Newsreports

Native American NEWSREPORTS

Mar. 12, '99: Interior Officials End Indian Talks
Settlement of claims involving billions of dollars in Indian trust funds has been delayed. Once again Interior Department officials have broken off talks with Indian leaders.
The Dept. manages $2.5 billion of tribal funds and another $500 million of individual Indians' money. The largest account represents a court judgment won by the Sioux tribes as compensation for their loss of the Black Hills. The funds have been mismanaged for years; the Indians' legal counsel says that the government could be liable for claims worth billions of dollars.
In February Bruce Babbitt and Robert Rubin were found in contempt of court for their delay in turning over account records in connection with a lawsuit over the government's handling of the funds.
Quotes:
"You can't call me a liar in the morning and that afternoon ask me to trust you," said Kevin Gover, the Interior Department's assistant secretary for Indian affairs. "We're not sure there is enough trust between the two parties to continue to negotiate without some kind of congressional involvement."
"I came 1,400 miles to give the testimony and meet with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They told us their feelings were hurt and they didn't want to meet," said the chief of Oklahoma's Osage Nation, Charles Tillman. He has been assisting in negotiations with the department on a way to settle these claims.
"We're hopeful that a process can be set up for productive meetings in the future,": Stephanie Hanna, a spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

11-98 - American Indians Want Battle Shirt Back
The curator for Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries said that, though he understands the Sioux' feelings, the city wants to keep the "ghost shirt" believed to be recovered from the 1890 Wounded Knee battlefield. "There are few other objects in our collections which can communicate so powerfully the bloody consequences of the encounter between Europeans and the first people all over the world."
The secretary of the Wounded Knee Survivors' Association says that it should be brought home to help the people heal their grief: "It may make a genuine contribution to the search of the Lakota people for healing which will enable them to move forward to find a new identity. For the remaining descendants it will bring closure to the sad and horrible event in the history of our people."
Brought to Glasgow in 1891 with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, the shirt and other artifacts have remained in the art gallery since then. The blood of a slain warrior stains the sacred shirt.
Wounded Knee in southwestern South Dakota was the last major armed conflict between Indians and U.S. troops. Accounts differ: The federal government says about 150 Indians and 30 soldiers died. The Sioux say the troops massacred as many as 400.

Aug. 24, 1998 - Crazy Horse Museum Receives Beads
The Indian Museum of North America at the Crazy Horse Memorial has received a donation of twenty four beads that historians say were used to buy Manhattan Island from the American Indians. The Dutch gave 32 to 40 beads (worth about $24 at the time) to Indians in 1626 for the island's purchase. Two anonymous Chicago men and James Gillihan, of New Harmony, Ind., each donated eight beads.
Ruth Ziolkowski, wife of the late Korczak Ziolkowski (the sculptor who began the massive carving of Crazy Horse's image near the town of Custer in the Black Hills of South Dakota) and operator of the Memorial in western South Dakota said "It's one more piece of this country's history."
Crazy Horse was a leading warrior in the attack on the U.S. 7th Cavalry led by George A. Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Montana, in 1876.
May 13, 1998 - California Indian Gambling Faces Crisis
California Indian gambling is facing a crisis that pits most of the 107 tribes against the combined forces of the state and federal governments. It's a crisis that tribes say could cost 15,000 jobs and send their people plummeting back onto welfare. "We're once again in the role of having something that someone wants and having it taken away under the guise of the law," says Daniel Tucker of the California Nations Indian Gaming Association.
Gov. Pete Wilson's deal with the Pala Band of Mission Indians, which does not currently run a casino, permits a new type of machine that allows players to compete with one another, rather than against the house. Several lawsuits have been filed challenging the pact. Tucker's group has submitted a possible November ballot initiative that would allow them to keep the video machines. But the four U.S. attorneys in the state, with Wilson's blessing, were to be allowed to begin taking action to shut down Indian casinos with the illegal machines.
A few tribes have said they will sign the Pala compact. Most have adamantly objected. "For 150 years, we have been forced to sign bad treaties," said Hank Murphy of the Sycuan Band of Kumeyaay Indians. "We will not sign the Pala compact and we will not surrender our machines."
There are two key issues: the sovereignty of Indian tribes and the type of gambling machines used. Federal law recognizes tribes as "quasi-sovereign" self-governments. Many tribes argue they should not be subject to state law; most states, including California, disagree. As gambling spread around the country in the early 1980s, Indian tribes in Florida and California opened bingo parlors. The first in California was the Fantasy Springs Casino, opened in 1984 in Indio by the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. States challenged the tribes. But the Supreme Court, ruling in the Cabazon case in 1987, said Indians could offer on their tribal lands any form of gambling permitted by state law. Congress tried to solve the resulting disputes in 1988 with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. It requires states to negotiate in good faith with tribes that want to offer Class III games, which are casino-style games such as lotteries and slot machines. Several California tribes tried to make a deal, but negotiations broke down. The tribes wanted lucrative slot machines, while the governor insisted only lottery-type games were permitted under California law. During nearly a decade of dispute and lawsuits, the tribes continued to open casinos, most with video poker and video slot machines. The other tribes are skeptical that the Pala's new machines will be as popular with gamblers as the current slot-type machines. "Machine gambling is what drives the gambling industry," says Scott Crowell, an attorney who represent tribes in Washington state and California.

