From gars@netcom.com Sat Oct 25 23:31:38 1997 Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 20:10:53 -0700 From: Gary Night Owl To: Internet Recipients of Wotanging Ikche Subject: Wotanging Ikche--nanews05.043 _ __ _____ __ _ __ ___ ____ _ __ ___ ' ) / / ') / / ) ' ) ) / ) / ' ) ) / ) / / / / / / /--/ / / / ___ / / / / ___ (_(_/ (__/ ( / (_ / (_ (___/ '__/_ / (_ (___/ ' O ____ _ , ___ _ , ___ O o O / ' ) / / ) ' ) / / ' O o O / /-< / /--/ /-- VOLUME 05, ISSUE 043 O o o o o O __/_ / ) (___/ / ( (___, 25 October 1997 O o O KANOHEDA ANIYVWIYA Otapi'sin Atsinikiisinaakssin O o O Es'te Opunvk'vmucvse ni-mah-mi-kwa-zoo-min Aunchemokauhettittea O ( N A T I V E A M E R I C A N N E W S ) This issue contains articles from NAT-FILM, Triballaw, AisesNet, Innu-L, Minn-Ind & Native-L lists; Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty; NASC News; UUCP email; Indigenous Environmental Network Articles appearing have been previously posted for public dissemination and/or permission for inclusion has been secured. Letters of authorization are on file. A list of those granting permission to repost their words in this issue are listed at the end of part A. I thank each of you for allowing your words to be shared with the people. <----<<<< >>>>----> This newsletter is a way of keeping the brothers and sisters who share our Spirit informed about current events within the lives of those who walk the Red Road. ++ It may be subscribed to via email by sending a request from your own internet addressable account to gars@netcom.com ++ It is archived at http://www.nanews.org Thanks to Borries Demeler all _Wotanging_Ikche_ (part a) submissions to AISESnet are archived under AISESnet and can be accessed easily by World Wide Web: 1994: http://aises.uthscsa.edu/94_dis.html 1995: http://aises.uthscsa.edu/95_dis.html 1996: http://aises.uthscsa.edu/96_dis.html 1997: http://aises.uthscsa.edu/97_dis.html This is a searchable index to the AISESnet Discussion mailing list database archive, and the keyword "Wotanging" will retrieve all issues for that year. "There was a time when we did not know the whites -- our wants were then fewer than they are now. They were always within our control -- we had seen nothing which we could not get. Before our intercourse with the whites who have caused such a destruction in our game, we could lie down and sleep, and when we awoke we would find the buffalo feeding around our camp -- but now we are killing them for their skins, and feeding the wolves with their flesh, to make our children cry over their bones." __ Chief Petaleshoro, Pawnee +- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -+ | Indian Pledge of Allegiance | The Indian Pledge of Alleg- | | iance was first presented | I pledge allegiance to my Tribe,| on 2 December '93 during the | to the democratic principles | opening address of the Nat- | of the Republic | ional Congress of American | and to the individual freedoms | Indian Tribal-States Relat- | borrowed from the Iroquois and | ions Panel in Reno, NV. NCAI | Choctaw Confederacies, | plans distribution of the | as incorporated in the United | Indian Pledge to all Indian | States Constitution, | Nations. | so that my forefathers | | shall not have died in vain | Walk in Beauty! Night Owl +- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -+ O'siyo Brothers and Sisters! South Dakota winters are unforgiving. Each year we lose precious Elders who are unable to withstand the dangerous killer temperatures. This year we may lose another one. Cornelia Quick Bear, 77, who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease, will be evicted from HUD subsidized low rent, Lakota Homes, in Rapid City, S.D. The irony of is that Mrs. Quick Bear is not being thrown out of the only home she has, for non payment of rent, but because the Housing Authority raised her rent from $141 a month, to market value of $625, while she was in the hospital recuperating from needed surgery. Far more than she receives each month from her meager Social Security Check. Mark Connot, attorney for the HUD agency, appears to have shrugged the life and death matter off with the usual response of 'she'll have her day in court'. Maybe not. Lakota Homes has a policy of not allowing anyone other than the renter, to live in their subsidized homes. Ms. Quick Bear is required to have a caregiver and her son lived with her until recently, to help provide that care. Lakota Homes does not seem to understand the necessity of the life giving care needed for this Traditional Elder. She, of course, does not have the money to fight eviction and there are currently no vacancies in other Pennington County Housing projects. Waiting lists are 6-12 months. She may not live that long. Ms. Quick Bear, sadly smiles, prepared to meet her HUD fate of eviction, not understanding that the rules of a unfeeling Government agency. Queries to Tom Daschle, SD State Senator, were returned with automated responses. There is no agency in Rapid City to help Ms. Quick Bear, thus the reason for this article. Please call the Lakota Housing Authority at 605-343-6836 and help to save this one precious Elder. She is literally, being thrown out in the snow. The FAX for Lakota Homes is (605)343-3083 I can also tell you a Lakota Elder and Warrior, who was falsely accused of selling ceremony has sold his only dwelling to repair his "Indian" car, so he can answer calls for prayer and ceremony. Now, he and his family are without housing of their own. Doesn't sound like a man getting well off from selling ceremony or anything else. Let this serve as a reminder that you must seek the truth for yourself. Many who read this newsletter are warriors. I will remind you a warrior lives by a sacred oath to defend and protect children and elders. If you ignore these calls for assistance, and elders and children die, you have failed as a warrior. The tragic plight of our elders on the various reservations is so great, their peril so real, their walk so close to the edge that I will continue to feature contact addresses where you can send donations of clothing, food, blankets, money to purchase fuel and repair throughout the winter. As new contacts are received they will be added to the list. PLEASE help the elders. PLEASE help grow this list and help ALL the elders. For the Red Shirt Community: Marvin Helper P.O. Box 312 Hermosa, SD 57744 For Porcupine, Oglala and Wounded Knee: David Swallow or Gerald Ice % Gerald ice P.O. Box 199 Wounded Knee, SD 57794 Or... Joe Chasing Horse % P.O. Box 8392 Rapid City, S.D. 57709 For Truck loads & UPS Shipments: Joe Chasing Horse 714 Paha Sapa Drive Rapid City, SD 57701 From: Lora Czarnowsky Adi Defender Project New Dawn PO Box 616 McLaughlin, SD 57642 This is for the various communities on the Standing Rock Reservation. From: tusweca Darlene Cross PO Box 52 Kyle SD 577075 From: yona@infi.net Toy drive going on for the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte If you would like to donate a toy or more information, you may contact me by email: yona@infi.net or phone me 757-425-7992..you may also drop off a toy if you are in the vicinity of our store Na-va'kee 618 Hilltop West. biah yazzie From: DORSEY.THOMAS_J+@ALBANY.VA.GOV Norma Grassrope Lower Brule Reservation Lower Brule, South Dakota 57028 (605) 473-5594 She is the chair of a charitable group called the Womens Support Group. From: Pioquark@aol.com Clay Watson Pioneer Industries 1100 E. 24th St. Cheyenne, Wy. 82001 (307)778-7860 pioquark@aol.com These donations will be gifted to the Rose Bud and Pine Ridge Reservations in South Dakota and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. I'm on the road a lot, out back loading the truck etc. PLEASE leave a message if there is no answer.. From: ALBERT SUN BUTLER Ti Ospaye PO Box 200 Wanblee SD 57577 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - If any of you have addresses/contacts to add to this list for other Rez's PLEASE email me with them soon. Winter winds have already brought snow. email to gars@netcom.com Just in case the cause of our elders is not enough to concern you, the Yellowstone National Park is now going to kill bison within the park. It is now clear this mindless slaughter will not stop until the Buffalo Nation is gone. Read the article below, and remember this. Your taxes paid for the restoration of that herd and your taxes are going to pay for their slaughter. It is up to you to write your congressional representatives and tell them you are not going to sit by while your dollars pay hired guns to kill a National Resource. From the Bozeman Chronicle Oct 15, 1997 Bozeman, Montana BISON MAY LOSE SANCTUARY Joan Haines, Chronicle Staff Writer POPULATION CONTROL: Park considers plan to shoot bulls within Yellowstone's borders. For the first time in years. Yellowstone National Park officials have accepted a proposal that would call for park workers to shoot bull bison inside the park near it's northern boundary. A spokesman for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition calls that a bad idea. However, federal and state bison specialists said Tuesday they want to hold Yellowstone's bison population at 2,200 - it's current status. (keeping in mind this is not true) They said they would rather haze them back inside the park's protective borders when possible and capture and release those that pose a low risk of infecting cattle with brucellosis than kill them. Bison specialists for the US Forest Service, Yellowstone Park, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks met Tuesday afternoon at FWP headquarters to discuss how to handle bison that enter Montana this winter. (Why were not tribal officials invited to this meeting?) They were updating interim bison management procedures that will go into effect when bison enter Montana. That usually begins to happen late in the year after several heavy snowfalls. When the Reece Creek capture facility near the Gardiner entrance reaches capacity, Park Service officials have agreed to shoot bulls, said Marc Bridges of the Department of Livestock. However, park workers will first try to haze the bulls back into the park. "Mature bulls are difficult ot handle," Bridges said. "If we have to take on mature bulls, we'll take them on by lethal means," he said. The Park Service has agreed to shoot the bulls inside the park if they aren't trapable or hazable. Last winter the Park Service participated in the shooting of bison only once at the request of the Montana Department of Livestock and that was outside the park. Almost 1,100 Yellowstone Bison were shot or sent to slaughter last winter when they entered Montana because some have brucellosis, a disease that can cause cattle to abort. It's poor policy to shoot bison inside the park, said Bob Ekey, Greater Yellowstone Coalition spokesman. "We feel the park should remain a sanctuary for bison," Ekey said. "An effort should be made to try and acquire winter range." Yellowstone's bison are shot or sent to slaughter when they enter Montana because livestock officials fear bison can transmit brucellosis to cattle and Montana could lose it's brucellosis-free status. That would mean ranchers would have to test the blood of all cattle shipped out of state, an expensive proposition. Environmentalists have said it has never been proven that wild bison can infect cattle. Federal and state bison officials are also seeking approval to move a federal capture facility to Horse BUtte, an area outside the park on Hebgen Lake where bison congregate each winter. Bison have been shot in the area for years. If that plan if approved, low risk bison that test negative for brucellosis would be allowed to roam on public land and APHIS would attempt to keep states from boycotting Montana beef. State and federal bison specialists are also attempting to change the classification of bulls, calves, yearlings and cows that have given birth that come into Montana near West Yellowstone from high to low risk. "We're trying to hold the bison population at the status quo", said Rich Inman, a resource manager with the U.S. Forest Service. "We don't want a big lethal kill." Top state and federal officials, particularly APHIS, must agree to the changes before they could go into effect this winter. APHIS must also decide how long bison must be off of cattle range before it will be considered a low risk situation. END OF ARTICLE Here's a late breaking update on the upcoming Rally for Leonard Peltier in Washington, DC.... Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 15:08:22 -0400 (EDT) From: FirehairSS@aol.com Subj: Leonard-Lobbying Action ---------- Forwarded Message Follows ----------- From: simahoyo@blarg.net (Scott) 'siyo friends, Here are the latest details on the Lobbying Action next Tuesday and Wednesday (Oct 21 & 22), courtesy of Kathleen at the LPDC. (The LPDC office is having trouble with their Mac, so they have not been able to send many email messages; they have just mailed out info in the Support Group Connection, so you can expect more details there if you are a support group chairperson.) Things kick off Tuesday afternoon with a press conference at 1pm, in Room HC-5, which is in the U.S. Capitol Building. After the press conference, there will be a meeting, at which LPFC director Ron Lessard will give instructions (and materials) to those who will visit the Congressional offices. IMPORTANT: Ron has asked that all participants dress professionally: NO T-shirts, NO levis/ jeans, please. This is not a rally or demonstration. Kathleen also mentioned NO signs or banners. (I don't know if this means just for the events at the Capitol, or all events; I'm hoping to receive clarification on this when Ron arrives back in town.) If you have not been to the U.S. Capitol before, be aware that it is very difficult (and expensive) to find parking, and traffic can be heavy, so please allow yourself adequate travel time and parking money. If you come into town on the subway ("Metro"), you probably want to exit at the Capitol South station (orange or blue lines) or the Union Station (red line). Both of these stations are within walking distance (approx 2-4 blocks) of the Capitol. > Some people have asked me for Peltier bumper stickers, so I will bring some with me ($2 each). I will have a *few* pins too (also $2). > NOTE TO MARYLAND LPSGers: We will *not* be having a meeting on Monday night the 20th. However, if you need to carpool -- or you have room to let carpoolers ride with you -- please contact me or Marti Iben as soon as possible. > ME (day/work #): 301-731-9891 ext. 113 Marti: 410-444-6895 > If you have any questions, call Ron Lessard (804-823-2845) or the LPDC (785-842-5774), or you may contact me via email (preferable) or phone. Thanks to Mike Wicks for the following reminder: In Memory (with Respect and Honor) 10.26.1975 Olivia Binais - AIM supporter killed in Porcupine by "person or persons unknown." Investigation still "open." 10.26.1975 Janice Black Bear - AIM supporter killed at Manderson by Goons. No investigation. Peace! Night Owl , , Gary Night Owl gars@netcom.com (*,*) P. O. Box 672168 gars@nanews.org (`-') Marietta, GA 30067, U.S.A. gars@igc.apc.org ===w=w=== gars@bellsouth.net Fax: 770-528-9643 gars@juno.com ----------- News of the people featured in this issue ---------- - Elder Forced Out - Crazy Horse Malt Liquor Case - OK Given to Kill Some Bison - Apache Elders Applaud Sacred - Free Winter Vacation in Yellowstone Runners - Gustafsen Appeals Adjourned - White House Fellowship Program - Nuclear Waste on Native Lands - Trouble Behind These Walls - Mohawk Fight Multinational - Native Prisoner Corporation - A Hundred Years Ago - Anglican Residential Schools - Poem: The Journey of Reality - More Lawsuits Over School Abuse - Verse: Hawaiian Book of Days - What Can We Expect from Inco - Conferences and Powwows - Crow Coal Tax Case - Status of NativeNet Mailing Lists --------- "RE: Elder Forced Out" --------- Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 08:53:52 -0400 From: "Thomas SunHawk" Subj: Fw: ITC Article UUCP email O'siyo!! Below is an article sent to me, that should be read by all and responded to. It is our responsibility to help and support our Brothers & Sisters and our Elders. Please Read ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ELDER FORCED OUT OF HOME By K. Marie Porterfied and Justin Jones "Four years ago 77 year old Cornelia Quick Bear was diagnosed with terminal non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver, but she refused to let health problems get her down. Recuperating at the Rapid City Care Center from lung surgery, she plans to go home soon. The only problem is, she may not have a home. Lakota Community Homes, Inc., the subsidized North Rapid housing where she lived raised her rent from $141 to $625 a month and, last week, began eviction proceedings against her. 