“My dad was a professional soccer play[er] for Manchester United, and when they toured America back in ’51, he brought me a little Roy Rogers suit. I’ve still got the pair of guns from it.
You know, I actually preferred the Indians, but they weren’t selling Indian outfits then.”
Ian McShane of Deadwood
Read the whole f***ing interview with McShane.
Referring to the Congressional election Tuesday in South Dakota, “If you take out the Indian reservation, we would have won,” said Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), former chairman of the NRCC.
The General writes Davis a letter.
Eighty years ago today the United States declared: “That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States.”
Until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Indians occupied an unusual status under federal law. Some had acquired citizenship by marrying white men. Others received citizenship through military service, by receipt of allotments, or through special treaties or special statutes. But many were still not citizens, and they were barred from the ordinary processes of naturalization open to foreigners. Congress took what some saw as the final step on June 2, 1924 and granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.
The granting of citizenship was not a response to some universal petition by American Indian groups. Rather, it was a move by the federal government to absorb Indians into the mainstream of American life. No doubt Indian participation in World War I accelerated the granting of citizenship to all Indians, but it seems more likely to have been the logical extension and culmination of the assimilation policy. After all, Native Americans had demonstrated their ability to assimilate into the general military society. There were no segregated Indian units as there were for African Americans. Some members of the white society declared that the Indians had successfully passed the assimilation test during wartime, and thus they deserved the rewards of citizenship.
Source: NebraskaStudies.org
It was 24 years before every state enabled Indian citizens to vote.
The states that set the most stringent restrictions on voter eligibility were Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. These states required that voters be not only citizens, but residents and taxpayers as well. In Arizona, the state supreme court in Porter v. Hall, decided in 1928, ruled that Indians should be disqualified from voting because they were under “federal guardianship,” a status construed by the court to be synonymous with “persons under disability.” This decision stood for twenty years until the court finally reversed itself in Harrison v. Laveen.
From AP via the Albuquerque Tribune:
Charles Leno worked a dead-end job dealing cards at the Chinook Winds casino on the Oregon coast, earning minimum wage and not much in fringe benefits.
He saw little in his future, so he was casting about for a change – and the change he decided on was his tribe.
Last year the 28-year-old moved from the tribe of his mother’s ancestry, the Siletz, to his father’s tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde – operators of Oregon’s most successful casino.
“They help you more here,” he said.
As a tribal member, he receives between $4,000 and $5,000 a year in per-capita payments. He had hiring priority for a higher-paying job at Spirit Mountain casino. And his newborn son, Future Warrior, receives the same benefits every year in a trust – a solid investment of tens of thousands of dollars by the time the boy turns 18.
American Indians are discovering that one possible route out of poverty is joining a tribe with a successful casino, a transfer that’s allowed if they can show they have blood ties to that tribe.
From the Reno Gazette-Journal:
Lawyers for two men accused of looting American Indian artifacts said Thursday that the real culprit is the U.S. Forest Service because it failed to mark the site near Reno as culturally significant.
From the Albuquerque Tribune:
Harlan McKosato likens his quest to start an American Indian cable station to the famous first line in “Field of Dreams.”
“I keep saying: ‘If you build it, they will come,’ ” said McKosato, 38.
And come they will, McKosato is certain, to a cable and satellite channel filled 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with nothing but American Indian programming.
“People are starting to look for a specific slice of our (American Indian) society,” he said.
He’s so certain that on April 9 he gave up his nine-year gig as host of the locally produced syndicated radio show “Native America Calling” to focus on getting this channel into the homes of the 105 million cable and satellite subscribers in the United States, and a few more around the world.
“If we get the European market, we think that’s going to bust it loose because of the interest they have in Native American history,” he said.
Legend and a number of historical accounts have it that on this date in 1626, Manhattan Island was purchased from the Canarsee Delawares by the Dutchman Peter Minuit. Most accounts state that Dutch beads were part of the deal.
The only known document specifically relating to the acquisition was written in Amsterdam late in 1626 as a report to the board of the West India Company. It said, in part:
They [the crew and passengers of a returning ship] report that our people are in good heart and live in peace there; the women have also borne some children there. They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; ’tis 11,000 morgens (about 22,00[0] acres) in size.
[60 guilders has been estimated as worth from $24 to $300. Manhattan is actually about 15,000 acres, not 22,000.]
The late bead historian Peter Francis argued in his prize-winning 1986 article “The Beads That Did Not Buy Manhattan Island” that, because this contemporary report does not mention beads, we cannot assume that beads were part of the transaction. According to Francis, beads were added to the story by Martha J. Lamb in her History of the City of New York (1877). It was only from then on that Dutch beads became part of the story. [And, as a result, making the Delawares seem even more ignorant in light of Manhattan’s growing importance and wealth.]