From the Forbes issue dated 5/19/97:
Under the heading "Indian uprisings"
Our West Coast Bureau's Damon Darlin has been visiting Indian reservations and finds the Indians are quietly rebelling against the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, a bureaucracy created in the 19th century to act as the Indian's guardian. Who can blame the Indians? They want to develop their economies and, like upwardly mobile people everywhere, see the bureaucrats as an obstacle. "When the Indians talk of nation-building and creating wealth, they sound just like the leaders I met during the seven years in Asia," says Darlin. "As Carl Artman, an Oneida Nation businessman, told me: I started off reading Marx, but the world made a lot more sense after I read Adam Smith."
4/21/97:
New York State Police and about 1,000 Seneca Indians and their supporters clashed on the New York State Thruway south of Buffalo yesterday during a protest over the state's attempt to collect sales taxes on Indian land. The Seneca Nation of Indians and the state have been at odds regarding taxes on sales of gasoline and cigarettes.
2/11/97:
When did Native Americans first arrive to North America?
After long debates over the years, archaelogists have finally come to a consensus that humans reached southern Chile 12,500 years ago. The date is more than 1,000 years before the previous benchmark for human habitation in the Americas, 11,200-year-old stone spear points first discovered in the 1930s near Clovis, N.M.
The Chilean site, known as Monte Verde, is near the Pacific Ocean. Even former skeptics have joined in agreeing that its antiquity is now firmly established and that the bone and stone tools and other materials found there definitely mark the presence of hunting-and-gathering people. The new consensus regarding Monte Verde, described in interviews last week and formally announced yesterday, thus represents the first major shift in more than 60 years in the confirmed chronology of human prehistory in what would much later be called, from the European prospective, the New World.
For American archaeologists it is a liberating experience; they have broken the Clovis barrier. Even moving back the date by as little as 1,300 years, archaeologists said, would have profound implications on theories about when people first reached America, presumably from northeastern Asia by way of the Bering Strait, and how they migrated south more than 10,000 miles to occupy the length and breadth of two continents. It could mean that early people, ancestors to the Indians, first arrived in the new world at least 20,000 years before Columbus.
Involved in this research has been a team of American and Chilean archaeologists led by Dr. Tom D. Dillehay of the University of Kentucky and a report will be published next month by the Smithsonian Institution. Also involved was Dr. Alex W. Barker, chief curator of the Dallas Museum of Natural History, Dr. C. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona, Dr. James Adovasio of Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., Dr. David J. Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Dr. Dean Dincauze of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Dr. Donald K. Grayson of the University of Washington in Seattle and Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
1/20/97:
There is finally an effort going on to promote and preserve the legacy of one of the most tragic chapters of American Indian history, according to Deb Charles, owner of a remote hunting lodge at the edge of Shawnee National Forest named "Trail of Tears Lodge" and an Illinois delegate to the National Trail of Tears Association formed by the National Park Service. Although the Trail of Tears was accepted as part of the National Trails System by the National Park Service in 1987, until recently little has been done to uphold the memory of the thousands who suffered and died on the forced march in 1838. Portions of the trail are marked with National Trail System signs, and there is a 5,000-acre Trail of Tears State Forest west of Jonesboro, Ill. Other than that there is little to mark the event itself. The National Trail of Tears Association has been formed to indentify, protect, develop and manage resources and interpretive points along the