_ __ _____ __ _ __ ___ ____ _ __ ___ ' ) / / ') / / ) ' ) ) / ) / ' ) ) / ) / / / / / / /--/ / / / ___ / / / / ___ (_(_/ (__/ ( / (_ / (_ (___/ '__/_ / (_ (___/ ' ____ _ , ___ _ , ___ / ' ) / / ) ' ) / / ' VOLUME 14, ISSUE 019 / /-< / /--/ /-- __/_ / ) (___/ / ( (___, WOTANGING IKCHE - Lakota - Common News Wotanging Ikche and Native American News Copyright c. 1996-2006 nanews.org Aboriginal/AmerIndian Perspective about the First Nations of Turtle Island May 13, 2006 Assiniboine indiwiga/idle moon Abenaki kikas/field maker moon Valley Maidu kon-moko/seeds, fish, geese moon Lakota Canwahpeto Wi/Moon When Leaves Are Green +-------------------------------------------------------+ | Much more happens in Indian Country than is reported | | in this weekly newsletter. For daily updates & events | | go to http://www.owlstar.com/dailyheadlines.htm | +-------------------------------------------------------+ Otapi'sin Atsinikiisinaakssin -- Blackfeet -- News for All the People Ni-mah-mi-kwa-zoo-min -- Ojibwe -- We Are Talking About Ourselves Aunchemokauhettittea -- Naragansett -- Let Us Share News Kanoheda Aniyvwiya -- Cherokee -- Journal of the People O Es'te Opunvk'vmucvse -- Creek -- People's New News O o O Acimowin -- Plains Cree -- Story or Account O o O Tlaixmatiliztli -- Nahuatl -- News O o o o o O Agnutmaqan -- Listuguj Mi'kmaq -- News O o O Sho-da-ku-ye -- Teehahnahmah -- Talking Birchbark O o O Un Chota -- Susquehannic Seneca -- The People Speak O Ha-Sah-Sliltha -- Ditidaht Nation -- News of the People Ximopanolti tehuatzin, inin Mexika tlahtolli -- Nahuatl -- For you we offer these words It-hah-pe-hah Ah-num pah-le -- Chickasaw -- Together We Are Talking Dineh jii' adah' ho'nil'e'gii ba' ha' neh -- Navajo Nation -- What's Happening among The People News Okla Humma Holisso Nowat Anya -- Choctaw -- People(s) Red Newspaper Hi'a chu ah gaa -- Pima -- The stories or the talk of the People s ch mA mL tL squee Lux -- Okanogan -- News from the People Native American News -- Language of the Occupation Forces ++>If you speak a Native American language not listed above, please send us your words for "News of the People." We'd rather take up this whole page saving these few words of our hundreds of nations than present a nice clean banner in the language of the occupation forces who came here determined to replace our words with their own. email gars@nanews.org with the equivalent of "News of the People" in your tribal language along with the english translation <================<<<< >>>>================> This newsletter is produced in straight ASCII text for greatest portability across platforms. Read it with a fixed-pitch font, such as Courier, Monaco, FixedSys or CG Times. Proportional fonts will be difficult to read. <================<<<< >>>>================> This issue contains articles from www.owlstar.com; www.indianz.com; www.pechanga.net; Frostys AmerIndian, Chiapas95-En, NetRez-L, Rez_Life, and Mohawk Nation News Mailing Lists; UUCP Mail IMPORTANT!! ----------- In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, all material appearing in this newsletter is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for educational purposes. <================<<<< >>>>================> 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@speakeasy.org ++ It is archived at http://www.nanews.org <================<<<< >>>>================> +-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --+ + -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- + | As historian Patricia Nelson | | Once a language is lost, it is | | Limerick summarized in "The | | gone forever | | Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken | | * Of the 300 original Native | | Past of the American West... | | languages in North America, | | "Set the blood quantum at | | only 175 exist today. | | one-quarter, hold to it as a | | * 125 of these are no longer | | rigid definition of Indians, | | learned by children. | | let intermarriage proceed as | | * 55 are spoken by 1 to 6 elders;| | it had for centuries, and | | when they die, their language | | eventually Indians will be | | will disappear. | | defined out of existence." | | * Without action, only 20 | | "When that happens, the federal | | languages will survive the next| | government will be freed of | | 50 years. | | its persistent 'Indian problem.'"| | Source: Indigenous Language | +-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --+ | Institute | |http://www.indigenous-language.org| This issue's Quote: + -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- + =================== "I think the reason they (Navajo Leaders of the past) stood their ground is they knew who they were and they knew where they came from, what was theirs and belonged to them. That's why they didn't want to make a deal. There was no dealing to be made." "I don't see why we need to jump with fear every time New Mexico or Arizona or any of these states, or MGS or Peabody say something. Everybody starts shaking in their boots and then they say, 'OK, what else do you want?'" __ Peter MacDonald, former Navajo Nation Chairman +- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -+ | 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 +- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -+ +- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -+ | Journey | In the summer and early fall | The Bloodline | of 1998 the Treaty Unity Riders | | rode a thousand miles on horse- | For all that live and live by law | back, carrying a staff and | We Stand, we Call, We Ride | praying each step of the way. | For All that fear and fear by sight | | We Hear, we Listen, we Ride | These prayers were offered for | For all that pray and pray by strength| each of us, and that the Unity | We Feel, we Move, we Ride | of all Peoples might happen. | For all that die and die by greed | | We Hurt, we Cry, we Ride | Tatanka Cante forwarded this | For all that birth and birth by right | poem on behalf of all the Unity | We Smile, we Hold, we Ride | Riders that we might stop and | For all that need and need by heart | ask if the next words we say, the | We Came, we Went, we Rode. | next act we make is for the good | | of the People or is it from ego | Treaty Unity Riders | for self. +- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -+ O'siyo Brothers and Sister! Ontario Provincial Police attempt to force Mohawk off their ancestral lands. Police brutally attack villagers who support Marcos in Atenco. Georgia State Parks Department makes special racist rules against Indians only. Sacred Bear Butte now has a biker bar at its front door. We've come a long way, but we obviously have a long way to go. Native Peoples throughout this entire hemisphere have not given in to the jack booted occupation forces, and they cannot stand it. The effort to arrive at the final answer to the "Indian Question" remains and shall remain unanswered. Be proud. Dohiyi Ani Oginalii , , Gary Smith (*,*) wotanging@bellsouth.net P. O. Box 672168 (`-') gars@nanews.org Marietta, GA 30006, U.S.A. ===w=w=== http://www.nanews.org ----------- News of the people featured in this issue ----------- - Opposition mounts - Cowlitz prepare for to cuts in Health Programs` a weeklong Canoe trip - They're finally going to - GIAGO: Living in a Red Day get their Accounting - GIAGO: Is there a generic - Tribe receives $10M Indian word for Greed to settle Trust Claims - RED ALERT Declared by Marcos - County approves liquor license - Police Brutality in Atenco near Bear Butte - AFN Statement - Pueblo water rights settlement on the 2006 Federal Budget heads to Washington - Innu to fight Quebec - Bush Admin. opposes logging Permits Pueblo Water Settlement - KKK marches into Caledonia - Navajos 'must control' - The seige continues at Six Nations their Resources - Quebec creating - Tohono O'odham settle a Police State atmosphere Water rights dispute - Warrior 'alliance' - BIA rejects UKB Trust Land request appears at Barrier - County, Eastern Shawnee - Firms Harvesting Energy still not speaking from Public Land May Owe - Ancient remains - Sweat Lodge citations finally are reburied meant to enforce Safety - Archaeologist, Waccamaw - Native Prisoner want remains returned -- NA Inmate Volunteer - Governor Huntsman - Rustywire: Shiprock & hears Tribal Leaders' concerns Tse Nalyehe & The Twin Heros - Tribal Officials mum - John Berry Poem: Work-a-day about Ethanol Plant - Upcoming Events --------- "RE: Opposition mounts to cuts in Health Programs" --------- Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 08:29:16 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="PUSH BACK ON PROGRAM CUTS" http://nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=7813 Opposition mounts to cuts in literacy, health programs Debate centers on what works and what is needed Sam Lewin May 2, 2006 Lawmakers have sent a letter to the Bush Administration, requesting that funding for a family-literacy program used by several Oklahoma tribes be put back in the federal budget. Meanwhile health workers continue to warn that up to 100,000 people could be impacted if planned health clinic cuts are implemented. Both claims are countered by charges that the literacy program does not work, and that the health cuts can be remedied through other services. "Poor and disadvantaged families cannot afford to lose supportive services that help them succeed in their classrooms, fully participate at work, and make valuable contributions to their communities," said Rep. George Miller (D-CA), in an appeal to restore funding for Even Start Family Literacy, a program aimed at improving reading skills in low income families by combining childhood education programs with adult literacy. Many of the adults in the program do not have GEDs, and half of the participants are Hispanic immigrants, although Oklahoma tribes like the Poncas and the Cherokees have incorporated Even Start into their tribal services. US Rep. Dale E. Kildee, a Michigan Democrat, said slashing Even Start disproportionately hurts American Indians. "Even Start makes the playing field a little more fair for disadvantaged and low-income families, including Native Americans for whom we have promised such opportunities. The federal government has a trust responsibility to Native Americans, and these cuts are a breach of that trust," Kildee said. Even Start's budget has been cut by 56 percent, from $225 million to $99 million. The Bush Administration says million of new dollars being funneled into No Child Left Behind Program, including $200 million in school improvement grants, would offset Even Start's budget shortfall. There have also been claims that Even Start does not work as well as it should. A 2002 federal report charged that the program duplicates other available services and is not effective based on national evaluations. Although Even Start is aimed at helping adults without a high-school education, only 17-percent actually go on to earn a GED. "I can't think of anybody in the Congress who is not for helping low- income families become literate. The problem is that after three separate evaluations, it has become abundantly clear that [Even Start] is not succeeding. People are not becoming more literate," Bush said in defending the cuts. "It's a well-intended approach, but it didn't capture what Congress intended," said Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA). The push to have all of Even Start's original funding written back intto next year's spending plan comes as Indian officials continue to warn about the consequences if $33 million is taken from urban Indian health care. On their website, the National Council of Urban Indian Health states: "Such a cut would result in bankruptcies, lease defaults, elimination of services to tens of thousands of Indians who may not seek care elsewhere, an increase in the health care disparity for American Indians and Alaska Natives and the near annihilation of a body of medical and cultural knowledge addressing the...needs of the urban Indian population held almost exclusively by these programs." Medical workers on the frontlines agree. "This would be a cut of $33 million for the 34 urban Indian health programs that are located throughout the United States," said Liz Hunt, executive director of the Indian Health Center in San Jose, Ca. "Some of these programs have no other source of funding and would have to close. Others would have to reduce services significantly." Similar to the arguments in favor of cutting Even Start, the Bush Administration says services provided at the clinics are mirrored elsewhere. Although it cuts funding for the the clinics, the proposed budget calls for $80 million more next year for Indian Health Service. The clinics are paid for by the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, a piece of legislation passed several decades ago to improve upon the lack of health care options in Indian Country. Defending the Urban Indian Health reductions, officials from the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement that "after 30 years of federal funding, the 2007 budget proposes to phase out direct funding for Urban Indian Health and redirect the dollars to improving the health status of the increasing population of American Indians and Alaska Natives living in rural areas and on reservations." The cuts would not apply to the two centers in Oklahoma, where one is located in Tulsa and the other in Oklahoma City. That's because in 2004 then-Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles authored legislation that changed the way the clinics are funded. The two centers combined serve an estimated 25,000 patients a year. You can reach Sam Lewin at sam@okit.com Native American Times. Copyright c. 2005 All Rights Reserved. --------- "RE: They're finally going to get their Accounting" --------- Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 08:35:09 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="TRUST ACCOUNTING ... SORT OF" http://www.casperstartribune.net/567b77dfe8d4441c8725716500661fee.txt 'They're finally going to get their accounting' By JOHN HEILPRIN Associated Press writer May 7, 2006 LENEXA, Kan. - Seventy feet beneath the prairie, the government is filling limestone caverns - protected by guards and a bomb-sniffing dog - with truckloads of American Indian financial and cultural records. What is ground zero for an accounting that will take seven years and cost $335 million owes its existence to a bitter class-action lawsuit brought against the Interior Department a decade ago. Still, it's only a short version of the historical accounting that Indians demanded but no longer want - because they don't think it can be done properly. The Indians say the government mismanaged a trust in their names for 120 years and now owes them tens of billions of dollars. The dispute dates to 1887, when Congress made the Interior Department trustee for 145 million acres of Indian lands. Indians were supposed to benefit but the government gave most of the land to white settlers. Today, Interior manages 10 million acres of trust land for individual Indians and 46 million acres for tribes. In 1996, the Indians sued to reconcile their historical accounts. They, and Congress, demanded an audit. The Indians may be owed a century's worth of grazing rents, oil and gas royalties and timber sales from the land, plus interest. Both the Indians and the Interior Department agree $13 billion was collected between 1909 