Washita

The surprise attack on Black Kettle’s village of Southern Cheyenne at the Washita River in Indian Territory (now western Oklahoma) took place on this date in 1868.

Just before midnight, they crawled to the edge of a bluff which overlooked a river valley. One of the scouts announced he could smell smoke. The other heard a dog bark. Custer could not see anything, and he did not smell smoke or hear the dog. But in the quiet moments of listening, he heard a baby cry. He had found his Indians.

Custer divided his command into four detachments, which would surround the village, north, south, east, and west, and wait for dawn. On his command, they would charge from the four directions.

At first light, Custer turned to the band leader and directed him “to give us ‘Garry Owen’ [his favorite song]. At once the rollicking notes of that familiar marching and fighting air sounded forth through the valley, and in a moment were re-echoed back from the opposite sides by the loud and continued cheers of the men of the other detachments, who, true to their orders, were there and in readiness to pounce upon the Indians the moment the attack began. In this manner the battle of the Washita commenced.”

The “battle” in the village was short, barely fifteen minutes. The soldiers drove the people from their lodges barefoot and half naked, shooting them in the open. Many of the warriors managed to reach the trees, where they began to return fire; a few of them escaped, but after a couple of hours, the firing ceased and 103 Cheyennes lay dead in the snow and mud. Custer reported that they were fighting men, but others said that ninety-two of them were women, children, and old people. Black Kettle, the sixty-seven-year-old leader of the band, and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, who had survived nine gunshot wounds at the Massacre of Sand Creek four years before, had been shot in the back as they attempted to cross the Lodge Pole or Washita River. Their bodies, trampled and covered with mud, were found in the shallow water by the survivors.

The soldiers seized everything in the village—guns, bows and arrows, decorated clothing, sacred shields, tobacco, dried meat, dried berries, robes, and fifty-one lodges—and burned it. In addition, they captured 875 horses and mules. Custer gave the order to slaughter these animals by cutting their throats, but the horses feared whiteman smell and shied away, and after several attempts, the men grew tired. Custer gave the order to shoot the animals instead. Custer himself slaughtered camp dogs. Then the 7th Cavalry took its captives, mostly women and children and old ones, and headed north to its base of operations, Camp Supply.

Excerpt from Killing Custer by James Welch

Native Foods Nourish Again

How about some “three sisters soup” in tomorrow’s Thanksgiving menu? Read about American Indian foods in this interesting article by Kim Severson in The New York Times. Two excerpts:

As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical and cultural erosion, they are turning to the food that once sustained them, and finding allies in the nation’s culinary elite and marketing experts.

One result is the start of a new sort of native culinary canon that rejects oily fry bread but embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon from Alaska and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the Southeast, corn from New York, bison from the Great Plains and dozens of squashes, beans, berries and melons.

Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three sisters soup, built from the classic Indian trilogy of beans, squash and corn.
…

Native foods encompass hundreds of different cultures. “There’s only now becoming a more pan-Indian sense of what Native food can be,” said the author Louise Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes about tribal food in many of her books and is working on a cookbook with her sister, a pediatrician on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

“You’re talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a long time,” Ms. Erdrich said.

American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that has yet to be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi reservation in Oklahoma.

“You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can’t eat indigenous foods native to the Americas,” said Ms. Oden….

One item that won’t be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy circles of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations. That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal government commodities, including white flour and lard - the two ingredients in fry bread.

Edge of America

The subject of modern Native American life is largely untapped, and any number of interesting films might have been made about it, especially now that casinos have brought new revenue and competing ideologies to some reservations. It is a shame that the producers instead chose to make a film concluding with the wisdom, “The basketball is round, like Mother Earth.”

From Ginia Bellafante in a The New York Times review of the Showtime movie Edge of America. The film is about an African-American coach and an American Indian girls high school basketball team.

Tribes’ Basketball Passion Turns Into Business

From the front page of today’s New York Times, an article on basketball, Indian tribes and the Yakama Sun Kings.

The stands in the SunDome were unusually full Tuesday night when Yakima’s minor league basketball team, the Sun Kings, bounded onto the court for an exhibition game a few days before the start of the season.

The crowd itself was atypical, too, filled with hundreds of members of the Yakama Nation, an Indian tribe that rarely mingles with the world outside its vast reservation about five miles east of here. But in a move that riveted tribes across the country and created a rift among Indians here, leading to the ousting of three tribal officials, the Yakama Nation became the new owners of the Sun Kings last spring.

