native American families with a legacy of violent deaths
An untracked number of Indigenous people have more than one relative missing or murdered in unexplained circumstances
Hallie Golden in Seattle
the guardian
Tue 25 Feb 2020 02.00 EST
Women take part in an annual event honoring the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Photograph: Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters
When Pauline HighWolf’s son came to her home in Montana three months ago to tell her that her sister was dead, she was overwhelmed by a painful jolt of deja vu.
HighWolf, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, had been helping her 64-year-old sister Laverna Wallowing to transition out of homelessness in California to a senior living apartment in southern Montana. Wallowing had died of a head injury, but HighWolf still doesn’t know how or why.
Almost five years earlier, HighWolf had received similar news at her home. Her youngest daughter Allison, or “Babez” as her family liked to call her, was found dead in a Rodeway Inn in Hardin, Montana.
Officials reported there was a fire in the 25-year-old’s motel room and she died of smoke inhalation. But in a coroner’s report from Montana’s forensics department that was shared with the Guardian, the manner of death was listed as “undetermined”.
When HighWolf saw her daughter’s body, she said there was a dent on her forehead, bruising on her nose and hands, scraped knees and red around her neck.
“What’s going on with my family?” HighWolf, 60, asked. “There’s times when I just want to cry and scream, but I gotta stay strong.”
Wallowing and HighWolf may be two of the thousands of Native American women and girls who have been killed in the US. But the fact that they are relatives means that they are also part of a distinct, yet lesser known group of Indigenous families who have been hit hardest by this crisis.
It’s very difficult to say exactly how common it is for a Native American family to have more than one immediate relative be found dead in unexplained circumstances, have been murdered or gone missing, as there is no single federal database specifically tracking these crimes.
Though HighWolf does not know for certain what happened to her loved ones, her suspicions of foul play are not unfounded. Native Americans disappear at twice the per capita rate of white Americans, despite comprising a far smaller population, according to FBI figures. In 2008, research funded by the Department of Justice found Indigenous women who are living on tribal lands are murdered at more than 10 times the national average in some places.
There have also long been complaints over gaps in law enforcement’s response and prosecution when it comes to cases involving Indigenous women and girls.
The Imperial county sheriff’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Wallowing’s case. The Big Horn county sheriff’s office did not return calls for comment on Allison HighWolf’s case.
The Sovereign Bodies Institute recently released a report with Brave Heart Society in which they documented more than 50 instances in the US and Canada in which a missing or murdered Indigenous woman or girl (MMIWG) had a similar case in their immediate family. Many of these cases included daughters and granddaughters of a MMIWG, according to the report.
Annita Lucchesi, a Southern Cheyenne descendant and the executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, said the number is surely much higher.
“It’s hard enough for a family to talk about one case but to have to talk about two, it takes such a huge, deep toll, that a lot of families don’t have the capacity for that,” she said.
The report gave the example of Harriet Wilson, 42, who was found in the Yellowstone River in Billings, Montana, in April 2018, after some type of blunt force to her body and being strangled, according to her mother, Mary Wilson. She said Harriet Wilson had been with friends Sunday morning at a park when she walked across the street to a convenience store. By 2pm, she was found dead. The case has never been solved.
“It’s really hard because she was, like, my strongest kid,” said Mary Wilson, a member of the Crow Tribe. “She’s a very humble person. It will never be the same.”
At the same time, Wilson, 64, is still trying to get justice for her aunt (also named Harriet Wilson), who Mary Wilson said she found raped and shot inside her trailer near Hardin, Montana, 45 years ago. The year before Mary Wilson was born, her grandmother, Rose Old Bear, was also found dead, likely due to strangulation, inside her car. Both cases have never been solved.
Mary Wilson said unsolved murders across three generations of her family have made her very protective of her children and grandchildren. But after her daughter’s death, she said, “I don’t go out unless I have to, because when I go out, it’s like I see her everywhere.”
“I try to move on, continue with my daily activities and daily things, but it’s just – I can’t,” she said.
Sarah Deer, a tribal member and professor at the University of Kansas, who has written extensively about violence against Native Americans, said it’s difficult to say exactly why multiple people in the same Indigenous family are murdered or go missing, as it tends to be case specific.
But these crimes can also be linked to earlier traumas, which tend to compound over time and across generations, explained Lucchesi. She referenced a study done in Alberta in which local tribal community elders met with Indigenous homeless people. They noticed that most of the people living on the streets were direct descendants of those who had been most severely physically and sexually abused at residential schools.
“The people who are on the streets now, that generation, they were never in those schools to begin with, but that legacy of that violence and all of the trauma trickled down and left for them to struggle in all sorts of ways and be targeted for all sorts of violence,” she said.
But these types of crimes happening in the same immediate family also illustrate the fact that Indigenous women are being targeted, said Lucchesi. It doesn’t matter what type of home you grew up in or what kind of loss your family has experienced or even the choices you make on a day to day basis, she said, referencing the fact that she was trafficked while a college student.
In a report released by the Canadian government last summer, its authors estimated as many as 4,000 instances of Indigenous women and girls being killed or going missing in the past 30 years, calling this crisis a “Canadian genocide”. But it also admitted that the exact number will never be known.
Pauline HighWolf experienced the effects of this crisis long before her sister or daughter died. When she was 12 years old, her older sister was killed by her boyfriend. She said she remembers being told that the couple were arguing in an alley, when he hit her on the head.
The difference with that case was that her sister’s boyfriend went to jail. Now HighWolf wants justice for her other sister and daughter.
She said the most difficult part about losing her loved ones is not knowing what happened to them. She spent the first month after her sister died calling police in El Centro, California, almost every day, in an effort to get an update on the investigation.
“Nobody would return our phone calls,” said HighWolf. “We called the jail and asked for the detectives and they just kind of bounced us around.”
She said she doesn’t know whether her nephew (Wallowing’s son), who she doesn’t have a good relationship with, may have told law enforcement not to release information to her, or whether the police are just not being very forthcoming.
After her daughter died, HighWolf said she pushed for law enforcement in Hardin, Montana, to further investigate the case, even hiring two pro bono lawyers to help. But she is still searching for answers.
The postmortem report by Montana’s Department of Justice, which was shared with the Guardian, states that Allison Highwolf had “prior history of suicide attempts”, and “that this death may represent a suicide”.
Pauline HighWolf said this is not true. Allison HighWolf would call just about every day to let her four young children, who all lived with Pauline HighWolf, know she loved them. And, just like her aunt, she had been looking to make big changes in her life – trying to go back to school and get treatment for her alcohol addiction.
“I need answers,” said HighWolf.
On Sunday, the Sovereign Bodies Institute held a vigil at the Rodeway Inn where Allison HighWolf was found dead in 2015. They have called for justice for her case, which they say was not “adequately or thoroughly investigated”.
HighWolf, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, had been helping her 64-year-old sister Laverna Wallowing to transition out of homelessness in California to a senior living apartment in southern Montana. Wallowing had died of a head injury, but HighWolf still doesn’t know how or why.
Almost five years earlier, HighWolf had received similar news at her home. Her youngest daughter Allison, or “Babez” as her family liked to call her, was found dead in a Rodeway Inn in Hardin, Montana.
Officials reported there was a fire in the 25-year-old’s motel room and she died of smoke inhalation. But in a coroner’s report from Montana’s forensics department that was shared with the Guardian, the manner of death was listed as “undetermined”.
When HighWolf saw her daughter’s body, she said there was a dent on her forehead, bruising on her nose and hands, scraped knees and red around her neck.
“What’s going on with my family?” HighWolf, 60, asked. “There’s times when I just want to cry and scream, but I gotta stay strong.”
Wallowing and HighWolf may be two of the thousands of Native American women and girls who have been killed in the US. But the fact that they are relatives means that they are also part of a distinct, yet lesser known group of Indigenous families who have been hit hardest by this crisis.
It’s very difficult to say exactly how common it is for a Native American family to have more than one immediate relative be found dead in unexplained circumstances, have been murdered or gone missing, as there is no single federal database specifically tracking these crimes.
Though HighWolf does not know for certain what happened to her loved ones, her suspicions of foul play are not unfounded. Native Americans disappear at twice the per capita rate of white Americans, despite comprising a far smaller population, according to FBI figures. In 2008, research funded by the Department of Justice found Indigenous women who are living on tribal lands are murdered at more than 10 times the national average in some places.
There have also long been complaints over gaps in law enforcement’s response and prosecution when it comes to cases involving Indigenous women and girls.
The Imperial county sheriff’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Wallowing’s case. The Big Horn county sheriff’s office did not return calls for comment on Allison HighWolf’s case.
The Sovereign Bodies Institute recently released a report with Brave Heart Society in which they documented more than 50 instances in the US and Canada in which a missing or murdered Indigenous woman or girl (MMIWG) had a similar case in their immediate family. Many of these cases included daughters and granddaughters of a MMIWG, according to the report.
Annita Lucchesi, a Southern Cheyenne descendant and the executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, said the number is surely much higher.
“It’s hard enough for a family to talk about one case but to have to talk about two, it takes such a huge, deep toll, that a lot of families don’t have the capacity for that,” she said.
The report gave the example of Harriet Wilson, 42, who was found in the Yellowstone River in Billings, Montana, in April 2018, after some type of blunt force to her body and being strangled, according to her mother, Mary Wilson. She said Harriet Wilson had been with friends Sunday morning at a park when she walked across the street to a convenience store. By 2pm, she was found dead. The case has never been solved.
“It’s really hard because she was, like, my strongest kid,” said Mary Wilson, a member of the Crow Tribe. “She’s a very humble person. It will never be the same.”
At the same time, Wilson, 64, is still trying to get justice for her aunt (also named Harriet Wilson), who Mary Wilson said she found raped and shot inside her trailer near Hardin, Montana, 45 years ago. The year before Mary Wilson was born, her grandmother, Rose Old Bear, was also found dead, likely due to strangulation, inside her car. Both cases have never been solved.
Mary Wilson said unsolved murders across three generations of her family have made her very protective of her children and grandchildren. But after her daughter’s death, she said, “I don’t go out unless I have to, because when I go out, it’s like I see her everywhere.”
“I try to move on, continue with my daily activities and daily things, but it’s just – I can’t,” she said.
Sarah Deer, a tribal member and professor at the University of Kansas, who has written extensively about violence against Native Americans, said it’s difficult to say exactly why multiple people in the same Indigenous family are murdered or go missing, as it tends to be case specific.
But these crimes can also be linked to earlier traumas, which tend to compound over time and across generations, explained Lucchesi. She referenced a study done in Alberta in which local tribal community elders met with Indigenous homeless people. They noticed that most of the people living on the streets were direct descendants of those who had been most severely physically and sexually abused at residential schools.
“The people who are on the streets now, that generation, they were never in those schools to begin with, but that legacy of that violence and all of the trauma trickled down and left for them to struggle in all sorts of ways and be targeted for all sorts of violence,” she said.
But these types of crimes happening in the same immediate family also illustrate the fact that Indigenous women are being targeted, said Lucchesi. It doesn’t matter what type of home you grew up in or what kind of loss your family has experienced or even the choices you make on a day to day basis, she said, referencing the fact that she was trafficked while a college student.
In a report released by the Canadian government last summer, its authors estimated as many as 4,000 instances of Indigenous women and girls being killed or going missing in the past 30 years, calling this crisis a “Canadian genocide”. But it also admitted that the exact number will never be known.
Pauline HighWolf experienced the effects of this crisis long before her sister or daughter died. When she was 12 years old, her older sister was killed by her boyfriend. She said she remembers being told that the couple were arguing in an alley, when he hit her on the head.
The difference with that case was that her sister’s boyfriend went to jail. Now HighWolf wants justice for her other sister and daughter.
She said the most difficult part about losing her loved ones is not knowing what happened to them. She spent the first month after her sister died calling police in El Centro, California, almost every day, in an effort to get an update on the investigation.
“Nobody would return our phone calls,” said HighWolf. “We called the jail and asked for the detectives and they just kind of bounced us around.”
She said she doesn’t know whether her nephew (Wallowing’s son), who she doesn’t have a good relationship with, may have told law enforcement not to release information to her, or whether the police are just not being very forthcoming.
After her daughter died, HighWolf said she pushed for law enforcement in Hardin, Montana, to further investigate the case, even hiring two pro bono lawyers to help. But she is still searching for answers.
The postmortem report by Montana’s Department of Justice, which was shared with the Guardian, states that Allison Highwolf had “prior history of suicide attempts”, and “that this death may represent a suicide”.
Pauline HighWolf said this is not true. Allison HighWolf would call just about every day to let her four young children, who all lived with Pauline HighWolf, know she loved them. And, just like her aunt, she had been looking to make big changes in her life – trying to go back to school and get treatment for her alcohol addiction.
“I need answers,” said HighWolf.
On Sunday, the Sovereign Bodies Institute held a vigil at the Rodeway Inn where Allison HighWolf was found dead in 2015. They have called for justice for her case, which they say was not “adequately or thoroughly investigated”.
When Native Americans Are Told To ‘Go Back’ To Where They Came From
The absurdity of a white supremacist slur laid bare.
By Christopher Mathias - huff post
12/23/19
Dakota Access Pipeline protesters square off against police near the Standing Rock Reservation and the pipeline route outside the little town of Saint Anthony, North Dakota on Oct. 5, 2016.
Lori Metoxen, 52, works as an administrator at Oneida Behavioral Health in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a treatment center for indigenous people suffering from addiction and mental illness. Metoxen says one beautiful summer day in 2017 she drove home from work with the windows down, the sunroof open, and her Oneida Nation license plate, available only to members of the tribe, proudly displayed on the back of her car. When she stopped at a traffic light in the part of western Green Bay that belongs to the Oneida Nation reservation, she noticed a car full of white, teenage girls in the lane beside hers.
“Go back to Mexico, you scumbag sack of shit!” one of the girls yelled at Metoxen.
Stunned, Metoxen remembers saying something like, “What is your problem?” to which the girl, after a string of profanities, replied, “You heard me, go back to Mexico!”
“The angriness of their voices was shocking to me,” Metoxen, a Native American who is not from Mexico, recounted to HuffPost. “They really needed to make somebody feel bad. What was the fun in that?”
After a few seconds, the light turned green and the white girls, all laughing, turned left. Metoxen drove straight, and as so often happens after incidents like these, she suddenly realized what she should have said.
“You go back to where you came from! I belong here!”
A White Supremacist Slur
Metoxen’s story is one of 22 stories HuffPost has collected of people with Native American ancestry being told — absurdly — to “go back” to where they came from.
Native Americans reported being told different variations of the phrase: “Go back to your country,” “go back to Mexico,” “go home,” “get out of our country,” and “go back to the reservation.”
For a white person — and it’s almost always a white person — to say “go back” to a Native American, whose ancestors were here long before European settlers colonized this continent, betrays the real, white supremacist meaning of the phrase: We don’t want you anywhere at all.
These 22 stories were culled from over 800 reports of hate incidents, occurring over the last four years in the U.S., in which assailants communicated some variation of “go back” to their victims. HuffPost, working with ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project, collected these incidents in a database to examine the moral emergency of hate in the era of President Donald Trump.
The 22 incidents occurred in 15 states, from a post office in Alaska to a Walmart in Arizona, from a library in Washington to that traffic intersection in Wisconsin.
Five of the perpetrators in these hate incidents invoked the president’s name while targeting their victim; six yelled “go back” from cars before driving off; six yelled “go back to Mexico” at their victims, none of whom are from Mexico; and of the perpetrators whose race is known, all were white.
Of those Native Americans who were told to “go back” where they came from, three were veterans of the U.S. military.
Some of those interviewed by HuffPost for this article expressed fears that anti-indigenous bigotry is on the rise thanks to the election of President Trump in 2016 — a man with a long history of racism towards Native Americans.
Trump, after all, keeps a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, the 19th century president best known for his policy of “Indian Removal,” an ethnic cleansing campaign that included the Trail of Tears, the forced death march of Native Americans from their homes in the Deep South to points west, like Oklahoma, where 57-year-old Jennie Wright lives.
“I look Indian,” Wright, a high school English teacher, told HuffPost. Her father was white but her mother, she said, was an enrolled member of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe.
A couple weeks after the 2016 election, Wright says she went to a Walmart in Bartlesville, a short drive from the Osage Reservation (where Native Americans in the early 20th century, newly wealthy from oil discovered on that land, were systematically robbed and murdered.)
As Wright crossed a crosswalk in the Walmart parking lot, she suddenly heard the sound of a revving engine. She looked around and saw a middle-aged white woman in a “beat-up old car” speeding towards her. Wright scurried towards the sidewalk.
The woman in the car stopped, leaned her head out of the window and yelled at Wright to “go back” to where she came from. “What the hell are you talking about?” Wright replied.
“Go back to Mexico!” the woman screamed, before speeding off and yelling, “Trump!”
Wright says it was the first time anything like this has ever happened to her. “It opened my eyes a little bit,” she told HuffPost. “I always thought everything was pretty much okay. Thought it died out.”
“Then he came,” she added, referring to the president. “And he gave everyone free rein to say things.”
A survey conducted in 2017 by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard University found that nearly 40% of Native Americans said they had personally experienced offensive comments about their race or ethnicity. Over a third of those surveyed said they or a family member had experienced either violence, threats or harassment because they are Native American.
Cheryl Redhorse Bennett, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies hate crimes targeting indigenous people, says she’s seen a “surge” in Native Americans being told to “go back” since 2015.
Although she’s seen her fair share of Native Americans being the victims of anti-Hispanic hate (being told to “go back to Mexico”), she says perpetrators most often tell Native Americans to “go back to the reservation.”
“Generally native people refer to towns that are adjacent to reservations as border towns,” Bennet explained to HuffPost. “Within these border towns, there’s a long history of violence against native people, racism, and hate crimes.”
Bennett said white border town residents often view reservations and treaty rights not for what they are — meager compensations for centuries of theft and genocide — but as “privileges” unfairly bestowed upon Native Americans.
“You tell native people to ‘go home,’” Bennett said, “but then you want to develop their land, you want to abolish treaty rights. So it’s never enough.”
“We Were Here First!”
Rattler, legal name Michael Markus, is a 46-year-old Marine veteran who is the descendant of Chief Red Cloud, the Lakota leader who signed the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty.
Rattler was among thousands of Native activists in 2016 who set up camp on land that treaty protected: the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. This was Rattler’s ancestral land, and he was going to protect its ancient burial sites and its water from the planned construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline, he and other activists argued, was a violation of that treaty.
It was also a violation of that treaty, they later claimed, for state law enforcement officials to invade the native activists’ unarmed encampment on Oct. 27, 2016, using sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and tanks to disperse the protesters. Rattler was among a handful of activists who allegedly set barricades of tires and wood on fire to slow the violent police raid.
For this, months later in February, just after Trump’s inauguration, he was indicted on federal charges of civil disorder and of using a fire to commit a felony. He and other activists saw the indictment as political — an excuse to justify the police brutality visited upon the encampments.
As he awaited trial, Ratter’s bail conditions stipulated he had to wear an ankle monitor and not leave the area in and around Bismarck, North Dakota — a border town.
It was during this period, he told journalist Natasha Lennard, author of the book “Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life,” that local residents would often drive past Rattler and yell “go home!” as he smoked cigarettes on his porch.
It’s a striking scene to imagine: a Native American Marine veteran wearing an ankle monitor, awaiting trial for protecting tribal land from the fossil fuel industry, being told to “go home” by white people driving by.
“It’s funny, because I want to get out of here too,” Rattler told Lennard at the time. “But part of me wants to yell back, ‘Go home? We were here first!’”
As Rattler awaited trial, President Trump approved the final permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which over the next year spilled oil five times, just as native activists had warned it would.
Rattler, after accepting a non-cooperating plea deal, is now serving a three-year sentence in a federal prison in South Dakota.
In a statement released to the press after his sentencing, he said he was praying that native activists had “the strength to keep up the fight.” Standing Rock, he said, “was a training ground.”
And despite what he and other activists thought about the federal government’s motivations for prosecuting him, Rattler also stated he was praying for the judge who handled his case.
“We all live on this earth together,” he said. “They segregate us because we have a different color skin, but we’re all red underneath.”
“Go back to Mexico, you scumbag sack of shit!” one of the girls yelled at Metoxen.
Stunned, Metoxen remembers saying something like, “What is your problem?” to which the girl, after a string of profanities, replied, “You heard me, go back to Mexico!”
“The angriness of their voices was shocking to me,” Metoxen, a Native American who is not from Mexico, recounted to HuffPost. “They really needed to make somebody feel bad. What was the fun in that?”
After a few seconds, the light turned green and the white girls, all laughing, turned left. Metoxen drove straight, and as so often happens after incidents like these, she suddenly realized what she should have said.
“You go back to where you came from! I belong here!”
A White Supremacist Slur
Metoxen’s story is one of 22 stories HuffPost has collected of people with Native American ancestry being told — absurdly — to “go back” to where they came from.
Native Americans reported being told different variations of the phrase: “Go back to your country,” “go back to Mexico,” “go home,” “get out of our country,” and “go back to the reservation.”
For a white person — and it’s almost always a white person — to say “go back” to a Native American, whose ancestors were here long before European settlers colonized this continent, betrays the real, white supremacist meaning of the phrase: We don’t want you anywhere at all.
These 22 stories were culled from over 800 reports of hate incidents, occurring over the last four years in the U.S., in which assailants communicated some variation of “go back” to their victims. HuffPost, working with ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project, collected these incidents in a database to examine the moral emergency of hate in the era of President Donald Trump.
The 22 incidents occurred in 15 states, from a post office in Alaska to a Walmart in Arizona, from a library in Washington to that traffic intersection in Wisconsin.
Five of the perpetrators in these hate incidents invoked the president’s name while targeting their victim; six yelled “go back” from cars before driving off; six yelled “go back to Mexico” at their victims, none of whom are from Mexico; and of the perpetrators whose race is known, all were white.
Of those Native Americans who were told to “go back” where they came from, three were veterans of the U.S. military.
Some of those interviewed by HuffPost for this article expressed fears that anti-indigenous bigotry is on the rise thanks to the election of President Trump in 2016 — a man with a long history of racism towards Native Americans.
Trump, after all, keeps a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, the 19th century president best known for his policy of “Indian Removal,” an ethnic cleansing campaign that included the Trail of Tears, the forced death march of Native Americans from their homes in the Deep South to points west, like Oklahoma, where 57-year-old Jennie Wright lives.
“I look Indian,” Wright, a high school English teacher, told HuffPost. Her father was white but her mother, she said, was an enrolled member of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe.
A couple weeks after the 2016 election, Wright says she went to a Walmart in Bartlesville, a short drive from the Osage Reservation (where Native Americans in the early 20th century, newly wealthy from oil discovered on that land, were systematically robbed and murdered.)
As Wright crossed a crosswalk in the Walmart parking lot, she suddenly heard the sound of a revving engine. She looked around and saw a middle-aged white woman in a “beat-up old car” speeding towards her. Wright scurried towards the sidewalk.
The woman in the car stopped, leaned her head out of the window and yelled at Wright to “go back” to where she came from. “What the hell are you talking about?” Wright replied.
“Go back to Mexico!” the woman screamed, before speeding off and yelling, “Trump!”
Wright says it was the first time anything like this has ever happened to her. “It opened my eyes a little bit,” she told HuffPost. “I always thought everything was pretty much okay. Thought it died out.”
“Then he came,” she added, referring to the president. “And he gave everyone free rein to say things.”
A survey conducted in 2017 by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard University found that nearly 40% of Native Americans said they had personally experienced offensive comments about their race or ethnicity. Over a third of those surveyed said they or a family member had experienced either violence, threats or harassment because they are Native American.
Cheryl Redhorse Bennett, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies hate crimes targeting indigenous people, says she’s seen a “surge” in Native Americans being told to “go back” since 2015.
Although she’s seen her fair share of Native Americans being the victims of anti-Hispanic hate (being told to “go back to Mexico”), she says perpetrators most often tell Native Americans to “go back to the reservation.”
“Generally native people refer to towns that are adjacent to reservations as border towns,” Bennet explained to HuffPost. “Within these border towns, there’s a long history of violence against native people, racism, and hate crimes.”
Bennett said white border town residents often view reservations and treaty rights not for what they are — meager compensations for centuries of theft and genocide — but as “privileges” unfairly bestowed upon Native Americans.
“You tell native people to ‘go home,’” Bennett said, “but then you want to develop their land, you want to abolish treaty rights. So it’s never enough.”
“We Were Here First!”
Rattler, legal name Michael Markus, is a 46-year-old Marine veteran who is the descendant of Chief Red Cloud, the Lakota leader who signed the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty.
Rattler was among thousands of Native activists in 2016 who set up camp on land that treaty protected: the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. This was Rattler’s ancestral land, and he was going to protect its ancient burial sites and its water from the planned construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline, he and other activists argued, was a violation of that treaty.
It was also a violation of that treaty, they later claimed, for state law enforcement officials to invade the native activists’ unarmed encampment on Oct. 27, 2016, using sound cannons, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and tanks to disperse the protesters. Rattler was among a handful of activists who allegedly set barricades of tires and wood on fire to slow the violent police raid.
For this, months later in February, just after Trump’s inauguration, he was indicted on federal charges of civil disorder and of using a fire to commit a felony. He and other activists saw the indictment as political — an excuse to justify the police brutality visited upon the encampments.
As he awaited trial, Ratter’s bail conditions stipulated he had to wear an ankle monitor and not leave the area in and around Bismarck, North Dakota — a border town.
It was during this period, he told journalist Natasha Lennard, author of the book “Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life,” that local residents would often drive past Rattler and yell “go home!” as he smoked cigarettes on his porch.
It’s a striking scene to imagine: a Native American Marine veteran wearing an ankle monitor, awaiting trial for protecting tribal land from the fossil fuel industry, being told to “go home” by white people driving by.
“It’s funny, because I want to get out of here too,” Rattler told Lennard at the time. “But part of me wants to yell back, ‘Go home? We were here first!’”
As Rattler awaited trial, President Trump approved the final permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which over the next year spilled oil five times, just as native activists had warned it would.
Rattler, after accepting a non-cooperating plea deal, is now serving a three-year sentence in a federal prison in South Dakota.
In a statement released to the press after his sentencing, he said he was praying that native activists had “the strength to keep up the fight.” Standing Rock, he said, “was a training ground.”
And despite what he and other activists thought about the federal government’s motivations for prosecuting him, Rattler also stated he was praying for the judge who handled his case.
“We all live on this earth together,” he said. “They segregate us because we have a different color skin, but we’re all red underneath.”
Native American 2020 candidate aims to raise awareness of indigenous peoples
Mark Charles knows his bid is a long shot but hopes to shed light on the historic abuse of Native Americans and other ethnicities
@adamgabbatt
the guardian
Sun 29 Sep 2019 02.02 EDT
In a video launching his presidential campaign, Mark Charles, hair tied in a tsiiyéeł, a Native American hair knot, introduces himself in the Navajo language.
“Yá’ át’ ééh. Mark Charles yinishyé,” Charles says.
“Tsin bikee dine’é nishłí. Dóó tó’aheedlíinii bá shíshchíín. Tsin bikee’ dine’é dashicheii. Dóó tódích’ íi’ nii dashinálí.”
Roughly translated, Charles is explaining that his father was Navajo and his mother Dutch American. What doesn’t need explaining is that if Charles were elected in November 2020, he would become the first Native American president of the United States.
It’s an extremely long-shot bid. But Charles is also aiming to use his campaign to raise awareness of the historic, and continuing, abuse of Native Americans and other ethnicities, hopefully resulting in an improved constitution that he believes would better reflect the modern-day US.
“Do we want to be a nation where we the people actually means all the people?” Charles says.
“Because if we do, then we have some foundational level work to do.”
Native American people living on reservations, Charles says, have always been overlooked by politicians. The territory of the Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles alone – enough to make it the 48th largest state in the US. Despite that, Charles says, the territory of 350,000 people is rarely visited by politicians running for president.
Charles is determined to change that with his campaign. He held his first campaign event on the Navajo Nation, at a chapter house – a communal meeting place – near Fort Defiance, north-east Arizona. His second event was at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and another at the Denver Indian Center.
“Almost every state I go to I want my first contact to be with the indigenous nations, the indigenous peoples of that state,” Charles said.
“I really want to connect with them again because I’m coming on to their land to campaign and I want them to know me and to understand who I am and, and why, why I’m there.”
Charles believes he is the best person to lead the country as a whole, but he is also running with some ideas that would specifically help Native Americans, African Americans and other people of color. On the stump he talks a lot about creating a “common memory” – educating people on the atrocities committed in the past and the challenges different races face.
At the center of Charles’s platform is the establishment of a “truth and conciliation commission”, which would work towards creating that memory. His idea is modeled on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa, after the end of apartheid.
“I don’t call ours truth and reconciliation because reconciliation implies a previous harmony, and if you know our history you know that’s not true.”
In South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation committee hearings, which allowed both victims and perpetrators to explain their experiences, were broadcast live, in what has been described as the “gold standard” for how a divided society might deal with a violent past. Charles believes his committee could eventually lead to an at least partial rewriting of the US constitution.
Charles said he had the idea for “that type of conversation years ago”.
“But I did not know the best way to bring that proposal to the nation. And after observing several presidential campaigns, I realized every four years we have a dialogue about who we are and where we’re going: our presidential campaign cycle.
“So I felt like this is an important enough of a proposal that it actually could very well be the center of a presidential campaign. So one of my motivations in running for president is to raise this issue of truth and conciliation to the national level.”
Charles grew up in New Mexico, and went to university in California, before spending 11 years living in the Navajo Nation, which is spread across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.
Three of those years were spent on a remote sheep camp, where Charles and his young family lived in a one-room hogan, a traditional Navajo house, which had a dirt floor, no running water, no electricity and was six miles from the nearest paved road.
Charles isn’t the first Native American to run for the White House. Russell Means, an activist from the Lakota tribe who died in 2012, ran for the Libertarian party nomination ahead of the 1988 election, but came second to the Texas congressman Ron Paul.
In 2018 there was a breakthrough for Native American women in particular, when Sharice Davids, from Kansas, and Deb Haaland, from New Mexico, became the first Native American women to be elected to Congress. Both Davids and Haaland are Democrats. Charles says he has voted for both Democrats and Republicans in the past, but believes his best chance for office is to eschew both parties.
“I don’t want people to think that becauseI’m running as an independent I’m not a serious candidate,” Charles said. He believes he would not clinch the Democratic or Republican nomination – aside from anything else, he isn’t a member of either party – but he plans to be on the ballot in all 50 states, and is committed to running all the way through to November.
“If our country does not begin creating this common memory, and does not make a decision on whether we want to be a place where we the people means all the people,” Charles said, “We’re going to continue to face these deep racial divides that we’ve had in our country since its founding.”
“Yá’ át’ ééh. Mark Charles yinishyé,” Charles says.
“Tsin bikee dine’é nishłí. Dóó tó’aheedlíinii bá shíshchíín. Tsin bikee’ dine’é dashicheii. Dóó tódích’ íi’ nii dashinálí.”
Roughly translated, Charles is explaining that his father was Navajo and his mother Dutch American. What doesn’t need explaining is that if Charles were elected in November 2020, he would become the first Native American president of the United States.
It’s an extremely long-shot bid. But Charles is also aiming to use his campaign to raise awareness of the historic, and continuing, abuse of Native Americans and other ethnicities, hopefully resulting in an improved constitution that he believes would better reflect the modern-day US.
“Do we want to be a nation where we the people actually means all the people?” Charles says.
“Because if we do, then we have some foundational level work to do.”
Native American people living on reservations, Charles says, have always been overlooked by politicians. The territory of the Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles alone – enough to make it the 48th largest state in the US. Despite that, Charles says, the territory of 350,000 people is rarely visited by politicians running for president.
Charles is determined to change that with his campaign. He held his first campaign event on the Navajo Nation, at a chapter house – a communal meeting place – near Fort Defiance, north-east Arizona. His second event was at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and another at the Denver Indian Center.
“Almost every state I go to I want my first contact to be with the indigenous nations, the indigenous peoples of that state,” Charles said.
“I really want to connect with them again because I’m coming on to their land to campaign and I want them to know me and to understand who I am and, and why, why I’m there.”
Charles believes he is the best person to lead the country as a whole, but he is also running with some ideas that would specifically help Native Americans, African Americans and other people of color. On the stump he talks a lot about creating a “common memory” – educating people on the atrocities committed in the past and the challenges different races face.
At the center of Charles’s platform is the establishment of a “truth and conciliation commission”, which would work towards creating that memory. His idea is modeled on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa, after the end of apartheid.
“I don’t call ours truth and reconciliation because reconciliation implies a previous harmony, and if you know our history you know that’s not true.”
In South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation committee hearings, which allowed both victims and perpetrators to explain their experiences, were broadcast live, in what has been described as the “gold standard” for how a divided society might deal with a violent past. Charles believes his committee could eventually lead to an at least partial rewriting of the US constitution.
Charles said he had the idea for “that type of conversation years ago”.
“But I did not know the best way to bring that proposal to the nation. And after observing several presidential campaigns, I realized every four years we have a dialogue about who we are and where we’re going: our presidential campaign cycle.
“So I felt like this is an important enough of a proposal that it actually could very well be the center of a presidential campaign. So one of my motivations in running for president is to raise this issue of truth and conciliation to the national level.”
Charles grew up in New Mexico, and went to university in California, before spending 11 years living in the Navajo Nation, which is spread across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.
Three of those years were spent on a remote sheep camp, where Charles and his young family lived in a one-room hogan, a traditional Navajo house, which had a dirt floor, no running water, no electricity and was six miles from the nearest paved road.
Charles isn’t the first Native American to run for the White House. Russell Means, an activist from the Lakota tribe who died in 2012, ran for the Libertarian party nomination ahead of the 1988 election, but came second to the Texas congressman Ron Paul.
In 2018 there was a breakthrough for Native American women in particular, when Sharice Davids, from Kansas, and Deb Haaland, from New Mexico, became the first Native American women to be elected to Congress. Both Davids and Haaland are Democrats. Charles says he has voted for both Democrats and Republicans in the past, but believes his best chance for office is to eschew both parties.
“I don’t want people to think that becauseI’m running as an independent I’m not a serious candidate,” Charles said. He believes he would not clinch the Democratic or Republican nomination – aside from anything else, he isn’t a member of either party – but he plans to be on the ballot in all 50 states, and is committed to running all the way through to November.
“If our country does not begin creating this common memory, and does not make a decision on whether we want to be a place where we the people means all the people,” Charles said, “We’re going to continue to face these deep racial divides that we’ve had in our country since its founding.”
The Cherokee Nation wants a representative in Congress, taking the US government up on a promise it made nearly 200 years ago
By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Updated 2:40 AM ET, Sun August 25, 2019
(CNN)The Cherokee Nation announced Thursday that it intends to appoint a delegate to the US House of Representatives, asserting for the first time a right promised to the tribe in a nearly 200-year-old treaty with the federal government.
It was a historic step for the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation and its nearly 370,000 members, coming about a week after Chuck Hoskin Jr. was sworn in as principal chief of the tribe. The Cherokee Nation says it's the largest tribal nation in the US and one of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes.
The move raises questions about what that representation in Congress would look like and whether the US will honor an agreement it made almost two centuries ago.
Here's what's at stake.
Why is this happening now?
The Cherokee Nation's right to appoint a delegate stems from the same treaty that the US government used to forcibly remove the tribe from its ancestral lands.
As a result of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokee were ultimately made to leave their homes in the Southeast for present-day Oklahoma in exchange for money and other compensation. Nearly 4,000 members of the tribe died of disease, starvation and exhaustion on the journey now known as the Trail of Tears.
A delegate in the House of Representatives was one of the ways the US government promised to compensate the Cherokee Nation.
So why is the tribe only taking up the offer now?
Ezra Rosser, a law professor at American University, told CNN that the US government has long made it difficult for tribes to exercise rights afforded to them in treaties. But now, tribes are asserting themselves in a way that demands the attention of non-Native Americans.
"We have to recognize that we imposed a genocide on tribes and we imposed harsh measures toward any government structure that they had," Ezra Rosser said. "To me, it's not surprising that it would take somewhat deep into the self-determination era for tribes to be in a position to assert some of these rights."
Hoskin echoed that sentiment, telling CNN that "the Cherokee Nation is today in a position of strength that I think is unprecedented in its history."
Why is this important?
Having a delegate in the House would fundamentally alter the relationship between the US government and the Cherokee Nation, Rosser wrote in a 2005 article for the Boston University Public Interest Law Journal.
Right now, the federal government and Native American tribes largely operate as two sovereign nations that interact with one another, Rosser said. Representation in the House would incorporate the Cherokee Nation into the US government itself.
The two other Cherokee tribes recognized by the federal government are the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma, which has about 14,000 members, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, which has about 16,000 members. It's unclear if they would have the same right to appoint a delegate.
What power would a delegate have?
The treaty doesn't specify whether or not the Cherokee Nation's delegate would be a voting member of the legislature. But Hoskin said the position might look something like the non-voting members that represent Washington, D.C., and five US territories.
"I think we have to look at the roadmaps that are laid out as a suggested path to seating our delegate, and certainly the delegates afforded the territories give us an idea of what is workable in the Congress," he said.
There are currently six non-voting members in the House. Washington D.C. and four permanently inhabited US territories -- American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands -- are represented by a delegate, who serves a two-year term. Puerto Rico is served by a resident commissioner, who is elected every four years.
Those representatives can't vote on the House floor, but they can vote in committees that they are on, introduce legislation and engage in debate. Hoskin said he hoped the Cherokee Nation's delegate would help advance the interests of the tribe and, more broadly, all Native Americans.
Who will be the tribe's delegate?
Kimberly Teehee has been nominated to serve as the Cherokee delegate.
She is currently the tribe's vice president of government relations, and previously worked as a senior policy advisor on Native American affairs for three years in President Barack Obama's administration. For about 12 years before that, Teehee was a senior advisor to Dale Kildee, then a Democratic congressman from Michigan.
What's the next step?
First, Teehee has to be confirmed by the tribal council of the Cherokee Nation in a special meeting on August 29.
Then Congress will need to take legislative action, Hoskin said. The tribe plans to continue its conversations with Oklahoma's representatives in the House and begin crafting ideas about what that legislation will look like.
"It will be a process that I think will be a long one, but it's one we're prepared to take," Hoskin said.
Will there be resistance to the move?
Maybe.
There's reason to believe that the US might not recognize its treaty with the Cherokee Nation. In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld legislation that infringes on US treaties with tribal nations, according to Rosser.
Some organizations could mount legal challenges to the Cherokee Nation's push for a delegate, Rosser added, potentially arguing that the move gives members of the tribe more representation in Congress than non-indigenous US citizens.
Rosser said it's also likely that the Cherokee Nation's appointment could face resistance from other tribes, particularly those who were also forced from their lands but weren't granted their own delegate through a treaty.
Other tribes might argue that a delegate for the Cherokee Nation threatens their own relationships with the US government, according to Rosser. The Cherokee Nation's delegate could end up becoming the de facto voice in Congress for all tribal nations, raising fears that the representative might favor the Cherokee Nation at the expense of other tribes.
Despite the potential hurdles, Hoskin said he is optimistic.
"I can boil this down very simply for the Congress," he said. "Does the Congress intend to keep its word to the Cherokee people? If the answer's yes, then Ms. Teehee will be seated."
It was a historic step for the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation and its nearly 370,000 members, coming about a week after Chuck Hoskin Jr. was sworn in as principal chief of the tribe. The Cherokee Nation says it's the largest tribal nation in the US and one of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes.
The move raises questions about what that representation in Congress would look like and whether the US will honor an agreement it made almost two centuries ago.
Here's what's at stake.
Why is this happening now?
The Cherokee Nation's right to appoint a delegate stems from the same treaty that the US government used to forcibly remove the tribe from its ancestral lands.
As a result of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokee were ultimately made to leave their homes in the Southeast for present-day Oklahoma in exchange for money and other compensation. Nearly 4,000 members of the tribe died of disease, starvation and exhaustion on the journey now known as the Trail of Tears.
A delegate in the House of Representatives was one of the ways the US government promised to compensate the Cherokee Nation.
So why is the tribe only taking up the offer now?
Ezra Rosser, a law professor at American University, told CNN that the US government has long made it difficult for tribes to exercise rights afforded to them in treaties. But now, tribes are asserting themselves in a way that demands the attention of non-Native Americans.
"We have to recognize that we imposed a genocide on tribes and we imposed harsh measures toward any government structure that they had," Ezra Rosser said. "To me, it's not surprising that it would take somewhat deep into the self-determination era for tribes to be in a position to assert some of these rights."
Hoskin echoed that sentiment, telling CNN that "the Cherokee Nation is today in a position of strength that I think is unprecedented in its history."
Why is this important?
Having a delegate in the House would fundamentally alter the relationship between the US government and the Cherokee Nation, Rosser wrote in a 2005 article for the Boston University Public Interest Law Journal.
Right now, the federal government and Native American tribes largely operate as two sovereign nations that interact with one another, Rosser said. Representation in the House would incorporate the Cherokee Nation into the US government itself.
The two other Cherokee tribes recognized by the federal government are the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma, which has about 14,000 members, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, which has about 16,000 members. It's unclear if they would have the same right to appoint a delegate.
What power would a delegate have?
The treaty doesn't specify whether or not the Cherokee Nation's delegate would be a voting member of the legislature. But Hoskin said the position might look something like the non-voting members that represent Washington, D.C., and five US territories.
"I think we have to look at the roadmaps that are laid out as a suggested path to seating our delegate, and certainly the delegates afforded the territories give us an idea of what is workable in the Congress," he said.
There are currently six non-voting members in the House. Washington D.C. and four permanently inhabited US territories -- American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands -- are represented by a delegate, who serves a two-year term. Puerto Rico is served by a resident commissioner, who is elected every four years.
Those representatives can't vote on the House floor, but they can vote in committees that they are on, introduce legislation and engage in debate. Hoskin said he hoped the Cherokee Nation's delegate would help advance the interests of the tribe and, more broadly, all Native Americans.
Who will be the tribe's delegate?
Kimberly Teehee has been nominated to serve as the Cherokee delegate.
She is currently the tribe's vice president of government relations, and previously worked as a senior policy advisor on Native American affairs for three years in President Barack Obama's administration. For about 12 years before that, Teehee was a senior advisor to Dale Kildee, then a Democratic congressman from Michigan.
What's the next step?
First, Teehee has to be confirmed by the tribal council of the Cherokee Nation in a special meeting on August 29.
Then Congress will need to take legislative action, Hoskin said. The tribe plans to continue its conversations with Oklahoma's representatives in the House and begin crafting ideas about what that legislation will look like.
"It will be a process that I think will be a long one, but it's one we're prepared to take," Hoskin said.
Will there be resistance to the move?
Maybe.
There's reason to believe that the US might not recognize its treaty with the Cherokee Nation. In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld legislation that infringes on US treaties with tribal nations, according to Rosser.
Some organizations could mount legal challenges to the Cherokee Nation's push for a delegate, Rosser added, potentially arguing that the move gives members of the tribe more representation in Congress than non-indigenous US citizens.
Rosser said it's also likely that the Cherokee Nation's appointment could face resistance from other tribes, particularly those who were also forced from their lands but weren't granted their own delegate through a treaty.
Other tribes might argue that a delegate for the Cherokee Nation threatens their own relationships with the US government, according to Rosser. The Cherokee Nation's delegate could end up becoming the de facto voice in Congress for all tribal nations, raising fears that the representative might favor the Cherokee Nation at the expense of other tribes.
Despite the potential hurdles, Hoskin said he is optimistic.
"I can boil this down very simply for the Congress," he said. "Does the Congress intend to keep its word to the Cherokee people? If the answer's yes, then Ms. Teehee will be seated."
Remembering the US soldiers who refused orders to murder Native Americans at Sand Creek
By The Conversation - raw story
May 27, 2019
This rare photograph by an unknown photographer shows the ill-fated Cheyenne chief, Black Kettle, and a number of his associated at Camp Weld (Wikimedia Commons)
Every Thanksgiving weekend for the past 18 years, Arapaho and Cheyenne youth lead a 180-mile relay from the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to Denver.
The annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run opens at the site of the Sand Creek Massacre near Eads, Colorado, with a sunrise ceremony honoring some 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne people who lost their lives in the infamous massacre. This brutal assault was carried out by Colonel John Chivington on Nov. 29, 1864.
While the Sand Creek massacre has been the subject of numerous books, much less attention has been given to two heroes of this horrific event: U.S. soldiers Captain Silas Soule and Lt. Joseph Cramer.
These were men who rejected the violence and genocide inherent in the “conquest of the West.” They did so by personally refusing to take part in the murder of peaceful people, while ordering the men under their command to stand down. Their example breaks the conventional frontier narrative that has come to define the clash between Colonial settlers and Native peoples as one of civilization versus savagery.
This is a theme I’ve previously addressed as a scholar in the fields of American Indian studies and Colonial history, both in my book on the Indian captivity narrative genre, “Buried in Shades of Night,” and more recently in writings on Sand Creek.
Soule’s noble act of compassion at Sand Creek is humbly conveyed in a letter to his mother included in the Denver Public Library Western History Collections: “I was present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly women and children… It was a horrable scene and I would not let my Company fire.”
Refusing to participate, Soule and the men of Company D of the First Colorado, along with Cramer of Company K, bore witness to the incomprehensible. Chivington’s attack soon descended into a frenzy of killing and mutilation, with soldiers taking scalps and other grisly trophies from the bodies of the dead. Soule was a devoted abolitionist and one dedicated to the rights of all people. He stayed true to his convictions in the face of insults and even a threat of hanging from Chivington the night before at Fort Lyon.
