_ __ _____ __ _ __ ___ ____ _ __ ___ ' ) / / ') / / ) ' ) ) / ) / ' ) ) / ) / / / / / / /--/ / / / ___ / / / / ___ (_(_/ (__/ ( / (_ / (_ (___/ '__/_ / (_ (___/ ' ____ _ , ___ _ , ___ / ' ) / / ) ' ) / / ' VOLUME 15, ISSUE 012 / /-< / /--/ /-- __/_ / ) (___/ / ( (___, WOTANGING IKCHE - Lakota - Common News Wotanging Ikche and Native American News Copyright c. 1996-2007 nanews.org Aboriginal/AmerIndian Perspective about the First Nations of Turtle Island March 19, 2007 Blackfeet sa'aiki'somm/duck moon Yuchi wadasine/little summer moon Assiniboine wicinstayazan/sore eye moon Algonquin namossack kesos-/catching fish moon Lakota Siyoistohcapi Wi/moon of Snow blindness +-------------------------------------------------------+ | 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; www.indiancountrytoday.com; Mailing Lists: Chiapas95-En, Frostys AmerIndian and Native American Poetry; 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: + -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- + =================== Along the U.S.-Mexico border, the body count continues to pile up daily. Meanwhile, the Minutemen patrol the U.S.-Mexico border and shameless politicians find it easy to denounce illegal immigration as the cause of all the nation's problems - including linking it with "the war on terror." Amidst all the clatter, the only views not being heard are the ones that matter most. Thus here, we bring you a truly historic column, featuring the views of those that have come before us to these lands: American Indians: "... False and violent borders have been imposed upon our many peoples and upon the landscape, dissecting our Mother Earth, our home continent, in two and attempting to sever our deep connection with the land, and with each other... We maintain our recognition and respect for all our Indigenous brothers and sisters of the Western Hemisphere, with whom we traded, learned from, loved and laughed with for a millennia. We are Indigenous, of this place on Mother Earth, called Turtle Island, the Middle Place, Abya Yala and the Fourth World. And we remain bonded together forever, knowing ourselves as the K'iche and Karuk, Saraguro and Cheyenne, the Cherokee, Xicano and Chumash, we are all relations." __ Tia Peters, Zuni, Seventh Generation Fund +- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -+ | 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 Sisters I am breaking several self imposed "rules". I am including an article in the editorial. The article included is about, yet another, act of utter racism by Montana Representative Ed Butcher. Butcher has made a career out of ignorant, anti-Indian remarks. Please hold your nose and read the following: http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? AID=/20070318/NEWS01/703180332/1002 Butcher draws more fire for e-mail message By ALAN SUDERMAN Associated Press Writer HELENA Rep. Ed Butcher was criticized Saturday for insensitivity reflected in a private e-mail, written by him, that characterized supporters of increased funding for a Native American education program as "semi-literate." The Winifred Republican said he is the victim of a Democratic attack designed to silence debate. Retired Fairfield teacher Dorothea Susag wrote Butcher an e-mail on Wednesday, urging him to support a bill by Sen. Carol Juneau, D-Browning, that would increase funding for Indian Education for All. The program is intended to teach all students about Montana's Indian tribes. The funding measure, which passed the Senate, was heard Friday by the House Education Committee. In his response to Susag, Butcher, who is on the committee, wrote that the program was misguided and was being "propelled by the 'politically correct' crowd of semi-literate proponents." Later in an interview, Butcher would not specify which people comprise "the politically correct crowd." But he said Juneau was not among them, nor were other Indian lawmakers or the Office of Public Instruction, the department that overseas Indian Education for All. He also wrote in his response he had been "astonished at the naivety of our educational community in buying into this 'Indian education project."' He wrote that an accurate picture of historic Indian culture was not possible because Indians were a "hunter/gather peoples who would have had a limited vocabulary ... and relied upon sign-language for much of their communication." The e-mail exchange eventually was forwarded to lawmakers critical of Butcher's comments. Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Rocky Boy, said Butcher was "basically thumbing (his) nose to the creator." Earlier this session, Butcher apologized on the House floor for calling Windy Boy "Chief Windy Boy." In 2001, Butcher drew criticism for calling Indian reservations "ghettos." Butcher said that the statements in his e-mail were accurate and that he has studied Indian history extensively. He added that he was not prejudiced against Indians, but simply thinks their history should not be "overemphasized" in schools, to the neglect of other subjects. "I mean good grief, there are a heck of a lot more Norwegians, Germans and other ethnic groups in the state of Montana than there are Indians," Butcher said. Last month, House Democrats tried to have Butcher censured for calling an argument from Rep. Rep. Eve Franklin, D-Great Falls, "nonsense." "The Democrats are twisting and turning this thing to try and make an issue out of something that is a non-issue," Butcher said. Democrats made no official statement criticizing Butcher's e-mail, but Senate Majority Leader Carol Williams, D-Missoula, urged Republicans to speak out against him. "I think that shows a void in Republican leadership because it implies that the leadership agrees with him," Williams said. House Majority Leader Michael Lange, R-Billings, called Butcher's e-mail "disappointing," but said he had no control over the private correspondence of his party's members. Copyright c. 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. Copyright c. 2007 Great Falls Tribune. All Rights Reserved. -- This semi-literate, mixed-blood would like to point out there is Black History, Spanish History and European History presented in Montana schools. In a state with as many tribes as Montana has, to continue to ignore Tribal History is pure hypocrisy, at best. I have a sign for Ed Butcher. It's one raised finger. Even a smart, educated bigot like him can figure that one out. Dohiyi Ani Oginalii , , Gary Smith (*,*) wotanging@bellsouth.net P. O. Box 672168 (`-') gars@nanews.org Marietta, GA 30007, U.S.A. ===w=w=== http://www.nanews.org ----------- News of the people featured in this issue ----------- Editorial Section - JODI RAVE: . Butcher's Bigotry Native economy focus of Res2007 - Urban Clinics told to - Mayan Priests purify ruin deny Undocumented Patients after Bush visit - Lawmakers must ensure - Int'l Observers denounce all Indians have Health Care paramilitary aggressions - New Evidence surfaces - ROSS: in Schaghticoke Appeal Being Zapatistass - Bush aide linked in the Southwest to Special Trustee firing resigns - Social struggles - Senecas rally in Oaxaca and Chiapas against tax collections - Canadian Indigneous - Radioactive Water in struggle support EZLN near Hopi Springs - The Akwesasne Fairy Tale - Rosebud Sioux declare emergency - Iroquois curse on Conrad Black over Suicides - Open message from - Feds, Indians clash two former Grand Chiefs at Bison Refuge - National Chief Fontaine - Zuni Pueblo works on Special land claims to expand Housing availability - Film: Missing and murdered - Nanticoke try to bring Aboriginal Women Tribe's Tongue back to life - Supreme Court reverses - MORON ALERT: County water rights ruling Band dispute Racism Perception - Seminole Police quiet - Play takes Native Language about fatal shooting to unfamiliar Stage - Native Justice - WICKHAM: The floating heads -- Aboriginal Youth incarcerations of Mount Rushmore disproportionatly high - YELLOW BIRD: - Rustywire: Times change, dreams don't Navajo Grandma - Shi Ma Ssni - ROSSUM: Court must affirm - Verse: Hawaiian Book of Days Tribes' Sovereignty - Lee Goins Poem: The Jester --------- "RE: Urban Clinics told to deny Undocumented Patients" --------- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:33:12 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="REFUSING TO PROVIDE CARE" http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=64851&nfid=rssfeeds American Indian Tribal Clinics In Urban Areas Told To Deny Undocumented Patients, Officials Say Date: 12 Mar 2007 Primary Care / General Practice Some taxpayer-funded tribal clinics in urban areas recently have stopped admitting people who cannot document their federal tribal status even though the clinics are required by law to provide health care for all people of American Indian ancestry, some patients and clinic officials say, the AP/Boston Herald reports. Indian Health Service oversees 33 clinics nationwide that provide no-cost or discounted care to American Indians and Alaska Natives who live in cities. More than 60% of those populations live in urban areas. The clinics are funded under the American Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976, which requires clinics to serve members of tribes that are recognized by states or the federal government, as well as their descendents. Many states recognize tribes that the federal government does not, the AP/Herald reports. However, Martin Young -- who chairs a Santa Barbara, Calif., clinic board -- said the clinic received a letter last fall from the Bureau of Indian Affairs ins tructing it to deny no-cost health services to people from unrecognized tribes or who do not have a bureau identification card. Young said the clinic has since turned away about 200 patients. An IHS spokesperson said the letter explained who was eligible for care and did not instruct the clinic to deny services. However, clinic managers in Tucson, Ariz.; Wichita, Kan.; and Boston said they also received similar orders. Reaction Susette Schwartz, director of the Hunter Health Clinic in Wichita, said, "IHS is suddenly saying that you can't serve this Indian even though he looks Indian, and his family says he's Indian and has all of this history of being Indian, but he doesn't have this piece of paper." She added, "We need some consistency." Federal officials say the clinics are doing the best they can with limited funds, which could be eliminated entirely under President Bush's fiscal year 2008 budget proposal. Paul Redeagle, deputy director of the Indian Health Service office in Sacramento, said, "We recognize that the urban Indian population is in need of care and we don't want to disenfranchise any native Americans who are living in urban areas." The Senate Indian Affairs Committee likely will discuss who is entitled to no-cost care at its meeting on Thursday, according to the AP/Herald (AP/Boston Herald, 3/8). --- "Reprinted with permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork. org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . Copyright c. 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved. Copyright c. 2007 MediLexicon International Ltd. --------- "RE: Lawmakers must ensure all Indians have Health Care" --------- Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:42:07 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="COMMENTARY: ALL INDIANS MUST HAVE ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE" http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/mar/14/ commentary-lawmakers-must-ensure-all-american-indi/ Commentary: Lawmakers must ensure all American Indians have access to health care John Lewis and Keith Franklin March 14, 2007 New Mexico has the one of the largest populations of American Indians in the country. Nearly 50,000 call Albuquerque home, ranking it third in the nation among cities with the highest percentage of Indians. Given these facts, it seems New Mexico would serve as a model for the rest of the nation in its approach to the health care delivery system for Indians. Sadly, Indians living in New Mexico struggle to access services in a health care delivery system riddled with broken processes and broken promises. Despite its obligation to provide health care to Indian people, the federal government continues to abrogate its responsibility by underfunding programs and reducing services. Increasingly, Indian people find themselves reliant on federal entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Medicare or forced to declare themselves indigent to qualify for financial assistance at already overburdened local hospitals. Indian people relinquished their tribal lands to the United States in exchange for a variety of services, including housing, education and health care. In essence, it was the first prepaid health insurance policy. Health care for Indians is not charity. It is a legal obligation based on a long history of Supreme Court decisions, treaties and legal precedence. Federal relocation programs implemented in the 1960s dramatically changed the demographics of tribal communities, resulting in more than 70 percent of tribal members living off the reservation. However, off-reservation communities do not enjoy a government-to- government relationship with state or federal agencies. They are dependent on the limited advocacy of tribal leaders struggling to provide services for tribal members on the reservation. The increasing marginalization of tribal members living in urban and rural communities, away from their home reservations, and their lack of representation has had catastrophic effects on off-reservation communities. The recent experience faced by a member of our community paints a disturbing picture of how our local health care delivery system fails our people. In 2006, a member of the Lakota Sioux nation went to the Albuquerque Indian Health Center, and was told he needed cataract surgery. Because of changes in available services, he was told, he would have to go outside the Indian Health Service system for care, and services would be paid only if he met strict eligibility requirements. Although he is a member of a federally recognized tribe, he was not eligible for services, because he lives away from his home reservation. He was told to contact his home service unit, but when he telephoned, he learned that because he had been away for more than 180 days he was no longer eligible for services. Too young to qualify for Medicare and unable to declare himself indigent, he found himself in a no-man's land of a bureaucratic red tape. Well-intended New Mexico lawmakers are sponsoring legislation meant to address these issues. HB 784, the Native American Health Care Improvement Act, would provide $10 million to expand health care