'I'm feeling pretty good," she said. "I'm a fighter. The only thing that worries me is how they could do this to me. I never did anything wrong." According to Mark , Lakota Homes' lawyer, because Ms. Quick Bear allowed unauthorized people to live in her home, her HUD rent subsidy was pulled and she was charged full market rent in October. "All I know is the facts that Lakota Homes provided me with," he said. "We are serving her with a summons and complaint today." Ms. Quick Bear, who was in the hospital for a month following her surgery, didn't receive notice of the rent raise. Instead, the papers were sent to a daughter living in California, she said. "I couldn't eve begin to pay what they want me to," she said. "My Social Security comes to less than that." She said that because of her health, she is required to have a caretaker living with her. "My son, his wife and their children were staying with me, so he could take care of me," she said. "Lakota Homes knew about it. He was causing problems, but he moved out a month ago" According to Ms. Quick Bear, while she was in the hospital, a daughter died and, from her hospital bed, she gave family members permission to briefly stay in her home. Currently another daughter living in Rapid City has the only key to her home. "She went over there to clean and that was all," Ms. Quick Bear said. Long time residents of the area, Ms. Quick Bear and her husband served on the board of Sioux Addition. After he died, her house was vandalized and burned to the ground. It was then that she moved to Lakota Homes. "I never drank liquor or smoked any kind of cigarettes," she said. "I turned my life over to God. What crime have I been convicted of?" Mr. Connot said he intended to proceed with the eviction. "IF what she's saying is true, she will have a chance to fight it in court," he said. In the meantime, finding a home may prove difficult. According to Doug Wells, the director of Pennington County Housing, the agency maintains units for low income elderly people seeking a place to live. The wait is usually six months to a year. End of Article We urge all people to call Lakota Community Homes at 605-343-6836 and Strongly PROTEST their eviction of a Traditional Grandmother who is another victim of racism and prejudice by Government agencies. Time is critical! Call today! --------Comment below and information below supplied by SunHawk---------- It sounds to me like the people who need to get a earful are the HUD folks, not Lakota Community Homes, Inc. As I see it, HUD is the one who took away the housing grant making it impossible for this Grandmother to afford to pay her rent! Here is the e-mail address for the complaint dept of HUD and also their snail mail address. [Editorial Note: Because of the laws they were established under, Lakota Community Homes, Inc. is virtually without oversite, so contact both HUD and Lakota Homes. Call or Fax till both lines glow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The purpose of the Hotline is to receive complaints of fraud, waste, and abuse in HUD programs and operations, including mismanagement or violations of law, rules, or regulations by HUD employees or program participants. Complaints may be received directly from HUD employees, participants in HUD programs, or the general public. Complaints are received directly from HUD employees, participants in HUD programs and the general public. The IG Act and other pertinent laws provide for the protection of persons making Hotline complaints, including assuring confidentiality (except for e-mail complaints) and prohibiting reprisals. You have the option of submitting your complaint(s) via Internet electronic mail, telephone, fax, or U.S. mail. INTERNET ELECTRONIC MAIL If you elect to submit your complaint(s) via Internet E-mail, you must waive confidentiality due to the non-secure nature of Internet electronic mail systems. oig_hotline@hud.gov HOTLINE TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS You May Request Confidentiality Commercial.....(202)708-4200 TDD............(202)708-2451 Toll Free......(800)347-3735 Fax............(202)708-4829 MAILING ADDRESS You May Request Confidentiality Department of Housing & Urban Development Office of Inspector General Hotline Assistant Inspector General for Investigations 451 7th Street, S.W., Room 8270, Washington, DC 20410 --------- "RE: OK Given to Kill Some Bison" --------- Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 20:22:12 -0400 From: Sonja Keohane Subj: Rangers given OK to kill some bison UUCP email And so it begins.....as the bison begin to leave the park again...... http://www.bigskywire.com/gazette/wednesday/region/reg021.htm Rangers given OK to kill some bison By JOE KOLMAN Gazette Bozeman Bureau The Billings Gazette BOZEMAN - In a change of policy, Yellowstone National Park rangers will be allowed this winter to shoot some bison within park boundaries. Large, mature bulls that tried to leave the north edge of the park last year near Reese Creek did not respond well to hazing and were tough to handle, at times putting rangers in danger, North District Ranger Mona Divine said Tuesday. "We're lucky we didn't get someone killed or seriously injured trying to haze them," Divine said. This year, rangers will be allowed to shoot the animals, after other options like hazing are exhausted, Divine said. She said that normally only injured animals are killed by rangers. Montana officials have for years shot bison that leave the park in an effort to prevent the animals from coming into contact with livestock. But rangers shooting the animals within Yellowstone's confines is a change in policy that Divine said came about from negotiations with several agencies that deal with bison management. "It's obviously something we don't want to do," Divine said. Bob Ekey, spokesman for the Bozeman-based Greater Yellowstone Coalition, said the group doesn't want rangers to be in danger but was surprised that no such concerns about unruly bison needing to be shot have been raised in the last 10 years. Usually, when the actions of people conflict with Yellowstone wildlife, Ekey said the Park Service changes what the people are doing. Park policy was one of several changes discussed here Tuesday by state and federal officials who carry out the day-to-day management of bison during the winter when the animals leave the park looking for food. --------- "RE: Free Winter Vacation in Yellowstone" --------- Date: Wednesday, 15-Oct-97 09:27 AM From: Wild Rockies InfoNet \ Internet:(wild-rockies-alerts@wildrockies.) Subj: Free Winter Vacation in Yellowstone! UUCP email Greetings from Buffalo Nations. Its official. Buffalo Nations has just opened their second office in West Yellowstone. Winter has already started to show itself. Four bull buffalo have crossed the park boundary and could be in trouble soon. We have tried to haze them back to the park but they keep coming back out. At the moment we only have two dedicated activists at each office (Gardiner and West Yellowstone). With all of the winter chores-- gathering at least 12 cords of wood, canning food, setting up a tepee for a field camp and winterizing the cabin--there's not much time to watch over the buffalo. That's right. We need more people ASAP!!! We offer free food and lodging for any activists that care enough to help. Yellowstone is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if you have never seen it, NOW IS YOUR BIG CHANCE. Remember West Yellowstone is more often than not the coldest town in the lower 48 states (don't let that scare you, we are great fire builders). Bring all your warm clothes and a winter sleeping bag. We also encourage people to bring snowshoes and/or cross-country skis to help patrol the borders of the park. If this sounds like a winter dream vacation to you, please contact Mike or Jeremy at: Buffalo Nations P.O. Box 957 West Yellowstone, Mt. 59758 ph 406-646-0070 fax 406-646-0071 e-mail: buffalo@wildrockies.org. LAST WINTER THE STATE OF MONTANA KILLED 1100 OF THE LAST WILD BUFFALO IN THE UNITED STATES. IT'S UP TO ALL OF US TO NOT LET THIS EVER HAPPEN AGAIN. Buffalo Nations PO Box 242 Gardiner, MT 59030 406-848-9867 phone buffalo@wildrockies.org --------- "RE: Gustafsen Appeals Adjourned" --------- Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 01:36:01 -0800 From: SISIS@envirolink.org (S.I.S.I.S.) Subj: Gustafsen Appeals Adjourned :-:-:-:S.I.S.I.S. Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty:-:-:-: Oct. 12, 1997 Bulletin <== GUSTAFSEN APPEALS ==> The appeals of several of those convicted in the Ts'peten (Gustafsen Lake) trial have been adjourned by the British Columbia Court of Appeal. Native rights lawyer Dr. Bruce Clark submitted in writing the appeals of Wolverine a.k.a. William Jones Ignace, James "OJ" Pitawanakwat and Shelagh Franklin, in tandem with the appeal of LiL'Wat traditionalist Tsemhu7qw a.k.a. Harold Pascal, who is advancing a civil case challenging the jurisdiction of the BC courts over unceded, sovereign LiL'Wat territory. Wolverine and Pitawanakwat remain incarcerated in the Matsqui prison in Mission, BC, Canada. The unexpected adjournment is best understood from the correspondence between Clark and the Crown Counsel: :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: Bruce Clark, LL.B.,M.A.,Ph.D. By Fax And Mail September, 22, 1997 William F Ehrke Crown Counsel, Ministry of the Attorney General Criminal Justice Branch, Criminal Appeals 800-865 Hornby Street,Vancouver, BC V6Z 2G3 Re: CA023439/40/41 Dear Counselor: In answer to your letter dated 11 September 1997 please be advised that: (a) The address for service is unchanged; (b) Ignace and Pitawanakwat are in custody at Matsqui; (c) I act pro bono for the appellants Ignace, Franklin and Pitawanakwat so far as preparation of their documents is concerned; (d) They appeal pro se because the bench and bar of British Columbia will not allow me to appear as their counsel; (e) The reason that the bench and bar of British Columbia will not allow me to appear as their counsel is, as the ground of appeal states, that the bench and bar of British Columbia are not willing to address the law which substantiates the ground of appeal, and I am the only lawyer in Canada who is ready, willing and able to raise and defend that law; (f) Delivery of the Appellants' Factum, Appeal Book and Casebook was completed 8 July 1997; (g) For the reason identified in the Appeal Book no Transcript is required; (h) Their Motion to expedite was adjourned indefinitely on 23 July 1997 in response to which I now appear on their behalf as counsel in the Supreme Court of Canada on Application for Leave to Appeal number 26185; Very truly yours, Bruce Clark :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: RUSSELL & DUMOULIN - Barristers & Solicitors 2100-1075 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC.,Canada V6E 3G2 Tel:(604) 631-3131 / Fax: (604) 631-3232 internet: http://rdcounsel.com/rd Russell & Dumoulin is an Independent Law Partnership That Includes Law Corporations. Affiliations: Borden-DuMoulin-Howard-Gervais Toronto Vancouver Calgary Montreal London, England. In Strategic Alliance With Perkins Coie: Seattle. Anchorage. Bellvue, Los Angeles, Portland, Washington DC, Hong Kong Taipei, London. Represented in Hong-Kong By Vincent T K Cheung, Yap & Co. September 25, 1997 Shelagh Anne Franklin Joseph William Ignace Matter No. ATT49490 James Allan Scott Pitawanakwat Direct Line: (604) 631-4789 Dear Sirs/Mesdames: Re: R. v. Ignace, No. CA023439 R. v. Franklin, No. CA023440 R. v. Pitawanakwat, No. CA023441 On July 23, 1997, your applications came on for hearing before Madam Justice Huddart. At that time, we advised Madam Justice Huddart that other defendants who may be appealing their convictions may also be advancing the same arguments that you wish to argue on the appeal, that is, that the court has no jurisdiction over you. In the circumstances, we submitted to Madam Justice Huddart that your application for an expedited appeal date should be adjourned generally until all other defendants have been canvassed to determine whether or not they would be participating in the argument you wish to advance. We have written separately to other defence counsel or defendants in order to obtain their positions and will advise you once we have received a reply from them. Yours very truly, Charles F. Willms LITG/ATT49490/300406_1.W51 :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: Bruce Clark, LL.B.,M.A.,Ph.D Box 32, Route 22, Granville, New York 12832 By Fax October 1, 1997 Charles F. Willms Russell & DuMoulin Re: Pascal v. Walker CA022072; Pascal v. Walker SCC26186; Ignace v. R. CA023439; Franklin v. R. CA023440; Pitawanakwat v. R. CA023441; Ignace, Franklin and Pitawanakwat v. R. SCC26185 Dear Mr. Willms: Please note my new address. I have for reply your 3 letters dated 25 September 1997. Crown Counsel Mr. Ehrke had also written, relative to Jones, Franklin and Pitawanakwat, and thus there seems to be some overlap between you and him, which I ask the two of you to sort out. A copy of my response to Mr. Ehrke accompanies this letter. The essential reason for the decision of Huddart JA on the Pascal motion to expedite his appeal was her view that there is no possibility of the appeal succeeding in the Court of Appeal. Even though she did not address the law put forward by Pascal, based upon past experience there can be no doubt that she is right: for regardless of what the law says, there is no prospect whatever that the judges of British Columbia will address the law, at least not publicly. For the law says that the British Columbia judges have no jurisdiction relative to natives upon yet-unceded territory and that the common judicial assumption to the contrary prima facie has constituted misprisions of treason and fraud and arguably has constituted complicity in genocide. And events have established beyond a doubt that there is no prospect that the judges are going to acknowledge the law indicting their crimes. If, therefore, the law is ever to be addressed it will have to be an independent and impartial third-party adjudicator, which, exactly is the legal point of the Order in Council (Great Britain) of 9 March 1704 in the matter of Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut, which precedent and legislation has been blind sided not only by Huddart JA but by every single other of the 30 or so judges of British Columbia judges