In the following weeks, Soule and Cramer wrote letters to Major Edward “Ned” Wyncoop, the previous commander at Fort Lyon who had dealt fairly with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Both harshly condemned the massacre and the soldiers who carried it out. Soule’s letter details a meeting among officers on the eve of the attack in which he fervently condemned Chivington’s plans asserting “that any man who would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.”
Describing the attack to Wynkoop, Soule wrote, “I refused to fire and swore that none but a coward would.” His letter goes on to describe the soldiers as “a perfect mob.”
This account is verified by Cramer’s letter. Detailing his own objections to Chivington, whom he describes as coming “like a thief in the dark,” Cramer had stated that he “thought it murder to jump them friendly Indians.” To this charge, Chivington had replied, “Damn any man or men who are in sympathy with them.”
In Soule’s account, he writes, “I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.”
While few Americans – especially those living outside of Colorado – may know their names, Soule and Cramer are honored and revered by the descendants of the people they tried to save. According to David F. Halaas, former Colorado state historian and current historical consultant to the Northern Cheyenne, without their courage in disobeying Chivington’s orders and keeping their men from the massacre, “the descendants probably wouldn’t be around today,” and there would be no one to tell the stories.
The horrific descriptions of Soule and Cramer prompted several official inquiries into the atrocity. Both men also testified before an Army commission in Colorado as witnesses. While the officers and soldiers responsible escaped punishment, their testimony brought widespread condemnation upon Chivington, who defended the massacre for the rest of his life.
These investigations also ended the political career of the Colorado territorial governor, John Evans, who had issued two proclamations calling for violence against Native people of the plains, and for organizing the 3rd Colorado Cavalry Regiment in which Chivington was placed in command.
Sites of reverence and healing
The Cheyenne and Arapaho will return to Denver this year to honor their ancestors and remember Soule’s and Cramer’s conscience and humanity. This will be done through an offering of prayers and blessings, along with the performance of honor songs.
On the third and final day of the healing run, they will gather for a sunrise ceremony at Soule’s flower-adorned grave at Denver’s Riverside Cemetery. The participants will then continue on to 15th and Lawrence Street in downtown Denver. There, a plaque is mounted on the side of an office building at the place where Soule was murdered on April 23, 1865. His death, for which no one was ever brought to justice, occurred only two months after he testified against Chivington before the Army commission.
Over the last few decades, Soule’s grave and place of death have been transformed into sacred sites of remembrance within a violent and traumatic frontier past.
The catastrophe of the Sand Creek Massacre is recognized by historians as among the most infamous events in the annals of the American West. Even now, it is the only massacre of Native people recognized as such by the U.S. government, with the land itself preserved as a national historic site for learning and reflection.
In Cheyenne and Arapaho stories, this event remains an ever-present trauma and persists as part of their cultural memory. In addition, it encapsulates the stark moment of betrayal against their ancestors and the theft of their lands.
The story of Soule’s and Cramer’s actions and their courage to say “no” to the killing of peaceful people at Sand Creek is an important chapter of U.S. history. I maintain that it is people like Soule and Cramer who truly deserve to be remembered through monuments and memorials, and can be a source for a different kind of historical understanding: one based not on abstract notions of justice and right, but upon the courage and integrity it takes to breathe life into those virtues.
On the 153nd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, as we honor the memory of those who died at Sand Creek, may we also be inspired by the heroic actions of these two American soldiers.
The annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run opens at the site of the Sand Creek Massacre near Eads, Colorado, with a sunrise ceremony honoring some 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne people who lost their lives in the infamous massacre. This brutal assault was carried out by Colonel John Chivington on Nov. 29, 1864.
While the Sand Creek massacre has been the subject of numerous books, much less attention has been given to two heroes of this horrific event: U.S. soldiers Captain Silas Soule and Lt. Joseph Cramer.
These were men who rejected the violence and genocide inherent in the “conquest of the West.” They did so by personally refusing to take part in the murder of peaceful people, while ordering the men under their command to stand down. Their example breaks the conventional frontier narrative that has come to define the clash between Colonial settlers and Native peoples as one of civilization versus savagery.
This is a theme I’ve previously addressed as a scholar in the fields of American Indian studies and Colonial history, both in my book on the Indian captivity narrative genre, “Buried in Shades of Night,” and more recently in writings on Sand Creek.
Soule’s noble act of compassion at Sand Creek is humbly conveyed in a letter to his mother included in the Denver Public Library Western History Collections: “I was present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly women and children… It was a horrable scene and I would not let my Company fire.”
Refusing to participate, Soule and the men of Company D of the First Colorado, along with Cramer of Company K, bore witness to the incomprehensible. Chivington’s attack soon descended into a frenzy of killing and mutilation, with soldiers taking scalps and other grisly trophies from the bodies of the dead. Soule was a devoted abolitionist and one dedicated to the rights of all people. He stayed true to his convictions in the face of insults and even a threat of hanging from Chivington the night before at Fort Lyon.
In the following weeks, Soule and Cramer wrote letters to Major Edward “Ned” Wyncoop, the previous commander at Fort Lyon who had dealt fairly with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Both harshly condemned the massacre and the soldiers who carried it out. Soule’s letter details a meeting among officers on the eve of the attack in which he fervently condemned Chivington’s plans asserting “that any man who would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.”
Describing the attack to Wynkoop, Soule wrote, “I refused to fire and swore that none but a coward would.” His letter goes on to describe the soldiers as “a perfect mob.”
This account is verified by Cramer’s letter. Detailing his own objections to Chivington, whom he describes as coming “like a thief in the dark,” Cramer had stated that he “thought it murder to jump them friendly Indians.” To this charge, Chivington had replied, “Damn any man or men who are in sympathy with them.”
In Soule’s account, he writes, “I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.”
While few Americans – especially those living outside of Colorado – may know their names, Soule and Cramer are honored and revered by the descendants of the people they tried to save. According to David F. Halaas, former Colorado state historian and current historical consultant to the Northern Cheyenne, without their courage in disobeying Chivington’s orders and keeping their men from the massacre, “the descendants probably wouldn’t be around today,” and there would be no one to tell the stories.
The horrific descriptions of Soule and Cramer prompted several official inquiries into the atrocity. Both men also testified before an Army commission in Colorado as witnesses. While the officers and soldiers responsible escaped punishment, their testimony brought widespread condemnation upon Chivington, who defended the massacre for the rest of his life.
These investigations also ended the political career of the Colorado territorial governor, John Evans, who had issued two proclamations calling for violence against Native people of the plains, and for organizing the 3rd Colorado Cavalry Regiment in which Chivington was placed in command.
Sites of reverence and healing
The Cheyenne and Arapaho will return to Denver this year to honor their ancestors and remember Soule’s and Cramer’s conscience and humanity. This will be done through an offering of prayers and blessings, along with the performance of honor songs.
On the third and final day of the healing run, they will gather for a sunrise ceremony at Soule’s flower-adorned grave at Denver’s Riverside Cemetery. The participants will then continue on to 15th and Lawrence Street in downtown Denver. There, a plaque is mounted on the side of an office building at the place where Soule was murdered on April 23, 1865. His death, for which no one was ever brought to justice, occurred only two months after he testified against Chivington before the Army commission.
Over the last few decades, Soule’s grave and place of death have been transformed into sacred sites of remembrance within a violent and traumatic frontier past.
The catastrophe of the Sand Creek Massacre is recognized by historians as among the most infamous events in the annals of the American West. Even now, it is the only massacre of Native people recognized as such by the U.S. government, with the land itself preserved as a national historic site for learning and reflection.
In Cheyenne and Arapaho stories, this event remains an ever-present trauma and persists as part of their cultural memory. In addition, it encapsulates the stark moment of betrayal against their ancestors and the theft of their lands.
The story of Soule’s and Cramer’s actions and their courage to say “no” to the killing of peaceful people at Sand Creek is an important chapter of U.S. history. I maintain that it is people like Soule and Cramer who truly deserve to be remembered through monuments and memorials, and can be a source for a different kind of historical understanding: one based not on abstract notions of justice and right, but upon the courage and integrity it takes to breathe life into those virtues.
On the 153nd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, as we honor the memory of those who died at Sand Creek, may we also be inspired by the heroic actions of these two American soldiers.
'We're in constant crisis': cyclone-hit reservation forced to recover on its own
Michael Sainato Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota
the uardian
Fri 10 May 2019 02.00 EDT
The canyons and hills of South Dakota’s Badlands National Park fade south into the nearly 3,500-sq-mile Pine Ridge Reservation. About 20,000 members of the Oglala Lakota nation live on the reservation in sparsely populated towns and ranches with small trailers often housing multiple families, loosely connected by miles of dirt roads.
Home to the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where US soldiers massacred 150 to 300 Native Americans in 1890, including women and children, the reservation is wracked by rampant poverty, lack of resources and poor infrastructure. Pine Ridge encompasses some of the poorest counties in the United States, with unemployment around 75% and the lowest life expectancy in the country.
Now it faces another devastating challenge – extreme weather and a government that seems unwilling to help those it hits.
On the Pine Ridge Reservation, Virgil Poafpybitty makes peace pipes and jewelry for a living, in between volunteering the use of his carpentry skills to neighbors for house repairs when materials are available. His wife, Toni, works in the Oglala Lakota nation tribal office, one of the few on the reservation with the steady income of a job. Their home was one of hundreds on Pine Ridge recently damaged due to flooding induced by a bomb cyclone, essentially a winter hurricane, in March. The event displaced an estimated1,500 tribal members from their homes and uprooted the lives of hundreds more.
Donald Trump approved a national disaster declaration for Nebraska and Iowa in March after the cyclone hit the region, providing federal funding to impacted individuals and communities in those states. But in South Dakota, Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation hit by the same storm have been forced to try to recover on their own.
“Imagine 1,000 families stranded. Imagine families subsisting on $10,000 to $20,000 a year. We’re living in a constant crisis,” said Chase Iron Eyes, public relations director for the Oglala Lakota nation who resides on the Pine Ridge Reservation. “We’re survivors. We’re surviving these circumstances meant to bring about our extinction. If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘poverty is violence’, you just have to come to Pine Ridge to see what that means.”
More than a month after the bomb cyclone hit, many roads remain unusable and dozens of homes are still inaccessible from main roads. The Oglala Lakota nation is currently circulating a petition for Trump to provide federal disaster relief to the Pine Ridge Reservation.
This is the second storm within a year that badly damaged the Poafpybitty’s home. Last July, their home was one of hundreds of houses on Pine Ridge badly damaged by a storm that included baseball-sized hail, his roof, windows and house siding still scarred from the damage. Fema (Federal Emergency Management Agency) denied requested assistance to the Oglala Lakota nation after that storm, leaving residents to live with the damage to their homes and gradually make repairs as they can.
“The latest storm shut everything down. A lot of people’s livestock starved. Our whole basement was flooded. We’re just now coming out of it.,” said Poafpybitty.
Nearly a year after the July 2018 hailstorm, about half of the damaged homes are still not repaired. Many residents lived in darkness for months, with just plastic wrap and blankets used to cover broken windows to try to keep out South Dakota’s brutally cold winter air in homes where heating, electricity and access to clean water are already substandard or nonexistent.
Now the residents of Pine Ridge are recovering without any federal support again.
“When the storm hit, we couldn’t leave for a week,” said Poafpybitty. “For about two weeks, the water was off. Now they’re finally pumping it through, but they have to treat it. We can’t drink it. I had to buy a filter the other day to take a bath because it’s treated with chemicals. We live on bottled water.”
His wife, Toni , explained people at Pine Ridge need building materials and able-bodied volunteers to help rebuild, but have grown accustomed to being denied help or ignored. “We’ve been so used to lip service and we’re not going to get our hopes up until we see action,” she said.
The Oglala Lakota nation is in the process of assessing the extent of the damages in order to file a formal request for funding to Fema. The South Dakota state legislature passed a resolution urging South Dakota senators and the state’s lone congressional representative to seek an emergency declaration from Trump, but no action has been taken by the Trump administration.
“We’re trying to get our preliminary damage assessments done by May 10,” said tribal member Del Brewer, a former hazard specialist with Fema for 16 years who is helping the tribe’s emergency management team. “Right now, we can’t get to some of these families without burying our vehicles in the mud.” Brewer noted at least one person has died so far from the flooding due to being unable to get out to their dialysis treatment.
Hundreds of miles of dirt roads throughout the reservation have been completely destroyed. Food, water and medical supplies still have to be delivered to many homes by foot, horseback or air-dropped.
Federal funding for Native American tribes has significantly decreased across the board under the Trump administration. In March 2019, Trump released a 2020 budget proposal that would cut the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from $2.4bn in 2019 to $1.9bn in 2020, and a reduction in staffing at the agency from 6,873 full-time employees in 2019 to 4,569. The agency has gradually been cut since Trump took office; in 2017 its budget was $2.9bn and staffed 7,431 full-time employees before Trump proposed his administration’s first budget in 2018.
“We should have highways and infrastructure. The federal government, they’re obligated to provide us certain things by treaties,” said Calvin Ghostbear. The road to his home was washed away and his barn was flooded with water, killing several of his cattle. His wife had to be rescued by boat from their home during the flooding.
Ghostbear noted no one on the reservation has ever experienced flooding of this magnitude. “Climate change, its clear to me, I see it,” he said. “We try to protect mother earth. She’s mad and this is a perfect example of what we’re dealing with.”
A Fema spokesperson told the Guardian in an email in regards to Fema’s denial of assistance to the reservation after the July 2018 storm, “requests for major disaster declarations are decided by the president, and the region is not always informed of how or why decisions are reached”. The spokesperson added the South Dakota governor has not yet formally requested a disaster declaration from Trump.
As the disaster continues to take it toll, locals seem almost resigned to government inaction. “We do everything on our own. We don’t rely on anyone anymore, but we’re poor. We make do with what we have,” Poafpybitty said.
Home to the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where US soldiers massacred 150 to 300 Native Americans in 1890, including women and children, the reservation is wracked by rampant poverty, lack of resources and poor infrastructure. Pine Ridge encompasses some of the poorest counties in the United States, with unemployment around 75% and the lowest life expectancy in the country.
Now it faces another devastating challenge – extreme weather and a government that seems unwilling to help those it hits.
On the Pine Ridge Reservation, Virgil Poafpybitty makes peace pipes and jewelry for a living, in between volunteering the use of his carpentry skills to neighbors for house repairs when materials are available. His wife, Toni, works in the Oglala Lakota nation tribal office, one of the few on the reservation with the steady income of a job. Their home was one of hundreds on Pine Ridge recently damaged due to flooding induced by a bomb cyclone, essentially a winter hurricane, in March. The event displaced an estimated1,500 tribal members from their homes and uprooted the lives of hundreds more.
Donald Trump approved a national disaster declaration for Nebraska and Iowa in March after the cyclone hit the region, providing federal funding to impacted individuals and communities in those states. But in South Dakota, Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation hit by the same storm have been forced to try to recover on their own.
“Imagine 1,000 families stranded. Imagine families subsisting on $10,000 to $20,000 a year. We’re living in a constant crisis,” said Chase Iron Eyes, public relations director for the Oglala Lakota nation who resides on the Pine Ridge Reservation. “We’re survivors. We’re surviving these circumstances meant to bring about our extinction. If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘poverty is violence’, you just have to come to Pine Ridge to see what that means.”
More than a month after the bomb cyclone hit, many roads remain unusable and dozens of homes are still inaccessible from main roads. The Oglala Lakota nation is currently circulating a petition for Trump to provide federal disaster relief to the Pine Ridge Reservation.
This is the second storm within a year that badly damaged the Poafpybitty’s home. Last July, their home was one of hundreds of houses on Pine Ridge badly damaged by a storm that included baseball-sized hail, his roof, windows and house siding still scarred from the damage. Fema (Federal Emergency Management Agency) denied requested assistance to the Oglala Lakota nation after that storm, leaving residents to live with the damage to their homes and gradually make repairs as they can.
“The latest storm shut everything down. A lot of people’s livestock starved. Our whole basement was flooded. We’re just now coming out of it.,” said Poafpybitty.
Nearly a year after the July 2018 hailstorm, about half of the damaged homes are still not repaired. Many residents lived in darkness for months, with just plastic wrap and blankets used to cover broken windows to try to keep out South Dakota’s brutally cold winter air in homes where heating, electricity and access to clean water are already substandard or nonexistent.
Now the residents of Pine Ridge are recovering without any federal support again.
“When the storm hit, we couldn’t leave for a week,” said Poafpybitty. “For about two weeks, the water was off. Now they’re finally pumping it through, but they have to treat it. We can’t drink it. I had to buy a filter the other day to take a bath because it’s treated with chemicals. We live on bottled water.”
His wife, Toni , explained people at Pine Ridge need building materials and able-bodied volunteers to help rebuild, but have grown accustomed to being denied help or ignored. “We’ve been so used to lip service and we’re not going to get our hopes up until we see action,” she said.
The Oglala Lakota nation is in the process of assessing the extent of the damages in order to file a formal request for funding to Fema. The South Dakota state legislature passed a resolution urging South Dakota senators and the state’s lone congressional representative to seek an emergency declaration from Trump, but no action has been taken by the Trump administration.
“We’re trying to get our preliminary damage assessments done by May 10,” said tribal member Del Brewer, a former hazard specialist with Fema for 16 years who is helping the tribe’s emergency management team. “Right now, we can’t get to some of these families without burying our vehicles in the mud.” Brewer noted at least one person has died so far from the flooding due to being unable to get out to their dialysis treatment.
Hundreds of miles of dirt roads throughout the reservation have been completely destroyed. Food, water and medical supplies still have to be delivered to many homes by foot, horseback or air-dropped.
Federal funding for Native American tribes has significantly decreased across the board under the Trump administration. In March 2019, Trump released a 2020 budget proposal that would cut the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from $2.4bn in 2019 to $1.9bn in 2020, and a reduction in staffing at the agency from 6,873 full-time employees in 2019 to 4,569. The agency has gradually been cut since Trump took office; in 2017 its budget was $2.9bn and staffed 7,431 full-time employees before Trump proposed his administration’s first budget in 2018.
“We should have highways and infrastructure. The federal government, they’re obligated to provide us certain things by treaties,” said Calvin Ghostbear. The road to his home was washed away and his barn was flooded with water, killing several of his cattle. His wife had to be rescued by boat from their home during the flooding.
Ghostbear noted no one on the reservation has ever experienced flooding of this magnitude. “Climate change, its clear to me, I see it,” he said. “We try to protect mother earth. She’s mad and this is a perfect example of what we’re dealing with.”
A Fema spokesperson told the Guardian in an email in regards to Fema’s denial of assistance to the reservation after the July 2018 storm, “requests for major disaster declarations are decided by the president, and the region is not always informed of how or why decisions are reached”. The spokesperson added the South Dakota governor has not yet formally requested a disaster declaration from Trump.
As the disaster continues to take it toll, locals seem almost resigned to government inaction. “We do everything on our own. We don’t rely on anyone anymore, but we’re poor. We make do with what we have,” Poafpybitty said.
Native Peoples’ Bones Are Not Collectors’ Items. They Must Be Returned.
BY Mary Annette Pember, Truthout
PUBLISHED April 28, 2019
A Native American family burial plot in Ponemah Point, Minnesota, is seen in this photograph taken in 1934.
U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVE AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION / WIKIMEDIA
How did the ghoulish practice of grave-digging become an “innocent hobby” for so many white people in the US?
A recent FBI press release is a reminder that digging up and robbing Native American graves is still considered acceptable by many Americans and barely treated as a crime. Our dead, like butterflies pinned to a collector’s board, are treated as stuff for collectors and hobbyists. We are “artifacts.”
On February 27, 2019, the FBI issued a press release and a unique request. The Bureau’s Art Crime Team is reaching out to tribes in the United States for help in repatriating approximately 500 sets of human remains looted from Native American burial grounds. The remains were found during a 2014 FBI raid on a vast collection of artifacts and antiquities from around the world held by Don Miller of rural Rush County, Indiana.
The Normalization of Grave-Digging in White Culture
I covered the 2014 Indiana case as a journalist for Indian Country Todayand also covered other cases of illegal Native American artifact and remains hunting and collecting. I continue to be baffled by the complete disrespect white folks have for Native American graves versus the respect they have for those of their own ancestors. Even more baffling to me is the urge to dig up and own the dead — anybody’s dead. What internal mental process transforms grave-digging into an acceptable hobby?
The short answer is racism. Multigenerational, entrenched racism has so thoroughly scrubbed clean the practice of Native American artifact hunting and collecting that it has been normalized and elevated as an acceptable right for the descendants of European settlers.
The European settlers who conquered and dominated Native peoples sought to justify their violence by casting us as less than human. This violence continues in the current day, with some portraying us as denizens of a long dead past and others treating us as part of nature’s fauna.
Many amateur white American archaeologists and collectors are still influenced by the right of conquest mentality that continues to endorse the objectification and ownership of Native peoples and the entirety of our patrimony.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)enacted in 1990 makes removing Native American cultural items, such as human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or items of cultural patrimony from federal and tribal land illegal.
Trafficking in these items is also against the law. NAGPRA includes a process for repatriation of remains and objects to affiliated tribes. Hunting for artifacts on private land, however, is not illegal. Although trafficking in human remains and other cultural items is a crime, these cases are seldom prosecuted.
After covering the Indiana case, I wrote a series entitled “People of the Dirt,” in which I interrogated the practice of digging for and collecting artifacts. I described the extensive subculture of digging and collecting and the lucrative market place for these items. I learned that unbroken pottery items have almost always been taken from burial sites. I spoke with several Native people including Ben Barnes, second chief and former Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma.
“When you remove the bones of my loved ones from the earth where they are interred, you remove them from the proxim[ity] of family,” Barnes told me in an interview conducted for the “People of the Dirt” series.
According to Kathy Jefferson Bancroft, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone reservation in California, whom I also quoted in the “People of the Dirt” piece, “Disturbing our graves is the worst thing you can do to us.”
In the course of my research, I uncovered a world of those obsessed with artifacts. Collectors and amateur archaeologists adamantly defend their plundering of graves and artifacts as harmless and even frame their activities as a means to honor Native Americans. By challenging the good intentions of these “collectors,” however, I unwittingly unleashed a wave of entitled white anger and fragility I hadn’t bargained for. For months after the articles were published, I received numerous threatening emails and phone calls. Outraged readers accused me of inaccurate reporting, saying I falsely portrayed their hobby as a form of racism. Others threatened me with bodily harm.
In discussing these dynamics for my “People of the Dirt“ series, Barnes reflected that artifact collectors appear to “lack the ability to see remains and artifacts as connected to living cultures.”
FBI Efforts to Repatriate Stolen Remains
Clearly, changing the narrative around artifact hunting and collecting is slow going. But the public attitude is finally beginning to change, albeit at a glacial pace. Some of the change is being forwarded by an unlikely ally for Native Americans — the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Historically, the FBI hasn’t had a good relationship with Indian Country,” said Pete Coffey, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota.
In the 1960s and 1970s the FBI targeted the American Indian Movement (AIM) as part of its infamous COINTELPRO operation designed to destabilize the civil rights movement. Today, the FBI is responsible for policing a large portion of reservations but is criticized for its poor record of bringing cases reported by tribal members to prosecution. For instance, in 2012 the Department of Justice, the agency overseeing the FBI, filed charges in about 50 percent of murder investigations in Indian Country and turned down two-thirds of sexual assault cases.
However, after the FBI raid that unearthed Don Miller’s vast collection of human remains looted from Native American burial grounds, the FBI unexpectedly exhibited proactive concern for Indigenous communities’ interest in repatriating the remains.
“The FBI reached out to us first. We were surprised,” Coffey said.
Coffey, of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, helped repatriate some of the remains and artifacts found among Miller’s huge collection.
Stymied by the enormity and disarray of Miller’s holdings, the FBI is struggling to find a means to respectfully repatriate the remains. In February, the FBI announced the creation of an invitation-only website that contains information about all the recovered material. (Official representatives of tribes can submit a request to claim items to the Bureau’s art theft program at [email protected].)
The idea is to have the experts “come to us and guide us in the repatriation process,” FBI Agent Tim Carpenter told Truthout.
“We weren’t prepared for the amount of ancestral remains we found in the Miller case,” Carpenter said.
Don Miller’s Collection Offers Gruesome Example of Dehumanization in Action
Miller’s collection is the largest recovery of remains found in a single case according to Carpenter. There were over 2,000 individual bones, likely representing 500 people.
“It was traumatizing, shocking to the senses even for seasoned agents to see how the remains in Miller’s collection were treated,” Carpenter said.
Holly Cusack-McVeigh, a professor of anthropology and museum studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis described her shock over Miller’s treatment of the remains in his collection. Cusack-McVeigh has been involved with the case since its beginning in 2013, guiding the FBI on handling and repatriating the remains.
“The remains were completely comingled. And worse, they were manipulated,” she told Truthout.
For instance, Miller inserted a spear point into one of the skulls kept in a display case.
“Miller was a showman; he mixed and manipulated his collection to create his desired effect,” said Larry Zimmerman, a retired professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who also worked on the case and spoke with Truthout about the experience.
Investigators also found the remains of several infants. “As a mother, finding the remains of babies was haunting; I won’t rest until those babies are back home,” Cusack-McVeigh said.
“This is a human rights issue. All people have the right to bury their dead with their cultural protocols,” she said. “These ancestors deserve to be treated with the same love and care they received when they were first buried.”
A Case Study in White Fragility and Unimpeachable Innocence
Before Miller passed away in 2015 at the age of 91, he agreed to relinquish his collection to the FBI. He was not charged with a crime. Agents described him as cooperative throughout the investigation.
Miller and his collection were well known in his community, where he was considered a beloved neighbor, despite his grisly plundering and manipulation of Native remains. He regularly invited school and scouting groups to view his collection. The FBI raid in 2014 outraged neighbors who felt Miller had done nothing wrong even though he admitted that much of his collection was obtained illegally.
In the handful of NAGPRA cases prosecuted by the federal government, right-wing federalists denounced the actions as overkill and aggravating to citizens already distrustful of federal law enforcement.
Indeed, white fragility surrounding federal intervention in these violations is so powerful and pervasive that recent press coverage by CBSof the Miller case spent considerable time painting Miller as a beloved neighbor rather than a rampant grave robber who routinely violated federal laws.
After the CBS story in which Cusack-McVeigh describes actions by collectors like Miller as racist, she received angry, threatening messages via email and social media accusing her of overreacting and conflating an innocent hobby with racism.
“They aren’t digging white graves. Anybody who digs graves must be of the mentality that the people they are digging up aren’t human,” she said.
For Indigenous peoples, the practice of digging for artifacts, especially in graves, reflects not only a deep cultural hegemony of European conquest and entitlement over Indigenous peoples but also demonstrates a peculiar urge to accumulate that reflects contemporary acquisitive culture. “It’s about greed and the same sense of entitlement that led to the depopulation of Indigenous peoples from North America in the name of Manifest Destiny,” said Henrietta Mann of the Cheyenne Nation and emeritus professor at Montana State University’s Department of Native American Studies.
In the meantime, the ancestors’ bones from Miller’s collection languish in a secure facility near Indianapolis as they await tribes to claim them. The temperature, humidity and light in the FBI-leased space are carefully controlled — a far cry from the jumbled mess in which Miller kept the remains.
“Those spirits have been wandering since their graves were violated. When we repatriate, we do so with the least amount of attention. We feed them with tobacco and water and apologize to them and we rebury them,” said Coffey. “One of those ancestors could have been my great-great-grandfather.”
A recent FBI press release is a reminder that digging up and robbing Native American graves is still considered acceptable by many Americans and barely treated as a crime. Our dead, like butterflies pinned to a collector’s board, are treated as stuff for collectors and hobbyists. We are “artifacts.”
On February 27, 2019, the FBI issued a press release and a unique request. The Bureau’s Art Crime Team is reaching out to tribes in the United States for help in repatriating approximately 500 sets of human remains looted from Native American burial grounds. The remains were found during a 2014 FBI raid on a vast collection of artifacts and antiquities from around the world held by Don Miller of rural Rush County, Indiana.
The Normalization of Grave-Digging in White Culture
I covered the 2014 Indiana case as a journalist for Indian Country Todayand also covered other cases of illegal Native American artifact and remains hunting and collecting. I continue to be baffled by the complete disrespect white folks have for Native American graves versus the respect they have for those of their own ancestors. Even more baffling to me is the urge to dig up and own the dead — anybody’s dead. What internal mental process transforms grave-digging into an acceptable hobby?
The short answer is racism. Multigenerational, entrenched racism has so thoroughly scrubbed clean the practice of Native American artifact hunting and collecting that it has been normalized and elevated as an acceptable right for the descendants of European settlers.
The European settlers who conquered and dominated Native peoples sought to justify their violence by casting us as less than human. This violence continues in the current day, with some portraying us as denizens of a long dead past and others treating us as part of nature’s fauna.
Many amateur white American archaeologists and collectors are still influenced by the right of conquest mentality that continues to endorse the objectification and ownership of Native peoples and the entirety of our patrimony.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)enacted in 1990 makes removing Native American cultural items, such as human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects or items of cultural patrimony from federal and tribal land illegal.
Trafficking in these items is also against the law. NAGPRA includes a process for repatriation of remains and objects to affiliated tribes. Hunting for artifacts on private land, however, is not illegal. Although trafficking in human remains and other cultural items is a crime, these cases are seldom prosecuted.
After covering the Indiana case, I wrote a series entitled “People of the Dirt,” in which I interrogated the practice of digging for and collecting artifacts. I described the extensive subculture of digging and collecting and the lucrative market place for these items. I learned that unbroken pottery items have almost always been taken from burial sites. I spoke with several Native people including Ben Barnes, second chief and former Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma.
“When you remove the bones of my loved ones from the earth where they are interred, you remove them from the proxim[ity] of family,” Barnes told me in an interview conducted for the “People of the Dirt” series.
According to Kathy Jefferson Bancroft, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone reservation in California, whom I also quoted in the “People of the Dirt” piece, “Disturbing our graves is the worst thing you can do to us.”
In the course of my research, I uncovered a world of those obsessed with artifacts. Collectors and amateur archaeologists adamantly defend their plundering of graves and artifacts as harmless and even frame their activities as a means to honor Native Americans. By challenging the good intentions of these “collectors,” however, I unwittingly unleashed a wave of entitled white anger and fragility I hadn’t bargained for. For months after the articles were published, I received numerous threatening emails and phone calls. Outraged readers accused me of inaccurate reporting, saying I falsely portrayed their hobby as a form of racism. Others threatened me with bodily harm.
In discussing these dynamics for my “People of the Dirt“ series, Barnes reflected that artifact collectors appear to “lack the ability to see remains and artifacts as connected to living cultures.”
FBI Efforts to Repatriate Stolen Remains
Clearly, changing the narrative around artifact hunting and collecting is slow going. But the public attitude is finally beginning to change, albeit at a glacial pace. Some of the change is being forwarded by an unlikely ally for Native Americans — the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Historically, the FBI hasn’t had a good relationship with Indian Country,” said Pete Coffey, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota.
In the 1960s and 1970s the FBI targeted the American Indian Movement (AIM) as part of its infamous COINTELPRO operation designed to destabilize the civil rights movement. Today, the FBI is responsible for policing a large portion of reservations but is criticized for its poor record of bringing cases reported by tribal members to prosecution. For instance, in 2012 the Department of Justice, the agency overseeing the FBI, filed charges in about 50 percent of murder investigations in Indian Country and turned down two-thirds of sexual assault cases.
However, after the FBI raid that unearthed Don Miller’s vast collection of human remains looted from Native American burial grounds, the FBI unexpectedly exhibited proactive concern for Indigenous communities’ interest in repatriating the remains.
“The FBI reached out to us first. We were surprised,” Coffey said.
Coffey, of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, helped repatriate some of the remains and artifacts found among Miller’s huge collection.
Stymied by the enormity and disarray of Miller’s holdings, the FBI is struggling to find a means to respectfully repatriate the remains. In February, the FBI announced the creation of an invitation-only website that contains information about all the recovered material. (Official representatives of tribes can submit a request to claim items to the Bureau’s art theft program at [email protected].)
The idea is to have the experts “come to us and guide us in the repatriation process,” FBI Agent Tim Carpenter told Truthout.
“We weren’t prepared for the amount of ancestral remains we found in the Miller case,” Carpenter said.
Don Miller’s Collection Offers Gruesome Example of Dehumanization in Action
Miller’s collection is the largest recovery of remains found in a single case according to Carpenter. There were over 2,000 individual bones, likely representing 500 people.
“It was traumatizing, shocking to the senses even for seasoned agents to see how the remains in Miller’s collection were treated,” Carpenter said.
Holly Cusack-McVeigh, a professor of anthropology and museum studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis described her shock over Miller’s treatment of the remains in his collection. Cusack-McVeigh has been involved with the case since its beginning in 2013, guiding the FBI on handling and repatriating the remains.
“The remains were completely comingled. And worse, they were manipulated,” she told Truthout.
For instance, Miller inserted a spear point into one of the skulls kept in a display case.
“Miller was a showman; he mixed and manipulated his collection to create his desired effect,” said Larry Zimmerman, a retired professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who also worked on the case and spoke with Truthout about the experience.
Investigators also found the remains of several infants. “As a mother, finding the remains of babies was haunting; I won’t rest until those babies are back home,” Cusack-McVeigh said.
“This is a human rights issue. All people have the right to bury their dead with their cultural protocols,” she said. “These ancestors deserve to be treated with the same love and care they received when they were first buried.”
A Case Study in White Fragility and Unimpeachable Innocence
Before Miller passed away in 2015 at the age of 91, he agreed to relinquish his collection to the FBI. He was not charged with a crime. Agents described him as cooperative throughout the investigation.
Miller and his collection were well known in his community, where he was considered a beloved neighbor, despite his grisly plundering and manipulation of Native remains. He regularly invited school and scouting groups to view his collection. The FBI raid in 2014 outraged neighbors who felt Miller had done nothing wrong even though he admitted that much of his collection was obtained illegally.
In the handful of NAGPRA cases prosecuted by the federal government, right-wing federalists denounced the actions as overkill and aggravating to citizens already distrustful of federal law enforcement.
Indeed, white fragility surrounding federal intervention in these violations is so powerful and pervasive that recent press coverage by CBSof the Miller case spent considerable time painting Miller as a beloved neighbor rather than a rampant grave robber who routinely violated federal laws.
After the CBS story in which Cusack-McVeigh describes actions by collectors like Miller as racist, she received angry, threatening messages via email and social media accusing her of overreacting and conflating an innocent hobby with racism.
“They aren’t digging white graves. Anybody who digs graves must be of the mentality that the people they are digging up aren’t human,” she said.
For Indigenous peoples, the practice of digging for artifacts, especially in graves, reflects not only a deep cultural hegemony of European conquest and entitlement over Indigenous peoples but also demonstrates a peculiar urge to accumulate that reflects contemporary acquisitive culture. “It’s about greed and the same sense of entitlement that led to the depopulation of Indigenous peoples from North America in the name of Manifest Destiny,” said Henrietta Mann of the Cheyenne Nation and emeritus professor at Montana State University’s Department of Native American Studies.
In the meantime, the ancestors’ bones from Miller’s collection languish in a secure facility near Indianapolis as they await tribes to claim them. The temperature, humidity and light in the FBI-leased space are carefully controlled — a far cry from the jumbled mess in which Miller kept the remains.
“Those spirits have been wandering since their graves were violated. When we repatriate, we do so with the least amount of attention. We feed them with tobacco and water and apologize to them and we rebury them,” said Coffey. “One of those ancestors could have been my great-great-grandfather.”
‘A crisis like we’ve never seen’: Native communities shed light on shutdown’s disastrous impacts
Already vulnerable populations face food and medicine shortages, as well as lapses in pay.
AMANDA MICHELLE GOMEZ - thinkprogress
JAN 15, 2019, 4:09 PM
In the first congressional hearing at which Native members of Congress were present, Democratic representatives on Tuesday heard directly from Native American communities that are being devastated by the ongoing partial government shutdown, which this week became the longest in U.S. history.
Many groups — including veterans, TSA employees, and law enforcement — have been impacted with lapses in pay and shortages in key resources, but it has been particularly disastrous for Native communities that are supposed to receive a wide-range of federal services due to treaty obligations.
“These threats — I haven’t seen anything like this,” said Aaron Payment, chairman of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe and board member of the National Congress of American Indians.
“This is a crisis like we’ve never seen,” he added.
Speaking to Democratic members on the House Committee on Natural Resources, he and others outlined the many ways already vulnerable populations are hurt by the shutdown. An Indian Health Service (IHS) contractor, Native American Lifelines of Baltimore and Boston, can’t afford to pay for its patients’ insulin, antibiotics, blood pressure and thyroid medications; food deliveries through the National Association of Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations Board have been stalled; and thousands of Bureau of Indian Affairs and IHS employees are furloughed and working without pay.
It was an emotional hearing, largely because — for many of the panelists, and the members of Congress hosting them — it was personal.
“I have family members who are using Vivitrol as medication-assisted treatment to prevent them from overdosing and from going to get fentanyl — this is really life threatening,” Payment said.
A particularly striking moment came when Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM) — one of two of the first Native women elected to Congress in 2018 — thanked tribe leaders for their service.
“Thank you all so much for taking the time to be here today and for your amazing caring about the communities you serve — I’m just very grateful for your time here,” Haaland told panelists, holding back tears.
For the past several weeks, the shutdown has exacerbated a dire situation in which services are already under-funded.
Native American Lifelines, for example, received less than $1 million from IHS for its two facilities in major metropolitan areas — a mere $691 of which is dedicated to mental health, the executive director told representatives. The last time funds were distributed to the nonprofit was months ago, in September 2018.
“The money to operate our facility has effectively stopped coming in, but the patients have not stopped needing health care,” said Native American Lifelines executive director Kerry Hawk Lessard.
More broadly, the 41 nonprofits that contract with IHS through the Office of Urban Indian Health Programs receive an average of $700 per patient, given that it’s a single line-item in the budget, said Lessard.
The nonprofit’s behavioral health treatment and counseling has also been interrupted, which is especially concerning given that six clients have overdosed and, in the past two months, four of them have died.
“Those struggling now have nowhere to go. Substance abuse will continue to occur and so will the overdoses,” said Lessard.
Meanwhile, the National Association of Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations Board has furloughed employees. As a result, a Minnesota affiliate has one staff member handling day-to-day operations. Mary Greene Trottier said people who depend on their services — typically the elderly — have been calling to ask if they’re still in operation.
“Difficult to be reassuring when we only have funds until the end of January,” said Trottier, adding that food can’t leave the national warehouse after Jan. 31 if the shutdown continues.
This isn’t the first time Native communities have been impacted by government shutdowns. However, panelists noted that, this time, there is an unprecedented lack of communication with the Trump administration. Payment said the Obama administration called tribal leaders in advance of the 2013 government shutdown to develop a triage plan, but the Trump administration did not. Indeed, Native communities were given less than 24 hours notice. When IHS held a call last week with tribal leaders, government staff weren’t able to answer basic questions, like whether communities will be reimbursed, Payment told lawmakers.
Panelists offered lawmakers various solutions to this problem.
“This shutdown crystallizes the need for IHS funding to become mandatory … IHS should be funded through advanced appropriations, which would ensure the basic health services for tribes are uninterrupted,” said Payment.
Many groups — including veterans, TSA employees, and law enforcement — have been impacted with lapses in pay and shortages in key resources, but it has been particularly disastrous for Native communities that are supposed to receive a wide-range of federal services due to treaty obligations.
“These threats — I haven’t seen anything like this,” said Aaron Payment, chairman of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe and board member of the National Congress of American Indians.
“This is a crisis like we’ve never seen,” he added.
Speaking to Democratic members on the House Committee on Natural Resources, he and others outlined the many ways already vulnerable populations are hurt by the shutdown. An Indian Health Service (IHS) contractor, Native American Lifelines of Baltimore and Boston, can’t afford to pay for its patients’ insulin, antibiotics, blood pressure and thyroid medications; food deliveries through the National Association of Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations Board have been stalled; and thousands of Bureau of Indian Affairs and IHS employees are furloughed and working without pay.
It was an emotional hearing, largely because — for many of the panelists, and the members of Congress hosting them — it was personal.
“I have family members who are using Vivitrol as medication-assisted treatment to prevent them from overdosing and from going to get fentanyl — this is really life threatening,” Payment said.
A particularly striking moment came when Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM) — one of two of the first Native women elected to Congress in 2018 — thanked tribe leaders for their service.
“Thank you all so much for taking the time to be here today and for your amazing caring about the communities you serve — I’m just very grateful for your time here,” Haaland told panelists, holding back tears.
For the past several weeks, the shutdown has exacerbated a dire situation in which services are already under-funded.
Native American Lifelines, for example, received less than $1 million from IHS for its two facilities in major metropolitan areas — a mere $691 of which is dedicated to mental health, the executive director told representatives. The last time funds were distributed to the nonprofit was months ago, in September 2018.
“The money to operate our facility has effectively stopped coming in, but the patients have not stopped needing health care,” said Native American Lifelines executive director Kerry Hawk Lessard.
More broadly, the 41 nonprofits that contract with IHS through the Office of Urban Indian Health Programs receive an average of $700 per patient, given that it’s a single line-item in the budget, said Lessard.
The nonprofit’s behavioral health treatment and counseling has also been interrupted, which is especially concerning given that six clients have overdosed and, in the past two months, four of them have died.
“Those struggling now have nowhere to go. Substance abuse will continue to occur and so will the overdoses,” said Lessard.
Meanwhile, the National Association of Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations Board has furloughed employees. As a result, a Minnesota affiliate has one staff member handling day-to-day operations. Mary Greene Trottier said people who depend on their services — typically the elderly — have been calling to ask if they’re still in operation.
“Difficult to be reassuring when we only have funds until the end of January,” said Trottier, adding that food can’t leave the national warehouse after Jan. 31 if the shutdown continues.
This isn’t the first time Native communities have been impacted by government shutdowns. However, panelists noted that, this time, there is an unprecedented lack of communication with the Trump administration. Payment said the Obama administration called tribal leaders in advance of the 2013 government shutdown to develop a triage plan, but the Trump administration did not. Indeed, Native communities were given less than 24 hours notice. When IHS held a call last week with tribal leaders, government staff weren’t able to answer basic questions, like whether communities will be reimbursed, Payment told lawmakers.
Panelists offered lawmakers various solutions to this problem.
“This shutdown crystallizes the need for IHS funding to become mandatory … IHS should be funded through advanced appropriations, which would ensure the basic health services for tribes are uninterrupted,” said Payment.
U.S. to Investigate Discrimination Against Native American Students on Montana Reservation
The Education Department said it will look into a long-standing complaint of racial inequities in Wolf Point schools after The New York Times and ProPublica wrote a story about the issue.
by Annie Waldman, ProPublica, and Erica L. Green, The New York Times
Jan. 4, 5 a.m. EST
A year and a half after receiving a detailed complaint from tribal leaders, the U.S. Department of Education plans to investigate their allegations that the Wolf Point School District in Montana discriminates against Native American students.
In a Dec. 28 letter, sent hours after The New York Times and ProPublica published an investigation into racial inequities in the school district, the department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the lawyer representing the tribal executive board of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation that it would look into the complaint. The board includes members of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes.
According to the letter, the investigation will focus on whether Wolf Point schools discipline Native students more harshly than white students, shunt them into remedial programs without appropriate cause, and deny them special education evaluations and services. Native American and mixed-race students make up more than three-quarters of Wolf Point’s enrollment.
The department said it will also examine whether the district failed to respond to a parent’s allegations that a Native student was racially harassed. The student wasn’t identified in the tribal complaint or in the letter.
“Tribal children have suffered unfairly for years in the Wolf Point School District,” said Melina Healey, the lawyer representing the tribal executive board. She called for a “swift and thorough investigation that leads to much-needed reforms.”
The Office for Civil Rights is already looking into a complaint by Louella Contreras that the Wolf Point district failed to provide her granddaughter, Ruth Fourstar, with special education services. The department’s decision to look into the tribal leaders’ broader allegations bucks the Education Department’s policy under Secretary Betsy DeVos of pulling back from investigating complaints of systemic discrimination by schools and colleges, and concentrating on mistreatment of individuals. ProPublica reported in June that, under DeVos, the department had scuttled more than 1,200 civil rights investigations that began under the Obama administration and lasted at least six months.
Nationwide, more than 90 percent of Native students attend integrated public schools near or on reservations, which have historically restricted tribal influence over curriculum, funding and staffing. Native American students have some of the worst academic outcomes in public schools: They score lower than nearly all other demographic groups on national tests and less than three-fourths of Native students graduate from high school.
In the early 20th century, white homesteaders prevailed on the federal government to open up unused lands on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation to non-Native settlement. In June 2017, the tribal executive board filed a 46-page complaint that described dozens of instances where Wolf Point schools provided limited academic opportunities and social support to Native students.
ProPublica and the Times found that Native students in Wolf Point are twice as likely to receive at least one suspension compared with their white peers, and white students are more than 10 times as likely to take at least one Advanced Placement course as Native students, according to an analysis of federal education data. In interviews, students, staff and parents said Wolf Point’s schools push Native children into a poorly funded, understaffed program for remedial students and truants. Native students said they were dropped from sports teams after giving birth, while a white pregnant student was not.
The Times-ProPublica investigation also found that some Native students have turned to self-harm and suicide. Three months before the tribal executive board’s complaint, a Wolf Point High School junior killed himself following a public rebuke from the principal for poor attendance, two students said. He was the second student at the high school in seven years to take his own life after being chided by district administrators.