NewMexiKen however, wonders whether “for the value of 60 guilders” does not imply trade goods rather than coin. What use would Dutch money have been to the Delawares? And, if the transaction was strictly for money, why not report “for 60 guilders” rather than the vague “for the value of 60 guilders”? Trade goods were used in the purchase of Staten Island in August 1626 according to a copy of the deed – “Some Diffies, Kittles, Axes, Hoes, Wampum, Drilling Awls, Jew’s Harps, and diverse other wares” [Diffies are cloth]. What does “Wampum” mean in this Dutch account if not beads? [The word “Wampum” comes from the Narragansett word for white shell beads.]
More than likely the Delawares assumed they were “leasing” the use of the land. Permanent title would not have occurred to them. And $24 to $300 for a lease (whether in cash or goods) would not have been unattractive.
As the result of war, the Dutch traded New Amsterdam to the English in 1667 for what is now Suriname (Dutch Guyana).
From a report in Native Times —
Motor vehicle crashes are the third leading cause of death for American Indians and Alaskan Natives, according to the Indian Health Service. According to Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, the death rate from motor vehicle crashes among American Indians is 2.5 times higher than the general population….Indians also had the lowest seat belt use rate.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs plans aggressive enforcement during the national “Click It or Ticket” campaign.
From The Washington Post:
The nation’s top Indian affairs official has recused himself from the highest-profile issues related to his job — tribal recognition, casino gambling and related land disputes — just four months after being confirmed by the Senate.
*****“A recusal of this kind goes to core responsibilities of his office and is very problematic legally and ethically,” [Connecticut Attorney General Richard] Blumenthal said. “This bypasses congressional oversight and scrutiny. . . . Aurene Martin isn’t confirmed by anybody. She’s not accountable in the same way.”
Widely known as “Famous Dave,” after the name of his restaurants, Anderson, a member of the Chippewa and Choctaw tribes, enjoyed the support of Native Americans.
Anderson’s office controls the bureau’s 10,000 employees, who administer almost 60 million acres of land held in trust for Indians and Alaska Natives, provide for health and human services, and run other programs for about 1.5 million Indians.
With the advent of Indian gambling, the BIA’s mission has become more complicated and the agency has come under increasing pressure to recognize — and not recognize — tribes. There are nearly 200 casino-owning tribes, which generate about $10 billion in annual revenue.
Report in the Arizona Republic on a Congressional visit to the Navajo reservation:
NAVAJO RESERVATION – Marie Keams, 49, humbly welcomed members of Congress into the two-room house south of Cameron where she raised seven children.
One room held two beds, two couches, dressers and a wood stove. The other room had a propane stove and an U.S. flag taped over the door.
No electricity. No running water. And the well outside is contaminated with oil, so Keams is forced to get her drinking water from the Cameron chapter house several miles away.
“I’ve been to 48 or 50 different countries, and that housing is comparable to the Third World,” said Rep. Robert Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee on housing and community opportunity.
“Those are the toughest living conditions I’ve seen.”
From Native American Times:
Tulsa has the opportunity to be the home of the largest freestanding bronze monument with an observation area. The proposed statue, called “The American,” depicts a young Native American warrior standing firm with the wind blowing his hair across his face. His right arm is raised as a bald eagle, with an 82-foot wingspan, lands on his forearm, while his left arm, relaxed at his side, catches a blanket falling from his shoulder. Visitors would ride an elevator to an observation area in the warrior’s head.
The statue would stand about 17½ stories tall, reaching a soaring 21 stories with its limestone-concrete base. Its $26 million price tag would be privately funded, but the project would require incentives and a site to build on.
Shan Gray, the artist, is part Osage. Gray hopes to secure a site by April 1 and to complete the monument before the 2007 state centennial celebration.
“The American” would be 25 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty without her base, and more than nine times the height of the statue at the Lincoln Memorial.
From Native American Times:
Imitation Native American art is being mass-produced in places like Mexico and Asia, and the fallout from this manufacturing of Indian culture is hurting Native artists and craftspeople.
“The people that are in the business and attempting to make authentic stuff have to contend with imports,” Michael Kirk, a craftsman from Isleta, New Mexico, told the Native American Times. He said that import laws are not properly enforced.
Kirk is one of the lucky ones, though. His jewelry and carvings are geared toward higher-end consumers like museums and galleries. He specializes in one-of-a-kind art. Those most harmed by the cheap imitations are the artists who make smaller items like silver rings, Kirk told the Native Times.
The fakes are bad for business in New Mexico. Tourism is the second biggest industry in the state, but some visitors get counterfeit art when they try to buy the real thing.