before whom I have attempted to raise that authority from 1990 to the present. There may be a possibility of success in the Supreme Court of Canada, if only because that Honorable Court and the public are becoming sensitized to the issue of third-party adjudication because of the Quebec Succession Reference. But in any event of the prognosis for success in the Supreme Court of Canada, it is plain that there is no prospect for success in the courts of your province. My apprehension is that your proposals - to put Pascal's appeal back on the rails in the Court of Appeal and to canvas others convicted along with Ignace, Franklin and Pitawanakwat as to whether they wish to join to be added to Ignace et al's appeal - are not made in good faith, but, rather, for the purpose of delay. I may be wrong. If so please prove me so, specifically by agreeing to expedite the disposition of all appeals in the Court of Appeal, and to recommend that the Court of Appeal grant leave to appeal in the Supreme Court of Canada. Only in this way, so far as I can see at any rate, will it be possible for the law to be addressed and the genocide apprehended in a timely manner. In short, if your principal [Attorney General of B.C.] is now ready to address rather than to stonewall the law let us in effect agree to do so, on consent, as soon as can be arranged, before the Supreme Court of Canada. To that end my clients would be willing not to oppose a motion by your client in the Court of Appeal for summary judgment on the jurisdictional point of law alone in relation to all of the above matters, provided leave to appeal be granted. It is crucial, in my view at least, to the integrity of the rule of law in our country that the Supreme Court of Canada address the jurisdictional point of law alone before it disposes of the appeal in Delgamuukw v. AGBC and the Quebec Succession Reference. I feel sure that you understand. Very truly yours, Bruce Clark Copy: William F. Ehrke, Crown Counsel Ministry of the Attorney General :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: More information on Clark's legal position: http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/Clark/docmain.html More information on Ts'peten (Gustafsen Lake): http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/gustmain.html Write to the Ts'peten Political Prisoners: Wolverine (William Jones Ignace) Political Prisoner Box 4000 Abbotsford, BC V2S 5X8 Canada James "OJ" Pitawanakwat same address as Wolverine :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: S.I.S.I.S. Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty P.O. Box 8673, Victoria, "B.C." "Canada" V8X 3S2 EMAIL: SISIS@envirolink.org WWW: http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/SISmain.html SOVERNET-L is a news-only listserv concerned with indigenous sovereigntist struggles around the world. To subscribe, send "subscribe sovernet-l" in the body of an email message to For more information on sovernet-l, contact S.I.S.I.S. --------- "RE: Nuclear Waste on Native Lands" --------- Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 08:48:45 -0400 (EDT) From: NASCSwan@aol.com Subj: NASC URGENCY: HR2107 - Nuclear Waste on Native Lands TODAY <><><><><><><>NASC NEWS<><><><><><><> Subj: News: Mobile Chernobyl bill.... Date: 97-10-17 12:34:47 EDT From: FireSpeak IEN Notices, Events & Alerts Mobile Chernobyl Act URGENT - ALERT! HOUSE TO VOTE ON MOBILE CHERNOBYL! "Mobile Chernobyl" Bill scheduled for House vote the week of October 20! CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES NOW! ACTIVATE YOUR NETWORKS! GET THE WORD OUT! HR 1270, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1997, more popularly known as the "Mobile Chernobyl Act" is on its way to the House Floor. It now appears that a floor vote will occur the week of October 20. It has become clear to us that many Congressmembers know little about this bill and have not yet heard much from their constituents. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED NOW! Please call your U.S. Representative-ask for the Energy Aide-Capital Switchboard is 202-225-3121 -- and urge them to VOTE NO ON HR 1270 -- tell them to STOP A MOBILE CHERNOBYL! Background: This bill was written by the nuclear utilities to "solve" their nuclear waste problem by taking the waste off their hands, give it to the tax-payer (that's you!), and dump it on Native American lands in Nevada. This is a departure from current law because it would force the movement of high-level nuclear waste from commercial nuclear reactors NOW, before it has been determined whether Yucca Mountain is an appropriate site for permanent storage of the waste. This "temporary" dump would essentially be a parking lot for radioactive waste casks. The area which includes Yucca Mountain has had 621 earthquakes 2.5 or higher within the last 20 years. The site is also under study for a below-ground repository. The data so far shows that the site will NOT isolate this waste for as long as it is hazardous. Independent scientists have recommended that the site be abandoned. Nonetheless, Congress is very close to shipping the waste there anyway. This program will not only affect the Western Shoshone Nation whose sacred lands these are, or the people in Nevada, it will affect more than 50 million Americans who live within one half-mile of the likely waste transport routes between the nuclear reactors and Yucca Mountain. Three-quarters of our nuclear power reactors are east of the Mississippi and each route to the site averages 2000 miles. The nuclear industry boasts of its safety record in shipping high-level radioactive waste (mostly small shipments of submarine fuel): 7 accidents in 2100 shipments. This equals one accident every 343 shipments! If you or I had an accident every 343 times we stepped into our car, we'd lose our driver's license! DOE justifies the death and damage form nuclear waste transport accidents by averaging the affected community across the entire US population. Let's get busy and stop this while we can before we have to try and stop the truck and trains directly! Please call your Congressmember today and urge him or her to oppose HR 1270. For more details about this program, visit the Don't Waste America section of NIRS website: http://www.nirs.org . Or call NIRS, 202-328-0002 -- but better to call your Congressmember! And please activate every network you have-we only need about 150 votes to be able uphold the veto promised (in writing, on seven different occasions) by the Clinton Administration. THANK YOU! 105th Congress: E-Mail List -- C-SPAN Threats to the Native <><><><><><><>NASC NEWS<><><><><><><> Please note that NASC NEWS is a free subscription Native American News Letter. If you would like to subscribe or unsubscribe, simply write to NASCSwan@aol.com. <><><><><><><> --------- "RE: Mohawk Fight Multinational Corporation" --------- Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 10:05:44 -0400 From: Kahn-Tineta Horn Subj: Students and parents fight Multinational corporation on Kahnawake Mohawk Territory] Indigenous Environmental Network: There is a project here on Mohawk Nation land for Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) to build 4 grain elevators right next to a school. The band council and the Canadian government have given the go ahead. An environmental assessment was done through a contract with ADM which gave it a glowing report. The students and people of Kahnawake have done their own studies and have found the gases, grain dust, vermin, fire and explosion potential to have been overlooked. Foremost is the loss of land and the encroachment by one of the biggest food cartels in the world on our land. The people do not want it. How can it be stopped? As well, On the CBC News on October 14th there was a report that the multinationals, Archer Daniels Midland and Copeland, are taking over the Canadian prairie grain business. The Canadian government under former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney changed the regulations of the grain industry so that it would open the door for the big corporations to step into Canada and take over the industry. Brian Mulroney and Nelson Rockefeller Jr., among others, are on the Board of Directors of ADM. Kahnawake Mohawk Territory is located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River right across from Montreal. The St. Lawrence Seaway, a railroad and a major highway run through the territory. The majority of Mohawks are opposed to the project, but construction is to begin on November 11th 1997. The multinationals have targeted places where they could put their grin elevators right across Canada. Kahnawake appears to be the site of ADM's grain elevators in the East. Out West they are working around the clock to build elevators across the praries. In the past, grain elevators were owned by the farmers' coops which were set up in the early 1930's to stop private industries from trying to control the prices. With the new regulations the multinationals are once again privately owning the grain and setting the prices, as they did in the 1930's. The United States is coming to Canada, setting the prices and starving the Canadian farmers out of business. The multinationals will be buying up the farmland and will control the buying and selling of the grain. The U.S. presently does not need to sell grain and will use Canada as a storage place and then sell when they decide. In other words, the multinationals will buy up the grains, fix the prices, store the grain in Canada and then decide where and when to sell to the world and for how much! According to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 the Minister of Indian Affairs and the Canadian government have a fiduciary responsibility in regards to lands and monies set aside for Indigenous Nations. I have asked the Minister to intervene in favour of the Mohawks Nations regarding the mismanagement of land in Kahnawake as there are grain elevators being build on Indigenous land without proper environmental assessments. Also there is mismanagement of funds allocated to the Kahnawake band council, an arm of the Canadian government, and I am asking the Minister of intervene and ensure that proper environmental assessments take place before any action is taken. I am urging that the Minister subject the Kahnawake band council to a forensic audit without delay. We need information on the environmental impact and how to stop this multinational from setting up on our land. Any assistance you can provide is greatly appreciated. Kahn-Tineta Horn, President, Canadian Alliance in Solidarity With Native Peoples 514-635-8696 416-972-1573 email: mohawkns@cyberglobe.net casnp@pathcom.com --------- "RE: Anglican Residential Schools" --------- Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 00:25:35 -0800 From: SISIS@envirolink.org (S.I.S.I.S.) Subj: Anglican Residential Schools Sender: owner-serendipity@majordomo.pobox.com Precedence: bulk Reply-To: serendipity@listbox.com Status: R :-:-:-:S.I.S.I.S. Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty:-:-:-: [Please note: The following mainstream news article may contain biased or distorted information and may be missing pertinent facts and/or context. It is provided for reference only. -- S.I.S.I.S.] CHURCH, DIOCESE FIGHT ABUSE LAWSUITS: GOVERNMENT RAN SCHOOLS, CHURCH SAYS Anglican Journal, Vol. 123, No. 8, October 1997 Leanne Larmondin Staff Writer - Toronto Controversy over church-run schools could erupt again as the Anglican Church of Canada defends itself against two potentially costly lawsuits by former students - one in British Columbia, the other in Ontario. The suits are the first filed against the church because of its connection with residential schools. In 1993, the church apologized for the detrimental effects of its role in residential schools. But it is fighting these lawsuits because it says the federal government, not the church, ran the two institutions, St George's Residence in Lytton, BC, and Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ont. "The MSCC (Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada) ran several residential schools," said Archdeacon Jim Boyles, general secretary of the national church, "but at no time did it operate Mohawk or Lytton." The Diocese of Cariboo could face a financial crunch if a lawsuit launched by Floyd Mowatt is successful. One of 10 financially assisted member dioceses of the Council of the North, it has just eight self-supporting parishes. Mr. Mowatt, 37, who lived at St. George's Residence from 1965 to 1977, is suing the church, the Diocese of Cariboo, the federal Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs and Derek Clarke, a former dormitory supervisor at St. George's, for an unspecified amount in damages. The former student alleges Mr. Clarke sexually assaulted him on a number of occasions between 1965 and 1970. He is holding the national church, the diocese and the federal minister responsible because the government contracted the church to run the school, which in turn hired Mr. Clarke. Mr. Mowatt also claims the church failed to investigate Mr. Clarke's background. Mr. Clarke was convicted of sexual assault in 1988. Specified by Mr. Mowatt are that he suffered "serious, lasting and permanent personal injuries, including nervous shock, anxiety, depression, emotional trauma, personality change" and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Archdeacon Boyles said the church's defence will be the same in both cases: that the schools were owned and operated by the federal Department of Indian Affairs and an entity known as the New England Company - not the Anglican Church. (The New England Company was founded by Oliver Cromwell in 1649 to take Christianity to the Native people of the British colonies.) Cariboo diocese is joining the national church in its defence of the Lytton case, but the diocesan bishop, Jim Cruikshank, said lawyers have asked him not to comment on the case. (In 1993, Bishop Cruikshank delivered a personal and diocesan apology to Native people for residential schools.) The Lytton school, said Arch deacon Boyles, was owned and operated by Indian Affairs during the 1960s and '70s, the period in question for the lawsuit. The New England Company owned and ran it until the 1920s, when it was agreed that it would be operated by the government with an Anglican cleric as principal and Anglican doctrine in the curriculum. A hearing requested by the church was scheduled late last month in a Lytton courthouse to determine whether the lawsuit should continue to be directed at the national church and diocese. Meanwhile, in Brantford, Ont., a similar lawsuit brought against the church and the Minister of Indian Affairs has not progressed as far. In a statement of claim, complainant Frederick Taylor is seeking damages of $20 million. Born in 1945, Mr. Taylor says he was removed in 1953 "without the ...knowledge of his parents" from his home on Mud Lake Reserve, near Peterborough, to the Mohawk Institute at Brantford. There, he said, he was "repeatedly physically, sexually and emotionally assaulted" by at least three teachers or other officers of the school, and subjected to punishment and a "regime of discipline and control which had as its purpose the denial to him of his race, language, religion and culture." Like Lytton, the Mohawk Institute was operated by the New England Company until the early 1900s, when it entered into an agreement with the federal government. Archdeacon Boyles said the national church is exploring the possibility that its insurance might cover the lawsuits if it remains a defendant. :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: Letters to the Anglican Journal: editor@national.anglican.ca :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: S.I.S.I.S. Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty P.O. Box 8673, Victoria, "B.C." "Canada" V8X 3S2 EMAIL: SISIS@envirolink.org WWW: http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/SISmain.html SOVERNET-L is a news-only listserv concerned with indigenous sovereigntist struggles around the world. To subscribe, send "subscribe sovernet-l" in the body of an email message to For more information on sovernet-l, contact S.I.S.I.S. --------- "RE: More Lawsuits Over School Abuse" --------- Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 21:15:36 -0800 From: SISIS@envirolink.org (S.I.S.I.S.) Subj: UC Residential Schools - More Lawsuits :-:-:-:S.I.S.I.S. Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty:-:-:-: [Please note: The following mainstream news article may contain biased or distorted information and may be missing pertinent facts and/or context. It is provided for reference only. -- S.I.S.I.S.] TWO MORE ABORIGINAL MEN FILE SUIT OVER SCHOOL ABUSE Victoria Times-Colonist, Thursday, October 16, 1997, by Kim Westad, Page A1 Two more aboriginal men have filed lawsuits against the United Church, the federal government and five men for physical and sexual abuse suffered at the Alberni Indian Residential School. For Harvey Brooks, 66, it is the final chapter in dealing with abuse he suffered from 1939-1946. The retired vocational rehabilitation consultant with the Workers' Compensation Board has struggled all his life with the complicated feelings brought on by abuse. Though he went on to become a vocational teacher at Malaspina College, Brooks said Wednesday he "never lived up to my potential." He decided to file the lawsuit as a way to "finally close the book on the issue. This will be the final chapter." Gilbert Hill, 50, said in a statement of claim filed in BC Supreme Court that he, too, still feels the effects of the abuse inflicted by white supervisors at the school. Brooks and Hill are suing the men they say physically and sexually abused them, the people who hired those supervisors and teachers, and the United Church and federal government for allowing the schools to be run the way they were. Like most BC native children from the mid-1800s to the 1970s, Brooks and Hill were yanked from their homes and placed in church-run schools. Brooks, who lives in Surrey, is a member of the Lax Kw'alaams band of the Tsimshian Nation, just north of Prince Rupert. He was at the Alberni school between 1958 and 1961, and also alleges graphic physical and sexual abuse by school staff. Both men say their lives have been irreparably harmed by the abuse, the results ranging from suicide attempts to loss of knowing aboriginal culture. Along with sexual abuse, the men are suing the church for allowing mistreatment, racist ridicule and harassment, including being isolated from family and community, prohibition of using native language, and banning the practice of native religion and culture. The church and federal government - through the Department of Indian Affairs - had actual knowledge of the abuse, says the statement of claim, but did not protect the students. Instead, they kept the alleged abusers on as staff. Hill alleges he reported the abuse to a school nurse, but that the superiors at the school did not conduct an investigation. Rather, they reported the allegation to the man who was abusing him, who further beat Hill. An RCMP task force has been investigating the hundreds of complaints against church officials and school employees from BC's 15 residential schools. No criminal charges have been laid against any of the five men named in the most recent lawsuit, said Const. Gerry Peters, the lead investigator in the task force. One of the men named is dead. Criminal charges were laid in another case, against Arthur Henry Plint, 79. He was sentenced in March 1995 to 11 years in prison for 18 sexual abuse related convictions. Seventeen men are also suing Plint in civil court for abusing them. The United Church and the federal government have been named in those lawsuits as well. Plint is not one of the men being sued by Brooks and Hill. :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: Letters to the Times Colonist: timesc@interlink.bc.ca Reverend Bill Phipps, Moderator United Church of Canada email: dearborn@uccan.org :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: S.I.S.I.S. Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty P.O. Box 8673, Victoria, "B.C." "Canada" V8X 3S2 EMAIL: SISIS@envirolink.org WWW: http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/SISmain.html SOVERNET-L is a news-only listserv concerned with indigenous sovereigntist struggles around the world. To subscribe, send "subscribe sovernet-l" in the body of an email message to For more information on sovernet-l, contact S.I.S.I.S. --------- "RE: What Can We Expect from Inco" --------- Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 22:48:55 -0400 From: Larry Innes Subj: Mick Lowe: What Can We Expect from Inco (VB-IRC teach-in) Mailing List: Innu People Forum list Voisey's Bay - Innu Rights Coalition Teach-In September 13, 1997 What Can We Expect From INCO? A look at INCO's corporate, safety, and environmental record by Sudbury investigative journalist and author Mick Lowe I want to frame our discussion today by saying two things: number one, I'm not anti-mining, and I'm not anti-INCO. I am a critic of INCO. And Kevin, you're right, they don't like it very much. And I'm not anti- Voisey's Bay development. This is strictly my opinion, but I told Peter Penashue of the Innu Nation last year that what you have here is a gift from the Creator; that an ore body is a treasure. It's something that the people in Sudbury have been living on, and off of, for a century now. It's an extraordinary thing. And now the Innu and Inuit are fortunate enough to have it on their land. It just so happens that it was discovered by Europeans. And it represents both tremendous wealth, and also tremendous opportunity for those people. I come from a community that is based on the exploitation of base metals, and precious metals. And many other northern Ontario communities are the same. We built this city that you live in. The mines of northern Ontario created the Toronto Stock Exchange, places like Rosedale, the University of Toronto. Many of the amenities that you have, which we still don't have, came from the north, from the value torn from the ground by working people in Northern Ontario. So I would hope that you could respect that. The chairs you're sitting on have nickel in them. This building has a tremendous amount of nickel in it. You cannot get away from it. If you ride a mountain bike, there's nickel in the titanium alloy. If you've got change in your pocket, coinage, there is nickel strip in that. You are a consumer of nickel if you are part of this economy. I'm from western Nebraska, ranching country, and one of my uncles was a rancher, a cowboy all his life, a man of few words. My brother and I noticed one day that he didn't drink milk. And we said to him, "Uncle Slim, how come you never drink milk?" He had this cowboy's disdain for farmers, and he said, "Boys, if I drank milk, somebody might ask me to milk a cow". And so that's what I would say maybe your attitude could be toward mining. If you're going to use the products, you'd better be prepared to milk that cow. And the folks in northern Ontario do the heavy lifting, do precisely that, and have done for a hundred years. Secondly, it's very important that you understand the basic process, the cycle of mining, milling, smelting, and refining. So I've drawn this up here, moving from left to right. The mine - two kinds, basically - either open-pit or underground. The initial mine site at Voisey's Bay will be an open pit. The mine ships ore to the mill. I've written in red the various - primarily environmental - hazards that will be associated with each stage of the process. I know there will be a session next week that will deal with that process in detail. [Graphic omitted] In addition to the environmental hazards, there are also bio-hazards to the people who work there. People will die; people have already died, at Voisey's Bay. People will suffer debilitating illness which won't be readily apparent at the time of exposure. Nickel in its raw form, in its elemental form, is a carcinogen. And what this whole process is all about it, of course, is producing pure nickel. There are many associated hazards for the workers and for the people of the region. So we have the mine producing ore. Ore is shipped to the mill and it's concentrated, into kind of a slurry, usually, like a fine wet powder. These three processes will take place in northern Labrador, at Voisey's Bay, just a few miles from the Inuit community of Nain. I was lucky enough to visit there about a year ago. The concentrate will be shipped by freighter down to Newfoundland, and the rest of the process will take place at Placentia Bay, on the south coast of Newfoundland. The concentrate goes to the smelter, which produces matte. The concentrate might be say, 30% pure nickel. At each stage, of course, you have a purer and purer product. The smelter involves heat, to smelt the concentrate, and produces matte, which is then sent to the refinery, which produces finished nickel products. I had an environmentalist from St John's stay with me a year ago, and he said, "Gee Mick, I'm not sure if we want that smelter," and I said, "You want it, believe me." No jurisdiction should ship its raw resources out without the absolute maximum value added. And that is a part of the problem with INCO, historically, that Canada and Ontario have had. (And I'll explain that in just a moment.) So, INCO will refine nickel in Newfoundland. I'm sure the government there had a lot to do with that. That might not have been the company's first choice, but it's a very very good thing for the people of Newfoundland. It's the way it should be, despite the hazards. Nickel ore has been mined continuously in Sudbury for over a hundred years. It actually pre-dates the company itself. That's extraordinary longevity for any ore body, and it still remains to be seen whether Voisey's Bay will be bigger than Sudbury. At this point it's not, and I don't think it's even close. So Sudbury is the grandaddy of them all. We produce nickel, copper, iron, cobalt, gold, silver, other precious metals, and a whole variety of various other elements, from Sudbury. It is known in any geological school; any school of mining engineering will know Sudbury, will have studied Sudbury. It is a world capital of smelting and refining. There is one other company there - Falconbridge. INCO was born in March of 1902, and if ever a company was born with a silver spoon in its mouth, it was INCO. You're going to start hearing about their centennial - it comes up in the year 2002 - and I know they're already looking for somebody to write the official corporate history, and I'm sure it will be widely bandied about in the media. INCO was the creation of the United States Steel Company, which in turn had been born only the year before, in 1901. We're back now into the age of the robber barons, the gilded age, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning part of the 20th century. U.S. Steel was created out of the Carnegie Steel Company, and a number of others. It was a huge merger, engineered by John Pierpoint Morgan, who was at the centre of a financial web that included at least half of the corporate wealth in the United States at that time. It was known as a trust, a steel trust. In the battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines in 1898 or 1899, the American navy had armoured its battleships with a new kind of steel which contained a nickel alloy. And they discovered, in the battle of Manila Bay against the Spanish, that even a direct hit on the battleship wouldn't necessarily break through. So that got the world buzzing, the world of armaments, about this new, or relatively new mineral, nickel, and its possible uses in armaments. Ever since, INCO has had strong ties both to the military-industrial complex of the United States - in fact, it's a key player - but also to the U.S. Navy Department. So, the new steel bosses said, "Geez, this nickel could be worth something. Let's get in there on the ground floor." There were two companies operating in Sudbury already, which were merged, along with a couple of other mines, to create the International Nickel Company, as it was originally known. The Board of Directors read like a Who's Who of the American establishment. One of the directors, one of the key guys, was a fellow named Charles Schwab. And you'll see his name on TV all the time because there's a big investment house down in New York using his name - Charles Schwab and Associates. I don't know why, because ultimately he built two great steel companies and died, I think, a pauper. Easy come, easy go. But they're using his name, and he was on the original INCO Board. And he chose the first president of INCO, Ambroise Monell, another Carnegie guy, who was only 29 years old when he was put in charge of this company, which was based primarily in Sudbury but had a refinery in New Jersey - the new INCO. Now a debate raged for twenty years, and had done before INCO was created, and the debate was this. Canada did not refine its nickel. We smelted it, in Sudbury, in great open-bed roasters, which were terrible for the sulfur they released into the environment. [With] sulfide ore - the same thing they have at Voisey's Bay - a very large component of sulfur is in the ore, in the rock, and must be dealt with somehow or another, through engineering. It's there, and it won't go away; it cannot be transmuted. So originally it would just go into the air from these great huge open fires where they smelted the ore. The corrosive nature of the smoke from these fires was so bad that when they first put in the copper telephone lines between Copper Cliff, just outside of Sudbury where INCO has its headquarters, and the city of Sudbury, the lines kept snapping due to the corrosion. A real problem for the telephone companies; you can imagine what this would do to your lungs, your respiratory system, etc. Anyway, we smelted the matte, but for the final stage we shipped everything to the U.S. And this debate raged for twenty years, with the Canadian economic nationalists of the day saying that we should be refining our own nickel here in Canada, and getting those jobs, and getting that tax revenue, and getting that control over our production. And the company's saying, "Oh no, no. We can't do that. We couldn't make a profit. It's got to be done in the U.S. And if you make us, by legislative fiat, we'll go to New Caledonia and mine our nickel there, in the South Pacific." Sound familiar? And that's the way it stayed. Our nickel was refined in the U.S. until the Deutschland incident of 1916. We were at war; the Americans weren't. Nickel is a key component in any kind of modern weaponry. The Americans were still shipping Canadian nickel to the Germans, and a U-boat called the Deutschland was reported to have left from Baltimore with a load of Sudbury nickel, heading for Germany, where it would be made into bullets and bombs and shot right back at the Sudbury boys who were dying in Western Europe in the trenches. Well that was it. Finally, the politicians were united, the public outcry was so great. We had the great Canadian