Jeana Lervick, an attorney representing the school district, said the district is closed for the holidays and is unable to comment on the federal investigation. “Wolf Point Schools works constantly to address the challenges facing our students and in particular, our Indigenous students,” Lervick said in an earlier statement. “Our district is aware of historical issues in our nation and as educators do everything in our power to address them.”
The district’s superintendent and the high school principal did not respond to emailed questions.
Should civil rights investigators identify violations of federal law, the school district could lose federal funding. Typically, before investigators recommend sanctions, school districts voluntarily enter into an agreement with the department to remedy any wrongdoing and bring the district back into compliance with federal law. Federal civil rights investigations can take up to several years to resolve.
“Instead of providing a safe learning environment, the Wolf Point School District adds to the long history of educational abuses of our tribal communities,” said Roxanne Gourneau, a former member of the Fort Peck tribal executive board, who has worked to reform Wolf Point schools since her son took his life after being disciplined at the high school. “The school district has done more to fuel Native students’ trauma than to support their education. Change is long overdue.”
In a Dec. 28 letter, sent hours after The New York Times and ProPublica published an investigation into racial inequities in the school district, the department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the lawyer representing the tribal executive board of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation that it would look into the complaint. The board includes members of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes.
According to the letter, the investigation will focus on whether Wolf Point schools discipline Native students more harshly than white students, shunt them into remedial programs without appropriate cause, and deny them special education evaluations and services. Native American and mixed-race students make up more than three-quarters of Wolf Point’s enrollment.
The department said it will also examine whether the district failed to respond to a parent’s allegations that a Native student was racially harassed. The student wasn’t identified in the tribal complaint or in the letter.
“Tribal children have suffered unfairly for years in the Wolf Point School District,” said Melina Healey, the lawyer representing the tribal executive board. She called for a “swift and thorough investigation that leads to much-needed reforms.”
The Office for Civil Rights is already looking into a complaint by Louella Contreras that the Wolf Point district failed to provide her granddaughter, Ruth Fourstar, with special education services. The department’s decision to look into the tribal leaders’ broader allegations bucks the Education Department’s policy under Secretary Betsy DeVos of pulling back from investigating complaints of systemic discrimination by schools and colleges, and concentrating on mistreatment of individuals. ProPublica reported in June that, under DeVos, the department had scuttled more than 1,200 civil rights investigations that began under the Obama administration and lasted at least six months.
Nationwide, more than 90 percent of Native students attend integrated public schools near or on reservations, which have historically restricted tribal influence over curriculum, funding and staffing. Native American students have some of the worst academic outcomes in public schools: They score lower than nearly all other demographic groups on national tests and less than three-fourths of Native students graduate from high school.
In the early 20th century, white homesteaders prevailed on the federal government to open up unused lands on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation to non-Native settlement. In June 2017, the tribal executive board filed a 46-page complaint that described dozens of instances where Wolf Point schools provided limited academic opportunities and social support to Native students.
ProPublica and the Times found that Native students in Wolf Point are twice as likely to receive at least one suspension compared with their white peers, and white students are more than 10 times as likely to take at least one Advanced Placement course as Native students, according to an analysis of federal education data. In interviews, students, staff and parents said Wolf Point’s schools push Native children into a poorly funded, understaffed program for remedial students and truants. Native students said they were dropped from sports teams after giving birth, while a white pregnant student was not.
The Times-ProPublica investigation also found that some Native students have turned to self-harm and suicide. Three months before the tribal executive board’s complaint, a Wolf Point High School junior killed himself following a public rebuke from the principal for poor attendance, two students said. He was the second student at the high school in seven years to take his own life after being chided by district administrators.
Jeana Lervick, an attorney representing the school district, said the district is closed for the holidays and is unable to comment on the federal investigation. “Wolf Point Schools works constantly to address the challenges facing our students and in particular, our Indigenous students,” Lervick said in an earlier statement. “Our district is aware of historical issues in our nation and as educators do everything in our power to address them.”
The district’s superintendent and the high school principal did not respond to emailed questions.
Should civil rights investigators identify violations of federal law, the school district could lose federal funding. Typically, before investigators recommend sanctions, school districts voluntarily enter into an agreement with the department to remedy any wrongdoing and bring the district back into compliance with federal law. Federal civil rights investigations can take up to several years to resolve.
“Instead of providing a safe learning environment, the Wolf Point School District adds to the long history of educational abuses of our tribal communities,” said Roxanne Gourneau, a former member of the Fort Peck tribal executive board, who has worked to reform Wolf Point schools since her son took his life after being disciplined at the high school. “The school district has done more to fuel Native students’ trauma than to support their education. Change is long overdue.”
New brew: the Native American women upending craft beer
New Mexico’s Bow & Arrow brewery is reimagining a predominantly white, male industry using tribal traditions
Samuel Gilbert and Mike Graham in Albuquerque, New Mexico
the guardian
Fri 28 Dec 2018 07.00 EST
Missy Begay is a co-founder of Bow & Arrow, the only brewery in the US owned by Native American women. Photograph: Roberto Rosales
The past decade has seen an explosion of craft beer breweries in the US as small businesses tap into growing demand for food and drink rooted in local traditions and ingredients.
Nowhere is this consumer movement more apparent, and unique, than at Bow & Arrow brewery in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first and only brewery in the US owned by Native American women, it has carved a space in the predominantly white and male-dominated industry by showcasing elements of their tribal identities, communities and ingredients through beer.
“We have been very intentional about highlighting our special place in the south-west,” said Bow & Arrow’s co-founder and CEO, Shyla Sheppard, sitting with her fellow founder Missy Begay inside the high-ceilinged brewery. On one wall was a mounted cardboard sculpture of a buffalo bust – on another, a star-spangled Pendleton blanket set near a huge photograph of Monument Valley.
According to Sheppard, this regional and indigenized aesthetic is present at every level of the Bow & Arrow business, from the art on the walls to the brewery’s “hop arrow” logo – symbolizing the cultural significance of the arrowhead to many Native American tribes – to the “beer and beer names”. The menu features selections such as Bolos and Bling (a play on the bolo tie of New Mexico and the jewelry for which Native Americans are known in the south-west), and Denim Tux, a playful reference to popular south-western apparel as well as a nod the color of the main ingredient, local blue corn, that is used in the beer.
For Sheppard, an economist and former social impact investor from the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, and Begay, a physician from the Navajo Nation, the use of local ingredients is another way to celebrate the region.
“People take for granted what’s in the backyard,” said Sheppard, explaining Bow & Arrow’s unique use of additives such as New Mexican hops, sumac berries, blue corn, regionally sourced malt and Navajo tea, an earthy, herbal plant used by the local Hopi, Pueblo and the Navajo Nation. “It was the drink of the summer,” said Begay, recalling days in the Canyon de Chelly region drinking cold homemade Navajo tea.
Hops, among the essential ingredients in beer, have long been used by Native Americans for their medicinal properties. “They recognized the bitter aspect of [hops] as an antiseptic. That kind of naturally led us to use Navajo tea,” said Begay, noting how the medical properties of the Navajo tea leaves led them to “a curiosity that transformed into this unique beer”.
The sumac berries used in Bow & Arrow’s Way Out West-Sumac beer, meanwhile, are traditionally used by south-western tribes to make a refreshing drink.
More recently, Bow & Arrow began experimenting with wild yeasts found around Albuquerque.
“We have been trying to capture different native cultures in order to ferment our beer,” said the head Brewer, Ted O’Hanlan, explaining the process of putting wort (ground malt and water) outside to capture different microbes. “Depending on the moisture or wind in the air, you’re going to get a different native culture.”
“Incorporating local ingredients is part of our bigger plan, and I feel like we have just scratched the surface,” explained Begay.“We want to get to the point that not only are the additives locally sourced but also yeast – the thing that makes beer beer – is from this area.”.
For Sheppard and Begay, who live just down the street from Bow & Arrow, the emphasis on place extends to a community-centered approach to daily operations.
“We are playing a part in creating this healthy ecosystem of businesses,” said Sheppard, who as CEO has taken pains to support local businesses by hosting local food trucks and volunteering space for neighborhood association meetings, not-for-profit fundraisers and pop-up markets.
According to Sheppard and Begay, the importance of community informed the design of the space itself. “Design can in many ways influence behavior,” said Sheppard, referring to the rows of communal tables set up beer-hall style. Begay added: “We both grew up on the rez and our social and community events are very much elbow-to-elbow with your family, friends and community.”
That sensibility includes providing a safe and inclusive space for all – something at times lacking in the predominantly white and male beer industry.
“You may find our brewery is more diverse than others,” said Sheppard. “Women have stopped us and said thank you for creating this space.”
Looking to the future, Sheppard and Begay see Bow & Arrow as part of a growing movement of businesses owned by native women. This year, the brewery hosted pre-conference kickoff event for the first annual Native Women’s Business Summit.
“To pack a room with Native women businesspeople was amazing,” said Sheppard of the nearly 150 people who attended. “I feel like there is becoming this critical mass where there is more conversation and dialogue and desire to support each other. To be a part of that is something we are very proud of.”
RELATED: How Native American tribes are bringing back the bison from brink of extinction
Nowhere is this consumer movement more apparent, and unique, than at Bow & Arrow brewery in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first and only brewery in the US owned by Native American women, it has carved a space in the predominantly white and male-dominated industry by showcasing elements of their tribal identities, communities and ingredients through beer.
“We have been very intentional about highlighting our special place in the south-west,” said Bow & Arrow’s co-founder and CEO, Shyla Sheppard, sitting with her fellow founder Missy Begay inside the high-ceilinged brewery. On one wall was a mounted cardboard sculpture of a buffalo bust – on another, a star-spangled Pendleton blanket set near a huge photograph of Monument Valley.
According to Sheppard, this regional and indigenized aesthetic is present at every level of the Bow & Arrow business, from the art on the walls to the brewery’s “hop arrow” logo – symbolizing the cultural significance of the arrowhead to many Native American tribes – to the “beer and beer names”. The menu features selections such as Bolos and Bling (a play on the bolo tie of New Mexico and the jewelry for which Native Americans are known in the south-west), and Denim Tux, a playful reference to popular south-western apparel as well as a nod the color of the main ingredient, local blue corn, that is used in the beer.
For Sheppard, an economist and former social impact investor from the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, and Begay, a physician from the Navajo Nation, the use of local ingredients is another way to celebrate the region.
“People take for granted what’s in the backyard,” said Sheppard, explaining Bow & Arrow’s unique use of additives such as New Mexican hops, sumac berries, blue corn, regionally sourced malt and Navajo tea, an earthy, herbal plant used by the local Hopi, Pueblo and the Navajo Nation. “It was the drink of the summer,” said Begay, recalling days in the Canyon de Chelly region drinking cold homemade Navajo tea.
Hops, among the essential ingredients in beer, have long been used by Native Americans for their medicinal properties. “They recognized the bitter aspect of [hops] as an antiseptic. That kind of naturally led us to use Navajo tea,” said Begay, noting how the medical properties of the Navajo tea leaves led them to “a curiosity that transformed into this unique beer”.
The sumac berries used in Bow & Arrow’s Way Out West-Sumac beer, meanwhile, are traditionally used by south-western tribes to make a refreshing drink.
More recently, Bow & Arrow began experimenting with wild yeasts found around Albuquerque.
“We have been trying to capture different native cultures in order to ferment our beer,” said the head Brewer, Ted O’Hanlan, explaining the process of putting wort (ground malt and water) outside to capture different microbes. “Depending on the moisture or wind in the air, you’re going to get a different native culture.”
“Incorporating local ingredients is part of our bigger plan, and I feel like we have just scratched the surface,” explained Begay.“We want to get to the point that not only are the additives locally sourced but also yeast – the thing that makes beer beer – is from this area.”.
For Sheppard and Begay, who live just down the street from Bow & Arrow, the emphasis on place extends to a community-centered approach to daily operations.
“We are playing a part in creating this healthy ecosystem of businesses,” said Sheppard, who as CEO has taken pains to support local businesses by hosting local food trucks and volunteering space for neighborhood association meetings, not-for-profit fundraisers and pop-up markets.
According to Sheppard and Begay, the importance of community informed the design of the space itself. “Design can in many ways influence behavior,” said Sheppard, referring to the rows of communal tables set up beer-hall style. Begay added: “We both grew up on the rez and our social and community events are very much elbow-to-elbow with your family, friends and community.”
That sensibility includes providing a safe and inclusive space for all – something at times lacking in the predominantly white and male beer industry.
“You may find our brewery is more diverse than others,” said Sheppard. “Women have stopped us and said thank you for creating this space.”
Looking to the future, Sheppard and Begay see Bow & Arrow as part of a growing movement of businesses owned by native women. This year, the brewery hosted pre-conference kickoff event for the first annual Native Women’s Business Summit.
“To pack a room with Native women businesspeople was amazing,” said Sheppard of the nearly 150 people who attended. “I feel like there is becoming this critical mass where there is more conversation and dialogue and desire to support each other. To be a part of that is something we are very proud of.”
RELATED: How Native American tribes are bringing back the bison from brink of extinction
Trump Is Seizing Land From The Tribe That Welcomed The Pilgrims.
Blogs by Syndicated - AccessPressMag.com
November 22, 2018
About 400 years ago, a man named Tisquantum was kidnapped by an English explorer and taken to Spain as a slave. Miraculously, Tisquantum escaped and returned to the “New World” and to the coastal village where he once lived. In the years he was gone, his entire family died of disease.
A short time later, struggling, desperate English settlers arrived on the shores where his tribe, the Wampanoag, still lived. Tisquantum was key to their survival. Because of his time in Europe, he could speak English. He helped the settlers plant corn and survive winter, and he brokered a peace agreement, without which their colony ― and, by extension, the United States ― would have never existed. The first treaty and the first land grant to the white settlers in North America were translated by this man.
Few people who celebrate Thanksgiving know Squanto’s full name or the name of his tribe. But without Tisquantum or the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock surely would have died.
And on this Thanksgiving, the United States government is in the process of terminating the reservation of the tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims.
On Sept. 7, Cedric Cromwell, the chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe received a letter from Tara Sweeney, the assistant secretary of Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior, informing him that his tribe no longer fit the legal definition of “Indian” and would be losing its reservation status. This is the first time that land held under special status for tribes has been taken out of trust since Harry Truman’s presidency.
“The same country that we helped form is now turned against us,” Cromwell told HuffPost this week. “It’s quite frightening that our own country is attacking us during the holiday that we helped establish.”
The legal battle over the Mashpee reservation started in 2016, when casino developer Neil Bluhm wanted to open a casino in a part of Massachusetts set aside for tribal gaming only. He financially backed a small group of residents from the city of Taunton, where the tribe planned to open a casino, to sue the Department of Interior, demanding the agency revoke the reservation’s trust status. In July 2016, the Taunton residents won.
But the wording of the court’s ruling kicked the decision back to the DOI, which could have legally affirmed the Mashpee’s trust status and saved its reservation. In September the administration declined to do that.
“Because the Tribe was not ‘under federal jurisdiction’ in 1934, the Tribe does not qualify under the [Indian Reorganization Act’s] first definition of ‘Indian,’” Sweeney wrote in her letter.
The sprawling 1934 Indian Reorganization Act gave the DOI the ability to take land into trust for tribes. Before 1934, tribes lost 90 million acres to allotment. Since then, tribes have been buying back stolen land within their treaty territories. But tribal ownership of a piece of land does not make it Indian Country. For the tribe to be able to exercise jurisdiction, practice self-governance or operate a casino there, the DOI has to put that land into trust.
For decades, the DOI put land into trust without hesitation and restored 9 million acres of lost tribal land. With the advent of Indian gaming in the 1990s, this long-established practice suddenly became controversial. Powerful gaming interests started fighting new trust lands to shut out tribes and corner the casino market.
In 1993, Trump, then a New York real estate mogul deeply invested in Atlantic City casinos, testified before Congress that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was unfair and hurting his business. “They don’t look like Indians to me,” he said.
Now he and his administration are still arguing that contemporary tribes are not Indian enough for treaty rights and federal statutes to apply. Under the Obama administration, over 500,000 acres of land were taken into trust. Under Trump, the slow restoration of tribal lands has come to a dead stop. According to the DOI’s legal arguments, if the Mashpee Wampanoag are not Indian enough to have trust land, 128 of the 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States could lose their reservations as well.
With the Mashpee decision, the country is moving backward.
After exhausting his options with the judicial and executive branches, Cromwell is taking his fight to the legislative branch. “Congress has the ultimate plenary authority to protect tribes,” he said. “Based on how we protected the early settlers and helped create this country.”
The two lawmakers who represent the tribe, Reps. Bill Keating and Joe Kennedy III (both D-Mass.), have co-authored legislation to cement federal recognition of the Mashpee Wampanoag land. The text of the Mashpee Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act is shorter than this article and straightforwardly states that all laws with “general applicability to Indians” apply to the Mashpee. In short, they would still be Indians. The bill has 21 co-sponsors from both parties and is the tribe’s final hope to maintain a small piece of the land it so generously shared 397 years ago.
On the Mashpee Wampanoag reservation lie its tribal offices, a future housing development, a casino still under construction, a language immersion school, community gardens and its burial grounds. The traditional homeland of the Wampanoag confederacy ― the tribe the Pilgrims first encountered ― is roughly a third of present-day Massachusetts. Today the tribe is fighting to hold on to 316 acres, an area roughly the size of the National Mall.
A short time later, struggling, desperate English settlers arrived on the shores where his tribe, the Wampanoag, still lived. Tisquantum was key to their survival. Because of his time in Europe, he could speak English. He helped the settlers plant corn and survive winter, and he brokered a peace agreement, without which their colony ― and, by extension, the United States ― would have never existed. The first treaty and the first land grant to the white settlers in North America were translated by this man.
Few people who celebrate Thanksgiving know Squanto’s full name or the name of his tribe. But without Tisquantum or the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock surely would have died.
And on this Thanksgiving, the United States government is in the process of terminating the reservation of the tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims.
On Sept. 7, Cedric Cromwell, the chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe received a letter from Tara Sweeney, the assistant secretary of Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior, informing him that his tribe no longer fit the legal definition of “Indian” and would be losing its reservation status. This is the first time that land held under special status for tribes has been taken out of trust since Harry Truman’s presidency.
“The same country that we helped form is now turned against us,” Cromwell told HuffPost this week. “It’s quite frightening that our own country is attacking us during the holiday that we helped establish.”
The legal battle over the Mashpee reservation started in 2016, when casino developer Neil Bluhm wanted to open a casino in a part of Massachusetts set aside for tribal gaming only. He financially backed a small group of residents from the city of Taunton, where the tribe planned to open a casino, to sue the Department of Interior, demanding the agency revoke the reservation’s trust status. In July 2016, the Taunton residents won.
But the wording of the court’s ruling kicked the decision back to the DOI, which could have legally affirmed the Mashpee’s trust status and saved its reservation. In September the administration declined to do that.
“Because the Tribe was not ‘under federal jurisdiction’ in 1934, the Tribe does not qualify under the [Indian Reorganization Act’s] first definition of ‘Indian,’” Sweeney wrote in her letter.
The sprawling 1934 Indian Reorganization Act gave the DOI the ability to take land into trust for tribes. Before 1934, tribes lost 90 million acres to allotment. Since then, tribes have been buying back stolen land within their treaty territories. But tribal ownership of a piece of land does not make it Indian Country. For the tribe to be able to exercise jurisdiction, practice self-governance or operate a casino there, the DOI has to put that land into trust.
For decades, the DOI put land into trust without hesitation and restored 9 million acres of lost tribal land. With the advent of Indian gaming in the 1990s, this long-established practice suddenly became controversial. Powerful gaming interests started fighting new trust lands to shut out tribes and corner the casino market.
In 1993, Trump, then a New York real estate mogul deeply invested in Atlantic City casinos, testified before Congress that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was unfair and hurting his business. “They don’t look like Indians to me,” he said.
Now he and his administration are still arguing that contemporary tribes are not Indian enough for treaty rights and federal statutes to apply. Under the Obama administration, over 500,000 acres of land were taken into trust. Under Trump, the slow restoration of tribal lands has come to a dead stop. According to the DOI’s legal arguments, if the Mashpee Wampanoag are not Indian enough to have trust land, 128 of the 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States could lose their reservations as well.
With the Mashpee decision, the country is moving backward.
After exhausting his options with the judicial and executive branches, Cromwell is taking his fight to the legislative branch. “Congress has the ultimate plenary authority to protect tribes,” he said. “Based on how we protected the early settlers and helped create this country.”
The two lawmakers who represent the tribe, Reps. Bill Keating and Joe Kennedy III (both D-Mass.), have co-authored legislation to cement federal recognition of the Mashpee Wampanoag land. The text of the Mashpee Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act is shorter than this article and straightforwardly states that all laws with “general applicability to Indians” apply to the Mashpee. In short, they would still be Indians. The bill has 21 co-sponsors from both parties and is the tribe’s final hope to maintain a small piece of the land it so generously shared 397 years ago.
On the Mashpee Wampanoag reservation lie its tribal offices, a future housing development, a casino still under construction, a language immersion school, community gardens and its burial grounds. The traditional homeland of the Wampanoag confederacy ― the tribe the Pilgrims first encountered ― is roughly a third of present-day Massachusetts. Today the tribe is fighting to hold on to 316 acres, an area roughly the size of the National Mall.
Cherokee Nation to appeal decision striking down Native American adoption law
By HOLLY ROSENKRANTZ CBS NEWS
October 11, 2018, 10:48 PM
The Cherokee Nation is planning to appeal a decision last week that struck down a law governing the adoptions of Native American children, according to Cherokee Nation Deputy Attorney General Chrissi Ross Nimmo. The law, which was meant to keep the children within Native American families, was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge in Texas.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, in an Oct 4 ruling, found that the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) illegally gives Native American families preferential treatment in adoption proceedings for Native American children based on race.
The ruling found that the law was in violation of the Fifth Amendment's equal protection guarantee.
O'Connor ruled that the law violated the 10th Amendment's federalism guarantees, including the''anti-commandeering'' principle that was established by the Supreme Court, most recently in a 2018 sports gambling case that bars Congress from ''commanding'' states to modify their laws.
In this case, O'Connor found the law ''offends the structure of the Constitution,'' since it requires state courts to implement a policy ''unequivocally dictated'' by the federal government. The same principle has been used by two federal courts, in Pennsylvania and California, to block Trump administration action on sanctuary cities.
The decision has shocked Native American advocates who have relied upon the law to help promote stability and keep Native American families and tribes together.
Nimmo said that the Cherokee Nation has filed to stay the decision, and that they have 60 days to file an appeal because the United States is a party.
"This is the only federal court that has ever found ICWA to be unconstitutional on its face or as applied. No Circuit or Supreme Court opinions over the past 40 years have found any provision of ICWA to be unconstitutional even though these arguments have been raised, including in the Supreme Court. We strongly believe that in the end, ICWA will be affirmed and reinforced," said Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, in an Oct 4 ruling, found that the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) illegally gives Native American families preferential treatment in adoption proceedings for Native American children based on race.
The ruling found that the law was in violation of the Fifth Amendment's equal protection guarantee.
O'Connor ruled that the law violated the 10th Amendment's federalism guarantees, including the''anti-commandeering'' principle that was established by the Supreme Court, most recently in a 2018 sports gambling case that bars Congress from ''commanding'' states to modify their laws.
In this case, O'Connor found the law ''offends the structure of the Constitution,'' since it requires state courts to implement a policy ''unequivocally dictated'' by the federal government. The same principle has been used by two federal courts, in Pennsylvania and California, to block Trump administration action on sanctuary cities.
The decision has shocked Native American advocates who have relied upon the law to help promote stability and keep Native American families and tribes together.
Nimmo said that the Cherokee Nation has filed to stay the decision, and that they have 60 days to file an appeal because the United States is a party.
"This is the only federal court that has ever found ICWA to be unconstitutional on its face or as applied. No Circuit or Supreme Court opinions over the past 40 years have found any provision of ICWA to be unconstitutional even though these arguments have been raised, including in the Supreme Court. We strongly believe that in the end, ICWA will be affirmed and reinforced," said Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker.
the lies persist!!!
Colonizing Histories and Rebranding Pocahontas
BY
Maile Arvin Truthout
PUBLISHED
september 24, 2018
An illustration of Pocahontas saving the life of John Smith, from Ballou's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, 1857.
© CORBIS / CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; EDITED: LW / TO
On a recent visit to the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), on the Washington, DC, National Mall, I encountered a wall with the declaration: “Pocahontas didn’t save John Smith. She saved America.” After staring at these sentences for several moments, troubled and confused, I wandered into the rest of the exhibit, where I was promised I would learn the “true” story of Pocahontas. Yet browsing the subsequent panels that detail what historians know about Pocahontas’s life did little to counter my anger and bewilderment at that opening frame.
What “America” was this panel talking about? “America,” by which the museum seemed to mean the United States, did not exist during Pocahontas’s life, circa 1596-1617. The Jamestown colony organized by the Virginia Company was established in 1607, when Pocahontas was approximately 11 years old. As the exhibit notes, the real-life Pocahontas was the daughter of the chief of the Powhatan people, and she accompanied her father on diplomatic missions to Jamestown. She likely never had a romance with John Smith, but in 1613, at age 18, she was kidnapped and held hostage by English settlers for over a year. During her captivity, she met and agreed to marry the English colonist John Rolfe. In 1616, she traveled to England with Rolfe and their son, and died there in 1617.
John Smith himself was responsible for creating and spreading the story about his romance with Pocahontas through accounts he published, as the exhibit explains. But why critique the John Smith story immortalized by Disney only to replace it with the same portrait of Pocahontas as remarkable chiefly as a savior of white settlers? In what way did she “save America”? The exhibit explains that her marriage to Rolfe helped institute a break in warfare between the English and the Powhatan Confederacy. By telling her story this way, the NMAI paints Pocahontas as a “founder” of the United States, when her actual story as a long-time hostage of the English is evidently more complicated. So, I wanted to know: Why was a museum supposedly dedicated to telling stories that empower and reflect the complexities of Native American people rehashing tired tropes about Pocahontas and her value to the United States?
The Pocahontas exhibit is part of a larger show at the NMAI titled simply “Americans,” which will be ongoing through 2022. “Americans” purports to examine how Native Americans are “embedded in unexpected ways in the history, pop culture, and identity of the United States.” Alongside the room on Pocahontas, the exhibit also has sections on Thanksgiving, the Trail of Tears and the Battle of Little Bighorn. These rooms extend from a large gallery room that surrounds visitors with hundreds of images and objects featuring stereotypical representations of Native Americans in US popular culture — from the Land-o-Lakes “Indian maiden” to “Indian” sports mascots (many of these images are also viewable online). Brief captions accompany these pieces, often providing context for the individual representation, but rarely providing meaningful critique. The point of this room, and the “Americans” exhibit overall, seems to be to get non-Indigenous peoples to see how pervasive “Indian” imagery is in the United States, and perhaps from that recognition, to further understand the importance of Native Americans to US history and culture.
I imagine this lesson may be powerful to certain non-Indigenous people who have never been asked to think critically (or at all) about Native Americans. But to me, the proliferation of stereotypical images without any serious analysis of settler colonialism, cultural appropriation and ongoing violence against Native American people, was overwhelming and outrageous. As an Indigenous Studies scholar, and as a Native Hawaiian woman whose community is often abused in similar ways, being in a room full of images of racist mascots and celebrities in fake headdresses was profoundly disempowering. I was angry not because I had never seen such racist caricatures, but because, as the exhibit points out, these images are everywhere in the United States. They are surprising to no one. Rather, I was shocked by the museum’s lack of care and complexity with this material.
Who is this exhibition meant for? It cannot be primarily for Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples themselves. I saw other visitors smiling at some objects, as if remembering that cartoon or album cover from their childhood. Indigenous peoples are not humorless. I smirked at the familiar photo of Cher from her 1973 “Half-Breed” video too. But I also saw that without the interpretative critique, some visitors were walking away from that room with nostalgia for the well-worn stereotypical images of their youth. When people walk away from colonial propaganda feeling fondness for the representations rather than disturbed, or at the very least uncomfortable, something is wrong.
To be clear, my argument is not about censorship. These images should be shown, contextualized and critiqued, ideally by amplifying Native American voices. I do precisely this in my own classes. Instead, the NMAI appears to have settled for simply pointing out general inaccuracies in the representations. This approach utterly fails in challenging the broader ideological work that these images do in teaching and maintaining racist, sexist and colonial views of Indigenous peoples. These days, we have a new appreciation for simple facts, and of course, elevating the truth matters. But merely commenting on the incorrectness of, for example, the hair style and fashion of the 1994 Native American Barbie is meaningless if that correction is not tied to a larger discussion of how Native American women have long been subject to specific kinds of cultural appropriation, racism and sexual violence.
---
To put Pocahontas and other Native American women’s stories into this larger colonial, contemporary context, the NMAI need not reinvent any wheels. Indigenous feminist scholars, including Renya Green and Chris Finley have told complex stories about Pocahontas and how representations of her impact Native American women. Many other Indigenous feminist scholars and activists have broadly analyzed, critiqued and challenged the links between gendered violence and settler colonialism. Anita Lucchesi, for example, has created an online database for missing and murdered Indigenous women. Instead of referencing any of this meaningful work or interviewing Native American women about the significance of Pocahontas, the Pocahontas exhibit closes with a video of seemingly random passersby responding to what comes to mind when they hear Pocahontas. The result is salt in the wound: a lot of off-key, nostalgic singing of Colors of the Wind and other songs from the 1995 Disney movie.
It is not that the “Americans” exhibit should only focus on the damage colonialism continues to wreak on Native American peoples. Rather, by failing to substantially engage with the contemporary Native voices who have robust interpretations of the topics of the exhibition, the show also erases the substantial efforts of Native Americans to resist settler colonialism. In this way, the exhibit does not appear to hail Indigenous peoples as its audience, despite the fact that Native American scholars curated this show.
My critique of this show is in fact spurred by this point: that Native American people directed this show, and that this show is at the NMAI, a museum that Indigenous peoples hope will treat our histories and contemporary lives with more care than other museums have. My words are not a dismissal of this show or the museum, but a deeply invested plea to all Indigenous scholars, museum curators, librarians, teachers and more. We owe it to our communities to do better. Though the NMAI may face particular pressures to tell Indigenous histories as if they are primarily valuable for their contributions to the US because of its placement on the National Mall, even there, we do not have to tell our stories as if the diverse Indigenous peoples of this land were always destined to be “Americans.” There is a tension between Indigenous histories and US history that is productive to leave and highlight, not attempt to ignore or resolve.
The new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) down the street from the NMAI provides a strong example of how to do precisely this in its skillful telling of Black histories from slavery through Jim Crow, Black Power and Black Lives Matter.
The NMAAHC impressed me especially in its ability to see both Black and non-Black people as its audience. Its exhibits put racist images in context with both racial violence and ever-present resistance to that violence. The NMAI could similarly do more to include both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples as its audience, instead of staging exhibits like “Americans” that largely shallowly engage non-Indigenous peoples by correcting the facts of tired settler mythologies that the settlers have unsurprisingly gotten wrong. What if the NMAI and all exhibits everywhere about Indigenous peoples centered not just their “contributions” to the settler nation or the beauty in Indigenous cultural objects, but the beauty of ongoing Indigenous art and activism? Such work might offer Indigenous audiences an empowering reflection of themselves while also teaching non-Indigenous visitors something about how to be in better relation to the land they live on and to the peoples whose stories about that land far precede the United States.
What “America” was this panel talking about? “America,” by which the museum seemed to mean the United States, did not exist during Pocahontas’s life, circa 1596-1617. The Jamestown colony organized by the Virginia Company was established in 1607, when Pocahontas was approximately 11 years old. As the exhibit notes, the real-life Pocahontas was the daughter of the chief of the Powhatan people, and she accompanied her father on diplomatic missions to Jamestown. She likely never had a romance with John Smith, but in 1613, at age 18, she was kidnapped and held hostage by English settlers for over a year. During her captivity, she met and agreed to marry the English colonist John Rolfe. In 1616, she traveled to England with Rolfe and their son, and died there in 1617.
John Smith himself was responsible for creating and spreading the story about his romance with Pocahontas through accounts he published, as the exhibit explains. But why critique the John Smith story immortalized by Disney only to replace it with the same portrait of Pocahontas as remarkable chiefly as a savior of white settlers? In what way did she “save America”? The exhibit explains that her marriage to Rolfe helped institute a break in warfare between the English and the Powhatan Confederacy. By telling her story this way, the NMAI paints Pocahontas as a “founder” of the United States, when her actual story as a long-time hostage of the English is evidently more complicated. So, I wanted to know: Why was a museum supposedly dedicated to telling stories that empower and reflect the complexities of Native American people rehashing tired tropes about Pocahontas and her value to the United States?
The Pocahontas exhibit is part of a larger show at the NMAI titled simply “Americans,” which will be ongoing through 2022. “Americans” purports to examine how Native Americans are “embedded in unexpected ways in the history, pop culture, and identity of the United States.” Alongside the room on Pocahontas, the exhibit also has sections on Thanksgiving, the Trail of Tears and the Battle of Little Bighorn. These rooms extend from a large gallery room that surrounds visitors with hundreds of images and objects featuring stereotypical representations of Native Americans in US popular culture — from the Land-o-Lakes “Indian maiden” to “Indian” sports mascots (many of these images are also viewable online). Brief captions accompany these pieces, often providing context for the individual representation, but rarely providing meaningful critique. The point of this room, and the “Americans” exhibit overall, seems to be to get non-Indigenous peoples to see how pervasive “Indian” imagery is in the United States, and perhaps from that recognition, to further understand the importance of Native Americans to US history and culture.
I imagine this lesson may be powerful to certain non-Indigenous people who have never been asked to think critically (or at all) about Native Americans. But to me, the proliferation of stereotypical images without any serious analysis of settler colonialism, cultural appropriation and ongoing violence against Native American people, was overwhelming and outrageous. As an Indigenous Studies scholar, and as a Native Hawaiian woman whose community is often abused in similar ways, being in a room full of images of racist mascots and celebrities in fake headdresses was profoundly disempowering. I was angry not because I had never seen such racist caricatures, but because, as the exhibit points out, these images are everywhere in the United States. They are surprising to no one. Rather, I was shocked by the museum’s lack of care and complexity with this material.
Who is this exhibition meant for? It cannot be primarily for Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples themselves. I saw other visitors smiling at some objects, as if remembering that cartoon or album cover from their childhood. Indigenous peoples are not humorless. I smirked at the familiar photo of Cher from her 1973 “Half-Breed” video too. But I also saw that without the interpretative critique, some visitors were walking away from that room with nostalgia for the well-worn stereotypical images of their youth. When people walk away from colonial propaganda feeling fondness for the representations rather than disturbed, or at the very least uncomfortable, something is wrong.
To be clear, my argument is not about censorship. These images should be shown, contextualized and critiqued, ideally by amplifying Native American voices. I do precisely this in my own classes. Instead, the NMAI appears to have settled for simply pointing out general inaccuracies in the representations. This approach utterly fails in challenging the broader ideological work that these images do in teaching and maintaining racist, sexist and colonial views of Indigenous peoples. These days, we have a new appreciation for simple facts, and of course, elevating the truth matters. But merely commenting on the incorrectness of, for example, the hair style and fashion of the 1994 Native American Barbie is meaningless if that correction is not tied to a larger discussion of how Native American women have long been subject to specific kinds of cultural appropriation, racism and sexual violence.
---
To put Pocahontas and other Native American women’s stories into this larger colonial, contemporary context, the NMAI need not reinvent any wheels. Indigenous feminist scholars, including Renya Green and Chris Finley have told complex stories about Pocahontas and how representations of her impact Native American women. Many other Indigenous feminist scholars and activists have broadly analyzed, critiqued and challenged the links between gendered violence and settler colonialism. Anita Lucchesi, for example, has created an online database for missing and murdered Indigenous women. Instead of referencing any of this meaningful work or interviewing Native American women about the significance of Pocahontas, the Pocahontas exhibit closes with a video of seemingly random passersby responding to what comes to mind when they hear Pocahontas. The result is salt in the wound: a lot of off-key, nostalgic singing of Colors of the Wind and other songs from the 1995 Disney movie.
It is not that the “Americans” exhibit should only focus on the damage colonialism continues to wreak on Native American peoples. Rather, by failing to substantially engage with the contemporary Native voices who have robust interpretations of the topics of the exhibition, the show also erases the substantial efforts of Native Americans to resist settler colonialism. In this way, the exhibit does not appear to hail Indigenous peoples as its audience, despite the fact that Native American scholars curated this show.
My critique of this show is in fact spurred by this point: that Native American people directed this show, and that this show is at the NMAI, a museum that Indigenous peoples hope will treat our histories and contemporary lives with more care than other museums have. My words are not a dismissal of this show or the museum, but a deeply invested plea to all Indigenous scholars, museum curators, librarians, teachers and more. We owe it to our communities to do better. Though the NMAI may face particular pressures to tell Indigenous histories as if they are primarily valuable for their contributions to the US because of its placement on the National Mall, even there, we do not have to tell our stories as if the diverse Indigenous peoples of this land were always destined to be “Americans.” There is a tension between Indigenous histories and US history that is productive to leave and highlight, not attempt to ignore or resolve.
The new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) down the street from the NMAI provides a strong example of how to do precisely this in its skillful telling of Black histories from slavery through Jim Crow, Black Power and Black Lives Matter.
The NMAAHC impressed me especially in its ability to see both Black and non-Black people as its audience. Its exhibits put racist images in context with both racial violence and ever-present resistance to that violence. The NMAI could similarly do more to include both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples as its audience, instead of staging exhibits like “Americans” that largely shallowly engage non-Indigenous peoples by correcting the facts of tired settler mythologies that the settlers have unsurprisingly gotten wrong. What if the NMAI and all exhibits everywhere about Indigenous peoples centered not just their “contributions” to the settler nation or the beauty in Indigenous cultural objects, but the beauty of ongoing Indigenous art and activism? Such work might offer Indigenous audiences an empowering reflection of themselves while also teaching non-Indigenous visitors something about how to be in better relation to the land they live on and to the peoples whose stories about that land far precede the United States.
A 124-year-old statue reviled by Native Americans – and how it came down
Jose Fermoso
the guardian
Mon 24 Sep 2018 06.00 EDT
The Early Days statue depicts a Native American at the feet of a Spanish cowboy and Catholic missionary in San Francisco. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americans watching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a flatbed truck. It was a moment stoked with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone.
Those who gathered at the removal last week didn’t celebrate with fire torches. They only prayed, sang hymns, and looked on morosely at the empty platform. That’s what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection.
“I feel like it is a win. I feel good about it. [But] there is still a lot of work to be done,” Desirae Harp, a Mishewal Ona*tsáTis (Wappo) and Diné (Navajo) tribe member told me.
Erected in the aftermath of the California mission era, the Early Days statue depicts a Native American on his back, defeated, a Catholic priest above him pointing to the heavens, and an anglicized vaquero bestriding the scene in triumph. The statue is part of the Pioneer Monument celebrating the state’s origins. Native Americans saw it as dehumanizing art but no one had managed to convince politicians to take it down. It wasn’t until gender- and racially-diverse city boards, as well as backlash against Eurocentric depictions of dominance, that change came.
Over the last few months, I spoke with Native Americans who said the existence of this type of art in a public sphere kept alive false narratives. That native people’s systematic killing was a necessary means to an end of the state’s development and current prosperity. It’s the type of thinking that becomes gospel if only one side tells you what to believe in.
A long road
The journey to the statue’s current undisclosed location – where officials say it’s safely preserved – has been long and winding.
In 1996, a plaque was added to Early Days to explain what happened to natives but political pressure resulted in language that reeked of false objectivity. Catholic leaders rejected copy fully blaming missionaries for Native deaths, using disease and malnutrition as top factors rather than mistreatment and murder.
Last year, concern grew over Early Days in the aftermath of the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, incited by the removal of a statue of confederate General Robert E Lee. On 2 October 2017, after the public asked leaders to remove the statue, the arts commission passed a resolution to initiate a review. At a following meeting, it voted to put it in storage.
But there was pushback. Frear Stephen Schmid, a Sonoma county lawyer, said the commission didn’t have the legal right to remove it. Broadly, he said art shouldn’t be changed and the statue merited historical preservation, which the board of appeals agreed with. People really got upset.
Asking for a rehearing, city directors noted a similar appeal to cultural understanding had been approved – the city administrative code had changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. Continued display, they said, “causes real and sustained harm to San Francisco’s Native American community” especially when old visual stereotypes are “now universally viewed as disrespectful, misleading, and racist”. This led to the new, final vote to remove last week. As for Schimd, he said he’s going to sue the city.
As the fight against white supremacist symbols grows in America under a president that supports them all but explicitly, citizens are ramping up more tear downs. San Jose removed a statue of Christopher Columbus and Arcata’s William McKinley statue’s days are numbered (he broke up tribal governments). More than 30 other cities are either in discussion to or recently removed statues including southern hubs such as Atlanta, Birmingham and Nashville.
In related news, ESPN found there’s an increase in US statue-building of sports figures, 80% of them white males, many in coaching, the most segregated position in all athletics.
Those who gathered at the removal last week didn’t celebrate with fire torches. They only prayed, sang hymns, and looked on morosely at the empty platform. That’s what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection.
“I feel like it is a win. I feel good about it. [But] there is still a lot of work to be done,” Desirae Harp, a Mishewal Ona*tsáTis (Wappo) and Diné (Navajo) tribe member told me.
Erected in the aftermath of the California mission era, the Early Days statue depicts a Native American on his back, defeated, a Catholic priest above him pointing to the heavens, and an anglicized vaquero bestriding the scene in triumph. The statue is part of the Pioneer Monument celebrating the state’s origins. Native Americans saw it as dehumanizing art but no one had managed to convince politicians to take it down. It wasn’t until gender- and racially-diverse city boards, as well as backlash against Eurocentric depictions of dominance, that change came.
Over the last few months, I spoke with Native Americans who said the existence of this type of art in a public sphere kept alive false narratives. That native people’s systematic killing was a necessary means to an end of the state’s development and current prosperity. It’s the type of thinking that becomes gospel if only one side tells you what to believe in.
A long road
The journey to the statue’s current undisclosed location – where officials say it’s safely preserved – has been long and winding.
In 1996, a plaque was added to Early Days to explain what happened to natives but political pressure resulted in language that reeked of false objectivity. Catholic leaders rejected copy fully blaming missionaries for Native deaths, using disease and malnutrition as top factors rather than mistreatment and murder.
Last year, concern grew over Early Days in the aftermath of the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, incited by the removal of a statue of confederate General Robert E Lee. On 2 October 2017, after the public asked leaders to remove the statue, the arts commission passed a resolution to initiate a review. At a following meeting, it voted to put it in storage.
But there was pushback. Frear Stephen Schmid, a Sonoma county lawyer, said the commission didn’t have the legal right to remove it. Broadly, he said art shouldn’t be changed and the statue merited historical preservation, which the board of appeals agreed with. People really got upset.
Asking for a rehearing, city directors noted a similar appeal to cultural understanding had been approved – the city administrative code had changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. Continued display, they said, “causes real and sustained harm to San Francisco’s Native American community” especially when old visual stereotypes are “now universally viewed as disrespectful, misleading, and racist”. This led to the new, final vote to remove last week. As for Schimd, he said he’s going to sue the city.
As the fight against white supremacist symbols grows in America under a president that supports them all but explicitly, citizens are ramping up more tear downs. San Jose removed a statue of Christopher Columbus and Arcata’s William McKinley statue’s days are numbered (he broke up tribal governments). More than 30 other cities are either in discussion to or recently removed statues including southern hubs such as Atlanta, Birmingham and Nashville.
In related news, ESPN found there’s an increase in US statue-building of sports figures, 80% of them white males, many in coaching, the most segregated position in all athletics.
Navajo delegation goes to New York City to send anti-coal message to billionaire investor
Groups want investment in renewables, not dirty coal on Navajo Nation.
MARK HAND - thinkprogress
SEP 11, 2018, 11:24 AM
NAVAJO AND HOPI TRIBE MEMBERS GATHER IN NEW YORK CITY ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2018 TO PROTEST THE PROPOSED PURCHASE OF A COAL PLANT LOCATED ON THE NAVAJO NATION. CREDIT: JEFFREY CAPPELLA/RESOURCE MEDIA
In a steady rain, more than a dozen Navajo Nation and Hope Tribe members protested Monday outside the New York City offices of Avenue Capital Group, a private equity firm that wants to purchase the coal-burning Navajo Generating Station (NGS) in Arizona.
They had traveled from their homes in northern Arizona to oppose the private equity firm’s proposed acquisition of NGS, the largest coal-fired power plant in the western United States, and to advocate for clean forms of energy in the Four Corners region.
The facility — which spews tons of the most hazardous air pollutants — was on its way to shutting down in 2019. But Avenue Capital Group’s interest in purchasing a majority stake in the plant has brought new life to the highly polluting facility.
The current operator of NGS — the Salt River Project — has suggested keeping the coal plant open past 2019 will result in losses exceeding $130 million annually. Avenue Capital Group likely could profit from its purchase of NGS only through some combination of federal subsidies and cuts to jobs, health, and safety protections, experts say.
The delegation traveled to Manhattan to request a meeting with Avenue Capital Group co-founder and CEO Marc Lasry, who also is a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball franchise and a billionaire Democratic Party donor.
Earlier this year, Navajo groups sent two letters to Lasry, inviting him and his staff to visit the plant and discuss the environmental and financial risks of keeping the plant running. When the groups did not receive a response, they decided to take their concerns to Lasry’s office doorstep on Park Avenue.
A couple members of the delegation entered Avenue Capital Group’s headquarters to request a meeting with officials from the investment firm. The request was denied.