And after Tuesday’s game, the first at home under the new ownership, the Sun Kings signed an Indian player, a Sioux from Montana who had electrified the crowd with his dazzling shooting for the opposing team. The player, Richard Dionne, a 6-foot-5, 210-pound forward, is believed by officials to be the only American Indian on the roster of the Continental Basketball Association, a national eight-team league that can be a steppingstone to the N.B.A.

The tribal ownership of the team and the signing of Mr. Dionne, 24, who had been playing here for a nonprofit team not in the league, come as Indians are slowly making their way into college, semiprofessional and professional basketball.

Indians have passionately played basketball for decades on the crude courts of reservations, on half-court patches of Alaska’s frozen tundra, or anywhere they can hang a hoop. Now, for the first time, tribes are looking to buy teams as they expand their reach beyond gambling and other traditional tribal businesses.

And this, at the end:

The team’s new logo features a band wrapped around a basketball with two feathers, replacing a flaming ball. And Mr. Palmer, the tribal director, said he would suggest to team and tribal officials that they start home games with an Indian prayer and traditional Yakama drumming, to go along with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Vine Deloria Jr.

The funeral for Vine Deloria Jr. is Friday in Golden, Colorado. NewMexiKen has been wondering why this great leader hasn’t seen more national honors since his death Sunday. Someone I read wrote that Deloria was to American Indians as Rosa Parks was to African-Americans. I would say more that Vine Deloria Jr. was to American Indians as Martin Luther King Jr. was to African-Americans — an intellectual and spiritual leader.

I don’t know his wishes, those of his family or his religion, but I believe it would have been fitting if Mr. Deloria had lain in state in the rotunda of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.

Block That Mascot? Bite Your Tongue

Marc Fisher in The Washington Post:

Two major studies show that while activists are busy suing teams, many Indians take no offense. A survey of Indians conducted in 2002 for Sports Illustrated found that 81 percent don’t think high school or college teams should drop Indian nicknames. Asked about the Redskins, 75 percent said the name doesn’t offend them. Last year, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Election Survey found that 90 percent of Indians did not consider “Redskins” offensive.

Best team name mentioned in the column: Southeastern Oklahoma State University women’s teams — the Lady Savages.

Court: Indian money accounting impossible

A federal appeals court decided Tuesday that it was unreasonable to require a historical accounting of money the government has been managing for Indian tribes, saying the bookkeeping chore would “take 200 years.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the government and the tribes in their effort to block a lower court order for a detailed tally of money owed the tribes going back to 1887.

The accounting had been ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing a class-action lawsuit in which thousands of Indians claim they were cheated out of more than $100 billion in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Interior Department.

In their appeals, the government and the Indians argued that the massive historical accounting Lamberth ordered would cost up to $13 billion - far more than was reasonable.

On Tuesday, a three judge appeals panel agreed, overturning the accounting and calling Lamberth’s decision “ill-founded,” an abuse of discretion and was not favored by either side in the lawsuit.

AP via Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The Opinion [pdf file].

Note: The case concerns individual Indian money, not tribal money as stated in the AP story.

Vine Deloria Jr.

Some words about Vine Deloria Jr., who died Sunday at age 72:

Mr. Deloria, who was trained as both a seminarian and a lawyer, steadfastly worked to demythologize how white Americans thought of American Indians. The myths, he often said - whether as romantic symbols of life in harmony with nature or as political bludgeons in fostering guilt - were both shallow. The truth, he said, was a mix, and only in understanding that mix, he argued, could either side ever fully heal.

And while [Custer Died for Your Sins], with its incendiary title, was categorized at the time as an angry young man’s anthem, Mr. Deloria’s real weapon, critics and admirers said, was his scathing, sardonic humor, which he was able to use on both sides of the Indian-white divide. He once called the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were defeated by a combined force of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne in 1876 in the Montana territory, “a sensitivity-training session.”

“We have brought the white man a long way in 500 years,” he wrote….

The New York Times

“Vine was a great leader and writer, probably the most influential American Indian of the past century — one of the most influential Americans, period,” said Charles Wilkinson, of the University of Colorado School of Law at Boulder and an Indian law expert.

Deloria wrote more than 20 books, but it was his first in 1969, “Custer Died for Your Sins,” that brought him to the nation’s attention.

In 2002, Wilkinson called it “perhaps the single most influential book ever written on Indian affairs” and described it as “at once fiery and humorous, uplifting and sharply critical.”

Los Angeles Times

Burn tobacco today for the wonderful spirit of Vine Deloria Jr., who passed into the world of the ancestors Nov. 13.

Indian Country Today

Your baby’s first year

“Sometimes the baby squalled at night but [Sacajawea] pinched its nostrils shut; a child must learn that to make a sound might mean death, telling the Blackfeet where you were.”

— Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire

[First posted here two years ago.]

Pueblos from A to Z

The Seattle Times provides a brief description of the 19 New Mexico pueblos — “the oldest tribal communities in the United States, having descended from the ancestral Pueblo cultures that once inhabited Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Bandelier.”

The accompanying article — Catching glimpses of tradition in New Mexico’s native villages.

Thanks to Ah, Wilderness! for the link.

Early North American free trade agreements

NewMexiKen is reading Charles Mann’s excellent 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I found this passage particularly interesting:

Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice-their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistall could not pierce it.” To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”; he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”

At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin.

The “epidemic” Mann refers to is the one — probably viral hepatitis — during the late 1610s that killed as many as 90% of the Indians along the Atlantic coast of what is now called New England.

Thinking about Columbus Day

NewMexiKen is well aware of the feelings among many American Indians about Columbus Day. One Lakota woman who worked for me used to ask if she could come in and work on Columbus Day, a federal holiday.

My feeling is we can’t have enough holidays and so I choose to think of Columbus Day as the Italian-American holiday. Nothing wrong with that. We have an African-American holiday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. We have the Irish-American celebration that is St. Patrick’s Day. And Cinco de Mayo is surely the Mexican-American holiday, a much larger celebration here than in most of Mexico.

So, instead of protesting Columbus Day, perhaps American Indians should organize and bring about a holiday of their very own. Given the great diversity among Indian nations (and, lets face it, a proclivity for endless debate), the tribes might never reach agreement, though, so NewMexiKen will suggest a date.

The day before Columbus Day.

Columbus Day — ‘with fifty men we could subjugate them all’

They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

— Christopher Columbus writing in his log upon meeting the Arawaks.

The American Indian Great-Grandmother Princess

A fascinating article from Wired on the “blood feud” between the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) and the descendants of “Freedmen.”

And yet, three-quarters of a century after the death of Cherokee legend Stick Ross, there’s no room for his great-grandson in the Cherokee Nation. Leslie Ross has been denied citizenship in the tribe on the grounds that he is not truly Indian. “They said I don’t have any Indian blood. They say blacks have never had a part in the Cherokee Nation,” says Ross, his usually calm voice swelling with anger. “The thing is, there wouldn’t be a Cherokee Nation if it weren’t for my great-grandfather. Jesus, he was more Indian than the Indians!”

Ross is just one of at least 25,000 direct descendants of Freedmen who cannot join Oklahoma’s largest tribes. Once paragons of racial inclusion and assimilation, the Native American sovereign nations have done an about-face and systematically pushed out people of African descent. “There’s never been any stigma about intermarriage,” says Stu Phillips, editor of The Seminole Producer, a local newspaper in central Oklahoma. “You’ve got Indians marrying whites, Indians marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money.”

I will fight no more forever

I am tired of fighting. Our Chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Ta Hool Hool Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say “Yes” or “No.” He who led the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are - perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Chief Joseph of the Nez-Percé surrendering to Gen. Nelson Miles on this date in 1877.

Popé’s long trek ends in U.S. Capitol

New Mexico and one of the oldest American Indian tribes in the United States will be recognized Thursday when a statue of Popé, the San Juan Pueblo leader who organized the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, will be enshrined in the National Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol.

“In a city of monuments, there will be a pueblo person representing one of the most ancient tribes, so I think that’s very significant,” said Herman Agoyo, past president of the New Mexico Statuary Hall Foundation and San Juan tribal council member.

— The [Santa Fe] New Mexican

Each state is allowed two statues in Statuary Hall. New Mexico’s other statue is of Dennis Chavez, U.S. Senator from 1935-1962.

NewMexiKen votes for Popé and replacing the honorable Senator Chavez with one of the Unsers.

The Special Trustee responds

In a recent editorial in your newspaper, Cobell v. Norton litigation spokesman Bill McAllister says that reporters are not asking the Department of the Interior enough questions. I agree. There are many misconceptions about the litigation, the current state of the Indian Trust, our accounting activities, and our record keeping that need clarification, and I welcome questions.

Any good reporter will find that history has not been kind to the American Indian, and that there have been historical problems with the management of the Indian Trust. However, there is a widespread belief that the long running Cobell v. Norton litigation is about mismanagement and theft of Indian trust funds. This is not so. The case was filed to compel Interior to do an accounting of the funds that have been deposited to, and disbursed from, the trust, and to provide that accounting to each trust beneficiary.