services and develop plans to improve the delivery of and access to health care services for Indians in New Mexico. The act would establish the Native American Health Council to develop improvement plans, as well as review and approve proposals for funding to expand and develop services. Yet the act does not adequately address the needs of the very community that needs it most - tribal members living off the reservation in urban and rural communities throughout New Mexico. Despite the large number of Indian people living off the reservation in New Mexico and the critical health care needs faced by our community, the current language contained in HB 784 allows for only two off-reservation representatives on the council. Unlike tribal representatives, the off- reservation representatives must be selected by the governor of New Mexico, not by the communities they are expected to serve. Inadequate or ineffective representation will only serve to compound existing disparities. The council plays a key role in identifying priorities and allocating resources. Without sufficient representation, off-reservation communities will continue to languish. The definitions and language in the provisions of the HB 784 do not adequately ensure it will equally benefit tribal and off-reservation communities. There are many instances in which benefits are specific to tribal communities. For example, the bill provides $400,000 for information systems and technology support for tribal health care delivery systems and $400,000 to complete assessments of unmet behavioral health needs in tribal communities. In an interview with Indian Country Today on Feb. 28, Gov. Bill Richardson expressed his concern regarding the plight of our tribal members living off the reservation and deplored the lack of health care available to them. Recognizing the need to elevate the status of off- reservation communities, he stated he "would make it a government-to- government relationship." Let's work together to make the governor's bold vision a reality right here in New Mexico, by crafting legislation that is truly inclusive of all Indian people and provides an equal voice for our off-reservation community members. --- Today's bylines Lewis, of Southwest Native Consultants Inc., and Franklin, president of the Albuquerque Metro Native American Coalition, wrote this article under the aegis of the Albuquerque Coalition of Native American Non-Profit Organizations. Copyright c. 2007 The Albuquerque Tribune. --------- "RE: New Evidence surfaces in Schaghticoke Appeal" --------- Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:28:27 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="RECOGNITION REVERSAL" http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414649 New evidence surfaces in Schaghticoke appeal by: Gale Courey Toensing / Indian Country Today March 12, 2007 KENT, Conn. - A batch of handwritten notes about the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation's historic marriage rates surfaced recently at the BIA, raising more questions about how and why Interior Department decision-makers made the unprecedented decision to reverse the tribe's federal acknowledgement, tribal attorneys said in their latest court filing. The tribe's appeal of the reversal of its recognition alleges violations of due process and improper political influence, and names Interior and its officials as plaintiffs. The Feb. 23 motion says the seven pages of notes that Office of Federal Acknowledgement genealogist Rita Souther found when she was "spring cleaning" her office recently add weight to their previous request for permission to take testimony from Barbara Coen, an attorney in Interior's solicitor's office. "New information just produced by the Federal Respondents emphasizes the central role played in this recognition process by Ms. Coen, revealing that the justification for her deposition is now even greater," the attorneys wrote. The tribe has also asked for testimony from David Bernhardt, Interior's former congressional liaison and current solicitor, and Lee Fleming, OFA director. Souther is part of the OFA research team that worked on STN's petition. The tribe received federal recognition from the BIA in January 2004, only to have it reversed by Interior Associate Deputy James Cason in October 2005 after a fierce opposition campaign by Connecticut officials, an anti- -Indian citizens' group and its powerful White House-connected lobbyist, Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Souther sent her newly discovered notes and a memo to Coen on Feb. 8, seeking advice on what to do with them. "I know we had some discussion about the litigation in the not too distant past regarding submitting the STN administrative record ... [These notes] are clearly my incomplete kind of 'thinking on paper' notes, and not something I would have copied to distribute to anyone else. However, I do not know if they should be considered part of the STN administrative record or not," Souther wrote. Coen sent Souther's documents to U.S. Attorney John Hughes, who represents Interior in the appeal, and he sent the packet to the tribe's attorneys, who filed them and other documents as exhibits with the motion. The notes appear to be in two different handwritings. The first page, dated June 22, 2005, is addressed to Coen and discusses documents that should be sent to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals in response to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's appeal of the tribe's recognition. The writer also expresses concern about "ex parte" contact with the IBIA judges, because parties to the tribe's petition were prohibited by a court order from contacting Interior decision-makers. The remaining pages, written by Souther on July 14, 2005, are concerned with how the OFA calculates and applies endogamous marriage rates, or marriages between tribal members. Cason's reversal of the STN's acknowledgement rested on two issues - the use of state recognition to supplement some periods of the 19th century when documentation was not available, and endogamous marriages during some periods of the 19th century. Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who approved the tribe's recognition, testified in January that she and staff members made a considered, policy judgment that, as a matter of constitutional principles of federalism, the tribe's hundreds of years of state recognition merited important consideration in the recognition process. She said she still believes the decision to recognize the STN was fair and reasonable. The second claim was that the tribe fell short of a 50 percent "threshold" for endogamous marriages because it had counted individuals instead of marriages. The 50 percent threshold can be used as "carryover" evidence for continuous community and political authority, two of the mandated criteria for federal recognition. But Souther's notes indicate there was no established or consistent method of calculating marriage rates. "Is it the percentage of marriages or the percent of members who marry other members? The [regulations] say 50 percent of the marriages ... [There's] more than one reasonable interpretation. ... Did we rely on the number of marriages in others [other tribes]? ... The guidelines say count individuals. ... What action do we take now? What do we send to IBIA in terms of response to CT? Is there a standard [of the anthropologists] on how to calculate the endogamy? Count marriages or individuals? ... Regs [regulations] say marriages in one place and members elsewhere - so there is an ambiguity," Souther wrote. Nowhere in Souther's notes, in other documents in the record received through Freedom of Information requests or in the regulations does it explain how a tribe could reach a 50 percent endogamous marriage rate by counting marriages rather than individuals, since a marriage count would require 100 percent of tribal members marrying each other. The ambiguity, lack of consistency, or even a precedent led Souther to question the next steps. "Do we let sleeping dogs lie ... tell IBIA ... inform Aurene [Martin, former Acting Assistant Secretary Indian Affairs, who signed off on the STN's positive recognition] ... file something on her behalf saying it's inconsistent and ask it back or ask the Sec. to pull it from IBIA and then would it be delegated back to us?" Souther wrote. Almost six months later, on Dec. 2, 2005, three days after the tribe's deadline to file final documents, Coen submitted a "Supplemental Transmittal" informing the IBIA that there was a problem with the tribe's marriage rates, the attorneys wrote. "That document effectively undercut the Tribe's Positive Final Determination by informing the IBIA that it could not rely upon the endogamy analysis used in that Positive Final Determination. By waiting over five months to file the Supplemental Transmission, Ms. Coen ensured that the Tribe was procedurally foreclosed from an opportunity to refute the endogamy-related assertions that undermined its recognition," the attorneys wrote. Coen was one of the "decision-makers" upon whom Cason relied in deciding to reverse the STN's acknowledgement, the attorneys said. She wrote the supplemental transmittal, "which the tribe views both substantively and procedurally "to be among the most unfair documents in this record," the attorneys wrote. "Both the Tribe and this court are entitled to understand Ms. Coen's role in reversing the Tribe's recognition," they said, urging the court to allow further discovery. Both the tribe's attorneys and Interior officials declined comment. Copyright c. 1998 - 2007 Indian Country Today. All Rights Reserved. --------- "RE: Bush aide linked to Special Trustee firing resigns" --------- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:33:12 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="ANOTHER BUSH WHACKER GOES DOWN" http://www.indianz.com/News/2007/001830.asp Bush aide linked to Special Trustee firing resigns Wednesday, March 14, 2007 A Bush administration aide who contributed to the firing of former Special Trustee Tom Slonaker resigned on Tuesday amid uproar over the firing of several U.S. Attorneys. D. Kyle Sampson resigned as chief of staff to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales through he remains a government employee. Sampson - with the help of White House aides - orchestrated the firing of the federal prosecutors, but failed to inform Department of Justice superiors fully about his role, Gonzales said. Sampson previously worked for the White House, as did Gonzales. In July 2002, Sampson pressured Slonaker to revise testimony to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee that stated an accounting of the Indian trust was impossible. Slonaker went ahead and told the committee of missing records, inadequate information and inaccurate data. A week later, he was asked to leave the Interior Department by former secretary Gale Norton and former deputy secretary J. Steven Griles. The Cobell plaintiffs sought to question Sampson and other White House and DOJ attorneys about their role in the firing but the Bush administration refused to allow access. Copyright c. Indianz.Com. --------- "RE: Senecas rally against tax collections" --------- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:33:12 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="SENECA REFUSE TO SERVE AS GOVERNOR'S TAX AGENTS" http://www.pechanga.net/ http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2007/03/12/daily26.html Senecas rally against tax collections Business First of Buffalo March 13, 2007 by James Fink Business First The Seneca Nation of Indians Tuesday brought their anti-tax lobbying efforts to what they call the heart of the aboriginal Buffalo Creek territory - Niagara Square in downtown Buffalo. The afternoon rally attracted several hundred Indian tribal members, including some from Long Island and elsewhere in New York state. It marks the latest chapter in an on-going war of words with state leaders about efforts to collect taxes from Native American retailers who sell tobacco items to non-Indians. New York state is seeking to collect more than $200 million in tobacco sales taxes this year from Indian tribes. Indians, however, are refusing to pay, citing centuries-old treaties that grant them sovereign nation status. It was that stalemate that turned Niagara Square into a rally, punctuated by protesting chants against New York state and Gov. Eliot Spitzer. "We will not become tax collectors for New York state," said Maurice John Sr., Seneca Nation of Indians president. "We will not cave in." Speaker after speaker in the more than one-hour long rally criticized efforts by Spitzer to collect the taxes. "You can't make an excuse for what New York state is trying to do," said Kevin Seneca, Seneca Nation treasurer. The Seneca Nation is one of the region's largest employers with more than 5,200 working for it, primarily at its casino operations in Niagara Falls and Salamanca. The Seneca Nation, according to an economic impact study released last month, shows it is a corporation with $1.12 billion in annual revenues with a gross domestic product in Western New York of $588 million. The Seneca Nation had a $120 million payroll in 2005 and generates state and local fees and taxes of $68 million annually plus another $53 million through indirect taxes and fees paid by vendors and employees. "Every Friday, the Seneca Nation gives New York state a shot in the arm," said Richard Nephew, a member of the Seneca Nation's tribal council. Copyright c. 2007 American City Business Journals, Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. --------- "RE: Radioactive Water near Hopi Springs" --------- Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:16:14 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="RADIOACTIVE WATER" http://www.azdailysun.com/articles/2007/03/18/news/20070318_news_37.txt Radioactive water near Hopi springs By CYNDY COLE Daily Sun Staff March 18, 2007 Two Hopi villages and their wells lie in the path of a radioactive plume of water A plume of radioactive water is moving toward two Hopi villages, threatening to contaminate wells and spring-fed drinking water for about 1,000 residents. Nothing has been done to contain or remove the waste. Hydrologists, geochemists and consultants have said the radioactive waste appears to have been taken from a Cold War-era uranium milling site near Tuba City and buried at a public dump 1 mile east of the communities. The villages of Upper Moenkopi and Lower Moencopi have seen levels of radioactive uranium in their ground water that appear to be above normal for the area, though these levels are still well within drinking water standards