Avenue Capital Group officials have met with official Navajo Nation tribal leaders to negotiate keeping the plant open. But the investment firm has refused to meet with Navajo community groups, such as the ones who traveled to New York City on Monday, who favor clean energy over the continued operation of NGS.
After being told Avenue Capital Group officials would not meet with them, the Navajo protesters deployed two large banners in front of the office building. For several hours, the Navajo delegation stood with umbrellas chanting, “Coal is dead” and “Avenue Capital, we want renewables.”
“I believe that our physical presence, along with our signs and banners made the action at Avenue Capital Group headquarters successful,” Nadine Narindrankura, a Navajo Nation member who attended the protest, said in an email to ThinkProgress.
Narindrankura, a member of Tó Nizhóni Ání, a Navajo community group, said opponents of the NGS are hoping that through this action “we will find groups and others here in New York City to help us in our efforts to discourage Avenue Capital Group from purchasing NGS.”
Avenue Capital Group had not responded to a request for comment from ThinkProgress at the time this article was published. Indian Country Today reported Monday that a spokesperson for Avenue Capital Group said the company had “made no decision regarding the NGS project.”
In their letters to Lasry earlier this year, the Navajo community members noted that he has shown “unwavering support of Democratic priorities” and has been “an equally staunch opponent” of President Donald Trump.
“You were a major and trusted fundraiser for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during their presidential campaigns. And your disdain for Donald Trump is no secret, as you have openly refused to let your NBA team stay at Trump-branded hotels when on the road,” leaders with the Navajo groups — Diné CARE and Tó Nizhóni Ání — wrote in a June 8 letter to Lasry.
The Navajo community members said they are concerned that Lasry’s interest in purchasing NGS allies him with “Mr. Trump’s misleading and misguided agenda” in favor of coal over renewable energy.
In 2017 the Trump administration stepped in and made saving the coal plant, located on tribal land in Arizona, a top priority of the president’s coal-first energy policy. The Trump administration wanted to ensure the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station — the seventh biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the country — had a post-2019 future.
The Trump administration prioritized keeping the 44-year-old coal plant running because the federal government owns a stake in the generating facility. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, primarily a water management agency, oversees the government’s 24.3 percent ownership stake in the plant.
Lasry’s Avenue Capital Group owns Middle River Power, a company that has more than 2,200 megawatts of power generation assets in operation or development. After several months of researching the economics of purchasing a majority ownership stake in the old and inefficient Navajo Generating Station, Avenue Capital Group Group and Middle River Power decided the acquisition made financial sense.
Middle River Power has a track record of buying distressed energy businesses and wringing value from them. The company recently presented a plan that would keep the Navajo Generating Station open by running it at a reduced capacity during off-peak demand.
Keeping the plant running also would be good news to Peabody Energy, which owns a nearby coal mine on the nearby Black Mesa plateau of the Four Corners region. The mine is the sole coal supplier to the power plant.
The Navajo community group leaders believe Middle River Power will not be able to make NGS profitable without harming members of the Navajo Nation through layoffs and pay cuts.
“You may be betting that the same dynamics — of preying on distressed assets — that have allowed Avenue to capitalize on weak oil and gas companies are in play for NGS,” they wrote in their letter to Lasry. “That is not the case. The issues facing Peabody and utilities that burn coal, as many, many analysts have noted, are structural, not cyclical. Coal is not going to bounce back. And that means the sooner the Navajo Nation can switch to a clean energy economy, the better.”
In their letter to Lasry, the Navajo community group leaders emphasized that decades after the massive NGS began operations, 18,000 homes on the Navajo Nation still don’t have electricity, even though the plant is located on tribal land. Natural springs and streams that once provided water to the Navajo people have been sucked dry by the operations of the power plant and the Peabody coal mine, they said.
“Our very existence is bound to the fate of our land, water and air,” Nicholas Ashley, an activist with Tó Nizhóni Ání who attended Monday’s protest, said in a statement. “The financial capital of the world needs to know that Diné people will no longer be putting our bodies and our homelands on the line for multinational corporations.”
They had traveled from their homes in northern Arizona to oppose the private equity firm’s proposed acquisition of NGS, the largest coal-fired power plant in the western United States, and to advocate for clean forms of energy in the Four Corners region.
The facility — which spews tons of the most hazardous air pollutants — was on its way to shutting down in 2019. But Avenue Capital Group’s interest in purchasing a majority stake in the plant has brought new life to the highly polluting facility.
The current operator of NGS — the Salt River Project — has suggested keeping the coal plant open past 2019 will result in losses exceeding $130 million annually. Avenue Capital Group likely could profit from its purchase of NGS only through some combination of federal subsidies and cuts to jobs, health, and safety protections, experts say.
The delegation traveled to Manhattan to request a meeting with Avenue Capital Group co-founder and CEO Marc Lasry, who also is a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball franchise and a billionaire Democratic Party donor.
Earlier this year, Navajo groups sent two letters to Lasry, inviting him and his staff to visit the plant and discuss the environmental and financial risks of keeping the plant running. When the groups did not receive a response, they decided to take their concerns to Lasry’s office doorstep on Park Avenue.
A couple members of the delegation entered Avenue Capital Group’s headquarters to request a meeting with officials from the investment firm. The request was denied.
Avenue Capital Group officials have met with official Navajo Nation tribal leaders to negotiate keeping the plant open. But the investment firm has refused to meet with Navajo community groups, such as the ones who traveled to New York City on Monday, who favor clean energy over the continued operation of NGS.
After being told Avenue Capital Group officials would not meet with them, the Navajo protesters deployed two large banners in front of the office building. For several hours, the Navajo delegation stood with umbrellas chanting, “Coal is dead” and “Avenue Capital, we want renewables.”
“I believe that our physical presence, along with our signs and banners made the action at Avenue Capital Group headquarters successful,” Nadine Narindrankura, a Navajo Nation member who attended the protest, said in an email to ThinkProgress.
Narindrankura, a member of Tó Nizhóni Ání, a Navajo community group, said opponents of the NGS are hoping that through this action “we will find groups and others here in New York City to help us in our efforts to discourage Avenue Capital Group from purchasing NGS.”
Avenue Capital Group had not responded to a request for comment from ThinkProgress at the time this article was published. Indian Country Today reported Monday that a spokesperson for Avenue Capital Group said the company had “made no decision regarding the NGS project.”
In their letters to Lasry earlier this year, the Navajo community members noted that he has shown “unwavering support of Democratic priorities” and has been “an equally staunch opponent” of President Donald Trump.
“You were a major and trusted fundraiser for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during their presidential campaigns. And your disdain for Donald Trump is no secret, as you have openly refused to let your NBA team stay at Trump-branded hotels when on the road,” leaders with the Navajo groups — Diné CARE and Tó Nizhóni Ání — wrote in a June 8 letter to Lasry.
The Navajo community members said they are concerned that Lasry’s interest in purchasing NGS allies him with “Mr. Trump’s misleading and misguided agenda” in favor of coal over renewable energy.
In 2017 the Trump administration stepped in and made saving the coal plant, located on tribal land in Arizona, a top priority of the president’s coal-first energy policy. The Trump administration wanted to ensure the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station — the seventh biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the country — had a post-2019 future.
The Trump administration prioritized keeping the 44-year-old coal plant running because the federal government owns a stake in the generating facility. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, primarily a water management agency, oversees the government’s 24.3 percent ownership stake in the plant.
Lasry’s Avenue Capital Group owns Middle River Power, a company that has more than 2,200 megawatts of power generation assets in operation or development. After several months of researching the economics of purchasing a majority ownership stake in the old and inefficient Navajo Generating Station, Avenue Capital Group Group and Middle River Power decided the acquisition made financial sense.
Middle River Power has a track record of buying distressed energy businesses and wringing value from them. The company recently presented a plan that would keep the Navajo Generating Station open by running it at a reduced capacity during off-peak demand.
Keeping the plant running also would be good news to Peabody Energy, which owns a nearby coal mine on the nearby Black Mesa plateau of the Four Corners region. The mine is the sole coal supplier to the power plant.
The Navajo community group leaders believe Middle River Power will not be able to make NGS profitable without harming members of the Navajo Nation through layoffs and pay cuts.
“You may be betting that the same dynamics — of preying on distressed assets — that have allowed Avenue to capitalize on weak oil and gas companies are in play for NGS,” they wrote in their letter to Lasry. “That is not the case. The issues facing Peabody and utilities that burn coal, as many, many analysts have noted, are structural, not cyclical. Coal is not going to bounce back. And that means the sooner the Navajo Nation can switch to a clean energy economy, the better.”
In their letter to Lasry, the Navajo community group leaders emphasized that decades after the massive NGS began operations, 18,000 homes on the Navajo Nation still don’t have electricity, even though the plant is located on tribal land. Natural springs and streams that once provided water to the Navajo people have been sucked dry by the operations of the power plant and the Peabody coal mine, they said.
“Our very existence is bound to the fate of our land, water and air,” Nicholas Ashley, an activist with Tó Nizhóni Ání who attended Monday’s protest, said in a statement. “The financial capital of the world needs to know that Diné people will no longer be putting our bodies and our homelands on the line for multinational corporations.”
For Native Americans, History Continues to Repeat Itself
BY Dahr Jamail Truthout
PUBLISHED
August 27, 2018
Professor emeritus and former chair of Native American Studies at University of California Davis Jack Forbes writes in his book, Columbus and Other Cannibals, of what he calls the “sickness of exploitation,” or the wétiko (cannibal) disease.
Cannibalism, as Forbes defines it, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”
Forbes notes, “Imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil.”
“Few, if any, societies on the face of the Earth have ever been as avaricious, cruel, violent, and aggressive as have certain European populations,” Forbes concludes.
Native Americans experienced wétiko in brutal fashion not long after “first contact” with Europeans.
“[Europeans] slaughtered, during one short period alone, 50 million buffalo, because thousands of us relied on them, and in less than a generation, they annihilated them,” Harold Dick Jr., a 72-year-old Chiricahua Apache, told Truthout. “And they take pride in this, and take pictures of the dead buffalo, like it takes a ‘real man’ to shoot an animal with a high-powered rifle from far away.”
He added that when Native Americans talk about “great” people, they usually speak of medicine people, “but all of the greats the whites ever write about were great at destruction and subjugating people.”
Dick Jr’s point has been true since the so-called founding of the United States — given that it was rich, land-owning white men who authored the US Constitution, setting the stage for the white supremacy that drives US policy, both domestic and foreign, to this day.
Stan Rushworth is an elder of Cherokee decent who has taught Native American literature and critical thinking classes focused on Indigenous perspectives for more than a quarter of a century, and now teaches at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.
“As far as Indians are concerned, no administration that I know of has had Indians’ best interest at heart,” Rushworth told Truthout. “Eisenhower said, ‘We’re getting out of the Indian business and unilaterally abrogate all the treaties and do away with all the reservations.’ So the will of the American people is that we disappear.”
Thus, for Rushworth and a lot of his friends, “Trump didn’t lift a veil at all — he simply imposed another layer of a veil.”
Dick Jr. feels similarly. He told Truthout that, from his perspective as a Native American, if the US is going to talk about freedom and liberty, people need to recall that the country was founded upon genocide and slavery.
“If they want to start clean, the have to cop to the fact of what they did, and that it was wrong, and that [of] over 300 treaties written, not one was ever kept,” Dick Jr. said. “It is a huge case of hypocrisy … they talk of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty,’ but we don’t get any. And by extension, the citizens of the country don’t really get any, either.”
They are far from alone in their analysis about what ails this country, and how very far back that ailment goes.
A Rotten Foundation
“We [Native Americans] represent a shame, we represent a huge moral lapse in a country that likes to see itself as based on morality,” Rushworth said. “Rule of law is what people say we are based on. But rule of law is based on a society’s moral behavior. And with Indians, there is nothing but contradiction there. There is this huge cognitive dissonance.”
That cognitive dissonance stems from the history of genocide, injustice, slavery and colonial history the US is based upon.
Dr. Martin Rizzo, a post-doc fellow in the history department at the University of California, Riverside, is currently working on his forthcoming book examining Indigenous survival in 19th-century California.
Rizzo reminded Truthout of the ongoing legal injustices around the fact that there has never been a reckoning with the reality of the theft of land and resources from Native Americans, but also pointed towards the need to understand the historical traumas from what was done.
“The process of colonialism involves direct genocide,” Rizzo said, noting that scalp bounties in the West are one example of state-sanctioned violence, in which the government reimbursed white people for hunting down Native Americans.
Rizzo notes the psychological warfare component of this — how Native Americans were literally taught that they were “subhuman.”
“Like Trump today saying we shouldn’t be embarrassed about ‘civilizing’ this continent, this is deeply embedded in the colonial mindset that sees one people superior and another people inferior,” Rizzo said. “We have to reckon with this.”
According to Rizzo, Native Americans are dealing with trans-generational traumas that need to be undone due to hundreds of years of being told that their lifestyles were inferior to the colonists’ way.
“We are seeing this colonial world that has been increasingly devastating the environment,” Rizzo said. “Natives were pointing out hundreds of years ago the need to take care of the Earth for seven generations to preserve life for the future, versus this colonial approach we see today that is destroying the planet.”
Dick Jr. reminds us of Article Six, paragraph two of the US Constitution, which deals with the sovereignty of Native people.
“The treaties made between sovereign nations are supposed to be ironclad and not disused … but they’ve never kept this,” he said. “One of the old chiefs once said, ‘They should put wheels on us so when they change the treaties, they could just roll us out of the way.’ The first thing they do when they come in is they take all of it. And no matter how much there is, they take more of it.”
Speaking to Forbe’s wétiko disease, Dick Jr. reminds us of the colonialists coming from Europe who called themselves pilgrims. “The bottom line is that the day these people got off the boat until today is they’ve never kept their word.”
Dick Jr. shed light on how the basic Christian belief system brought by the colonialists drove their behavior, pointing out how many Native Americans believe they were born into paradise, whereas the Christian mindset is one of being kicked out of paradise.
“They think we were ‘bad’ and god threw us out,” he said. “But we think we must be pretty good, because the creator gave us all of this.”
Rizzo pointed out the systematic annihilation then assimilation of Native Americans, a large component of which included the breaking up of their community.
“Native American policies of the federal government shifted from outright warfare and genocide against them to: Who can we integrate into societies?” he said. “The [Dawes General] Allotment Act [of 1887] broke apart collective holdings of reservation land, and this caused a rapid loss of land for Native Americans.”
According to Rizzo, during the early 20th century, in 20 years, 35 percent of all Native lands were sold, and within 40 years, roughly half were gone, and this went on until the 1930s. This furthered the disintegration and isolation within tribal societies, and contributed to psychological displacement, depression and myriad other issues.
One example of the scale and rapidity of the genocide of the Native Americans occurred between 1846 and 1880 in California, when 90 percent of them were killed by white colonists.
Rizzo consistently teaches about the slavery and genocide that the US is built upon, because, as he put it, “It’s like the guy who thinks he is flawless and continues to abuse and carryout bad things. If you’re not willing to look at the harsh realities of the past, then it is impossible to work towards justice.”
Rizzo reminds his classes that Native American children were forcibly removed from their families, forbidden to speak their native languages and suffered corporal abuse in the name of assimilation. For at least a century this was ongoing, in addition to the fact that during the period of overt slavery, African children were separated from their parents, and oftentimes sold off to plantations.
He connects this history to the crisis at the US-Mexico border, where the federal government is separating immigrant children from their parents.
“Even today people look at the border and say, ‘Oh my god, this is not the country that we are,’ but this is the country we are,” Rizzo said. “This has happened over and over in our history … We have to have proper context of this all being part of a larger systematic problem that has to be corrected.”
Part of coming to terms with this ongoing legacy involves Native Americans grappling with historical trauma and relating to a society that largely erases their existence.
Struggles for Indigenous Students
Dr. Rebecca Hernandez, a Mescalero Apache, is the director of the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) at University of California, Santa Cruz. The AIRC serves all students, but advocates for Native students who comprise less than 1 percent of the total student body, as is usually the case on college campuses. Hernandez told Truthout that her biggest struggle is retaining students, because the contemporary issues facing Native Americans in universities stem largely from the unhealed issues from their ancestors’ brutal history under colonialism.
Hernandez talks to her students about this history in the context of how it contributes to contemporary problems and how so many of them are first-generation college students who are also struggling with guilt due to the fact that their people back home on the reservations continue to struggle mightily.
“Our collective histories as Native peoples have contributed to us as having to make these difficult decisions now because of what happened in the past,” she told Truthout. “Some of us have to be these forerunners and push harder to get to the other side to get through college, or to go back (or not) and help our families, and bring other people through after us.”
Hernandez works to help her students appreciate their history, because as she sees it, “We’ve always had these challenges and had to adapt rapidly. We were taken away from our families and expected to be really solid human beings, but there is a lot of dysfunction and sadness in our communities that has happened from that, and we are only now seeing the results of the colonization.”
She sees colonization as ongoing, and one ramification of this is how so many of her Indigenous students are unaware of their own tribal history.
Hernandez works towards having her students learn to discuss themselves as Native in a way “that is confident, authentic, and they own that identity and do so with confidence.”
This is because part of the current colonization stems from what Native American students deal with in their interactions with non-Natives.
“People dismiss them, ask insensitive questions, and often, the students don’t have the tools to talk about themselves in a way that shuts that nonsense down,” Hernandez said. “We have to learn how to talk about ourselves as Natives. Most of us present white. Because when you don’t, instantly you are fair game for weird questions, stereoypes and other weird things.”
An example she gave is this: “If someone says they are Egyptian, people don’t ask them, ‘How Egyptian are you?’ We are the only group in the US that has to deal with that question. I’ve had people here ask me to help them figure out what their spirit animal is. I can’t imagine what a 19-year-old does to deal with that. I just wonder when is this going to end.”
Hernandez wonders when people are going to see Native Americans as part of the American fabric just like every other demographic in the US.
“I’m like any other ethnic group, that’s a big part of the contemporary experience, and I try to help students practice responding to these stereotypes and weird questions,” she explained. “These are real things students are experiencing. So how do we then collectively respond and learn how to put on the brakes and say something isn’t ok to say to me, or to dismiss me based on how I look?”
Additionally, Hernandez pointed out how underscoring all of those issues are the ongoing systemic problems of Native Americans suffering the low end of the tremendous wealth disparities in the US, having incredibly high suicide rates and having major health problems.
But, despite these massive issues, Hernandez encourages her students.
“Every day, I see these young people and I say, ‘You are our future, you have to do this, you can’t quit’,” she said. “It would be a privilege to quit, but that is not a privilege we have. You alone are going to affect so many lives by finishing. You are going to show that little girl or boy that this is possible.”
Hernandez is acutely aware of the challenge she faces.
“It’s not easy here for them; we are so invisible,” she said. “You layer that invisibility on top of feelings of inadequacy, and it makes it even harder. So I try to be that person here, to remind these young people how phenomenal they are.”
It Is and Always Was “About Resources”
Dick Jr. told Truthout that in the colonialists’ quest for freedom, they denied everybody else freedom.
“They’ve done everything in their power to annihilate us,” Dick Jr. said. “Ninety-eight percent of the Indigenous population of Turtle Island [North America] was wiped out … you have to work at that, to wipe out that many of us.”
He pointed out how, despite living on the homeland of his birth and that of his ancestors, he had to buy land to live there. “So what I’m doing is buying back my land. So that is ironic. I have to buy my land in order to live in it. There is something really wrong with that.”
Rushworth reminds us that the invasion of the continent by the colonists was always about resources, driven initially by how those who came from Europe did so because they had used up their resources there.
“Their lack of philosophical underpinnings, the idea that it is all there to be used up — that’s what happened in Europe,” he explained. “By 1492, it was trashed, by all accounts.”
He reminded us of the conditions in Europe of that time: rampant disease, no functional social networks, widespread homelessness, child labor, fiefdoms.
“These were not healthy societies,” Rushworth said. “That can be measured in how they treated prisoners, how they treated women, how they treated the environment. It was not healthy people that came here. Most of them didn’t come here with a healthy attitude.”
Hence, carrying this attitude and the soul-sickness that accompanied it, “They took what they wanted when they came here.”
“That’s when the Westward expansion began, and a really deep dehumanization became the national rhetoric, and that wasn’t that long ago,” Rushworth concluded. “And that is all about exploitation of resources. That comes into Jack Forbe’s wétiko disease of exploitation, greed and power. I think he’s spot on … It is a disease, and that is what we are still living in the middle of.”
Cannibalism, as Forbes defines it, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”
Forbes notes, “Imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil.”
“Few, if any, societies on the face of the Earth have ever been as avaricious, cruel, violent, and aggressive as have certain European populations,” Forbes concludes.
Native Americans experienced wétiko in brutal fashion not long after “first contact” with Europeans.
“[Europeans] slaughtered, during one short period alone, 50 million buffalo, because thousands of us relied on them, and in less than a generation, they annihilated them,” Harold Dick Jr., a 72-year-old Chiricahua Apache, told Truthout. “And they take pride in this, and take pictures of the dead buffalo, like it takes a ‘real man’ to shoot an animal with a high-powered rifle from far away.”
He added that when Native Americans talk about “great” people, they usually speak of medicine people, “but all of the greats the whites ever write about were great at destruction and subjugating people.”
Dick Jr’s point has been true since the so-called founding of the United States — given that it was rich, land-owning white men who authored the US Constitution, setting the stage for the white supremacy that drives US policy, both domestic and foreign, to this day.
Stan Rushworth is an elder of Cherokee decent who has taught Native American literature and critical thinking classes focused on Indigenous perspectives for more than a quarter of a century, and now teaches at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.
“As far as Indians are concerned, no administration that I know of has had Indians’ best interest at heart,” Rushworth told Truthout. “Eisenhower said, ‘We’re getting out of the Indian business and unilaterally abrogate all the treaties and do away with all the reservations.’ So the will of the American people is that we disappear.”
Thus, for Rushworth and a lot of his friends, “Trump didn’t lift a veil at all — he simply imposed another layer of a veil.”
Dick Jr. feels similarly. He told Truthout that, from his perspective as a Native American, if the US is going to talk about freedom and liberty, people need to recall that the country was founded upon genocide and slavery.
“If they want to start clean, the have to cop to the fact of what they did, and that it was wrong, and that [of] over 300 treaties written, not one was ever kept,” Dick Jr. said. “It is a huge case of hypocrisy … they talk of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty,’ but we don’t get any. And by extension, the citizens of the country don’t really get any, either.”
They are far from alone in their analysis about what ails this country, and how very far back that ailment goes.
A Rotten Foundation
“We [Native Americans] represent a shame, we represent a huge moral lapse in a country that likes to see itself as based on morality,” Rushworth said. “Rule of law is what people say we are based on. But rule of law is based on a society’s moral behavior. And with Indians, there is nothing but contradiction there. There is this huge cognitive dissonance.”
That cognitive dissonance stems from the history of genocide, injustice, slavery and colonial history the US is based upon.
Dr. Martin Rizzo, a post-doc fellow in the history department at the University of California, Riverside, is currently working on his forthcoming book examining Indigenous survival in 19th-century California.
Rizzo reminded Truthout of the ongoing legal injustices around the fact that there has never been a reckoning with the reality of the theft of land and resources from Native Americans, but also pointed towards the need to understand the historical traumas from what was done.
“The process of colonialism involves direct genocide,” Rizzo said, noting that scalp bounties in the West are one example of state-sanctioned violence, in which the government reimbursed white people for hunting down Native Americans.
Rizzo notes the psychological warfare component of this — how Native Americans were literally taught that they were “subhuman.”
“Like Trump today saying we shouldn’t be embarrassed about ‘civilizing’ this continent, this is deeply embedded in the colonial mindset that sees one people superior and another people inferior,” Rizzo said. “We have to reckon with this.”
According to Rizzo, Native Americans are dealing with trans-generational traumas that need to be undone due to hundreds of years of being told that their lifestyles were inferior to the colonists’ way.
“We are seeing this colonial world that has been increasingly devastating the environment,” Rizzo said. “Natives were pointing out hundreds of years ago the need to take care of the Earth for seven generations to preserve life for the future, versus this colonial approach we see today that is destroying the planet.”
Dick Jr. reminds us of Article Six, paragraph two of the US Constitution, which deals with the sovereignty of Native people.
“The treaties made between sovereign nations are supposed to be ironclad and not disused … but they’ve never kept this,” he said. “One of the old chiefs once said, ‘They should put wheels on us so when they change the treaties, they could just roll us out of the way.’ The first thing they do when they come in is they take all of it. And no matter how much there is, they take more of it.”
Speaking to Forbe’s wétiko disease, Dick Jr. reminds us of the colonialists coming from Europe who called themselves pilgrims. “The bottom line is that the day these people got off the boat until today is they’ve never kept their word.”
Dick Jr. shed light on how the basic Christian belief system brought by the colonialists drove their behavior, pointing out how many Native Americans believe they were born into paradise, whereas the Christian mindset is one of being kicked out of paradise.
“They think we were ‘bad’ and god threw us out,” he said. “But we think we must be pretty good, because the creator gave us all of this.”
Rizzo pointed out the systematic annihilation then assimilation of Native Americans, a large component of which included the breaking up of their community.
“Native American policies of the federal government shifted from outright warfare and genocide against them to: Who can we integrate into societies?” he said. “The [Dawes General] Allotment Act [of 1887] broke apart collective holdings of reservation land, and this caused a rapid loss of land for Native Americans.”
According to Rizzo, during the early 20th century, in 20 years, 35 percent of all Native lands were sold, and within 40 years, roughly half were gone, and this went on until the 1930s. This furthered the disintegration and isolation within tribal societies, and contributed to psychological displacement, depression and myriad other issues.
One example of the scale and rapidity of the genocide of the Native Americans occurred between 1846 and 1880 in California, when 90 percent of them were killed by white colonists.
Rizzo consistently teaches about the slavery and genocide that the US is built upon, because, as he put it, “It’s like the guy who thinks he is flawless and continues to abuse and carryout bad things. If you’re not willing to look at the harsh realities of the past, then it is impossible to work towards justice.”
Rizzo reminds his classes that Native American children were forcibly removed from their families, forbidden to speak their native languages and suffered corporal abuse in the name of assimilation. For at least a century this was ongoing, in addition to the fact that during the period of overt slavery, African children were separated from their parents, and oftentimes sold off to plantations.
He connects this history to the crisis at the US-Mexico border, where the federal government is separating immigrant children from their parents.
“Even today people look at the border and say, ‘Oh my god, this is not the country that we are,’ but this is the country we are,” Rizzo said. “This has happened over and over in our history … We have to have proper context of this all being part of a larger systematic problem that has to be corrected.”
Part of coming to terms with this ongoing legacy involves Native Americans grappling with historical trauma and relating to a society that largely erases their existence.
Struggles for Indigenous Students
Dr. Rebecca Hernandez, a Mescalero Apache, is the director of the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) at University of California, Santa Cruz. The AIRC serves all students, but advocates for Native students who comprise less than 1 percent of the total student body, as is usually the case on college campuses. Hernandez told Truthout that her biggest struggle is retaining students, because the contemporary issues facing Native Americans in universities stem largely from the unhealed issues from their ancestors’ brutal history under colonialism.
Hernandez talks to her students about this history in the context of how it contributes to contemporary problems and how so many of them are first-generation college students who are also struggling with guilt due to the fact that their people back home on the reservations continue to struggle mightily.
“Our collective histories as Native peoples have contributed to us as having to make these difficult decisions now because of what happened in the past,” she told Truthout. “Some of us have to be these forerunners and push harder to get to the other side to get through college, or to go back (or not) and help our families, and bring other people through after us.”
Hernandez works to help her students appreciate their history, because as she sees it, “We’ve always had these challenges and had to adapt rapidly. We were taken away from our families and expected to be really solid human beings, but there is a lot of dysfunction and sadness in our communities that has happened from that, and we are only now seeing the results of the colonization.”
She sees colonization as ongoing, and one ramification of this is how so many of her Indigenous students are unaware of their own tribal history.
Hernandez works towards having her students learn to discuss themselves as Native in a way “that is confident, authentic, and they own that identity and do so with confidence.”
This is because part of the current colonization stems from what Native American students deal with in their interactions with non-Natives.
“People dismiss them, ask insensitive questions, and often, the students don’t have the tools to talk about themselves in a way that shuts that nonsense down,” Hernandez said. “We have to learn how to talk about ourselves as Natives. Most of us present white. Because when you don’t, instantly you are fair game for weird questions, stereoypes and other weird things.”
An example she gave is this: “If someone says they are Egyptian, people don’t ask them, ‘How Egyptian are you?’ We are the only group in the US that has to deal with that question. I’ve had people here ask me to help them figure out what their spirit animal is. I can’t imagine what a 19-year-old does to deal with that. I just wonder when is this going to end.”
Hernandez wonders when people are going to see Native Americans as part of the American fabric just like every other demographic in the US.
“I’m like any other ethnic group, that’s a big part of the contemporary experience, and I try to help students practice responding to these stereotypes and weird questions,” she explained. “These are real things students are experiencing. So how do we then collectively respond and learn how to put on the brakes and say something isn’t ok to say to me, or to dismiss me based on how I look?”
Additionally, Hernandez pointed out how underscoring all of those issues are the ongoing systemic problems of Native Americans suffering the low end of the tremendous wealth disparities in the US, having incredibly high suicide rates and having major health problems.
But, despite these massive issues, Hernandez encourages her students.
“Every day, I see these young people and I say, ‘You are our future, you have to do this, you can’t quit’,” she said. “It would be a privilege to quit, but that is not a privilege we have. You alone are going to affect so many lives by finishing. You are going to show that little girl or boy that this is possible.”
Hernandez is acutely aware of the challenge she faces.
“It’s not easy here for them; we are so invisible,” she said. “You layer that invisibility on top of feelings of inadequacy, and it makes it even harder. So I try to be that person here, to remind these young people how phenomenal they are.”
It Is and Always Was “About Resources”
Dick Jr. told Truthout that in the colonialists’ quest for freedom, they denied everybody else freedom.
“They’ve done everything in their power to annihilate us,” Dick Jr. said. “Ninety-eight percent of the Indigenous population of Turtle Island [North America] was wiped out … you have to work at that, to wipe out that many of us.”
He pointed out how, despite living on the homeland of his birth and that of his ancestors, he had to buy land to live there. “So what I’m doing is buying back my land. So that is ironic. I have to buy my land in order to live in it. There is something really wrong with that.”
Rushworth reminds us that the invasion of the continent by the colonists was always about resources, driven initially by how those who came from Europe did so because they had used up their resources there.
“Their lack of philosophical underpinnings, the idea that it is all there to be used up — that’s what happened in Europe,” he explained. “By 1492, it was trashed, by all accounts.”
He reminded us of the conditions in Europe of that time: rampant disease, no functional social networks, widespread homelessness, child labor, fiefdoms.
“These were not healthy societies,” Rushworth said. “That can be measured in how they treated prisoners, how they treated women, how they treated the environment. It was not healthy people that came here. Most of them didn’t come here with a healthy attitude.”
Hence, carrying this attitude and the soul-sickness that accompanied it, “They took what they wanted when they came here.”
“That’s when the Westward expansion began, and a really deep dehumanization became the national rhetoric, and that wasn’t that long ago,” Rushworth concluded. “And that is all about exploitation of resources. That comes into Jack Forbe’s wétiko disease of exploitation, greed and power. I think he’s spot on … It is a disease, and that is what we are still living in the middle of.”
Why Native Americans Are Struggling to Protect Their Sacred Places
Their religious practices are being threatened all over again.
The Conversation - alternet
August 14, 2018, 4:21 AM GMT
Forty years ago the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act so that Native Americans could practice their faith freely and that access to their sacred sites would be protected. This came after a 500-year-long history of conquest and coercive conversion to Christianity had forced Native Americans from their homelands.
Today, their religious practice is threatened all over again. On Dec. 4, 2017, the Trump administration reduced the Bears Ears National Monument, an area sacred to Native Americans in Utah, by over 1 million acres. Bears Ears Monument is only one example of the conflict over places of religious value. Many other such sacred sites are being viewed as potential areas for development, threatening the free practice of Native American faith.
While Congress created the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to provide “access to sacred sites,” it has been open to interpretation. Native Americans still struggle to protect their sacred lands.
Land-based religions
Native Americans have land-based religions, which means they practice their religion within specific geographic locations. As Joseph Toledo, a Jemez Pueblo tribal leader, says, sacred sites are like churches; they are “places of great healing and magnetism.”
Some of these places, as in the case of Bears Ears National Monument, are within federal public lands. As a Native American scholar, I have visited many of these places and felt their power.
For thousands of years, tribes have used Bears Ears for rituals, ceremonies and collecting medicines used for healing. The different tribes – the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni – have worked to protect the land. Together they set up a nongovernmental organization, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to help conserve the landscape in 2015.
The tribes believe Bears Ears is one of the last large undisturbed areas in the lower 48 states and contains the spirits of those who once lived there. Bears Ears Navajo elder Mark Maryboy emphasized, “It’s very important that we protect the earth, the plants, and special ceremonial places in Bears Ears for future generations — not just for Native Americans, but for everybody.”
Sacred landscape
My great-grandparents, Páyotayàkχkumei and Kayetså’χkumi, (translated as Aims-while-flying-through-the-air and Hollering-in-the-air), were well-known religious leaders on the Blackfeet reservation. They lived in the foothills of the south side of the reservation. However, they went into the mountains and onto public lands in an area now called the Badger-Two Medicine in northcentral Montana to practice their religion.
My great-grandfather traveled into Badger canyon to trap eagles and gather their feathers which he used in ceremonies and for divine protection. My great-grandmother gathered medicinal plants used in healing ceremonies. Together they prayed and sought solitude in this sacred landscape.
Similar to Bears Ears, the Badger-Two Medicine, a 130,000-acre area within the Lewis and Clark National Forest, became embroiled in a controversy over potential natural resource development between 1982 and 2017. The Blackfeet tribe argued that these lands were sacred. And that tribal members, such as my great-grandparents, had used these lands for years for spiritual purposes.
The Blackfeet tribe ultimately succeeded in stopping development, but only after a 35-year-long fight with the Department of Interior, which initially approved almost 50 oil and gas leases. In 2017 Interior Secretary Jewell canceled the last of these leases. This means these public lands will not be used for natural resource development in the future.
Now my family and other Blackfeet, who have used the Badger-Two Medicine for millennia, can use these public lands for their religious practice in solitude.
Forty years later
The reality is, however, that not every dispute between tribes and the U.S. government ends up in favor of the tribes. Historically, Native American tribes have struggled to explain why certain landscapes are sacred for them.
In 1988, just 10 years after the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Supreme Court considered a case involving the construction of a U.S. Forest Service road through undeveloped federal lands sacred to northern California tribes in the Six Rivers National Forest.
The lower court had ruled in favor of the Yurok, Karok and Tolowa tribes stating the road would impact their religious practice.
However, the Supreme Court reversed the decision, ruling that building a road through a sacred landscape would not prohibit the tribes “free exercise” of religion.
The tribes lost, because the Supreme Court viewed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act as a policy and not a law with legal protections.
Ultimately, the road was not built because Congress stepped in and added this sacred area to the existing Siskiyou Wilderness, which is a protected area by federal law.
What was noteworthy in the SCOTUS deliberations, though, was the dissenting opinion of Justice William Brennan, who defended land-based religions. He said,
“Native American faith is inextricably bound to the use of land. The site-specific nature of Indian religious practice derives from the Native American perception that land is itself a sacred, living being.”
Indeed, religion scholars such as Yale professor Tisa Wenger point out that “the most important religious freedom issues for Native Americans” center around protecting their sacred places.
At a time when the Trump administration has created a new task force to address discrimination against certain religious groups, the exclusion of Bears Ears and other places of religious significance from these discussions raises important questions about religious freedom in the United States and also the legacy of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.
Today, their religious practice is threatened all over again. On Dec. 4, 2017, the Trump administration reduced the Bears Ears National Monument, an area sacred to Native Americans in Utah, by over 1 million acres. Bears Ears Monument is only one example of the conflict over places of religious value. Many other such sacred sites are being viewed as potential areas for development, threatening the free practice of Native American faith.
While Congress created the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to provide “access to sacred sites,” it has been open to interpretation. Native Americans still struggle to protect their sacred lands.
Land-based religions
Native Americans have land-based religions, which means they practice their religion within specific geographic locations. As Joseph Toledo, a Jemez Pueblo tribal leader, says, sacred sites are like churches; they are “places of great healing and magnetism.”
Some of these places, as in the case of Bears Ears National Monument, are within federal public lands. As a Native American scholar, I have visited many of these places and felt their power.
For thousands of years, tribes have used Bears Ears for rituals, ceremonies and collecting medicines used for healing. The different tribes – the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni – have worked to protect the land. Together they set up a nongovernmental organization, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to help conserve the landscape in 2015.
The tribes believe Bears Ears is one of the last large undisturbed areas in the lower 48 states and contains the spirits of those who once lived there. Bears Ears Navajo elder Mark Maryboy emphasized, “It’s very important that we protect the earth, the plants, and special ceremonial places in Bears Ears for future generations — not just for Native Americans, but for everybody.”
Sacred landscape
My great-grandparents, Páyotayàkχkumei and Kayetså’χkumi, (translated as Aims-while-flying-through-the-air and Hollering-in-the-air), were well-known religious leaders on the Blackfeet reservation. They lived in the foothills of the south side of the reservation. However, they went into the mountains and onto public lands in an area now called the Badger-Two Medicine in northcentral Montana to practice their religion.
My great-grandfather traveled into Badger canyon to trap eagles and gather their feathers which he used in ceremonies and for divine protection. My great-grandmother gathered medicinal plants used in healing ceremonies. Together they prayed and sought solitude in this sacred landscape.
Similar to Bears Ears, the Badger-Two Medicine, a 130,000-acre area within the Lewis and Clark National Forest, became embroiled in a controversy over potential natural resource development between 1982 and 2017. The Blackfeet tribe argued that these lands were sacred. And that tribal members, such as my great-grandparents, had used these lands for years for spiritual purposes.
The Blackfeet tribe ultimately succeeded in stopping development, but only after a 35-year-long fight with the Department of Interior, which initially approved almost 50 oil and gas leases. In 2017 Interior Secretary Jewell canceled the last of these leases. This means these public lands will not be used for natural resource development in the future.
Now my family and other Blackfeet, who have used the Badger-Two Medicine for millennia, can use these public lands for their religious practice in solitude.
Forty years later
The reality is, however, that not every dispute between tribes and the U.S. government ends up in favor of the tribes. Historically, Native American tribes have struggled to explain why certain landscapes are sacred for them.
In 1988, just 10 years after the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Supreme Court considered a case involving the construction of a U.S. Forest Service road through undeveloped federal lands sacred to northern California tribes in the Six Rivers National Forest.
The lower court had ruled in favor of the Yurok, Karok and Tolowa tribes stating the road would impact their religious practice.
However, the Supreme Court reversed the decision, ruling that building a road through a sacred landscape would not prohibit the tribes “free exercise” of religion.
The tribes lost, because the Supreme Court viewed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act as a policy and not a law with legal protections.
Ultimately, the road was not built because Congress stepped in and added this sacred area to the existing Siskiyou Wilderness, which is a protected area by federal law.
What was noteworthy in the SCOTUS deliberations, though, was the dissenting opinion of Justice William Brennan, who defended land-based religions. He said,
“Native American faith is inextricably bound to the use of land. The site-specific nature of Indian religious practice derives from the Native American perception that land is itself a sacred, living being.”
Indeed, religion scholars such as Yale professor Tisa Wenger point out that “the most important religious freedom issues for Native Americans” center around protecting their sacred places.
At a time when the Trump administration has created a new task force to address discrimination against certain religious groups, the exclusion of Bears Ears and other places of religious significance from these discussions raises important questions about religious freedom in the United States and also the legacy of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.
When Native Americans Routed the Ku Klux Klan in the Battle of Hayes Pond
After the recognition of the Lumbee in North Carolina, Ku Klux Klan wizard James W. “Catfish” Cole launched a campaign of terror against the tribe, questioning its indigenous status. “There’s about 30,000 half-breeds up in Robeson County and we are going to have some cross burnings and scare them up,” he said.
by Brandon Weber - the progressive
July 19, 2018
White men and Lumbee Indians in an armed skirmish in Robeson County, 1958.
On July 5 a historical marker was erected in Maxton, North Carolina, to commemorate an event that occurred sixty years ago, when the Ku Klux Klan tried to rally in the heart of Lumbee Indian territory. The Klansmen were run out of town, and the 1958 event made the national news, including in TheNew York Times and Life magazine. The conflict became known as “The Battle of Hayes Pond.”
The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina has fought long and hard for tribal recognition and respect. With 55,000 members, it’s the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and the ninth largest in the nation. But while the tribe was recognized by the state of North Carolina in 1885, the federal government dragged its feet on official recognition until 1956, and even then stopping shortof full recognition.
In 1956, Ku Klux Klan activities in the area had already been ratcheting up in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Educationmandating the desegregation of schools. After the recognition of the Lumbee in North Carolina, Ku Klux Klan wizard James W. “Catfish” Cole launched a campaign of terror against the tribe, questioning its indigenous status and telling the Greensboro Daily News, “There’s about 30,000 half-breeds up in Robeson County and we are going to have some cross burnings and scare them up.”
Cole and other members of the KKK accused the Lumbee of being “mixed race” people, who were intermingling with African Americans and whites, and called for a rally “in the heart of that mongrelized Indian country.”
In January of 1958, Klansmen started distributing a flier to organize a gathering at Hayes Pond, located near Maxton, North Carolina. “Hear the Klan Kludd [chaplain] speak on “Why I Believe In Segregation,” the flier announced.
In the days leading up to the rally, crosses were burned in front of at least two homes—one belonging to a Native American family that had recently moved into a “white neighborhood” and the other to a Lumbee woman who had been rumored to be dating a white man. A caravan with loudspeakers drove through town to drum up support, hurling racial slurs.
As evening settled on Saturday, January 18, the Klansmen had prepared for the rally in a large field, with loudspeakers, a cross to be burned, and a large banner. But in the end, only fifty to 100 supporters showed up. Cole, who was from South Carolina, misunderstood the racial dynamics in Lumbee territory and the extent to which the tribe, which had been struggling for sovereignty for decades, was prepared to defend itself and other indigenous people.
Before Cole could even begin his prepared speech, more than 500 well-armed men—Lumbee people, as well as members of the Tuscarora and Coharie tribes—began to emerge from the surrounding dark. He was accosted on the makeshift stage by one of the members of the tribe, a shoving match ensued, and one tribal member shot out the solitary floodlight. Others began shooting rifles into the air to disperse the crowd. “You didn’t know exactly what you were going to do when you got there, but you were excited about going,” remembered one Lumbee, Ray Little Turtle.
Klansmen fled in all directions, Cole even leaving his wife behind. Four Klansmen were wounded in the first volley fired by the Lumbee, none seriously. The Lumbees even reportedly helped Mrs. Cole push her car out of the ditch where she had gotten it stuck during the panic.
“We had to do what we had to do,” Lumbee member Lee Ancil Maynor, who was thirty-three at the time of the rally, said at a reunion event in 2016. “If we hadn’t done it, they would have soon been in our front yard.”
Local law enforcement showed up after the altercation had taken place, but by then, the field was clear.
The Lumbee gathered up discarded robes and the rally banner and marched back into Maxton to celebrate, which included burning Catfish Cole in effigy. Press coverage showcased two Lumbee men, one a celebrated World War II bomber engineer, wrapped in the KKK banner they had torn off a Klansmen’s car at the rally.
The historical marker erected July 5 was proposed by students at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. The students obtained the tribe’s approval before proceeding.
Today, the Lumbee continue to struggle today for recognition and respect, most recently resisting the construction of an oil and gas pipeline running across the tribe’s territory, threatening to separate communities and pollute precious water resources. But the tribe’s identity will be forever tied to the 1958 resistance.
“This is a part of who we are,” saidtribal Chairman Harvey Godwin Jr. at a the 2016 gathering. “We drove the KKK out of Robeson County and they haven’t came back since. We need to use that energy to fight our battles today, but without the weapons.”
The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina has fought long and hard for tribal recognition and respect. With 55,000 members, it’s the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and the ninth largest in the nation. But while the tribe was recognized by the state of North Carolina in 1885, the federal government dragged its feet on official recognition until 1956, and even then stopping shortof full recognition.
In 1956, Ku Klux Klan activities in the area had already been ratcheting up in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Educationmandating the desegregation of schools. After the recognition of the Lumbee in North Carolina, Ku Klux Klan wizard James W. “Catfish” Cole launched a campaign of terror against the tribe, questioning its indigenous status and telling the Greensboro Daily News, “There’s about 30,000 half-breeds up in Robeson County and we are going to have some cross burnings and scare them up.”
Cole and other members of the KKK accused the Lumbee of being “mixed race” people, who were intermingling with African Americans and whites, and called for a rally “in the heart of that mongrelized Indian country.”
In January of 1958, Klansmen started distributing a flier to organize a gathering at Hayes Pond, located near Maxton, North Carolina. “Hear the Klan Kludd [chaplain] speak on “Why I Believe In Segregation,” the flier announced.
In the days leading up to the rally, crosses were burned in front of at least two homes—one belonging to a Native American family that had recently moved into a “white neighborhood” and the other to a Lumbee woman who had been rumored to be dating a white man. A caravan with loudspeakers drove through town to drum up support, hurling racial slurs.