We take the subject of trust management very seriously at Interior. In the past, department officials have stipulated to a number of trust management problems. For some years Interior officials and tribal leaders have been hard at work improving and modernizing the trust for the benefit of all trust account holders. Today business is different in Indian Country. It is detrimental to all Indian Trust account holders to propagate the notion, as plaintiffs and others do, that nothing has changed in ten years.

Newspapers have been printing emotional stories about people in Indian Country who, plaintiffs say, have been wronged by Interior. It is not difficult to find people to profile American Indians who are in need, and who deserve attention from the press. But it is manipulative to use these human interest stories to demonize Interior. Good reporters asking knowledgeable questions will find that those situations can have roots in other social, economic, or congressionally required management policies. Take, for example, the people who see oil pumps working on their land, but who receive checks for very small amounts. There are a number of questions that should be asked: Does the beneficiary own the subsurface mineral rights or did an heir sell them at some point? Is the ownership of the land highly divided among many beneficiaries? Because of early inheritance laws and probate codes passed by Congress, trust land is often divided among many heirs as it is passed down from generation to generation. It is common to have hundreds—even thousands—of Indian owners for one parcel of land. (If you divide a lease payment of $1,000 a month between 300 heirs, each beneficiary will receive a check for $3.33.) What’s more, many businesses are not interested in leasing Indian land simply because of the enormous amount of congressionally mandated regulations and red tape that lessees have to navigate. This, sadly, drives away competition, and results in the loss of higher market prices.

Many news articles include stories that are not factual but due to the Privacy Act we are unable to respond to these articles. …

— Ross Swimmer, Special Trustee for American Indians, letter to Native American Times

Who Owns Native Culture?

So what happens in a liberal democracy when Australian Aborigines demand that museum curators forbid all female staff members from handling the indigenous sacred objects that are on display in Sydney, out of respect for the sexual division of the world in Aborigine society? Or when Native American Lakotas object to the desecration of a sacred site by mountain climbers and by New Age religious worshipers, and the sacred site just happens to be Devils Tower National Monument (made famous by the movie ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), which is located in a public park in Wyoming?

What code of cultural privacy makes sense when representatives of the Pueblo community complain that the sun symbol on the New Mexico state flag was stolen without permission from a design on a 19th-century ceramic pot made by an anonymous and unidentifiable American Indian potter? What about the disempowered forest-dwelling pygmies of Central Africa? Is there a meaningful modern sense in which they can be said to own their traditional flute music and distinctive form of yodeling, traces of which have diffused throughout the globe and can be detected in Herbie Hancock’s album ”Headhunters” and Madonna’s ”Bedtime Stories”? Should the pygmies be compensated? Why and how? What are our legal responsibilities under such circumstances? What are our moral responsibilities?

From a New York Times review in 2003 of Who Owns Native Culture? by Michael F. Brown (first mentioned by NewMexiKen two-years-ago today). Read a discussion of the Hopi-Voth controversy from the first chapter here.

American Indian tribal names

The names by which most ‘tribes’ are generally known are usually not those which they use for themselves: often they are derived from the more-or-less disparaging terms their neighbors used to describe them to early European traders and explorers. (For a rough equivalent, imagine visitors from another planet arriving in England, asking who lived across the channel, and being given the answer ‘Bloody Frogs’.)

From The Earth Shall Weep by James Wilson.

[First posted by NewMexiKen November 12, 2003.]

Exactly!

Indian beneficiaries are responsible for determining whether they get a fair amount for the use of their land, Special Trustee Ross Swimmer said on Wednesday.

Appearing on the nationally broadcast radio program Native America Calling, Swimmer said that federal law puts the burden on landowners to get the most for the oil, gas, timber and other assets. Only in certain cases does the Bureau of Indian Affairs play a stronger role, he claimed.

“The way the statutes and regulations read, the leaseholders are themselves the first persons responsible for leasing the land,” Swimmer said. “The BIA has to approve the lease of the land, and only in those situations where it’s so highly fractionated … does the BIA do the leasing.”

“It is a responsibility of individual Indian people to do the leasing and to ensure that they get what they want,” he continued. The BIA’s jobs is to conduct appraisals and oversee the deal, he said.
…

“If you want to take your land out of trust — whatever you own — or the money that you have in an account, you’re welcome to do that at any point in time,” he said.

— Indianz.Com

Native ingenuity

“Scholars have known for decades that Native American societies were in many ways more technologically sophisticated than their European counterparts. So why do we still find this fact so surprising?”

An article by Charles Mann at The Boston Globe explains.

Mann is the author of the well-received new book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

Hair, hair, hair. Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it.

Two brothers were suspended on the second day of school on Los Fresnos, Texas, for having braided hair that went below the collar.