established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Hopi water managers fear these readings are a sign the leading edge of the radioactive plume might already be hitting the villages' groundwater supply. "It's a matter of jeopardizing people's lives" if nothing is done, said Harris Polelonema, community service administrator for Lower Moencopi. Everyone's trash heap Tuba City's dump was opened by the Bureau of Indian Affairs a mile east of town. It was used for more than 40 years until it was covered with sand in 1997. Situated on the boundary marking Hopi and Navajo lands, the dump was a disposal site for medical waste, animal carcasses, paint, batteries and tires, nearby residents said in interviews. "We have no paper record of what's actually in the site," said Lynelle Hartway, an attorney working for the Hopi Tribe. This makes it difficult to assign responsibility for the estimated $23 million cost of removing contaminants thoroughly, which is what both tribal governments want. Test wells at the dump show uranium levels up to 10 times higher than the level the EPA considers safe for drinking water. This uranium plume appears to be moving south and west toward Upper Moenkopi and local washes. If the villages' water and the Navajo Aquifer were to become contaminated, the uranium could bioaccumulate in produce that the Hopi people depend on and in natural vegetation consumed by the livestock, researchers fear. "While the problem isn't too dramatic based on concentration, the cumulative effect over time could be," said geochemist Bill Walker, who analyzed the site. No one's responsibility People working for both tribes have been seeking to have the dump cleaned up and the radioactive water pumped out, but they have made little headway over the years. The Department of Energy won't clean up the dump because the Navajo Nation didn't raise the issue soon enough and because it contains much more than just radioactive waste. The tribe should have raised the issue before the department's congressional authority to conduct cleanups under the Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Act expired in 1998, the department told Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. in letters. And the EPA has been hesitant to designate the dump a federal cleanup site, because it isn't an immediate danger. "The emergency response office decided there was not an emergency and immediate risk to the public," said Andrew Bain, EPA's remedial project manager for Superfund in the West. That leaves open the possibility of trying to bill cleanup costs to the company that merged with Rare Metals Corporation: El Paso Natural Gas Company. Building a case Some EPA and other government officials have suggested the radioactive waste in the dump could not be the result of uranium milling operations just a few miles down the road. Or perhaps, they said, it occurred naturally. But during a geochemical analysis at the dump, Ray Johnson and Laurie Wirt, of the U.S. Geological Survey, found similarities between the uranium found in the dump and the types of ore milled at the nearby Rare Metals Corporation uranium mill. Wirt died in a boating accident in 2006. Walker, the geochemist and consultant, has found that the geology around Tuba City is "highly unlikely" to host uranium deposits, meaning it doesn't form there naturally. Instead, he's also found evidence linking the radioactive plume in the dump to the chemicals used in the milling process at the Rare Metals mill. "We've got fingerprints and good, solid data," Walker said. But the person the EPA has assigned to work on this site, Carl Warren, isn't convinced the radioactive plume poses a threat to human health. Nor is Warren certain there's any connection between what's in the radioactive dump and the uranium that was processed at Rare Metals. Neither is the Department of Energy -- the agency usually responsible for cleaning up radioactive waste left over from wartime weapons production. "The DOE did not find any evidence that would support the allegations that Rare Metals Corporation disposed of contaminated equipment or uranium mill tailings at the Tuba City landfill," it said in a letter to Shirley. " ... DOE believes that the ground water contamination discussed in your letter is not from the former mill site but is from the Tuba City landfill or some other nearby source." Giving up the springs The villages of upper Moenkopi and lower Moencopi live differently, but share the same water sources that naturally flow out of the ground. Upper Moenkopi has electricity and running water inside the homes. Lower Moencopi has electricity in a few homes. The stone and mortar houses lack plumbing because the traditional property owners elect not to install most utilities. Lower village residents get water by going outside to a handful of faucets hooked up to gravity-loaded pipes fed by springs. On a sandy road in the upper village, a metal pipe sticks out of a hillside spring, "Susungva," under a large tree. It pours clear, cold water into a basin of stone, next to a valley where Hopi farmers plant their fields every year. It's common to stop here and take a mouthful straight from the pipe. "Even those that have running water in their homes, they still like to drink that spring water," said Chiropractor Alan Numkena, the lieutenant governor of Upper Moenkopi. Upper Moenkopi has drilled wells to tap the deeper Coconino Aquifer as an alternative water source, but the villages need a $1.4 million reverse osmosis treatment system to make the water potable due to salinity. There's no funding to pay for the treatment system, said Wilbert Honahni Sr., an economic development specialist with the Moenkopi Developers Corporation, a non-profit. And in a village where two to three families sometimes share a house, there are many other competing financial priorities. There are going to be house-to-house surveys, interviews about the dump and public meetings for these residents in the months to come. Every fact must be documented in the political attempt to gain funds, excavate the contaminants of the dump and pump out the radioactive plume. More test wells are pending near the dump, to see how far the uranium contamination has traveled. The village drinking water will be tested routinely. "We tell them," said Hartway, the attorney for the Hopi Tribe, "that we will do whatever we can to know exactly what is in their water." Public meeting on Wednesday The Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency will be hosting an open house at the Toh'Nanees Dizi Chapter House in Tuba City on Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Mountain daylight time, to answer and take questions and receive historical information. Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 at ccole@azdailysun.com. Copyright c. 2007 Arizona Daily Sun. --------- "RE: Rosebud Sioux declare emergency over Suicides" --------- Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:42:07 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="ROSEBUD SUICIDES" http://www.indianz.com/News/ http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2007/03/14/news/ top/news01_rosebud_suicide.txt Rosebud Sioux Tribe declares state of emergency on reservation suicides By Richard Winter, Journal correspondent March 14, 2007 MISSION - Gang violence and teen suicide on Rosebud Reservation recently captured the attention of state and national media. The suicide issue also caught the eye of local leaders, prompting Rosebud Sioux Tribal President Rodney Bordeaux to declare a state of emergency on suicides and attempted suicides during a Tribal Council meeting Wednesday. The declaration authorizes Bordeaux to ask the Aberdeen Area Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs along with Public Health Service for additional resources - including personnel in Behavioral Health at Rosebud Comprehensive Health Care Facility - to address the suicides and attempted suicides. The declaration was drafted by Tillie Black Bear, director of the White Buffalo Calf Woman's Society in Mission. Black Bear and her staff have already been visiting local high schools with presentations on teen dating violence. Black Bear said when she saw the increasing number of suicides, she had to do something. "I think the youth's reaction is there is always a lot of talk but no action," Black Bear said. "So, from the WBCWS's perspective, we want to keep going to the schools and providing them with information and start talking to them about teen suicides." According to Rosebud Economic Development Corporation, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Law Enforcement responded to three suicides and 193 attempted suicides from Jan. 1, 2006, to Dec. 31, 2006; and three suicides and 51 attempted from Jan. 1 to March 13 this year. Black Bear said those numbers may not reflect the full number of suicides and suicide attempts, because they are only the cases where the Rosebud police department responded. RST Councilman Robert Moore said the tribe needs help from outside agencies. "I think all of us agree that this is an important effort," Moore said. "It's clear that there are other agencies outside of just the tribal programs that have a great interest and a great role in helping us address this issue." Bordeaux, several other tribal leaders and concerned community members recently spoke to students at Todd County High School. The group talked about the recent violence and the suicides that have become common in the past two years. During the assembly, students were asked to fill out a student questionnaire. Bordeaux said he wanted to find out what the students wanted and how the Rosebud Sioux Tribe could help. One student wrote this comment: "Do your children sleep at night and do they worry about the party in your house? If their mom's going to get beat up, if their mom or dad's going to come home or with who? Are they going to sober up so they have to worry about food, each other? All the money drank up, hustle for lights, food and propane. That's my life and I wish I was able to talk about it." Bordeaux's wife, Jody Waln, said she has grown tired of groups and organizations talking about the problem but doing nothing to help. She said that frustration prompted her and her husband to get involved. "Every time we reach a crisis as a Lakota people, everyone says they are going to do this and this and this, and nothing happens," Waln said. "One of the things that I personally learned from reading the results of this survey is if we are going to come together to help the youth, we need to stand up drug and alcohol free and be ready to really help them." Waln believes that the lack of family structure and the abuse of alcohol and drugs are playing a large role in the problems reservation youths are facing today. "We see so many young kids that are told go to grandma's, 'I'm going to go out (to party),'" Bordeaux said. "These kids are full of hurt, and they just want someone home in their house that cares. We are in a really touchy situation right now because a lot of parents don't want to admit that they are not there." Bordeaux hopes all groups and agencies trying to help with the suicide issue will coordinate their efforts. Bordeaux said he will also seek the help of U.S. Rep. Stephanie Herseth, along with other state and national leaders. Copyright c. 2007 Rapid City Journal. All Rights Reserved. --------- "RE: Feds, Indians clash at Bison Refuge" --------- Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:09:27 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="MORE DIRTY TRICKS BY FISH AND WILDLIFE" http://www.pechanga.net/ http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5462057 Feds, Indians clash at bison refuge By Jeremy P. Meyer Denver Post Staff Writer March 17, 2007 Moises, Mont. - The National Bison Range - one of the nation's most successful wildlife refuges - has become a battleground between a federal agency and the local Indian tribe. The range was created in 1908 by President Teddy Roosevelt as one of the first preserves with a mission to save an animal from extinction. Today, the refuge, 45 miles north of Missoula, keeps about 350 animals and ships excess animals to other refuges such as the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Commerce City, where 16 bison arrived Saturday. A management issue, however, has landed the bison range in a political struggle. "The future of the bison range remains clouded and in doubt," said Matt Kales, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Two years ago, the federal government began allowing the tribe to take over management of some of the bison range based on the Indian Self- Determination Act of 1975, which allows tribes to participate in federal programs. The move led to allegations the Bush administration is trying to privatize the public land by handing it over to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. About 10 tribal members replaced Fish and Wildlife Service workers, doing maintenance and animal care. Fish and Wildlife personnel began complaining that bison weren't being fed and roads and fences weren't being maintained, according to the federal workers. In September, Fish and Wildlife staff filed grievances, saying work conditions were intolerable and complained about harassment, safety violations and "personal slander." In December, Fish and Wildlife Service workers say, 64 bison being held in a corral weren't being adequately fed. These animals included the animals that were to be sent to Colorado, said Steve Kallin, project manager at the National Bison Range. The feeding problem was the last straw, Kallin said, and the Fish and Wildlife Service canceled the tribe's contract - angering tribal leaders and frustrating Interior Department officials who oversee the Fish and Wildlife Service. However, Interior Department officials reversed the Fish and Wildlife Service's decision to end the contract and are negotiating with the tribe to seek a solution. Staff writer Jeremy P. Meyer may be reached at 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com. Copyright c. 2007 The Denver Post. All rights reserved. --------- "RE: Zuni Pueblo works to expand Housing availability" --------- Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 16:32:18 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="ZUNI HOUSING" http://www.gallupindependent.com/2007/march/031607nkj_zunitrblhsng.html Zuni Pueblo works to expand availability of tribal housing By Natasha Kaye Johnson Staff Writer March 16, 2007 ZUNI - Vanessa Peywa wants what almost every American wants, a nice home where she can raise her family. Recently coming out of a divorce and having limited options, Peywa, 33, was forced to move into her