Felice Pace

High Country News is big on westerners getting together. Dating back to the days when Ed and Betsy Marston were publisher and editor respectively, the publication has had a soft spot for any story about westerners from different perspectives coming to agreement. In his Editor’s Note in the June 23^rd edition, Jonathan Thompson acknowledges unabashedly that HCN “loves ‘unlikely alliances’.”

This is not peculiar to HCN. Across the West this sort of story has become commonplace. CRMPs, CRMs, partnerships, collaborations, stakeholder agreements, challenges, peace – the terms used to describe these comings together have changed; but instances of the phenomenon have been on the increase for 20 years now and HCN has been there all the way – cheerleading!

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Marty Durlin

Online Editor

A tornado hit the site of a large-scale hog farm being constructed near Marty, South Dakota, early in June, tearing out a fence, bringing down electrical poles and wiring, scattering concrete blocks and demolishing small buildings.

“The tornado was a sign for the builders to stop,” said Izzy Zephier, an elder known for his prophecies, as quoted in Indian Country Today. Despite a tribal court exclusion order and civil disobedience by Yankton Sioux tribal members and others who blocked construction equipment along BIA Route 29 in April, construction on the 70,000-piglet “Contained Animal Feeding Operation” (CAFO) has continued to move forward.

The tribe claims the hog farm is on Indian land, based on treaties signed in the 1850s. They also object to the use of the reservation roadway for access to the site.

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Ernie Atencio

New Mexico’s Mount Taylor, sacred to several tribes and under threat of uranium mining, has been designated (again) as a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP). Uranium mining historically wreaked havoc in the area and left a legacy of environmental destruction and cancer and among miners and residents, including many Native Americans. The Acoma, Hopi, Laguna, Navajo and Zuni tribes requested the designation after a recent flurry of uranium permits and exploration on the 11,301-foot mountain that disturbed some shrines and grave sites.

Uranium is hot in more ways than one right now, climbing from $7 to $130 per pound without declining once since 2003, and sure to threaten other landscapes around the West.

According to the Albuquerque Journal, the public hearing on Saturday at the Grants High School gym divided the community between Indians supporting the designation on one set of bleachers and Anglo and Hispano opposition on the other. Those opposed to the TCP designation worry that it will hinder the economic salvation that mining represents in this impoverished area.

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Mary K. Bowannie

One of the hazards of teaching is burnout. How do you keep inspiring students when you are overworked, underpaid, and overwhelmed? Where do you draw inspiration?

Well, I went to Minneapolis, Minn. Not to rest and relax, or experience the wild weather recently, but to attend the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform organized by the Free Press. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. Looking at the program agenda, I was intrigued by the variety of voices and ideas listed. But that was just the program, and what I experienced went far beyond the text on the paper.

Over three days, I met some of the 3,500 people from different and varied backgrounds and locations — all interested in getting information and images out on various issues from a variety of viewpoints.

One of my friends who worked for many years in television news scoffed about the term “media reform” when I told her about the conference.

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Felice Pace

Ever since I read Rebecca Clarren’s “Plowing under the fields of shame” in the April 14^th edition of HCN I have not been able to get the article out of my head. Although I have lived in the Rural West in the midst of western agriculture – and even though I have made a point of meeting the migrant agricultural laborers who work those fields and orchards – and even though I work hard to be informed about what is going on in my community and region – I was completely unaware of the degrading, demeaning and despicable sexual abuse to which female migrant farmworkers are regularly subjected. I am embarrassed that I was not aware of this abomination! I am even more embarrassed that my community and my region has allowed itself to be ignorant of what is going on in our fields and orchards – fields and orchards that are literally in our back yards.

There is only one other time when I have felt so out of touch with the reality of the rural West where I have resided for the past 33 years. That occurred when I read the book Little White Father: Redick McKee on the California Frontier by historian Ray Raphael. The book chronicles the work of special Indian Agent Redick McKee who was sent to California by US President Millard Fillmore to resolve the violent conflicts between the Indigenous inhabitants and the miners and settlers who were swarming over the land. One of three commissioners so charged, McKee took Northern California as his beat. He traveled up the coast from San Francisco, then up the Klamath to Yreka, before returning through the Sacramento Valley. Along the way McKee brought together natives, miners and settlers and, by alternately threatening and cajoling, he was able to secure signatures on treaties designating reservations and pledging peaceful relations.
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Felice Pace

Last week I had the honor to meet in Bozeman with a group of people who might just manage to change the dominant realities of everyday life on the Indian reservations of Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. It might surprise you that no political leaders were in attendance – at least not political leaders of the type we usually think about. The event was a gathering of reservation-based native non-governmental organizations (NGOs) formed and operated by individuals, couples, friends and relatives who are dedicated to serving the native youth of their far flung communities. They were brought together by another NGO that goes by the name Hopa Mountain. The focus was organizational development and the sessions were about writing grants, grassroots fundraising, governing board development, strategic planning and other similar topics.

