Increasing the odds

You go into a New Mexico Indian casino in 2006 and play a progressive slot machine; one with a very big prize, say $1.6 million dollars. Amazingly, you win.

But the casino says, oh sorry, the slot machine malfunctioned. You only won $400.

You appeal to the tribe’s gaming commission. They deny your claim; the slot machine malfunctioned.

You want “your” $1.6 million, so you file suit in state court. But Indian tribes have sovereign immunity. You can’t sue an Indian tribe. Case dismissed; the court has no jurisdiction.

You appeal to a higher court. In January 2010 the appeals court affirms the lower court’s dismissal. You can’t sue an Indian tribe.

Moral of the story: The house always wins.

The above is a very brief version of a true incident. Meanwhile last July another individual “won” $2.5 million on a slot machine at another New Mexico casino. Guess what? Her slot machine malfunctioned, too.

Regalia

Garret has a wonderful set of photos from Indian Market 2009.

Take a few minutes and enjoy.

Terrific, Garret, but is that last guy an Indian?

Wounded Knee

On this date in 1890 the 7th Cavalry killed about 350 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It is considered the last action of the Indian Wars, but it wasn’t a battle. It was a massacre. The Indian men had been largely disarmed before the firing began.

This 10-minute video, excerpted from a longer production, is a well-produced telling of what happened.

American Horse: There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in these three directions, and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.

Lakota accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee (1891)

One of the survivors was Black Elk, the famous medicine man, who was 27 years old at the time of the massacre. He wrote: “… I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, — you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

The Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 is different from the Wounded Knee incident of 1973.

Easy for her to say line of the day

“Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff who filed the class-action lawsuit in 1996, said she believed that the Indians were owed more, but that it was better to reach an agreement that could help impoverished trust holders than to spend more years in court.”

The impoverished trust holders get $1,000 (or possibly just $500) for each account. As a “Class Representative” however, Ms. Cobell is in line, with others, to receive “in the range of $15 million.”

Quotation from news coverage of tentative settlement in The New York Times. Term “Class Representative” and $15 million figure from Class Action Settlement Agreement.

More Columbus Day Perspective

“I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian.”

Charles Mann, “1491″ — The Atlantic (March 2002)

Columbus Day

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

My feeling is that 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 lobby to bring about a holiday of their own. Given the great diversity among Indian nations, the tribes might never reach agreement, though, so NewMexiKen will suggest a date.

The day before Columbus Day.

An American Indian’s journey in the land of Indian casinos

David Treuer’s fifth report in his series on Indian casinos appears to be the last. Too bad. It’s been interesting.

If you haven’t started the series, begin here.

An American Indian’s journey in the land of Indian casinos

David Treuer writing at Slate Magazine takes a tour of Indian casinos, writing about Indians, treaties, poker, golf, success and failure.

The series is up to four installments written at Morongo and Pechanga (southern California). I recommend it highly as informative and interesting.

Did you know the Seminole Tribe of Florida owns the Hard Rock Cafes? All of them. And all that memorabilia.

Sitting Bull surrenders

The Lakota Tatanka-Iyotanka (Sitting Bull) surrendered to the U.S. Army on this date 128 years ago (1881).

This from a fine, brief biographical essay at AmericanHeritage.com:

On the morning of July 20, in front of American and Canadian soldiers and a Minnesota newspaperman, Sitting Bull had his eight-year-old son, Crow Foot, hand [Major] Brotherton his Winchester rifle. “I surrender this rifle to you through my young son,” said the chief, “whom I [thereby] desire to teach . . . that he has become a friend of the Americans. . . . I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.”

Another damn dam

The Santa Fe New Mexican has a good story on Cochiti Pueblo and Cochiti Dam.

In the 1950s, this was their playground as boys. They would swim in the river, hunt birds and scoop up Rio Grande silvery minnows by the bucketful. “We used to fry them up. They were really good,” Pecos recalled, as the river water lapped almost to his shoes.

The men are old enough to remember picking fruit all summer and fall — apples, apricots, plums, cherries — from pueblo family orchards along the river. “Every family had a plot of land by the river,” said Suina. “Life was out there on the farm.”

“Everyone helped during harvest,” Pecos said. “Everyone shared food. That’s what kept the community together.”

It all changed in a generation.

More Little Bighorn

From Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians:

Nor does this picture change. Whether Custer is portrayed as a hero, as Errol Flynn did it 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.