solution - we appointed a Royal Commission. Here's their book of 1916, still available at the Whitney block, I think, from the Queen's Printer. It's a wonderful volume for $25 or $30, a complete compendium of the world of nickel in 1916. It was a very good report, and guess what? They decided, oh yes, INCO better refine its nickel in Canada. So the Port Colborne Nickel Refinery was started in about 1919 or 1920 and has been operating ever since. And the company's still making money and the sky hasn't fallen in. But that's what it took to get this company to refine the nickel in Canada. And I might add that Falconbridge, which has been operating since the 1930's, still does not refine its nickel in Canada. It ships everything to Norway, in matte, by ocean-going freighter, to serve European markets. So that's one thing - I don't want to dwell entirely on what's bad about INCO - that's one thing that they finally were forced to do right. They're doing it today, and Falconbridge, their competitor, still doesn't refine the nickel in Canada, or in Sudbury. INCO from the outset, too, was represented by a firm called Sullivan & Cromwell. This is the cre'me de la cre'me of Wall Street law firms. Their address is Number One, Wall Street. They always had a member of Sullivan & Cromwell on the Board of Directors of INCO. INCO had then, by the way, become one of the Dow Jones Industrial Stocks - that basket of blue-chip American stocks that goes up and down every day, that you hear about on the Business Report. Well INCO was a Dow Jones stock. It is no longer, but it was central, absolutely central, in the American economy and the American military. Alright, the twenties. Very hard times for everybody after the war. Commodity prices fell. INCO actually closed its doors for a year or so. Everybody suffered. And in 1920 another significant thing happened. INCO acquired the Mond Nickel Company, which was British-based and had a number of mines and a smelter in Sudbury as well. This gave INCO a mid-Atlantic flavour, which it retains to this day. The INCO Board of Directors is the elite of the British, American, and Canadian establishments. That is still the case, ever since the acquisition of the Mond in 1928. In the thirties, sort of contrary to the economy generally, as Europe began to re-arm, Sudbury and INCO began to boom. There are many stories of unemployed workers hopping freight trains and going to Sudbury, standing at the gates for mass cattle calls, hoping they'd be called in to go to work at INCO. The Sullivan & Cromwell connection - to show you how well- connected INCO is, a young lawyer from Sullivan & Cromwell was appointed to the Board of INCO in 1930, and his name was John Foster Dulles. As Germany re-armed, once again we had the controversy of shipping Canadian nickel to a possible enemy, and once again, Canada was in the war before the U.S. And about '38, not wanting to go down this road again, INCO decided to embargo (voluntarily) Germany from more nickel shipments. And it is said that Dulles wept at the decision, and at the lost profits to INCO of no longer shipping Germany nickel. (You'll hear more about John Foster Dulles very shortly.) In the forties, the mining industry and heavy industry enjoyed a wave of union organization across North America in the form of the CIO, industrial union organizing. Sudbury was no exception. And in 1942 the International Union of Mining, Mill and Smelter Workers mounted a serious organizing campaign. It began to look like for the first time - there had been workers' resistance to INCO since the turn of the century, since before, in fact, INCO was created. But the union was always smashed by the company. Quite often what would happen is, once you were known to be a union supporter or a union organizer you would be fired, you would be blacklisted throughout the industry. They went into a cell structure of organizing in order to prevent this, where various cells would meet from across the Sudbury district, and people wouldn't know each other, in theory at least. But the company managed to infiltrate that too. So time and again, union initiatives were destroyed, and lots of people's lives, and livelihoods along with it. Well, in '42 Mine Mill came in, and it looked serious. So what INCO did - and we have copies of this here, and other publications, if you want to order them - they let seven shift bosses from Frood mine off the job - they were punched in so they had an alibi - and they sent them in to the union headquarters down on Durham St. in Sudbury, and almost killed two of the main union organizers in the office. One guy was kicked when he was down - I think the story goes that they dropped a typewriter, and in those days a typewriter weighed a fair bit, on his head - but neither of them was killed. The union office was completely smashed, and they both wound up in the hospital. That night, the union gathered, and printed tens of thousands of these leaflets and distributed them house to house in Sudbury as a warning to INCO that this better not happen again. And finally, in 1944 I believe it was, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Local 598 was born, in the middle of the Second World War. It was the largest union local in Canada, something like 22,000 members during the war, all people working at INCO, some of them women, by the way, for the first time. So finally we had a union in the Sudbury district. After the war, the fifties. The Cold War begins. And John Foster Dulles was still on the INCO Board in the forties. In '52 Eisenhower appoints him Secretary of State, and Dulles helps to engineer the Guatemalan coup, against the progressive government in Guatemala. And his brother Allen, who was a founder of the CIA, was also on the INCO Board of Directors, before their appointments to government. In the fifties INCO enjoyed a virtual - not a complete monopoly over the nickel in the world - but a significant enough market share that it was the price-setter for this commodity in the world. And Canada was then, and is, the largest producer of nickel. Nineteen fifty-eight was a very important year. The Cold War was at its height. And the Mine Mill union was hounded out of the house of Labour for alleged Communist leadership and Communist leanings. In '58 there was a bit of a recession, but in spite of that Local 598 went on its first strike. It was over about four months, and it was terribly vitriolic. It was a defeat, although a lot of the old Mine Mill-ers don't like to admit that. And as it turned out, it mortally weakened the union. Because the solution to Mine Mill, in the Canadian labour movement, was to bring in the United Steelworkers to smash Mine Mill. The Steelworkers were a relatively conservative, U.S.-based, state-department backed union. So the raids, as we call them, began in Sudbury in the early sixties. And it was a virtual civil war on the streets of Sudbury. Mine Mill supporters fought with Steelworker supporters; brother turned against brother, father against son. Priests of the Catholic Church would rail from the pulpit about the forces of Communism and the evils of Mine Mill. I know people who walked out of their church, the Roman Catholic church, on a Sunday in the middle of a sermon, and have not gone back since. It was that kind of bitterness. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on the media. There were bombings, no one was ever killed. There were full-blown riots - it's probably a miracle no one was ever killed - and in the end the United Steelworkers prevailed and took over representing the workers at INCO, in 1962. Mine Mill, however, remained at Falconbridge. Let's move into the sixties. The war in Vietnam was happening. War is always good for the nickel business. During the Falklands War I remember sitting with a bunch of INCO workers watching TV, and the Argentineans were sinking a British boat, and the British were sinking an Argentinean battleship, and my friends at INCO were saying, "Oh, geez, if the Argentineans could only sink one of those big British aircraft carriers, that'd be just great." It is said that there is a ton of nickel in every B-52 bomber. And a lot of nickel in those bombs that were being dropped on the Vietnamese. So INCO boomed, Sudbury boomed, it was a great investment. Also INCO expanded from its Sudbury base into Thompson, Manitoba and formed another division, Manitoba Division, and that was the beginning of INCO's breaking outward, and also the beginning, in a way, of the end of Sudbury's monopoly. The environmental record reached its worst during the sixties as well. The Copper Cliff smelter of INCO - the stacks there, not the Super-stack we have now - put out something like 3600 tonnes of sulfur dioxide per day in smelting ore. They were the largest single source of sulfur dioxide emissions in the world. That one smelter accounted for 4% of the whole world's SO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide is a gas, a very noxious gas, that is a big contributor to acid rain, as environmentalists were to learn shortly in the seventies. And of course it became a global issue. I moved to Sudbury in 1974 and was immediately enamored with the place, and its importance in the American overall scheme of things. I was a draft dodger and quite happy to get back at Uncle Sam in any way I could. And I think one of the reasons Mine Mill was destroyed was because you had this militant, strong left-wing union sitting astride a material that has been described as the most strategic single mineral for making war that there is - nickel. And the U.S. Defence Department absolutely had to have a secure supply of nickel during the Cold War. I think that's one of the reasons Mine Mill was destroyed. In '74 when I moved there, there were 14, 000 unionized workers at INCO. The company made $300 million plus in profits - that's Canadian dollars - in 1974. That is, each worker produced the same amount that he or she received in wages, in profit, if you can imagine. It was a high water mark for the company. That year too INCO broke new ground by hiring women to work in production and maintenance. They had done so during the Second World War, but of course when the men returned from the fighting, as in so many other industries, INCO sent the women home. But now finally, they were beginning to hire women, under the expansion that was going on, and they were breaking this gender boundary long before most other mining companies. Falconbridge, to this day, has not a single woman working in production and maintenance, out of their 1500 workers. Every one is a man. At least at INCO - and believe you me, mining is a very male industry, from the get go, it's a very tough, macho world - INCO brought these women in, and they're still there. The hardier souls now have twenty years' seniority. But it was a difficult thing to do. It's something that is to INCO's credit for doing. They certainly didn't have to do it. Also in the mid-70's the company repatriated its headquarters - which had always been on Wall Street, in New York, even though the base of operations was in Canada - to Bay Street. So the world headquarters of INCO are in Toronto. And they will tell you they're a Canadian company. Well, it depends on how you define it. A majority of shares held in Canada? Maybe. Are the larger central shareholders Canadian? Maybe not. It's a widely held public company, and it's a classic example of a management-run company. There isn't a single block of shareholders who call the shots at INCO; the managers really seem to run the company, answerable, of course, to the Board of Directors. But that was a symbolic gesture that INCO made. Probably more than symbolic. Nineteen seventy-eight was a turning point. That was the year of the INCO strike. It began in the fall, and it went until June of '79. It was the longest strike, in terms of person-days off, in the history of Canadian labour. The start of any strike at INCO is like a visit to hell. There are picket lines at every plant gate, and the guys are probably drinking beer, and have probably torn up everything they can find that will burn and have started a bonfire. The beer is flowing pretty good, and anything that moves inside the fences is fair game for a brick or an empty beer bottle or whatever. The bosses are scurrying around in their trucks, trying to police the perimeter. And you've got guys just having a good old time and letting off a lot of the steam they feel from working for all these years at that place. There was a hit tune that year at INCO; it was called Take this Job and Shove it! by Johnny Paycheck. And there was a motto for this strike, "Out 'til the grass is green." And when you say that in Sudbury in September, you're talking about 6 or 7 months. There was just one problem. There was a 270 million pound stockpile [of nickel] at that time. Everyone from the leader of the Steelworker's union, to Stephen Lewis, then Leader of the NDP said, "These Sudbury workers must be suicidal. They're going to be out all winter." And that was sure the way it started. It was a titanic, , epical struggle that cost virtually every penny in savings that every worker had, and that wreaked tremendous hardship in the community. But it made a huge difference to the company, and to the community in the long- run. One of the things that happened was that INCO took a tremendous beating in the media. The media loved the story of the INCO strike. Here you had these Sudbury miners and their families, with their bare fridges, fighting this multi-national, greedy corporation that didn't care. And before that, in 1977, we had what was known as the INCO layoffs. The company is making money, and they suddenly announce, taking everyone by surprise, that they're laying off something like 1800 workers. It was such a huge controversy at this time that we were on The National three nights running. There was huge national media coverage, an outpouring over this thing, and the Ontario government actually appointed a select committee on the INCO layoffs, to look into it all. It was one of the first examples of a mass corporate downsizing by a company that was making a profit. It took everybody by surprise. Nowadays, of course, this happens every day. It's no longer the first item on the news - it doesn't even get on the national news. INCO pioneered that as well. They saw lean times coming and thought, we've got to get rid of the workers. One of the things they did too in '74, during the glory years, was that they bought a battery company down in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, called ESB, and they didn't know a thing about batteries. It seemed like a good thing at the time because there's a lot of nickel in batteries - they were nickel-carbide batteries - and the energy crisis was on, and they were happy to get into it. It looked like a sure bet, kind of a vertical integration. But it turned out to be a real bust, one of the many terrible decisions that have been made by INCO management that have cost the company, and its workforce, and Canadians, millions of dollars just in the last 25 years alone. We'll come back to ESB in a minute. The climax of the INCO strike, from the media perspective, came in May of '79. The strike had gone on all winter, and sure enough, the grass was turning green. And Canadian Business, with the full cooperation of the company, naturally - Canadian Business [being] a pretty conservative, Bay Street financial publication - devoted virtually their entire issue to INCO. It was in the national news all the time because of the strike. And the heading was - this was written by