Sounds pretty benign, right? So why do I make apparently grandiose claims about the potential impact of this group of youth workers?

To answer the question I must tell you something about the reservations of these three western states. If you are non-native you likely wouldn’t know that NGOs in general and social service NGOs in particular are, for the most part, a new phenomenon on these reservations where civil society institutions and structures are at best underdeveloped. That’s because since their founding those who control the reservations – first and always the federal Department of Interior and in recent decades the tribal governments - have been in charge of youth and other social services. With federal funding and institutionalized programs named after long-dead members of congress it has long been assumed that there was no need for non-governmental organizations to care for the reservations’ youth. But now community-based youth programs are sprouting on the reservations like cottonwoods after a flood. On the Pine Ridge Reservation alone there are at least 15 such programs which have begun operations over the course of the last five years and the spontaneous generation of more programs and services does not appear ready to abate anytime soon.

How can we explain this phenomenon? For the answer we need look no further than the federal agencies and tribal governments which were presumed to be providing all the services reservation youth could possibly need. The naked truth is that these government agencies with their dozens of programs and solid year-after-year funding are failing the reservation youth; there is a growing cadre of adults who are no longer willing to stand by and watch the debacle.

Many of the new youth programs are focused on traditional culture and language preservation. While tribal programs have long claimed to teach traditional culture and reservation schools all have native language programs, traditional values continue to erode and few younger people have become fluent in their native tongues. This erosion of tradition and language along with the epidemic of negative youth behaviors has prompted the folks who gathered in Bozeman last week to take matters into their own hands - undertaking the daunting task of establishing youth programs outside tribal government and education structures.

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Mary K. Bowannie

I was talking to Mario Atencio, one of my students in the Native American Studies program at the University of New Mexico, about the challenges of blogging. Putting one’s thoughts out there, keeping the word count tight, meeting the proverbial deadline, and addressing the issues from a personal (rather than a reporter) standpoint. Mario listened patiently as we sat outside on a very cold, windy day in Albuquerque, NM, waiting for The Longest Walk 2 event to start. When I finally stopped thinking out loud, he turned and looked at me and said, “Just let it flow.”

So here it goes.

The Longest Walk 2 event April 11 in Albuquerque was powerful and empowering. The local media coverage was mostly photo ops of the dancers, the colorful side of the event. Many folks heard the words of Dennis Banks and were reminded to keep fighting the fight. Banks feels not much has changed over the years.

While I respect Dennis Banks’ sacrifice and contributions, I have to disagree with his statement. Yes, some things haven’t changed: Indigenous lands and our sacred places are still being contaminated, endangered and raped. Tribes wrestle politically on a tribal, state and federal level to assert and exercise their sovereignty.

So what has changed?

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Ernie Atencio

Native American activists and supporters left Alcatraz Island, Calif. on Feb. 11 on the Longest Walk 2, taking their concerns about environmental protection, sacred sites and human rights to Washington, D.C. That’s over 3,000 miles on foot. Commemorating the first Longest Walk 30 years ago, this group plans to deliver a two-inch thick manifesto to Congress, “because the issues of ‘78 are still the same,” said Dennis Banks. “Nothing has changed.”

Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, is leading the southern group, making its way right now through New Mexico.

The walk has inspired awe, great food, nostalgia, powerful passions and interesting commentary. One stop along the northern route was at Sand Creek, Colo., site of a brutal massacre of Cheyennes and Arapahoes by the Colorado Militia in 1864. Meanwhile, the southern group was at Canyon de Chelly National Monument on the Navajo Nation, enjoying frybread and mutton stew and discussing National Park Service management issues.

After New Mexico, longest walkers on the southern route will continue through Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. Those on the northern route, led by activist Jimbo Simmons, are traveling through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Both routes will converge in D.C. on July 11 for several days of celebration and lobbying for Native American causes.

The first Longest Walk started out with 17 people and reached D.C. with nearly 60,000. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, pledging to preserve and protect traditional religious rights for Native people, was one outcome.

So far this walk includes just a few hundred, including a handful from Japan, Germany, Poland, Russia, Mexico, Argentina and Australia, all of whom have pledged to walk the entire way.

The Longest Walk 2 is fueled by old-fashioned determination and stamina – no corporate sponsorships or fancy athletic foot gear. Banks said that his “$30 Wal-Mart Special” shoes are holding up just fine.

Organizers are requesting support by way of cash donations, individual sponsorships and other assistance for rest days along the two routes.

Ernie Atencio

How is it, in our theoretical democracy of, by and for the people, that government agencies and corporations think they can just blow off the public process and accountability time after time? It’s become tiresome business-as-usual, laying the burden of public information on the people instead of with the powers that be, where it should reside.