The battle at Little Bighorn

… was 133 years ago today. This report is from The New York Times a few days later:

On June 25 Gen. Custer’s command came upon the main camp of Sitting Bull, and at once attacked it, charging the thickest part of it with five companies, Major Reno, with seven companies attacking on the other side. The soldiers were repulsed and a wholesale slaughter ensued. Gen. Custer, his brother, his nephew, and his brother-in-law were killed, and not one of his detachment escaped. The Indians surrounded Major Reno’s command and held them in the hills during a whole day, but Gibbon’s command came up and the Indians left. The number of killed is stated at 300 and the wounded at 31. Two hundred and seven men are said to have been buried in one place. The list of killed includes seventeen commissioned officers.

It is the opinion of Army officers in Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia, including Gens. Sherman and Sheridan, that Gen. Custer was rashly imprudent to attack such a large number of Indians, Sitting Bull’s force being 4,000 strong.

Custer, often a reckless but previously a lucky commander, was to have his reputation rescued by what became the life-long work of Mrs. Custer.

The best book about Custer is Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn.

“Son of the Morning Star makes good reading—its prose is elegant, its tone the voice of dry wit, its meandering narrative skillfully crafted. Mr. Connell is above all a storyteller, and the story he tells is vastly more complicated than who did what to whom on June 25, 1876.” Page Stegner

This book is generally considered one of the half-dozen best written about the American west.

The best book attempting to tell the vastly more important Indian side of the story is James Welch’s Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians.

Landscape photo credit: Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Custer marker photo: NewMexiKen 1995.

Geronimo

Several sources give June 16, 1829, as Geronimo’s date of birth. It’s not clear to me 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.

Read the rest of this entry.

Name-calling

The post about Arkansas demonstrates how often American Indian nations were renamed by their neighbors. The European explorers would ask, “Who lives further down this river?” And their hosts would reply, “Oh those c**ks**ckers, we call them the stupid downriver people.”

And so, a perfectly happily self-named tribe would soon become forever known by the word for “stupid downriver people” in some other Indian language, bastardized all the more by the Europeans who spelled it whatever which way in their journals.

It’d be like asking the people of Mexico what they called the people further north.

And so we would have become the United States of Gringos.

Heroes, all

Flags will be flown at half-staff through the Memorial Day weekend in honor of Navajo Code Talker John Brown Jr. of Crystal, N.M., who died Wednesday at the age of 87.

Brown received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2001. …

He was one of the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers with the U.S. Marine Corps and “endured the horrors of combat in the Pacific Theater battles on the islands of Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian and Guadalcanal,” said a proclamation by Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr.

Brown was born on Dec. 24, 1921 to Nonabah Bia Begay and Little Policeman (the late John Brown Sr.) in Chinle, Ariz., near Canyon De Chelly.

Santa Fe New Mexican

Following the Clues

A 75-year-old western mystery solved.

The Pueblo of San Felipe

Today is the feast day of St. Phillip, celebrated with the Green Corn Dance at San Felipe Pueblo. (San Fa-lee-pay)

San Felipe is a Keresan-speaking pueblo on the Rio Grande about half-way between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. It is one of 19 pueblos in New Mexico.

Gathering of Nations

Cool poster.

And here (scroll down) is Miss Indian World 2009. This young woman’s mother works in the same organization as my good friend Donna, and I’m pretty sure no one is any prouder of her success than Donna is this morning.

I love that Miss Indian World is a Hupa / Yurok / Karuk / Chiippewa from Beverly Hills, California.

Close Enough for Government Work

It turns out that in 1878, when they surveyed the boundaries of Utah-Colorado-New Mexico and Arizona, they adjusted the spot where the four territories met (unique in the U.S.) so that the location would be easier to get to.

It should have been at the confluence of 37ºN and 109ºW. That’s about 2½ miles east and slightly north of where the Four Corners Monument is located today near 36°59′56″N and 109°02′43″W.

Click Image for Larger Version

The states and Congress ultimately recognized the error, but accepted it, and the Four Corners Monument marks the official boundary. You don’t have to go back to take photos all over again.

Photo taken at Monument in 2006. (Click for Larger Version)

The present monument is on sovereign Navajo Nation land. The actual confluence of 37ºN and 109ºW is also on Indian land, the Ute Mountain Reservation.

Tatanka-Iyotanka

… was killed on this date in 1890.

Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man. He was born around 1831 on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota. He became a warrior in a battle with the Crow at age 14, subsequently becoming renowned for his courage in fights with the U.S. Army.

In 1874, an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer confirmed the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, an area that had been declared off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. When efforts by the government to purchase the Black Hills failed, the Fort Laramie Treaty was abrogated. All Lakota not settled on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull led his people in holding their ground.

Read the rest of this entry.

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

Now that’s a hall monitor with some street cred

NewMexiKen just posted this last year, but I believe in recycling to help protect the planet.

