http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/us/05navajo.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

From the New York Times:

Navajo voters have never had much of a say in how their modern government was shaped. But that may soon change, after a tribal judge cleared the way for a special election on a restructuring that could alter the balance of power on the sprawling reservation.

The government structure was forced upon Navajo voters 86 years ago and was reorganized under three branches without their consent.

Maybe Navajos “will have a greater sense of ownership in the government than they now have,” said Dale Mason, who teaches Navajo government at the University of New Mexico, Gallup.

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http://www.santaynezvalleyjournal.com/archive/7/27/4723/

deltafoxtrot:

Before the advent of Indian gambling casinos and the profits which enabled federally acknowledged Indian tribes to enter the world of big business, few people had ever heard of tribal sovereignty.

Generally the old European and international concept of sovereignty was associated with “nation states,” countries that saw their people and territory as having to answer to no other sovereign nation in their affairs.

Since the United States became a sovereign independent nation, it has exercised plenary power over all Indian tribes.

In the early days, there were only a few major recognized historic tribes, some with thousands of tribal members, unlike today, when tiny bands or groups of Indian descendants often claim to be a separate tribe.

In actuality, they are just splinter groups or families sharing a common or similar tribal ancestry.

In California, these tiny groups are no more than the remnants of families that at one time had a tribal ancestry.

The federal government’s Indian policies ran the gamut from treaties relations to welfare dependency.

In the beginning, when the European powers were struggling for hegemony, over the North American continent it was expedient to make treaties with various recognized tribes who were often allies in the war for control of what was called the American and Canadian territories.

As more and more Europeans migrated to the New World, the expansion of settlements often pushed tribes from territories they occupied and created conflicts between Native Indians and settlers.

Treaties then became a mechanism to make or insure a measure of peace.

As settlement became denser in the Eastern regions and migration westward increased, the conflicts could not be resolved by treaties alone, and in some cases treaties were broken.

This resulted in the disastrous relocation policies of the early to mid-1800s in which groups of Indians east of the Mississippi River were physically relocated to lands they were given by the government west of the Mississippi.

The injustices of the relocation policy and the continuing conflict between settlers were only interrupted by the Civil War.

Following the end of the Civil War, the great migration westward increased as did the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the east.

Conflicts continued with some of the warlike plains Indians and settlers seeking lands in the west.

These were often reported, sensationalized and exaggerated in newspapers and books in eastern cities and towns seeking to sell copy.

Treaties with Indian tribes were difficult at best to manage and were heavily oriented toward agriculture.

In 1881, Congress passed a law prohibiting the making of any more treaties with Indian tribes.

The advent of the homestead era, where settlers (and Indians) could homestead lands from the public domain served as impetus for the Dawes Act of 1887.

This federal law provided that Indian tribes could allocate the land they held in common as tribal lands in parcels to tribal members as their own fee lands to farm or ranch as they saw fit.

The intent in what was then still an agrarian-based economy was for these Indians to become self-sufficient and, essentially, to assimilate into the American economy and society.

Individual Indians could also homestead lands under a procedure established by the Indian Homestead Act.

By the terms of the Dawes Act, once a tribe had allotted all of its tribal land to its tribal members, the tribe ceased to have any tribal authority and political identity.

During that period, from the Dawes Act to 1921, there was much confusion in federal Indian policy, which conflicted with the earlier “treaty” policy that had created “reservations” for the occupation and control of tribal entitles.

The relocation policy also created “reservations” for the purposes of a recognized tribe of Indians to occupy and control, free from any outside interference in internal tribal affairs.

These reservations were lands ceded to tribes and to which some tribes were relocated.

Others voluntarily populated these lands set aside for their use and occupation.

During this same period, the U.S. government sought to make individual Indians full citizens of the United States, often creating fictitious or vague rationales for doing so.

Finally, in 1921, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, which made each individual Indian a full citizen of the United States.

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http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/national/plains/48619062.html

Frybread was born of necessity. Indian tacos were born of something else entirely – a love for chili, beans and lots of cheese.

What started in the late 1800s as sustenance concocted from government rations of lard, flour, salt and baking powder later became a staple in American Indian homes and at pow wows.

Today, an Oklahoma festival, fair or pow wow just wouldn’t be the same without a booth selling frybread topped with layers of chili, beans, lettuce, tomato and cheese.

Some say frybread was invented by the Navajo tribe, but it’s now hard to find a tribe that doesn’t lay claim to frybread or its culinary offshoot, the Indian taco.

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An Ashaninka indigenous woman cooked in the main road linking the central jungle to Lima.

Ashaninkas and Machiguengas, indigenous peoples of Peru, protested against the government’s plans to open large parts of the Amazon for drilling, logging and dam building.

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http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/home/content/49176917.html

Diane J. Humetewa, the first female Native American U.S. attorney in history, will soon be out of a job – and not because she’s doing a bad job, either. Instead, she will become a casualty of the political appointee process that comes with each new presidential administration.

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deltafoxtrot:

by David Swallow
Indian Country Today - 2 January 2009

Young American Indians today suffer from many problems of the modern world. Alcohol and drug abuse, early pregnancies, gangs and psychological disorders are everywhere on the reservations. However, a lot of the development of these issues can be historically traced back to World War II or shortly before.

The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act created a special kind of dual citizenship which made American Indians into citizens of the United States (for the first time) as well as citizens of their own sovereign nations. Finally, Indians could vote. But also, for the first time, they could be drafted into the military.

The young Lakota Warriors looked at the military as a way to prove themselves as warriors. They believed it was an honorable extension of the traditional warrior ways.