Val Ross, and is a classic piece of Canadian magazine journalism, in my opinion - The Arrogance of INCO: A Century of Power and Profit, and now, a Sea of Troubles. This devastated the company, from the senior management at First Canadian Place right on down to the shift bosses underground at the 3,000 foot level. A friend of mine was the PR guy at that time for INCO, here in Toronto, and naturally, being in public relations, you're trying to put a good spin on the corporate image, and he said that his friends at the toronto Press Club had dubbed him Titanic Tom. Because trying to get INCO a good public relations image was like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. So 1978 was a critical year. The strike was won, at tremendous cost to all concerned. And INCO began to change, because of this. They began to have a much better media policy, and presence. I moved to Sudbury, as I mentioned, in '74, and what I found there - and I wrote a documentary piece called "Hacks, Flacks, and Super-stacks" in a magazine called Content, was that they [INCO] completely controlled the Sudbury news media, not necessarily directly in the news room, but because they contributed so much in content, in advertising dollars and so on, that management naturally looked very favourably on the company, and no one dared to be critical of them publicly. And no one ever had, in the media. That began to change. They pulled back a lot of this advertising. They tried to have some kind of a proper distance from newsrooms in Sudbury and in Toronto. They launched a big sulfur dioxide abatement campaign. The Copper Cliff smelter was now almost 50 years old. They could have opened a new one at the cost of something like one billion dollars, but they didn't. What they did do was retrofit it; they cleaned up the old one. Did a pretty good job of it. They reduced the sulfur dioxide emissions by something like a magnitude of 5, I believe, from 3600 tonnes a day to 800 tonnes a day. That's still a lot of sulfur to be putting up in the air, but nonetheless, a five-fold improvement. Their safety and health record had been atrocious. In some years as many as a dozen workers would be killed. I remember one period - it's in this piece I wrote in '74 - when at just one mine three guys were killed in the span of just 3 or 4 months. They would run lost-time accidents - serious accidents that would require surgery, dressing, stitches, or even more drastic medical treatment - 6000 or 7000 lost-time accidents a year. Well, they began to change that as well on the job. Their accident frequency fell, their fatality rates fell. I think in 1982, actually, they went a whole year without killing anybody. It was the first time. I even wrote a story about it in the Globe. It was remarkable. Here they go a whole year and nobody died. That was something. So they learned the lessons of '78, that the workers and media had taught them. They're not stupid people. Don't ever underestimate your adversary. So by the 1980's do we have a kinder gentler INCO? If you believe their advertising. And you'll see it all the time in almost every Canadian slick glossy magazine. They'll buy a page [and write something] along the lines of "wiser or smarter for our experience" which is kind of a subtextual thing, saying "OK, our experience hasn't been very good, but we've learned from it, and now we're better". And this is the company that is now heading off to Voisey's Bay. Let me get back to ESB for a minute, in the early eighties. It had proven an unmitigated disaster. What did a bunch of nickel-mining guys - and they know their stuff about nickel mining - what do they know about running a battery company? Nothing, as it turned out. It was losing money, and in '82 they wrote the whole thing off. A $400 or $500 Million loss. The first time, I think, that INCO ever lost money in all its years. They took a major hit - I think it was the largest write-off at that time, since superseded by Olympia and York, and the Reichmann's, of course. So that was one of a number of reverses the company has endured, but it is so rich. And it has - I would like to think that the workers in Sudbury are so productive - that it can take a lot of hits and still keep on ticking. The other thing that happened, I'm sorry to say, was that the Steelworkers Local 6500, which had been a militant force in Canadian labour, became very quiet. And, not to put too fine a point on it, could be said to have climbed into bed with the company. And that sort of opposition within the community to INCO diminished, and that media fight that was going on, that kind of dialogue began to cease. So INCO sort of stepped into the shadows a bit. It wasn't in the news, and that's the way they like it. And the money kept rolling in. INCO, of course, is global. And in the '70's they decided to leave Canada for the first time, and they went into Guatemala, with a company called Exmibol, and Indonesia, at a place called Soroako, where they started PT Indonesia. These are wholly-owned - I think in Guatemala there's a fifty-fifty deal - they are wholly-owned subsidiaries, sometimes they have partners, and its a similar structure to what we have now in Voisey's Bay with Voisey's Bay Nickel Co. (VBN Ltd.), which is a wholly- owned INCO subsidiary. Guatemala, too, turned out to be a bust. These were different kinds of ores; they're laterites. They're on the surface, like Voisey's Bay, so they're cheaper to mine, but they're energy-intensive to smelt. The oil crisis came in 1974 and the cost of oil to fuel the smelter, to smelt or refine the laterites ore went way up - one of the cost variables, which may also be a factor in Voisey's Bay - and they couldn't make money. So Exmibol was closed and it remains closed. Indonesia, on the other hand, is open. It is expanding as we speak. It has turned out to be very profitable. I don't think I have to tell you that both countries have some of the most oppressive and repressive regimes in the world, and the company is able to deal very very nicely with these generals and these ruffians that run these places. And they will tell you, in Indonesia, that they've built a whole community. They have kind of a model city that didn't exist before - 20,000 people I think are clustered around their operation there. It has schools, it has hospitals, it has all sorts of amenities that are denied to peasants in the Third World, thanks to INCO. And they solved the energy question by generating their own hydro-electric power with big power dams. So, Indonesia has turned out to be a very good deal. Guatemala, another hundreds of millions of dollars' fiasco, and a write-off. So this is the company, then, that the people of Labrador & Newfoundland find coming into their backyard. The people there, I found out on my trip last year, have absolutely no experience with mining and milling and smelting and refining, not a lot of experience - it's true of both the native and the non-native population maybe - with industrial production and development. And so they're a bit baffled. And INCO is performing like its old self in these ways. I'll tell you a couple of stories. One, they go into Newfoundland and Labrador and hire the best brains money can buy. There's a guy who's Vice-President of Corporate Affairs, I think his name is Rick Gill. Vice- President of VBN Ltd., that is. He was one of the top PR guys in St. John's, Newfoundland. He's been hired by INCO to be one of their senior executives there. Well Rick and the boys fly into Nain, Labrador, the nearest settlement to the mine site itself, an Inuit community. And one of the things they do is buy sculptures, Inuit sculptures from a local sculptor, who happens to be opposed to the development, by the way. And they crate it up, and they pay thousands of dollars for this, and they put it on their airplanes and bring it back to St. John's or whatever. They spend a quarter of a million dollars supporting an art show of Inuit, Labrador and Newfoundland art, endowing the arts. There's a Winter Games held in Labrador. Well, INCO's giving a quarter of a million dollars to that too. And suddenly in your local media you begin to see pictures of Rick Gill giving a big nickel- plated cheque to the community sponsor of the Newfoundland and Labrador Winter Games. Classic, standard INCO practice. It's been going on in Sudbury and other places around the world since Day One. You can see it as a public-spirited corporation - and the company has endowed millions of dollars into hospitals and infrastructure in Sudbury - or you could see it as a company that could be paying more in tax, maybe if it had to, and we could be deriving these benefits through the tax structure, instead of at corporate whim. You can take your pick. But a lot of people are taken in, naturally, and a lot of people, when they need money to support some public endeavour, immediately, where do you go? You go to this rich company with deep pockets and cash on hand, and you ask for a donation, and quite likely, you get it. So that is, in a nutshell, the company that we're up against, whether in Sudbury or Voisey's Bay. Now I'd like to take a question or two before we take a break. And one of the things I'd like to do, while we're all here, is talk concretely about how we can organize to deal with Voisey's Bay, both to support the Innu and the Inuit, and the people of Newfoundland as well, in this looming struggle that they're about to start fighting, but also to bring the people of Sudbury, and Toronto, and Newfoundland and Labrador together more. We have this wealth of experience in dealing with this monster. And we've documented it. This is just a tiny fraction of the books that I have on my shelf about the nickel industry, INCO, the history of organized labour in Sudbury, and so on. So we need to exchange, we need to communicate, and ideally, we need to get people from here to Labrador, people from Labrador to Sudbury, people from Sudbury to Toronto. And I'd be interested in talking about ways that we might do that. Anyway, that's the short short corporate history of INCO. VB-IRC would like to thank the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (Toronto and York chapters) for co-sponsoring these teach-ins. --------- "RE: Crow Coal Tax Case" --------- Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 20:12:43 -0400 From: Sonja Keohane Subj: High court will rule on Crow coal tax case UUCP email Hello all, It is incredible that this has remained unresolved for twenty years, great court system we have here, it seems that it successfully keeps anything from being decided. High court will rule on Crow coal tax case By LORNA THACKERAY Of The Gazette Staff The Billings Gazette The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide whether Montana and Big Horn County must pay the Crow Tribe $58 million in taxes illegally collected on coal owned by the Crow Tribe. Outcome of the case could actually cost the state hundreds of millions more in interest on coal severance and gross proceeds taxes collected between 1975 and 1983. The coal was mined on the Ceded Strip adjacent to the reservation by Westmoreland Resources. Westmoreland, the only company mining Crow-owned coal, paid $46.8million to the state and another $11.4 million to Big Horn County during that eight-year period. Earlier in the history of the 20-year-old case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those taxes were an illegal infringement on the tribe's sovereignty. The issue the Supreme Court will hear this session is Montana's contention that it should not have to pay the tribe since the taxes were actually collected not from the Crow, but from Westmoreland. The state appealed from a 1996 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that ordered the state and Big Horn County to reimburse the tribe. The appeals court also remanded the issue of whether the state and county should pay interest on the illegally collected taxes back to the Montana federal court. Tribal attorney Robert Pelcyger reached Tuesday at his office in Boulder, Colo., said that he will argue that in collecting the tax it was the tribes' rights, not Westmoreland's, that were violated. "It was the Crow Tribe that is the wronged party here,'' Pelcyger said. "It was the Crow Tribe that was harmed by the taxes.'' Westmoreland would have paid the taxes to the tribe if it hadn't had to pay the state, he said. Pelcyger also said that the 9th Circuit in its 1996 decision had noted that the state had collected four times as much in taxes on Crow coal as the tribe had received in royalties. He will fly to Montana today to discuss the case with tribal Chairman Clara Nomee. The state now has 45 days to file additional briefs in the case. Then the tribe and the United States, which joined the tribe in its efforts to collect back taxes, have 30 days to respond. Pelcyger said he expects the case to be set for oral arguments in either February or March. A decision will probably be made before the court recesses at the end of June, he said. --------- "RE: Crazy Horse Malt Liquor Case" --------- Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 22:08:53 -0700 (PDT) From: CHDPMN@aol.com Subj: CHDP: Summary & Update SUMMARY AND UPDATE The Original CRAZY HORSE MALT LIQUOR Case In the ROSEBUD SIOUX TRIBAL COURT Jurisdiction on Appeal To the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals HORNELL BREWING CO., INC., D/B/A, FEROLITO, VULTAGGIO & SONS; THE G. HEILEMAN BREWING CO., INC., AND JOHN FEROLITO AND DON VULTAGGIO, INDIVIDUALLY, PLAINTIFFS/APPELLEES, VS. THE ROSEBUD SIOUX TRIBAL COURT; STANLEY WHITING, PRO-TEM TRIBUNAL JUDGE; SETH H. BIG CROW, SR. AS ADMINISTRATOR OF THE ESTATE OF TASUNKE WITKO, A.K.A CRAZY HORSE, ET AL., DEFENDANTS/APPELLANTS. [8 USCA No. 97-1242SDP/1243SDP//Cross Appeal No. 97-1244SDP] BACKGROUND On March 17, 1992, the makers of AriZona Iced Tea (Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons, dba Hornell Brewing Company, and the G. Heileman Brewing Company), produced a fortified alcohol beverage called: "The Original Crazy Horse Malt Liquor" that has been primarily marketed to young urban men of color. Despite some 18 months of protests by Indian Tribes, churches, activists, and a failed federal attempt prohibiting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from issuing a Certificate Of Label Approval, the Brewers expanded sales -- reportedly selling over one million cases of the malt liquor in the first year alone -- from 14 to over 40 states. Several states, including Washington, Nebraska and Minnesota, have taken action to oppose the use of this patently offensive label within their borders. The Washington State Liquor Control Board's prohibition was not challenged, Nebraska sought and received voluntary compliance from liquor distributors, and Minnesota's legislation was overturned by the state's appellate court on an appeal from the Minnesota chapter of the ACLU. In The ROSEBUD SIOUX TRIBAL COURT In August 1993, the Estate of Tasunke Witko (representing descendant families from Rosebud, Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River Reservations in South Dakota) filed a complaint with affidavits in Rosebud Sioux Tribal Court entitled: IN THE MATTER OF THE ESTATE OF TASUNKE WITKO (Crazy Horse) vs. Heileman, Hornell, Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons, and John Ferolito and Don Vultaggio, citing five causes of action: 1) Defamation of the spirit under Lakota law; 2) Negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress; and violations of 3) Estate's publicity rights under Lakota law; 4) the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act; and 