uncle's trailer. She took over the trailer's payments; however, her son and daughter had to move in with their grandma, just next door to her. "I don't have enough room," she said. For now, Peywa is working with her situation, and is hopeful that she will be able to secure a home loan so her children can have their own rooms and they can be together under one roof. "I want something that I can call my own," she said. Lucy Yatsatie, 56, and her husband, Fernando Yatsatie, 53, have been wanting to get a new home for the past eight years. "We live in a trailer, and it's kind of getting small," said Lucy. Lucy said there are total of seven people living in their two-bedroom home, including two of their daughters, and two grandchildren. The Yatsatie's and the Peywa's living situation is not unique to tribal members of Zuni. A majority of members have the same predicament. Wednesday night, the Yatsatie's and Peywa's were among 90 other community members who squeezed into a small room at the Zuni tribal office building to learn how they can begin to secure a Native American Home Loan. "Because this program is so flexible, I get a lot of Anglos who say, 'What about me?' There's a lot of Anglos who want to get on with this program, so take advantage of it," advised Ernie Little, loan officer for the American Mortgage Group, Inc. from Phoenix. The program is designed to offer home ownership, property rehabilitation, new construction, or refinancing opportunities for eligible tribes, Indian Housing Authorities, and Native people who want to own a home either on or off tribal land. Congress established the program in 1994, but it was not officially implemented in Zuni until late 2006. Before the program came into existence, lenders had no way to give home loans to people living on tribal lands since the tribe's sovereign status prevented them from repossessing a home in the event of a default. Because of this, many tribes began creating resolutions that would were "lender friendly" so that tribal members could have the opportunity to get home loans. Native home loan benefits "It's pretty much a 100 percent loan, and it's not credit score driven," said Brain Bell, loan officer with American Mortgage Group, Inc. The program has a number of other benefits, such as a low down payment of 1.25 percent to 2.25 percent, based on the lower of the appraised value or cost to acquire a home, a 1 percent finance-able guarantee fee at closing, no monthly mortgage insurance premium, and a 41 percent total debt to gross income ratio. The program also has no income restrictions, making it available to anyone. Many tribes in Arizona and New Mexico have the program available to tribal members, but there are tribes, like Hopi, who do not yet have it implemented. And although the program is considerably flexible, and has a number of attractive benefits and perks, many tribal members are unable to secure a loan immediately because of bad credit. This past summer, the Zuni Division of Housing Services compiled 23 applications to be reviewed for a home loan between $100,000 to $200,000, but only three people qualified. With the exception of a couple of people who had no credit built, Diane Cooche, loan mortgage consultant for the division, said that the rest had "credit issues." "Their debt to income ratio is too high," she said. Telling applicants they've been denied a home loan is difficult for division officials, especially since many come in optimistic about getting a loan. "They're discouraged," said Cooche. What the problem comes down to is that most community members, Cooche said, don't understand how credit works. "A majority of our people here have never seen their credit report," said Cooche. "People think that because a bill goes to collections, it's paid." In response to the high number of applicants with poor credit, the program implemented a financial education program to begin to help people understand how credit works, and how they can start to get their credit back on track. The 20-week programs first class will start this coming Sunday. "We want to convey to them that their situation is not hopeless," said Cooche. Although many people may feel discouraged about their credit history, Bell advised the packed audience Wednesday evening not to try to determine on their own whether they are eligible for a home loan. "A lot of people say 'I cannot afford a home; I can't qualify,' and its not true," said Bell. "With the 184 (Native American Loan Program), they'd be surprised." Changing the mentality One of the divisions biggest obstacles they face in their mission to help people acquire their own home is getting them to pull themselves out of a "gimme" mentality. Unfortunately, Cooche said, many community members view programs that are linked to Washington money, such as the division, as "free dollars". "They see it as a gimme program," she said. "That's their mentality." In an attempt to curtail that mindset, the division is making the financial education class mandatory for low-income families who will be moving into the Bluebird Project Housings. The project is over 50 percent complete. Because people are delinquent in paying their rent, Cooche said, it puts the division at high-risk for being audited. With the education program, officials want to begin to teach families how to live within their means, and properly manage their money. "We want to break that vicious cycle of delinquencies," said Cooche. Cooche said that the tribe can no longer rely on federal dollars, especially since the economy has put a crunch on the number of grant programs available. But altering that train of thought is a challenge within itself. "I call it turning the Titanic around," said Cooche. "It's hard because they're so used to having programs out there available." What the division ultimately wants to accomplish is offering community members the knowledge and the tools to become self-sufficient. "We need to have them say 'I can do this, but show me how,' " she said. For more information, contact ZDHS at 505-782-4550. Copyright c. 2007 the Gallup Independent. --------- "RE: Nanticoke try to bring Tribe's Tongue back to life" --------- Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:09:27 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="NANTICOKE LANGUAGE" http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=/20070317/NEWS/703170329 Nanticoke try to bring tribe's ancient tongue back to life By RACHAEL JACKSON, The News Journal March 17, 2007 There is no surviving word for "goodbye" in the Nanticoke language, and perhaps that is fitting. Even though it has been more than 150 years since the last conversation in Nanticoke took place, the tribe refuses to say farewell to the words of its ancestors. Joining a growing trend of American Indians reviving dormant languages, the Nanticoke recently embarked on a quest to reclaim a nearly lost part of their heritage. The Millsboro-based tribe has a list of about 300 words and the insights of a native speaker of a similar language. Right now, many of them feel pride when they construct simple sentences. But the Nanticoke, whose population is 150 to 200 locally with 1,000 active members nationwide, eventually hope to call each brother a nee-e mat and each sister a nimpz. Eventually they hope to recognize an eagle flying overhead as an ah- whap-pawn-top and refer to a river as a peemtuck. An estimated 175 Indian languages are still spoken in North America, according to Leanne Hinton, a linguistics professor at University of California, Berkeley, but few are still learned at home. Another 125 languages don't have speakers, she said, estimating that tribes are trying to revitalize about 50 of those languages. One of those groups is the Nanticoke. "I think it all shows the symbolic importance of a language as a kind of identity symbol for a group," said Hinton, who works with language revitalization. Nanticoke Chief James T. Norwood agreed. "A lot of tribes don't understand how you can survive without a language," he said. "It's a certain bond that you have. It just connects you more." Recorded in 1792 The Nanticoke's journey to the language of their ancestors started with a more than 200-year-old book. In 1792, Thomas Jefferson ordered the words of the Nanticoke language to be written. It's the only surviving record. The last fluent speaker died more than 150 years ago. To fill gaps, the tribe called upon Myrelene Ranville, a Canadian who speaks and teaches the Anishnabay language. Anishnabay and Nanticoke are part of the Algonquin language family, so Ranville was eager to help. "To work with a tribe who essentially has not heard their language and it has not been spoken in over 200 years and to work with a vocabulary that was recorded at the request of Thomas Jefferson is just incredible," she said. "It gives you shivers. This has not changed since 1792." In November, she left Manitoba for Delaware to lead classes on Nanticoke, using the old book. Financed by donations to the tribe, she applied her language's grammar and supplied words in Anishnabay when none was available in Nanticoke. It was like recreating Spanish with the help of a speaker of Italian. Sterling Street, assistant treasurer for the tribe, said he learned that the language is often literal. The word for "river," peemtuck, actually means "water by the tall trees." The word for man is wohacki, and the word for boy is wohacki-a-wauntit, which means little man. "For a fox, they might not have called it a fox, they might have called it 'four-legged red animal,'" Street said. But Ranville soon returned to her life in Canada, where she regularly converses with other tribe members in Anishnabay and has taught the language in an elementary school. The Nanticoke were left with tapes of her classes, which they play at sessions Thursday nights at the Nanticoke Indian Center in Millsboro. Street, who has a good aptitude for the language, leads the review sessions. But he does not call himself a teacher. As students reviewed words for hand, arm and eye at a recent class, he reminded them that he was still learning, too. A few hundred miles north, in Connecticut, Stephanie Fielding is on a similar mission to resurrect the Mohegan language, which also has Algonquin roots. Fielding, who recently published an 800-word dictionary, is working with the Mohegan-language diaries of Fidelia Fielding, the aunt of her great grandfather, who died in 1908 as the last fluent speaker of Mohegan. She said bits and pieces of the language are used in the present- day Mohegan community. "Even though people aren't fluent in it, we can use a word or two here and there," she said. Miami revived Scholars have differing opinions on bringing back dormant languages. Some point to the success of Hebrew, which before the establishment of Israel had long been restricted to religious uses. There's also the case of the Miami Indians in Oklahoma, who revived their language about 20 years after it fell out of use in the 1960s. Now, some Miami parents are raising their children with the language. "When it comes to reclaiming a cultural heritage, the home is really a sanctuary," said Daryl Baldwin, a member of the Miami tribe who runs the Myaamia Project at the University of Miami in Ohio. He said some of his four children's first words were in Miami. Hinton, the Berkeley scholar, who is also a co-founder of a group called Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, helps organize seminars for tribes to re-connect with their languages. She pairs young people with older tribe members and makes them commit to weekly conversation. She said the program has produced new speakers of about 30 languages. Hinton said the interest in bringing back lost Indian languages is gaining momentum. "It's been a real steady increase since the '90s," she said. "Everyone's realizing that their languages are in terrible danger." Hinton said that while the Nanticoke may not regain their language in its purest form, their efforts may not be in vain. "It's certainly feasible that they could be speaking ... fluently," she said. "The question as to whether fluent speakers could develop really depends on how much reconstitution they do and how much drive there is." She said the point may not be the language as much as rediscovering a part of the tribe's past. Right now the Nanticoke are looking for money to conduct more research and classes. Kim Robbins, 41, hopes to teach her younger brother and niece and nephews. A tribal dancer has written a song in Nanticoke. Others hope to document their legends in the revived language. They're learning their truest Indian names: Street, for example, is known as Earth Keeper in English and Ahkee Ganuhwandung in the Nanticoke-Anishnabay hybrid. And once again, tribe members can greet one another as their ancestors did. Eweenitu. Peace. Contact Rachael Jackson at 856-7373 or rjackson@delawareonline.com. TRANSLATIONS Nip -- water Eweenitu -- peace Nucotucquon -- day Weaku -- night Nowoze -- father Nicque -- mother Nee--e mat -- brother Nimpz -- sister Manitt -- God Ah--whap--pawn--top -- eagle Pukquah -- girl Acqua -- woman Wohacki--a--wauntit -- boy Wohacki -- man Song by Nanticoke tribe member Linda Wright Aameh Aameh n'wummoi ki (Yes, yes, I love you) A nee Nanticoke acqua (I am a Nanticoke woman) N' ne moo-ye-ow-wass (I have joy) N' nuckundoh (I sing) Wummoi ki (Love to you) Copyright c. 2007 The News Journal, Wilmington, Del. --------- "RE: MORON ALERT: County/Band dispute Racism Perception" --------- Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:47:55 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="MILLE LACS COUNTY RACISM" http://www.pechanga.net/ http://millelacsmessenger.com/main.asp? SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=16294&TM=73802.55 County, Band dispute racism perception Accusations addressed at board meeting by Vivian Clark and Rob Passons Messenger Staff Writers March 14, 2007 Mille Lacs County Commissioner Frank Courteau defended County Attorney Jan Kolb against allegations of racism made in a Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe fact book. The 32-page handout had been distributed to legislators at the state Capitol during the Indian Issues 101 workshop last month, and Courteau passed out portions of the fact book at the county commissioners meeting on March 6. The booklet listed reservation boundary disputes and incidents of racism as two of the biggest issues facing the Band. A summery of a page titled Racism in the Mille Lacs Area stated that, "Recent acts aimed at the Mille Lacs Band and its members are a reminder that racial intolerance and misinformation are still alive." First in the list of challenges was a reference to a memo Kolb had distributed to her