Rodney and Skyler Burns transferred to Los Fresnos from Ardmore, Oklahoma. The next day they were placed on “In School Suspension,” The Brownsville Herald reported. They are kept in a room all day, not allowed to eat lunch or mingle with other students and not allowed to participate in extracurricular activities.

Rodney, 14, and Skyler, 14, are part Chickasaw. Their mother said the school is being discriminatory. “They are punishing them over their heritage,” Deborah Burns told the paper.

The school says it is not biased but won’t change policy. If the boys don’t cut their hair or change their hairstyle, they could be sent to the alternative high school.

Source: Indianz.Com

Isn’t dictating the length of a male’s hair also some sort of sex discrimination?

Florida State Can Keep Its Seminoles

There was never any doubt where the Seminole Tribe of Florida stood on Florida State University’s nickname. The tribe helped university boosters create the costume for the Chief Osceola mascot, approving the face paint, flaming spear and Appaloosa horse that have no connection to Seminole history.

[Tuesday], the National Collegiate Athletic Association agreed with the 3,100-member tribe and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which had also endorsed the nickname. The N.C.A.A. removed Florida State from the list of universities banned from using what it called “hostile and abusive” mascots and nicknames during postseason play.

The New York Times

Tribe debate sizzles on campus

Columnist Dave Fairbank of the Daily Press in Hampton Roads, Virginia:

In that incubator for radicals and educated malcontents tucked into the colonial capital, otherwise known as the College of William and Mary, there is a buzz of activity - and not just because parking spaces are as valued as a final-grade mulligan. …

But the most intriguing athletic issue on campus these days has nothing to do with fields and buildings, and everything to do with perception.

William and Mary is in the process of assembling a report to the NCAA about its nickname - Tribe - and why it should not be judged “hostile and abusive” to Native-Americans.

Thirty-two of the 33 NCAA member schools with Native-American nicknames and mascots recently learned if they were acceptable. W&M received an extension because it was between administrations.

Any school that produced four U.S. presidents and that was judged “hottest small state school” by Newsweek needs no outside help to argue its case, but part of its report will go something like this:

“Tribe” is about as innocuous a reference to Native-Americans as it gets. The closest thing to a mascot the school has is a green, fuzzy creature called Colonel Ebirt (”Tribe” spelled backwards), who obviously was named on a day when all the clever kids slept late.

Area Indian tribes have not protested the school nickname as hostile or insensitive. The only visible Native-American references are a couple of green-and-gold feathers on the school logo.

In the rare instances when inclined, William and Mary fans perform maybe the nation’s most pitiful, half-hearted “Tomahawk Chop.”

Naturally, all of this guarantees that the NCAA will deem “Tribe” hostile and abusive.

On being Indian in America

The Newest Indians by Jack Hitt in The New York Times Magazine touches on those who’ve recently discovered their Indian blood and the reaction in Indian country, as well as the concept of ethnicity in America. An excerpt:

How much easier (though scarier) life might be if we all got ethnic identification cards so that when encountering a very light-skinned person claiming to be black, you could reply, ”O.K., show me your federal identification card guaranteeing the proper amount of African blood to qualify you as an African-American.” Here’s the thing: you could ask an Indian that question. Some Native Americans carry what is called, awkwardly, a white card, officially known as a C.D.I.B., a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. This card certifies a Native American’s ”blood quantum” and can be issued only after a tribe has been cleared by a federal subagency.

The practice of measuring Indian blood dates to the period just after the Civil War when the American government decided to shift its genocide policy against the Indians from elimination at gunpoint to the gentler idea of breeding them out of existence. It wasn’t a new plan. Regarding Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote that ”the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” When this idea was pursued bureaucratically under President Ulysses S. Grant, Americans were introduced to such phrases as ”half breed” and ”full blood” as scientific terms. In a diabolical stroke, the government granted more rewards and privileges the less Indian you were. For instance, when reservation lands were being broken up into individual land grants, full-blooded Indians were ruled ”incompetent” because they didn’t have enough civilized blood in them and their lands were administered for them by proxy agents. On the other hand, the land was given outright to Indians who were half white or three-quarters white. Here was the long-term catch: as Indians married among whites and gained more privileges, their blood fraction would get smaller, so that in time Indians would reproduce themselves out of existence.

The Indian trust lawsuit — there are two sides to the story

This from the Special Trustee for American Indians, Ross Swimmer, published in Indian Country Today:

A few weeks ago, a $27.5 billion offer was proposed - by plaintiffs and others - to settle the Cobell v. Norton Indian Trust accounting litigation. This case has dragged on since 1996, and there is widespread hope across Indian country, in the administration and in Congress that an acceptable solution can be achieved for the good of all Indian people.