and 2001. The Indians had claimed the unpaid interest could be more than $150 billion, but they've offered to drop the whole thing if the government coughs up $27.5 billion. That money would be spread among individual Indian accountholders, about a fifth of the nation's 2.5 million American Indians who live mainly in the West. No way, the Bush administration replied: The government has been forwarding most of the rents and royalties to tribes and individual Indians all along. "It could be just $30 million that's owed to the Indians," said Ross Swimmer, the Interior Department's special trustee for American Indians and also a member of Oklahoma's Cherokee Nation. During a tour of the Kansas cave, Swimmer and other Interior officials were eager to show that many more Indian records exist than people realize. They also wanted to demonstrate their ability to check the accuracy of financial transactions with Indians. "They're finally going to get their accounting," Swimmer said. "For once we've gotten something right for the Indians." In an irony befitting an "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" legal war, the government is relying on the Indian-demanded accounting - actually, it's a statistical sampling - to come up with figures that Indians claim lowball what they're owed. "It's a number in the m's, not the b's," said Fritz Scheuren, who oversees Interior's statistical sampling and was president of the American Statistical Association last year. The Indian plaintiffs now say too many records have been destroyed to come up with an accurate figure. Before 1990, the Treasury Department routinely destroyed the Indian trust's canceled checks, and court documents attest to numerous destroyed trust records. "The documents that the government has preserved are a fraction of those that have been lost and destroyed," said Dennis Gingold, an attorney for the suing Indians. "Massive hard copy and electronic destruction ... make the accounting legally and factually impossible." The Indians' biggest ally is embattled U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a former Reagan administration official whose strongly worded rulings condemn the Interior Department. After nine years presiding over the case, Lamberth concluded last July the agency is a "pathetic outpost" that has bungled its fiduciary duty. "For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few," the judge wrote. Not surprisingly, the Interior Department wants Lamberth removed from the case and another judge assigned to it. Down the rabbit hole, tractor trailers disappear into an obscure grassy knoll just off the Prairie Star Parkway. Situated in an industrial park a half hour southwest of Kansas City, the cave offers few indications it houses a semi-secretive government facility. Several minutes of driving through the dark, and the corridors get curiouser and curiouser. A faint dankness and dust fill the nostrils. Pocked walls climb into shadow. Painters have brightened them, like gardeners painting red roses white. In dimly lit parking spaces, trucks disgorge box after box of documents to be catalogued, computerized and stashed away. Two years and $120 million into the accounting, the archive has amassed 140,000 boxes with 300 million pages of old leases, bills, ledgers, account statements, school records, maps, letters and black-and-white photographs. In a space the size of Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium and managed by the Interior Department and the National Archives, boxes extend close to the ceiling and down aisles so long they fade into the caverns - reminiscent of the fate met by Indiana Jones' recovered ark. "People come in and ask, 'Where is the Lost Ark?"' said Jeffrey Zippin, deputy executive director of Interior's Office of Historical Trust Accounting. The shelves are coated with an electrostatically charged powder to resist corrosion or chemical action. The air within the painted cavern walls is kept at 60 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 percent humidity. High- efficiency air filters catch 99 percent of all microscopic particles. The facility is leased for $900,000 a month from Minneapolis-based Meritex Enterprises Inc. Its security and climate controls are matched only by the National Archives itself in Washington and an annex in College Park, Md. The cavern teems with a small army of federal contractors - five accounting firms and 15 other businesses - assisting about a dozen Interior and National Archives employees. Thirty students at Haskell Indian Nations University, in nearby Lawrence, use the documents for training. It is closed to all but federal workers, contractors, Indian tribal representatives and researchers; privacy laws protect the names of living accountholders. The boxes come from about 100 of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs offices and National Archives' record centers around the country. At a nondescript warehouse nearby, 100 workers sort through the boxes and log their contents into computers. The records are an eclectic mix: 1943 photographs of Navajo women cooking; a handwritten appeal from a Great Plains Indian for compensation because some of his cattle died; and a 16-page list of Sioux Indians killed and wounded - bearing ill-fated names like Black Moon, Sore Eyes Woman and Afraid of Left Hand - on Dec. 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee. Some boxes are tattered, faded or water-damaged. A few were decontaminated because of animal droppings. Concerns about the how the trust accounts are managed are almost as old as the trust itself. In 1915, the Joint Commission of Congress on Indian Funds warned of "fraud, corruption and institutional incompetence almost beyond the possibility of comprehension." In 1928, the Interior Department found Indian trust data unreliable and almost useless. Dozens of other, scathing reports followed. Finally, in 1994, Congress demanded Interior fulfill an obligation to account for money received and disbursed. A year later when account statements still hadn't been reconciled, Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet Indian tribe joined with the Boulder, Colo.-based Native American Rights Fund and others in filing suit. So-called "fractionalization" of accounts is a major obstacle in managing the trust. As ownership of the 160-acre and smaller land parcels transferred from generation to generation, proceeds from the trust accounts had to be divided among more and more descendants. Interior officials say 90 percent of the transactions are for less than $100. "In every category it has cost us more to find the errors than the total amount of the errors we found," said departing Interior Secretary Gale Norton. "When you consider that we have millions of transactions under $1, you're spending $3,500 to find out if we handled $1 correctly." Norton's plan for the accounting includes checking half the 57 million transactions and a quarter of the $5 billion at stake between 1985 and 2000. "We don't have every single record of every single transaction that has occurred since the 1800s. We certainly do have enough records to do a complete accounting," she said. Accountants are examining nearly all financial transactions over $100,000 in the 1985-2000 window. That represents $276 million - or about 5 percent of all the money at stake. Also being checked is nearly every payment an Indian tribe made to its members or resulted from a lawsuit or settlements. They total $784 million - or 16 percent of the transactions. Another 4 percent of the money - 19 million transactions, most for less than $1 - is considered interest. That represents $177 million. All those transactions are checked, too. For the other half of the transactions - three-quarters of the $5 billion at stake - the department uses statistical sampling to the check the accuracy. It's a method the Indians and Lamberth rejected, but a federal appeals court approved for use as a tool. The courts must sign off on any final accounting. After 10 years of battling in court, no one knows exactly how much was collected or paid out to the Indians. "The previous administration as well as ourselves tried in good faith to tackle this problem. It was a much larger undertaking than anyone imagined," Norton said. Early in her tenure, Norton half-joked about how she divided her time. "Indian trust, Indian trust and Indian trust," she told the AP. Geoffrey Rempel, an accountant working for Indian plaintiffs, said the evidence is undisputed that trust records were destroyed over the past century, so there is no way Interior officials can claim to have enough of them for a proper accounting. "All they're doing is matching bad documents to bad documents, showing you what they want you to see," he said. "People would be thrown in jail if they audited banks like this. This is completely unacceptable - unless it's for the Indians." Most people agree the only acceptable solution will come from Congress. Senate Indian Affairs Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., co-chaired a recent hearing to find the quickest and fairest way to end the dispute. Experts urged them to study the legal arguments - then arbitrarily pick a settlement figure. Stuart Eizenstat, a former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, believes Congress should create an Indian claims settlement commission to process claims, similar to the reparations made after World War II. "It would be a disaster to go back to court. It would just resign the Indians to another decade of fruitless litigation," he told the AP. "This cries out for an administrative, rough justice solution." Eizenstat negotiated the historic agreement with Switzerland's two largest banks to pay Holocaust survivors $1.25 billion. He said Congress should pick a figure that errs on the side of overpay to handle both accounting claims and anticipated claims from Indians challenging how the government actually managed the lands. "You presume that if the records weren't there, it's because of mismanagement," he said. "If they themselves as trustees mishandled records, then they have to handle the burden." Even Swimmer, who wants Congress to give Interior some "clear direction on its responsibilities," agrees with the concept of a big, somewhat arbitrary payout. "Just pick a number," he told the AP. "It's reparations, not repayment." Copyright c. 1995-2006 Casper Star Tribune - Lee Enterprises Inc, --------- "RE: Tribe receives $10M to settle Trust Claims" --------- Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 08:29:16 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="CROW RECEIVE TRUST ACCOUNTING CLAIM" http://www.indianz.com/News/ http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/05/03/50-settlement.txt Tribe receives $10M to settle trust accounting claims By CLAIR JOHNSON Of The Gazette Staff May 3, 2006 CROW AGENCY - The Crow Tribe received $10 million from the federal government on Monday to settle trust accounting claims against the U.S. Department of Interior. Crow Chairman Carl Venne, announcing the payment on Tuesday, said the money will go toward the tribe's social and educational needs, help with overall care and development of the reservation and its resources and settle some debts. Venne, along with Vice Chairman Cedric Black Eagle, Majel Russell, an attorney for the tribe, and other tribal officials, discussed how the tribe will spend the money at a news conference at the Administration Building. The money is being allocated according to a revised 2005 budget approved by the Crow Tribal Legislature last year, Venne said. The tribe and the Interior Department actually agreed to the $10 million settlement in April 2005. A joint stipulation settling the case was filed in December in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth dismissed the case on April 7. "It took this long" to get the money, Venne said. "It was a long, drawn- out thing." The tribe sued the Interior Department in 2002, alleging the government had mismanaged its trust fund accounts. The suit involved accounts managed, invested and controlled by either the Interior Department or the Treasury from 1972 to 1992. The government settled without admitting liability. The settlement does not address other, major claims yet to be resolved, Russell said, including water rights, alleged trespass within the Bighorn Canyon National Recreational Area, claims for land created by the movement of the Bighorn River and the enforcement of the Crow Allotment Act. The tribal settlement is for the tribal trust accounting claims, not individual trust accounting claims, Venne said. The settlement does not affect individual tribal members' claims in an ongoing class-action suit against the Interior Department called the Cobell case, he said. The settlement money, Venne said, is aimed at improving education opportunities and helping youth. "We need to start looking after our youth," he said. "We need to take care of our social problems. ... We need to rebuild this nation." With the settlement money, each of the tribe's six districts will receive $200,000 for community projects, such as community centers, to benefit youth and the elderly, Venne said. The tribe's three schools, in Wyola, Lodge Grass and Pryor, each will receive $100,000. The money is to improve the schools and to bring "pride and integrity" back to the students' Crow heritage, Venne said. Another $1 million will go the Crow Education Department for a college scholarship program. The Crow Tribal Youth Activities Complex project will receive $312,000. The recreation park has plans for softball and soccer fields, a skate park and basketball courts. "A lot of our young kids have nothing to do in the evening," Venne said. The park will foster teamwork, he said. The Crow Tribe also will increase benefits from $100 a month to $200 a month to its elderly members on limited incomes. The revised budget said the program helps 449 elders. The Crow Tribal Court will receive $500,000. "By having a strong court, the Crow Tribe will create it own sovereignty," Venne said. Another $500,000 will go to improve public health services at the Indian Health Service. The tribal also will spend $1 million to hire attorneys for litigation, negotiation and tribal government development. The tribe will pay $325,000 to about 60 former tribal employees who lost their jobs after former Tribal Chairman Clara Nomee left office and Clifford Birdinground became chairman. The former employees sued the tribe, and the parties eventually negotiated a settlement with a mediator at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The former employees have complained to the U.S. District Court about the lack of payment. The tribe also will pay $912,000 to the Bill Barrett Corp. to reimburse the company for money it provided for mineral exploration and development. Venne said Barrett backed out of the deal and the tribe needs to refund the money. The settlement will allow tribal lands to be released for future mineral development, the revised budget said. Venne said the reservation itself will benefit. About $175,000 will be spent "cleaning up the reservation," he said. The chairman plans to hire more than 300 young people to clean up communities and to paint houses. Another $100,000 is to replace five old cabins in the Bighorn Mountains used by tribal members for subsistence hunting. Venne also said he would like to do management plans for the