News

“Alaska, We Have a Rape Problem”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

An excerpt:

Alaska, we have a rape problem. Apparently that’s acceptable to most of us or we’d be storming the castle for change.

My blood pressure is still in the stratosphere after reading a recent fundraising letter from our governor. As part of his pitch for money, Sean Parnell listed his “accomplishments.” Most of them were your garden-variety political credit-snatching and posturing, but one had me apopletic.

“… Our Choose Respect initiative has freed Alaskans from domestic violence and sexual assault.”

I’ll wait while you re-read that sentence. …

As the cliche goes, “I may have been born in the morning but not this morning.”

I’m tempted to take off on a name-calling tear, but let’s look at the facts instead.

Alaska was recently rated as the third most violent of the 50 states. (The FBI apparently didn’t get Parnell’s letter, so it continues to work with these things called “crime statistics,” a practice I would recommend to the governor’s office.)

Keith Harper’s Nomination Resubmitted to Senate

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

Diane Humetewa Renominated to Federal Bench

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

Cheyenne Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma v. Jewell, Complaint and Accompanying Documents

Kate Fort

Complaint here.

May 1, 2013 Return of Compact Amendment Letter here.

April 5, 2013 Settlement Agreement here.

August 1, 2013 Disapproval Letter here.

Nov. 6, 2013 Disapproval letter here.

News coverage via The Oklahoman here.

News Coverage of Wiyot Nation Return to Indian Island after 150 Years

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

An excerpt:

“We need to complete the ceremony of 1860 for the ones who were lost,” said Ted Hernandez, chairman of the 645-member tribe.

The ceremony will act as a marker on a long and unlikely journey of survival. It is not easy to recover from a massacre, and that year the endured one of the worst ethnic slaughters in U.S. history as they danced and sang at a world renewal ceremony on Indian Island.

A posse of white settlers sneaked through the darkness one night in 1860 and murdered more than 50 Native American women and children, mostly with axes and hatchets.

“Amidst the wailing of mutilated infants,” The San Francisco Bulletin wrote at the time, “the savage blows are given, cutting through bone and brain.” 

Nearby settlers carried out two more massacres that night, killing an additional 90 Indians, most of them Wiyot, and for more than a century it seemed the Wiyot were a destroyed people.

NYTs on the Auction of Little Thunder’s Shirt

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here is the article “Indian Family Sees Its History in a Shirt.”

An excerpt:

Cultural property claims can be complex: The competing interests of good-faith collectors and plundered civilizations have to be adjudicated among complications like the passage of time, the disappearance of records and the evolution of law.

Douglas Diehl, director of the American Indian and ethnographic art department at the auction house, would not discuss the matter when reached by phone, but released a statement saying that Skinner “is committed to the highest standards of research and due diligence” and is “particularly sensitive to Native American artifacts.”

The collector who consigned the item for sale, Charles E. Derby, said that he had good title to the shirt. He bought it, according to his lawyer, William H. Fry, from another collector in the early 1980s and has a bill of sale. Mr. Fry said his client could track the shirt, which has been shown in museums, back to 1955, when it was displayed, and later sold, by a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass.

A lawyer for the Little Thunder family, Robert P. Gough, said that a collector would need a lengthier provenance for the shirt to claim good title.

Wind Energy Blog Commentary on New Eagle Permit Rule

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

American Public Media “Marketplace” Shows on Crow and Lummi Coal News

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Thanks to D.L.:

The American Public Media show “Marketplace” is doing a series on coal, and two of their stories have focused on Indian tribes.  The first, about coal mining on the Crow Reservation, is more about the tribal economy; but the second, about a proposed coal shipping terminal in Washington state, has some legal issues (whether treaty fishing rights might be used to defeat the proposed coal terminal).

Both stories can be found at http://www.marketplace.org/topics/sustainability/coal-play

WaPo: BIA/IHS Fail to Pay Contract Support Costs

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

An excerpt:

At issue are contract support costs that are spelled out in the agreements, under which the government pays tribes to run education, public safety and health programs on reservations. The support costs — which include items like travel expenses, legal and accounting fees, insurance costs and worker’s compensation fees — typically account for 20 percent of the value of the contract, according to Lloyd Miller, a lawyer who represented the tribes at the Supreme Court.

“Tribes Win Big on Major Water Dispute in Nevada”

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

An excerpt:

Indian Tribes in eastern Nevada received a great victory in a long-standing fight to protect their sacred lands and water from being drained and converted into a barren dust bowl by Las Vegas and the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA).

Since the late 1980s, Las Vegas water officials have pushed plans to import groundwater from across eastern Nevada to supply future growth and provide a backup supply to the Las Vegas Valley, which gets 90 percent of its drinking water from an overtaxed and drought-stricken Colorado River. Water authority officials hope to deliver water to the valley from as far north as Great Basin National Park through a network of pumps and pipelines stretching more than 300 miles and costing as much as $15 billion. The attorney for SNWA has aptly called this the “largest water case in Nevada’s history”.

On December 10, 2013 the Seventh Judicial Court of Nevada in Ely reversed the Nevada State Engineer’s decision to grant SNWA virtually all of the groundwater in eastern Nevada water basins (about 84,000 acre feet annually). The Court ruled that the amount of water awarded had to be reduced and recalculated. Importantly, the Court also agreed with the Tribes that the monitoring and mitigation approved by the State Engineer had to be revised to include more participants and have more detailed standards to protect against environmental damage from draining groundwater from the basins.