In her editorial, lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell called the proposal “a commonsense bargain for the government and Indian people.” In light of the size of the settlement figure - an amount greater than the combined budgets of the Department of the Interior, Commerce and the Environmental Protection Agency - a resolution to this case should be based upon facts, and the facts do not support Cobell’s statements.

Over the course of the last century, BIA employees across Indian country (most of whom are American Indians) did, in fact, distribute trust funds to Indian Trust account holders and did, in good faith, attempt to keep good Indian trust records.

To date, the accounting firms working to reconcile historic accounts have found only a few instances in which individual Indians were underpaid. And while some records have been lost, most have not because of the “do not destroy” orders by the National Archives [and] Records Administration - which are still in place as a consequence of the Indian Land Claims Commission in the early 1950s. Existing records account for a large percentage of Indian Trust funds because the bulk of the money came into the trust after 1970, when oil and timber prices began to rise dramatically. So far, 119,665 boxes containing almost a quarter of a billion pages of Indian records have been electronically indexed and stored in a brand-new, state of the art archive facility for safeguarding and future use.

…

Today, Interior reconciles cash receipts on a daily basis and financial assets on a monthly basis. Beneficiaries are provided with quarterly financial statements, and we are beginning to issue new quarterly asset statements that include comprehensive information. Our accounting systems are the same as those used in major private trust corporations, and are audited every year.

Potomac-Basin Indigenous Persons trademark back in court

Friday, an appellate court put new life into the legal challenge to the trademark of the Washington professional football team. According to The Washington Post:

The appellate ruling hinged on the question of whether the Native Americans waited too long to file their challenge. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled in October 2003 that the seven plaintiffs had no standing to complain because they did not formally object until 25 years had elapsed since the date of the first trademark.

But the appellate judges found that one plaintiff still could have standing because he was only 1 year old in 1967. They sent the case back to Kollar-Kotelly for review.

NewMexiKen has long thought the Washington football franchise was insensitive about this; even more I think they are being financially short-sighted. If they change their name, alas every item of merchandise with the current logo will sell in an instant to collectors. Then, all the fans will rush to get current with the new name and the new merchandise will have a boom.

Do the right thing and make a fortune. This is a no-brainer. But then the owner of the team is a no-brainer in many ways, too.

Loved to death

Thirty years ago, as a result of pesticides, water pollution, hunting and other factors, bald eagles had vanished from all but the most remote corners of the country that had made them a national symbol. Today, they can be found in every state except Hawaii, and are even making their home in a New York City park.

But the eagles’ comeback, still fragile at best, is threatened by an unusual confluence of factors. And, paradoxical as it may seem, Johnson’s package is linked to the policies and institutions that made the resurgence possible as well as to the new dangers that threaten it.

…

That’s where Johnson and his unusual package come in.

For more than three decades, the National Eagle Repository, an obscure federal agency near Denver, has quietly collected deceased eagles from zoos, highway departments and game wardens, and distributed them to people so they could carry on religious and cultural practices without having to hunt or trap live birds. The repository sends about 1,700 deceased eagles each year to Native Americans across the country.

However, the system of legal protections and government-controlled distribution of eagle parts to Native Americans is showing signs of breaking down.

And the demand for eagle feathers has begun to soar. Black-market prices for eagle feathers and parts are climbing too. And that, wildlife experts fear, could set off a wave of illegal poaching — with disastrous results.

— Los Angeles Times

The Founding Sachems

Did the Founding Fathers Really Get Many of Their Ideas of Liberty from the Iroquois? is a brief essay by Professor Jack Rakove of Stanford in a response to a July 4th op-ed piece in The New York Times.

He thinks not.

Bureaucrats and Indians

Columnist John Tierney writes about Bureaucrats and Indians in The New York Times. He begins:

The Crow Indians rode with Custer at Little Bighorn, but they have since reconsidered. On the anniversary of the battle Saturday, they cheered during a re-enactment when Indians drove a stake through his fringed jacket and carved out the heart of the soldier going by the name of Yellow-Hair in Blue Coat Who Kills Babies, Old Men and Old Women.

Their revised opinion is understandable considering what has happened to them since that battle to get their valley back from rival tribes. Today it’s a Crow reservation with enough land and mineral resources to make each tribe member a millionaire, yet nearly a third live below the poverty level, and the unemployment rate has reached 85 percent.