reservation's three mountain ranges, the Bighorns, the Pryors and the Wolf mountains. "We Crows need to take care of our mountains. They're sacred to us," he said. Asked when there will be a party to celebrate, Venne smiled and said, "There's no party. There's more work." Copyright c. The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises. --------- "RE: County approves liquor license near Bear Butte" --------- Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 08:29:16 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="DESECRATION OF BEAR BUTTE" http://www.indianz.com/News/ http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2006/05/03/news/top/news01.txt Groups vow protests during motorcycle rally By Dan Daly, Journal Staff Writer May 3, 2006 STURGIS - American Indian groups vowed Tuesday to stage daily demonstrations in Sturgis during the 2006 motorcycle rally to protest the event's continuing eastward expansion toward Bear Butte, a sacred site to a number of tribes. However, Carter Camp of the Intertribal Coalition to Defend Bear Butte and Jay Red Hawk of the Bear Butte International Alliance both emphasized Tuesday that the demonstrations will be peaceful. In addition to the rally week protests, the groups are organizing a large, summerlong gathering at Bear Butte. It could draw as many as 10,000 people, Camp said. Camp said the groups will ask bikers to voluntarily honor a buffer zone around Bear Butte, staying away from the rally campgrounds, saloons and concert venues east of Fort Meade Veteran's Affairs Hospital. He believes some bikers will side with the groups. "Were not trying to shut down the rally," Camp said. "We know the rally has an economic impact on the state; we just want a buffer around Bear Butte." The vow to protest came amid a tense, sometimes confrontational meeting of the Meade County Commission on Tuesday morning in Sturgis. Despite pleas from the crowd, commissioners voted 5-0 to approve a liquor license for Gary Lippold's new concert venue south of Bear Butte, Rock'n the Rally at Glencoe CampResort. In many ways, Tuesday's hearing was an angry replay of the April 4 Meade County Commission meeting, when the commission unanimously approved a beer license for the Broken Spoke Saloon and Sturgis County Line campground north of Bear Butte. The Broken Spoke decision could be referred to a countywide vote. Bear Butte International Alliance members were scrambling before Tuesday's 5 p. m. deadline to turn in enough signatures for a referendum. It isn't clear whether they gathered enough valid signatures in time. At Tuesday's hearing, tempers flared over procedural questions. Commissioners imposed a 30-minute time limit for each side, but only a fraction of the opponents had spoken as the time limit expired. "We're tired of asking for justice; we're going to demand it," Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Lakota Action League, said from the podium. "We don't have a religion, ... we have a Lakota way of life." As Tilsen turned to address Lippold directly, one of the commissioners tried to stop him from talking. "We're going to talk, and you're going to listen," Tilsen declared, and continued his speech. At one point, Sheriff Ron Merwin stood between the commissioners and a number of angry people who were still waiting to testify when the time limit expired. When commission Chairman Bob Mallow called a five-minute recess, the audience shouted at commissioners as they filed out of the room together. Eventually, some, but not all, of the people waiting to speak were given a chance to testify. Tuesday's Rock'n the Rally hearing drew about 120 people, about a fourth of the size of the crowd at the Broken Spoke hearing April 4. At the start of the hearing, Lippold told the county commissioners that he needs to serve liquor for the hospitality tents and VIP tents that would draw the upscale crowds he needs to make the venue a success. He is paying the county $500,000 for the liquor license. "I can't sell enough booze in 10 lifetimes in (10 days per year) to pay for this liquor license," he told the commissioners. But with the license, he said he will be able to draw upscale crowds and stage country music festivals at other times of the year. He vowed to do everything possible to mitigate the noise and other effects on Bear Butte. His attorney, Dale Hansen, told the commissioners that Lippold's family ties in Meade County go back 100 years. He said Lippold's business ventures employ 100 people full-time and that he is the biggest private employer in Sturgis. The concert venue is a natural expansion of Glencoe, Hansen said, and that Lippold deserves a liquor license. But opponents - including Lakota speakers, Christian speakers and Meade County ranchers - talked at length about Bear Butte and its role in American Indian culture. They also spoke about what they see as a continuing lack of respect shown by the Meade County Commission and the biker-bar culture of the Sturgis motorcycle rally. One speaker, Nancy Hilding of Black Hawk, noted that South Dakota law bars liquor sales on Sunday morning out of respect for Christians but that American Indians are denied the same protection of their religion. Carl Meyer of the Mennonite Central Committee was among the non-Indian speakers. So was Gail Arnold, a Methodist minister from Belle Fourche. Arnold presented a letter from the Association of Christian Churches in South Dakota. It said: "For many years, state and local governments have shown respect for our places of worship by establishing fair zoning practices and by exempting our properties that are used for worship and education from taxation. ... That is why we were surprised and dismayed to hear that you have granted an alcoholic beverage permit to an out-of-state entrepreneur for a Rally Park in the vicinity of Bear Butte State Park. ... Bear Butte has been and continues to be a sacred place of prayer and meditation for several Native American nations. The noise from a nearby rally park can only disrupt religious practices on Bear Butte." After the hearing, protesters gathered on the courthouse steps. "Tell our women not to cry, because this is only the beginning," Vic Camp declared in an emotional rally on the steps of Meade County Courthouse. "This is a great day to be Lakota!" Contact Dan Daly at 394-8421 or dan.daly@rapidcityjournal.com Copyright c. 2006 Rapid City Journal. --------- "RE: Pueblo water rights settlement heads to Washington" --------- Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 08:27:12 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="AAMODT WATER SETTLEMENT" http://www.indianz.com/News/ http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/43070.html Feds final piece of Aamodt puzzle By Brandon Garcia The New Mexican May 2, 2006 Local leaders have agreed to sign the proposed settlement in the 40-year- old Aamodt water-rights lawsuit, but the most daunting task remains: convincing the federal government to chip in for a water system. Representatives from the state, Santa Fe County, non-Indian well owners, and the pueblos of Nambe' , Pojoaque, San Ildefonso and Tesuque will gather for a ceremony in the governor's cabinet room Wednesday morning to officially sign the settlement , but a trip to Washington looms in the near future. "The wild card is Congress," said Bill Hume, the governor's director of policy and issues. "We need to engage our delegation and find their views on this and how it needs to change so they'll bring it to Congress," he said. The federal government will be asked to pitch in about $150 million later this year for a water system serving residents in the Pojoaque basin. The system - the cornerstone of the settlement - also will be paid for by the state and Santa Fe County, which will pony up about $20 million and $10 million, respectively. The system has a price range of $172 million to $177 million. In 2004, the federal government squelched a previous settlement proposal when it refused to fund a $218 million request for a larger water system . Hume said officials from the pueblos, county and state will travel to Washington, D.C., in two weeks to discuss the settlement with the state's congressional delegation. "I don't expect they'll go there and come back with a ringing endorsement," he said, explaining that unlike many other states, New Mexico is flush with cash. "They'll say, `Since you're so well off, why don't you pick up the cost?' " At least one delegate shared Hume's outlook. The Aamodt settlement "will require an appropriate local and state contribution," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N .M. "In light of a tight federal budget, securing the funds necessary to implement this settlement will be very challenging," he said. But a spokeswoman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N .M., said the Aamodt settlement's impediment isn't Congress, but the president. "The Bush administration hasn't been willing to invest in Indian water projects in the states, so we're concerned there won't be support for this," Maria Najera said. Efforts to reach the Department of the Interior regarding the executive branch's position were unsuccessful. Under the current proposal, non-Indians would take 15 percent less groundwater from their wells than they currently use, unless they use less than half an acre-foot , as most do. In exchange, the pueblos of Tesuque , Pojoaque, San Ildefonso and Nambe' would use water imported from the Rio Grande to support development projects . The pueblos also have agreed to not assert their senior water rights during crises. Rules governing the water master, the division of the State Engineer's Office that will enforce the agreement and the impairment fund, which will pay restitution to non-Indian wells harmed by pueblos' pumping, haven't been determined . Those negotiations are scheduled to take place next fall, attorneys said. Peter Chestnut, an attorney for San Ildefonso Pueblo, said finalizing the lawsuit "will still take years." ---- Disclosure: New Mexican publisher Robin Martin is a party to the Aamodt litigation. AAMODT CASE Background: The State Engineer's Office filed a federal lawsuit in 1966 to determine ownership of water rights in valleys along the Rio Pojoaque, Rio Tesuque and Rio Nambe' . A central question: How much water are four Indian pueblos entitled to claim? The Aamodt case gets its name from the alphabetical listing of defendants in the lawsuit, many of whom are non-Indians . Several settlement attempts have failed. What's new: All parties to the lawsuit except the federal government will sign the settlement proposal at 10 a.m. Wednesday in the state Capitol. What's next: Representatives from the state, the four pueblos and Santa Fe County will meet with New Mexico's congressional delegation in two weeks to discuss the settlement proposal. Copyright c. 2006 Santa Fe New Mexican, all rights reserved. --------- "RE: Bush Admin. opposes Pueblo Water Settlement" --------- Date: Thu, 4 May 2006 08:55:34 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="AAMODT SIGNED WITHOUT FEDERAL SUPPORT" http://www.indianz.com/News/ http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/43194.html Aamodt deal signed without federal support By Brandon Garcia | The New Mexican May 4, 2006 Local governments officially settled the 40-year-old Aamodt water-rights lawsuit Wednesday, but soon after the signatures were inked and the applause subsided federal officials said the U.S. government is being asked to pay too much for a regional water system. "The U.S. opposes any settlement that has the federal government providing the majority of the funding," said Cynthia Magnuson, a Department of Justice spokeswoman. John Right, a spokesman for the Department of the Interior, said "The benefits by nonfederal parties are disproportionate to their costs," he said. According to the settlement, the federal government will be asked to pitch in about $150 million later this year for a water utility serving residents in the Pojoaque basin. The system also will be paid for by the state and Santa Fe County, which will pony up about $20 million and $10 million, respectively. The system has a price range of $172 million to $177 million. Two years ago, the federal government was asked to buy New Mexico a $218 million water system. The proposal was nullified when the feds declined to foot the bill. The way around the federal government's opposition is through Congress, a top aide to Gov. Bill Richardson said. "If we can persuade Congress that this is a worthwhile settlement, it will get passed," said Bill Hume, the governor's director of policy and issues. State politicians hope they can convince Congress to pay for the water system during a trip to Washington, D.C., in two weeks, Hume said. Representatives from the state, Santa Fe County and the pueblos of Nambe', Pojoaque, Tesuque and San Ildefonso will meet with the state's congressional delegation. Leaders from those governments, along with Mayor David Coss, gathered Wednesday morning for a ceremony in the State Capitol to officially sign the settlement proposal as representatives for non-Indian well owners watched. The federal government filed the lawsuit in 1966 to determine the amount of water to which residents in the Pojoaque basin were entitled. Previous settlements fell apart when the thousands of defendants couldn't agree on how much water different groups of people should receive. As time passed, more people - most often the defendant's children - were added to the suit, making the case more complex. More recently, a key part of the talks began to hinge on the construction of a regional water system. At the ceremony, Coss said he was 6 years old when the suit was filed, but Santa Fe County Commissioner Harry Montoya did him one turn better. "I hadn't even been born yet," he said. Representatives of the Pojoaque Basin Water Alliance, a group of 500 non-Indian well owners, didn't attend the ceremony. Lee Waite, one of the organization's leaders, said he wants to settle, but dislikes the proposal because it isn't complete, he said. Waite is concerned because the rules that govern the state's enforcement of the agreement and the "impairment fund," which will pay restitution to non-Indian wells harmed by pueblos' pumping, haven't been determined. Those negotiations are scheduled to take place in the fall, attorneys said. Larry White, an attorney for Tesuque well-owners, called the alliance's protests "a red herring," and government officials said their endorsement of the settlement is guaranteed no matter how future negotiations unfold. Fred Waltz, the alliance's attorney, said he is recommending the settlement to his clients with the caveat that future negotiations end with a fair conclusion. Peter Shoenfeld, who represents the Pojoaque Water Users Association, said his clients won't be able to find a better settlement and should agree to the proposal. "Any non-Indians who don't sign up for the settlement are deceiving themselves," he said. After the ceremony, lawyers and representatives for other non-Indian well owners said nearly all their clients plan to sign the settlement. According to the state Engineer's Office, the settlement calls for the federal government to acquire 2,500 acre-feet of water a year for the four pueblos. Meanwhile, Santa Fe County is responsible for finding 750 acre- feet of water for non-Indian residents of the valley. Most of the water has already