trail, and to lobby for funding to do all of that. "The people at the Park Service say that there are more inquiries about the Trail of Tears than any other in the National Trail System, but in the past there has been no budget or staff to handle requests", said Paul Austin, executive director of the American Indian Center of Arkansas in Little Rock, which has contracted to manage Trail of Tears affairs. "The trail has not received the funding it deserves because people in Washington, D.C., don't know much about the Trail of Tears", noted Ken Blankenship, a tribe member, who is director of the museum and interpretive center being planned in Cherokee, N.C.
Brenda Farnell, an anthropology professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana noted: "The Trail of Tears was a particularly shameful piece of federal Indian policy in American history. Today, we would call it 'ethnic cleansing'." Mary McCorvie, a Shawnee National Forest archaelogist, and Carol Morrow, a Southeast Missouri State anthropologist, have combed public and private lands and historical records, trying to indentify significant sites on the trail. They have been partly guided by the diary of missionary minister David Buttrick, who traveled with the Cherokee along the path at one time.
1/19/97:
A new Minnesota ruling limits the policing of reservation as tribes are sovereign nations and responsible for their own affairs. The case involved Peter Charette, a Chippewa Indian, that had been pulled over by police three times on the White Earth Indian Reservation where he lives. Each time he received a traffic ticket and, after some back talk on his part, was thrown in jail. Charette said he insisted to the officers, who were not Indians, that they had no right to stop him. The Minnesota Court of Appeals agreed with him, in a ruling being watched closely by tribes and their neighboring communities nationwide. Last month, the appeals court ruled that state troopers and sheriff's officers cannot ticket tribal members on reservations for violating certain traffic laws, such as speeding or driving without a license or insurance. That role, said the court, belongs to the tribe as part of its sovereign status. The court ruling spoke only to White Earth, but other tribes around the country can use it as a precedent in similar cases, said Scott Strand, assistant deputy attorney general for Minnesota. Laura West, a law librarian for the Colorado-based Native American Rights Fund (one of the main defenders of Indian rights), says she believes states, in their attempt to control tribes, are making Indian jurisdiction more complicated than it needs to be. "The law is clear cut...Tribes are a sovereign nation and, by and large, they are responsible for their own affairs." In fact, most of the nation's 554 tribes have their own law enforcement codes, tribal courts and police forces that handle civil, misdemeanor and regulatory infractions. The only exception to tribal jurisdiction is when an Indian commits a major crime such as murder, assault, rape or armed robbery on a reservation. In those cases, the federal government is called in.
1/11/97:
A few days ago, it was reported that Oklahoma's Cherokee Indians (as well as Indiana's Amish and the Cree Indians in Canada) have provided a tantalizing clue to genes that may protect against Alzheimer's disease. They appear to be much less likely than most people to contract the devastating brain killer. The strongest clue to an unknown protective gene comes from Oklahoma, where Dr. Roger Rosenberg (a Southwestern neurologist at University of Texas) discovered that the stronger a person's Cherokee ancestry is, the less likely that Alzheimer's will strike. If doctors could locate such a gene and synthesize the protein it produces, they might one day create a drug to delay Alzheimer's onset. Dr. Rosenberg studied the Cherokee Nation which keeps an extensive ancestry registry. Although Dr. Rosenberg acknowledges that his study is too small - 52 people - to be definitive, he is working with the 80,000 member tribe on a larger confirming study. Other researchers familiar with the study is Dr. Zaven Khachaturian, director of the Alzheimer's Association's Reagan Research Institute.
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