On the other side of the river

From Killing Custer:

Nor does this picture change. Whether Custer is portrayed as a hero, as Errol Flynn did in the World War II-era They Died with Their Boots On, or as a genocidal nut, as in the Vietnam-era Little Big Man, he is still the center of attention. The recent miniseries Son of the Morning Star depicted Custer as a naughty, hot-blooded, fratboy type-but he is still the character that the cameras follow, the man whose death has always been the point of telling the story. No matter that in fact his famous hairline was beginning to recede, that his remaining hair was cut short, and that it was too hot to wear buckskin that summer day. Or that the Lakotas and the Cheyennes had no idea who had attacked them or which particular army commander they were fighting. More than a century after his death, Custer has the kind of name recognition that would make any aspirant for national political office jealous.

But if you switch the focus, the story becomes infinitely richer. Late on a cold November night, with the wind howling outside his trailer on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Johnson Holy Rock began talking to us about Crazy Horse. Nearly eighty, Johnson is a former tribal chairman whose father was a young boy in Crazy Horse’s camp at the Little Bighorn. “Traditional history tells us that Crazy Horse could ride in front of a line of soldiers and they could all take a potshot at him and no bullet could touch him,” Johnson said, moving his arms back and forth for emphasis. “He’d make three passes, and after the third pass, then his followers were encouraged to make the charge. ‘See, I haven’t been wounded. I’m not shot.’ We would charge.”

I was intrigued, not by Crazy Horse’s ability to ward off bullets in the story, but by Holy Rock’s use of the term “traditional history.” Traditional history according to whom? Not the folks who wrote the history textbooks I read at Glen Rock Junior/Senior High School back in northern New Jersey. Amid George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and even George Custer, figures like Crazy Horse-and, in fact, centuries of Native Americans-rated barely a mention. Traditional history.

Geronimo

Several sources give June 16, 1829, as Geronimo’s date of birth. It’s not clear to NewMexiKen that the Apaches were using the Gregorian calendar at that time. And, indeed, one of those sources, The New York Times, stated in its obituary of Geronimo in February 1909 that he was nearly 90 — not 79 as this birth date would indicate. But, he had to be born some time. So why not June 16?

In her excellent 1976 biography of Geronimo, Angie Debo concludes:

Geronimo was born in the early 1820’s near the upper Gila in the mountains crossed by the present state boundary [Arizona-New Mexico], probably on the Arizona side near the present Clifton. …

He was given the name Goyahkla, with the generally accepted meaning “One Who Yawns,’ why or under what circumstances is not known.

As an adult in battle he was called Geronimo by Mexican soldiers, perhaps because they could not pronounce Goyahkla, or perhaps to invoke Saint Jerome (Geronimo is Spanish for Jerome). The name was adopted for him by his own people.

In its obituary of Geronimo, The Times provided this quote:

Gen. Miles, in his memoirs, describes his first impression of Geronimo when he was brought into camp by Lawton, thus: “He was one of the brightest, most resolute, determined-looking men that I have ever encountered. He had the clearest, sharpest dark eye I think I have ever seen, unless it was that of Gen. Sherman.”

Some have wondered what motivated Geronimo to fight so fiercely. Perhaps this from his autobiography (written with S.M. Barrett in 1905) explains a little:

In the summer of 1858, being at peace with the Mexican towns as well as with all the neighboring Indian tribes, we went south into Old Mexico to trade. Our whole tribe (Bedonkohe Apaches) went through Sonora toward Casa Grande, our destination, but just before reaching that place we stopped at another Mexican town called by the Indians Kas-ki-yeh. Here we stayed for several days, camping outside the city. Every day we would go into town to trade, leaving our camp under the protection of a small guard so that our arms, supplies, and women and children would not be disturbed during our absence.

Late one afternoon when returning from town we were met by a few women and children who told us that Mexican troops from some other town had attacked our camp, killed all the warriors of the guard, captured all our ponies, secured our arms, destroyed our supplies, and killed many of our women and children. Quickly we separated, concealing ourselves as best we could until nightfall, when we assembled at our appointed place of rendezvous–a thicket by the river. Silently we stole in one by one: sentinels were placed, and, when all were counted, I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain. There were no lights in camp, so without being noticed I silently turned away and stood by the river. How long I stood there I do not know, but when I saw the warriors arranging for a council I took my place.

Ocmulgee National Monument …

was authorized on yesterday’s date (June 14) in 1934. The Monument is located near Macon, Georgia. The National Park Service informs us:

Ocmulgee is a memorial to the antiquity of man in this corner of the North American continent. The National Monument preserves a continuous record of human life in the Southeast from the earliest times to the present. From Ice-Age hunters to the Muscogee (Creek) people of historic times, there is evidence here of 12,000 years of human habitation.