5) the federal Lanham Act. In October, 1993, the Brewers filed a motion to dismiss filed in Tribal Court for lack of personal and subject matter jurisdiction. After a hearing in July, 1994, in which affidavits and arguments were submitted, the Tribal Court recognized the Estate's tribal right of publicity, but held that the Tribal Court lacked jurisdiction in this matter, under Montana v. United States. In January 1995, the Estate appealed the dismissal to the Rosebud Sioux Supreme Court. In the ROSEBUD SIOUX SUPREME COURT In June 1996, the Rosebud Sioux Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling on Estate's appeal of decision on motion to dismiss. It held that the Estate had established a prima facie case for jurisdiction, so as to survive the Brewers motion to dismiss. The Tribal Supreme Court remanded the case back to the Tribal Court for a "prompt trial on the merits" acknowledging that proper jurisdiction, of course, would have to be established, perhaps in an evidentiary hearing in the Tribal Court. The Rosebud Sioux Supreme Court also denied the Estate standing to bring any claims under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, interpreting the federal law as providing standing only to the U.S. Attorney General or a federally recognized Indian tribe to bring suit under the statute. On Remand to the TRIBAL TRIAL COURT In July 1996, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe petitioned to join the lawsuit as a co-plaintiff on behalf of itself and the Estate, bringing of causes of action under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. Into FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT In July 1996, Breweries claimed to have exhausted their tribal court remedies as required under federal law, and filed for "judicial review" of the Rosebud Sioux Supreme Court decision in the Federal District Court in Pierre, SD, [CIV. No. 96-3028]. The Breweries also asked the District Court to restrain and enjoin the Tribal Court from proceeding in this matter. The Breweries sought a federal determination that the Tribal Court has NO JURISDICTION to hear the case, and a preliminary injunction, claiming likelihood of the success on the issue of lack of jurisdiction. They maintained that simply by proceeding in a Tribal Court trial they would suffer irreparable harm in the nature of unrecoverable litigation costs and unspecified constitutional harms. The Breweries filed against the Estate, the Tribal Court and the Tribal Trial Court Judge, but did not include the Rosebud Sioux Tribe which had been granted status as a co-plaintiff in the Tribal Court action. DISTRICT COURT'S ORDER: In November 1996, the Federal District Court held a telephonic hearing, and in December 1996 issued an order which: 1) Found that the Brewers did NOT EXHAUST tribal court remedies; 2) Remanded the case back to the Tribal Court for an evidentiary hearing on jurisdiction. 3) Restrained the Tribal Court from holding anything but an evidentiary hearing on jurisdiction, i.e. NO FULL TRIAL ON THE MERITS. 4) Held that Brewers had shown a LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESS on lack of subject matter jurisdiction, even though the Court erroneously failed to addressed the "valid tribal interests" of the Indian parties and never addressed the DIRECT involvement of the Rosebud Tribe as a PARTY. 5) Reasoned that subjecting the Brewers to a Tribal Court trial would amount to irreparable harm, in that, should they ultimately win in Tribal Court or have the federal court overturn a Tribal Court decision in favor of the Estate, the Brewers would likely face unrecoverable litigation costs, along with unspecified violations of their constitutional rights. ON APPEAL TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE 8TH CIRCUIT Each side has appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. ESTATE AND TRIBAL COURT Argue: The Estate and Tribal Court have appealed the Federal District Court's restraining order and injunction, arguing: First, the District Court's ruling violated the law of the 8th Circuit with regard to the proper federal/tribal procedural interface, in that once "lack of exhaustion of tribal court remedies" is found, the Federal Court must "stay its hand" and, therefore, should not restrain the Tribal Court from proceeding to a full trial on the merits. Second, even if the 8th Circuit finds no such violation, the District Court erred in granting a preliminary injunction, particularly in this case because it erroneously held there was a likelihood of success of the Brewers proving a lack of subject matter jurisdiction. The Estate and the Tribal Court maintain that the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Court has adequate, if not exclusive, subject matter jurisdiction in a case involving the descent and appropriation of cultural property rights belonging to an Indian person's estate located on an Indian Reservation. Finally, the District Court erroneously held that the Brewers would be irreparably harmed, through supposedly unrecoverable litigation costs and unspecified violation of their Constitutional rights, by the allowance of even concurrent proceedings in Tribal Court. 1) The mere costs of litigation, even if unrecoverable, clearly do not amount to irreparable harm. 2) To date, the Breweries have simply not suffered any real or imagined violations of their constitutional rights. Further, they always would have full opportunity to seek federal review of a Tribal Court judgment as to any violation of constitutional rights prior to any enforcement action taken on a Tribal Court judgment. BREWING COMPANIES Argue: The Brewers contend that merely having gone to the Rosebud Sioux Supreme Court on the Estate's preliminary procedural appeal of the Brewers' motion to dismiss means that their tribal court remedies have been exhausted. They insist that the Federal District Court was wrong in finding that Tribal Court remedies were not exhausted. Further, the Brewers contend that under State v. A-1 Contractors (a U.S. Supreme Court decision denying tribal court jurisdiction to hear a civil tort claims case between two non-Indian parties arising from an automobile accident on a state highway in a reservation), that the Rosebud Tribal Court has no jurisdiction over them or their appropriation of intangible Indian property rights and thus it should be barred from ever hearing this case. ROSEBUD SIOUX TRIBE Files as Amicus: The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, which is a co-plaintiff in the Tribal Court action but has been ignored by the Brewers in their federal lawsuit, has filed as an Amicus in the 8th Circuit appeal. The Tribe argues the proper reach of Montana v. U.S. and underscores both the valid tribal interests and adequate subject matter jurisdiction in this case under both tribal law and federal law. ORAL ARGUMENT in the 8TH CIRCUIT Set for November 17th The issues have been fully briefed and oral argument is presently set for November 17th in St. Paul, MN. The argument is open to the public at the Federal Court House in St. Paul, Minnesota. For More Information Contact: Phyllis Tousey Frederick or Yolanda Maya Crazy Horse Defense Project (CHDP) c/o Neighborhood Justice Center Phone: 612-222-4703 500 Laurel Avenue FAX: 612-222-0931 St. Paul, MN 55102 e-mail: CHDP MN@aol.com --------- "RE: Apache Elders Applaud Sacred Runners" --------- Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 14:05:57 -0400 (EDT) From: FirehairSS@aol.com Subj: Mt.Graham Sacred Runners/Applauded by Apache Elders UUCP email News release: Oct. 13, 1997 APACHE ELDERS APPLAUD MT. GRAHAM SACRED RUNNERS San Carlos, AZ-- More than a dozen Apache Elders were joined by members of the San Carlos Apache Nation and other nations to thank Indian and non-Indian runners of the Mt. Graham Sacred Run on October 11th. The 66-mile run began from the traditional dancing grounds from Calva adjacent to Bylas, one of the four districts of the San Carlos Apache Reservation and up onto Dzil Nchaa Si An (Mt. Graham). The run was in protest of the University of Arizona, the Vatican, Italian and German and Ohio State University telescope desecration of this sacred Apache mountain coupled with the Aug. 30 arrest by UA officials of Wendsler Nosie, a tribal member, for criminal trespass after having gone there to pray. Mr. Nosie's trial has been set for Oct. 31 at 1:30 pm in the Graham County Courthouse in Safford, Arizona. The run was organized by Wendsler, Carlos and Tommy Nosie of the Apaches for Cultural Preservation. It was timed to coincide with the Student Environmental Action Coalition's (SEAC) demonstration protesting Columbus Day on the UA campus on Oct. 13. The Apaches ran side-by-side with Indian runners from various other nations and SEAC from throughout the United States in a show of solidarity in opposition to the Mt. Graham telescopes. Indian nations represented included Navajo, Yaqui, Lakota, Klamath, Modoc, Yahoo Band of Snake, Ojibwe, Pima, Gila River, Chippewa with SEAC students hailing from more than a dozen U.S. states. At 5:30 am, Tommy Nosie Sr. started the run by carrying the sacred object which had been blessed by Apache spiritual leaders. The Elders welcomes and thanked the runners for showing their concern for protecting Apache traditions. Tears rolled down the faces of the youth as a stirring prayer was given by Ruth Rogers. A moment of silence was provided for the late Perre Harney, an Elder medicine man who had been present on the mountain in the previous years. Wendsler Nosie asked for respect for the wisdom of their Elders and for Apache cultural values. He thanked the Indian and non- Indian runners who were standing side-by-side to help protect the Apache traditions under attack by the University of Arizona. "This is home to our Apache Mountain Spirit Dancers and it is a place that is sacred to my people. I prayed for the well being of my family, especially for my daughter who is reaching her puberty age. I have a responsibility to prepare her for a traditional ceremony. I believe in my right to freely exercise my religion and just because I did, I was punished by the U of A. Since when do people have to ask permission from UA to pray to our Creator?", said Nosie. Vernon Foster, a member of the Grand Council of the American Indian Movement and AIM's Southwest Regional Director, pointed out, "I thought it was an excellent gathering. I was very happy to see the Elders. They are a strong symbol of strength. We have put our bows and arrows down, now our weapon is our minds, our intellect, what we learn and how we apply it. We need allies not enemies." Other Elders present on Mt. Graham included Wheeler Grimes, Diane Grimes, Audrey Johnson, Betty Harney, Tessie Mull, Pauline McIntosh, Ruth Rogers, Lenora Robertson and Mary Anderson. By 3:15 pm, the sacred object was carried in by runner Joel Thomas, a Navajo from Prescott, Arizona, who said, "I heard about the run through the media and some friends, and I wanted to be part of it so I could contribute by prayers to my brothers, especially Wendsler Nosie, as he prepares for trial." Thomas was joined in by Indian and non-Indian runners who were greeted by a cheering circle of Elders. Wendsler Nosie concluded, "The statute which I was charged with states that I cannot go into any property with trespassing signs. My purpose on Dzil Nchaa Si An was to pray. I have a right to freely speak to God and I have a right to freely exercise my religious beliefs. Like my ancestors, many of our prayers have been said on Mt. Graham. The violation cited against me was not proper and the U.S. Constitution assures me protection to freely practice my right of religious freedom as I did on Dzil Nchaa Si An on Aug. 30." For further info: >> Sandra Rambler 520 475-2361 (San Carlos Apache Tribal Office) --------- "RE: White House Fellowship Program" --------- Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 09:58:27 -0600 From: "Cade, Susan, , SAM-GNFB" Subj: Text file for the White House Fellowship Program Mailing List: AISESnet General List THE WHITE HOUSE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM 1. PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THE WORD TO INDIVIDUALS INTERESTED IN APPLYING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM. 2. PLEASE RUN THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE TO PUBLICIZE THIS PROGRAM FOR THE NEXT MONTH. DID YOU KNOW ALL U.S. CITIZENS (EXCEPT FEDERALLY EMPLOYED CIVILIANS) ARE ELIGIBLE TO APPLY FOR THE WHITE HOUSE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM? THERE ARE NO RESTRICTIONS FOR AGE, SEX, RACE, GRADE OR PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS. THIS PROGRAM SEEKS TO DRAW EXCEPTIONALLY PROMISING PEOPLE FROM THROUGHOUT THE NATION, PROVIDING THEM FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE IN THE PROCESS OF GOVERNING OUR NATION. ANNUALLY, 11 TO 19 U.S. CITIZENS ARE SELECTED TO WORK FULL- TIME FOR 1 YEAR AS SPECIAL ASSISTANTS TO SENIOR EXECUTIVES IN CABINET- LEVEL AGENCIES OR IN THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE ENCOURAGED TO APPLY AS THIS PROGRAM DOES ENHANCE EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LOCAL MPF CUSTOMER SERVICE ELEMENT FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. APPLICATIONS MAY BE OBTAINED BY WRITING THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON WHITE HOUSE FELLOWS, 712 JACKSON STREET NW, WASHINGTON DC 20006 OR BY CALLING (202)395-4522. ALSO, THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION HAS A WEBSITE WHERE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CAN BE OBTAINED. INTERESTED CITIZENS MAY ACCESS THIS INFORMATION AT: HTTP://WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/WH-FELLOWS/. COMPLETED APPLICATIONS MUST BE RETURNED TO THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION POSTMARKED NOT LATER THAN 15 NOV 97, THE APPLICATION DEADLINE. THE SELECTION PROCESS IS VERY COMPETITIVE. CANDIDATES ARE JUDGED ON THE BASIS OF PROFESSIONAL, ACADEMIC, ATHLETIC, ARTISTIC AND OTHER ACCOMPLISHMENTS, AND ON THEIR DEMONSTRATED INTEREST IN PUBLIC SERVICE. THE PROCESS IS ALSO LENGTHY. REGIONAL FINALISTS WILL BE SELECTED IN FEB 98 WITH REGIONAL INTERVIEWS SCHEDULED DURING MAR 98 IN CITIES THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES. FROM THE INTERVIEWS, NATIONAL FINALISTS WILL BE SELECTED AND NOTIFIED. NOTIFICATION FROM THE COMMISSION WILL BE BY LETTER IN APR 98 WITH NATIONAL INTERVIEWS FOLLOWING IN JUN 98. THE FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF SELECTION AS A WHITE HOUSE FELLOW WILL BE MADE BY THE PRESIDENT IN JUN 98. THOSE SELECTED AS WHITE HOUSE FELLOWS WILL BEGIN THEIR TOUR 1 SEP 98 WITH COMPLETION ON 31 AUG 99. --------- "RE: Trouble Behind These Walls" --------- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 15:20:05 GMT From: stockton@ohsu.edu (Tanya White Cloud) Subj: Native Prisoners UUCP email I am reprinting an article written by Strongbow Lone Eagle who is in a Connecticut prison. Replies may be sent to my e-mail address and will be forwarded to LoneEagle. Postings in reply will also be printed and forwarded to him. TROUBLE BEHIND THESE WALLS: THE STATE OF NATIVE SPIRITUALITY IN CONNECTICUT PRISONS. WRITTEN BY STRONGBOW LONE EAGLE I must first begin by saying that one of the Elders who takes time to conduct our services here in Connecticut, helped to turn my life around. Grandfather, if you are reading this, I thank you with all my heart for your strength and wisdom. The reason I write this article, is because, if I don't who will? As Mary Crow Dog said it in Lakota