been secured, attorneys said. Under the settlement proposal, non-Indians would take 15 percent less groundwater from their wells than they currently use, unless they use less than half an acre-foot, as most do. In exchange, the pueblos of Tesuque, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso and Nambe' would use water imported from the Rio Grande to support development projects. The pueblos also have agreed to not assert their senior water rights during crises. Disclosure: New Mexican publisher Robin Martin is a party to the Aamodt litigation. Contact Brandon Garcia at 995-3826 or at bgarcia@sfnewmexican.com. Copyright c. 2006 Santa Fe New Mexican. --------- "RE: Navajos 'must control' their Resources" --------- Date: Thu, 4 May 2006 08:55:34 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="TELL PEABODY TO FLY A KITE" http://www.indianz.com/News/ http://www.gallupindependent.com/2006/may/050306mcdwtr.html 'Tell Peabody to fly a kite' Former Chairman McDonald says Navajos 'must control' their water By Kathy Helms Dine' Bureau May 3, 2006 WINDOW ROCK - It's time the Navajo Nation stood up, grabbed the reins of a runaway horse, and took the matter of tribal water rights into its own hands, according to former Navajo Nation Chairman Peter MacDonald. Speaking at a "Water for Din NOT Peabody" public education and awareness meeting in Dilkon Monday afternoon, MacDonald who has a history with water rights told the group his position is: "Anything that has to do with the C-aquifer, or any aquifer for that matter, is that the Navajo Nation must control everything. "To begin with, Navajos should control and undertake the study themselves, pay for it. Navajo should not only do a study, but develop the well and own it. Thirdly, the Navajo Nation must control the usage and allocation of that C-aquifer. "If anybody wants to use that water that the Navajo Nation developed, then it's up to the Navajo Nation how they're going to allocate that." If Mohave Generating Station or Peabody want water, he said, "Then, 'OK, how much are you willing to pay?' "Charge for the use of the water. That's the bottom line so far as I'm concerned, and it's doable," MacDonald said. "It's doable all the way around. And there's no reason why the Navajo Nation should beg and beg and kneel down to MGS and Southern California Edison and Peabody. They don't need to do that." A confidential draft of a Mohave mediation document which recently came to light apparently was intended as a consensus document to be used as a basis for a final agreement among parties involved in keeping Mohave Generating Station open and Black Mesa and Kayenta mines operating. The draft document calls for approval by Congress of Navajo and Hopi coal leases and grants under new legislation called the "Navajo-Hopi Coal Leasing Settlement Act," and also assumes the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will operate the C-aquifer project. At Monday's meeting, members of Din Care, C Aquifer For Din, and other grassroots groups and community members from Dilkon, Leupp, Tolani Lake, Teesto, and Birdsprings called for "no more secrecy and no more water deals." If Mohave reopens, the tribes would agree to drop the RICO and Arizona lawsuits worth up to $600 million. The lawsuits were filed by the Navajo Nation, which was later joined by the Hopi Tribe, against Peabody for illegally influencing the U.S. government not to increase coal royalties in the 1980s. Also according to the negotiating document, the tribes would not be allowed to impose any new taxes on the area where the C-aquifer wells and pipeline will be, or to develop uses that might interfere with C-aquifer water use. All claims for damages to the Navajo aquifer will be dismissed and MGS and Peabody held harmless. The Natural Resources Defense Council recently released an updated study which it says is based on the federal government's own records and shows the N-aquifer already has been impacted on Black Mesa. Peabody says the aquifer is in good health. No fear MacDonald said he was "shocked and surprised" at the Mohave sequence of events and how it has unfolded because of the history of Navajo. "If you just go back not even 100 years, Navajo leaders of the past, without fear, they took on the United States government for what they believed was rightfully theirs. And without fear they took on states as well as BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) and giant corporations. "The taxation that we started back in 1975, we knew the corporations would take us on. Sure enough, when we enacted that tax law, 22 corporations filed a lawsuit against us. They teamed up together. Not only did they file a lawsuit against us in Arizona District Court, 9th Circuit, but they also filed, quoting the same lawsuit, in Albuquerque federal court, 10th Circuit Court. "Then they did the same thing in federal court in Salt Lake City. So we had three courts and they knew they would run us ragged or (we would) back off because we would say it was too expensive," he said. But the Navajo Nation was undaunted. "We beat them in Arizona District Court, we beat them in Albuquerque Federal District Court, we beat them in Utah Federal District Court with one exception. The federal district court in Salt Lake City said, 'Yes, Navajo Nation has a right to tax with one exception provided that the Secretary of Interior agrees that they should tax'," MacDonald said. "Our position was, 'No, we don't need anybody's approval.' So we appealed that particular decision, the Salt Lake City decision, in the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, and obviously we won that. Then all of the major energy companies, they dropped out." Navajo leaders of the past stood strong, according to MacDonald. "They didn't shake in their boots when the government or the states or BIA or corporations were coming at them. They stood their ground. "I think the reason they stood their ground is they knew who they were and they knew where they came from, what was theirs and belonged to them. That's why they didn't want to make a deal. There was no dealing to be made," he said. "I don't see why we need to jump with fear every time New Mexico or Arizona or any of these states, or MGS or Peabody say something. Everybody starts shaking in their boots and then they say, 'OK, what else do you want?'" Keeping Mohave and Black Mesa up and running is worth 400 jobs and $25 million to the Navajo Nation, according to MacDonald. "Four hundred jobs could be gotten within 90 days if you work at it. And $25 million? I hear council delegates running around, saying, 'One casino will give us $50 million a year.' So, why shake in your boots when all you need to do is develop one casino and you get $50 million? Unless they're not telling us the truth. "But if a casino is going to give us $50 million a year, that's twice as much as what Peabody is giving us in royalty for coal right now. I would rather keep the coal and tell Peabody to go fly a kite," he said. "I imagine the word out all over the Southwest is, 'Just tell the Navajos they're going to get jobs, they're going to get some royalty, and you get whatever you want.' I think it's time we get away from that. We could have jobs without those people. We could create our own jobs with the same project, but it would be ours." Go for the gold MacDonald said a project such as the Desert Rock Energy Project is self- financing. "Why do you want to just lease it to somebody? If it's good, why not let the Navajo do it? They say, 'Well, we cannot finance.' That's bologna. The people that are going to put that power plant together don't have a billion dollars. They're going to have to get it financed just as we would have to have it financed," he said. "They're going to collateralize the project. The project is self- financing. In other words, the amount of coal that's going to be used, the water, all of that is financeable. I'm sure they're going to use the project as a big part of the collateral to get their finances. Any tribe could do that," he said. The Resources Committee of the Navajo Nation Council is to meet this week in Phoenix with Sithe Global Power LLC and Din Power Authority in a possible executive session work session to hammer out questions regarding a proposed business site lease for the Desert Rock Energy Project. Resources recently tabled the legislation. Of the Mohave negotiations and development of the C-aquifer project to slurry coal, MacDonald said, "People talk about Enron as the poster child for fraud. Well this project here, the C-aquifer business, is worse than that. "It's time we get serious about this water thing. My suggestion is for them (Navajo Nation) to get rid of the amateurs that they have working on water. These people are kindergarten kids compared to people that we need that can play in the Super Bowl." To do the litigation, he said the tribe has to get good witnesses, including traditional elders. "While they are still with us, they need to get their statements. They need to use them because a lot of our rights and sovereignty is based on Navajo history, Navajo culture, our legends and traditions," he said. Also needed are top engineers, scientists, and anthropologists. "I don't mean just the local ones. I mean world-renowned anthropologists, world renowned geologists, international water experts not some of these guys running around saying I'm an Indian water expert," MacDonald said. "You don't need Indian water experts, per se. You want international water experts, economists and agriculturists. The last person you want to testify for you is a lawyer. The only time you need a lawyer is when you're looking for a loophole. That's all they know, how to find loopholes. In some cases they don't even know how to do that," he said. Copyright c. 2006 the Gallup Independent. --------- "RE: Tohono O'odham settle Water rights dispute" --------- Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 08:35:09 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="GOVERNOR AND TRIBE SIGN ACCORD" http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0507water0507.html S. Ariz. tribe settles water-rights dispute Associated Press May 7, 2006 TUCSON - Tohono O'odham tribal leaders joined Gov. Janet Napolitano and Tucson officials in signing a water-rights settlement that the tribe hopes will make some of its land bloom again. The settlement will end 31 years of litigation that Rosanna Carlyle and another tribal member had filed on behalf of a group of San Xavier landowners to limit Tucson's water pumping, which was one reason the river dried up. The settlement doesn't stop the city's pumping. But it will assure the tribe 50,000 acre-feet a year of water, mainly from the Central Arizona Project and give non-Indian area residents some certainty about their future water supplies, by providing assurances against future O'odham water-rights litigation and ending the original lawsuit. It also will clear the way for mining giant Asarco to start using CAP water, an option it had long resisted, to replace much of the groundwater used for its Mission Mine near Sahuarita. Asarco, one of the parties to the case, must first get approval from federal Bankruptcy Court to sign on because it is currently in bankruptcy proceedings. A judge overseeing the long-standing discussions for the Gila River water-rights adjudication - which includes the Tohono O'odham - must also sign off on the settlement. Officials hope the settlement will be fully completed by Dec. 31, 2007. The water settlement will allow the tribe to expand its existing cooperative farm just north of San Xavier District offices, where the ceremony was held. The farm, which already uses about 1,000 acre-feet of CAP water, should ramp up to about 5,000 to 6,000 acre-feet by 2008. That's when it will expand to 960 acres from its current 250 acres. The tribe has also started putting small amounts of CAP water into the Santa Cruz, where it also has reintroduced some native fish species. It is also recharging some CAP water into the aquifer in some arroyos. Under the settlement, Asarco will pay $1.5 million to San Xavier allottees and will have the rights to use up to 10,000 acre-feet of tribal CAP water at the Mission Mine. In return, the tribe will get credits allowing it to pump more groundwater. Copyright c. 2006, azcentral.com. All rights reserved. --------- "RE: BIA rejects UKB Trust Land request" --------- Date: Thu, 4 May 2006 08:55:34 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="UKB LAND TRUST REJECTED" http://www.cherokee.org/Phoenix/2006/images05/MAY06.pdf BIA rejects UKB Trust Land request United Keetowah Band says it will appeal the decision Cherokee Phoenix May 2006 TAHLEQUAH, Okla. (AP) - The Bureau of Indians Affairs in April denied the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians' bid for trust status, tribal officials said. The decision erased plans to provide a home base for the 10,000-citizen landless tribe. The federally recognized tribe asked for trust consideration on 76 acres it bought about two miles from its Tahlequah offices. Disappointed, UKB officials said they would appeal the decision. "The bureau's evaluation of the request and supporting documents reveals that there is (BIA) regulatory and statutory authority for the acquisition of the property in trust," the UKB stated in a public letter to the BIA. A copy of the BIA's response was not immediately available, and BIA officials did not respond to requests for comment. Jeanette Hanna, director of the BIA's Eastern Regional Office in Muskogee, Okla., was scheduled to make the determination on the application. "The BIA's latest decision affirms countless other court rulings, federal laws, treaties, precedents and nearly 170 years of history. The Cherokee Nation is the sole entity with jurisdiction over Indian land within our borders,"Mike Miller, CN communications officer, said. The UKB claims concurrent jurisdiction on the CN's 14-county area. The UKB also acquired support from Cherokee County commissioners for their trust application. CN officials protested the commissioners' position, claiming that a decision for the UKB would jeopardize the CN territorial jurisdiction. UKB attorney James McMillin said the BIA noted that the UKB was once part of the CN, which obliged the bureau to consult with the CN on the UKB application, although the CN had no veto power in the process. UKB officials said the BIA failed to adequately consider the interests of the UKB as a landless tribe. Acquiring land into trust is fundamental for federally recognized tribes. Trust status provides a property tax exemption and other federal protections that would brand the land as "Indian Country." Copyright c. 2006 Cherokee Phoenix. --------- "RE: County, Eastern Shawnee still not speaking" --------- Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 21:16:02 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="" http://www.limanews.com/story.php?IDnum=25419 County, tribe still not speaking; Topic of prior discussions in question By JIM SABIN 419-993-2091 jsabin@limanews.com May 5, 2006 LIMA - An American Indian tribe is considering more sites in Allen County after talks broke down over the Gateway Commerce Park earlier this month. Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma Chief Charles Enyart said the other sites are getting more attention now that Allen County has effectively cut off communication over the Inter-state 75 site. But county officials maintain they're still waiting on some formal offer from the tribe for the land. "We are sorry that you decided to end discussions which had been proceeding in a positive fashion," Enyart wrote in a letter to the Allen County commissioners, dated Tuesday. "We will have to pursue options with other parties in the lawsuit for possible settlement of our claims and possible location of tribal development projects." The tribe filed a land claim lawsuit against the state, adding dozens of other defendants, in-cluding counties, municipalities and individuals, last year. Allen County, Lima, Fort Shawnee, Shawnee Township and the Johnny Appleseed Metropolitan Park District are among those named, as well as Auglaize County. Tribal representatives have visited Lima over the last several months and met with county commissioners Greg Sneary and Dan Reiff, along with attorneys for both sides. But the county maintains those were talks about a land purchase, not about settling the lawsuit. "There have been no negotiations relating to this suit. Whatever information has come for-ward has come through the city, not them," Reiff said Thursday. Enyart said in a court affidavit that the tribe has been negotiating with Allen County, among others, in support of the tribe's request for an extension for more time to file its next brief. Marc Fishel, a Columbus attorney representing Allen County and others, sent a letter to tribe attorney Mason Morisset asking that any such negotiations cease. Fishel has said he was unaware of the meetings when they were going on. Based on that, Enyart said he believes the tribe's hands are tied. "If we can't deal, then we'll be looking to other places," Enyart said Thursday. "Our attorney has advised us that they don't want to talk to us, and we need to be looking at other options." Enyart wouldn't talk about where those other sites could be, other than to say that Lima is not out of the running. "I want to emphasize, Lima is still in the running. It's just the sites may change," he said. Other tribal representatives have also declined to comment on possible sites. The tribe has also been looking to locate in Massillon, Monroe, Lordstown and Botkins, and has also held talks with Lorain and Russells Point. The tribe has been prepared to make an offer for the land since early April, but has been holding onto it for fear of violating Fishel's request. Fishel has told The Lima News that the tribe can contact him at any time, and Reiff said he's told tribe representatives, including local real estate agents working for the tribe, that requests should be sent to Fishel and carbon-copied to the county. "They have been told. The realtor has been told. The offer still has not come to us," Reiff said. "They have been told over and over and over again that we have land for sale." The tribe has been poking around Lima for nearly three years, and more recently started ne-gotiating with Lima on possible terms of an agreement that would reimburse local govern-ments for the tax dollars they wouldn't get to collect if land is taken into trust for the tribe. Lima officials took those details to the county in March. Lima Finance Director Steve Cleaves said the city is still willing to talk with the tribe, but hasn't since the talks with the county ended. "We're still open to discussion with the Eastern Shawnee. We had a very good negotiating relationship with them and with the county at the time the negotiations were ongoing," Cleaves said. When told the county maintains the talks didn't represent negotiations, Cleaves disagreed. "I spent a lot of years in a lot of negotiations, and if we weren't negotiating for the last two and a half years, I don't know what we were doing," Cleaves said. Copyright c. 2004 Lima News. All rights reserved. --------- "RE: Ancient remains finally are reburied" --------- Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 21:16:02 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="MESA VERDE" http://www.sltrib.com/ci_3794945?source=rss Ancient remains finally are reburied Mesa Verde: Ancestral Puebloans and their funerary artifacts are placed a remote site inside the national park By Jim Erickson Rocky Mountain News May 7, 2006 TOWAOC, Colo. - "A wrong has been righted," a New Mexico tribal leader said of the recent reburial in Mesa Verde National Park of the remains of more than 1,500 Ancestral Puebloans. The prehistoric corn, squash and bean farmers had been unearthed in archaeological excavations spanning more than a century. "Finally they have been reburied so they can continue to make their journey," said Peter Pino, tribal administrator for the Zia Pueblo in northcentral New Mexico. New Mexico's Zia, Acoma and Zuni pueblos and Arizona's Hopi tribe worked with park officials to finalize a repatriation agreement signed in December. Last month, Hopi officials reburied 1,560 sets of human remains, including 455 nearly complete skeletons, said Linda Towle, the park's chief of research and resource management. Also buried were 4,937 related funerary objects. More than 90 percent of the human remains were unearthed during archaeological excavations between the 1880s and the 1960s at Mesa Verde. The bones are 700 to 1,550 years old, Towle said. The bones and artifacts were reburied at a remote, undisclosed backcountry site, she said during the second day of the park's three-day centennial archaeology symposium. About 100 people are attending the meeting at the Ute Mountain casino in Towaoc, 11 miles south of Cortez. Last month's reburial was the culmination of a 13-year negotiation that initially involved 24 tribes. It was one of the largest reburials since the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed in 1990. That law requires museums and federal agencies to return American Indian remains, funerary items, sacred objects and other goods to the descendants of the dead or to culturally affiliated tribes. "It's long overdue, and it's what every human being deserves, whether you're Native American or Anglo," said Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the Hopi cultural preservation office. "The disturbance of burial grounds is a violation of spiritual law," Kuwanwisiwma said Thursday. "This particular reburial did ease our minds that the final journey would finally go toward closure." Towle said the grave goods included pottery, beads and other jewelry, stone tools and turkey-feather blankets. Everything was buried several feet deep, under a "huge mound of very rocky soil." Only a handful of park employees know the exact burial location, which is inaccessible in the winter and is patrolled by park law enforcement officers in the summer. Kuwanwisiwma said security was a big concern for all the tribes involved in the repatriation negotiations. He said the Hopis are satisfied with the park's security measures and feel confident that the remains and grave goods are safe from thieves. Kuwanwisiwma was present at the reburial, which he said did not involve a ceremony, prayers or songs. "It was simply a reburial," he said. The 24 tribes initially told park officials that they believed their people are descendants of the prehistoric Mesa Verde dwellers. Later, those 24 tribes selected the Hopi, Zuni, Zia and Acoma to represent them in the negotiations. The prehistoric farmers of the Four Corners area have long been known to archaeologists as the Anasazi. Federal officials and some others now refer to them as the Ancestral Puebloans. Under the federal law, Mesa Verde was required to inventory all Indian human remains, grave goods and sacred objects in its collection, which includes about 73 million items. A team of researchers searched every box and cabinet in the collection, a process that took months to complete, Towle said. "We promised the tribes early on that we would rebury their ancestors in the park," she said. "We're very pleased that we have been able to accomplish that. We never thought it would take this long." Copyright c. 2006, The Salt Lake Tribune. --------- "RE: Archaeologist, Waccamaw want remains returned" --------- Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 08:35:09 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="REBURIAL" http://www.thestate.com/14520821.htm?source=rss&channel=thestate_local Allies want remains returned State archaeologist, Waccamaw chief working to rebury tribespeople By JIM DuPLESSIS jduplessis@thestate.com May 7, 2006 State archaeologist Jon Leader is caretaker for about 300 Native American remains that he wants returned to tribes for reburial. Harold "Buster" Hatcher, the 50-year-old chief of the Waccamaw tribe in Horry County, wants remains of tribal members returned for reburial. They sat four feet apart at a conference on the issue at USC on Saturday, but the divide between the allies might just as well been miles. Leader doesn't have the legal standing to return the remains; Hatcher lacks the standing to claim them. Federal law restricts the return of remains to tribes that have federal recognition. Like many other Indian groups, the 395-member Waccamaw tribe is not federally recognized. So it is that Indian remains are locked away in 2-by-2 cardboard boxes at USC's South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. Leader, as director of the institute, is responsible for keeping them safe and untouched until someone can let him release them from that limbo. Hatcher said about 60 of the remains were taken from the basin of the Waccamaw River as it flows from Columbus County, N.C., through Horry and Georgetown counties to the sea. It's the path Hatcher's ancestors traveled, the place many were buried and some were dug up, often decades ago before attitudes changed and laws enacted to prevent the grave-robbing. "I believe some of the people they have in cardboard boxes might be my great-great-great-great-grandfather or my great-great-great-great- grandmother," Hatcher said. "They need to be returned," he said. "It hurts. This is blood of blood. We want them respected. We want to put the ancients back in the ground where they're supposed to be." The men said they share good will, but the journey home for those long- dead Indians could be years longer as descendants and government officials pick their way through a labyrinth of laws ancient, federal and international. For their journey to succeed, they will need to take along patience, persistence and a lawyer, said Sherry Hutt, a lawyer who manages the National Park Service's enforcement of the National Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Part of her job is educating tribal members. Part of it is educating lawyers about the multitude of legal strategies they can use, and the ways they can collect damages. "Sometimes until there's a monetary judgment, people don't change their behavior," she told the more than 30 people who attended the conference sponsored by the S.C. Indian Affairs Commission, a nonprofit group based in Columbia. The challenge faced by Hatcher and others can be overcome if recognized tribes can be enlisted to use their standing for the purpose of returning remains to related tribes who don't have federal recognition, Hutt said. "Tribes with money who have gaming are starting to assist tribes who don't," she said. Even if the legal maze is solved, Leader said some of the remains will be difficult to return because they can't be adequately identified. Many of the remains are single bone fragments. Even when the bone can be identified as human and its original location is known, the bone often can't be tied to a specific tribe because different tribes lived in the area during the span of years estimated for the bone's age. Some of the remains are of those who died before 1500, when little is known about tribes' identities or movements. "It becomes fuzzy pretty quick," Leader said. Some of the remains date 2,000 years. The older the remains, the weaker the ancestral ties to any one tribe today. Hatcher believes that with hard work and cooperation, he will be able to get his people back to the Waccamaw. His tribe has set aside a burial place. When the remains return, tribal members will burn a mixture of sacred herbs - sage, sweetgrass, tobacco, cedar and deer's tongue. And a tribal member will purify the grounds to remove ill feelings by wafting the smoke with an eagle's feather. But then, Hatcher will have another problem: it's against federal law for anyone to possess an eagle's feather unless they belong to a federally recognized tribe. Copyright c. 2006 The State. --------- "RE: Governor Huntsman hears Tribal Leaders' concerns" --------- Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 21:16:02 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="UTAH" http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635204975,00.html Governor hears tribal leaders' concerns By Nancy Perkins Deseret Morning News CEDAR CITY - Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s visit with tribal council leaders of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah marked a unique day in state history, said chairwoman Lora Tom. "No governor has sat here with us at this table before," Tom told Huntsman during their meeting Wednesday. "We've had representatives before, but no governor. Let's start anew, government to government. Let's network and partner together." Huntsman met with the tribal leaders at the Cedar Band of Paiute Tribe headquarters, which sits on reservation land in the middle of Cedar City. "I appreciate more than you know being here and having you here," Huntsman told the six tribal leaders around the table. "We should be able to work together on economic-development ideas. Let's rally around that." Leaders of Utah's five Indian tribes each voiced concern over a lack of economic-development opportunities and jobs on reservation land. Glenn Rogers, chairman of the Shivwits Paiute Band, said he had some concerns and was glad Huntsman was there to listen. Rogers pointed out that people constantly encroach on reservation land in Washington County with off-road vehicles, and little is being done to keep outsiders from tearing up sacred ground. "Until things are done, it's just words," Rogers said. Huntsman said monitoring those areas might not be within the state's purview. "We're here to represent the state, not the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the federal government," he said. "I'm not sure we need more in the way of bureaucracy. We do need to know what you think we're responsible for and what the state can do." Tribal sovereignty and self-sufficiency were central themes echoed by each council member in their remarks to the governor, who took notes and asked questions throughout the two-hour meeting. Tribal leaders mentioned options for economic development that included a golf course near Cedar City with restaurants and a cultural center. Gaming or gambling operations are another option, although tribal leaders said that idea was on the far back burner and would be considered as a last resort. Other tribal concerns centered around educating children, experiences with discrimination and bigotry, protecting sensitive archaeological and cultural resources, and the lack of funding to provide health clinics and housing for tribal members. Huntsman said Utah's economy is rebounding and providing opportunities for everyone. "We'll deal leader to leader so that our children, the next generation later in life, will want to