As evening settled on Saturday, January 18, the Klansmen had prepared for the rally in a large field, with loudspeakers, a cross to be burned, and a large banner. But in the end, only fifty to 100 supporters showed up. Cole, who was from South Carolina, misunderstood the racial dynamics in Lumbee territory and the extent to which the tribe, which had been struggling for sovereignty for decades, was prepared to defend itself and other indigenous people.
Before Cole could even begin his prepared speech, more than 500 well-armed men—Lumbee people, as well as members of the Tuscarora and Coharie tribes—began to emerge from the surrounding dark. He was accosted on the makeshift stage by one of the members of the tribe, a shoving match ensued, and one tribal member shot out the solitary floodlight. Others began shooting rifles into the air to disperse the crowd. “You didn’t know exactly what you were going to do when you got there, but you were excited about going,” remembered one Lumbee, Ray Little Turtle.
Klansmen fled in all directions, Cole even leaving his wife behind. Four Klansmen were wounded in the first volley fired by the Lumbee, none seriously. The Lumbees even reportedly helped Mrs. Cole push her car out of the ditch where she had gotten it stuck during the panic.
“We had to do what we had to do,” Lumbee member Lee Ancil Maynor, who was thirty-three at the time of the rally, said at a reunion event in 2016. “If we hadn’t done it, they would have soon been in our front yard.”
Local law enforcement showed up after the altercation had taken place, but by then, the field was clear.
The Lumbee gathered up discarded robes and the rally banner and marched back into Maxton to celebrate, which included burning Catfish Cole in effigy. Press coverage showcased two Lumbee men, one a celebrated World War II bomber engineer, wrapped in the KKK banner they had torn off a Klansmen’s car at the rally.
The historical marker erected July 5 was proposed by students at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. The students obtained the tribe’s approval before proceeding.
Today, the Lumbee continue to struggle today for recognition and respect, most recently resisting the construction of an oil and gas pipeline running across the tribe’s territory, threatening to separate communities and pollute precious water resources. But the tribe’s identity will be forever tied to the 1958 resistance.
“This is a part of who we are,” saidtribal Chairman Harvey Godwin Jr. at a the 2016 gathering. “We drove the KKK out of Robeson County and they haven’t came back since. We need to use that energy to fight our battles today, but without the weapons.”
Oops! Federal officials divulge secret info about Native American artifacts
By Jennifer Oldham / reveal
July 12, 2018
Friends of Cedar Mesa Executive Director Josh Ewing looks at ancient ruins in Utah’s Montezuma Canyon, a culturally important site to Native Americans. After learning that the BLM posted a report briefly online exposing the locations and descriptions of hundreds of artifacts, Ewing said it caught him by surprise and that he’d never seen such details publicized before.
Federal officials mistakenly published confidential information on locations and descriptions of about 900 ancient cliff dwellings, spiritual structures, rock art panels and other Native American antiquities in Utah.
The Bureau of Land Management posted a 77-page report online that included unique identifiers for priceless artifacts as it prepared to auction the most archaeologically rich lands ever offered for industrial use. The report exposed ruins spanning 13,000 years of Native American history to vandalism and looting, and experts say the BLM violated federal regulations that prohibit publicly sharing information about antiquities.
The document appeared on a BLM web page before the March oil and gas lease of 51,482 acres in a remote desert region of southeastern Utah. The BLM removed it and then reposted it with entire pages of detailed site descriptions blacked out. The report appeared online the last weekend in February and remained there for at least a few days – long enough for a state agency in Utah to download it and realize it violated the state’s privacy restrictions.
“That’s a big screwup,” said Paul Reed, an archaeologist with Archaeology Southwest, a nonprofit science organization based in Arizona. “If you were a pot hunter wanting to work in southeastern Utah and knew about the lease process, that would have been a gold mine for you.”
Utah’s dry red rock wilderness has preserved ancient evidence of nomadic hunter-gatherers, farmers and tribes, including the Navajo, Ute and Hopi. Archaeologists in Utah have relied on BLM secrecy to protect dance circles sprinkled with shards of ancient black-on-white pottery, circular Navajo structures known as hogans and points for tools used by Paleoindians to hunt mammoths.
The report’s appearance online unnerved Native Americans and scientists who provided the BLM with detailed reports and comments on antiquities with the understanding that they would be kept secret.
“It did catch me by surprise,” said Josh Ewing, executive director for Friends of Cedar Mesa, a Bluff, Utah-based nonprofit founded by a former BLM river ranger. “They went to a level with this report that was very unusual in terms of listing site numbers and descriptions by parcel that I haven’t seen before.”
In response to questions about how the confidential information ended up online, the BLM did not explain why the report was published.
The agency “replaced the first report with (a) redacted copy of the report that removed the nature and location of archaeological sites to prevent looting and vandalism at these sites,” Nate Thomas, the BLM’s head archaeologist in Utah, said in an email to Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
Attorneys representing Native American tribes declined to comment, citing ongoing negotiations with federal agencies on “delicate matters on a number of fronts.”
The BLM’s release of confidential information occurred as its understaffed field offices are under strain from an executive order issued by President Donald Trump last year to relieve the energy industry of “regulatory burdens.” A directive from the Department of Interior urged these offices to speed auctions of public lands by truncating scientific review and comment periods.
Before the BLM discovered the publishing error, Reveal downloaded a copy of the unredacted review. Its existence hasn’t been reported until now. According to the report obtained by Reveal, the 43 parcels in Utah that the BLM auctioned to oil and gas companies contain 1,282 archaeological sites and likely hundreds of undiscovered ones.
Of those, 899 were identified by a unique combination of numbers and letters known as a “Smithsonian trinomial,” which catalogs each relic or building by the state and county where it is located.
The mistakenly released report didn’t include global positioning coordinates for those sites, but it did list them by parcel numbers that corresponded with maps published on the BLM’s website. It also contained proper names of archaeological sites, types of relics, numbers of sites on each parcel and the tribes that might have built them, which indicates their age. All of that was later redacted by the BLM.
The release of the report is the latest controversy in an intensifying debate about how to protect the nation’s heritage as development and tourism explode across the West.
The BLM – which manages nearly 950 million surface and subsurface acres, primarily in 12 Western states – oversees leasing land to oil and gas companies. It’s required to ensure federal lands are available for multiple uses while also protecting cultural resources. These two responsibilities collided in the March 20 auction of lands in Utah.
A Reveal investigation published in March found that the administration’s expedited move to open public lands to energy exploration puts at risk scores of ancient buildings, vessels, petroglyphs and roads. An analysis of hundreds of pages of federal documents, memos, protest letters and interviews showed the BLM expedited lease sales without analyzing all available cultural resource data.
Under its regulations, the BLM must conduct environmental reviews and seek public comments before auctioning off federal land to the highest bidders. The agency also must make a “reasonable and good faith effort” to identify historic properties with the assistance of consulting parties and tribes, who say keeping the information they provide secret is paramount to protecting these sites.
“Once something becomes public and is on the internet, trying to keep it a secret is a lost cause,” Ewing said. “I can think of thousands of sites I know of in San Juan County that are not public and are not known to the people and they shouldn’t be published.”
Looters download such information and sell it. Conservationists work feverishly to get it taken down.
“The internet has changed everything – now there is widespread information on sites that were completely unknown two or three years ago,” said Diane Orr, co-chairman of the conservation committee for the Utah Rock Art Research Association, a consulting party on the BLM lease sale in Utah.
States protect their cultural resources differently. Utah tightly restricts access. Only qualified archaeologists can access these computer systems, after receiving credentials and signing a user’s agreement with Utah’s State Historic Preservation Office.
Attorneys for conservation organizations said that several regulations require the federal government to keep such information confidential.
“The law would prohibit publicly publishing site locations and site names,” said Laura Peterson, a staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which was a consulting party on the March sale. Her organization and several other parties signed a memorandum of understanding with the BLM to protect such information.
“When we filed a protest to this sale we had one version that was public and a second version that had more information we gave directly to archaeologists at the BLM because of confidentiality concerns,” she said.
Little is understood about Ancient Puebloans, basketmakers and others who lived, worked, migrated and died on and near the auctioned lands. Several auctioned parcels are located near Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients national monuments.
“There are thousands of undiscovered sites,” Hannah Russell, vice president of government affairs and research for the Utah Professional Archaeological Council, which was a consulting party to the March lease, said in an email to Reveal.
Inventories exist for only 2 percent to 55 percent of the parcels the BLM auctioned in Utah’s Grand and San Juan counties. Using new technologies, scientists are beginning to understand connections between prehistoric peoples in southeastern Utah and other places in the Four Corners area. About 1,000 new archaeological sites were discovered in fiscal year 2017 alone on land the BLM oversees in Utah.
“Utah sits at multiple cultural intersections in history and so there is still so much to learn,” said Russell, the principal investigator and owner at Moab-based Cottonwood Archaeology, LLC. “A useful parable for understanding what archaeologists are trying to extrapolate from the archaeological record is the one about blind men feeling an elephant.”
Paradoxically, most of the sites in confidential state and BLM databases were discovered after developers or oil and gas companies hired archaeologists to survey areas prior to construction or drilling.
“Archaeological locations should be kept confidential,” Russell said. “Archaeological resources are in danger of intentional and unintentional impacts from people who take from archaeological sites, loot archaeological sites, graffiti archaeological sites, or inadvertently trample, break, or touch archaeological sites and materials.”
The Bureau of Land Management posted a 77-page report online that included unique identifiers for priceless artifacts as it prepared to auction the most archaeologically rich lands ever offered for industrial use. The report exposed ruins spanning 13,000 years of Native American history to vandalism and looting, and experts say the BLM violated federal regulations that prohibit publicly sharing information about antiquities.
The document appeared on a BLM web page before the March oil and gas lease of 51,482 acres in a remote desert region of southeastern Utah. The BLM removed it and then reposted it with entire pages of detailed site descriptions blacked out. The report appeared online the last weekend in February and remained there for at least a few days – long enough for a state agency in Utah to download it and realize it violated the state’s privacy restrictions.
“That’s a big screwup,” said Paul Reed, an archaeologist with Archaeology Southwest, a nonprofit science organization based in Arizona. “If you were a pot hunter wanting to work in southeastern Utah and knew about the lease process, that would have been a gold mine for you.”
Utah’s dry red rock wilderness has preserved ancient evidence of nomadic hunter-gatherers, farmers and tribes, including the Navajo, Ute and Hopi. Archaeologists in Utah have relied on BLM secrecy to protect dance circles sprinkled with shards of ancient black-on-white pottery, circular Navajo structures known as hogans and points for tools used by Paleoindians to hunt mammoths.
The report’s appearance online unnerved Native Americans and scientists who provided the BLM with detailed reports and comments on antiquities with the understanding that they would be kept secret.
“It did catch me by surprise,” said Josh Ewing, executive director for Friends of Cedar Mesa, a Bluff, Utah-based nonprofit founded by a former BLM river ranger. “They went to a level with this report that was very unusual in terms of listing site numbers and descriptions by parcel that I haven’t seen before.”
In response to questions about how the confidential information ended up online, the BLM did not explain why the report was published.
The agency “replaced the first report with (a) redacted copy of the report that removed the nature and location of archaeological sites to prevent looting and vandalism at these sites,” Nate Thomas, the BLM’s head archaeologist in Utah, said in an email to Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
Attorneys representing Native American tribes declined to comment, citing ongoing negotiations with federal agencies on “delicate matters on a number of fronts.”
The BLM’s release of confidential information occurred as its understaffed field offices are under strain from an executive order issued by President Donald Trump last year to relieve the energy industry of “regulatory burdens.” A directive from the Department of Interior urged these offices to speed auctions of public lands by truncating scientific review and comment periods.
Before the BLM discovered the publishing error, Reveal downloaded a copy of the unredacted review. Its existence hasn’t been reported until now. According to the report obtained by Reveal, the 43 parcels in Utah that the BLM auctioned to oil and gas companies contain 1,282 archaeological sites and likely hundreds of undiscovered ones.
Of those, 899 were identified by a unique combination of numbers and letters known as a “Smithsonian trinomial,” which catalogs each relic or building by the state and county where it is located.
The mistakenly released report didn’t include global positioning coordinates for those sites, but it did list them by parcel numbers that corresponded with maps published on the BLM’s website. It also contained proper names of archaeological sites, types of relics, numbers of sites on each parcel and the tribes that might have built them, which indicates their age. All of that was later redacted by the BLM.
The release of the report is the latest controversy in an intensifying debate about how to protect the nation’s heritage as development and tourism explode across the West.
The BLM – which manages nearly 950 million surface and subsurface acres, primarily in 12 Western states – oversees leasing land to oil and gas companies. It’s required to ensure federal lands are available for multiple uses while also protecting cultural resources. These two responsibilities collided in the March 20 auction of lands in Utah.
A Reveal investigation published in March found that the administration’s expedited move to open public lands to energy exploration puts at risk scores of ancient buildings, vessels, petroglyphs and roads. An analysis of hundreds of pages of federal documents, memos, protest letters and interviews showed the BLM expedited lease sales without analyzing all available cultural resource data.
Under its regulations, the BLM must conduct environmental reviews and seek public comments before auctioning off federal land to the highest bidders. The agency also must make a “reasonable and good faith effort” to identify historic properties with the assistance of consulting parties and tribes, who say keeping the information they provide secret is paramount to protecting these sites.
“Once something becomes public and is on the internet, trying to keep it a secret is a lost cause,” Ewing said. “I can think of thousands of sites I know of in San Juan County that are not public and are not known to the people and they shouldn’t be published.”
Looters download such information and sell it. Conservationists work feverishly to get it taken down.
“The internet has changed everything – now there is widespread information on sites that were completely unknown two or three years ago,” said Diane Orr, co-chairman of the conservation committee for the Utah Rock Art Research Association, a consulting party on the BLM lease sale in Utah.
States protect their cultural resources differently. Utah tightly restricts access. Only qualified archaeologists can access these computer systems, after receiving credentials and signing a user’s agreement with Utah’s State Historic Preservation Office.
Attorneys for conservation organizations said that several regulations require the federal government to keep such information confidential.
“The law would prohibit publicly publishing site locations and site names,” said Laura Peterson, a staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which was a consulting party on the March sale. Her organization and several other parties signed a memorandum of understanding with the BLM to protect such information.
“When we filed a protest to this sale we had one version that was public and a second version that had more information we gave directly to archaeologists at the BLM because of confidentiality concerns,” she said.
Little is understood about Ancient Puebloans, basketmakers and others who lived, worked, migrated and died on and near the auctioned lands. Several auctioned parcels are located near Hovenweep and Canyons of the Ancients national monuments.
“There are thousands of undiscovered sites,” Hannah Russell, vice president of government affairs and research for the Utah Professional Archaeological Council, which was a consulting party to the March lease, said in an email to Reveal.
Inventories exist for only 2 percent to 55 percent of the parcels the BLM auctioned in Utah’s Grand and San Juan counties. Using new technologies, scientists are beginning to understand connections between prehistoric peoples in southeastern Utah and other places in the Four Corners area. About 1,000 new archaeological sites were discovered in fiscal year 2017 alone on land the BLM oversees in Utah.
“Utah sits at multiple cultural intersections in history and so there is still so much to learn,” said Russell, the principal investigator and owner at Moab-based Cottonwood Archaeology, LLC. “A useful parable for understanding what archaeologists are trying to extrapolate from the archaeological record is the one about blind men feeling an elephant.”
Paradoxically, most of the sites in confidential state and BLM databases were discovered after developers or oil and gas companies hired archaeologists to survey areas prior to construction or drilling.
“Archaeological locations should be kept confidential,” Russell said. “Archaeological resources are in danger of intentional and unintentional impacts from people who take from archaeological sites, loot archaeological sites, graffiti archaeological sites, or inadvertently trample, break, or touch archaeological sites and materials.”
First Americans lived on land bridge for thousands of years, genetics study suggests
the conversation
Disappearing Beringia, from 21,000 years before present (BP) to today. NOAA
The theory that the Americas were populated by humans crossing from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge was first proposed as far back as 1590, and has been generally accepted since the 1930s.
But genetic evidence shows there is no direct ancestral link between the people of ancient East Asia and modern Native Americans. A comparison of DNA from 600 modern Native Americans with ancient DNA recovered from a late Stone Age human skeleton from Mal'tanear Lake Baikal in southern Siberia shows that Native Americans diverged genetically from their Asian ancestors around 25,000 years ago, just as the last ice age was reaching its peak.
Based on archaeological evidence, humans did not survive the last ice age’s peak in northeastern Siberia, and yet there is no evidence they had reached Alaska or the rest of the New World either. While there is evidence to suggest northeast Siberia was inhabited during a warm period about 30,000 years ago before the last ice age peaked, after this the archaeological record goes silent, and only returns 15,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended.
So where did the ancestors of the Native Americans go for 15,000 years, after they split from the rest of their Asian relatives?
Surviving in Beringia
As John Hoffecker, Dennis O'Rourke and I argue in an article for Science, the answer seems to be that they lived on the Bering Land Bridge, the region between Siberia and Alaska that was dry land when sea levels were lower, as much of the world’s freshwater was locked up in ice, but which now lies underneath the waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas.
This theory has become increasingly supported by genetic evidence.
The Bering Land Bridge, also known as central part of Beringia, is thought to have been up to 600 miles wide. Based on evidence from sediment cores drilled into the now submerged landscape, it seems that here and in some adjacent regions of Alaska and Siberia the landscape at the height of the last glaciation 21,000 years ago was shrub tundra – as found in Arctic Alaska today.
This is dominated by dwarf shrubs such as willow and birch, only a few centimetres tall. There is evidence that there may have been some stands of spruce trees in these regions too in some protected microhabitats, where temperatures were milder than the regions around. The presence of a particular group of beetle species that live in shrub tundra habitats today in Alaska, and are associated with a specific range of temperatures, also supports the idea that the area was a refuge for both flora and fauna.
This kind of vegetation would not have supported the large, grazing animals – woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, Pleistocene horses, camels, and bison. These animals lived on the vegetation of the steppe-tundra which dominated the interior of Alaska and the Yukon, as well as interior regions of northeast Siberia. This shrub tundra would have supported elk, perhaps some bighorn sheep, and small mammals. But it had the one resource people needed most to keep warm: wood.
The wood and bark of dwarf shrubs would have been used to start fires that burned large mammal bones. The fats inside these bones won’t ignite unless they are heated to high temperatures, and for that you need a woody fire. And there is evidence from archaeological sites that people burned bones as fuel – the charred remains of leg bones have been found in many ancient hearths. It is the heat from these fires that kept these intrepid hunter-gatherers alive through the bitter cold of Arctic winter nights.
Escape to America
The last ice age ended and the land bridge began to disappear beneath the sea, some 13,000 years ago. Global sea levels rose as the vast continental ice sheets melted, liberating billions of gallons of fresh water. As the land bridge flooded, the entire Beringian region grew more warm and moist, and the shrub tundra vegetation spread rapidly, out-competing the steppe-tundra plants that had dominated the interior lowlands of Beringia.
While this spelled the end of the woolly mammoths and other large grazing animals, it probably also provided the impetus for human migration. As retreating glaciers opened new routes into the continent, humans travelled first into the Alaskan interior and the Yukon, and ultimately south out of the Arctic region and toward the temperate regions of the Americas. The first definitive archaeological evidence we have for the presence of people beyond Beringia and interior Alaska comes from this time, about 13,000 years ago.
These people are called Paleoindians by archaeologists. The genetic evidence records mutations in mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to offspring that are present in today’s Native Americans but not in the Mal'ta remains. This indicates a population isolated from the Siberian mainland for thousands of years, who are the direct ancestors of nearly all of the Native American tribes in both North and South America – the original “first peoples”.
But genetic evidence shows there is no direct ancestral link between the people of ancient East Asia and modern Native Americans. A comparison of DNA from 600 modern Native Americans with ancient DNA recovered from a late Stone Age human skeleton from Mal'tanear Lake Baikal in southern Siberia shows that Native Americans diverged genetically from their Asian ancestors around 25,000 years ago, just as the last ice age was reaching its peak.
Based on archaeological evidence, humans did not survive the last ice age’s peak in northeastern Siberia, and yet there is no evidence they had reached Alaska or the rest of the New World either. While there is evidence to suggest northeast Siberia was inhabited during a warm period about 30,000 years ago before the last ice age peaked, after this the archaeological record goes silent, and only returns 15,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended.
So where did the ancestors of the Native Americans go for 15,000 years, after they split from the rest of their Asian relatives?
Surviving in Beringia
As John Hoffecker, Dennis O'Rourke and I argue in an article for Science, the answer seems to be that they lived on the Bering Land Bridge, the region between Siberia and Alaska that was dry land when sea levels were lower, as much of the world’s freshwater was locked up in ice, but which now lies underneath the waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas.
This theory has become increasingly supported by genetic evidence.
The Bering Land Bridge, also known as central part of Beringia, is thought to have been up to 600 miles wide. Based on evidence from sediment cores drilled into the now submerged landscape, it seems that here and in some adjacent regions of Alaska and Siberia the landscape at the height of the last glaciation 21,000 years ago was shrub tundra – as found in Arctic Alaska today.
This is dominated by dwarf shrubs such as willow and birch, only a few centimetres tall. There is evidence that there may have been some stands of spruce trees in these regions too in some protected microhabitats, where temperatures were milder than the regions around. The presence of a particular group of beetle species that live in shrub tundra habitats today in Alaska, and are associated with a specific range of temperatures, also supports the idea that the area was a refuge for both flora and fauna.
This kind of vegetation would not have supported the large, grazing animals – woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, Pleistocene horses, camels, and bison. These animals lived on the vegetation of the steppe-tundra which dominated the interior of Alaska and the Yukon, as well as interior regions of northeast Siberia. This shrub tundra would have supported elk, perhaps some bighorn sheep, and small mammals. But it had the one resource people needed most to keep warm: wood.
The wood and bark of dwarf shrubs would have been used to start fires that burned large mammal bones. The fats inside these bones won’t ignite unless they are heated to high temperatures, and for that you need a woody fire. And there is evidence from archaeological sites that people burned bones as fuel – the charred remains of leg bones have been found in many ancient hearths. It is the heat from these fires that kept these intrepid hunter-gatherers alive through the bitter cold of Arctic winter nights.
Escape to America
The last ice age ended and the land bridge began to disappear beneath the sea, some 13,000 years ago. Global sea levels rose as the vast continental ice sheets melted, liberating billions of gallons of fresh water. As the land bridge flooded, the entire Beringian region grew more warm and moist, and the shrub tundra vegetation spread rapidly, out-competing the steppe-tundra plants that had dominated the interior lowlands of Beringia.
While this spelled the end of the woolly mammoths and other large grazing animals, it probably also provided the impetus for human migration. As retreating glaciers opened new routes into the continent, humans travelled first into the Alaskan interior and the Yukon, and ultimately south out of the Arctic region and toward the temperate regions of the Americas. The first definitive archaeological evidence we have for the presence of people beyond Beringia and interior Alaska comes from this time, about 13,000 years ago.
These people are called Paleoindians by archaeologists. The genetic evidence records mutations in mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to offspring that are present in today’s Native Americans but not in the Mal'ta remains. This indicates a population isolated from the Siberian mainland for thousands of years, who are the direct ancestors of nearly all of the Native American tribes in both North and South America – the original “first peoples”.
Native Americans seek to rename Yellowstone peak honoring massacre perpetrator
Activists also target valley named for advocate of extermination, amid nationwide fight to reject legacy of racism
Jason Begay in Missoula, Montana
the guardian
Thu 5 Jul 2018 05.00 EDT
Hayden Valley was named for a geologist and surveyor who supported the extermination of tribal people who rejected federal dictates. Photograph: Ed Austin/Herb Jones
Mount Doane is a 10,500ft peak in Yellowstone national park, named for Lt Gustavus C Doane, a US army cavalry captain and explorer. In January 1870, he led a massacre that killed around 175 Blackfeet people, and he continued to brag about the incident throughout his life.
Hayden Valley, a broad valley that holds Yellowstone Lake, was christened for Dr Ferdinand V Hayden, a geologist and surveyor. He also advocated for the extermination of tribal people who refused to comply with federal dictates.
A group of Native Americans say such names can no longer stand. The Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association, an organization of tribal chairmen of 16 Sioux tribes from Nebraska and the Dakotas, is pursuing an application to change Mount Doane to First Peoples Mountain and Hayden Valley to Buffalo Nations Valley.
The proposal echoes moves to take down monuments commemorating Confederate leaders and proponents of slavery. And it mirrors other efforts across the US – and online – to rename landmarks bearing appellations rooted in racism.
“We’re not against certain names,” said William Snell, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, who supports the Yellowstone renaming. “But we’re not for names where individuals have been involved with genocide, where elders and children have been killed and there have been some traumatic events in our history that don’t meet standards of honor.”
The US Board on Geographic Names has received a slew of requests since the early 1990s related to the word “squaw”, which has an unclear history but is now recognized as insulting, and has given new names to everything from mountains to waterways and neighborhood streets. Notably, in 2013, it changed Squaw Peak in Phoenix, Arizona to Piestewa Peak, after Lori Ann Piestewa, the first Native American woman to die in combat serving in the US military.
“We’d be driving down the freeway and saying: ‘Oh my God, why do we still have to look at this disparaging name?’” said Jack Jackson Jr, a lawyer and former Arizona state senate member whose father, Jack Jackson Sr, drafted several name-change bills during his 15-year career in the Arizona legislature. “Native people are always facing disparaging names and mascots.”
In 2016, the board approved changing the name of Harney Peak, a mountain in South Dakota named after the US army general William S Harney, who led troops in an 1855 battle against the Brule Sioux and killed women and children as well as warriors. Its new title is Black Elk Peak, for a man believed to be a survivor of the battle.
At Yellowstone, the name-change request has so far met with resistance. Local county representatives voted against it in early May, and in a motion the county commissioner, Tim French, said a name change was like “trying to change history”. The commissioners’ opposition could prove fatal. “The board on geographic names places a good deal of emphasis on local opinion,” said Lou Yost, its executive secretary.
The board, which meets monthly, has not yet scheduled a meeting to discuss the issue because it is waiting to hear from other state and federal officials.
Renaming efforts move more quickly online, where another grassroots effort is taking hold. The organization NativesOutdoors is both an outdoor apparel company and an Instagram account with 18,000 followers. The founder, Len Necefer, of the Navajo tribe, has been working for years to encourage Instagrammers to use original tribal names in the app’s geotagging feature instead of Americanized names.
Necefer himself used the Facebook geotagging system to identify four mountains surrounding the Navajo Nation, considered sacred boundaries, by their traditional names rather than the colonized terms.
In Colorado, he used the names Sisnaajiní and Dibé Nitsaa instead of Blanca Peak and Hesperus Mountain. To the west, he geotagged Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks as Dook’o’oosłiid. And in New Mexico, he tagged himself on Tsoodził rather than Mount Taylor.
“The creation of the first national parks, like Yellowstone and Glacier (national park), was predicated on the forced removal of indigenous populations from these areas,” Necefer told Outside Online earlier this year. “It created this myth that these are untouched wilderness areas.”
Hayden Valley, a broad valley that holds Yellowstone Lake, was christened for Dr Ferdinand V Hayden, a geologist and surveyor. He also advocated for the extermination of tribal people who refused to comply with federal dictates.
A group of Native Americans say such names can no longer stand. The Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association, an organization of tribal chairmen of 16 Sioux tribes from Nebraska and the Dakotas, is pursuing an application to change Mount Doane to First Peoples Mountain and Hayden Valley to Buffalo Nations Valley.
The proposal echoes moves to take down monuments commemorating Confederate leaders and proponents of slavery. And it mirrors other efforts across the US – and online – to rename landmarks bearing appellations rooted in racism.
“We’re not against certain names,” said William Snell, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, who supports the Yellowstone renaming. “But we’re not for names where individuals have been involved with genocide, where elders and children have been killed and there have been some traumatic events in our history that don’t meet standards of honor.”
The US Board on Geographic Names has received a slew of requests since the early 1990s related to the word “squaw”, which has an unclear history but is now recognized as insulting, and has given new names to everything from mountains to waterways and neighborhood streets. Notably, in 2013, it changed Squaw Peak in Phoenix, Arizona to Piestewa Peak, after Lori Ann Piestewa, the first Native American woman to die in combat serving in the US military.
“We’d be driving down the freeway and saying: ‘Oh my God, why do we still have to look at this disparaging name?’” said Jack Jackson Jr, a lawyer and former Arizona state senate member whose father, Jack Jackson Sr, drafted several name-change bills during his 15-year career in the Arizona legislature. “Native people are always facing disparaging names and mascots.”
In 2016, the board approved changing the name of Harney Peak, a mountain in South Dakota named after the US army general William S Harney, who led troops in an 1855 battle against the Brule Sioux and killed women and children as well as warriors. Its new title is Black Elk Peak, for a man believed to be a survivor of the battle.
At Yellowstone, the name-change request has so far met with resistance. Local county representatives voted against it in early May, and in a motion the county commissioner, Tim French, said a name change was like “trying to change history”. The commissioners’ opposition could prove fatal. “The board on geographic names places a good deal of emphasis on local opinion,” said Lou Yost, its executive secretary.
The board, which meets monthly, has not yet scheduled a meeting to discuss the issue because it is waiting to hear from other state and federal officials.
Renaming efforts move more quickly online, where another grassroots effort is taking hold. The organization NativesOutdoors is both an outdoor apparel company and an Instagram account with 18,000 followers. The founder, Len Necefer, of the Navajo tribe, has been working for years to encourage Instagrammers to use original tribal names in the app’s geotagging feature instead of Americanized names.
Necefer himself used the Facebook geotagging system to identify four mountains surrounding the Navajo Nation, considered sacred boundaries, by their traditional names rather than the colonized terms.
In Colorado, he used the names Sisnaajiní and Dibé Nitsaa instead of Blanca Peak and Hesperus Mountain. To the west, he geotagged Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks as Dook’o’oosłiid. And in New Mexico, he tagged himself on Tsoodził rather than Mount Taylor.
“The creation of the first national parks, like Yellowstone and Glacier (national park), was predicated on the forced removal of indigenous populations from these areas,” Necefer told Outside Online earlier this year. “It created this myth that these are untouched wilderness areas.”
Cyclists of the Cherokee Nation Ride the Trail of Tears
EACH YEAR, THESE NATIVE AMERICANS BIKE NEARLY 1,000 MILES TO HONOR THEIR ANCESTORS
BY AMANDA LOUDIN - bicycling.com
5/24/18
Like many new cyclists, Sky Wildcat has spent time collecting road rash and bruises as she learns to master clipless pedals. She’s also getting used to the pain and discomfort that comes with covering increasingly higher mileage in the saddle. Things like heat and dehydration on long climbs are all new experiences for the 22-year-old master’s degree candidate.
But she welcomes it all, because she’s training for the ride of her life.
On June 1, Wildcat will join nine fellow members of her Cherokee Nation tribe and eight others from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to bike nearly 1,000 miles from New Echota, Georgia, to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Together, they will follow in the footsteps of their ancestors—footsteps that walked the Trail of Tears during the federal government’s forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeastern United States in the 1830s. The ride, called “Remember the Removal,” is meant to honor those ancestors, some 4,000 of whom died during the march.
This is the ninth consecutive year Cherokee Nation members have participated in the ride. (The tribe founded the event back in 1984, and revived it in 2009.) The Eastern Band joined their western counterparts in 2011. Since then, it has become an integral part of historical, cultural, and physical education for the Cherokee people.
“When you experience adversity as a young person, you learn what you’re capable of,” Eastern Band Chief Richard Sneed, himself an alumnus of the ride, told Bicycling. “Everyone has a transformative moment out there.”
Like Wildcat, many participants come into the ride with little to no cycling experience. After applying to make the team, each rider follows a six-month training program with both physical and educational components. “I grew up around the language and history, but the lessons have made it all the more real to me,” Wildcat said. “It’s at the core of what we do.”
The route follows the northern removal path—one of several making up the Trail of Tears, which affected at least five different tribes. It stops at important historical landmarks, such as Mantle Rock and Blythe Ferry, as well as the gravesites of those who died on the march.
“We bring in a genealogist so the riders can find a real, personal connection along the way,” said Sheena Kanott Lambert, program director of the public health initiative Cherokee Choices and a participant in the 2011 ride. “It’s one thing to read a book about our history, and another to experience it in person.”
Team members wear matching kits, provided by the tribes, that sport meaningful designs. They might show the faded signatures, for instance, of the Cherokee National Council that originally signed a petition in protest of the removal. The jerseys are red, black, yellow, and white—traditional Cherokee colors often found in mound artifacts. One copper-colored side panel features seven stars to represent the seven removed clans. Another panel shows only a single star, to represent those lost along the trail.
The ride in 1984 looked much different than it does today. Cyclists back then primarily supported themselves—toting gear, handling mechanicals, and cooking all on their own. “Today we have a marshal with flashing lights to stop traffic for us,” Sneed said. “It’s nice to have a cool hotel room at the end of the day. That original team had it much harder than we do.”
Despite the creature comforts, riders today face tough physical challenges that help bring perspective to the Trail of Tears experience. “I try to fathom what it was like for our ancestors,” Lambert said. “The beauty of it is that they persevered. It’s truly humbling.”
Daily rides vary in distance from 35-70 miles. Organizers built rest days into the schedule and have two support vans with trailers following along. On some days the team will camp, but riders will more often stay in hotels. All told, the ride generally takes about three weeks.
As the 20 or so cyclists make their way into Tahlequah on their final day, emotions run high and tears flow freely. “When we return to our community, it’s with confidence, and many alumni go on to become leaders,” Lambert said. “It’s hard to explain, but we are all more willing to strive for cultural preservation and to volunteer our time with the project in years to come. It’s life-changing.”
But she welcomes it all, because she’s training for the ride of her life.
On June 1, Wildcat will join nine fellow members of her Cherokee Nation tribe and eight others from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to bike nearly 1,000 miles from New Echota, Georgia, to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Together, they will follow in the footsteps of their ancestors—footsteps that walked the Trail of Tears during the federal government’s forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeastern United States in the 1830s. The ride, called “Remember the Removal,” is meant to honor those ancestors, some 4,000 of whom died during the march.
This is the ninth consecutive year Cherokee Nation members have participated in the ride. (The tribe founded the event back in 1984, and revived it in 2009.) The Eastern Band joined their western counterparts in 2011. Since then, it has become an integral part of historical, cultural, and physical education for the Cherokee people.
“When you experience adversity as a young person, you learn what you’re capable of,” Eastern Band Chief Richard Sneed, himself an alumnus of the ride, told Bicycling. “Everyone has a transformative moment out there.”
Like Wildcat, many participants come into the ride with little to no cycling experience. After applying to make the team, each rider follows a six-month training program with both physical and educational components. “I grew up around the language and history, but the lessons have made it all the more real to me,” Wildcat said. “It’s at the core of what we do.”
The route follows the northern removal path—one of several making up the Trail of Tears, which affected at least five different tribes. It stops at important historical landmarks, such as Mantle Rock and Blythe Ferry, as well as the gravesites of those who died on the march.
“We bring in a genealogist so the riders can find a real, personal connection along the way,” said Sheena Kanott Lambert, program director of the public health initiative Cherokee Choices and a participant in the 2011 ride. “It’s one thing to read a book about our history, and another to experience it in person.”
Team members wear matching kits, provided by the tribes, that sport meaningful designs. They might show the faded signatures, for instance, of the Cherokee National Council that originally signed a petition in protest of the removal. The jerseys are red, black, yellow, and white—traditional Cherokee colors often found in mound artifacts. One copper-colored side panel features seven stars to represent the seven removed clans. Another panel shows only a single star, to represent those lost along the trail.
The ride in 1984 looked much different than it does today. Cyclists back then primarily supported themselves—toting gear, handling mechanicals, and cooking all on their own. “Today we have a marshal with flashing lights to stop traffic for us,” Sneed said. “It’s nice to have a cool hotel room at the end of the day. That original team had it much harder than we do.”
Despite the creature comforts, riders today face tough physical challenges that help bring perspective to the Trail of Tears experience. “I try to fathom what it was like for our ancestors,” Lambert said. “The beauty of it is that they persevered. It’s truly humbling.”
Daily rides vary in distance from 35-70 miles. Organizers built rest days into the schedule and have two support vans with trailers following along. On some days the team will camp, but riders will more often stay in hotels. All told, the ride generally takes about three weeks.
As the 20 or so cyclists make their way into Tahlequah on their final day, emotions run high and tears flow freely. “When we return to our community, it’s with confidence, and many alumni go on to become leaders,” Lambert said. “It’s hard to explain, but we are all more willing to strive for cultural preservation and to volunteer our time with the project in years to come. It’s life-changing.”
Canada sued over years of alleged experimentation on indigenous people
Class-action suit filed on behalf of thousands of people allegedly subjected to medical tests without consent in the mid-20th century
Ashifa Kassam in Toronto
the guardian
Fri 11 May 2018 03.01 EDT
A class action lawsuit has been filed in a Canadian court on behalf of the thousands of indigenous people alleged to have been unwittingly subjected to medical experiments without their consent.
Filed this month in a courtroom in the province of Saskatchewan, the lawsuit holds the federal government responsible for experiments allegedly carried out on reserves and in residential schools between the 1930s and 1950s.
The suit also accuses the Canadian government of a long history of “discriminatory and inadequate medical care” at Indian hospitals and sanatoriums – key components of a segregated healthcare system that operated across the country from 1945 into the early 1980s.
“This strikes me as so atrocious that there ought to be punitive and exemplary damages awarded, in addition to compensation,” said Tony Merchant, whose Merchant Law Group filed the class action.
The lawsuit, which has not yet been tested in court, alleges that residential schools – where more than 150,000 aboriginal children were carted off in an attempt to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian society – were used as sites for nutritional experiments, where researchers tested out their theories about vitamins and certain foods.
“The wrong here is that nobody knew it was happening. Their families didn’t know it was happening,” Merchant said.
As the diet at the schools was known to be nutritionally deficient, the children were considered “ideal experimental subjects”, according to court documents. It cites six schools, stretching from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, and links them to experiments carried out from 1948 to 1953.
At times, researchers would carry out what Merchant described as trials aimed at depriving the children of nutrients that researchers suspected were beneficial.
“So what they did on a systemic basis … they would identify a group of indigenous children in schools where they were being compulsorily held and they would not give them the same treatment,” said Merchant. “They used them as a control against experiments that they were doing in other places and they also used them to test certain kinds of foods and drugs.”
Court documents describe the lengths researchers at times went to protect their results: after a principal in Kenora, Ontario, asked that all the residential school’s children be given iron and vitamin tablets, the researcher asked him to refrain from doing so, as it would interfere with the experiment.
In other instances, researchers withheld dental treatment from children, worried that healthier teeth and gums would skew their results.
The school in Kenora was also used to test an experimental drug on children with ear problems, leaving nine children with significant hearing loss, according to court documents.
The lawsuit notes that those who did not cooperate were subject to physical abuse.
The experiments also extended to reserves, court documents note. At times children were used to study the effectiveness of drugs and given varying dosages of treatments in order to compare their effectiveness on illnesses ranging from amoebic dysentery to tuberculosis. In Saskatchewan, children living on reserves were used to test the effectiveness of a new tuberculosis vaccine.
At a reserve in northern Manitoba, researchers visiting in the 1940s suspected malnutrition was behind several cases of blindness as well as an outbreak of tuberculosis. In order to test their theory, they gave nutritional supplements to 125 people. The others on the 300-person reserve were used as a control group, left to fend off malnutrition amid a collapsing fur trade and sharp limits on government aid.
Years later, researchers noted they had seen an improvement in health among those given the supplements.
Merchant believed that the number of those affected by the experiments could run into the thousands. “Some people don’t even know that they were the subject of experiments,” he said. “In some instances we can prove that principals of the schools said, ‘Well, we need consent,’ and they said, ‘We’re not going to ask for consent.’”
The lawsuit is directed at the federal government, as it was Canada that established, funded and oversaw residential schools, Indian hospitals and sanatoriums.
The plaintiff in the case is John Pambrun, 77, a First Nations man who spent nearly six years of his childhood in Indian hospitals and sanatoriums. In 1955 – long after antibiotics had become the standard treatment for tuberculosis – doctors removed part of his right lung, according to court documents.
“We can’t find anything in the medical records that indicates that he even had tuberculosis,” said Merchant. “We’re just mystified.”
The years of treatment took him away from his family and his education, while the partial loss of a lung left him suffering shortness of breath and limited his employment options. “It has just been gnawing him all these years that he was mistreated by a nation that took him into their care and had a special responsibility for his care,” said Merchant.
Many of the allegations contained in the lawsuit stem from investigations done by Ian Mosby at the University of Guelph. In research published in 2013, he documented more than a decade of nutritional experiments on indigenous peoples.
In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Canada’s indigenous and northern affairs department described news of the allegations as “very troubling”. Noting that the federal government had yet to review the statement of claim, the ministry declined to comment further.
While Merchant acknowledged that the lawsuit was aimed at the government of the day, rather than the many governments who allegedly allowed these experiments to happen under their watch, he described it as part of Canada’s fledgling efforts to confront its historical mistreatment of the country’s indigenous population.
“We’re in a time of patching our relationship with indigenous people,” he said. “So to go back and recognise that there was wrong and pay compensation, I think, is important.”
Filed this month in a courtroom in the province of Saskatchewan, the lawsuit holds the federal government responsible for experiments allegedly carried out on reserves and in residential schools between the 1930s and 1950s.
The suit also accuses the Canadian government of a long history of “discriminatory and inadequate medical care” at Indian hospitals and sanatoriums – key components of a segregated healthcare system that operated across the country from 1945 into the early 1980s.
“This strikes me as so atrocious that there ought to be punitive and exemplary damages awarded, in addition to compensation,” said Tony Merchant, whose Merchant Law Group filed the class action.
The lawsuit, which has not yet been tested in court, alleges that residential schools – where more than 150,000 aboriginal children were carted off in an attempt to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian society – were used as sites for nutritional experiments, where researchers tested out their theories about vitamins and certain foods.
“The wrong here is that nobody knew it was happening. Their families didn’t know it was happening,” Merchant said.
As the diet at the schools was known to be nutritionally deficient, the children were considered “ideal experimental subjects”, according to court documents. It cites six schools, stretching from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, and links them to experiments carried out from 1948 to 1953.
At times, researchers would carry out what Merchant described as trials aimed at depriving the children of nutrients that researchers suspected were beneficial.
“So what they did on a systemic basis … they would identify a group of indigenous children in schools where they were being compulsorily held and they would not give them the same treatment,” said Merchant. “They used them as a control against experiments that they were doing in other places and they also used them to test certain kinds of foods and drugs.”
Court documents describe the lengths researchers at times went to protect their results: after a principal in Kenora, Ontario, asked that all the residential school’s children be given iron and vitamin tablets, the researcher asked him to refrain from doing so, as it would interfere with the experiment.
In other instances, researchers withheld dental treatment from children, worried that healthier teeth and gums would skew their results.
The school in Kenora was also used to test an experimental drug on children with ear problems, leaving nine children with significant hearing loss, according to court documents.
The lawsuit notes that those who did not cooperate were subject to physical abuse.
The experiments also extended to reserves, court documents note. At times children were used to study the effectiveness of drugs and given varying dosages of treatments in order to compare their effectiveness on illnesses ranging from amoebic dysentery to tuberculosis. In Saskatchewan, children living on reserves were used to test the effectiveness of a new tuberculosis vaccine.
At a reserve in northern Manitoba, researchers visiting in the 1940s suspected malnutrition was behind several cases of blindness as well as an outbreak of tuberculosis. In order to test their theory, they gave nutritional supplements to 125 people. The others on the 300-person reserve were used as a control group, left to fend off malnutrition amid a collapsing fur trade and sharp limits on government aid.
Years later, researchers noted they had seen an improvement in health among those given the supplements.
Merchant believed that the number of those affected by the experiments could run into the thousands. “Some people don’t even know that they were the subject of experiments,” he said. “In some instances we can prove that principals of the schools said, ‘Well, we need consent,’ and they said, ‘We’re not going to ask for consent.’”
The lawsuit is directed at the federal government, as it was Canada that established, funded and oversaw residential schools, Indian hospitals and sanatoriums.
The plaintiff in the case is John Pambrun, 77, a First Nations man who spent nearly six years of his childhood in Indian hospitals and sanatoriums. In 1955 – long after antibiotics had become the standard treatment for tuberculosis – doctors removed part of his right lung, according to court documents.
“We can’t find anything in the medical records that indicates that he even had tuberculosis,” said Merchant. “We’re just mystified.”
The years of treatment took him away from his family and his education, while the partial loss of a lung left him suffering shortness of breath and limited his employment options. “It has just been gnawing him all these years that he was mistreated by a nation that took him into their care and had a special responsibility for his care,” said Merchant.
Many of the allegations contained in the lawsuit stem from investigations done by Ian Mosby at the University of Guelph. In research published in 2013, he documented more than a decade of nutritional experiments on indigenous peoples.
In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Canada’s indigenous and northern affairs department described news of the allegations as “very troubling”. Noting that the federal government had yet to review the statement of claim, the ministry declined to comment further.
While Merchant acknowledged that the lawsuit was aimed at the government of the day, rather than the many governments who allegedly allowed these experiments to happen under their watch, he described it as part of Canada’s fledgling efforts to confront its historical mistreatment of the country’s indigenous population.
“We’re in a time of patching our relationship with indigenous people,” he said. “So to go back and recognise that there was wrong and pay compensation, I think, is important.”
Native Language Schools Are Taking Back Education
Friday, April 20, 2018
By Abaki Beck, YES! Magazine | Report
For more than 150 years, the Wôpanâak language was silent. With no fluent speakers alive, the language of the Mashpee Wampanoag people existed only in historical documents. It was by all measures extinct. But a recently established language school on the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's reservation in Massachusetts is working to bring back the language.