department heads telling them to, "make sure all of your staff know that there is no longer a reservation in Mille Lacs County." Courteau said that the fact book had come out soon after members of the Band had met with Mille Lacs community leaders at an elected officials gathering meant to build bridges. "How do you build bridges when your construction partner is slamming you with the state leaders when you're not there to defend yourself?" Courteau said. Courteau's voice rose as he referenced the implications of racism directed at Kolb, saying it was a hurtful, nasty label to apply, and Kolb wasn't deserving of the characterization. "They are linking a legal position with racism, and it's bullshit," he added. Kolb was not present for that portion of the commissioner's meeting, but stated on March 8 that she was aware of what had been said, and she had seen the fact book. She addressed the subject of reservation boundaries first. She said that the Band had the opportunity to have the reservation clearly defined by a federal court, but had made motion after motion to block the proceedings. "If they were so certain there is a 61,000 -acre reservation, they should have allowed the case to go forward," Kolb said. She shared Courteau's sentiments where the subject of racism was concerned. According to Kolb the memo in question, which was intended for internal department use, described a legal position, and racism had nothing to do with it. "They invited me to build bridges and then they slap me in the face as a racist," Kolb said. Kolb added that she was not going to allow the fear of being labeled a racist stop her from doing what she believed was the right thing. Band's response In February each year for the last 10 years, including this year, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe has published a booklet to be used as an informational resource tool. The 32-page fact book contains brief summaries on issues relative to the operation of the Band as a whole, according to Emily Johnson, Mille Lacs Band director of government affairs. The booklet includes brief historical summaries on Indian gaming, government, sovereign nations and Indian businesses to name a few topics covered. The booklet also includes summaries on the issues facing the Band and plans for the future. "The intent of the booklet is to be used as another tool to educate the public," Johnson said. "It is a concise way to answer questions for legislators, government officials and interested individuals." There is no dispute racism is an issue Band members face, according to Johnson. The argument over whether the issues of racism in the Mille Lacs area should have been published in the booklet is defended by Johnson, stating simply, racism is an issue Band members face every day. Listing the memo and the incident at the Isle Days parade are two tangible and well documented examples of racism as perceived by the Band. "I would agree the terminology in the (Kolb) memo is of a legal issue," Johnson said. "However, if you look back through history, you will see that all civil and human rights issues began as legal issues." As for the parade incident, "I fully believe that 25 years - even 50 years - from now people will still remember that incident," Johnson said. "By continuing to talk about situations that are traumatic and painful - that is how we prevent those mistakes from being made in the future." There isn't a perfect answer, according to Mille Lacs Band long-range planner, Don Wedll. "Racism is defined by the minority. If you are called a racist, and want to do something about it, you need to convince the minority that you are not racist. If you do nothing to contradict the label, the label will continue." Boundary dispute The Band has never denied the boundary dispute is a tough legal case, according to Wedll. On the other hand, it is a case the Band fully believes they would win should it be brought before the courts again. In all litigation disputes, the defense must prove standing, which means prove there is a legitimate issue, according to Wedll. During the course of the boundary dispute court proceedings the county raised several issues they felt were legitimate and proved the county was being harmed, according to Wedll. "But the judge looked at all they presented and the judge repeatedly asked, 'What's the problem?'" Wedll said. "They could not find one issue that proved the reservation was hurting anybody. The case was dismissed." The county appealed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court denied the appeal. The county then appealed to the United States Supreme Court. According to Wedll, the judges looked at the case and denied cert, (writ of certiorari) meaning they reviewed what previous judges ruled and agreed with previous decisions. The bottom line is the Band will defend the threat to the reservation boundary as long as they must, Johnson said. "The 1855 Treaty promised a right to the Mille Lacs Band to have a reservation forever." Copyright c. 2007 Mille Lacs Messenger. --------- "RE: Play takes Native Language to unfamiliar Stage" --------- Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:28:27 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="SHAKESPEAR IN TLINGIT" http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/plaindealer/index.ssf?/ base/entertainment/117378545163270.xml&coll=2 Play takes native language to unfamiliar stage Steve Quinn Associated Press March 13, 2007 Juneau, Alaska - Jake Waid rubbed his bloodshot eyes, blankly stared at a script for Shakespeare's "Macbeth," then resumed an unfamiliar struggle with a set of lines. "Tleil tsu tlax yei l kusheek'eiyi ye yageeyi kwasatinch, ch'a aan yak'ei," he read slowly of what would normally be, "So foul and fair a day I have not seen." Waid, a 31-year-old who has been acting since he was 15, faces his most daunting stage assignment to date: performing Shakespeare in Tlingit (pronounced CLING-kit), an American Indian language unique to southeast Alaska and Canada, and in which fewer than 300 people are fluent. Its words are difficult to translate into English sounds. The role calls for mastering new sets of pauses, sounds and pitches - first with his ears then with his voice - in delivering the lines. That's not all. He and 11 other Perseverance Theatre actors had less than one month to learn a story many knew by heart - but that was in English. "It takes 10 times longer to learn just one line," said Waid, who plays Macbeth and has performed Shakespeare in theaters worldwide with various production groups since he was a teen. "As far as the structure of the language and the grammar, it's still a mystery." He reprises his role as Macbeth for Perseverance, which was founded in 1979 in this capital city of 30,000. Since the early February start of rehearsals, actors, stage crew and directors have been on a harried pace to prepare for the mid-March engagement of "Macbeth" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. It is part of a six-month "Shakespeare in Washington" celebration conceived by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Washington's Shakespeare Theatre Company. It wasn't just actors facing challenges. Costumes had to be redesigned and stages rebuilt to accommodate this third and final Tlingit production by the Alaskan theater group. A truck carrying sets was put on a barge - no roads lead out of the state capital - then driven cross country and rebuilt in time for final rehearsals. Meanwhile, cast members pulled all-nighters learning to speak Tlingit with integrity, honoring not only the language's heritage but the play's adaptation. Director plays on cultural connections Twice in 2004, Perseverance actors performed Tlingit versions of "Macbeth," but it was retold primarily in English and featured indigenous American Indian dances, music and clothing. But this time the 12-member cast, whose ages range from 15 to 42, has agreed to perform most of the play in Tlingit. "It's like running a marathon, without training for it," said actor Ishmael Hope, who plays Malcolm, the son of King Duncan who is killed by Macbeth. "But we're doing the work to make it happen." Director Anita Maynard-Losh developed the idea of producing a Tlingit version of "Macbeth" while living in the predominantly Tlingit village of Hoonah, about 50 miles west of Juneau, 25 years ago. She conducted artists' workshops when she began seeing connections between the Tlingit culture and "Macbeth" - the relationships with the supernatural and the history of fierce warfare found in the Tlingit culture and in "Macbeth." The first production, performed in Juneau, was almost entirely in English as was a subsequent showing in Anchorage, both three years ago. After the Anchorage show, the Smithsonian invited Perseverance Theatre to perform its "Macbeth" version and is underwriting most of the costs for a production that exceeds $200,000. This time, Maynard-Losh wanted to illustrate how Macbeth puts individual gain ahead of the good for the whole, breaking Tlingit tenets. So when characters adhere to tribal values, cast members speak Tlingit; when they espouse individual beliefs, they speak Shakespearean English. For Waid's Macbeth, this occasionally means pursuing a seamless segue from English to Tlingit and back to English - in the same scene. Translations reach beyond words Not only did actors have to learn lines in another language, but Maynard-Losh had to direct a cast without understanding what's being said. To help compensate, she concentrated on the characters' physical features - posture, proximity, facial expressions. The cast features nine original members and three new actors, all of whom are of Alaska Indian descent. The cast includes a mix of seasoned performers, high school students and one actor making his theater debut. As in most small productions, many cast members perform multiple roles: one actor writes Tlingit songs for the play; another doubles as choreographer; a third serves as the much-needed language coach. Translation began last summer when Hope, an actor who oversees the theater's education outreach programs, sought the help of Alaska Indian elders. The result was a script that initially made the actors' eyes glaze over while reading lines, made up of underscored and accented letters and words with periods in the middle. Help is within reach The wall to the left of the stage is decorated with colored construction paper featuring single words of Tlingit translation, somewhat akin to flash cards. On the director's table are two Tlingit dictionaries, one listing nouns and the other verbs. Rehearsals lasted close to nine hours a day, six days a week. Breaks were really just another chance to review lines. In the waning days before the cast left for Washington on Feb. 25 for last week's opening, they were getting close, but still forgetting some lines. George Holly, who plays Lennox and wrote the play's songs, reminded the exhausted cast of the significance of their work. "Whoever hears Tlingit spoken, even for more than 30 seconds, it's just a phrase here and there, or it's from some elders," he said. "This is so much more. "This is not really a premiere of a different take on a Shakespearean play; it's a premiere of a language on the world stage." Copyright c. 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. Copyright c. 2007 Cleveland Live. All Rights Reserved. --------- "RE: WICKHAM: The floating heads of Mount Rushmore" --------- Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:47:55 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="WICKHAM: RUSHMORE" http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414683 Wickham: The floating heads of Mount Rushmore by: John Wickham March 16, 2007 The New York Times recently ran stories about U.S.- and U.N.-funded rebuilding of ruined treasures of the ancient world. One, titled "The Reach of War; From Ruins of Afghan Buddhas, a History Grows" decried the Taliban's 2001 demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the world's largest standing statues built 1,500 years ago, carved into a mountainside. UNESCO prompted restoration by calling it an "Endangered World Heritage Site." Another story lauded a U.S.-funded restoration of the crumbling 5,000- year-old fortress temples built by Egyptian kings before the pyramids. Later, a Jan. 20 Times op-ed, "Archives of Spin," criticized presidential libraries. An accompanying graphic parodied Mount Rushmore, depicting its chiseled heads as book covers. The author argued the libraries' legacies should be restored from compromising politics, resulting in a little more than extended campaign commercials: "Presidential libraries are vital institutions that help us learn from our history ... [not] temples of political propaganda." Publicizing the restoration of these cultural artifacts is advertising for a worldview celebrating mankind's grand progress. They mislead because antiquities through history took a tragic route that disconnected the mind from its millennial relationship with the landscape - the aboriginal sense of awe, beauty and reverence for place. This trajectory eventually transformed sacred land into lifeless raw clay, unworthy of preservation as beauty unless reshaped into ego-centered monuments. Venerating man's earthworks then morphed into an economic ideology of property to possess, resources to strip mine. Modernity confronts a wrecked earth-climate, dwindling resources and decimated species in shattered habitats. Mount Rushmore's effigies symbolize a Swiss Army knife of prosperity and progress - freedom from tyranny, democracy, social and racial equality, and capitalism. These ideals proved inadequate to the environmental tasks ahead and have become part of the problem. President Bush's technological Band-Aids may postpone this crash, but they will not stop the engine. Something fundamental is required, and Mount Rushmore holds a clue. Mount Rushmore can be parodied as decapitated heads floating over the land, having lost all memory of it. Like the Taliban's vandalism, Mount Rushmore represents a national graffiti by disfiguring the magnificent natural imagery of the historic Black Hills. Mount Rushmore's icons of iron superimpose the ideological superiority of American ideals over ageless indigenous wisdom. This portrays another ideal as worthless to mankind - the extraordinary insights into human nature by Native cultures that for 10,000 years revered and protected this distinctive landscape. The definition of "ancient antiquities" must be expanded by the United Nations to restore historic and culturally sensitive landscapes - such as the Black Hills - from the ruins of pillaging capitalists. This requires a new worldview of our relationship with nature