work together," the governor said. Copyright c. 2006 Deseret News Publishing Company. --------- "RE: Tribal Officials mum about Ethanol Plant" --------- Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 21:16:02 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="ROCKY BOY ETHANOL PLANT" http://www.havredailynews.com/articles/2006/05/05/local_headlines/tribal.txt Tribal officials mum about ethanol plant Angela Brandt Havre Daily News abrandt@havredailynews.com May 5, 2006 ROCKY BOY'S INDIAN RESERVATION - Many people are asking about the status of a planned ethanol plant, the Chippewa Cree tribal council chair said. Chair John "Chance" Houle and other officials said much has been accomplished. They said they could not yet report on the specifics. "The biggest gorillas have been conquered and we're moving forward," Houle said at Thursday's tribal council meeting. Houle said he will be able to be more specific as early as next week. Those who are involved with the project said they do not want to compromise any possible partnerships with investors by naming names before contracts are signed. The planned ethanol plant has been in the works for almost two years. "The main hurdles have all been jumped," ethanol plant project leader Steve Galbavy said. Neal Rosette Sr., National Tribal Development Association chief operating officer, said the tribe has been communicating with interested investors, including a few major corporations. "I can't say who yet, but all is moving along," Rosette said. The cost of opening the plant and the first year's operation fees are estimated to cost between $83 million and $87 million. Tribal leaders have said that the tribe wants to retain the majority of the ownership of the proposed ethanol plant. A feasibility study conducted last year by BBI International of Cotopaxi, Colo. said the reservation could support a plant that produces 40 million gallons of ethanol per year. The plant would supply an estimated 42 full-time jobs to the Hi-Line and employ up to 400 workers during construction. Copyright c. 2006 Havre Daily News. --------- "RE: Cowlitz prepare for a weeklong Canoe trip" --------- Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 08:35:09 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="COWLITZ MEMBERS TO CANOE ANCIENT WATERS" http://www.tdn.com/articles/2006/05/07/area_news/news08.txt Cowlitz Tribe members prepare for a weeklong canoe trip through ancient waters By Sally Ousley May 7, 2006 LAKE MAYFIELD - The craft is modern, but the traditions are old. At Ike Kinswa State Park on Saturday, members of the Cowlitz Tribe launched a fiberglass replica of the ocean-going Indian canoes of the past. "Salmon Dancer," as the 31-foot canoe is christened, took to the placid waters behind Mayfield Dam on the upper Cowlitz River. Tribal members and their friends were practicing a second time for a 160-mile journey some of them will make this summer from Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula, through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and into Puget Sound and Lake Washington. They will be participating in the 2006 Tribal Canoe Paddle Journey. According to the event Web site, "the canoe journey experience is a mixture: excitement to be there, exhilaration to be on the water communing with nature, spiritual renewal, tests of endurance, hard work ... " "We need to unite with our ancestors in the old ways and to travel with our sister tribes to celebrate with them," Willie Koch, Cowlitz Tribe member from Salkum and canoe captain, said of the effort. He said the canoe journey is a way for most tribal members who have never had a chance to take part in Cowlitz traditions. "To most it's a new thing," said Koch, 47. "Now they will be able to realize the importance of what our ancestors did on a daily basis. This ties us to the ways of our past. And it ties the elders to the young people." The Cowlitz Canoe Family, a group of about 70 tribal and non-tribal members, purchased the previously-owned canoe and are organizing the effort to participate in the journey. Before taking on the open sea, tribal members are practicing on calm water - lest they be up the creek without a paddle once they're out in the open sea. On a deeper level, though, it was important to get the canoe in waters of the tribe's aboriginal homeland in Lewis County. "We are in Cowlitz waters," Koch said. "This is our Motherland." Tribal Journeys began with Paddle to Seattle in 1989 and has become an annual event. More than 80 canoes are participating this year, including teams from Hawaii and New Zealand, but this is the first time for the Cowlitz. "Salmon Dancer" can handle up to 13 paddlers. Koch said he hopes to have two sets of crews by the time of the journey, and both men and women will participate. The white and tan canoe is decorated with salmon and otters on each side and eagles on the back. An eagle feather flies on the front to guard passengers from harm. The canoe is about 4 feet wide and is designed for rough water: it has a stabilizer that will prevent capsizing. A chief from the Hoh tribe will serve as honorary skipper, Koch said. Koch said he participated in a canoe journey for the Hoh Indian Tribe in 2002. Since then, his vision has been for the Cowlitz to have their own canoe journey. Koch said although tribal officials have not sponsored the canoe's journey, he's still hopeful they will. This spring, before the tribe launched its canoe for the first time, they blessed it by wiping it down with cedar boughs and sage to cleanse past bad experiences. To Koch, this is a real personal journey because he suffers from multiple sclerosis first diagnosed six years ago. "I don't know how many journeys I have left," he said. "This is real important to me." Copyright c. 2006 The Daily News. --------- "RE: GIAGO: Living in a Red Day" --------- Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 08:27:12 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="GIAGO: DRUG ABUSE ON TH REZ" http://www.nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=7802 Living in a Red Day Notes from Indian Country Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji) May 1, 2006 Terri Blue is her family name and so is White Eyes. But if you put the names together as she does sometimes, it comes out Terri Blue White Eyes. Hmmmm! Anyway, however she writes her name there should be room in there for "Dynamic." That's right - dynamic or maybe "Devoted." For more than 20 years she has spent her life providing health care to the sick and those consumed by the double scourges of drugs and alcohol. "You can blame it all on my Mom because she was a health care worker and it sort of trickled down to me. I remember when she worked at the Health Clinic in Los Angeles and I was there to learn from her," Blue said. Her mother, Juanita White Eyes and her brothers and sisters, were students at Holy Rosary Indian Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota when I attended school there. Her uncle Carl White Eyes was about my age and we were pretty good friends at the mission school. Juanita is now 80 years old and according to Ms. Blue, "she is still running around getting things done." Ms. Blue is the Director of Anpetu Luta Otipi (Living in a Red Day), an Oglala Sioux Tribe Comprehensive Substance Abuse Program. The program started out many years ago as Project Phoenix but has since merged to form the one program. Her office and staff is located just outside of Kyle on the No Flesh Road. It is also a residence that houses beds for 10 inpatients. "I've put in 20 years with the program, but one of my staff members, Peggy Janis, has been here for 23 years," Blue said. The Indian Health Service funds the program and when I asked Ms. Blue if they were supportive, she replied, "They say they are." She was very concerned about the lack of support from the State of South Dakota. "The state will not recognize our credentials as certified alcohol and drug counselors and we feel excluded because in order to get recognized by them we have to attend their special training program and since we are Lakota and use our own traditional and cultural values to heal our people, we just do not fit in with the state regulations at times," she said. Ms. Blue believes in teaching her clients about living in balance. "We don't follow a 12-step program, but instead we have a traditional concept we call The Seven Directions. We try to help our clients with their mental, physical and spiritual self," she said. Anpetu Luta Otipi gets as many as 900 referrals a year. Of those that are accepted into the program about 90 percent are considered residential patients. "All of our staff are certified alcohol and drug counselors and the biggest problem we face on this reservation is alcoholism," Ms. Blue said. Because of space and funding shortages the program has alternating cycles of 30 days for the youth and 30 days for the adults in the residential program. Ms. Blue is particularly proud of the support given her program by the Lakota people in her community. "Our clients have to remain alcohol and substance free for one year before they can come to us and offer their help as volunteers," she said. But because the reservation is a small community patients often return to the same situations and lifestyles that brought them to the program in the first place. "Recidivism is very high, about 85 percent and we are really trying to create a new approach, a paradigm shift if you will," Blue said. The program has helped youngsters fighting alcohol related problems as young as 10-years-old. "We had to sneak in the 10-year-old's, because the program is designed to help people from age 12 on up. Two thirds of our clients are male, but we do get a lot of women referred to us from the Department of Social Services. These women have been abused or have become alcohol and substance dependent and have lost custody of their children," Blue said. "We have a hard time convincing the state government that our program has to emphasize Lakota values. Traditional Lakota values like generosity, wisdom, courage, respect and bravery guide all aspects of the program," Blue said. "Our philosophy includes the belief that the Lakota people have endured hundreds of years of grief, pain and loss. Our people have learned to cope with this loss through the use of drugs and alcohol," Blue believes. "It's been a long, hard fight for us at Anpetu Luta Otipi, but we are determined to cure the serious addictions that have plagued our people for much too long and sometimes we have to cry along with them, but we try to lend them our strength to heal themselves," Blue said. The color "red" reflects the path many Lakota travel when they are living good and productive lives. It reflects the Good Red Road they walk upon and those who come to Terri Blue White Eyes for help are looking for a new life that will bring them to "Living in a Red Day," the Lakota equivalent of "One Day at a Time." Anyone wishing to help this wonderful program survive can call 605-455- 2331 or write to: Anpetu Luta Otipi, P.O. Box 275, Kyle, SD 57752. With funds from the Indian Health Service cut for this year, Terri and her loyal staff need all of the financial assistance they can get. --- Tim Giago is the president of the Native American Journalists Foundation, Inc., and the publisher of Indian Education Today Magazine. He can be reached at najournalists@rushmore.com or by writing him at 2050 W. Main St. , Suite 5, Rapid City, SD. He was also the founder and former publisher of the Lakota Times and Indian Country Today newspapers. Native American Times. Copyright c. 2005 All Rights Reserved. --------- "RE: GIAGO: Is there a generic Indian word for Greed" --------- Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 08:35:09 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="GIAGO: GREED" http://nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=7825 Notes from Indian Country Is there a generic Indian word for greed? Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji) Copyright c. 2006 Native American Journalists Foundation, Inc. May 8, 2006 The jokesters call them "Katrina cottages" and there are 10,000 sitting empty in Hope, Arkansas. Ironically, these mobile homes now resting in the birthplace of former President Bill Clinton, were purchased by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (they bought 20,000 trailers for $440 million) to house the thousands of people left homeless by the Katrina Hurricane, but only half of them were ever utilized. The trailer debacle was just another mistake in the long list of mistakes chalked up by FEMA after Katrina. It seems that FEMA has established rules that disallow manufactured homes from being set up in a flood plain, and since New Orleans is below sea level, it is considered by FEMA itself as a flood plain. But all of that aside, what would be the most advantageous way to make good use of the stranded house trailers? Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) has a great idea. Why not move them to where they are badly needed, say the Indian reservations? Many of the reservations in the west are housing poor. There are supposedly 90,000 families that are homeless or are living in substandard housing. On reservations like the Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Crow Creek and Standing Rock, some homes hold as many as three families. People without a home see little hope for the future. Homelessness contributes greatly to the cycle of poverty so prevalent on Indian reservations in states like South Dakota. The proposal by Senator Johnson has merit. He has taken the time to visit many Indian reservations in the west, particularly in his home state, and he has observed firsthand, the horrific living conditions of so many Indian families. I recall visiting the office of Andrew Cuomo when he was the head of the Housing and Urban Development agency in Washington, DC and scratching my head in wonder as Cuomo took me through the halls of HUD showing me the enlarged photos of the interiors and exteriors of the terrible housing problems on South Dakota's Indian reservations Some of the photos showed the poverty stricken families sitting on makeshift beds that doubled as couches surrounded by all of the accoutrements of the very poor. All of the evidence of the harsh conditions existing on these reservations was there decorating the halls of HUD like so many trophies. Why even post these terrible photos? What purpose did they serve if nothing was being done to change the images? The living conditions of the very poor Indians in states like South Dakota, compared to those very rich casino Indians, is analogous to people living in the poorest Third World country to those living in Beverly Hills, California. In fact, there is no comparison. Some Indian tribes are making so much money from their casinos that their members live in 4,000 square foot mansions while in South Dakota many tribal members live in the worst squalor. The very rich gaming tribes are not obligated to help their brothers and sisters on the poor reservations and in most cases, they don't. It bothers some of us greatly when we observe these rich tribes spending millions promoting boxing matches or buying professional women's basketball teams, or just squandering their money on golf courses and elaborate resorts. And even when these rich tribes try to help, it sometimes causes more problems than even they