Excerpt from an editorial in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Argus Leader:
Political correctness can go too far. We’ve all seen it.
But racist bigotry still is easy to spot – as it was in a Rush Limbaugh broadcast last week.
Limbaugh was commenting on Tim Giago’s decision to drop out of the U.S. Senate race after a meeting with Minority Leader Tom Daschle. The decision was worthy of comment and brings up all sorts of questions that many of us would like to have answered.
But Limbaugh went too far:
“I predicted that Tim Giago – South Dakota Native American activist – would be scalped politically. … Last week, Daschle and Giago had a powwow. What happened in the tepee is unknown, but when the smoke signals cleared, Giago was Home on the Range. … As for Giago, since he’s back on the reservation … .”
The Christian Science Monitor has some thoughts about Gambling on the Reservation:
Gambling dollars have unfortunately become a main source of revenue for most native American tribes. In California, for instance, the state’s 54 Indian gaming casinos bring in some $6 billion a year.
The lure of easy money has caused Indian casinos to proliferate to more than 330, and the opportunity for more has many native Americans working side by side with gambling interests to gain federal recognition as tribes (a prerequisite for opening a casino). Indian tribal offices have been flooded with “I’m an Indian, too” calls.
Members of tribes are embroiled in disputes over just who is a tribe member (and thus, who can share in the bounty). In California, one fifth of the 61 tribes there with gambling agreements are in membership disputes. (The more members, of course, the less casino profit per person.) One band in Kansas is even considering DNA testing to cull its membership. …
But getting Congress to tighten up the recognition process no doubt is stymied by the fact that gambling interests have thrown millions into congressional campaign coffers.
There are a number of links to related stories in the Monitor sidebar.
From The Arizona Republic:
The Navajo tribe is considering making it easier to be a Navajo.
A proposal to lower the minimum blood requirement from one-quarter to one-eighth is being debated this week in the Navajo Nation Council, the governing body of the largest tribe in the United States. If approved, membership could double, increasing to more than 600,000 from about 310,000. …
Tribal membership across the country has become controversial as some people clamber to join to get in on per capita casino payments.
“For those highly successful tribes, with new riches of gaming, people want to enroll,” said Peterson Zah, former chairman and president of the Navajo Nation.
But the tribe has no casino, no individual payments to members, and Zah said he believes this proposal is more about recognizing successive generations of those who have married outside the tribe and making sure all community voices are counted in votes.
“This is a response to so many of our tribal members who are intermarrying with other nationalities,” said Zah, an adviser on American Indian affairs to the president of Arizona State University. “We are in the same situation as many other tribes that have had to redo their qualifications.”
The article from The Arizona Republic continues, discussing both sides of the Navajo issue and providing the larger historical context for Indian tribal membership.
The Rocky Mountain News reports:
The Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma filed a claim Wednesday for 27 million acres given to the tribes in a 19th century treaty but said they would settle for 500 acres to build a casino in a symbolic return to Colorado.
The petition, filed with the Department of Interior, covers northeastern Colorado and about 40 percent of the state. The land claims include water rights on the Platte and Arkansas rivers that predate those of many water users today.
From The Bozeman Daily Chronicle:
It took a few years, but Squaw Creek finally has a new name.
The stream in the Gallatin Range south of Bozeman now bears the official moniker of Storm Castle Creek, according to Jackie Riley, cartographer for the Gallatin National Forest.
Two other features on the Gallatin, Squaw Peak and Squaw Gulch, both in the Absaroka Range, have also been renamed.
“Squaw Peak is now Morningstar Peak,” Riley said Monday. The gulch is now Travois Gulch.
A fourth feature, Squaw Pass in the Absarokas, hasn’t been renamed yet because a committee in Washington, D.C., couldn’t decide what to call it.
The new names are part of a pattern taking place around the country. The word “squaw” is considered by many Native Americans to be an insulting epithet for a woman’s private parts.
Debby posted this story elsewhere:
When NASA was preparing for the Apollo Project, it took the astronauts to a Navajo reservation in Arizona for training. One day, a Navajo elder and his son came across the space crew walking among the rocks.
The elder, who spoke only Navajo, asked a question. His son translated for the NASA people: “What are these guys in the big suits doing?” One of the astronauts said that they were practicing for a trip to the moon. When his son relayed this comment the Navajo elder got all excited and asked if it would be possible to give to the astronauts a message to deliver to the moon.
Recognizing a promotional opportunity when he saw one, a NASA official accompanying the astronauts said, “Why certainly!” and told an underling to get a tape recorder. The Navajo elder’s comments into the microphone were brief. The NASA official asked the son if he would translate what his father had said. The son listened to the recording and laughed uproariously. But he refused to translate.