On April 2, the Navajo grassroots group Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (Diné CARE) (HCN 10/31/94) and the San Juan Citizens Alliance filed a lawsuit against federal agencies overseeing the proposed Desert Rock coal-fired power plant in northwestern New Mexico to force them to release documents that they are legally required to share with the public. Diné CARE and the Citizens Alliance want to see records on the draft environmental impact statement; they want to know where the required water will come from and how the related expansion of the nearby BHP Navajo coal mine would affect tribal members living in the area. Sounds reasonable, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it’s regional director in Gallup and the Department of Interior — all named in the lawsuit — have so far refused to comply with requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

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Mary K. Bowannie

This week has been a blur. A whirlwind of information came at me on a variety of environmental issues: climate change, solid waste, underground storage tanks, the protection of sacred and cultural sites from mining and development, and water – its availability and quality. All of these issues impact those who live in the West on a daily basis. What hit me as I listened to the various speakers working in these areas was how all these issues impact tribal communities, and the responsibility tribes have for the future of our respective communities to talk about these difficult issues and raise awareness among our own people, and the larger global community.

Jerry Pardilla is Penobscot and the Executive Director of the National Tribal Environmental Council based in Albuquerque, NM. NTEC’s mission is “to support Indian Tribes and Alaskan Native Villages in protecting, regulating, and managing their environmental resources according to their own priorities and values.” 184 Federally Recognized Tribes are NTEC members out of the over 500 Federally Recognized Tribes.

Pardilla spoke to students in the Environmental Ethics and Practices in Native America course at the University of New Mexico on Tuesday, March 25. Dr. Lloyd Lee, Navajo, is the course instructor. Lee had heard about NTEC and wanted to know exactly what the organization does to protect the environment.

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Marty Durlin

Online Editor

There are more than 800 geographic landforms in the U.S. with the word “squaw” in them, according to a piece by Hadley Robinson for Gelf. Native Americans in 1999 asked the U.S. Board of Geographic Names (BGN) to change all of them. In 1963, the BGN changed all place names with “nigger” to “negro” (143 of them), and in 1974, all “Jap” names to “Japanese.” But in the case of squaw, although some say the term is a perversion of the French word for “vagina,” or a shortened form for the same term from the Mohawk word “ojiskwa” — others say it means simply “woman,” and there’s no consensus on what word to exchange.

Squaw Peak near Phoenix (2600 feet), once known as Squaw Tit Peak, was renamed after Lori Piestewa in 2003 by the Arizona Board of Geographic and Historic Names. The board waived its five-year waiting period at the request of Gov. Janet Napolitano to honor Piestewa, a Hopi who was the first woman in the U.S. armed forces killed in the Iraq war and the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving with the U.S. military.

With no national mandate from the BNG to change “squaw” names in a wholesale manner, local governments and state name boards have the decision-making responsibility. (In protest of state legislation in Minnesota to change all “squaw” names, officials of Lake County offered to change Squaw Creek to Politically Correct Creek.)

The BGN will decide April 10 whether to officially change Phoenix’s Squaw Peak to Piestewa Peak.

Francisco Tharp

Neon pink bubble letters. Rainbow-colored text. Flaming buzz words. Awkwardly placed parenthetical phrases. A hits ticker numbering in the mere thousands. And it all adds up to one long, raving block of righteously amassed “evidence.”

Most of us who hang ten online on a regular basis have stumbled across it at some point: that’s right, I’m talking about the conspiracy theory website.

So when I happened upon “AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?” a website claiming to prove that John McCain is guilty of “brutal genocide” of the Navajo people of the Black Mesa area, the attention-deficit format made me immediately suspicious.

The site, maintained by the Canaanite Independent Political Committee (sorry, no website that I could find) said,

John McCain (a/k/a “Saddam McCain”) introduced and arranged for the enforcement of unethical and Constitutionally unlawful legislations which brutally displaced thousands of Navajo farmers onto a Nuclear Waste Dump to live after brutalizing them for two decades in peaceful resistance…Using a phony tribal counsel composed of paid stooges, McCain and Peabody Western Coal Company have been progressively stealing and exploiting their lands for mutual personal gain, brutalizing the natives to leave, bulldozing their sacred sites and sweat lodges, beating their members and abusing their elders to the point of terrorizing them and causing health failure and heart failures.

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Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Senator Barack Obama addressed native issues at a town meeting in Elko, Nev. on January 18, as he spoke to a crowd of about 1,600 people. In response to a question about what he would do for tribal members if he became President, Obama talked about acknowledging the “tragic history” of the U.S. government’s relationship with native peoples; said he would appoint a Native American policy advisor to strengthen relationships between the chief executive and tribes; and pledged to ensure that adequate resources are appropriated for Indian agencies.

In contrast, President George W. Bush proposed cuts to many Indian programs in the ‘08 budget he presented to Congress, slashing funds for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Service, the Indian Health facilities fund, Department of Justice programs that deal with tribal lands, Department of Education programs for Native Americans, and the Native American Housing Block Grants program. Bush also threatened to veto the Indian Health Care Improvement Act last month.

The President added $108 million in funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada, a project long opposed by tribes.

Obama said treatment of Native peoples by the U.S. government is “an embarrassment for all of us.”