anticipated. Case in point, the Shakopee Nation in Minnesota made a loan of $38 million to the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge Reservation recently. Perhaps the loan should have come to the tribe in the form of a grant because the entire financial obligations of the tribe to repay the loan was not explained thoroughly to the general population and once the rumor mills started chaos set in. Tribal President Cecelia Fire Thunder requested the loan for all of the obvious reasons. The tribe was heavily in debt and sinking deeper every day. The loan would not only help the tribe lift itself up from the depths, but it would help them build an addition to their casino and, hopefully, provide more income and jobs. As I said, these good intentions were not explained very well reservation-wide and soon rumors began to circulate that the tribal council and its president had put up the very land the tribe walked upon as collateral for the loan. Impeachment proceedings were started and Fire Thunder was suspended from office for 66 days. Fire Thunder eventually set the record straight and her suspension was lifted, but all of this turmoil and loss of valuable time could have been prevented if the communications between the tribal government, the Shakopee and the people had been more specific. Although Shakopee's intent was good, the aftermath was not. With all of their millions Shakopee should have sent a delegation of public relations people to Pine Ridge to explain all of the intricacies of the loan, and when things turned so bad that Fire Thunder was nearly impeached, Shakopee should have intervened by removing the 6 percent interest rate it was charging the tribe for the loan, or by making the loan an outright grant. All that aside, I commend Sen. Tim Johnson for taking the initiative to find adequate housing for some of the poorest tribes in America and as I have written in the past, Tim Johnson is one of the very best friends the Indian people have in the U. S. Senate. Representative Stephanie Herseth (D-SD) is the very best friend Indians have in the House of Representatives. I also say shame on you to those rich tribes that squander billions on frivolity while their brothers and sisters live in extreme poverty. Is there a generic Indian word for greed? --- Tim Giago is the president of the Native American Journalists Foundation, Inc., and the publisher of Indian Education Today Magazine. He can be reached at najournalists@rushmore.com or by writing him at 2050 W. Main St., Suite 5, Rapid City, SD. He was also the founder and publisher of the Lakota Times and Indian Country Today newspapers. Native American Times. Copyright c. 2005 All Rights Reserved. --------- "RE: RED ALERT Declared by Marcos" --------- Date: Thursday, May 04, 2006 04:13 am From: Chiapas95-english Subj: RED ALERT Declared by Marcos,May 03 (fwd) Mailing List: Chiapas95-En -- This message is forwarded to you by the editors of the Chiapas95 newslists. To contact the editors or to submit material for posting send to: . Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 23:10:14 -0500 (CDT) From: Chiapas 95 Moderators Subject: RED ALERT Declared by Marcos,May 03 19:30 Subcomandante Marcos announced today that he has declared a "red alert" in the Autonomous Municipalities of Chiapas (MAREZ) due to the conflict between peasants and State forces in the State of Mexico, in the center of the country [Salvador Atenco to be exact] "We are declaring ourselves on "red alert" said Marcos during a public event in the Plaza of Three Cultures, in Mexico City and he said that, "from this moment on an alternative command structure is in place in case anything were to happen to me." The Zapatista Leader declared this after learning of clashes today between the community of Salvador Atenco and police"clashes that have left 42 people injured, at least three of them critically [as of 20:45 Reforma newspaper had posted that two had in fact died as a result of the attacks] The Zapatista army of National Liberation, who has received numerous signs of support from the population of San Salvador de Atenco, has for a number of years controlled a series of autonomous municipalities [whose centers] they refer to as Caracoles. Marcos declared, "we are Atencos," with reference to the population of Salvador de Atenco which has for the last several years mounted a number of campaigns of resistance [most specifically against a government sponsored airport] "From this moment on we are canceling all our scheduled events and we will instead dedicate ourselves, to the extent it is needed, to meeting the needs of the people of Atenco," said Marcos, whom after his speech ducked into an apartment in the Tlatelolco area in the northern part of Mexico City. ----------------------------- 19:30 El subcomandante Marcos, anuncio' hoy que decreto' una "alerta roja" en los municipios rebeldes de Chiapas a partir de ma~ana debido al conflicto entre campesinos y polici'as en el Estado de Me'xico, centro del pai's. "Nos estamos declarando en alerta roja", dijo Marcos en un acto poli'tico en la Plaza de la Tres Culturas, en Ciudad de Me'xico, y se~alo' que "a partir de este momento esta' funcionado ya un mando alterno por si algo me pasa". El li'der zapatista hizo esta declaracio'n tras conocer un choque hoy entre campesinos de San Salvador Atenco y polici'as, que ha dejado hasta el momento al menos 42 heridos, tres de ellos graves. El Eje'rcito Zapatista de Liberacio'n Nacional (EZLN), que ha recibido expresiones de apoyo de los pobladores de San Salvador Atenco, controla desde hace varios a~os municipios en el sure~o estado de Chiapas a los que llamada "caracoles". Marcos aseguro' que "en el EZLN somos 'atencos'", en relacio'n a los pobladores de San Salvador Atenco que desde 2002 han realizado varios movimientos de resistencia. "Desde este momento cancelamos los eventos programados y vamos a asistir en caso de que se necesite a la comunidad de Atenco", dijo Marcos, quien despue's de su acto pu'blico entro' a un departamento de la zona de Tlatelolco, norte de la capital mexicana -- To subscribe to this list send a message containing the words subscribe chiapas95 (or chiapas95-lite, or chiapas95-english, or chiapas95-espanol) to majordomo@eco.utexas.edu. Previous messages are available from http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html or gopher to Texas, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Economics, Mailing Lists. --------- "RE: Police Brutality in Atenco" --------- Date: Monday, May 08, 2006 01:55 am From: Chiapas95-english Subj: Police Brutality in Atenco,Reports of Rape and Murder,May 06 Mailing List: Chiapas95-En This message is forwarded to you by the editors of the Chiapas95 newslists. To contact the editors or to submit material for posting send to: . From: "Dana" Date: Sat, 6 May 2006 22:46:41 +0200 Police Brutality in Atenco: Reports of Rape and Murder as the Number Political Prisoners and Disappeared Passes 400 The Other Campaign Announces Mobilizations Across the Country and a National Popular Assembly for Saturday By Bertha Rodri'guez Santos The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in San Salvador Atenco May 6, 2006 NarcoNews SAN SALVADOR ATENCO, MAY 5, 2006: Around 400 arrested - of which the authorities have only recognized 109, and which include three injured - 18 people disappeared and five women raped. These new figures must be added to the hundreds of injured and one boy murdered as a result of the brutal repression against the flower vendors of Texcoco and peasant farmers of San Salvador Atenco, perpetrated by municipal, state and federal police from May 3 onward. Political prisoner Gloria Arenas Aji's relayed these numbers from her tiny cell in Santiaguito prison (where most of those arrested were taken) to be read to thousands of demonstrators marching in solidarity with the people of Atenco and Texcoco. The grief, courage and outrage of thousands of people after the violent repression against the flower growers and members of the Peoples' Front in Defense of the Land (FPDT) exploded this afternoon in a long protest march that left from the University of Chapingo and continued until it reached San Salvador Antenco, almost six miles away. The marchers showed their solidarity through the slogans the chanted: "Brother Atenco, the people extend their hand to you!"; "Atenco, listen, the people are part of your struggle!"; "Atenco is not a barracks, get the army out of it!"; "The damn government doesn't like our style, but they're fucked, because we are all Atenco!" Not to mention the tears of many women farmers from Atenco who came out to the street to cheer on the crowd, which cried out "Justice! Justice!" and "You are not alone!" again and again. They were thousands - some calculated more than six thousand - who came from different parts of the country, especially from neighboring cities like Mexico City, and mobilized to support the towns of Texcoco and Atenco. Aside from the delegation from the Sixth Commission of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in its Spanish initials) led by Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos, hundreds of students from the University of Chapingo, the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National Polytechnic Institute marched down the Lecheri'a-Texcoco highway. For more than three hours, members of the Emiliano Zapata Popular Revolutionary Union (UPREZ), the Francisco Villa Popular Independent Front (FPFVI), the National Peasant-Farmer Front (FNC), the National Coordinating Committee of the Plan de Ayala and the Promotora Nacional Contra el Neoliberalismo ("National Promoter Against Neoliberalism") also marched. >From prison, Gloria Arenas - accused of belonging to the guerrilla Insurgent People's Revolutionary Army (ERPI) - sent a communique' in which she argues that the repression unleashed against the two towns in the Texcoco valley is a direct aggression against the Other Campaign and the peaceful movement led by different social movements linked together through the EZLN Sixth Commission's tour that began in January in Chiapas. Arenas wrote that the repressive policies of the governments run by the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD, to which Texcoco municipal mayor Nazario Gutie'rrez Marti'nez belongs), of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, to which Mexico state governor Enrique Pe~a Nieto belongs) and the National Action Party (the PAN of President Vicente Fox) will continue against the adherents of the Other Campaign and predicted that "the prisons will keep filling up." For this reason, wrote Arenas, the national and international mobilizations that began yesterday must be continued and reinforced. She announced that she had begun a hunger strike at 5 o'clock that afternoon inside the prison. She called on all women prisoners around the country to join the hunger strike until all political prisoners are released. A representative from Atenco in the municipal government was the first to take the microphone during the demonstration. He was blunt: "We oppose the police entering people's homes and breaking things; they hit women and showed no respect for the children." Another San Salvador Atenco resident explained indignantly during a conversation on the street how on May 4, from 7:00 a.m. on, some three thousand Federal Preventive Police agents and state police officers violently barged into several Atenco homes. A helicopter also participated in the operation, nearly scraping the houses' roofs as it flew overhead. A masked man rode in the helicopter, pointing out specific houses below which police on foot then forced their way in to. The man was riding his bike but as he realized how much danger lay in the streets he returned home, and from his rooftop witnessed the savage beating the police gave a group of students who had taken refuge in a house across the street. He said the group looked to be about 20 college students who traveled to the town's auditorium to show their solidarity with the people under siege. It is assumed that the students planned to run into the abandoned lot behind the building. But some 50 police broke down the door to the house and entered violently. They dragged all the youths, men and women out of the house and threw them to the ground, pulling peoples' shirts up to cover their own faces. The policed forced some people a squatting position and put everyone in a single line. One of the police began counting them by hitting them in the head one by one with a club. As he reached the end, he said, "Ay, I've lost count, let's go back to the beginning," and indicated to his partner to repeat the whole operation. But in the end, the other policeman said that he couldn't count either, and so now they needed to count down in reverse order, beating the prisoners as hard as they could. The prisoners, especially the girls, cried out for them to stop the beating, but rather than listening to them the police kicked them without mercy, shouting, "shut up, you troublemaking assholes!" "Many had lost consciousness, and the police kept beating them," lamented the Atenco resident, who guessed that the operation lasted until 2:00 p.m. "If as many people as are here today had been there, we would have all come out of our houses, but we were very few. What's more, when the police saw that we were watching everything they did, they pointed their teargas guns at us and ordered us to get inside because if we didn't they would come for us." The brute force of the police temporarily silenced this town. Many houses and businesses that were trashed have locked their doors. During the event at the end of the march, an elderly woman complained of the barbarity committed by the police under orders from all three levels of government (municipal, state and federal), saying that her son was on his way to work when he was arrested, just like many of those in jail today. "We mothers suffer. We are full of rage and pain," burst out another woman, who said her son had only gone outside to see what was happening when they took him. In addition to holding protests, including marches and road blockades all across the country, several organizations will hold sit-ins in front of the Almoloya Maximum Security Prison in Jua'rez (where FPDT leader Ignacio del Valle - "Nacho" as the people of Atenco call him - is being held), as well as in front of the Santiaguito prison where hundreds more are detained. Ame'rica del Valle, Nacho's daughter and sister of Ce'sar, one of the disappeared, spoke to the demonstrators by telephone, saying: "Don't bend to their pressure; don't give up." She warned the municipal, state and federal governments that the use of force in the town of San Salvador Atenco "has not defeated us." After pointing out that "yesterday, organized people defeated the police," she said that this is not the only place in struggle, as "there are many Atencos throughout Mexico." Ameri'ca del Valle warned the Televisa and TV Azteca television networks - who only broadcast images of the injured police, giving the impression that these were victims of the townspeople's' "madness," and whose news anchors incited and then applauded greater police intervention - that "your poison will not kill us." She said that now the people are less willing then ever to give up their rights. "We have a great responsibility and we are going to fight for our children, for our women, for our