One period stands out. Between AD 900 and 1200 a skillful farming people lived on this site. Known to us as Mississippians, they were part of a distinctive culture which crystallized about AD 750 in the middle Mississippi Valley and over the next seven centuries spread along riverways throughout much ofthe central and eastern United States. The Mississippians brought a more complex way of life to the region and here they left behind eight earthen mounds and the remains of a ceremonial earthlodge.

How many people lived in the Americas in 1491?

Scholarly estimates have run from 8 million to 112 million. Europe, by way of comparison, had about 70 million people at the time.

In the 1830s artist George Catlin estimated there had been 16 million Indians in North America at the time of contact. He was in the minority. In 1894, the Census Bureau suggested the number had been more like 600,000.

In the 20th century experts used counts at the time of contact (as reported by explorers, etc.) to estimate the pre-contact population. In 1928, Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney guessed 1.15 million persons were present in 1492 in what is now the U.S. and Canada. Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber further refined Mooney’s work and concluded there were 4.2 million inhabitants in North America and 4.2 million inhabitants in South America before Columbus.

The problem with these estimates is that, among other things, they failed to account for the incredible loss of life due to disease BEFORE direct contact; that is, before the explorers and first settlers could make a count. Diseases unknown in the Americas (foremost being smallpox) may have killed as many as 90 percent of the indigenous people in some areas BEFORE any Europeans arrived.

In the past 40 years the estimates of indigenous population have been much higher than before (and much higher than what most of us learned in school). In 1966, anthropologist Henry Dobyns calculated there had been more than 10 million Indians in North America and 112 million altogether. Most critics felt he oversimplified (and overestimated the loss to disease). Subsequent estimates have moderated Dobyns’s count, but have been much higher than those that preceded him.

In the 1990s, geographer William Denevan attempted to reconcile various estimates. He concluded there were about 54 million people in the hemisphere; 3.8 million of these were in what is now the U.S. and Canada.

More on the name Arkansas

This from the Arkansas Secretary of State — ARkan-SAW or Ar-KANSAS?

At the time of the early French exploration, a tribe of Indians, the Quapaws, lived West of the Mississippi and north of the Arkansas River. The Quapaws, or OO-GAQ-PA, were also known as the downstream people, or UGAKHOPAG. The Algonkian-speaking Indians of the Ohio Valley called them the Arkansas, or “south wind.”

The state’s name has been spelled several ways throughout history. In Marquette and Joliet’s “Journal of 1673″, the Indian name is spelled AKANSEA. In LaSalle’s map a few years later, it’s spelled ACANSA. A map based on the journey of La Harpe in 1718-1722 refers to the river as the ARKANSAS and to the Indians as LES AKANSAS. In about 1811, Captain Zebulon Pike, a noted explorer, spelled it ARKANSAW.

During the early days of statehood, Arkansas’ two U.S. Senators were divided on the spelling and pronunciation. One was always introduced as the senator from “ARkanSAW” and the other as the senator from “Ar-KANSAS.” In 1881, the state’s General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that the state’s name should be spelled “Arkansas” but pronounced “Arkansaw.”

Inheriting the land

Momentum is building to transfer federal lands in New Mexico to the heirs of Spanish and Mexican land grants.

Descendants of families who received government grants of land before New Mexico was annexed to the United States say that’s the only way to correct injustices caused when their ancestors lost control of some of their properties.

While the prospect of fencing off forests and streams now open to the public riles many who aren’t land-grant heirs, Gov. Bill Richardson and the New Mexico Legislature are urging Congress to transfer lands from the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management to land-grant heirs.

Santa Fe New Mexican

If the land is to be returned to “rightful” parties, you might want to consult with the Pueblos.

The Indians should have had a law in 1630 — no Puritans

The Massachusetts Legislature on Thursday repealed a 330-year-old law that barred American Indians from entering Boston and has long irked area tribes — even though it hasn’t been enforced.

Both the House and the Senate voted to strike down the 1675 law passed during King Philip’s War between colonists and area Indians, and that has remained on the books ever since.

Boston.com

Nez Perce National Historical Park

… was established on this date 40 years ago. According to the National Park Service:

The 38 sites of Nez Perce National Historical Park are scattered across the states of Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Montana and have been designated to commemorate the stories and history of the Nimiipuu and their interaction with explorers, fur traders, missionaries, soldiers, settlers, gold miners, and farmers who moved through or into the area.

Gathering of Nations

A terrific Gathering of Nations photo from The Albuquerque Tribune. Well worth a click.

The Gathering of Nations is North America’s largest powwow.

Indian Arts

Garrett has some fine photos from the Institute of American Indian Arts Spring Pow Wow today at the Santa Fe Indian School.