Woman, "You cannot live forever off the deeds of Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse. You can't wear their eagle feathers, freeload off their legends. You have to make your own legends now." With that, let's look at the hard facts: one, I am a prisoner. Two, it's my fault that I am in Prison. Three, the Elders have lives also. The fact remains, the Creator would not have given the Elders the strength, wisdom and visions if He believed that the Elders would not share the knowledge with ALL of the Native People. I read many Native periodicals with articles crying out for us as Native People to come together to protect our culture for our future generations. These are the articles that inspire me, to keep me going. Then as it usually turns out; not very many people, if anyone, answers these cries. What are these tribes who have come into a lot of green frog skins doing to protect our culture? Mashantuckets do you hear me? On several occasions our circle wrote to this tribe for assistance in conducting our services, never a reply. Who am I, Joe Convict to speak against anyone? Well it seems as though, no one else will! So for you brothers and sisters who tell writers from Native periodicals, "We need to come together to protect our culture for our future generations." and don't attend to do anything to protect our culture - SHUT UP! Now to the problem with Connecticut prisons. The big problem is that there are not enough Elders coming in to conduct our services, there is only one prayer circle and one Sweat Lodge Ceremony a month, we can only pray with tobacco once a day, there is no studies program, we cannot possess a Sacred Pipe, no Native festivals are celebrated and then there is constant harassment by the correctional employees. Let's not forget the administration here also allows non-Natives, "New Agers," to attend our services without a Native sponsor. To my knowledge, the Elders do not have a problem with these New Agers attending our services. This is a very far cry from the prisons in Arizona, New Mexico, etc.... As it was so well written in an article titled "A Theft of Spirit" in Akwesasne Notes new series volume 2 no. 2 - "From high-priced Sweat Lodges to imitation rituals, Native American Spirituality is being debased and exploited say Indian activists. And the culprit, they say, is, "The New Age Movement." Well, these New Agers (or wannabes) here only come to our services to get out of their cells, to get/steal tobacco and to other wise "Hang out." The administration does nothing to curtail this. So we desperately need all our Elders to help us stop these New Agers from disrupting our services. I have done my part, by filing a law suit. I have suffered the repercussions-transfers, beating, etc.... Now if there were more coming in and telling the administration what needs to be changed, corrected - we wouldn't have so many problems. This article is not intended to disrespect the Elders of this area. It is intended to *wake them up*! If they are so eager to protect our culture for our future generations they must first begin with this one. It should must be known that at least eighty percent of the Native warriors are in prisons. The other twenty percent are concentrated on tribal affairs. Why are not the "others" helping out? You don't need to be a warrior to share your strength and wisdom with your downed brothers and sisters. Then there are the people in charge of the Native periodicals (on Indian Land and Akwesasne Notes are excluded.) Why do you have such a hard time printing letters from prisoners seeking aid with lawsuits and printing poems and essays? If you cannot donate a issue, write them and tell them. Why can't you set up programs that will give the Native convict a discount? Of course, this will have to be watched for these New Agers attempting to cut-in. I am not looking for a handout, but for some assistance. How many Native periodicals will have a problem printing this? Too long? Too controversial? I'll let you know who prints it and who don't. In closing, I ask that those who are truly willing to protect our culture for future generations please help! For those who just speak to hear themselves talk, *SHUT UP* ! Come to the prisons, be a pen-pal, donate literature. Don't become a Uncle Tomahawk. --------- "RE: Native Prisoner" --------- Date: Thu, 23 Oct 97 08:00 -0500 From: Janet Smith (evestar@juno.com) Subj: Contacting those in the Ironhouse UUCP email Below is this week's correspondence. My thanks to Sylvia for giving us NI Sequoyah's story: My name is Sylvia Willis and I am writing you on behalf of my friend NI Sequoyah who is a death row prisoner in San Quentin, CA. I told him of the Native American Prisoner Pen Pal List website, and he asked that I forward his address to be included in the list. NI Sequoyah # H27800 San Quentin State Prison San Quentin, CA 94974 DOB: 1/03/52 Ancestry: Cherokee If you are interested, you can read a little about NI in "Frontiers of Justice: Volume I: The Death Penalty." On pages 116-17 Catholic priest and author Matthew Regan explains why he thinks NI is innocent of the crimes with which he is charged and is actually a political prisoner. However, please understand that NI's only intention in being included in your list is the opportunity to correspond with more people out of prison. He is a very articulate and sensitive man who enjoys talking about a great many subjects. If you have any questions, please email me at sylvia@mitigate.com or call me collect at 415 621 8860. Thank you. -------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't make distinctions here between those who may be imprisoned for real crimes and those who may have been guilty of nothing more than being Indian. When there's suspicion that a conviction had more to do with politics than real guilt, though, I encourage readers to follow their consciences in deciding whether to investigate and lend support. I do encourage correspondents to be cautious when corresponding with anyone in prison. Especially be aware that some things we take for granted as a part of our ceremonies are very much contraband in the prison system. Always ask what is permitted before you send anything. In most prisons, the chaplain can be a conduit for ceremonial items a prisoner cannot receive directly. My appreciation to Thomas Sunhawk, who provided much of my current Native Prisoner pen pal list, and to Laura Brooks. I encourage readers to visit Laura's homepage for the complete list, which includes her original list, Sunhawk's list, and the list I started with from our friend River. Laura's site is at http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/9118. You'll also find good discussions there about Native prisoner religious rights and other legal issues and some great links. From Laura Brooks' website: Gillespie, Ronald K Gaisez, John Lee #214-602 #R134-316 PO Box 5500 PO Box 5500 Chillicothe, OH 45601 Chillicothe, OH 45601 Date of Birth: 2/16/57 Date of Birth: 10/24/56 Ancestry: Cherokee Ancestry: Cherokee Glover, Alan L. Garlinsky, Mike # R128-811 #199-506 PO Box 5500 PO Box 511 Chillicothe, OH 45601 Columbus, OH 43216 Date of Birth: 3/2/62 Date of Birth: 2/10/49 Ancestry: Cherokee Ancestry: Mohawk Grahm, Sherman Daniel Garnett, Steven R. BK1750 SCI Albion Box A 10745 Rt. 18 Bellefonte, PA 16830 Albion, PA 16475-0002 Date of Birth: 12/19/64 Date of Birth: 5/29/71 Grisez, John Lee Gerken, Judy Ann A134-316 #38169 HE PO Box 5500 1479 Collins Ave. Chillicothe, OH 45601 Marysville, OH 43040 Date of Birth: 10/24/56 Ancestry: Cherokee From Free the Wolverine Campaign: Wolverine (William Jones Ignace) "OJ" Pitawanakwat Political Prisoner Political Prisoner Box 4000 Box 4000 Abbotsford, BC Abbotsford, BC V2S 5X8 V2S 5X8 For more information, please contact the Free the Wolverine Campaign: Box 13-2147 Commercial Dr, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5N 4B3 Spokespeople: Splitting the Sky - Phone/Fax: (604) 543-9661 Bill Lightbown - Phone: (604) 251-4949 or see the SISIS pages at http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/gustmain.html Also we have a listing of native political prisoners around the world, at http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/links/POW.html ---------------------------------- Please especially remember - this is the "Year of Leonard". Leonard Peltier #89637-132, Box 1000, Leavenworth, KS 66048 Rally for Leonard Peltier will be held in Washington DC. Oct 21-22, 1997 Info: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee 913 842-5774 or: Leonard Peltier Freedom Committee 804 823-2845 Both Laura and I would greatly appreciate knowing about any other Native inmate needing contact. Please send correspondence to evestar@juno.com --------- "RE: A Hundred Years Ago" --------- Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 22:00:36 -0700 From: Landis Subj: A Hundred Years Ago - Week 25 Mailing List: NAT-FILM [Editorial Note: These reprints are being included in this newsletter so that you might know the mind of those who ran institutions like Carlisle.] THE INDIAN HELPER ------------------------------------ PRINTED EVERY FRIDAY --AT THE-- Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa., BY INDIAN BOYS. ---> THE INDIAN HELPER is PRINTED by Indian boys, but EDITED by The man-on-the-band-stand who is NOT an Indian. --------------------------------------------- P R I C E: --10 C E N T S A Y E A R ============================================= Entered in the P.O. at Carlisle as second class mail matter. ============================================= Address INDIAN HELPER, Carlisle, Pa. Miss M. Burgess, Manager. ============================================= Do not hesitate to take the HELPER from the Post Office for if you have not paid for it some one else has. It is paid for in advance. ============================================== VOL. XIII. FRIDAY, October 22, 1897 NUMBER 2 =============================================== PATHS --------- (Printed by Request.) The path that leads to a loaf of bread Winds through the swamps of toil, And the path that leads to a suit of clothes Goes through a flowerless soil, And the paths that lead to the loaf of bread And the suit of clothes are hard to tread. And the path that leads to a house of your own Climbs over the bowidered hills, And the path that leads to a bank account, Is swept by the blast that kills; But the men who start in the paths today In the lazy hills may go astray. In the lazy hills are trees of shade, By the dreamy brooks of sleep, And the rollicking river of pleasure laughs And gambols down the steep; But when the blasts of winter come, The brooks and the river are frozen dumb. Then woe to those in the lazy hills, When the blasts of winter moan, Who strayed from the path to a bank account And the path to a house of their own; These paths are hard in the summer heat, But in winter they lead to a snug retreat. S.W. Foss in "Yankee Blade." ================================================= WOMEN IN PLACE OF WINE ------ FRANKFORT, Ky., Oct. 7. -- The Kentucky Bankers' Association, before adjourning its annual session, unanimously adopted a resolution complimenting and endorsing the local bankers for keeping wine off the table at the annual banquet Wednesday night, saying that it was recognized as a pleasing advancement and resolving that at all the annual banquets hereafter ladies should be among the guests "as the only stimulants there." -[Ex. Don't Believe in Pledges? Some people hesitate to sign a pledge for temperance, saying that, while they believe in temperance principles, they do not believe in pledges of any kind. Now, these people show lack of business knowledge, for in most of the affairs of life pledges are required. Whenever men or women sign bank checks, they pledge themselves to pay money, and every contract to do a certain amount of work is a pledge, and so on, ad infinitum. Written pledges in business are manifold, while verbal pledges are daily, nay hourly, occurrences. The very promise to meet a friend at a certain place and hour for a walk or some social enjoyment is a pledge of good faith, and our self-honor or self-respect will lead us to keep good these promises or pledges. The women or men who fail to have stamina enough to make pledges, if only in a business way, or character enough to proudly keep them, are the ones for whom the world has little respect; not the ones who respect their own character sufficiently to take the responsibility to stand for what is honorable in business, social or temperance affairs. (See Arabic Proverb last page.) =================================================== WHAT HE WOULD HAVE SAID. -------------- When Mr. N. Konishi, of Japan, was here last week he took a hearty interest in our pupils and their work and studies. While he writes very fair English he hesitates to speak. Had he been able to speak as he felt he would have said the following, which was handed to the Man-on-the-band-stand by him: MY DEAR FRIENDS: I am very glad to see you all this evening. I had not the right understanding of the Red Men as the Geography teaches us wrong, but I saw an Indian in Delaware last summer and another lady in the school for the Deaf in Mount Airy. And it surprised me to find that both ladies had very great resemblance to us on several points. Hence I wished to visit you here, and I felt as if I had met with my brothers and cousins. You graduates will write about yourselves rightly, but not boastfully and give good warning and advice to your next generation, thus improving your civilization more and more as all others in the world do. We will not care for our complexions, but we will try constantly to improve ourselves in civilization. I trust you all are thankful to your kind Superintendent and teachers for teaching, and also our statesmen for giving you such liberal instructions and supplying such fine buildings with very wholesome place, as you are to your God every day. ======================================================================== (page 2) Vertical writing now holds sway from No. 1 to No. 9. The number of our girls who take the HELPER and pay for it is over 200. We are still waiting for that promised list from the boys' quarters. Florence Esther Allen has come to brighten the home of Mr. and Mrs. Allen of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She arrived October 4th. It will be remembered that Mrs. Allen was Miss Ida Johnson, when here. We see by the "Montanian" that Dr. Daniel is after a Bruin he lost in vicinity of St. Mary's lake during his former incumbency as agency physician. The Doctor had a fine robe on his floor here, of a bear killed by himself. A circular from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals giving hints for the dog days, is full of information and should be read by everybody. Many dogs are cruelly treated as mad when they are not mad. Letters relating to the school work of the country pupils will be going to the patrons soon. May we hope for a speedy response? All these means, help to bind school, pupils and patrons closer. All are helped and uplifted in helping each other. The boys and girls gave the Captain a most enthusiastic greeting as he mounted the platform last Saturday night at English Speaking, and after Miss Johannsdottir's address, he repaid them in an old-time speech which went to the very finger-tips of every one present. Last Thursday, Dennison Wheelock addressed a large and appreciative audience gathered in the immense Moravian Church at Bethlehem, this State. The meeting was under the auspices of the Woman's Indian Rights Association of that city. And