The threat of extinction that faces the Wôpanâak language is not uncommon for indigenous languages in the United States. Calculated federal policy, not happenstance, led to the destruction of Native American languages such as Wôpanâak.
But today, Native language schools are working to change that by revitalizing languages that have been threatened with extinction.
In the 19th century, federal policy shifted from a policy of extermination and displacement to assimilation. The passage of the Civilization Fund Act in 1819 allocated federal funds directly to education for the purpose of assimilation, and that led to the formation of many government-run boarding schools. Boarding schools were not meant to educate, but to assimilate.
Tribal communities continue to be haunted by this history. As of April, UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Endangered Languages listed 191 Native American languages as "in danger" in the United States. Of these, some languages are vulnerable -- meaning that children speak the language, but only in certain contexts -- to critically endangered -- meaning the youngest generation of speakers are elderly.
Today, the education system in the United States fails Native American students. Native students have the lowest high school graduation rate of any racial group nationally, according to the 2017 Condition of Education Report. And a 2010 report shows that in the 12 states with the highest Native American population, less than 50 percent of Native students graduate from high school per year.
By founding schools that teach in Native languages and center tribal history and beliefs, tribal language schools are taking education back into their own hands.
Mukayuhsak Weekuw: Reviving a Silent Language
On the Massachusetts coast just two hours south of Boston is Mukayuhsak Weekuw, a Wôpanâak language preschool and kindergarten founded in 2015. The school is working to revitalize the Wôpanâak language. As one of the first tribes to encounter colonists, the Mashpee Wampanoag faced nearly four centuries of violence and assimilation attempts; by the mid 19th century, the last fluent speakers of Wôpanâak had died.
In the 1990s, Wampanoag social worker Jessie Little Doe Baird began to work to bring the language back to her people. It began like this: More than 20 years ago, Baird had a series of dreams in which her ancestors spoke to her in Wôpanâak. She says they instructed her to ask her community whether they were ready to welcome the language home.
She listened, and in 1993 she sought the help of linguists and community elders to begin to revitalize the language -- elders like Helen Manning from the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, with whom she would later co-found the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project.
Baird found a lot of resources. To translate the Bible, colonists had transcribed Wôpanâak to the Roman alphabet in the 1600s, which the Wampanoag used to write letters, wills, deeds, and petitions to the colonial government. With these texts, Baird and MIT linguist Kenneth Hale established rules for Wôpanâak orthography and grammar, and created a dictionary of 11,000 words.
In 2015, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project was ready to open the Mukayuhsak Weekuw preschool. According to the school's Project Director Jennifer Weston, 10 students attended in the first year it opened, growing to 20 in the current school year. As part of the language program, parents or grandparents of students at the school are required to attend a weekly language class to ensure that the youth can continue speaking the language at home.
The curriculum is taught entirely in the Wôpanâak language, and it is also grounded in tribal history and connection to the land. "Our languages embody our ancestors' relationships to our homelands and to one another across millennia," Weston says. "They explain to us to the significance of all the places for our most important ceremonies and medicines. They tell us who we are and how to be good relatives."
In addition to language learning, the children also learn about gardening, hunting, and fishing. They practice tribal ceremonies, traditional food preservation, and traditional hunting and fishing practices. At Native American language schools like Mukayuhsak Weekuw, students experience their culture in the curriculum in a deeply personal and empowering way.
'Aha Pūnana Leo: Overcoming Policy Barriers
Considering the violent history of America's education system towards Native Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising that policy barriers continue to hinder contemporary language revitalization schools.
Federal policies are often misaligned with the reality of tribal communities and language revitalization schools. Leslie Harper, president of the advocacy group National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs, says schools often risk losing funding because they lack qualified teachers who meet federal standards. But these standards are paternalistic, notes Harper, who says that fluent language teachers at Native schools are often trained outside of accredited teaching colleges, which don't offer relevant Native language teaching programs. These teaching colleges don't "respond to our needs for teachers in Indian communities," she says.
In Hawai'i, 'Aha Pūnana Leo schools have had some success in overcoming policy barriers like these. The schools have led the way for statewide and national policy change in Native language education.
When the first preschool was founded in 1984, activists estimated that fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian statewide. Today, 'Aha Pūnana Leo runs 21 language medium schools serving thousands of students throughout the state, from preschool through high school. Because of this success, emerging revitalization schools and researchers alike look to 'Aha Pūnana Leo as a model.
Nāmaka Rawlins is the director of strategic collaborations at 'Aha Pūnana Leo. Like Harper, she says that required academic credentialing burdened the language preschools, which relied on fluent elders. This became an issue in 2012 when kindergarten was made compulsory in Hawai'i, and teachers and directors of preschools were required to be accredited. But she, along with other Hawaiian language advocates, advocated for changes to these state regulations to exclude Hawaiian preschools from the requirement and instead accredit their own teachers as local, indigenous experts. And they succeeded.
"We got a lot of flack from the preschool community," she says. "Today, we provide our own training and professional development."
One of the early successes of 'Aha Pūnana Leo was removing the ban on the use of Hawaiian language in schools, which had been illegal for nearly a century. Four years later, in 1990, the passage of the Native American Language Act affirmed that Native American children across the nation have the right to be educated, express themselves, and be assessed in their tribal language.
But according to Harper, progress still needs to be made before NALA is fully implemented by the Education Department. Since 2016, Native American language medium schools have been able to assess students in their language. This took years of advocacy by people like Harper, who served on the US Department of Education's Every Student Succeeds Act Implementation Committee and pushed for the change.
While this is an important first step, Harper is concerned that because language medium school assessments must be peer reviewed, low capacity schools -- or those that lack the technical expertise of developing assessments that align with federal standards -- will be burdened. And the exemption doesn't apply to high schools.
Studies from multiple language revitalization schools have found that students who attend these schools have greater academic achievement than those who attend English-speaking schools, including scoring significantly higher on standardized tests. "We are beginning to see the long-term benefits of language revitalization and language-medium education in our kids," Harper says. "But the public education system and laws are still reticent about us developing programs of instruction for our students."
Looking Back, Looking Forward
A movement to revitalize tribal languages is underway. The success of 'Aha Pūnana Leo and promise of Mukayuhsak Weekuw are examples of communities taking education into their own hands. When Native American students are taught in their own language and culture, they succeed.
Weston says parents are eager for Mukayuhsak Weekuw to expand into an elementary school, and in fall 2018, the school will include first grade in addition to pre-school and kindergarten. It is a testament to the work and vision of the Wampanoag that just two decades ago, their language was silent, and today, they have a school that expands in size each year. "All of our tribal communities have the capacity to maintain and revitalize our mother tongues," Weston says -- no matter how daunting it may seem.
The threat of extinction that faces the Wôpanâak language is not uncommon for indigenous languages in the United States. Calculated federal policy, not happenstance, led to the destruction of Native American languages such as Wôpanâak.
But today, Native language schools are working to change that by revitalizing languages that have been threatened with extinction.
In the 19th century, federal policy shifted from a policy of extermination and displacement to assimilation. The passage of the Civilization Fund Act in 1819 allocated federal funds directly to education for the purpose of assimilation, and that led to the formation of many government-run boarding schools. Boarding schools were not meant to educate, but to assimilate.
Tribal communities continue to be haunted by this history. As of April, UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Endangered Languages listed 191 Native American languages as "in danger" in the United States. Of these, some languages are vulnerable -- meaning that children speak the language, but only in certain contexts -- to critically endangered -- meaning the youngest generation of speakers are elderly.
Today, the education system in the United States fails Native American students. Native students have the lowest high school graduation rate of any racial group nationally, according to the 2017 Condition of Education Report. And a 2010 report shows that in the 12 states with the highest Native American population, less than 50 percent of Native students graduate from high school per year.
By founding schools that teach in Native languages and center tribal history and beliefs, tribal language schools are taking education back into their own hands.
Mukayuhsak Weekuw: Reviving a Silent Language
On the Massachusetts coast just two hours south of Boston is Mukayuhsak Weekuw, a Wôpanâak language preschool and kindergarten founded in 2015. The school is working to revitalize the Wôpanâak language. As one of the first tribes to encounter colonists, the Mashpee Wampanoag faced nearly four centuries of violence and assimilation attempts; by the mid 19th century, the last fluent speakers of Wôpanâak had died.
In the 1990s, Wampanoag social worker Jessie Little Doe Baird began to work to bring the language back to her people. It began like this: More than 20 years ago, Baird had a series of dreams in which her ancestors spoke to her in Wôpanâak. She says they instructed her to ask her community whether they were ready to welcome the language home.
She listened, and in 1993 she sought the help of linguists and community elders to begin to revitalize the language -- elders like Helen Manning from the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, with whom she would later co-found the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project.
Baird found a lot of resources. To translate the Bible, colonists had transcribed Wôpanâak to the Roman alphabet in the 1600s, which the Wampanoag used to write letters, wills, deeds, and petitions to the colonial government. With these texts, Baird and MIT linguist Kenneth Hale established rules for Wôpanâak orthography and grammar, and created a dictionary of 11,000 words.
In 2015, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project was ready to open the Mukayuhsak Weekuw preschool. According to the school's Project Director Jennifer Weston, 10 students attended in the first year it opened, growing to 20 in the current school year. As part of the language program, parents or grandparents of students at the school are required to attend a weekly language class to ensure that the youth can continue speaking the language at home.
The curriculum is taught entirely in the Wôpanâak language, and it is also grounded in tribal history and connection to the land. "Our languages embody our ancestors' relationships to our homelands and to one another across millennia," Weston says. "They explain to us to the significance of all the places for our most important ceremonies and medicines. They tell us who we are and how to be good relatives."
In addition to language learning, the children also learn about gardening, hunting, and fishing. They practice tribal ceremonies, traditional food preservation, and traditional hunting and fishing practices. At Native American language schools like Mukayuhsak Weekuw, students experience their culture in the curriculum in a deeply personal and empowering way.
'Aha Pūnana Leo: Overcoming Policy Barriers
Considering the violent history of America's education system towards Native Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising that policy barriers continue to hinder contemporary language revitalization schools.
Federal policies are often misaligned with the reality of tribal communities and language revitalization schools. Leslie Harper, president of the advocacy group National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs, says schools often risk losing funding because they lack qualified teachers who meet federal standards. But these standards are paternalistic, notes Harper, who says that fluent language teachers at Native schools are often trained outside of accredited teaching colleges, which don't offer relevant Native language teaching programs. These teaching colleges don't "respond to our needs for teachers in Indian communities," she says.
In Hawai'i, 'Aha Pūnana Leo schools have had some success in overcoming policy barriers like these. The schools have led the way for statewide and national policy change in Native language education.
When the first preschool was founded in 1984, activists estimated that fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian statewide. Today, 'Aha Pūnana Leo runs 21 language medium schools serving thousands of students throughout the state, from preschool through high school. Because of this success, emerging revitalization schools and researchers alike look to 'Aha Pūnana Leo as a model.
Nāmaka Rawlins is the director of strategic collaborations at 'Aha Pūnana Leo. Like Harper, she says that required academic credentialing burdened the language preschools, which relied on fluent elders. This became an issue in 2012 when kindergarten was made compulsory in Hawai'i, and teachers and directors of preschools were required to be accredited. But she, along with other Hawaiian language advocates, advocated for changes to these state regulations to exclude Hawaiian preschools from the requirement and instead accredit their own teachers as local, indigenous experts. And they succeeded.
"We got a lot of flack from the preschool community," she says. "Today, we provide our own training and professional development."
One of the early successes of 'Aha Pūnana Leo was removing the ban on the use of Hawaiian language in schools, which had been illegal for nearly a century. Four years later, in 1990, the passage of the Native American Language Act affirmed that Native American children across the nation have the right to be educated, express themselves, and be assessed in their tribal language.
But according to Harper, progress still needs to be made before NALA is fully implemented by the Education Department. Since 2016, Native American language medium schools have been able to assess students in their language. This took years of advocacy by people like Harper, who served on the US Department of Education's Every Student Succeeds Act Implementation Committee and pushed for the change.
While this is an important first step, Harper is concerned that because language medium school assessments must be peer reviewed, low capacity schools -- or those that lack the technical expertise of developing assessments that align with federal standards -- will be burdened. And the exemption doesn't apply to high schools.
Studies from multiple language revitalization schools have found that students who attend these schools have greater academic achievement than those who attend English-speaking schools, including scoring significantly higher on standardized tests. "We are beginning to see the long-term benefits of language revitalization and language-medium education in our kids," Harper says. "But the public education system and laws are still reticent about us developing programs of instruction for our students."
Looking Back, Looking Forward
A movement to revitalize tribal languages is underway. The success of 'Aha Pūnana Leo and promise of Mukayuhsak Weekuw are examples of communities taking education into their own hands. When Native American students are taught in their own language and culture, they succeed.
Weston says parents are eager for Mukayuhsak Weekuw to expand into an elementary school, and in fall 2018, the school will include first grade in addition to pre-school and kindergarten. It is a testament to the work and vision of the Wampanoag that just two decades ago, their language was silent, and today, they have a school that expands in size each year. "All of our tribal communities have the capacity to maintain and revitalize our mother tongues," Weston says -- no matter how daunting it may seem.
Supreme Court case tests weight of old Native American treaties in 21st century
The Conversation - raw story
13 APR 2018 AT 07:38 ET
On April 18, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Washington v. United States, which pits the state of Washington against the United States and 21 Indian tribes. The main question in the case is narrow – whether the state must quickly replace hundreds of culverts that allow the flow of water under roads but also block salmon migration. Yet the underlying issue is far broader.
At stake in the case is the Supreme Court’s ongoing role as the nation’s highest arbiter of justice. Despite immense changes, that role remains grounded in a 229-year-old Constitution premised on the supremacy of federal treaties and individual rights.
In previous cases, the Supreme Court upheld the tribes’ rights to fish salmon, spelled out by various treaties entered in the 1850s. But, having insulated those rights from destruction previously, the court must now decide their meaning for the 21st century and beyond. That decision may say more about what justice means in our modern legal system than it does about tribes, salmon or culverts.
‘As justice and reason demand’
In the mid-1800s, the United States’ zeal for expansion and growth resulted in the removal of Indian people and the acquisition of their territory, often through the use of treaties.
Isaac Stevens, the first governor of the territory of Washington, negotiated treaties on behalf of the United States with tribes across the Pacific Northwest and did so using similar treaty forms and language. In the heart of salmon country, Stevens recognized the importance of fishing to the tribes and, to persuade them to cede vast swaths of land, he emphasized language in the treaties that would preserve the tribal “right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations…in common with all citizens of the Territory.” In fact, while negotiating one treaty, Stevens promised the tribes that the “paper secures your fish.”
There was an abundance of salmon at the time. However, the explosion of settlers in the late 1800s and the proliferation of canneries and commercial fishing operations quickly created competition with tribal rights. Within decades, tribes’ rights to salmon were threatened by non-Indian interference and declining fish populations. The United States, acting on the tribes’ behalf, went before before the Supreme Court seeking to protect the terms of the treaties.
In 1905, the court was asked to resolve the question of whether non-Indians who erected fish wheels to capture salmon could fence off an area, thereby excluding tribal fishermen who sought to fish at their usual and accustomed ground. The court, saying it interpreted the treaties “as justice and reason demand,” upheld the treaty claims.
Recognizing their federal supremacy, the court rejected arguments that the admission of Washington to the Union on equal footing with other states destroyed the rights tribes previously secured in agreements with the United States. According to the court, the treaties “seemed to promise more, and give the word of the nation for more” than just fishing like all other citizens.
Modern challenges to old rights
Despite that early victory, both tribal treaty rights and salmon populations continued to be threatened. In the 1960s and 1970s, the state of Washington engaged in a concerted effort to denigrate tribal rights, leading to “fish-in” protests by natives, multiple arrests, and violence.
Once again, the courts were called upon to render justice. The central case, brought by tribes and the United States on their behalf against Washington, was filed in 1970. And as in 1905, courts honored tribal rights, deciding that tribes were entitled to half of the salmon harvest. In 1979, the Supreme Court affirmed this. Later decisions even included fish raised in hatcheries.
But salmon populations continued to plummet, putting more and more pressure on tribes’ ability to exercise their rights. As a result, in 2001, 21 tribes in Washington revived the 1970 litigation by asking the federal courts to decide whether the state of Washington was violating the treaties by building roads across salmon streams using culverts that closed off upstream migration. In doing so, the tribes relied upon a 1997 study showing that hundreds of culverts blocked fish passage and that replacing even half of the culverts would produce 200,000 more salmon each year.
According to the tribes, though earlier decisions had preserved their rights, without additional protections for salmon habitat and populations, they would only retain the right to witness wild salmon go extinct.
Both the federal trial court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the tribes. Indeed, the trial court entered a permanent injunction requiring the state to replace hundreds of culverts within the next 17 years. Echoing the 1905 Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit determined that the treaties promised more than just access to fishing sites. The treaties also promised that there would be fish “sufficient to sustain them.”
The state of Washington claims the treaties did not promise that much. They point to other actions of the federal government that hurt salmon populations and argue that complying with the injunction would require reallocating billions of additional dollars, and now ask the Supreme Court to reverse those lower court decisions. In the state’s view, the rights claimed by the tribes and recognized by the lower courts are “new” and not contemplated by the 160-year-old treaties.
More than culverts
The Supreme Court will now decide whether, despite having aged nearly two centuries, those 20 fateful words of the Stevens treaties from the 1850s still guarantee greater protection for tribal interests.
Its decision will have impact far beyond Washington state. While the “right to take fish” language of the Stevens treaties is unique to the tribes of the Northwest, tribes across the country continue to exercise treaty rights to hunt and fish in their historical homelands.
For example, the decision could provide more legal ammunition for those supporting recent tribal movements in support of Bears Ears or to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Even if the court sides with Washington, the case is already prompting broader discussion of tribal rights nationally and could lead to more state-tribal cooperation to avoid similar challenges in the future.
More importantly, resolving this case demands an accounting of “the word of the nation,” which the court has largely honored since that 1905 decision. Although much has changed, the words of treaties remain, in the Constitution’s words, the “supreme law of the land.” But, without meaningful protection like that sought by the tribes in Washington v. United States, arguably those words will soon be rendered meaningless.
Supreme law or not, what good is the “right to take fish” if there are no more fish to take? Therefore, the crucial question before the Supreme Court is whether, beyond simply preserving the words of treaty rights, doing right by our Constitutional ideals - doing justice - demands more.
At stake in the case is the Supreme Court’s ongoing role as the nation’s highest arbiter of justice. Despite immense changes, that role remains grounded in a 229-year-old Constitution premised on the supremacy of federal treaties and individual rights.
In previous cases, the Supreme Court upheld the tribes’ rights to fish salmon, spelled out by various treaties entered in the 1850s. But, having insulated those rights from destruction previously, the court must now decide their meaning for the 21st century and beyond. That decision may say more about what justice means in our modern legal system than it does about tribes, salmon or culverts.
‘As justice and reason demand’
In the mid-1800s, the United States’ zeal for expansion and growth resulted in the removal of Indian people and the acquisition of their territory, often through the use of treaties.
Isaac Stevens, the first governor of the territory of Washington, negotiated treaties on behalf of the United States with tribes across the Pacific Northwest and did so using similar treaty forms and language. In the heart of salmon country, Stevens recognized the importance of fishing to the tribes and, to persuade them to cede vast swaths of land, he emphasized language in the treaties that would preserve the tribal “right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations…in common with all citizens of the Territory.” In fact, while negotiating one treaty, Stevens promised the tribes that the “paper secures your fish.”
There was an abundance of salmon at the time. However, the explosion of settlers in the late 1800s and the proliferation of canneries and commercial fishing operations quickly created competition with tribal rights. Within decades, tribes’ rights to salmon were threatened by non-Indian interference and declining fish populations. The United States, acting on the tribes’ behalf, went before before the Supreme Court seeking to protect the terms of the treaties.
In 1905, the court was asked to resolve the question of whether non-Indians who erected fish wheels to capture salmon could fence off an area, thereby excluding tribal fishermen who sought to fish at their usual and accustomed ground. The court, saying it interpreted the treaties “as justice and reason demand,” upheld the treaty claims.
Recognizing their federal supremacy, the court rejected arguments that the admission of Washington to the Union on equal footing with other states destroyed the rights tribes previously secured in agreements with the United States. According to the court, the treaties “seemed to promise more, and give the word of the nation for more” than just fishing like all other citizens.
Modern challenges to old rights
Despite that early victory, both tribal treaty rights and salmon populations continued to be threatened. In the 1960s and 1970s, the state of Washington engaged in a concerted effort to denigrate tribal rights, leading to “fish-in” protests by natives, multiple arrests, and violence.
Once again, the courts were called upon to render justice. The central case, brought by tribes and the United States on their behalf against Washington, was filed in 1970. And as in 1905, courts honored tribal rights, deciding that tribes were entitled to half of the salmon harvest. In 1979, the Supreme Court affirmed this. Later decisions even included fish raised in hatcheries.
But salmon populations continued to plummet, putting more and more pressure on tribes’ ability to exercise their rights. As a result, in 2001, 21 tribes in Washington revived the 1970 litigation by asking the federal courts to decide whether the state of Washington was violating the treaties by building roads across salmon streams using culverts that closed off upstream migration. In doing so, the tribes relied upon a 1997 study showing that hundreds of culverts blocked fish passage and that replacing even half of the culverts would produce 200,000 more salmon each year.
According to the tribes, though earlier decisions had preserved their rights, without additional protections for salmon habitat and populations, they would only retain the right to witness wild salmon go extinct.
Both the federal trial court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the tribes. Indeed, the trial court entered a permanent injunction requiring the state to replace hundreds of culverts within the next 17 years. Echoing the 1905 Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit determined that the treaties promised more than just access to fishing sites. The treaties also promised that there would be fish “sufficient to sustain them.”
The state of Washington claims the treaties did not promise that much. They point to other actions of the federal government that hurt salmon populations and argue that complying with the injunction would require reallocating billions of additional dollars, and now ask the Supreme Court to reverse those lower court decisions. In the state’s view, the rights claimed by the tribes and recognized by the lower courts are “new” and not contemplated by the 160-year-old treaties.
More than culverts
The Supreme Court will now decide whether, despite having aged nearly two centuries, those 20 fateful words of the Stevens treaties from the 1850s still guarantee greater protection for tribal interests.
Its decision will have impact far beyond Washington state. While the “right to take fish” language of the Stevens treaties is unique to the tribes of the Northwest, tribes across the country continue to exercise treaty rights to hunt and fish in their historical homelands.
For example, the decision could provide more legal ammunition for those supporting recent tribal movements in support of Bears Ears or to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Even if the court sides with Washington, the case is already prompting broader discussion of tribal rights nationally and could lead to more state-tribal cooperation to avoid similar challenges in the future.
More importantly, resolving this case demands an accounting of “the word of the nation,” which the court has largely honored since that 1905 decision. Although much has changed, the words of treaties remain, in the Constitution’s words, the “supreme law of the land.” But, without meaningful protection like that sought by the tribes in Washington v. United States, arguably those words will soon be rendered meaningless.
Supreme law or not, what good is the “right to take fish” if there are no more fish to take? Therefore, the crucial question before the Supreme Court is whether, beyond simply preserving the words of treaty rights, doing right by our Constitutional ideals - doing justice - demands more.
history
How the Nez Perce were kicked off their land and never allowed to return, despite repeated promises
Meteor Blades
Daily Kos Staff
Monday May 28, 2018 · 10:40 AM PDT
Nez Perce captives in 1877
On June 16, 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant issued an executive order barring white settlers from claiming title to northeast Oregon's Wallowa Valley. This was the traditional turf of one band of the Nez Perce (Nimi'ipuu) tribe. The executive order was needed because Nez Perce bands who didn't live in the valley had signed a treaty in 1863 surrendering it along with other lands. The U.S. government kept to the executive order until Grant left the presidency. Within two months of Rutherford B. Hayes's inauguration, however, the non-treaty Nez Perce had been ordered out of the Wallowa Valley and a five-month war and trek had begun, with 2,000 troops of the U.S. Army in pursuit.
The Nez Perce was the largest tribe on the Columbia River Plateau when Lewis and Clark encountered it 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 called Old Joseph to distinguish him from his son.
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, the band 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. A big portion of U.S. Indian policy at the time was based on revenge for what had happened at the Little Big Horn the year before, and tribes like the Nez Perce were targeted even though none of its warriors had been with the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe who had given George A. Custer his gory comeuppance.
Without ceremony, discussion or advance notice, Howard 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. So 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 were headed for the reservation, heartsick. Before they could get there, 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.
Thus began one of the most famous conflicts of the Indian Wars. It captured the attention of the nation and Europe as newspapers told of the pursuit of the Nez Perce by Gen. Howard. The Crow, Custer’s allies, refused asylum to the Nez Perce. So the decision was made to flee to Canada, where, they had learned, Sitting Bull had taken the Hunkpapa band of Lakota to evade the vengeful Army.
The Wallowa Nez Perce and their allies went on a nearly 1,200-mile, three-month-long zig-zag trek, outmaneuvering 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 have given a stirring speech ending with "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." The bulk of scholars have long since believed that what Chief Joseph is reported to have said was actually a later invention by Howard’s aide-de-camp, C.E.S. Wood. And yet those iconic 155 words written by a white man who later became a famous poet can be found everywhere listed as an, if not the, iconic American Indian speech.
Here’s Daniel Sharfstein writing at Slate last year on what happened after the capture of the surviving Nez Perce:
Imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth for the winter of 1877–78 and then exiled to Indian Territory, hundreds of Nez Perce War survivors died from malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and suicide. At the same time, Joseph achieved national renown. Once he had made peace with such eloquence and exquisite sentiment, he was easy to celebrate as “a most interesting blending of the old and the new,” as the anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher wrote upon meeting him. “One could not help respecting the man who … stood firmly for his rights,” her companion Jane Gay added. Thousands of people tried to visit him in exile, and when he was invited to speak in the capital in early 1879, he found himself the sensation of Washington society. Commanding General of the Army William Tecumseh Sherman, who during the Nez Perce War had envisioned Joseph dangling from a rope, cut through the crowd at a White House ball, shook the chief’s hand, and introduced him to his daughters. Nelson Miles, who had led the forces that finally caught the Nez Perce families, declared the chief “the best Indian” he’d ever met.
However, having a leader who was the “best Indian” didn’t stir Congress or any president to give the tribe its land back. The Nez Perce repeatedly were 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, today 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.
•••
The Nez Perce was the largest tribe on the Columbia River Plateau when Lewis and Clark encountered it 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 called Old Joseph to distinguish him from his son.
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, the band 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. A big portion of U.S. Indian policy at the time was based on revenge for what had happened at the Little Big Horn the year before, and tribes like the Nez Perce were targeted even though none of its warriors had been with the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe who had given George A. Custer his gory comeuppance.
Without ceremony, discussion or advance notice, Howard 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. So 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 were headed for the reservation, heartsick. Before they could get there, 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.
Thus began one of the most famous conflicts of the Indian Wars. It captured the attention of the nation and Europe as newspapers told of the pursuit of the Nez Perce by Gen. Howard. The Crow, Custer’s allies, refused asylum to the Nez Perce. So the decision was made to flee to Canada, where, they had learned, Sitting Bull had taken the Hunkpapa band of Lakota to evade the vengeful Army.
The Wallowa Nez Perce and their allies went on a nearly 1,200-mile, three-month-long zig-zag trek, outmaneuvering 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 have given a stirring speech ending with "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." The bulk of scholars have long since believed that what Chief Joseph is reported to have said was actually a later invention by Howard’s aide-de-camp, C.E.S. Wood. And yet those iconic 155 words written by a white man who later became a famous poet can be found everywhere listed as an, if not the, iconic American Indian speech.
Here’s Daniel Sharfstein writing at Slate last year on what happened after the capture of the surviving Nez Perce:
Imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth for the winter of 1877–78 and then exiled to Indian Territory, hundreds of Nez Perce War survivors died from malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and suicide. At the same time, Joseph achieved national renown. Once he had made peace with such eloquence and exquisite sentiment, he was easy to celebrate as “a most interesting blending of the old and the new,” as the anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher wrote upon meeting him. “One could not help respecting the man who … stood firmly for his rights,” her companion Jane Gay added. Thousands of people tried to visit him in exile, and when he was invited to speak in the capital in early 1879, he found himself the sensation of Washington society. Commanding General of the Army William Tecumseh Sherman, who during the Nez Perce War had envisioned Joseph dangling from a rope, cut through the crowd at a White House ball, shook the chief’s hand, and introduced him to his daughters. Nelson Miles, who had led the forces that finally caught the Nez Perce families, declared the chief “the best Indian” he’d ever met.
However, having a leader who was the “best Indian” didn’t stir Congress or any president to give the tribe its land back. The Nez Perce repeatedly were 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, today 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.
•••
GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS: A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW
Genocide and Denying It: Why We Are Not Taught that the Natives of the United States and Canada were Exterminated
Death Toll: 95,000,000 to 114,000,000
American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) – “over 100 million killed” “[Christopher] Columbus personally murdered half a million Natives”
“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
— P. 202, “Adolph Hitler” by John Toland
Native Americans have the highest mortality rate of any U.S. minority because of U.S. action and policy. The biggest killers though were smallpox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. All imported by the Europeans colonists.
“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
— P. 202, “Adolph Hitler” by John Toland
Native Americans have the highest mortality rate of any U.S. minority because of U.S. action and policy. The biggest killers though were smallpox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. All imported by the Europeans colonists.
FORCED ASSIMILATION
The Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture. The colonial world view split reality into popular parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and hear, European and primitive. American Indians spirituality lacks these dualism’s; language expresses the oneness of all things. God is not the transcendent Father but the Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all It is polytheistic, believing in many gods and many levels of deity. “At the basis of most American Native beliefs is the supernatural was a profound conviction that an invisible force, a powerful spirit, permeated the entire universe and ordered the cycles of birth and death for all living things.” Beyond this belief in a universal spirit, most American Indians attached supernatural qualities to animals, heavenly bodies, the seasons, dead ancestors, the elements, and geologic formations. Their world was infused with the divine – The Sacred Hoop. This was not at all a personal being presiding ominpotently over the salvation or damnation of individual people as the Europeans believed.
For the Europeans such beliefs were pagan. Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen “Indians” a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality. The world view which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures. In this remaking of the American Indians the impetus which drove the conquistador’s invading wars not exploration, but the drive to expand an empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure, land and cheap labor.
The Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture. The colonial world view split reality into popular parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and hear, European and primitive. American Indians spirituality lacks these dualism’s; language expresses the oneness of all things. God is not the transcendent Father but the Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all It is polytheistic, believing in many gods and many levels of deity. “At the basis of most American Native beliefs is the supernatural was a profound conviction that an invisible force, a powerful spirit, permeated the entire universe and ordered the cycles of birth and death for all living things.” Beyond this belief in a universal spirit, most American Indians attached supernatural qualities to animals, heavenly bodies, the seasons, dead ancestors, the elements, and geologic formations. Their world was infused with the divine – The Sacred Hoop. This was not at all a personal being presiding ominpotently over the salvation or damnation of individual people as the Europeans believed.
For the Europeans such beliefs were pagan. Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen “Indians” a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality. The world view which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures. In this remaking of the American Indians the impetus which drove the conquistador’s invading wars not exploration, but the drive to expand an empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure, land and cheap labor.
*history you should know*
*TRAIL OF TEARS: WHITE AMERICA'S 'INDIAN' HOLOCAUST(article below)
*ONCE LOST UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN WARS, THE REBELLION OF THE BLACK SEMINOLES IS RE-DISCOVERED(ARTICLE BELOW)
*GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS: A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CELEBRATING THE GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WHEN AMERICANS LYNCHED MEXICANS(ARTICLE BELOW)
The hidden health inequalities that American Indians and Alaskan Natives face
There’s a stark contrast in the quality of health between reservations and non-Native neighborhoods
ANNIE BELCOURT, THE CONVERSATION - salon
02.03.2018•5:29 AM
I was an American Indian student pursuing a doctoral degree in clinical psychology in the 1990s, when I realized the stark contrast between my life experiences growing up on my home reservation and those of my non-Native peers.
Many incredible family members and friends had sacrificed and broken a trail for me to realize my academic dreams. My rich and generous native culture and traditional ways helped sustain my family over the years.
However, as each year of school unfolded, I lost family members due to early causes of death, including homicide, suicide, motor vehicle accidents, cancer and pneumonia. I had to drive over four hours to the nearest Indian Health Service provider for prenatal visits for my children and nearly lost one child due to lack of access to proper medical care.
Unfortunately, my story isn’t uncommon for most Native Americans. As a collective, American Indians and Alaska Natives live more challenging and shorter lives. These are statistics I’m acutely aware of as researcher in clinical psychology. Understanding the sources of and solutions to these inequalities is the focus of my career.
The Indian Health Service is in the position to change these trends for the better. Outside of Native communities, few Americans know what this agency does, that its leadership is under fire and that the current nominee to head this IHS is a controversial figure. There is much work to be done to reverse American Indian health problems.
Health inequality
The IHS is the primary health care provider for most American Indians. It is responsible for providing health care under historical treaty agreements between the federal government and tribes.
In many ways, American Indian health has improved under the IHS over the past 20 years. For example, infant mortality decreased 67 percent between 1974 and 2009.
But there are steep divisions between the health of American Indians and other Americans. American Indians continue to have lower life expectancies than other Americans and lose more years of productive life. They also have the nation’s highest rates of death due to suicide. High rates of premature death due to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and accidents plague Native Americans.
These disparities are shaped by social inequality, historical trauma and discrimination. Most American Indians live in chronic poverty, with limited access to health care, adequate housing, quality education and adequate law enforcement services.
Early exposure to traumatic events and losses, including sexual and domestic violence, are common for many American Indians. This childhood trauma can translate to a lower quality of life and a wide variety of poor health outcomes.
My home state of Montana includes seven reservations and multiple urban centers of American Indians, with tribal representation from many of the 657 federally recognized tribes. American Indians live on average 20 years less than whites in the state. Montana currently has the highest rate of suicide in the nation.
The IHS has historically been inadequately funded. Federal funding only provides for 54 percent of needed services. Recent estimates show increased patient use despite proposed funding cuts. What’s more, the majority of American Indians live in urban settings with very limited access to IHS facilities.
As a result, many American Indian patients receive health care that may be inadequate or of minimal quality. Others must wait a long time for urgently needed care. These experiences have collectively led to a distrust of institutions, including health care centers. Many will avoid or delay necessary screenings and care. It should be a priority to find better ways to create outreach and directly provide services.
Hope for health
These experiences have motivated many Native people to work toward health equity.
Native-led organizations like The National Council of Urban Indian Health, the National Indian Health Board and the National Congress of American Indians have worked to improve health for all Native people. The National Indian Health Board has a number of public health initiatives working to inform tribes on best practices in obesity, violence, suicide and substance abuse prevention. The National Congress of American Indians advocates policies to improve health by engaging elected tribal leadership.
To improve access to health care, some also call for change in the way tribal health is funded and provided. Many tribal communities have even taken over the health care provision structure.
Many tribes have worked to bring back traditional healing methods, education, languages and traditional foods. This revitalization is showing promise to improve health the entire family and community. For example, The Piegan Institute on the Blackfeet reservation created language and culture immersion schools to help restore these practices.
These efforts are important, due in part to the significant lack of Native American health care workers. Many Native patients respond better to Native providers. Some educational programs are working to increase Native health professionals, researchers and educators.
Personally, I have sought a career in public health to help communities explore potential solutions to the many challenges we collectively face as Native people. I sit in my office today, looking upon the photos of family members lost too soon, and reflect upon the hope of healthier futures for my daughters, my niece and all Native youth.
My late father wrote a poem some years ago and a portion of that prose resonates today:
I said to the old man who stood at the Door of the Lodge, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
He replied, “Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of the Creator. That shall be to you better than light and safer than any known way.”
It is my hope that leaders in health harness the many gifts we have as Native peoples to build a healthier future. Our children are worth fighting for.
Many incredible family members and friends had sacrificed and broken a trail for me to realize my academic dreams. My rich and generous native culture and traditional ways helped sustain my family over the years.
However, as each year of school unfolded, I lost family members due to early causes of death, including homicide, suicide, motor vehicle accidents, cancer and pneumonia. I had to drive over four hours to the nearest Indian Health Service provider for prenatal visits for my children and nearly lost one child due to lack of access to proper medical care.
Unfortunately, my story isn’t uncommon for most Native Americans. As a collective, American Indians and Alaska Natives live more challenging and shorter lives. These are statistics I’m acutely aware of as researcher in clinical psychology. Understanding the sources of and solutions to these inequalities is the focus of my career.
The Indian Health Service is in the position to change these trends for the better. Outside of Native communities, few Americans know what this agency does, that its leadership is under fire and that the current nominee to head this IHS is a controversial figure. There is much work to be done to reverse American Indian health problems.
Health inequality
The IHS is the primary health care provider for most American Indians. It is responsible for providing health care under historical treaty agreements between the federal government and tribes.
In many ways, American Indian health has improved under the IHS over the past 20 years. For example, infant mortality decreased 67 percent between 1974 and 2009.
But there are steep divisions between the health of American Indians and other Americans. American Indians continue to have lower life expectancies than other Americans and lose more years of productive life. They also have the nation’s highest rates of death due to suicide. High rates of premature death due to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and accidents plague Native Americans.
These disparities are shaped by social inequality, historical trauma and discrimination. Most American Indians live in chronic poverty, with limited access to health care, adequate housing, quality education and adequate law enforcement services.
Early exposure to traumatic events and losses, including sexual and domestic violence, are common for many American Indians. This childhood trauma can translate to a lower quality of life and a wide variety of poor health outcomes.
My home state of Montana includes seven reservations and multiple urban centers of American Indians, with tribal representation from many of the 657 federally recognized tribes. American Indians live on average 20 years less than whites in the state. Montana currently has the highest rate of suicide in the nation.
The IHS has historically been inadequately funded. Federal funding only provides for 54 percent of needed services. Recent estimates show increased patient use despite proposed funding cuts. What’s more, the majority of American Indians live in urban settings with very limited access to IHS facilities.
As a result, many American Indian patients receive health care that may be inadequate or of minimal quality. Others must wait a long time for urgently needed care. These experiences have collectively led to a distrust of institutions, including health care centers. Many will avoid or delay necessary screenings and care. It should be a priority to find better ways to create outreach and directly provide services.
Hope for health
These experiences have motivated many Native people to work toward health equity.
Native-led organizations like The National Council of Urban Indian Health, the National Indian Health Board and the National Congress of American Indians have worked to improve health for all Native people. The National Indian Health Board has a number of public health initiatives working to inform tribes on best practices in obesity, violence, suicide and substance abuse prevention. The National Congress of American Indians advocates policies to improve health by engaging elected tribal leadership.
To improve access to health care, some also call for change in the way tribal health is funded and provided. Many tribal communities have even taken over the health care provision structure.
Many tribes have worked to bring back traditional healing methods, education, languages and traditional foods. This revitalization is showing promise to improve health the entire family and community. For example, The Piegan Institute on the Blackfeet reservation created language and culture immersion schools to help restore these practices.
These efforts are important, due in part to the significant lack of Native American health care workers. Many Native patients respond better to Native providers. Some educational programs are working to increase Native health professionals, researchers and educators.
Personally, I have sought a career in public health to help communities explore potential solutions to the many challenges we collectively face as Native people. I sit in my office today, looking upon the photos of family members lost too soon, and reflect upon the hope of healthier futures for my daughters, my niece and all Native youth.
My late father wrote a poem some years ago and a portion of that prose resonates today:
I said to the old man who stood at the Door of the Lodge, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
He replied, “Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of the Creator. That shall be to you better than light and safer than any known way.”
It is my hope that leaders in health harness the many gifts we have as Native peoples to build a healthier future. Our children are worth fighting for.
This Land Was Stolen for You and Me
Eric Ortiz - truthdig
This 1876 woodcut designed by A.R. Waud and engraved by J.P. Davis shows Samoset, the first Native American to make contact with the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony. (Wikimedia)
Donald Trump is right about one thing: This is our New American Moment.
America has a great opportunity, and as United States Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks said almost 40 years ago, “Great moments are born from great opportunity.”
But before every U.S. citizen can “be proud of this land that we love,” we have to start being honest about America.
Native Americans have a saying: “Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”
Americans could learn a lot from Native Americans, the only true “legal” citizens of the United States. A Native American underscored this point at an anti-illegal immigration protest in Arizona a few years ago.
Next time someone calls another immigrant “illegal,” remind them that America was founded on illegal immigration.
“The pilgrims that came over on the Mayflower were undocumented immigrants,” explained Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks. “They did not have any papers. They didn’t ask the permission of the Native Americans to land here. And then they certainly didn’t ask the permission of the Native Americans when they started butchering them. And then moving them onto reservations. And then violating those agreements. And moving them again. And having them die on the road. And then having them die on the reservations. And then having them die in the fields that they used to hunt in and live in.”
If Native Americans had built a wall, America might look a little different. To be clear, the land of our country was stolen from Native Americans by undocumented immigrants. Anyone who is complaining about illegal immigrants needs to stop.
---
“If you are not Native American or [your ancestors] did not arrive here in chains, then you or your ancestors immigrated to the U.S.,” Mendelsohn told The Times of Israel.
“People in genealogical glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and we’re all in genealogical glass houses metaphorically speaking,” she added.
Since we are all in this American experiment together, we have to create fair immigration policy—not a ransom note—that works for the 21st century. That will require compromise, but the solution is not as hard as some claim.
Set up a system that provides a path to citizenship for the immigrants who are productive members of society—the millions of undocumented citizens who are living, working and paying taxes in America. Law-abiding immigrants are contributing billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Give those immigrants, young and old, a reasonable path to citizenship. They should not have to wait 10 to 12 years.
Not all immigrants are “rapists and drug dealers.” In fact, the data show that crime is not correlated with immigration. With a vetting system, we can identify the undocumented undesirables, the real criminals. Find them. And deport them.
Treating every immigrant as a criminal is wrong. Labeling undocumented immigrants as “illegal” is inhumane. Forcing people to live in fear and uncertainty is un-American. Or perhaps the vitriol surrounding our immigration debate is as American as apple pie. If that’s the case, we need to start being un-American.
Every U.S. citizen needs to recognize and accept the truth about U.S. history. Stop with the bogus “this is our country—go home” arguments. Enough with the “illegal” talk. Remember: Every U.S. citizen who is not a Native American or a descendant of slaves had ancestors who immigrated to America. Every U.S. citizen who is not a Native American is living on stolen land.
Think about that when you’re standing for the national anthem or listening to Woody Guthrie.
America has a great opportunity, and as United States Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks said almost 40 years ago, “Great moments are born from great opportunity.”
But before every U.S. citizen can “be proud of this land that we love,” we have to start being honest about America.
Native Americans have a saying: “Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”
Americans could learn a lot from Native Americans, the only true “legal” citizens of the United States. A Native American underscored this point at an anti-illegal immigration protest in Arizona a few years ago.
Next time someone calls another immigrant “illegal,” remind them that America was founded on illegal immigration.
“The pilgrims that came over on the Mayflower were undocumented immigrants,” explained Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks. “They did not have any papers. They didn’t ask the permission of the Native Americans to land here. And then they certainly didn’t ask the permission of the Native Americans when they started butchering them. And then moving them onto reservations. And then violating those agreements. And moving them again. And having them die on the road. And then having them die on the reservations. And then having them die in the fields that they used to hunt in and live in.”
If Native Americans had built a wall, America might look a little different. To be clear, the land of our country was stolen from Native Americans by undocumented immigrants. Anyone who is complaining about illegal immigrants needs to stop.
---
“If you are not Native American or [your ancestors] did not arrive here in chains, then you or your ancestors immigrated to the U.S.,” Mendelsohn told The Times of Israel.
“People in genealogical glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and we’re all in genealogical glass houses metaphorically speaking,” she added.
Since we are all in this American experiment together, we have to create fair immigration policy—not a ransom note—that works for the 21st century. That will require compromise, but the solution is not as hard as some claim.
Set up a system that provides a path to citizenship for the immigrants who are productive members of society—the millions of undocumented citizens who are living, working and paying taxes in America. Law-abiding immigrants are contributing billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Give those immigrants, young and old, a reasonable path to citizenship. They should not have to wait 10 to 12 years.
Not all immigrants are “rapists and drug dealers.” In fact, the data show that crime is not correlated with immigration. With a vetting system, we can identify the undocumented undesirables, the real criminals. Find them. And deport them.
Treating every immigrant as a criminal is wrong. Labeling undocumented immigrants as “illegal” is inhumane. Forcing people to live in fear and uncertainty is un-American. Or perhaps the vitriol surrounding our immigration debate is as American as apple pie. If that’s the case, we need to start being un-American.
Every U.S. citizen needs to recognize and accept the truth about U.S. history. Stop with the bogus “this is our country—go home” arguments. Enough with the “illegal” talk. Remember: Every U.S. citizen who is not a Native American or a descendant of slaves had ancestors who immigrated to America. Every U.S. citizen who is not a Native American is living on stolen land.
Think about that when you’re standing for the national anthem or listening to Woody Guthrie.
Remember the Bear River Massacre, Climax of the American Holocaust
Sarah Sunshine Manning -truthdig
JAN 29, 2018
Roadside sign on U.S. Highway 91, about three miles north of Preston, Idaho. (Robert Scott Horning / Wikimedia)
Since 2005, the United Nations and its member states have honored Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The purpose of this day is twofold, says the United States Holocaust Museum on its website: “to serve as a date for the official commemoration of the victims of the Nazi regime” and to “develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.”
Education to prevent future genocides.