that draws upon the aboriginal psychology of the sacred sense of place. Mainstream society and its religions mock this as the poetic product of primitive halfwits. However, emerging cognitive science argues that language itself evolved from the myth-building process within the human mind - an interactive experience with animals and a "living" landscape. We carry this genetic inheritance today, albeit a dormant undercurrent of our psyche; an instinct repressed under the modern consciousness of hyper-rationality, seeing landscapes as inert matter. Native traditions associated with the Black Hills' petroglyphs and surrounding buttes epitomize the lost worldview of sacred landscape. They did not view the landscape as metaphorical, but possessed of life or spirit. Place was not passive. Science instructs that the brain's neural- architecture for consciousness is highly receptive to interact with landscape in a dynamic, potent way. According to author, researcher and lecturer Paul Devereux, who specializes in such areas as cognitive archaeology and ancient sites and worldviews, "the forms, textures, smells, sounds and light on a particular place can trigger mental associations and concepts that organize perceptions, feelings, imaginings." These recurring psychic patterns link verbal skills with imagery to create narrative myths. They become the perceptual building blocks of language because memory recall is easier if fixed to landscapes. Language's abstract syntax would be impossible without a brain primed from the stimulation of v isual imagery. The center of the world for the Oglala Sioux is the Black Hills. The conceptual "sacred center" once crossed all cultures, depicted as a terrestrial "navel," symbolizing a pregnant Mother Earth and newborn with protruding navels. The word "human" derives from the Old Latin homo - earthborn. This world-center linked the belly underworld, the middle human world and ancestor world. The Black Hills is the heart of tribal culture: ceremony, pilgrimage, offerings, fasting and contemplation. Linea Sundstrom's book, "Storied Stone: Indian Rock Art of the Black Hills Country," documents 10,000 years of petroglyphs of those treasuring the landscape. The rocks were portals to all living things and worlds. This "body-centering" made the ground psychologically meaningful and prevented its thoughtless destruction. Only in the 1980s were some of these petroglyphs listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Countless others are destroyed or unprotected on private land. So in the 1920s, the landscape was vulnerable to the Taliban-like demolition called Mount Rushmore. The instinctive mind-landscape dialogue today survives in various mutations. The escapist dogma of world religions severed the spirit from natural imagery to banish the collaborative partnership. Tourists to the Grand Canyon stare, speechless, without a communal narrative to awaken them to greater meaning and kinship. As 19th century nature poet William Wordsworth strained to say: "I have felt a presence that disturbs me with [a] joy ... a sense sublime of something more deeply interfused." We are conceptually lost in space, uprooted and homeless in a prepackaged mono- culture of generic strip malls, manufacturing complexes and cookie-cutter housing. Gone are powerful narratives binding culture to landscape preservation. The ideals of Mount Rushmore should symbolize freedom from a modern tyranny that preserves only contrived man-made antiquities. Those effigies should not stare blankly ahead into empty space. They should look beneath and around the Black Hills that cradle them, as Oglala holy man Black Elk once did. This sacred center is a beacon to revise the modern mind, reconnecting humanity to a lost dialogue and sense of place. --- John Wickham is an attorney representing service members and veterans in claims against the government. He lives in Evergreen, Colo. Copyright c. 1998 - 2007 Indian Country Today. All Rights Reserved. --------- "RE: YELLOW BIRD: Times change, dreams don't" --------- Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:09:27 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="YELLOW BIRD: SPRING MEMORIES" http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=31127 Times change, dreams don't Dorreen Yellow Bird March 17, 2007 As I traveled west across North Dakota last weekend, I could feel spring in the air - that unmistakable feeling that made me want to shout. I wanted my voice to echo across the rolling plains. I wanted to look out my window and see furry purple crocuses. I didn't see any, though. And to be honest, it was a bit chilly. My grandmother used to say that if an elder who is ill makes it through winter to spring, they'll live to see another year. Spring is a marker of beginnings and endings of life, she said. This spring was a marker of endings, as evident as the tombs in the old cemeteries. And it was my family's time for looking back at the life of my aunt/mother, Pearl Howard. Her ending came almost a year ago to the day. Her memorial and the end of our mourning was Saturday. The memories of her were bittersweet. Bitter because we remember clearly what we've lost, but sweet because we still can hear her laughter - she had a wonderful sense of humor. That's something people remembered and spoke about during her memorial. I didn't speak up, even though I did tell my sisters some of the funny things I remembered about my relationship with her. But my loss isn't healed yet. My sister went with me to the memorial. We cooked for the traditional table of foods that day. We made two of my aunt's favorite foods - buffalo tongue and squash. I had one large Lakota squash given to me by the Crawford family, and it, along with five acorn squash from Hugo's grocery, cooked up nicely for the feast. There were many elders at the feast but also a large group of young people. My sister and I talked about these young people on our way home. We realized that we've had my grandmother, mother, aunt and other elders to explain the Sahnish ways and culture to us. Time and time again, as we prepared for a ceremony in years past, the elders were the ones who made the final decisions on protocol. My aunt used to tell me that she wished her mother - my grandmother - had told her more that she could pass along to the children. My aunt used to talk about, and cry about, the fact that they missed some of the details of ceremonies and our ways because of the disruptions during their time. There are ceremonies that we no longer can practice because the way wasn't passed along. Perhaps, the elder who did the ceremony wasn't able to teach it before he died, or no one asked for it. They thought these elders always would be there to pray with the sacred bundles and perform the ceremonies. I am two generations from my grandmother, and I realize there are things I'm unsure of, too. And now, with my aunt no longer with me, I feel unsure at times. As we returned to Grand Forks, my sister and I talked about how the family seems to be moving in different directions. The glue that had held us together was my aunt and mother. We remember the times during ceremonies that they taught us sacred things, the culture and our ways. They often lamented at how much we've lost of these ceremonies. These days, I told my sister, I fear how much deeper we'll be affected. The memorial for my aunt reminded me that they both left us - my mother first, and then a year later, my aunt. I thought it was just like them to leave together and smiled to myself - they were a pair. When they were able to get around comfortably, they went everywhere together; you hardly saw one without the other. Only a few weeks after my aunt passed away, I had a dream about her, I told my sister. She was smiling at me and simply said, "Keep the family together." I didn't think much about the dream because I thought our family celebrations and gatherings that we all attend would continue without break. Yet, we haven't been able to find our way back as easily as we did before they left us. The summer before my aunt passed away, I was returning from Nez Perce country. It was dusk, and as I came over a rise in the highway, in the middle of the road was a blood red moon - so big and imposing, I could hardly believe it. It was a medicine moon and would foretell changes and the passing over, which came some months later. It wasn't until the memorial that I remembered the specter on the horizon; and I realized even though my mother and aunt are gone, they are also with us. The blood red medicine moon is a spirit - maybe their spirit now - that made itself known to foretell. So, perhaps, it's understanding, listening and knowing how to respond to the signs that will become the questions for us to contemplate and interpret in our years ahead. Wet AX Kooss'teeRIt, my mothers. --- Dorreen Yellow Bird is a reporter and columnist. Her columns appear Wednesdays and Saturdays on the opinion pages of the Herald. Reach her at (701) 780-1228 or dyellowbird@gfherald.com Copyright c. 2006 Grand Forks Herald, Forum Communications Co., Fargo ND. --------- "RE: ROSSUM: Court must affirm Tribes' Sovereignty" --------- Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:16:14 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="ROSSUM: SUPREME COURT, SOVEREIGNTY" http://www.pechanga.net/ http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/139429.html Ralph A. Rossum: Court must affirm tribes' sovereignty By Ralph A. Rossum - March 18, 2007 The U.S. Supreme Court is that branch of the federal government that historically has been most protective of the interests and sovereignty of Native American tribes. Lately, however, lower courts are ignoring its long-standing precedents and eroding the constitutional protections it has historically provided. Two recent decisions have clearly compromised tribal interests and infringed on tribal sovereignty; fidelity to the Constitution and justice to the tribes demand that the Supreme Court reverse these decisions. The Supreme Court's protections flow from two early decisions. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indian tribes are "domestic dependent nations" whose "relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian" and that the federal government therefore has a duty to act in their best interests. Consequently, the canons of statutory interpretation of federal Indian law differ from those applied elsewhere: Judges are obliged to construe statutes liberally on their behalf, to resolve all ambiguities in their favor and to preserve tribal property rights and sovereignty unless Congress's intent to the contrary is clear and unambiguous. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Marshall added to tribal protections by declaring that states have no power over Indian affairs. While the tribes' right of self-determination is limited by their "domestic dependent" status, it is not effaced. As Marshall declared, "a weak state . . . may place itself under the protection of one more powerful, without stripping itself of the right of government, and ceasing to be a state." Thus, Marshall held that state laws "have no force" in Indian country. The only government that can interact with Indian tribes is the federal government, not the states. Congress can, of course, constrict tribal sovereignty: It passed Public Law 280 in 1953, mandating that certain states, including California, enforce their criminal laws on reservations. However, given the canons of interpretation described above, Congress' constrictions must be clear and unambiguous. Two recent lower court cases, however, challenge the implications of both of these classic decisions. In San Manuel Band v. National Labor Relations Board decided last month, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals departed from the canons of interpretation and held that the National Labor Relations Act can be imposed on tribes and their commercial enterprises despite the facts that tribes are nowhere mentioned in the act and that it "was enacted by a Congress that in all likelihood never contemplated the statute's potential application to tribal employers." It further disparaged tribal sovereignty by declaring that it simply "exists as a matter of respect for Indian communities, ... thereby giving them latitude to maintain traditional customs and practices." And, in Agua Caliente Band v. Fair Political Practices Commission, decided last December, the California Supreme Court reached an even more egregious conclusion. The court affirmed that California courts have the power to abrogate tribal sovereign immunity and hear a case involving a tribe sued for its refusal to comply with the state's Political Reform Act. The tribe argued that its sovereign status afforded it immunity, but the California Supreme Court held that since Congress had "not granted the tribe immunity from this suit," it could therefore proceed. Under the canons of interpretation, the court got it entirely backward: Tribes are subject to state suit only when Congress expressly declares that they are, and Congress has expressed no such intention. In both of these cases, Congress could pass legislation subjecting tribes to the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act or state campaign-reform laws. But Congress has not. Until it does so clearly and unambiguously, the lower courts should act to protect the tribes from the wishes of those who have been unable to persuade Congress to pass such measures. And, when the lower courts fail in their duty to the tribes, the Supreme Court must intervene, repudiate their departures from clear and controlling precedents, and perform its historic role of protecting tribal interests and sovereignty by reversing obvious judicial error. Copyright c. 2007 The Sacramento Bee. --------- "RE: JODI RAVE: Native economy focus of Res2007" --------- Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:16:14 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="JODI RAVE: NATIVE ECONOMY" http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2007/03/18/jodirave/rave13.txt Native economy focus of Res2007 By JODI RAVE of the Missoulian March 18, 2007 LAS VEGAS - Richard Pugh, a Cherokee and small-business owner from Fremont, Calif., came here last week to meet with some of the nation's top corporate leaders during the largest economic development summit in Indian Country. "It's been a super conference," Pugh, the CEO of Reliable Delivery Systems, a transportation company, said Thursday. "I recommend anyone in small business to attend the conference. It's a great opportunity to promote your business and do business with these companies. Even if you don't get the work, you get your name out there." Welcome to Res2007, the longest-running business and trade fair in the United States, organized annually by the Mesa, Ariz.