So, young American Indians went off to WWII. After 100 years of forced boarding schools which resulted in generations of young Indians losing their sense of identity, family and traditions, the military became like the family they had never been allowed to have. They were grouped into companies which lived together and fought together and bonded with each other as a unit, as a family.

When the young warriors came home, they often became lost. With their military family no longer existing, gangs began to form to take their place. An example is the Hell’s Angels, the famous motorcycle gang, which was started in the late 1940s. It is commonly believed to have been founded by ex-members of famous military fighting units of the same name.
The young warrior knew his real purpose was to protect his people and their lives.

Then, in 1953, long after Prohibition had ended, President Eisenhower made it legal to sell alcohol to American Indians for the first time. This changed the lives of all Indian people.

In his grandfathers’ day, the Lakota warrior came from a good family where he had been taught good behavior, good manners, respect for all life and good relationship with all living things. His parents never lied to him and he never lied to anyone. He was reliable and practiced honor and respect with a clean mind.

Even with all those qualities, he still had to qualify to be a member of a warrior society. He had to prove himself. It wasn’t just about fighting. But when he did fight, even then he practiced respect. He never mutilated another warrior.

The young warrior also never stole from his own people. He never beat up or took advantage of his people. He never practiced sexual assaults on anyone.

The young warrior knew his real purpose was to protect his people and their lives. He knew his purpose was to protect the c’anunpa carriers, the sacred pipe carriers, and the holy men and spiritual leaders. He also listened to and learned from the holy men and spiritual leaders. He not only respected and protected life but he also learned to practice compassion. He acted with honor.

The young warrior knew that if he did all this, life would be beautiful and all would live in harmony.

But with the effects of alcohol, drugs, and the continuing policies of the federal government towards the Plains Tribes, most of this has become lost and forgotten.

These policies aren’t so different from those practiced against other ethnic groups throughout history. The Irish, the Italians, the Jewish, the Gypsies, and many others all experienced what was called ethnic cleansing. But, for the American Indian, the policies still continue today.

These policies try to force us to live in ghetto housing called cluster housing. These policies have taken away our traditional foods that kept us healthy. These policies have created a private state prison system that makes money on incarcerating our young people rather than rehabilitating them. These policies have kept my children, my grandchildren and nephews and nieces, from learning how to survive and live from the land.

These policies and politics have created the “haves” and the “have-nots,” a two-level society of extremes on the reservation favoring corruption and nepotism in BIA and reservation government relationships.

We have no YMCA. Many have no job or any possibility of a job. We have no vocational training centers. We have no residential treatment centers for children and teens as an alternative to jail like they have in the cities.

Hope is hard to find. So belonging to a gang has become the only way for many of our young people to feel good, to feel needed and wanted.

Now, they say the Lakota are “Third World welfare recipients.” But worse is the fact that our young people steal from each other. Our people shoot and hurt each other. They practice deceit and abuse our girls. Elders now live in fear. The traditional values of the Lakota warrior no longer exist. They have become lost to alcohol and drugs and gangs.

So today, I am calling on all young Lakota warriors and young Lakota people. We need you to help save the future generations to come. Not me, not Grandpa, I don’t need saving. But your children and your grandchildren do.

Get back into your own traditional spirituality and traditional ways and values. Those hold the answers for you. Those will guide you and help you to know who you are more than any gang ever could. And it will be you who will bring the harmony back to our lives.

It will be you who will bring back hope to our People.

Ho he’cetu yelo. I have spoken these words.

(David Swallow, Wowitan Yuha Mani, is a Lakota spiritual leader and a Headman of the Lakota Nation. He resides on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Porcupine, S.D.)

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Several hundred tribespeople today staged a protest against FTSE-100 company Vedanta, as it bids massively to expand its controversial aluminium refinery in Lanjigarh, Orissa.

The refinery occupies land belonging to the Majhi Kondh tribe, and lies at the foot of the Niyamgiri hills, home of the isolated Dongria Kondhs. Both tribes took part in the protests.

The refinery has already been condemned by government officials for regularly breaching safety standards, and emitting ‘alarming’ pollution. Over a hundred families lost their homes to their refinery. Many more lost their farm land and with it their food-security and self sufficiency.

via (Survival International | Tribes stage mass protests against British mining company Vedanta)

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Club Native - NFB - Film Collection - National Film Board of Canada

Tracey Deer grew up on the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake with two very firm but unspoken rules drummed into her by the collective force of the community. These rules were very simple and they carried severe repercussions: 1) Do not marry a white person, 2) Do not have a child with a white person.

The consequences of ignoring these rules were equally simple: 1) Lose all status as a Native person and, 2) Deny your unborn child their status as a Native person. The larger tragedy, of course, was that by breaking either of these rules, she would be depleting the growth of “the Nation” and, by extension, betraying everyone she loved.

In Club Native, Deer looks deeply into the history and present-day reality of Aboriginal identity. With moving stories from a range of characters from her Kahnawake Reserve - characters on both sides of the critical blood-quantum line - she reveals the divisive legacy of more than a hundred years of discriminatory and sexist government policy and reveals the lingering “blood quantum” ideals, snobby attitudes and outright racism that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community.

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http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/02/first-lady-potu.html

“Barack has pledged to honor the unique government-to-government relationship between tribes and the federal government,” she said. “And he’ll soon appoint a policy advisor to his senior White House staff to work with tribes and across the government on these issues such as sovereignty, health care, education — all central to the well-being of Native American families and the prosperity of tribes all across this country.”

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Documentary on the Kootenai people and Amy Trice, Chairwoman who delcared war on the US Government to reclaim thier land and human rights in Bonners Ferry, Idaho in 1974. Film will reflect the experiences of the Kootenai peoples feelings and those who experienced the war first hand.

Idaho’s Forgotten War

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