Bloodbath at Bear River
Just two days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Native Americans remember the largest and among the least-known massacres to occur on American soil, the Bear River Massacre. On Jan. 29, 1863, United States Col. Patrick Connor and California volunteers attacked approximately 500 Northwestern Shoshone Indians, leaving them bloodied and frozen in the snow, or floating down the crimson red and half-frozen Bear River in southeastern Idaho.
“The Indians tried to defend themselves, but what was an arrow and tomahawk against the rifles and side arms of the soldiers,” wrote Northwestern Shoshone elder Mae Parry, who recorded the testimony of 13 survivors. “The Indians were being slaughtered like wild rabbits. Indian men, women, children and babies were being killed left and right.”
There was no mass grave for the Shoshone after the massacre. The victims were left to the elements, to the crows and the wolves.
There was no official body count, and the recorded number of slain Shoshones range from the earlier estimates of 250 to later estimates of 450 and 490. According to oral stories from one tribal elder who has since passed, the number of deaths was much greater than that. Conversely, the Shoshone managed to kill or mortally wound 24 soldiers in the first hour of the four-hour massacre, before the skirmish turned into an all-out hunt for every remaining Shoshone.
In the same year as the Bear River Massacre, a series of treaties was struck with nearby Shoshone bands. Fearful and suffering their own series of assaults from settlers, tribal historians say, the Shoshone signed treaties “under the gun,” making egregiously lopsided agreements with the United States government.
The Box Elder Treaty was signed in July 1863, with the Shoshone forfeiting two-thirds of their hunting grounds in eastern Idaho. The Ruby Valley Treaty, signed on Oct. 1, 1863, granted the United States the right to cross through western Shoshone territory in northern Nevada with telegraphs, stage lines and railroads and engage in economic activities in Shoshone territory, which eventually meant mining the mountains for silver and gold.
Over a century later, in 1986, and after Northwestern Shoshone descendants of the Bear River Massacre survivors had spent years advocating for a memorial, the legislatures of Utah and Idaho jointly resolved to create a “Battle of Bear River Monument.” But the bloodbath at Bear River was clearly much more than a battle. The surviving Northwestern Shoshone threatened suit to force a shift toward their point of view. Finally, in 1990, after an investigation by historian Edwin C. Bearss, the federal government officially recognized the fight as a massacre, and designated the site as a National Historic Landmark.
Despite this designation, little is known about the Bear River Massacre today, which, according to the Smithsonian Institute, is said to be the deadliest massacre in American history.[...]
Education to prevent future genocides.
Bloodbath at Bear River
Just two days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Native Americans remember the largest and among the least-known massacres to occur on American soil, the Bear River Massacre. On Jan. 29, 1863, United States Col. Patrick Connor and California volunteers attacked approximately 500 Northwestern Shoshone Indians, leaving them bloodied and frozen in the snow, or floating down the crimson red and half-frozen Bear River in southeastern Idaho.
“The Indians tried to defend themselves, but what was an arrow and tomahawk against the rifles and side arms of the soldiers,” wrote Northwestern Shoshone elder Mae Parry, who recorded the testimony of 13 survivors. “The Indians were being slaughtered like wild rabbits. Indian men, women, children and babies were being killed left and right.”
There was no mass grave for the Shoshone after the massacre. The victims were left to the elements, to the crows and the wolves.
There was no official body count, and the recorded number of slain Shoshones range from the earlier estimates of 250 to later estimates of 450 and 490. According to oral stories from one tribal elder who has since passed, the number of deaths was much greater than that. Conversely, the Shoshone managed to kill or mortally wound 24 soldiers in the first hour of the four-hour massacre, before the skirmish turned into an all-out hunt for every remaining Shoshone.
In the same year as the Bear River Massacre, a series of treaties was struck with nearby Shoshone bands. Fearful and suffering their own series of assaults from settlers, tribal historians say, the Shoshone signed treaties “under the gun,” making egregiously lopsided agreements with the United States government.
The Box Elder Treaty was signed in July 1863, with the Shoshone forfeiting two-thirds of their hunting grounds in eastern Idaho. The Ruby Valley Treaty, signed on Oct. 1, 1863, granted the United States the right to cross through western Shoshone territory in northern Nevada with telegraphs, stage lines and railroads and engage in economic activities in Shoshone territory, which eventually meant mining the mountains for silver and gold.
Over a century later, in 1986, and after Northwestern Shoshone descendants of the Bear River Massacre survivors had spent years advocating for a memorial, the legislatures of Utah and Idaho jointly resolved to create a “Battle of Bear River Monument.” But the bloodbath at Bear River was clearly much more than a battle. The surviving Northwestern Shoshone threatened suit to force a shift toward their point of view. Finally, in 1990, after an investigation by historian Edwin C. Bearss, the federal government officially recognized the fight as a massacre, and designated the site as a National Historic Landmark.
Despite this designation, little is known about the Bear River Massacre today, which, according to the Smithsonian Institute, is said to be the deadliest massacre in American history.[...]
Not All Monuments are Created Equal as Trump Allows Mining and Drilling on Native Land and Burial Grounds
By David Love - December 7, 2017
From Atlanta Black Star: Apparently, not all monuments are created equal, at least from the standpoint of President Trump and leaders in Congress. As Trump champions the preservation of Confederate monuments that pay homage to white supremacy and slavery, he takes actions that would destroy the ancestral lands of Native peoples. These monuments of Native Americans, the burial grounds, the artifacts, fossils and places of ancestral, cultural and spiritual significance, are susceptible to looting, drilling and mining.
As if to erase not only the legacy of his predecessor but the legacy of native people, Trump announced his decision to significantly reduce two Utah national monuments: Bears Ears National Monument — created by President Obama last year as part of 5.7 million acres he reserved in federal land — will shrink by 85 percent. Grand Staircase-Escalante, which Clinton created in 1996, will be reduced by about half. The former has oil, gas and uranium deposits, while the latter contains mineral deposits. This move by the president, reflecting an executive order directing the Department of the Interior to review more than a hundred national monuments, means that 2 million acres of land will no longer have federal protection. This represents the largest loss of federal land in U.S. history, according to conservation advocacy groups.
“You know how best to conserve this land for many, many years to come,” Trump told a crowd as he was surrounded by Republican lawmakers in Salt Lake City on Monday. “They don’t know your land and truly they don’t care for your land like you do. From now on that won’t matter.”
Five Native American tribes played a role in the establishment of Bears Ears National Monument — Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Indian Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — land which is still used for cultural and religious purposes. The Native American Rights Fund, representing these sovereign nations, filed a lawsuit against Trump’s action in Utah. The complaint claims Trump has made an “unlawful attempt to revoke and replace a
national monument of major historic and scientific importance in violation of the United States Constitution and the Antiquities Act of 1906,” which was enacted by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 as the first legal protection of cultural and natural resources in the United States. The Native American tribes say that no president has tried to abolish a national monument by proclamation, and the Antiquities Act does not authorize the nation’s chief executive to do so. Trump, the nations allege, has exceeded his authority under the Constitution.
“Bears Ears has been home to Native peoples since time immemorial and is still cherished by Native peoples for its cultural, spiritual, and archaeological importance. Bears Ears
contains hundreds of thousands of objects of historic and scientific importance, many traditional cultural properties, and many sacred sites,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. The tribes still use Bears Ears for a variety of religious, cultural and medicinal purposes, including the collection of plants, minerals, water and other items, hunting, fishing, providing offerings at archaeological sites and conducting ceremonies. Some ceremonies require items that are only available on this land. while some tribal members hold grazing permits and allotments on the land.
NARF notes the Trump administration’s other actions against indigenous people, including granting a permit to the Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL, and revoking the executive order to protect the Bering Sea on April 28. Along with his harmful policies towards these sovereign nations, Trump has a history of making insensitive remarks towards native peoples. He has referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” — mocking her claims of Native American ancestry — which he reiterated in crass fashion recently during a White House ceremony honoring World War II Navajo code talkers.
In 1993, Trump gave testimony before a House subcommittee, claiming the mafia was involved in the Native American gaming casinos, and that certain tribes “don’t look Indian.”
This news comes as the Republican tax cut proposal making its way through the Senate would allow for oil drilling in the 1.5 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. America’s indigenous nations have decided to take action on these threats to their heritage and culture.
Leaders representing the Gwich’in Nation and Inupiaq Tribe, both of which extends across the borders of what is now the United States (Alaska) and Canada came to Washington, DC on December 6 to lead a pray-in in against the tax bill and drilling in the Arctic, on the 57th anniversary of the Arctic Refuge. Holding signs reading “Protect the Arctic,” “Indigenous Rights are Human Rights,” and “Don’t Use the Tax Bill to Attack Indigenous Rights,” they were joined by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), and Representative Alan Lowenthal (D-CA).
“We must resist the fossil fuel industry’s continued attacks on Indigenous rights and sovereignty,” said Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and MC of the rally, in a statement provided to Atlanta Black Star. “The Tax Bill being debated is bad across the board, but it especially highlights the ugly collusion between fossil fuel interests and the GOP. We must draw the line on the protection of our Indigenous homelands, we must defend the sacred.”
“We are outside the Capitol today to assert our Tribal Sovereignty and Indigenous identities, and affirm our commitment to protecting sacred places and demand Congress do the same,” said Bernadette Demientieff, Executive Director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee.
“I’m a hunter living a subsistence life in the Yukon, a life that was passed on to me by my parents and generations of family,” said Jeffrey Peter, Vuntut Gwich’in from the Yukon Territory. The Gwich’in are dependent on Porcupine Caribou, whose calving grounds extend from the Yukon territory in Canada to northeastern Alaska and include the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Drilling will put North America’s largest Caribou herd at risk, indigenous and environmental groups say. “I’m going to be a father soon, and I deserve the right to pass this life on to my son. Congress has no right to take that away from us — we cannot allow drilling in the Arctic Refuge.”
America’s original people, victims of land theft, dislocation and genocide, have struggled to live amid broken treaties and broken promises. Once again, their homes and culture are being threatened, and they are fighting to ensure justice is served.
As if to erase not only the legacy of his predecessor but the legacy of native people, Trump announced his decision to significantly reduce two Utah national monuments: Bears Ears National Monument — created by President Obama last year as part of 5.7 million acres he reserved in federal land — will shrink by 85 percent. Grand Staircase-Escalante, which Clinton created in 1996, will be reduced by about half. The former has oil, gas and uranium deposits, while the latter contains mineral deposits. This move by the president, reflecting an executive order directing the Department of the Interior to review more than a hundred national monuments, means that 2 million acres of land will no longer have federal protection. This represents the largest loss of federal land in U.S. history, according to conservation advocacy groups.
“You know how best to conserve this land for many, many years to come,” Trump told a crowd as he was surrounded by Republican lawmakers in Salt Lake City on Monday. “They don’t know your land and truly they don’t care for your land like you do. From now on that won’t matter.”
Five Native American tribes played a role in the establishment of Bears Ears National Monument — Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Indian Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — land which is still used for cultural and religious purposes. The Native American Rights Fund, representing these sovereign nations, filed a lawsuit against Trump’s action in Utah. The complaint claims Trump has made an “unlawful attempt to revoke and replace a
national monument of major historic and scientific importance in violation of the United States Constitution and the Antiquities Act of 1906,” which was enacted by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 as the first legal protection of cultural and natural resources in the United States. The Native American tribes say that no president has tried to abolish a national monument by proclamation, and the Antiquities Act does not authorize the nation’s chief executive to do so. Trump, the nations allege, has exceeded his authority under the Constitution.
“Bears Ears has been home to Native peoples since time immemorial and is still cherished by Native peoples for its cultural, spiritual, and archaeological importance. Bears Ears
contains hundreds of thousands of objects of historic and scientific importance, many traditional cultural properties, and many sacred sites,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. The tribes still use Bears Ears for a variety of religious, cultural and medicinal purposes, including the collection of plants, minerals, water and other items, hunting, fishing, providing offerings at archaeological sites and conducting ceremonies. Some ceremonies require items that are only available on this land. while some tribal members hold grazing permits and allotments on the land.
NARF notes the Trump administration’s other actions against indigenous people, including granting a permit to the Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL, and revoking the executive order to protect the Bering Sea on April 28. Along with his harmful policies towards these sovereign nations, Trump has a history of making insensitive remarks towards native peoples. He has referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” — mocking her claims of Native American ancestry — which he reiterated in crass fashion recently during a White House ceremony honoring World War II Navajo code talkers.
In 1993, Trump gave testimony before a House subcommittee, claiming the mafia was involved in the Native American gaming casinos, and that certain tribes “don’t look Indian.”
This news comes as the Republican tax cut proposal making its way through the Senate would allow for oil drilling in the 1.5 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. America’s indigenous nations have decided to take action on these threats to their heritage and culture.
Leaders representing the Gwich’in Nation and Inupiaq Tribe, both of which extends across the borders of what is now the United States (Alaska) and Canada came to Washington, DC on December 6 to lead a pray-in in against the tax bill and drilling in the Arctic, on the 57th anniversary of the Arctic Refuge. Holding signs reading “Protect the Arctic,” “Indigenous Rights are Human Rights,” and “Don’t Use the Tax Bill to Attack Indigenous Rights,” they were joined by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), and Representative Alan Lowenthal (D-CA).
“We must resist the fossil fuel industry’s continued attacks on Indigenous rights and sovereignty,” said Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and MC of the rally, in a statement provided to Atlanta Black Star. “The Tax Bill being debated is bad across the board, but it especially highlights the ugly collusion between fossil fuel interests and the GOP. We must draw the line on the protection of our Indigenous homelands, we must defend the sacred.”
“We are outside the Capitol today to assert our Tribal Sovereignty and Indigenous identities, and affirm our commitment to protecting sacred places and demand Congress do the same,” said Bernadette Demientieff, Executive Director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee.
“I’m a hunter living a subsistence life in the Yukon, a life that was passed on to me by my parents and generations of family,” said Jeffrey Peter, Vuntut Gwich’in from the Yukon Territory. The Gwich’in are dependent on Porcupine Caribou, whose calving grounds extend from the Yukon territory in Canada to northeastern Alaska and include the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Drilling will put North America’s largest Caribou herd at risk, indigenous and environmental groups say. “I’m going to be a father soon, and I deserve the right to pass this life on to my son. Congress has no right to take that away from us — we cannot allow drilling in the Arctic Refuge.”
America’s original people, victims of land theft, dislocation and genocide, have struggled to live amid broken treaties and broken promises. Once again, their homes and culture are being threatened, and they are fighting to ensure justice is served.
More than 150 years after the Sand Creek massacre, the whitewashers are still abundant
By Meteor Blades
Saturday Nov 25, 2017 · 2:16 PM PST
Not so long ago, the only reference at the site was to the "Sand Creek battleground."
From Daily Kos: Next Tuesday, Nov. 29th, marks the 153rd anniversary of one of the best known of scores of mass killings of Indians in the history of North America—the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho on the eastern plains of what is now Colorado. It was 1864, and with the Civil War eliminating soldiers like scythes, the men who slaughtered these natives were 90-day enlistees, a ragtag collection of volunteers, many of them ne-er-do-wells and outright criminals for whom killing Indians amounted to target practice.
Sand Creek wasn't something I learned about in my ninth-grade Colorado history class, and it's something that many Coloradans and most other Americans are still unaware of although almost everyone knows about Little Big Horn. The short version: on Nov. 29, 1864, Col. John Chivington and 700 volunteers attacked the peaceful Cheyenne-Arapahoe village on the Colorado plains and killed at least 150 people. Authorities had told the Indians they must move to the area if they wanted to avoid being attacked, and they had done so in good faith, a mistake tribes from the Massacusetts Bay Colony to the Modoc Valley of California had made.
The count of the Sand Creek dead in different sources varies greatly, in part because the soldiers on the scene that day exaggerated how many they killed. Most of the dead were warriors in their tales. Most of them were, in fact, children, women and old men, many of the young men being away on a hunt. But a few leaders of the two tribes were also killed: War Bonnet, Left Hand, White Antelope, Lone Bear, Yellow Wolf, Bear Man. One leader, Black Kettle, escaped, only to be killed by George Armstrong Custer’s men on the Washita River in 1868, an attack fictionalized in the 1970 movie, Little Big Man, in which, in a chilling scene, the 7th Cavalry storms out of the early-morning mist to the strains of “Garry Owen.”
Fifty years ago, in 1967, my Kiowa friend Tim Kloberdanz, my Navajo friend Charlie Cambridge, and I sought to get a student dormitory renamed at the University of Colorado. It had been named after Captain David Nichols—one of the officers at the Sand Creek massacre and later a lieutenant governor of the state. The name we chose was White Antelope, the Southern Arapaho chieftain killed in the massacre. We had founded the Student Crusade for Amerindian Rights (SCAR) two years before, and the dormitory renaming was one of several projects, including our eventually successful pressuring of the university to add American Indian Studies to the curriculum. It’s now the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.
A student referendum on the dormitory renaming was held and had passed 3-1 the year after I graduated in 1969. But the university’s board of regents rejected the name-change because family members of David Nichols, who had donated considerable sums of money to the university when it was founded in 1876 and for decades afterward, still lived locally and objected to the name change.
---
At Sand Creek, the soldiers mutilated bodies, cutting off breasts and scrota for use as tobacco pouches, and rode into Denver with scalps tied to their pommels. The Colorado newspapers were delirious in their glee at what had happened.
And what exactly had happened? Let Capt. Silas Soule—who was at Sand Creek but refused to fight that day and wrote a letter about the massacre--describe it:
The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain. One squaw with her two children were on their knees, begging for their lives of a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all firing — when one succeeded in hitting the squaw in the thigh, when she took a knife and cut the throats of both children and then killed herself. ... They were all horribly mutilated. You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did.
Soule testified against Chivington in 1866. He was murdered soon after. One hundred thirty-five years after the slaughter, in 1999, Congress passed a resolution to establish the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Today, you can visit the site and on plaques like the one pictured, read during a self-guided tour a reasonably accurate history about the slaughter.
Despite this laudable effort to bring some truth to the story, there have nonetheless been numerous attempts to obscure or whitewash the killings deep into the 21st Century. A few years ago, for instance, History Colorado, an organization that was founded less than 20 years after the massacre, planned an exhibit about Sand Creek in its new building to be opened in Denver in 2012. Progress, right? Just one problem, as Patricia Calhoun of the Denver weekly Westword wrote nearly five years ago. Arapaho and Cheyenne descendants of the victims of the massacre living in Montana and Oklahoma hadn't been consulted, as they were supposed to have been, by History Colorado until just a few months before the exhibit was scheduled to open:
And when the [Northern Cheyenne] tribe was consulted, they did not like what they found. A quote from George Bent, a survivor of the massacre, had been edited beyond all meaning. Dates were wrong; spellings were incorrect. A letter written by Soule was to be featured, but it was one he'd written his mother: "I was never much of a Christian and am naturally wild. Our Col. is a Methodist Preacher and whenever he sees me drinking, gambling, stealing or murdering, he says he will write to Mother." Chivington himself seemed to be getting off easy — especially since in 1865, the congressional committee considering his actions had said it could "hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct.... He deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savages."[...]
Sand Creek wasn't something I learned about in my ninth-grade Colorado history class, and it's something that many Coloradans and most other Americans are still unaware of although almost everyone knows about Little Big Horn. The short version: on Nov. 29, 1864, Col. John Chivington and 700 volunteers attacked the peaceful Cheyenne-Arapahoe village on the Colorado plains and killed at least 150 people. Authorities had told the Indians they must move to the area if they wanted to avoid being attacked, and they had done so in good faith, a mistake tribes from the Massacusetts Bay Colony to the Modoc Valley of California had made.
The count of the Sand Creek dead in different sources varies greatly, in part because the soldiers on the scene that day exaggerated how many they killed. Most of the dead were warriors in their tales. Most of them were, in fact, children, women and old men, many of the young men being away on a hunt. But a few leaders of the two tribes were also killed: War Bonnet, Left Hand, White Antelope, Lone Bear, Yellow Wolf, Bear Man. One leader, Black Kettle, escaped, only to be killed by George Armstrong Custer’s men on the Washita River in 1868, an attack fictionalized in the 1970 movie, Little Big Man, in which, in a chilling scene, the 7th Cavalry storms out of the early-morning mist to the strains of “Garry Owen.”
Fifty years ago, in 1967, my Kiowa friend Tim Kloberdanz, my Navajo friend Charlie Cambridge, and I sought to get a student dormitory renamed at the University of Colorado. It had been named after Captain David Nichols—one of the officers at the Sand Creek massacre and later a lieutenant governor of the state. The name we chose was White Antelope, the Southern Arapaho chieftain killed in the massacre. We had founded the Student Crusade for Amerindian Rights (SCAR) two years before, and the dormitory renaming was one of several projects, including our eventually successful pressuring of the university to add American Indian Studies to the curriculum. It’s now the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.
A student referendum on the dormitory renaming was held and had passed 3-1 the year after I graduated in 1969. But the university’s board of regents rejected the name-change because family members of David Nichols, who had donated considerable sums of money to the university when it was founded in 1876 and for decades afterward, still lived locally and objected to the name change.
---
At Sand Creek, the soldiers mutilated bodies, cutting off breasts and scrota for use as tobacco pouches, and rode into Denver with scalps tied to their pommels. The Colorado newspapers were delirious in their glee at what had happened.
And what exactly had happened? Let Capt. Silas Soule—who was at Sand Creek but refused to fight that day and wrote a letter about the massacre--describe it:
The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain. One squaw with her two children were on their knees, begging for their lives of a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all firing — when one succeeded in hitting the squaw in the thigh, when she took a knife and cut the throats of both children and then killed herself. ... They were all horribly mutilated. You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did.
Soule testified against Chivington in 1866. He was murdered soon after. One hundred thirty-five years after the slaughter, in 1999, Congress passed a resolution to establish the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Today, you can visit the site and on plaques like the one pictured, read during a self-guided tour a reasonably accurate history about the slaughter.
Despite this laudable effort to bring some truth to the story, there have nonetheless been numerous attempts to obscure or whitewash the killings deep into the 21st Century. A few years ago, for instance, History Colorado, an organization that was founded less than 20 years after the massacre, planned an exhibit about Sand Creek in its new building to be opened in Denver in 2012. Progress, right? Just one problem, as Patricia Calhoun of the Denver weekly Westword wrote nearly five years ago. Arapaho and Cheyenne descendants of the victims of the massacre living in Montana and Oklahoma hadn't been consulted, as they were supposed to have been, by History Colorado until just a few months before the exhibit was scheduled to open:
And when the [Northern Cheyenne] tribe was consulted, they did not like what they found. A quote from George Bent, a survivor of the massacre, had been edited beyond all meaning. Dates were wrong; spellings were incorrect. A letter written by Soule was to be featured, but it was one he'd written his mother: "I was never much of a Christian and am naturally wild. Our Col. is a Methodist Preacher and whenever he sees me drinking, gambling, stealing or murdering, he says he will write to Mother." Chivington himself seemed to be getting off easy — especially since in 1865, the congressional committee considering his actions had said it could "hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct.... He deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savages."[...]
Thanksgiving Distorts History and Sugarcoats Continuing State Violence Against Indigenous People
Thursday, November 23, 2017
By Jaskiran Dhillon, Truthout | Op-Ed
It's that time of year again. Step into any retail outlet and one is immediately confronted with a plethora of pumpkin products and leafy, decorative centerpieces for the dinner table. Families gather in groups, big and small, to engage in some form of "giving thanks." Gluttonous feasting and football are hallmarks of this annual, federal holiday that finds its roots back in the 1600s and the conventional trope of English pilgrims in Massachusetts. Less talked about, though, and even actively suppressed in some cases, are the ways that Thanksgiving -- in material and symbolic practice -- is yet another avenue for the distortion of colonial history through the elevation and circulation of settler memory and nostalgia. While often valorized and rationalized as a time of celebration characterized by the benign coming together of friends and family, it is also a holiday that actively elides the genocidal violence that has made the US. It is a state-sanctioned endorsement of the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lived experiences and resistance efforts, both past and present.
Stated otherwise: This holiday, like clockwork, ushers in more of the colonial same.
As a public scholar and educator who thinks deeply about colonial histories and contemporary realities, the widespread and normalized festivities during "Thanksgiving" have always made me feel profoundly uncomfortable. In particular, I've been troubled by the way this "holiday" reproduces notions of American benevolence and innocence, reinforcing the idea that the United States was born out of justice, liberty and goodwill instead of war, murder, slavery and the vicious seizure and occupation of Indigenous homelands (the real story). Thanksgiving tells the tale of peaceful settlement, of a conciliatory arrival at coexistence with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The celebratory zeal of the day reinforces collective and shared meaning of these nationalistic sentiments by keeping an imagined version of the United States alive in the hearts and minds of millions of white settlers and their descendants who, unquestionably, reap the material benefits from the immense harm that has been done, and continues to be done, to Indigenous lands and bodies. It is part of the state's machinery that allows us to abdicate political responsibility and turn a blind eye to the persistent colonial violence that is so clearly evidenced in the criminalization and incarceration of Indigenous peoples, the ongoing dismissal and violation of treaty rights, the encroachment of extractive industries onto Indigenous homelands and sacred sites, and the rampant gender violence that has become part of the everyday realities for so many Indigenous women, children and youth -- egregious violence that seems to exist outside the bounds of the law.
Contrary to the well-rehearsed response that one often faces when offering an intellectual and political critique of Thanksgiving, it is not simply a "holiday." Like Columbus Day and the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving is the symbolic embodiment of the story white Americans like to tell themselves about who they are and what they stand for. And this is what I tell my students when they ask me why I call for the critical interrogation of this so-called holiday.
For the past few months, I have been teaching an undergraduate/graduate seminar in the Global Studies program at The New School, my home university. It is a course that was designed to work in purposeful opposition to the unfailing denial of colonial history and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples in the present that is so pervasive throughout the mainstream education systems (both secondary and post-secondary) and media outlets in the United States. In many ways, it serves as an antithesis to Thanksgiving itself. Grounded in a version of revolutionary red pedagogy advanced by Quechua scholar Sandy Grande, the class takes students on a journey through competing versions about the "truth" of the United States. It does so by excavating knowledge that has been deliberately subjugated, and by asking essential and difficult questions that destabilize what we think we know about the places where we build our lives.
Throughout the evolution of this course, my students have faced unsettling realities -- including developing an awareness of their own complicity in reproducing colonial relations of domination. Week after week, students have collectively read the scholarship of Indigenous writers: a revolutionary move in its own right given the whiteness of the curriculum in most institutions of higher education. Week after week, they have systematically analyzed the colonial founding of what we now call the United States of America through anti-colonial accounts of history and politics. Week after week, they have pushed themselves, each other, and me, to reject depictions of Indigenous peoples as remnants of a bygone past and instead view them through the frame of the active presence. They are now recognizing them as leaders in a global fight for decolonization, freedom and environmental justice worldwide. They are coming to see them as communities of Nations who have been maintaining their own kinship relations and ways of being while living under conditions of violent occupation. They view them as the First Peoples of the territory many of my students call home. These discussions, not surprisingly, have also been characterized by the enduring question of how to actively organize alongside Indigenous peoples -- responsibly and ethically, in ways that lift up Indigenous social movements for revolutionary change as opposed to co-opting or working against them, often without even knowing it.
This has not been an easy process for my students, nor is their (re)education complete. But it is a step in the right direction. More so, the collective work we have begun to do serves as an example of what is possible when we step back and adopt a more radical politics when it comes to challenging the social and political meaning of holidays like Thanksgiving. It gives us some sense of how we can tackle the intensely racist backdrop against which this "holiday" has emerged, and to think critically about what it would mean to support political sovereignty and self-determination for the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, upon whose land all of us reside.
Stated otherwise: This holiday, like clockwork, ushers in more of the colonial same.
As a public scholar and educator who thinks deeply about colonial histories and contemporary realities, the widespread and normalized festivities during "Thanksgiving" have always made me feel profoundly uncomfortable. In particular, I've been troubled by the way this "holiday" reproduces notions of American benevolence and innocence, reinforcing the idea that the United States was born out of justice, liberty and goodwill instead of war, murder, slavery and the vicious seizure and occupation of Indigenous homelands (the real story). Thanksgiving tells the tale of peaceful settlement, of a conciliatory arrival at coexistence with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The celebratory zeal of the day reinforces collective and shared meaning of these nationalistic sentiments by keeping an imagined version of the United States alive in the hearts and minds of millions of white settlers and their descendants who, unquestionably, reap the material benefits from the immense harm that has been done, and continues to be done, to Indigenous lands and bodies. It is part of the state's machinery that allows us to abdicate political responsibility and turn a blind eye to the persistent colonial violence that is so clearly evidenced in the criminalization and incarceration of Indigenous peoples, the ongoing dismissal and violation of treaty rights, the encroachment of extractive industries onto Indigenous homelands and sacred sites, and the rampant gender violence that has become part of the everyday realities for so many Indigenous women, children and youth -- egregious violence that seems to exist outside the bounds of the law.
Contrary to the well-rehearsed response that one often faces when offering an intellectual and political critique of Thanksgiving, it is not simply a "holiday." Like Columbus Day and the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving is the symbolic embodiment of the story white Americans like to tell themselves about who they are and what they stand for. And this is what I tell my students when they ask me why I call for the critical interrogation of this so-called holiday.
For the past few months, I have been teaching an undergraduate/graduate seminar in the Global Studies program at The New School, my home university. It is a course that was designed to work in purposeful opposition to the unfailing denial of colonial history and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples in the present that is so pervasive throughout the mainstream education systems (both secondary and post-secondary) and media outlets in the United States. In many ways, it serves as an antithesis to Thanksgiving itself. Grounded in a version of revolutionary red pedagogy advanced by Quechua scholar Sandy Grande, the class takes students on a journey through competing versions about the "truth" of the United States. It does so by excavating knowledge that has been deliberately subjugated, and by asking essential and difficult questions that destabilize what we think we know about the places where we build our lives.
Throughout the evolution of this course, my students have faced unsettling realities -- including developing an awareness of their own complicity in reproducing colonial relations of domination. Week after week, students have collectively read the scholarship of Indigenous writers: a revolutionary move in its own right given the whiteness of the curriculum in most institutions of higher education. Week after week, they have systematically analyzed the colonial founding of what we now call the United States of America through anti-colonial accounts of history and politics. Week after week, they have pushed themselves, each other, and me, to reject depictions of Indigenous peoples as remnants of a bygone past and instead view them through the frame of the active presence. They are now recognizing them as leaders in a global fight for decolonization, freedom and environmental justice worldwide. They are coming to see them as communities of Nations who have been maintaining their own kinship relations and ways of being while living under conditions of violent occupation. They view them as the First Peoples of the territory many of my students call home. These discussions, not surprisingly, have also been characterized by the enduring question of how to actively organize alongside Indigenous peoples -- responsibly and ethically, in ways that lift up Indigenous social movements for revolutionary change as opposed to co-opting or working against them, often without even knowing it.
This has not been an easy process for my students, nor is their (re)education complete. But it is a step in the right direction. More so, the collective work we have begun to do serves as an example of what is possible when we step back and adopt a more radical politics when it comes to challenging the social and political meaning of holidays like Thanksgiving. It gives us some sense of how we can tackle the intensely racist backdrop against which this "holiday" has emerged, and to think critically about what it would mean to support political sovereignty and self-determination for the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, upon whose land all of us reside.
The Hidden History of How California Was Built on Genocide
Thursday, November 09, 2017
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
...The genocide of California's Indigenous nations was the foundation upon which settler colonialism built the "Golden State." In this interview, historian and author Benjamin Madley argues that understanding the 19th century genocide in California will assist scholars in "re-examining the larger, hemispheric Indigenous population catastrophe."
Mark Karlin: Can you define what constitutes "genocide" and the origin of the term?
Benjamin Madley: In 1943, the legal scholar Raphaël Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined "the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide," or killing, to describe genocide as any attempt to physically or culturally annihilate an ethnic, national, religious or political group. In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide more narrowly defined genocide as:
Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The Convention thus provides a clear, internationally recognized rubric for evaluating instances of genocide, including historical cases not subject to legal jurisdiction. First, perpetrators must evince "intent to destroy" a group "as such." Second, they must commit at least one of the five genocidal acts against one of the four protected groups.
In what ways was the killing of California's Native population that occurred in the mid-1800s a genocide? How many Indigenous Californians were killed?
The California catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition set forth in the UN Genocide Convention. First, perpetrators demonstrated, in word and deed, their "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such." Second, they committed all five genocidal acts listed in the convention. "Killing members of the group" occurred in more than 370 massacres, as well as in hundreds of smaller killings, homicides and executions. Sources indicate that from 1846 to 1873, vigilantes, state militiamen and soldiers killed at least 9,492 to 16,094 California [Natives], and probably many more. By way of contrast, California [Natives] killed fewer than 1,500 non-[Native Americans] during this period.
But direct killing was not the only case of this demographic catastrophe. In the book, I argue that starvation, exposure, diseases and other factors also caused thousands of deaths while suppressing demographic recovery. In total, historical demographers and most historians estimate that California's [Native] population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 during these years.
Other acts of genocide proliferated, too. Many rapes and beatings occurred, and these meet the Convention's definition of "causing serious bodily harm" to victims on the basis of their group identity and with the intent to destroy the group. The sustained military and civilian policy of demolishing California [Native] villages and their food stores while driving [them] into inhospitable desert and mountain regions amounted to "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
Some Office of Indian Affairs employees administering federal reservations in California committed the same genocidal crime. Further, because malnutrition and exposure predictably lowered fertility while increasing the number of miscarriages and stillbirths, some state and federal decision-makers also appear guilty of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."
Finally, the state, slave raiders and federal officials were all involved in "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Three thousand to 4,000 or more California [Native] children suffered such forced transfers. By breaking up families and communities, forced removals also constituted "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group." Sufficient evidence exists to designate the California catastrophe a case of genocide, according to the UN definition.
Who were the perpetrators of the genocide?
Elected California officials were the primary architects of annihilation. State legislators created a legal environment in which California [Natives] had almost no rights, thus granting those who attacked them virtual impunity.
Moreover, two state governors threatened annihilation, and both governors and elected officials cooperated in building a killing machine. California governors called out or authorized no fewer than 24 state militia expeditions between 1850 and 1861, which killed a minimum of 1,342 California [Native] people. State legislators also raised up to $1.51 million to fund these operations. By demonstrating that the state would not punish [these] killers, but instead reward them, state militia expeditions inspired an even greater number of vigilante killings. Finally, in 1863, after the US Army supplanted the state militia as the primary state-sponsored [Native]-killing force, California legislators passed a bill allowing the state to raise an additional $600,000 to encourage more men to enlist as California Volunteers.
[But] the state of California did not act alone. The US Army played a crucial part in the California genocide, first creating the exclusionary legal system, then setting genocidal precedents, helping to build the killing machine, participating in killing and finally taking control of it. In total, US Army soldiers killed at least 1,688 to 3,741 California [Natives] between 1846 and 1873.
If state legislators were the architects of genocide, federal officials helped to lay the groundwork, became the final arbiters of the design and ultimately paid for most of its official execution. By 1863, the federal government had given California more than $1 million for its militia campaigns. Of course, by 1863, the US Army had taken over as the primary state-sponsored killer, and Congress controlled that institution's budget. Indeed, federal legislators paid for some or all of many lethal campaigns against California [Natives] that began in 1846 and concluded in 1873.
You state in your conclusion, "The direct and deliberate killing of [Natives] in California between 1846 and 1873 was more lethal and sustained than anywhere in the United States or its colonial antecedents." What led to this appalling distinction?
Based on available research, the direct and deliberate killing of [Natives] in California between 1846 and 1873 was more lethal and sustained than anywhere in the United States or its colonial antecedents. Yet, as I argued in the book, there remains a need for additional detailed studies addressing the question of genocide in other regions and among other peoples within and beyond the United States. The variables present in the California genocide did not recur in precisely the same combination, or at the same intensities, in the histories of other Native American peoples. We need to build on our existing knowledge, with new research, in order to understand the full picture for the United States, North America and the Western Hemisphere. That said, this book presents a workable methodology for examining potential cases of genocide in the Americas and beyond.
Why do you think we are taught in school about historical events like the gold rush and the transcontinental railroad, but so little about the massacre of California's Native population?
This is a profoundly disturbing story with high stakes for scholars, California [Natives] and everyone living in the Western Hemisphere. If US citizens founded some regions of California, if not the state as a whole, on deliberate attempts to annihilate California [Natives], scholars will need to re-evaluate current interpretive axioms and address new questions. Scholars could, for example, re-examine the assumption that indirect effects of colonization, like diseases, rather than deliberate actions, like murder, were the leading cause of death in encounters between newcomers and California [Natives].
Exceptionalist interpretations of US history lose validity as researchers compare California to other mass killings around the globe. A careful study of genocide in California will also assist scholars in re-examining the larger, hemispheric Indigenous population catastrophe. Where scholars document a genocide, it will be necessary to evaluate what roles governments and private individuals played, as well as whether or not the event was part of a recurring regional or national pattern. Larger questions then follow. What tended to catalyze genocide? Who ordered and carried out the killing? Why do we not know more about these events? Did democracy drive mass murder and, ultimately, did genocide play a role in making modern Canada, Mexico, the United States or other Western Hemisphere nations?
The genocide question is particularly urgent for California's approximately 150,000 [Natives]. Should they press for government apologies, reparations and control of land where genocidal events took place? Will tribes marshal evidence of genocide in cases involving tribal sovereignty and federal recognition? How should they commemorate victims of mass murder, while also emphasizing accommodation, resistance, survival and cultural renewal?
The psychological issues related to genocide are also fraught. What happens if a tribal member learns that she or he is a descendant of both perpetrators and victims? How might California [Natives] reconcile increased knowledge of genocide -- sometimes at the hands of the United States -- with their often-intense patriotism? Finally, what role might acknowledgement of genocide have on the "intergenerational/historical trauma" prevalent in many California [Native] communities, and that trauma's connection to present-day physical illnesses, substance abuse, domestic violence and suicide?
The question of genocide in California under US rule also poses explosive questions for all US citizens. Should government officials tender public apologies, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? Should federal officials offer compensation, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion Congress paid to 82,210 of these Japanese Americans and their heirs? Might California officials decrease their cut of California [Natives'] $7.3 billion annual gaming revenues (2014) as a way of paying reparations?
A better understanding of the California genocide might also impact the federal government's dealings with the scores of California [Native] communities currently seeking federal recognition. The question of commemoration is closely linked. Will non-[Natives] support or tolerate the public commemoration of mass murders committed by some of the state's forefathers with the same kinds of monuments, museums and state-legislated days of remembrance that today commemorate the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust? Will genocides against California [Natives] join these mass murders in public school curricula and public discourse?
These questions are important, but can be addressed only in limited ways without a comprehensive understanding of relations between California [Natives] and newcomers from 1846 to 1873.
What is the myth of inevitable extinction?
The myth of inevitable extinction conveniently displaced agency from human beings to amorphous forces, such as Providence, fate and nature. This myth falsely but convincingly absolved both individuals and white society as a whole of moral responsibility for the destruction of Native Americans in general and California [Natives] in particular.
Mark Karlin: Can you define what constitutes "genocide" and the origin of the term?
Benjamin Madley: In 1943, the legal scholar Raphaël Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined "the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide," or killing, to describe genocide as any attempt to physically or culturally annihilate an ethnic, national, religious or political group. In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide more narrowly defined genocide as:
Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The Convention thus provides a clear, internationally recognized rubric for evaluating instances of genocide, including historical cases not subject to legal jurisdiction. First, perpetrators must evince "intent to destroy" a group "as such." Second, they must commit at least one of the five genocidal acts against one of the four protected groups.
In what ways was the killing of California's Native population that occurred in the mid-1800s a genocide? How many Indigenous Californians were killed?
The California catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition set forth in the UN Genocide Convention. First, perpetrators demonstrated, in word and deed, their "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such." Second, they committed all five genocidal acts listed in the convention. "Killing members of the group" occurred in more than 370 massacres, as well as in hundreds of smaller killings, homicides and executions. Sources indicate that from 1846 to 1873, vigilantes, state militiamen and soldiers killed at least 9,492 to 16,094 California [Natives], and probably many more. By way of contrast, California [Natives] killed fewer than 1,500 non-[Native Americans] during this period.
But direct killing was not the only case of this demographic catastrophe. In the book, I argue that starvation, exposure, diseases and other factors also caused thousands of deaths while suppressing demographic recovery. In total, historical demographers and most historians estimate that California's [Native] population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 during these years.
Other acts of genocide proliferated, too. Many rapes and beatings occurred, and these meet the Convention's definition of "causing serious bodily harm" to victims on the basis of their group identity and with the intent to destroy the group. The sustained military and civilian policy of demolishing California [Native] villages and their food stores while driving [them] into inhospitable desert and mountain regions amounted to "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
Some Office of Indian Affairs employees administering federal reservations in California committed the same genocidal crime. Further, because malnutrition and exposure predictably lowered fertility while increasing the number of miscarriages and stillbirths, some state and federal decision-makers also appear guilty of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."
Finally, the state, slave raiders and federal officials were all involved in "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Three thousand to 4,000 or more California [Native] children suffered such forced transfers. By breaking up families and communities, forced removals also constituted "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group." Sufficient evidence exists to designate the California catastrophe a case of genocide, according to the UN definition.
Who were the perpetrators of the genocide?
Elected California officials were the primary architects of annihilation. State legislators created a legal environment in which California [Natives] had almost no rights, thus granting those who attacked them virtual impunity.
Moreover, two state governors threatened annihilation, and both governors and elected officials cooperated in building a killing machine. California governors called out or authorized no fewer than 24 state militia expeditions between 1850 and 1861, which killed a minimum of 1,342 California [Native] people. State legislators also raised up to $1.51 million to fund these operations. By demonstrating that the state would not punish [these] killers, but instead reward them, state militia expeditions inspired an even greater number of vigilante killings. Finally, in 1863, after the US Army supplanted the state militia as the primary state-sponsored [Native]-killing force, California legislators passed a bill allowing the state to raise an additional $600,000 to encourage more men to enlist as California Volunteers.
[But] the state of California did not act alone. The US Army played a crucial part in the California genocide, first creating the exclusionary legal system, then setting genocidal precedents, helping to build the killing machine, participating in killing and finally taking control of it. In total, US Army soldiers killed at least 1,688 to 3,741 California [Natives] between 1846 and 1873.
If state legislators were the architects of genocide, federal officials helped to lay the groundwork, became the final arbiters of the design and ultimately paid for most of its official execution. By 1863, the federal government had given California more than $1 million for its militia campaigns. Of course, by 1863, the US Army had taken over as the primary state-sponsored killer, and Congress controlled that institution's budget. Indeed, federal legislators paid for some or all of many lethal campaigns against California [Natives] that began in 1846 and concluded in 1873.
You state in your conclusion, "The direct and deliberate killing of [Natives] in California between 1846 and 1873 was more lethal and sustained than anywhere in the United States or its colonial antecedents." What led to this appalling distinction?
Based on available research, the direct and deliberate killing of [Natives] in California between 1846 and 1873 was more lethal and sustained than anywhere in the United States or its colonial antecedents. Yet, as I argued in the book, there remains a need for additional detailed studies addressing the question of genocide in other regions and among other peoples within and beyond the United States. The variables present in the California genocide did not recur in precisely the same combination, or at the same intensities, in the histories of other Native American peoples. We need to build on our existing knowledge, with new research, in order to understand the full picture for the United States, North America and the Western Hemisphere. That said, this book presents a workable methodology for examining potential cases of genocide in the Americas and beyond.
Why do you think we are taught in school about historical events like the gold rush and the transcontinental railroad, but so little about the massacre of California's Native population?
This is a profoundly disturbing story with high stakes for scholars, California [Natives] and everyone living in the Western Hemisphere. If US citizens founded some regions of California, if not the state as a whole, on deliberate attempts to annihilate California [Natives], scholars will need to re-evaluate current interpretive axioms and address new questions. Scholars could, for example, re-examine the assumption that indirect effects of colonization, like diseases, rather than deliberate actions, like murder, were the leading cause of death in encounters between newcomers and California [Natives].
Exceptionalist interpretations of US history lose validity as researchers compare California to other mass killings around the globe. A careful study of genocide in California will also assist scholars in re-examining the larger, hemispheric Indigenous population catastrophe. Where scholars document a genocide, it will be necessary to evaluate what roles governments and private individuals played, as well as whether or not the event was part of a recurring regional or national pattern. Larger questions then follow. What tended to catalyze genocide? Who ordered and carried out the killing? Why do we not know more about these events? Did democracy drive mass murder and, ultimately, did genocide play a role in making modern Canada, Mexico, the United States or other Western Hemisphere nations?
The genocide question is particularly urgent for California's approximately 150,000 [Natives]. Should they press for government apologies, reparations and control of land where genocidal events took place? Will tribes marshal evidence of genocide in cases involving tribal sovereignty and federal recognition? How should they commemorate victims of mass murder, while also emphasizing accommodation, resistance, survival and cultural renewal?
The psychological issues related to genocide are also fraught. What happens if a tribal member learns that she or he is a descendant of both perpetrators and victims? How might California [Natives] reconcile increased knowledge of genocide -- sometimes at the hands of the United States -- with their often-intense patriotism? Finally, what role might acknowledgement of genocide have on the "intergenerational/historical trauma" prevalent in many California [Native] communities, and that trauma's connection to present-day physical illnesses, substance abuse, domestic violence and suicide?
The question of genocide in California under US rule also poses explosive questions for all US citizens. Should government officials tender public apologies, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? Should federal officials offer compensation, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion Congress paid to 82,210 of these Japanese Americans and their heirs? Might California officials decrease their cut of California [Natives'] $7.3 billion annual gaming revenues (2014) as a way of paying reparations?