-based National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development, or NCAIED. The four-day event ended Thursday. Scott Gregory, vice president of NCAIED, said networking opportunities are one of the main attractions that draw thousands of people to the summit, which was held at the Las Vegas Hilton, and where representatives of corporate America, the federal government and small businesses spent time mingling, meeting and making deals. The economic summit has proved a popular event since it began 21 years ago as a way to help Native entrepreneurs connect with big business and get established in the world of federal contracting. This year's conference focused on creating sustainable economies. Participants packed into rooms to listen to business experts extol the dangers and virtues of doing business in a global society. An accompanying trade show amassed 300 exhibitors, ranging from information technology companies to youth magazines. "This started out in 1987 as a brown bag lunch," said Gregory. "If they got 30 or 40 people there, they thought they were doing good. Today, we have 2,500 people here." The growth in attendance mirrors the dramatic changes taking place in Indian economies and communities, driven by the gambling industry and entrepreneurs representing tribes and individuals from urban and reservation communities across the nation. Native Americans had a purchasing power of $19 billion at the close of the 1990s, according to a University of Georgia study. In a 2005 follow-up study, the economic purchasing power of Native people had leaped to $34.8 billion. Res2007 leaders aim to keep those numbers growing. "The main purpose and mission of the national center ... is the development of the American Indian private sector," said Gregory. " `Res' is one of the ways we fill our mission. Annually, we help our Indian businesses procure a half-billion dollars." Despite growth, Native business owners still face some crucial barriers, said Steven Preston, administrator for the Small Business Administration, who spoke to participants during a summit luncheon. "We make sure we reach those communities that need our help the most," Preston told the audience. "With that objective in mind, I appreciate the theme of this year's conference." Even though the SBA is the largest single financial backer for the nation's small businesses, Natives still lack access to the financial capital needed to get their businesses going or to keep them growing, he said, acknowledging that banks make few loans. Another key area of the SBA is to provide business owners with technical assistance and contracting opportunities under the 8(a) Business Development program, which helps small, disadvantaged businesses compete and enter the federal contracting market. The program has its weaknesses. "I know the 8(a) certification process can be cumbersome and frustrating, " he said. "We need to fix the 8(a) process." His comments drew applause. Preston also acknowledged the hurdles Native business owners face, including lack of capital. A good source for funding hasn't been found yet, he said. Still, the national center has an increasing number of success stories built upon business owners who figured out how to overcome a challenge. On Wednesday evening, 750 people attended an awards banquet where the best of the best were honored. Award recipients were: - American Indian Business Owner of the Year: Tracy Stanhoff, president of AD PRO and chairwoman of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Mayetta, Kansas. - Corporate Advocate of the Year: IBM, Michael Robinson, Global Supplier program director. - Public Advocate of the Year: Ron Allen, chairman of the Jamestown S'Klallam, Sequim, Wash. - Tribal Enterprise of the Year: Suh'dutsing Technologies LLC, Cedar Band Paiute, Cedar City, Utah. - Volunteer of the Year: Jo Anne Arvizu, Raytheon Missile Systems, supplier diversity program administrator. - Tribal Leadership Award: John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, Boulder, Colo. - Tribal Gaming Visionary and Small Business Empowerment Award: Jamie Fuller, chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, Camp Verde, Ariz.; Linda Big Soldier, vice chairwoman of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, Perkins, Okla.; Stan Jones, chairman of the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, Tulalip, Wash. Additionally, the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development awarded the organization's first Living Legend award to Lionel Bordeaux, president of Sinte Gleska University of the Rosebud Sioux, Rosebud, S.D. Meanwhile, men like Steven Powell of Browning and Gerard Kipp of Fort Hall, Idaho, are focused on the next generation of entrepreneurs. Both teach financial literacy to youth through the Native American Community Development Corp. They understand that the growth of tribal economies begins with young people. Powell and Kipp find their work in schools rewarding. "It instills pride," said Powell. "When they graduate from high school, they have a solid understanding of banking. Ten years ago, they were all scared to walk into a bank." Powell and Kipp worked in the Native American Community Development Corp. booth during the trade show. But before the exhibits opened, Kipp had been doing some networking of his own as he aims to bring his business, Badger Energy, to life in Montana. "I have a land base," Kipp said. "And I've been crunching the numbers. I have six years of raw data for wind feasibility. The networking part of this place has been great. The contacts I made here, I'll utilize." -- Reporter Jodi Rave can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at jodi.rave@lee.net Copyright c. 2007 Missoulian, a division of Lee Enterprises. --------- "RE: Mayan Priests purify ruin after Bush visit" --------- Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:09:27 -0700 From: Gary Smith Subj: NA News Item - - - - - - -- - - - - - - filename="MAYAN PRIESTS PURIFY SITE" http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070315/ts_nm/bush_latinamerica_dc_1 Mayan priests purify ruin after Bush visit By Mica Rosenberg March 15, 2007 IXIMCHE, Guatemala (Reuters) - Mayan priests spiritually "cleansed" a Guatemalan religious site with incense and candles on Thursday after a visit earlier this week by President Bush. Two priests lit colored candles on the four corners of the ruins to represent natural elements, burning incense and beating a ceremonial drum on top of a pyramid visited by Bush and Guatemalan President Oscar Berger on Monday. The priests said they wanted to purify the site before a visit by Bolivia's indigenous President Evo Morales later this month. "During President Bush's visit here snipers occupied this entire area," said Mayan youth leader Jorge Morales Toj. "It's a violent way of showing how disrespectful the U.S. empire is toward indigenous people." The head of security at the U.S. embassy in Guatemala said it was standard practice for two sniper teams to protect President Bush while he was traveling. The official, who asked not to be named, said he did not know if snipers had been positioned at the ruins for the visit. Bush was dogged by protests throughout last week's five-country tour of Latin America, where he is widely unpopular. His visit sparked violent scuffles with police and protesters in all the countries he visited. At the Iximche ruins on Monday, Bush watched a reenactment of an ancient Mayan ball game played by young men in costumes using a soccer ball painted gold. Some Mayans said the show-game was an offensive portrayal of their culture as a tourist attraction. The United States supported military governments in Guatemala during the country's 1960-96 civil war, which had its roots in the overthrow of a left-leaning government by a CIA-supported coup in 1954. Entire Mayan villages were destroyed during the military's scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign that left nearly a quarter million people dead or missing. At Thursday's ceremony, two spiritual guides said prayers in Spanish and the Kaqchikel Mayan language, handing corn that had been used as decoration during Bush's visit to kneeling women. Corn is sacred in Mayan culture and is the origin of man in the Mayan holy book the Popul Vuh. The ceremony was meant to clear out residual "bad energy" at the ruins, the capital of the Kaqchikel Mayan people before the 1524 Spanish conquest, in preparation for the arrival of Morales, who will attend an international convention of native leaders here at the end of the month. Morales is Latin America's first indigenous head-of-state and a close ally of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the United States' principal antagonist in the region. Chavez shadowed Bush's tour with fiery, anti-U.S. speeches in neighboring countries and has called Bush "the devil," saying the U.S. leader left a smell of sulfur lingering in the room behind him at a United Nations debate last year. Copyright c. 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Copyright c. 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. --------- "RE: Int'l Observers denounce paramilitary aggressions" --------- Date: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 12:04 am From: Chiapas95-english Subj: En;Jornada,Int'l observers denounce paramilitary aggressions,Mar 10 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: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:53:52 +0100 From: "Dana Aldea" Originally published in Spanish by La Jornada - El Correo Ilustrado, March 10, 2007. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/03/10/index.php?sectioncorreo Protest letter of the international observers regarding the paramilitary aggressions in Chiapas To the government of Mexico, To the government of Chiapas, To the national and international civil society: In recent days a group of members of European solidarity committees undertook a journey to the zone of the Caracol of Morelia, where the Zapatistas of the autonomous municipalities of Olga Isabel and Vicente Guerrero have denounced serious threats from the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights AC (OPDDIC). The OPDDIC militants are attempting to seize the land of several communities in resistance. We also received a threat from the OPDDIC on March 7, when the members of that paramilitary organization attempted to intercept our entry to one of the affected communities. In the course of our journey we observed a very significant increase of harassments, threats, displacements, destructions and physical and psychological violence against various Zapatista indigenous communities of the state of Chiapas. At present the situation in Chiapas is very tense. We fear that an act of revenge on the part of the OPDDIC may occur, since their crimes have been extensively denounced by various Zapatista communities, NGO's, and human rights activists from different countries. We demand the immediate ending of all acts of harassment and violence against the Zapatista communities on the part of the security forces of the Mexican State and the paramilitary groups, in particular the OPDDIC. We are calling the national and international civil society to be attentive to the conflict situation in Chiapas. Signed: Members of solidarity committees from Germany and France Chiapas, March 8, 2007 * * * transl. Dana -- To subscribe from 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: ROSS: Being Zapatistass In The Southwest" --------- Date: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 12:14 am From: Chiapas95-english Subj: En;J.Ross,Being Zapatistass In The Southwest, 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: . 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: . ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:20:39 -0400 (EDT) From: johnross@igc.org Subj: Being Zapatistass In The Southwest FROM: JOHN ROSS 206-419-7957 johnross@igc.org Blindman's Buff @152 BEING A ZAPATISTA WHERE WE LIVE: TAKING BACK THE SOUTHWEST ALBUQUERQUE (March 14th) - The snow was frozen to the gutters and a gritty wind blowing hard out of the north this past Valentine's Day when I kicked off this odyssey at an anarcho outpost down by the railroad yards, La Semilla, in Albuquerque. Two hardscrabble hoboes eyed me through the chain link fence when I walked out into the front yard to bust a joint. Could they come inside and get warm, the white guy asked. He was from New Jersey and the black man with him from Brooklyn. That's what he called him: "Brooklyn." The two were heading west, California if they could get there. No, it wasn't a pleasure trip. The railroads bulls had kicked them off the freight they had hopped in Texas and they had pooled their change to buy a short dog of wine to keep out the cold. The black man squatted stoically by the wood stove and said nothing. What kind of place was this anyway, New Jersey wanted to know? "We're Wobblies, the IWW, one big union" Clay told him and called the rescue van to book them a bed at the shelter. There are a lot of homeless people walking the streets of Albuquerque this winter. They get booted off the freight trains or are thrown out by the family or just got out of prison with no fixed destination. Sasha just sent me a clip that reported there are 16,000,000 Americans living in deep poverty in this, the most overfed nation on the Planet Earth, a 26%increase in the six years since Bush declared the Terror War. We have 2,000,000 more locked down behind bars in American prisons - they're not included in the mix - and 7,000,000 undocumented workers who are not counted anywhere. That's about ten times the number of troops in the U.S. Armed Forces who are otherwise occupied with getting whacked in Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers of the hopeless should be enough to incite serious social disruption but the fuse is damp. How can we jumpstart the revolution? That's what I'm trying to find out out here on the road. New Mexico is outlaw country. It is up near the top of all U.S.A jurisdictions in incarcerations per capita, heroin deaths, drunk driving arrests, radioactive contamination, and private prisons. The nuclear poisons are in the wind, leaking out of Los Alamos and Alamogordo and the slag heaps of yellow cake up in Navajo country. The skag comes up the pipeline from Sinaloa, Mexican Brown, and has cut a swatch of death through northern New Mexico. Read Chellis Glendinning's "Chiva" to weigh its deadly embrace. Chellis lives out in Chimayo and knows where the bodies are buried. My pal Tilda knows its terrible toll only too well. She lost