So the NASA people took the tape to a nearby Navajo village and played it for other members of the tribe. They too laughed long and loudly but also refused to translate the elder’s message to the moon.
Finally, an official government translator was summoned. After she finally stopped laughing, the translator relayed the message: “Watch out for these assholes. They have come to steal your land.”
This story has been around the Internet since at least 1995. According to the Urban Legends Reference Pages —
Although it might possibly have earlier antecedents as yet unknown to us, the origin of this tale appears to be a joke Johnny Carson included in his Tonight Show monologue on the evening of 22 July 1969, two days after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the surface of the moon.
From AP via the Santa Fe New Mexican:
A plan to return a large swath of federal land to one of Oregon’s poorest Indian tribes requires a leap of faith, Sen. Gordon Smith says.
But potential payoffs justify that, the Oregon Republican said Tuesday at a Senate hearing on his plan to transfer nearly 63,000 acres of the Siuslaw National Forest near Florence, Ore. to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, to hold in trust for the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians.
From The New York Times:
It has become a ritual in every part of the nation: a group of people of American Indian heritage, eyeing potential gambling profits, band together and seek federal recognition as a tribe.
But in their quest, these groups have created another tribe in search of wealth: the troop of genealogists, historians, treaty experts, lobbyists and lawyers they hire to guide them through the process. And the crucial players in this brigade are the casino investors who can pay for it all.
There are now 291 groups seeking federal recognition as tribes, and many have already signed with investors seeking a piece of the nation’s $15-billion-a-year Indian gambling industry. Among the dozen or so groups awaiting final determinations from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, two-thirds have casino investors bankrolling them, said Eric Eberhard, a lawyer specializing in Indian law.
From The Arizona Republic, an update on the Piestewa Peak renaming challenge. The two sides are summed up nicely with the following:
“We should keep the name of the peak and not make it into a political issue that’s going to make the indigenous people feel, well, here we are, they are Indian givers again,” [Lori Piestewa’s mother] said.
“I guess because she (Piestewa) was Indian, but it annoys me because we had other Arizonans killed as well,” Stroud, 69, said. “To me it’s kind of a slap in the face for all the young men and women who have gone because they just keep making a big deal about her. She’s not even from Phoenix.”
From Wampum:
Late last year triballaw saw a case where a burger place, that employed about 20 Diné fired one of the workers for speaking Diné (aka “Navajo”). MB posted on this at the time, you can find the original here. Then we had a note out of the Los Angeles Indian community (quick: what is the largest Indian city in the US?) about Micky Dee having scholarships for Afro-American and Spanish-American college-bound youth, but nada for Indian college-bound youth. I was the designated stuckee to call corporate and learn that it was up to the local franchisees to best determine their market needs and opportunities or some such eyewash. Today in Israel, in MacDonalds, it is a cause for termination for one employee to speak Arabic to another.
was established in the Department of War on this date 180 years ago. The Bureau moved to the newly established Department of the Interior in 1849.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) responsibility is the administration and management of 55.7 million acres of land held in trust by the United States for American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. There are 562 federal recognized tribal governments in the United States. Developing forestlands, leasing assets on these lands, directing agricultural programs, protecting water and land rights, developing and maintaining infrastructure and economic development are all part of the agency’s responsibility. In addition, the Bureau of Indian Affairs provides education services to approximately 48,000 Indian students.
The BIA website as well as the BIA mail servers have been made temporarily unavailable due to the Cobell Litigation. Please continue to check from time to time. We have no estimate on when authorization will be given to reactivate these sites.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Snow-covered Alaska is a long way from the deserts of Iraq, but that doesn’t worry Janet Reiser, the president of an Anchorage-based company planning to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Because of the efforts of Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska Native-owned businesses like Reiser’s are allowed to receive government contracts of unlimited size without going through the normal bidding process. Pentagon officials are turning to them to speed up the rebuilding of Iraq.
“If you exchange snow for sand, work in Iraq is similar to the work we’ve done in Alaska,” said Reiser, whose Nana Pacific engineering company is in the final stages of negotiating a multimillion-dollar contract that will be awarded without competitive bidding. “We know how to do logistics in remote areas.”
From Furthermore at Wired News:
Aboriginal Indians and people from India are different. That’s what a contender for the leadership of Canada’s opposition Conservative Party learned after his office sent a letter to a native group congratulating it on a holiday celebrating India’s independence from Britain. Wrong Indians. The mistake prompted a stinging rebuke from the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centers president: “This is 2004, Mr. Harper, not 1492 … the last time a man got lost looking for India.” Harper apologized, blaming student interns who compiled a database of Indo-Canadian and other groups as part of an outreach program and got this one wrong.