A better understanding of the California genocide might also impact the federal government's dealings with the scores of California [Native] communities currently seeking federal recognition. The question of commemoration is closely linked. Will non-[Natives] support or tolerate the public commemoration of mass murders committed by some of the state's forefathers with the same kinds of monuments, museums and state-legislated days of remembrance that today commemorate the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust? Will genocides against California [Natives] join these mass murders in public school curricula and public discourse?
These questions are important, but can be addressed only in limited ways without a comprehensive understanding of relations between California [Natives] and newcomers from 1846 to 1873.
What is the myth of inevitable extinction?
The myth of inevitable extinction conveniently displaced agency from human beings to amorphous forces, such as Providence, fate and nature. This myth falsely but convincingly absolved both individuals and white society as a whole of moral responsibility for the destruction of Native Americans in general and California [Natives] in particular.
Stop Saying Columbus 'Discovered' the Americas—It Erases Indigenous History
Referring to tribal lands as "empty" seeks to justify their theft for commercial and military exploitation.
By Joanna Eede / AlterNet
Just over a hundred years ago in Peru, a tall history professor from Yale University left his camp in a valley northwest of Cusco, and walked through cloud forest to a mountain ridge more than 7,500 feet above sea level. There, high above the roaring Urubamba river, he found an ancient stone citadel; sculpted terraces of temples and tombs, granite buildings and polished walls that were covered in centuries of vines and vegetation.
Hiram Bingham had stumbled across the Inca site of Machu Picchu, the site he believed to be the ‘Lost city of the Incas’. ‘Machu Picchu might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest,’ he wrote in the 1913 edition of the National Geographic.
But his words were misleading. Bingham hadn’t ‘discovered’ Machu Picchu. Nor was it ‘lost’. He may have alerted it to the western scientific world – for there were no accounts of it in the chronicles of the Spanish invaders – but local tribes must have been aware of its existence. Yet Christopher Heaney, a Fellow at the University of Texas and author of a book on Hiram Bingham, claims the historian was amazed to discover an indigenous family close to the citadel. ‘When he climbed the mountain he was very surprised to find an Indian family at the top of the ridge,’ he said. Why Bingham was surprised is bewildering in itself.
It is unlikely that his terminology had adverse ramifications for the local indigenous peoples, but the language of colonists has long had a tragic part to play in the destruction of tribal peoples across the world. For centuries, tribal lands have been referred to as ‘empty’ in order to justify their theft for commercial, military or conservation reasons. After all, if a region is uninhabited, so the expedient thinking goes, there are by definition no human rights to address. Similarly, racist prejudices – the labeling of tribal peoples as ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’ or ‘savage’ – have inculcated a popular attitude of disrespect and fear, so underpinning (and even justifying, in the perpetrator’s mind), the appalling treatment to which tribal peoples have been subjected.
When European settlers landed on the shores of Australia, they claimed the land was ‘terra nullius’ – land belonging to no one. It wasn’t. The Aboriginal people had lived there for perhaps 50,000 years yet the concept of ‘terra nullius’ was only properly overthrown in 1992, allowing the lands to be stolen legitimately from the people who had first occupied the continent. Under British colonial law, Aboriginal people had no rights; they were deemed too ‘primitive’ to be owners. In just over 100 years from the first invasion, the Aboriginal population was reduced from an estimated one million to only 60,000.
Similarly, when the trade winds carried Christopher Columbus to the ‘New World’ in 1492, he had in fact arrived in the homelands of peoples who had lived there for millennia: tribes who had their own successful laws, rituals, beliefs, values, ways of life and religions. ‘The whites shout out today, “We discovered the land of Brazil,”’ says Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami spokesman, ‘as if it were empty! As if human beings hadn’t lived in it since the beginning of time!’ a thought echoed by Megaron Txukarramae, a Kayapo Indian when he said, ‘The land that the whites called Brazil belonged to the Indians. You invaded it and took possession of it.’
The reality of course is that South and North America were not ‘new,’ Australia was not ‘empty’ before Europeans arrived and Machu Picchu was not ‘discovered’ in 1911. ‘The phrase ‘discovery’ of America is obviously inaccurate,’ wrote the linguist and philosopher Professor Noam Chomsky. ‘What they discovered was an America that had been discovered thousands of years before by its inhabitants. Thus what took place was the invasion of America – an invasion by a very alien culture.’
These lands were the homes of indigenous peoples. To claim a land was ‘empty’ before the invasion of colonists and ‘discovered’ once they arrived is to rob tribal peoples of their identity, dignity and land rights; it is to deny their very existence.
They are still the homes of indigenous peoples. In the summer of 2013, Peru’s Prime Minister announced that his government has scrapped an official report warning of the dangers a controversial gas project poses to uncontacted tribes, and at least three ministers resigned amidst growing pressure to approve the project. The UN has called for the project’s ‘immediate suspension’. The invasion of their lands continues; their existence and rights overlooked.
Hiram Bingham had stumbled across the Inca site of Machu Picchu, the site he believed to be the ‘Lost city of the Incas’. ‘Machu Picchu might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest,’ he wrote in the 1913 edition of the National Geographic.
But his words were misleading. Bingham hadn’t ‘discovered’ Machu Picchu. Nor was it ‘lost’. He may have alerted it to the western scientific world – for there were no accounts of it in the chronicles of the Spanish invaders – but local tribes must have been aware of its existence. Yet Christopher Heaney, a Fellow at the University of Texas and author of a book on Hiram Bingham, claims the historian was amazed to discover an indigenous family close to the citadel. ‘When he climbed the mountain he was very surprised to find an Indian family at the top of the ridge,’ he said. Why Bingham was surprised is bewildering in itself.
It is unlikely that his terminology had adverse ramifications for the local indigenous peoples, but the language of colonists has long had a tragic part to play in the destruction of tribal peoples across the world. For centuries, tribal lands have been referred to as ‘empty’ in order to justify their theft for commercial, military or conservation reasons. After all, if a region is uninhabited, so the expedient thinking goes, there are by definition no human rights to address. Similarly, racist prejudices – the labeling of tribal peoples as ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’ or ‘savage’ – have inculcated a popular attitude of disrespect and fear, so underpinning (and even justifying, in the perpetrator’s mind), the appalling treatment to which tribal peoples have been subjected.
When European settlers landed on the shores of Australia, they claimed the land was ‘terra nullius’ – land belonging to no one. It wasn’t. The Aboriginal people had lived there for perhaps 50,000 years yet the concept of ‘terra nullius’ was only properly overthrown in 1992, allowing the lands to be stolen legitimately from the people who had first occupied the continent. Under British colonial law, Aboriginal people had no rights; they were deemed too ‘primitive’ to be owners. In just over 100 years from the first invasion, the Aboriginal population was reduced from an estimated one million to only 60,000.
Similarly, when the trade winds carried Christopher Columbus to the ‘New World’ in 1492, he had in fact arrived in the homelands of peoples who had lived there for millennia: tribes who had their own successful laws, rituals, beliefs, values, ways of life and religions. ‘The whites shout out today, “We discovered the land of Brazil,”’ says Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami spokesman, ‘as if it were empty! As if human beings hadn’t lived in it since the beginning of time!’ a thought echoed by Megaron Txukarramae, a Kayapo Indian when he said, ‘The land that the whites called Brazil belonged to the Indians. You invaded it and took possession of it.’
The reality of course is that South and North America were not ‘new,’ Australia was not ‘empty’ before Europeans arrived and Machu Picchu was not ‘discovered’ in 1911. ‘The phrase ‘discovery’ of America is obviously inaccurate,’ wrote the linguist and philosopher Professor Noam Chomsky. ‘What they discovered was an America that had been discovered thousands of years before by its inhabitants. Thus what took place was the invasion of America – an invasion by a very alien culture.’
These lands were the homes of indigenous peoples. To claim a land was ‘empty’ before the invasion of colonists and ‘discovered’ once they arrived is to rob tribal peoples of their identity, dignity and land rights; it is to deny their very existence.
They are still the homes of indigenous peoples. In the summer of 2013, Peru’s Prime Minister announced that his government has scrapped an official report warning of the dangers a controversial gas project poses to uncontacted tribes, and at least three ministers resigned amidst growing pressure to approve the project. The UN has called for the project’s ‘immediate suspension’. The invasion of their lands continues; their existence and rights overlooked.
Are Mexicans Indigenous?
Sunday, October 08, 2017
By Roberto Rodriguez, Truthout | Op-Ed
As many US states and municipalities have begun to eschew the colonial tradition of "Columbus Day" in favor of adopting Monday's holiday as "Indigenous Peoples' Day," one might wonder where people of Mexican heritage fit in.
For some, this is a controversial question due to hundreds of years of mestizaje, or mixture, and also due to hundreds of years of colonialism and colonized thinking. For others, this is not controversial at all, because with few European women brought to this continent, the mixture was not co-equal and consensual, and thus, most Mexicans essentially remain Indigenous or are de-Indigenized peoples as a result of colonization.
All answers are complex because the category of mestizo/mestiza is actually a non-scientific term born of a racial caste system of exploitation, designed primarily not as a racial descriptor, but to deprive people of their full human rights. If it were simply a racial designation, in all likelihood, most Mexicans would be considered mestizo or Indigenous; in Canada, a metis or person of "mixed-blood" is considered a First Nations person. In Mexico, very few Mexicans are considered "white."
One of the primary answers also gives us a clue as to why Mexicans have always been exploited in the United States.
The Mexican American Identity Throughout History
In the US, Mexicans represent memory; a reminder of land theft and unjust war. Yet what is commonly expressed by omission is that they are the antithesis of idealized, blonde and blue-eyed Americans. Mexicans are viewed as utter outsiders, as enemy "others." This has to do with the unfinished business of Manifest Destiny: Blacks were to be enslaved and Native peoples were supposed to have been eradicated from these "promised lands" of North America.
Mexicans have been viewed by white Americans as inferior peoples and convenient scapegoats. This thinking was behind the periodic, massive and inhumane deportation campaigns throughout US history, from the lynching campaigns of the 1840s-1920s, to the Trump administration's current immigration policy.
During the height of the Chicano Movement, activists asserted a radical pride: they were mestizo/mestiza (mixed-peoples) and part of a bronze continent that did not recognize any "capricious borders." This was the origin of "Brown is Beautiful" and "Brown Power," and such ideas were embedded within El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, one of the foundational documents of this movement.
Many in the movement also proclaimed Indigeneity. This was contrary to how previous generations of Mexican Americans had identified, insistent upon a white identity, in particular, for waging legal desegregation battles. However, as University of Texas scholar Martha Menchaca has demonstrated in "Chicano Indianism," Mexican Americans were never actually treated by society and its institutions as white, especially in the courtroom.
Almost 50 years after the height of the movement, the question now being posed is whether Mexicans/Chicanos/Chicanas are Native peoples, especially since the population has skyrocketed and is no longer confined to the US Southwest. They have also been joined by many more millions of peoples from Mexico and Central America, who often share a common Mesoamerican root, and who increasingly come from living Indigenous pueblos.
Shifting Identities
Communities of Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha, Otomi, Nahua and Maya peoples, to name a few, identify as Indigenous, as do some Mexican peoples that have mixed with Native Americans throughout the United States.
The question of Indigeneity, then, is largely about de-Indigenized Mexicans and Central Americans: Are they Native? That question should be restricted to de-Indigenized peoples, but even Yaquis (who generally live in the Southwestern US, as well as northern Mexico), for example, are viewed by some as Mexican, as opposed to Native. Adding to this complexity, some consider O'odham peoples who live in Sonora also as Mexicans and not O'odham.
During the Chicano movement, Mexicans/Chicanos/Chicanas generally spoke of descending from Indigenous peoples -- Aztec and Maya, primarily. They never identified when they themselves stopped being Indigenous. That is the key -- Indigeneity is not simply the past, but also the present.
Given that we are speaking of perhaps 30-40 million people, is a shift toward identifying as Indigenous, among a population that is itself historically anti-Indigenous, possible? Who decides? Does white America -- including the US government -- have a say in this matter? The government can define US citizenship, but arguably has no standing when it comes to defining a historical identity that precedes the formation of the United States and, in effect, involves the entire continent, as opposed to just the US.
It is a conversation that needs to be had, especially within a society that is hell-bent on erecting a massive wall -- the consummate symbol of white supremacy -- to keep the "Brown hordes" out.
The people who would have a say in this matter would be the AmerIndigenous peoples -- the original peoples of this continent -- especially within the United States. This may not be an easy question to answer. Due to colonialism and extreme racism, many Mexicans over the centuries have been trained or raised to reject their own ancestry, and many have done so and continue to do so. Given this reality, many original peoples would never "accept them back." Others have and do, and many do so with open arms, wondering why it has taken them so long "to return."
I suspect that if there ever comes a time of full acceptance, it will come about as a result of much dialogue. And yet, it will be these de-Indigenized communities that will ultimately have to decide upon not simply their identity, but also their future.
However Mexicans ultimately choose to identify, what is certain is that unless something radical happens, chances are very likely that they will not be accepted as full human beings by this society in the foreseeable future. Thus, will Mexicans acknowledge their future as intertwined with the recognized original peoples of this continent, or will they choose a different course?
For some, this is a controversial question due to hundreds of years of mestizaje, or mixture, and also due to hundreds of years of colonialism and colonized thinking. For others, this is not controversial at all, because with few European women brought to this continent, the mixture was not co-equal and consensual, and thus, most Mexicans essentially remain Indigenous or are de-Indigenized peoples as a result of colonization.
All answers are complex because the category of mestizo/mestiza is actually a non-scientific term born of a racial caste system of exploitation, designed primarily not as a racial descriptor, but to deprive people of their full human rights. If it were simply a racial designation, in all likelihood, most Mexicans would be considered mestizo or Indigenous; in Canada, a metis or person of "mixed-blood" is considered a First Nations person. In Mexico, very few Mexicans are considered "white."
One of the primary answers also gives us a clue as to why Mexicans have always been exploited in the United States.
The Mexican American Identity Throughout History
In the US, Mexicans represent memory; a reminder of land theft and unjust war. Yet what is commonly expressed by omission is that they are the antithesis of idealized, blonde and blue-eyed Americans. Mexicans are viewed as utter outsiders, as enemy "others." This has to do with the unfinished business of Manifest Destiny: Blacks were to be enslaved and Native peoples were supposed to have been eradicated from these "promised lands" of North America.
Mexicans have been viewed by white Americans as inferior peoples and convenient scapegoats. This thinking was behind the periodic, massive and inhumane deportation campaigns throughout US history, from the lynching campaigns of the 1840s-1920s, to the Trump administration's current immigration policy.
During the height of the Chicano Movement, activists asserted a radical pride: they were mestizo/mestiza (mixed-peoples) and part of a bronze continent that did not recognize any "capricious borders." This was the origin of "Brown is Beautiful" and "Brown Power," and such ideas were embedded within El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, one of the foundational documents of this movement.
Many in the movement also proclaimed Indigeneity. This was contrary to how previous generations of Mexican Americans had identified, insistent upon a white identity, in particular, for waging legal desegregation battles. However, as University of Texas scholar Martha Menchaca has demonstrated in "Chicano Indianism," Mexican Americans were never actually treated by society and its institutions as white, especially in the courtroom.
Almost 50 years after the height of the movement, the question now being posed is whether Mexicans/Chicanos/Chicanas are Native peoples, especially since the population has skyrocketed and is no longer confined to the US Southwest. They have also been joined by many more millions of peoples from Mexico and Central America, who often share a common Mesoamerican root, and who increasingly come from living Indigenous pueblos.
Shifting Identities
Communities of Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha, Otomi, Nahua and Maya peoples, to name a few, identify as Indigenous, as do some Mexican peoples that have mixed with Native Americans throughout the United States.
The question of Indigeneity, then, is largely about de-Indigenized Mexicans and Central Americans: Are they Native? That question should be restricted to de-Indigenized peoples, but even Yaquis (who generally live in the Southwestern US, as well as northern Mexico), for example, are viewed by some as Mexican, as opposed to Native. Adding to this complexity, some consider O'odham peoples who live in Sonora also as Mexicans and not O'odham.
During the Chicano movement, Mexicans/Chicanos/Chicanas generally spoke of descending from Indigenous peoples -- Aztec and Maya, primarily. They never identified when they themselves stopped being Indigenous. That is the key -- Indigeneity is not simply the past, but also the present.
Given that we are speaking of perhaps 30-40 million people, is a shift toward identifying as Indigenous, among a population that is itself historically anti-Indigenous, possible? Who decides? Does white America -- including the US government -- have a say in this matter? The government can define US citizenship, but arguably has no standing when it comes to defining a historical identity that precedes the formation of the United States and, in effect, involves the entire continent, as opposed to just the US.
It is a conversation that needs to be had, especially within a society that is hell-bent on erecting a massive wall -- the consummate symbol of white supremacy -- to keep the "Brown hordes" out.
The people who would have a say in this matter would be the AmerIndigenous peoples -- the original peoples of this continent -- especially within the United States. This may not be an easy question to answer. Due to colonialism and extreme racism, many Mexicans over the centuries have been trained or raised to reject their own ancestry, and many have done so and continue to do so. Given this reality, many original peoples would never "accept them back." Others have and do, and many do so with open arms, wondering why it has taken them so long "to return."
I suspect that if there ever comes a time of full acceptance, it will come about as a result of much dialogue. And yet, it will be these de-Indigenized communities that will ultimately have to decide upon not simply their identity, but also their future.
However Mexicans ultimately choose to identify, what is certain is that unless something radical happens, chances are very likely that they will not be accepted as full human beings by this society in the foreseeable future. Thus, will Mexicans acknowledge their future as intertwined with the recognized original peoples of this continent, or will they choose a different course?
Poverty stays the same for American Indian children:
By Meteor Blades
Wednesday Sep 27, 2017 · 12:01 PM PDT
From Daily Kos: Despite a small increase in Native American median household income over the year, 1 in 3 Native American children were in poverty in 2016—completely unchanged from 2015. Native Americans are the only ethnic or racial group where child poverty did not go down this year.
Cherokee Nation processing citizenship for Black slave heirs
Sep 9, 2017
From Philly Tribune: TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — The Cherokee Nation has started processing tribal citizen applications for the descendants of Black slaves once owned by tribal members.
A federal court in Washington, D.C., ended a longstanding fight last week by ruling that descendants of the slaves, known as freedmen, have the right to tribal citizenship. About 3,000 applications had been on hold amid the legal dispute.
The tribe has begun processing those applications, and its registration office near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, received about 75 visits and a “couple hundred” phone calls after the ruling, tribal spokeswoman Amanda Clinton told the Tulsa World .
Freedmen have long argued that the Treaty of 1866, signed between the U.S. government and the Oklahoma-based Cherokees, gave them and their descendants “all the rights of native Cherokees.” Some tribal members argued that freedmen shouldn’t be considered members unless they could show proof of Native American blood.
Last week’s ruling ended a legal dispute that began in 2003. It gave Cherokee freedmen all the rights of a tribal citizen, including the ability to run for office, vote in elections and receive benefits, such as access to tribal health care and housing.
“We’re happy and relieved this longstanding case is finally resolved, and now we are moving forward processing applications as quickly as possible,” Cherokee Nation Attorney General Todd Hembree said in a statement.
While the ruling directly affects the citizenship status of more than 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen, an attorney for the group, John Velie, has said there could be as many as 25,000 people who could now be eligible to apply for citizenship.
The Cherokee Nation is the second largest tribe in the U.S., with more than 317,000 citizens. — (AP)
A federal court in Washington, D.C., ended a longstanding fight last week by ruling that descendants of the slaves, known as freedmen, have the right to tribal citizenship. About 3,000 applications had been on hold amid the legal dispute.
The tribe has begun processing those applications, and its registration office near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, received about 75 visits and a “couple hundred” phone calls after the ruling, tribal spokeswoman Amanda Clinton told the Tulsa World .
Freedmen have long argued that the Treaty of 1866, signed between the U.S. government and the Oklahoma-based Cherokees, gave them and their descendants “all the rights of native Cherokees.” Some tribal members argued that freedmen shouldn’t be considered members unless they could show proof of Native American blood.
Last week’s ruling ended a legal dispute that began in 2003. It gave Cherokee freedmen all the rights of a tribal citizen, including the ability to run for office, vote in elections and receive benefits, such as access to tribal health care and housing.
“We’re happy and relieved this longstanding case is finally resolved, and now we are moving forward processing applications as quickly as possible,” Cherokee Nation Attorney General Todd Hembree said in a statement.
While the ruling directly affects the citizenship status of more than 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen, an attorney for the group, John Velie, has said there could be as many as 25,000 people who could now be eligible to apply for citizenship.
The Cherokee Nation is the second largest tribe in the U.S., with more than 317,000 citizens. — (AP)
Trail of Tears: White America's 'Indian' Holocaust
Michael Coard May 27, 2017
From Philly Tribune: Exactly 187 years ago on May 28, 1830, the “Trail of Tears” began when President Andrew Jackson signed Senate Bill 102, i.e., the Indian Removal Act (IRA). That legislation forced primarily five Southeastern indigenous nations, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, as well as the Fox, Kickapoo, Lenape, Miami, Omaha, Ottawa, Potawatomie, Sauk, Shawnee, and Wyandot (along with a few other smaller ones), to trek up to 2,200 miles- on foot!- from as far as Florida to what’s now known as Oklahoma where the government’s newly created so-called Indian Territory was established.
These native people were brutally compelled to vacate their homeland on a continent where their ancestors had lived for approximately 14,000 years. That’s 12,508 years before Columbus and his murderous gang of white invaders arrived in 1492.
As renowned historian Dr. Howard Zinn declared in his seminal A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present, President Jackson was “the most aggressive enemy of the (so-called) Indians in early American history.” The learned Oxford Companion to United States History described the president’s actions following passage of the IRA as “the most complete genocide in U.S. history.”
And in his revealing Don’t Know Much About History, lecturer and New York Times best selling author Kenneth C. Davis proclaimed, “From the outset, superior weapons, force of numbers, and treachery had been the Euro-American strategy for dealing with the Indians in manufacturing ‘a genocidal tragedy that surely ranks as one of the cruelest episodes in man’s history.’” Davis went on to note, “The killing, enslavement, and land theft had begun with the arrival of the Europeans. But it may have reached its nadir when it became federal policy under President Jackson.”
The IRA led to what came to be called the “Trail of Tears,” which actually began six years before the 1836 date that most of this country’s history books erroneously cite as the year of its commencement. Although the actual numbers will never be known because, as Winston Churchill so accurately stated, “History is written by the victors,” it has been estimated that from May 1830 (when the IRA became law) until March 1839 (when the last Red person, actually a Cherokee, was savagely shoved into Oklahoma), approximately 100,000 of our Red brothers and sisters suffered the trail’s tortuous tribulations and possibly as many as 30 percent of them were killed on the way as a result of shootings, beatings, starvation, dysentery, whooping cough, cholera in the summer, pneumonia in the winter, and exposure to extreme weather conditions.
Also, this genocidal legislation robbed this land’s aborigines of more than 25 million acres of fertile farmland in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and elsewhere.
As horrific as this hell on earth was, the “Trail of Tears” didn’t result in just physical genocide and land theft. It also resulted in cultural genocide. As a History.com documentary entitled Andrew Jackson’s Controversial Decisions, featuring such scholarly historians as museum director Thomas Y. Cartwright and author Professor Harry L. Watson, pointed out, and as did the aforementioned Oxford book, the so-called Indians were forced at gunpoint to convert to Christianity, to cut their hair, to speak only English, to send their children to distant brainwashing and self-hating boarding schools like the Richard Pratt Industrial School here in Pennsylvania, and also to adopt European-style economic practices including and especially private ownership of property- in other words, capitalism.
The documentary continued by pointing out that many had to endure the excruciatingly long haul while being “bound in chains, marching double-file.”
None of that mattered to President Jackson because he viewed these noble people as subhuman. That’s why, in 1833, he said “(T)hose tribes... have neither the intelligence... (nor) the moral habits... which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of... a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority..., they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and... long disappear.”
As an aside, I should explain that the Red people ain’t no damn Indians. Columbus called them that in 1492 because he was an incompetent sailor who thought he had traveled east to India when he actually had traveled west to the so-called Americas. The correct (albeit general) name of the indigenous people from the 500 nations here on this continent is Onkwehonwe. And this land wasn’t called America either. It was Turtle Island.
You might wonder why I previously referred to these First Nations people as our brothers and sisters. Here’s why: At least one of these aboriginal groups, e.g., the Seminoles (and others throughout the country), had many Black members who had escaped slavery. And as documented by the Princeton Public Library’s African-American and Native American History Department, as many as one-third of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, just like the aforesaid Seminole, was Black. Moreover, the department’s researchers mentioned that the U.S. Army in 1802 listed 512 Blacks as living amongst the Choctaw.
By the way, President Jackson hated Blacks as much as he hated Reds. Even the Andrew Jackson Foundation had to concede that “Slavery was the source of... (his) wealth” and that he enslaved more than 150 Black folks, including children, on his 1,000 acre Hermitage cotton plantation in Nashville, Tennessee,
Many white (and sadly Black) Americans today might argue that as evil as the IRA and the “Trail of Tears” were, they at least ultimately brought “civilization” and progress to this technologically advanced country. However, Oglala Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote in his 1933 autobiography, From the Land of the Spirit Eagle, “True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly... inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim... (and) rob... then what is progress?” Good question, Brother Standing Bear. Very good question.
These native people were brutally compelled to vacate their homeland on a continent where their ancestors had lived for approximately 14,000 years. That’s 12,508 years before Columbus and his murderous gang of white invaders arrived in 1492.
As renowned historian Dr. Howard Zinn declared in his seminal A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present, President Jackson was “the most aggressive enemy of the (so-called) Indians in early American history.” The learned Oxford Companion to United States History described the president’s actions following passage of the IRA as “the most complete genocide in U.S. history.”
And in his revealing Don’t Know Much About History, lecturer and New York Times best selling author Kenneth C. Davis proclaimed, “From the outset, superior weapons, force of numbers, and treachery had been the Euro-American strategy for dealing with the Indians in manufacturing ‘a genocidal tragedy that surely ranks as one of the cruelest episodes in man’s history.’” Davis went on to note, “The killing, enslavement, and land theft had begun with the arrival of the Europeans. But it may have reached its nadir when it became federal policy under President Jackson.”
The IRA led to what came to be called the “Trail of Tears,” which actually began six years before the 1836 date that most of this country’s history books erroneously cite as the year of its commencement. Although the actual numbers will never be known because, as Winston Churchill so accurately stated, “History is written by the victors,” it has been estimated that from May 1830 (when the IRA became law) until March 1839 (when the last Red person, actually a Cherokee, was savagely shoved into Oklahoma), approximately 100,000 of our Red brothers and sisters suffered the trail’s tortuous tribulations and possibly as many as 30 percent of them were killed on the way as a result of shootings, beatings, starvation, dysentery, whooping cough, cholera in the summer, pneumonia in the winter, and exposure to extreme weather conditions.
Also, this genocidal legislation robbed this land’s aborigines of more than 25 million acres of fertile farmland in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and elsewhere.
As horrific as this hell on earth was, the “Trail of Tears” didn’t result in just physical genocide and land theft. It also resulted in cultural genocide. As a History.com documentary entitled Andrew Jackson’s Controversial Decisions, featuring such scholarly historians as museum director Thomas Y. Cartwright and author Professor Harry L. Watson, pointed out, and as did the aforementioned Oxford book, the so-called Indians were forced at gunpoint to convert to Christianity, to cut their hair, to speak only English, to send their children to distant brainwashing and self-hating boarding schools like the Richard Pratt Industrial School here in Pennsylvania, and also to adopt European-style economic practices including and especially private ownership of property- in other words, capitalism.
The documentary continued by pointing out that many had to endure the excruciatingly long haul while being “bound in chains, marching double-file.”
None of that mattered to President Jackson because he viewed these noble people as subhuman. That’s why, in 1833, he said “(T)hose tribes... have neither the intelligence... (nor) the moral habits... which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of... a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority..., they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and... long disappear.”
As an aside, I should explain that the Red people ain’t no damn Indians. Columbus called them that in 1492 because he was an incompetent sailor who thought he had traveled east to India when he actually had traveled west to the so-called Americas. The correct (albeit general) name of the indigenous people from the 500 nations here on this continent is Onkwehonwe. And this land wasn’t called America either. It was Turtle Island.
You might wonder why I previously referred to these First Nations people as our brothers and sisters. Here’s why: At least one of these aboriginal groups, e.g., the Seminoles (and others throughout the country), had many Black members who had escaped slavery. And as documented by the Princeton Public Library’s African-American and Native American History Department, as many as one-third of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, just like the aforesaid Seminole, was Black. Moreover, the department’s researchers mentioned that the U.S. Army in 1802 listed 512 Blacks as living amongst the Choctaw.
By the way, President Jackson hated Blacks as much as he hated Reds. Even the Andrew Jackson Foundation had to concede that “Slavery was the source of... (his) wealth” and that he enslaved more than 150 Black folks, including children, on his 1,000 acre Hermitage cotton plantation in Nashville, Tennessee,
Many white (and sadly Black) Americans today might argue that as evil as the IRA and the “Trail of Tears” were, they at least ultimately brought “civilization” and progress to this technologically advanced country. However, Oglala Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote in his 1933 autobiography, From the Land of the Spirit Eagle, “True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly... inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim... (and) rob... then what is progress?” Good question, Brother Standing Bear. Very good question.
Once Lost Under the Umbrella of the American Indian Wars, the Rebellion of the Black Seminoles is Re-Discovered
By D. Amari Jackson - February 19, 2017
From Atlanta Black Star: The year, 1835. The setting, the Florida territory on the eve of the Second Seminole War. Tensions between the region’s native inhabitants and an encroaching American government have escalated upon President Andrew Jackson’s order to push the Seminoles west for incorporation with Creek natives. Given the territory’s history as the largest haven for Africans escaping enslavement in the South, a sizable representation of maroons or “Black Seminoles” — Africans both formerly enslaved and free — live among and are allied with the natives. Unwilling to give up their land or submit to enslavement and though substantially outnumbered and outgunned, the alliance wages war against the United States Army.
From this turmoil emerges John Horse, a brave and savvy Black Seminole of both African and native lineage who fights alongside alliance leader Osceola before rising to leadership himself. In the process, he is captured by army soldiers but makes a daring prison escape to rejoin and inspire the weary alliance to fight on. From there, Horse, along with his elite cadre of Black Seminole warriors, fights fiercely for three years to a standstill with the U.S. Army, prompting the latter to arrange a Black Seminole armistice in 1838. Not only does this peace treaty represent the United States’ only non-victory until the Vietnam War over a century later but, given the resulting freedom for 400 formerly enslaved Black survivors, it also qualifies as the largest and most successful rebellion of enslaved Africans in American history.
So, why don’t we ever hear anything about it?
“America overlooked this rebellion because it could,” says J.B. Bird, Director of Media Relations and Digital Newsroom at The University of Texas at Austin. A longtime researcher on the Black Seminoles, he is the architect of the definitive website on Horse and the rebellion.
Bird explains the events happened at “a time in American history where newspapers and dominant public discourse were controlled mainly by white men” who, in the southern portion of the country, “did not talk about these kinds of things. If you read the newspapers of the times, you’ll see there are small references to insurrections and rebellions often written in a cryptic or deliberately euphemistic way. It wasn’t necessarily a conspiracy since that’s just what you did if you were a white man at the time. You didn’t talk about it.”(read more)
From this turmoil emerges John Horse, a brave and savvy Black Seminole of both African and native lineage who fights alongside alliance leader Osceola before rising to leadership himself. In the process, he is captured by army soldiers but makes a daring prison escape to rejoin and inspire the weary alliance to fight on. From there, Horse, along with his elite cadre of Black Seminole warriors, fights fiercely for three years to a standstill with the U.S. Army, prompting the latter to arrange a Black Seminole armistice in 1838. Not only does this peace treaty represent the United States’ only non-victory until the Vietnam War over a century later but, given the resulting freedom for 400 formerly enslaved Black survivors, it also qualifies as the largest and most successful rebellion of enslaved Africans in American history.
So, why don’t we ever hear anything about it?
“America overlooked this rebellion because it could,” says J.B. Bird, Director of Media Relations and Digital Newsroom at The University of Texas at Austin. A longtime researcher on the Black Seminoles, he is the architect of the definitive website on Horse and the rebellion.
Bird explains the events happened at “a time in American history where newspapers and dominant public discourse were controlled mainly by white men” who, in the southern portion of the country, “did not talk about these kinds of things. If you read the newspapers of the times, you’ll see there are small references to insurrections and rebellions often written in a cryptic or deliberately euphemistic way. It wasn’t necessarily a conspiracy since that’s just what you did if you were a white man at the time. You didn’t talk about it.”(read more)
Smallpox was instrumental in killing the American Indians
GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS: A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW
from: ...genocide/native-american-genocide
The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group” and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.”
The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as “….a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” Most people tend to associate genocide with wholesale slaughter of a specific people. However, “the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, describes genocide beyond outright murder of people as the destruction and extermination of culture.” Article II of the convention lists five categories of activity as genocidal when directed against a specific “national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”
These categories are:
By mass-execution prior to the arrival of Columbus the land defined as the 48 contiguous states of America numbered in excess of 12 million. Four centuries later, it had been reduced by 95% (237 thousand). How? When Columbus returned in 1493 he brought a force of 17 ships. He began to implement slavery and mass-extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. Within three years five million were dead. Fifty years later the Spanish census recorded only 200 living! Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of numerous accounts of the horrendous acts that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous people, which included hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food, and the list continues.
This did not end with Columbus’ departure, the European colonies and the newly declared United States continued similar conquests. Massacres occurred across the land such as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Not only was the method of massacre used, other methods for “Indian Removal” and “clearing” included military slaughter of tribal villages, bounties on native scalps, and biological warfare. British agents intentionally gave Tribes blankets that were intentionally contaminated with smallpox. Over 100 thousand died among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee and other Ohio River nations. The U.S. army followed suit and used the same method on the Plains tribal populations with similar success.(read more)
The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as “….a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” Most people tend to associate genocide with wholesale slaughter of a specific people. However, “the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, describes genocide beyond outright murder of people as the destruction and extermination of culture.” Article II of the convention lists five categories of activity as genocidal when directed against a specific “national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”
These categories are:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of group;
- Deliberately infliction on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
By mass-execution prior to the arrival of Columbus the land defined as the 48 contiguous states of America numbered in excess of 12 million. Four centuries later, it had been reduced by 95% (237 thousand). How? When Columbus returned in 1493 he brought a force of 17 ships. He began to implement slavery and mass-extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. Within three years five million were dead. Fifty years later the Spanish census recorded only 200 living! Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of numerous accounts of the horrendous acts that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous people, which included hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food, and the list continues.
This did not end with Columbus’ departure, the European colonies and the newly declared United States continued similar conquests. Massacres occurred across the land such as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Not only was the method of massacre used, other methods for “Indian Removal” and “clearing” included military slaughter of tribal villages, bounties on native scalps, and biological warfare. British agents intentionally gave Tribes blankets that were intentionally contaminated with smallpox. Over 100 thousand died among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee and other Ohio River nations. The U.S. army followed suit and used the same method on the Plains tribal populations with similar success.(read more)
Celebrating the Genocide of Native Americans
by Gilbert Mercier - Counterpunch
The sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own history into a mythological fantasy. The concepts of liberty, freedom and free enterprise in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are a mere spin. The US was founded and became prosperous based on two original sins: firstly, on the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their land by European colonialists; secondly, on slavery. This grim reality is far removed from the fairytale version of a nation that views itself in its collective consciousness as a virtuous universal agent for good and progress. The most recent version of this mythology was expressed by Ronald Reagan when he said that “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.”
In rewriting its own history about Thanksgiving, white America tells a Disney-like fairytale about the English pilgrims and their struggle to survive in a new and harsh environment. The pilgrims found help from the friendly and extremely generous Native-American tribe, the Wampanoag Indians, in 1621. Unfortunately for Native Americans, the European settlers’ gratitude was short-lived. By 1637, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Indian men, women and children. This event marked the start of a Native-American genocide that would take slightly more than 200 years to complete, and of course to achieve its ultimate goal, which was to take the land from Native Americans and systematically plunder their resources. The genocide begun in 1637 marks the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent until most Native Americans were exterminated, a few were assimilated into white society, and the rest were put in reservations to dwindle and die.
When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492, on his quest for gold and silver, the Native population, which he erroneously called Indians, numbered an estimated 15 million who lived north of current day Mexico. It was, by all considerations, a thriving civilization. Three hundred and fifty years later, the Native American population north of Mexico would be reduced to less than a million. This genocide was brought upon the Natives by systematic mass murder and also by disease, notably smallpox, spread by the European colonists.
Columbus and his successors proto-capitalist propensity for greed was foreign to Native Americans. They viewed the land as tribal collective ownership, not as a property that could be owned by individuals. “Columbus and his successors were not coming to an empty wilderness, but into a world which, in some places, was as densely populated as Europe, and where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations between men, women, children and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps in any other places in the world.” wrote Howard Zinn in his masterful A People’s History of the United States.
In many ways, the US’ celebration of Thanksgiving is analogous to setting aside a day in Germany to celebrate the Holocaust. Thanksgiving is the American Holocaust. The original crimes of genocide and slavery are not limited to US early history but have found an extension in the policies of modern-day US. The systematic assault on other nations and cultures still goes on under various pretenses or outright lies. United States wars of empire are going on today more than ever before. These wars have left millions of people dead across the world in the course of American history, and they are still fought for the same reasons behind the Native American genocide and slavery: namely, to expand the wealth of the US elite.
Defenders of Thanksgiving will say that whatever the original murky meaning of the holiday, it has become a rare chance to spend time with family and show appreciation for what one has. For most Americans today, however, it is hard to be thankful. As matter of fact, unless you belong to the 2 percent who represent the US ruling class you should not be thankful at all. How can you be appreciative for what you have if you have lost your house to foreclosure, don’t have a job and can’t feed your family? How can you be appreciative if you are a homeless veteran? How can you be appreciative when you are poor or sick in a society without social justice? On this Thanksgiving day, rich celebrities and politicians will make a parody of what should be real charity by feeding countless poor and homeless. This will ease their conscience, at least for a while. Charity, however, should not be a substitute for social justice. Just to ruin some people’s appetites before they attack that golden turkey: keep in mind that today we are celebrating a genocide.
In rewriting its own history about Thanksgiving, white America tells a Disney-like fairytale about the English pilgrims and their struggle to survive in a new and harsh environment. The pilgrims found help from the friendly and extremely generous Native-American tribe, the Wampanoag Indians, in 1621. Unfortunately for Native Americans, the European settlers’ gratitude was short-lived. By 1637, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Indian men, women and children. This event marked the start of a Native-American genocide that would take slightly more than 200 years to complete, and of course to achieve its ultimate goal, which was to take the land from Native Americans and systematically plunder their resources. The genocide begun in 1637 marks the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent until most Native Americans were exterminated, a few were assimilated into white society, and the rest were put in reservations to dwindle and die.
When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492, on his quest for gold and silver, the Native population, which he erroneously called Indians, numbered an estimated 15 million who lived north of current day Mexico. It was, by all considerations, a thriving civilization. Three hundred and fifty years later, the Native American population north of Mexico would be reduced to less than a million. This genocide was brought upon the Natives by systematic mass murder and also by disease, notably smallpox, spread by the European colonists.
Columbus and his successors proto-capitalist propensity for greed was foreign to Native Americans. They viewed the land as tribal collective ownership, not as a property that could be owned by individuals. “Columbus and his successors were not coming to an empty wilderness, but into a world which, in some places, was as densely populated as Europe, and where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations between men, women, children and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps in any other places in the world.” wrote Howard Zinn in his masterful A People’s History of the United States.
In many ways, the US’ celebration of Thanksgiving is analogous to setting aside a day in Germany to celebrate the Holocaust. Thanksgiving is the American Holocaust. The original crimes of genocide and slavery are not limited to US early history but have found an extension in the policies of modern-day US. The systematic assault on other nations and cultures still goes on under various pretenses or outright lies. United States wars of empire are going on today more than ever before. These wars have left millions of people dead across the world in the course of American history, and they are still fought for the same reasons behind the Native American genocide and slavery: namely, to expand the wealth of the US elite.
Defenders of Thanksgiving will say that whatever the original murky meaning of the holiday, it has become a rare chance to spend time with family and show appreciation for what one has. For most Americans today, however, it is hard to be thankful. As matter of fact, unless you belong to the 2 percent who represent the US ruling class you should not be thankful at all. How can you be appreciative for what you have if you have lost your house to foreclosure, don’t have a job and can’t feed your family? How can you be appreciative if you are a homeless veteran? How can you be appreciative when you are poor or sick in a society without social justice? On this Thanksgiving day, rich celebrities and politicians will make a parody of what should be real charity by feeding countless poor and homeless. This will ease their conscience, at least for a while. Charity, however, should not be a substitute for social justice. Just to ruin some people’s appetites before they attack that golden turkey: keep in mind that today we are celebrating a genocide.
WHEN AMERICANS LYNCHED MEXICANS
From NY Times( WILLIAM D. CARRIGAN and CLIVE WEBB): THE recent release of a landmark report on the history of lynching in the United States is a welcome contribution to the struggle over American collective memory. Few groups have suffered more systematic mistreatment, abuse and murder than African-Americans, the focus of the report.
One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.
Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes. One case, largely overlooked or ignored by American journalists but not by the Mexican government, was that of seven Mexican shepherds hanged by white vigilantes near Corpus Christi, Tex., in late November 1873. The mob was probably trying to intimidate the shepherds’ employer into selling his land. None of the killers were arrested.
From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.
Some of these cases did appear in press accounts, when reporters depicted them as violent public spectacles, as they did with many lynchings of African-Americans in the South. For example, on July 5, 1851, a mob of 2,000 in Downieville, Calif., watched the extralegal hanging of a Mexican woman named Juana Loaiza, who had been accused of having murdered a white man named Frank Cannon.
Such episodes were not isolated to the turbulent gold rush period. More than a half-century later, on Nov. 3, 1910, a mob snatched a 20-year-old Mexican laborer, Antonio Rodríguez, from a jail in Rock Springs, Tex. The authorities had arrested him on charges that he had killed a rancher’s wife. Mob leaders bound him to a mesquite tree, doused him with kerosene and burned him alive. The El Paso Herald reported that thousands turned out to witness the event; we found no evidence that anyone was ever arrested.
While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles in mob violence against Mexicans.
On Jan. 28, 1918, a band of Texas Rangers and ranchers arrived in the village of Porvenir in Presidio County, Tex. Mexican outlaws had recently attacked a nearby ranch, and the posse presumed that the locals were acting as spies and informants for Mexican raiders on the other side of the border. The group rounded up nearly two dozen men, searched their houses, and marched 15 of them to a rock bluff near the village and executed them. The Porvenir massacre, as it has become known, was the climactic event in what Mexican-Americans remember as the Hora de Sangre (Hour of Blood). It led, the following year, to an investigation by the Texas Legislature and reform of the Rangers.
Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego. White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action amid a climate of intense paranoia.
While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was remarkable. The lynchings persisted into the 1920s, eventually declining largely because of pressure from the Mexican government.
Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of lynching.
Southern blacks were the group most often targeted, but comparing the histories of the South and the West strengthens our understanding of mob violence in both. In today’s charged debate over immigration policy and the growth of the Latino population, the history of anti-Mexican violence reminds us of the costs and consequences of hate.
One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.
Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes. One case, largely overlooked or ignored by American journalists but not by the Mexican government, was that of seven Mexican shepherds hanged by white vigilantes near Corpus Christi, Tex., in late November 1873. The mob was probably trying to intimidate the shepherds’ employer into selling his land. None of the killers were arrested.
From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.
Some of these cases did appear in press accounts, when reporters depicted them as violent public spectacles, as they did with many lynchings of African-Americans in the South. For example, on July 5, 1851, a mob of 2,000 in Downieville, Calif., watched the extralegal hanging of a Mexican woman named Juana Loaiza, who had been accused of having murdered a white man named Frank Cannon.
Such episodes were not isolated to the turbulent gold rush period. More than a half-century later, on Nov. 3, 1910, a mob snatched a 20-year-old Mexican laborer, Antonio Rodríguez, from a jail in Rock Springs, Tex. The authorities had arrested him on charges that he had killed a rancher’s wife. Mob leaders bound him to a mesquite tree, doused him with kerosene and burned him alive. The El Paso Herald reported that thousands turned out to witness the event; we found no evidence that anyone was ever arrested.
While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles in mob violence against Mexicans.
On Jan. 28, 1918, a band of Texas Rangers and ranchers arrived in the village of Porvenir in Presidio County, Tex. Mexican outlaws had recently attacked a nearby ranch, and the posse presumed that the locals were acting as spies and informants for Mexican raiders on the other side of the border. The group rounded up nearly two dozen men, searched their houses, and marched 15 of them to a rock bluff near the village and executed them. The Porvenir massacre, as it has become known, was the climactic event in what Mexican-Americans remember as the Hora de Sangre (Hour of Blood). It led, the following year, to an investigation by the Texas Legislature and reform of the Rangers.
Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego. White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action amid a climate of intense paranoia.
While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was remarkable. The lynchings persisted into the 1920s, eventually declining largely because of pressure from the Mexican government.
Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of lynching.
Southern blacks were the group most often targeted, but comparing the histories of the South and the West strengthens our understanding of mob violence in both. In today’s charged debate over immigration policy and the growth of the Latino population, the history of anti-Mexican violence reminds us of the costs and consequences of hate.