NewMexiKen has been reading Angie Debo’s excellent 1976 biography of Geronimo. I recommend it. Here’s a couple of trivial items I thought were interesting.

When Geronimo’s and Naiche’s (son of Cochise) bands were consolidated at Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama, in 1887 and 1888, the post doctor was Walter Reed. Yes, THE Walter Reed.

A school was eventually set up at the Alabama camp, where the Apaches were prisoners of war — men, women and children. Geronimo reportedly monitored the children’s attendance and deportment, walking up and down the aisles with a stick.

I’m thinking many of our schools today could use Geronimo patrolling their classrooms.

The Apaches were relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894.

Update: Finishing the biography, amused to learn when that Geronimo traveled he would sell photos and autographs and even the buttons off his coat. He’d sell the buttons to people gathered to see him come by at the train station, then before the next station he’d sew on a new set of buttons.

Geronimo also rode in Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in March 1905. The Apache would have been about 75, nearly 76. It was said he could still vault onto his pony. This NewMexiKen post has a photo of Geronimo taken at the St. Louis Fair in 1904. He died in 1909, about age 80.

Geronimo

Geronimo and Naiche (son of Cochise) surrendered to Gen. Nelson Miles on this date in 1886 at Skeleton Canyon, near the Arizona-New Mexico line just north of the border with Mexico. It was the fourth time Geronimo had surrendered — and the last. With them were 16 men, 14 women and six children. The band was taken to Fort Bowie and by the 8th were on a train to Florida as prisoners of war.

Click image for larger version of this photograph (above) taken at a rest stop along the route to San Antonio. Naiche is third from left, Geronimo third from right (with the straw hat) in the front row. He was probably in his late 50s.

Geronimo and the others were moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. Geronimo eventually became a marketable celebrity, paid to appear at expositions and fairs. He died at Fort Sill in 1909, about age 80.

Also pictured are Geronimo at his third surrender in March 1886 and Geronimo on exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. (Click each for larger version.)

Fort Bowie National Historic Site (Arizona)

… was authorized on this date in 1964. According to the National Park Service:

Fort Bowie commemorates in its 1000 acres, the story of the bitter conflict between the Chiricahua Apaches and the United States military. For more than 30 years Fort Bowie and Apache Pass were the focal point of military operations eventually culminating in the surrender of Geronimo in 1886 and the banishment of the Chiricahuas to Florida and Alabama. It was the site of the Bascom Affair, a wagon train massacre, and the battle of Apache Pass, where a large force of Chiricahua Apaches under Mangus Colorados and Cochise fought the California Volunteers. The remains of Fort Bowie today are carefully preserved, the adobe walls of various post buildings and the ruins of a Butterfield Stage Station.

Visiting Fort Bowie requires a three mile round trip hike — unless you use the handicap entrance, which they keep a secret until you show up after walking a mile-and-a-half on a July afternoon with a daughter eight months pregnant and a two-year-old grandson.

The Pueblo Revolt

On this date in 1680, the surviving Spanish settlers under siege decided to abandon Santa Fe and began the trek to Chihuahua. The Spanish did not return to New Mexico for 12 years.

Colonists from Mexico first settled in New Mexico, north of present-day Santa Fe, in 1598. By the 1620s there were 2,000 colonists taking land and forcing labor from the Puebloans, occasionally executing dozens of Indians for the murder of one settler. In the 1660s a drought further stressed conditions for all, especially as Apaches and others raided the Pueblos. Many Puebloans began to feel that deserting their own religion to accept Christianity had brought on these disasters. There were occasional uprisings, but nothing sustainable until Popé, a San Juan medicine man, began unifying resistance among the various independent Pueblos in 1675.

On August 10, 1680, the Indians launched a unified all-out attack on Spanish settlers. Colonists were killed, churches burned, horses and cattle seized. Priests were singled out and killed in all the Pueblos, including Acoma, Zuni and Hopi (in modern Arizona). About 1,000 survivors escaped to Santa Fe and the town was put under siege on August 12. By the 16th the Indians occupied all of the town except the plaza and its surrounding buildings. According to reports, as they burnt the town the Indians sang Latin liturgy to taunt the Spanish.

Three-hundred-and-twenty-six years ago today the settlers were allowed to withdraw from Santa Fe. When they reached El Paseo del Norte in October, there were 1,946 from of a population that had been about 2,500. About 400 had been killed, another 150 escaped to Mexico independently.

The Puebloans removed all signs of the Spanish — the churches, the religion itself, the crops, even the animals (the horses let loose on the plains, eventually transforming the culture of the Plains Indians). One vestige remained: one man rule. Popé declared himself that man and moved to the Palace in Santa Fe.

Spanish attempts at reconquest failed until 1692.