her eldest to an o.d. and her second son is in his ninth year of a stretch for a teenage convenience store heist. Nine years! He was supposed to have been paroled in November but just got jacked up again for getting in his p.o.'s face and now his mom cana^??t even visit him. To stay sane, Tilda channels her rage into the prisoners' rights movement, stalking the legislature up in Santa Fe for change. Tilda came down from Pecos to a session at the Albuquerque Peace &Justice Center on "being Zapatistas where we live", an interchange between activists that I've been convoking as I travel between the coasts. By being a Zapatista where we live I mostly mean doing our work in a Zapatista way under the governing principal of "mandar obedeciendo", that is serving the community and taking decisions together without hierarchies or patriarchy, confronting power with truth, ripping the mask off capitalist exploitation and building a new American left from the bottom up. Like the compas down south, we need to get off the mal gobierno's grid and construct autonomous spaces and become the subjects of our own destiny. We can't do this alone. We have to do battle with sectarianism, spread solidarity, and make coalitions. Talk to each other, I'm always urging the folks who come to these meetings. I saw this being a Zapatista thing where we live taking root at South Central Farms in L.A, last summer where Zapatista solidarity people and white anarchists, undocumented workers and Chicano activists took on Wal-Mart and the Sheriff's deputies and the first Mexican-American mayor of the city since 1842. Up and down the coast, Zapatista groups were working on immigrant rights and issues of homelessness, racism, juvenile justice, and the war. In New Mexico, activists circled up and spoke about taking on the prison system, water rights and the asequias of the pueblos, childcare, coal power plants and the trashing of the state's once pristine environment. The Wobblies are trying to organize Starbucks and the war is driving people to take risks. The Hispanic community in particular is paying an awful price for the carnage in Iraq. Up in Taos where the domestic Zapatistas gathered at an oasis with an "openly subversive" sign planted in the front yard, the issue was what to do about Donald Rumsfeld who has lived in that weird burg for too many years. Now the anarchists are carrying around paper towels and asking Rummy to wipe the blood off his hands whenever they spot him prowling the upscale haunts. Keith McHenry, the big papa of Food Not Bombs is in residence these days fanning the flames in New Mexico these days and back in Burque, a posse of youngish anarchos decked out in red and black escorted me to the Mexican bus on their skateboards the morning I lit out for Las Cruces and the border. Jeff Conant, a colleague who was kicked out of Chiapas back in '98 for celebrating the advent of the autonomia named for the old anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon (Jeff returned to San Francisco to paint the mural the army had rubbed out on the wall of City Lights bookstore facing Jack Kerouac alley) thinks there's a lot of "The Almanac of the Dead" in everyday New Mexico - the magic realist novel written by the Native American writer Leslie Marman Silko that prophesized the Zapatista rebellion. Jeff took me along to see a purported Mayan shaman living east of Albuquerque where he would hold a mic in front of Flor de Mayo for an interview someone else was conducting from the Bay Area. Flor de Mayo turned out to be a short stocky woman in a gorgeous huipil who resembled a cross between Mother Jones and a pit bulldog and spoke in a sensational Bronx accent - she claimed that she had been spirited off to New York as a young girl from the jungles of Central America. Although Flor de Mayo appeared to know no Mayan, she did produce a volume bound in red leather that bore the legend "El Destino" ("The Destiny") which fixed the final day of the current Mayan cycle at November 28th 2011. You read it here first. The volume sat cheek by howl on the bookshelf above her desk with a book on how to sail. Flor de Mayos's husband restored old Airstreams - several were parked in the back yard. She spoke of flying up Mount Everest in a helicopter with the Dali Lama and didn't think much of the Zapatistas. Shamans, healers, fakirs, high priests, Ayahuascos, peyote eaters, and other variegated visionaries have always formed an important part of the northern New Mexico tax base. II. The border runs like a raw scar through the desert. The U.S. military, private contractors, and Israeli advisers are building The Wall to keep the global south from penetrating Fortress Amerikkka. Small mammals and reptiles will be denied passage between the two sides. Migratory birds will have to get visas to maneuver the flyway in from Canada. Larger mammals are being captured in record numbers (the toxically-named "Operation Return to Sender") or else being taken as trophies by armed safaris. At the Sleep Inn outside of Las Cruces, the National Guardsmen and women sporting their best Baghdad camou were changing shifts. "Kill a few for me!" I heard one incoming murderer yell joyfully at a comrade on his way down to patrol the border at Columbus where Pancho Villa once invaded. Where is the old revolutionary when we need him? I decided not to wear my kaffia down to the complimentary breakfast that morning for fear of triggering a flashback or being busted for impersonating a haji. El Paso-Juarez is right at the heart of the war zone. A lot of bodies turn up floating face down in the Rio Bravo. Life is cheap on the southern bank of the river where 300 women have been slaughtered in the past 12 years and it's not worth much more on El Otro Lado. The Zapatista solidarity movement was chartered here back in the '90s but the revolution has been spread by the four winds since then. Back then, we would send our old clothes to Chiapas to express solidarity - Subcomandante Marcos walked around with one pink pump (size six) in his rucksack, the "Cinderella Syndrome" he called it, to illustrate his frustration at such useless "material" aid. Now we are trying to do solidarity in a different way by being Zapatistas where we live. Bobby Byrd, the soul of Cinco Puntos Press (Lee Byrd is the heart), the border booksellers who defied the National Council on the Arts by publishing Marcos's "Story of Colors", took me out to dinner in Paso del Norte with Reyes Tejirina, the legendary leader of the 1967 raid on the courthouse at Tierra Amarilla New Mexico, since enshrined in Chicano history - although if the truth be told, the bold, armed action was actually in defense of the land grants the Spanish Crown had bestowed upon the first Hispanics to settle the land which, of course, really belonged to the Indian pueblos. Despite the confusion, the raid, coming at a moment when the Panthers were picking up the gun and the Nation of Aztlan was being reborn, galvanized identity politics in America for a generation of would-be revolutionaries. Reyes is in his 80s now, broke and unwell. When we picked him up at the El Paso apartment Bobby found for him, he seemed so enfeebled that I thought he might give up the ghost over supper. But a big steaming bowl of Pho seemed to revive him and he was soon boiling over with unruly advice. Marcos needed the Indians more than the Indians needed Marcos, he opined and I agreed. Could I name the Seven Jews who had built the Atom Bomb? (I could - my uncle was one of them.) The old man, still as chiseled and ruggedly handsome as he was as a younger icon with a great shock of white hair under his battered Stetson, seemed obsessed with the Jews. He had been to the Holy Land and stood with the Palestinians against "the Synagogue of Satan" (Apocalypse 2,9 and 3.9 - you could look it up.) Despite the looniness, sitting down to table with Reyes was like eating dinner with history and I handed him the new Zapatista book to chew on. He rang me up the next morning and called me "a warrior" and said he loved me and I carry that conversation proudly as I stumble through the country trying to convince another generation of American rebels to be Zapatistas where they are. Over on the other end of Texas, I would meet other folks being Zapatistas where they live. Dianne Wilson, an unreasonable woman, was one. She's the shrimp boat captain who launched hunger strikes and scuttled her own shrimper to protest Big Plastics' poisoning of the Gulf, then flew off to Baghdad to try and stop the war and even took herself to Washington where she sat and starved in front of the White House for a while in pursuit of the justice of which we have all been denied. I bumped into this valiant companera at the Texas Bend Social Forum over in Corpus Christi where we both keynoted the conclave, about 150 souls out there in the wilderness learning how to be Zapatistas in their own backyard. Some of those backyards are the Colonias where unscrupulous land speculators have sold off squalid lots without any services whatsoever to impoverished families of undocumented workers, converting the south Texas scrubland into an extension of squatter colonies that now extend from Nuevo Laredo all the way to Tierra del Fuego. The southwest leg of this endless perambulation took me back through Austin and Houston for a hot reading with old camaradas - ex-Sandanista guerrillero Roberto Vargas and the honored elder Raul Salinas at his Resistencia bookstore, and an afternoon with the prescient Mexican historian of anarchist uprising John Hart. and even a day with Lluvia, the three year-old granddaughter of la bella Elizabeth, my eternal editor, who played the strings of my heart like it was a busted ukulele. But something was missing in Tejas this time around. Maybe it was its sense of humor. They have taken Molly Ivins from us and suddenly George Bush and the rest of those bastards are not so funny. The business about which we are about is so serious, Subcomandante Marcos once counseled, that if we can't laugh at ourselves we will soon go nuts. I fear for the country. Molly Ivins, presente! Next stop, the New Old South. --- John Ross is on the road in the south and mid-west (Atlanta, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Madison, Cincinnati and Chicago) through the end of March with his latest opus "Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible - Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006." In April, Ross will be perambulating the east coast with dates in New York and New England shaping up - for suggested venues write johnross@igc.org -- To subscribe from 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: Social struggles in Oaxaca and Chiapas" --------- Date: Saturday, March 17, 2007 12:32 am From: Chiapas95-english Subj: Es/En;Social struggles in Oaxaca and Chiapas,Mar 15 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: . ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:53:38 -0500 (CDT) From: blancanegro Friends/Amig@s, This is the regional and national atmosphere in which Oaxaca is re-emerging as a mobilized force for social change: To celebrate his 100th day in office, Calderon pointedly chose to open a stretch of highway integral to the Plan Puebla Panama on Zapatista territory along the Oaxaca/Chiapas border. The attached communique from the Zapatistas details government provocation in Chiapas, an increase in paramilitary threats and attacks against their communities by the typically ironically named OPCCIC, Organization for the Defense of the Indigenous and Campesino Rights. Calderon's government, following the example of the Bush administration, has already acquired bugging equipment from the U.S. for telephone surveillance, and submitted two iniciatives for token congressional approval that give free reign to the federal police agency: arrest, search and entry without warrants, telephone and internet surveillance. Carlos Slim of Grupo Carso is the third wealthiest man globally with 90% control over Mexican telecommunications and service throughout Latin America, construction, mines, infrastructure and the auto industry, among other interests. Consider the following record of growth in 2006: Carlos Slim del Grupo Carso es el tercer hombre mas rico mundial con 90% del control sobre telecomunicaciones Mexicanas y servico en casi toda de America Latina, en construccion, minero, infraestructura, automotriz, entre otras interesas. Consideren el siguente record de crecimiento en 2006: Bill Gates/$56,000,000,000. 12% Warren Buffett/$52,000,000,000. 10% Carlos Slim/$49,000,000,000. 63% And this record of growth under the last three Mexican administrations: Y esta record de crecimiento durante las ultimas tres administraciones Mexicanas: Salinas de Gortari 130% Zedillo 192% Fox 353% In the last week there have been demonstrations in Chiapas, on the border between Zacatecas and San Luis Potosi, in Guerrero, in Mexico City, in Vera Cruz, Yucatan, and in other regions and towns demanding resolutions to agrarian issues, human rights issues, and in disgust at the visit of George Bush in Merida, at the moment of his arrival in a state of seige. Bush and Calderon don't attempt to meet openly in the nation's capital. March 8, 2007 Women's Day in Oaxaca Dia Internacional de la Mujer, Oaxaca: 92.1 fm Radio Planton is back on the air- "The voice of the democratic teachers union and the civil society of Oaxaca". Radio Planton is asking for letters of solidarity to buffer likely governmental attempts to silence the station again. Read the attached letter and rally support for Radio Planton, the voice of the people of Oaxaca. The 10th mega march was large and well organized, the govt reported 8000, the APPO 100,000, neither accurate. Oaxacan Women August 1 led the march, followed by representatives of APPO and the teacher's union. The SHUFFLE, the CAT AND MOUSE, the DIVIDE and CONQUER Catarino Torres Pereda, of the Citizens Defense Committee, imprisoned since August 1, was released. He had been held on false charges and tortured. Crucecita Yolanda Ramirez Ramirez, a member of Union 22 and of the organization Oaxacan Women August 1 that led the massive demonstration of March 8, was detained Thursday afternoon as she was entering the Autonomous University of Benito Juarez in Oaxaca to participate in a human rights forum with CCIOD. Following a quickly arranged march to the Santo Domingo church to demand her release and that of all the other political prisoners, she was released at 4 am Friday. Municipal and Communal Presidents from all parties, PRD, PRI and Pan, are being 'invited' to participate in all PRI conferences. If their names do not appear on the lists of atendees, their communities do not receive basic state funding. Celaya Luria,