elders, for the workers, for the indigenous and the peasant farmers. We are going to fight for all of them to the ultimate consequences." The young woman, who has an arrest warrant hanging over her, thanked "the Mexican people" from her unknown location. She thanked them for their solidarity before "the criminals from above" from whom she demanded "the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners, the living return of the disappeared and for all police forces to leave Atenco and Texcoco. As part of the immediate actions that the Other Campaign adherents have put in motion to achieve these goals, a Popular National Assembly has been programmed for May 6 in San Salvador Atenco, beginning at noon. -- To subscribe to this list send a message containing the words subscribe chiapas95 (or chiapas95-lite, or chiapas95-english, or chiapas95-espanol) to majordomo@eco.utexas.edu. Previous messages are available from http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html or gopher to Texas, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Economics, Mailing Lists. --------- "RE: AFN Statement on the 2006 Federal Budget" --------- Date: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 03:19 pm From: frostyca2000 Subj: Assembly of First Nations Statement on the 2006 Federal Budget Mailing List: Frostys AmerIndian Assembly of First Nations Statement on the 2006 Federal Budget - First Nations Sacrificed to Build a Better Canada OTTAWA, May 2 /CNW Telbec/ - "First Nations will remain in last place as a result of today's so-called "Building a Better Canada" federal budget. This disappointing budget does not begin to address the gap in quality of life between First Nations and other Canadians and could increase the gap through inaction. The Canadian public may see a $3.2 billion figure dedicated for Aboriginals in the 2006 budget, but $2.2 billion was already set aside last November as compensation for residential schools survivors. We welcome the money for survivors, but it was a measure to provide redress and acknowledge liability, not a new measure to build a better Canada for First Nations. The money allocated to address the critical socio-economic and infrastructure gaps faced by First Nations is more realistically described as a portion of the two-year, $450 million funding commitment that has been earmarked for "Aboriginal Canadians". That money is a drop in the bucket when compared to the $17 billion surplus, and is only a third of the money that had been allocated to improving quality of life for First Nations and other Aboriginal Canadians under the corresponding first two years of the Kelowna targets. The government committed in this budget to measures that will correct fiscal imbalances at the provincial and territorial level. Nowhere is fiscal imbalance more apparent than in the critical under-funding of First Nations health, education, housing and infrastructure, yet today's budget perpetuates the imbalance for our communities. There is a critical need to address First Nations health, social and childhood development issues, yet First Nations are excluded from the government's new comprehensive plan on wait time guarantees. This budget committed to a 6% escalator in health for provinces and territories, but despite previous announcements, there was no corresponding escalator for First Nations health. There is no First Nations-specific component in the government's child care plan and, while over $300 million was committed to addressing diseases like tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in developing countries, there was no funding to address rising tuberculosis and HIV infection rates for First Nations. This government stated today that they will consult with provinces, territories and Aboriginal leaders to "develop a new approach". The approaches developed in Kelowna were developed with and supported by Aboriginal leaders, provinces and territories. These were not commitments from a particular party, but by the federal and all provincial and territorial governments. The Minister of Indian Affairs, Jim Prentice, has stated publicly that he was committed to "putting the wheels on Kelowna". Why is it now necessary to reinvent the wheel? This government has consistently stated that they are willing to discuss Kelowna targets. We are more than willing to meet to discuss implementing measures that will improve quality of life for First Nations, but this budget does not appear to offer much." << Phil Fontaine National Chief Assembly of First Nations >> The Assembly of First Nations is the national organization representing First Nations citizens in Canada. --------- "RE: Innu to fight Quebec logging Permits" --------- Date: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 03:21 pm From: frostyca2000 Subj: Innu to fight Quebec logging permits Mailing List: Frostys AmerIndian Innu to fight Quebec logging permits Pessamit region. Say they weren't consulted properly by governments LYNN MOORE The Gazette May 2, 2006 The Pessamit Innu will contest North Shore logging permits issued by the Quebec government to as many as 27 forestry companies, its council chief said yesterday. Lawyers representing the band are to be in a Montreal courtroom Monday seeking to nullify permits issued to companies operating in Pessamit territory, Raphael Picard said in an interview. The Innu contend that the Quebec and federal governments failed to engage in a meaningful consultation process with them before issuing logging permits for land claimed by the band, about 140,000 square kilometres, located mostly north of Baie Comeau. Picard, who is to hold a news conference in Quebec City today to discuss the band's legal recourse against Quebec and Ottawa in connection with the James Bay agreement, said that the band will contest all permits issued this season by Quebec. About 27 companies have harvesting rights on the North Shore territory claimed by the Pessamit, including Abitibi-Consolidated and Kruger. Only about 10 "temporary and partial" permits were issued by Quebec's Natural Resources Department, given the dispute over consultation raised by the Innu and the region's economic needs, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Minister Pierre Corbeil said. The band has filed a $3.1-billion lawsuit alleging the Quebec and federal governments, as well as the forestry companies, have illegally exploited their resources. The lawsuit is one of two major legal offensives already launched by the Pessamit. The other involves logging rights held by Kruger. On Friday, the Innu suffered a setback on the Kruger front when the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned a lower court ruling that had prevented Kruger from logging virgin bor-eal forest on Ile Rene- Levasseur pending the outcome of a hearing over Quebec's issuance of permits to Kruger. Picard yesterday downplayed the impact of the ruling, saying that the case will be argued on its merits as early as this fall and that Quebec's appeal court has historically proven "conservative" in the area of constitutional rights. Kruger, which was given dispensation to harvest fire-damaged wood on the island last season, welcomed the appeal court ruling, noting that forest jobs at three North Shore mills rely on the wood, as does a Trois Rivieres pulp mill. lmoore@thegazette.canwest.com Copyright c. The Gazette (Montreal) 2006. --------- "RE: KKK marches into Caledonia" --------- Date: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 03:22 pm From: frostyca2000 Subj: "OVER AND OVER, I'LL BE A FOOL FOR YOU" Mailing List: Frostys AmerIndian "OVER AND OVER, I'LL BE A FOOL FOR YOU" - KKK MARCHES INTO CALEDONIA TO SOLVE "INDIAN PROBLEM" AT SIX NATIONS. MNN. May 2, 2006. Things are on schedule! The flyers in the hands of Caledonia residents, Ontario Provincial Police and a few Six Nations people reads: Citizens of Caledonia - Meeting tonight - 7:00 Sharp! (no location, no date) Agenda: Discussion of the "Indian Problem". "What is the final solution?" Full dress meeting. Wear your sheets. (This is no joke. This is what the flyer actually says. This ain't the movies, folks. This is real life). Special Speaker - all the way from Burning Cross Mississippi, Bobby Lee Raspmas, Veteran of the 50's, 60's, 70's. Hear about the "Final Solution". (How come Canada is letting him in and they won't let Indians cross the border to support us?) Three-fourths of the flyer has a picture of a KKK meeting with sheets on. We were waiting for this one! This flyer was given out for last Friday's rally and march onto the barricades at the site of the illegal housing project that the Six Nations People are trying to stop. It's being given out again for the Friday, May 5th rally at 7:00 right at the barricades this time. The press has been asking Caledonians where the flyer came from and nobody seems to know. Janie Jamieson said, "If the non-native rioters come here and it gets out of hand, the OPP will declare they can't handle it. Then the army will be brought in". Based on past experience we suspect that even putting this flyer out is supposed to create a panic. We've seen it all before. The same thing happened in the Mohawk Oka Crisis of 1990. We have given no reason for the army or the RCMP to come in. If these rioters create chaos, the Caledonians will be screaming for the big guns to come in. In 1990 the people of Chateauguay were incited to riot night after night at the boundary of Kahnawake. It was exactly exactly the same kind of threats, screaming, insults, trying to rush the barricades and yelling for the army to come in. It split the community up and gave it a "red neck" label that still taints its reputation 16 years later. What can be done? How do the people of Caledonia feel about being identified with the Ku Klux Klan? Hey, neighbors, can't you see it? You are being set up to get a bad name. David Peterson, the Ontario negotiator, has probably been given orders to demand that the barricades be taken down before talks can begin. They want to create a situation so they don't have to negotiate. "Remove your barricades and then we will talk", it says on the colonial script. Every time we object to oppression, this is the same procedure that has been followed. Peterson is probably going to try to make it look like the Indigenous people are being stubborn, belligerent and non-compromising. That's what Bernard Roy and Alex Patterson did in Kanehsatake in 1990. They were getting angry because we kept on wanting to talk about the land issue. Throughout we were peaceful and non-violent. They got impatient and suddenly cut off negotiations. Then the army closed the perimeter around us and kept us there under siege for almost another month. The term "final solution to the Indian problem" was coined first by Indian Affairs superintendent, Duncan Campbell Scott, to describe his genocidal policies in the 1920's. It's not surprising to find the KKK has taken up the banner of his cause. So they're not the first in line. Remember Hitler? He found Canadian and U.S. Indian policies very inspiring. Unfortunately, World War II was not enough to end such disgusting initiatives. Has Canada no sense of pride? Aren't they ashamed to be doing this again? This tired out old tactic is digging a hole for Canada's reputation. Rather than settling with the Indigenous people, Canada would prefer to use scare tactics to get a little bit instead of settling the big issues. Take a stand against the KKK. Take a stand against police and military solutions to legal problems. Ask you Member of Parliament how it is that the KKK is able to import speakers to incite racist violence. This flyer was put out a week ago and nothing's been done since then. We still need people to stand with us. Any help is appreciated. Keep writing the Governor General, the Prime Minister, the Queen and everybody in the world. Tell them what's happening to us. Kahentinetha Horn MNN Mohawk Nation News Kahentinetha2@yahoo.com www.mnn.mohawknationnews.com --------- "RE: The seige continues at Six Nations" --------- Date: Thursday, May 04, 2006 07:45 pm From: frostyca2000 Subj: The seige continues at Six Nations Mailing List: Frostys AmerIndian The seige continues at Six Nations. Your vigilance is important! Stay strong. Kahentinetha Horn www.mnn.mohawknationnews.com SIX NATIONS WILL NOT NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS MNN. May 4, 2006. We are the victims. Our land has been stolen. Canada claims it's there to protect us. So, why are we under siege? It's like a bank robbery, but instead of running off with the loot, the thieves took over the whole building and sold it to somebody else. While they were gone, we sneaked in the back door and mounted a guard to keep out the people who had taken over the stolen goods. They were in the process of fencing it to someone else. That's when the original crooks sent in their armed forces and attacked us and then held us hostage. Then while they put their guns to our heads, they demanded to negotiate with us. For what? They want all the jewels and money in the bank vault and the bank too. Then they say they'll let us go. This is terrorism! No one should negotiate with terrorists, we heard. The robbers are sending a patsy in to "negotiate" with us, to tell us about the cement shoes that await us if we don't tow the line. He's bringing us the message from the liars, embezzlers and thieves. He wants us to take down our protective barricades. Are we crazy or what? People all over the world are watching this hostage taking and putting pressure on Canada. Canada is trying to stop getting the information out. We know a thing or two about robbers and thieves. We can't put our guard down. Canada's got a stakeout with yellow tape around us telling everybody to stay away so they can make a secret deal with an imposter. They took him out to a steak dinner and to a hockey game hoping he would sign a surrender on our behalf. We won't go along with that. We can get by on baloney. That's all we've had to eat for the last 200 years. No offence to the people of Bologna Italy. This colonial idiom has nothing to do with their food. "Get your gun toting goons out of here", that's all we want right now. If Canada is going to refuse to protect us, the least it can do is to stop backing thievery. We want their "Big Don" ? whoever is running their gang - to tell them to back off. We heard that there is a big law somewhere out there that is supposed to protect us. The big Don knows about this. A long time ago to keep the peace they agreed to this pact. We want everyone to shame the big Don and his gang into obeying the big laws. We can't negotiate with these gangsters. We just want these bullies to give us back our property and to stay away from us. If the Don doesn't go along with this, we'll have to send for our `family' to come and help us. They don't like anyone picking on us. You never know. There might be repercussions all over the place if something happens to us. Now they're getting all our neighbors to gang up on us too. They used to bitch and complain about us but they always traded with us without any trouble. They didn't have the nerve to come in and kill us because they know that we will do whatever we have to do to defend ourselves. The next thing they did was to hire some thugs from far away to hang around outside and scream and threaten us. They want us to react to this so they can finish us off. In the meantime the gangsters are cre