News – Page 237 – Turtle Talk

Ugly Story: Tribal Law Allegedly Steers Tort Victim to Legal Dead End

February 15, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher

If this story is true, then this tribe should do the right thing. This bad press for all of Indian Country.

From the San Diego Union Tribune via Pechanga:

During a visit to Sycuan Casino five years ago, Sarah Harris walked into a restroom altercation that she says changed her life.

Now, after what feels like countless hearings on the Indian reservation and in federal court, the 75-year-old former diesel engine mechanic still doesn’t have the $160,000 an arbitrator says she’s due.

Although tribal law says arbitration awards are to be enforced in federal court, the tribe has convinced a federal judge that he has no jurisdiction over the case.

* * *

Sycuan’s lawyers say it wasn’t an intentional dead end.

“The ordinance surely wasn’t written to steer parties to a forum the tribe knew was not going to enforce something; that was not at all the tribe’s intent,” said lawyer Jay Shapiro. “Sometimes documents get written at times when it’s not clear what the law is, or what cases a federal court will hear or not hear.”

I hope this lawyer was misquoted because this statement is awful and wrong. Such an ordinance should be amended immediately, and at a later paragraph in the same article, another tribal lawyer says it will “look at rewording the ordinance.”

The tribe doesn’t want to pay the $160,000 because a tribal arbitrator failed to follow the rules when making the award, which is reasonable in most contexts, but not this one.

The link to the three district court opinions is here.

WaPo Article about Alaskan Yupik/Inuit Snowboarder

February 13, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From WaPo:

Callan Chythlook-Sifsof grew up in the part of Alaska known as “The Bush” and spent her first 12 years in a village about 500 miles northwest of Anchorage, a place reachable only by boat or plane.She received her first snowboard as a gift from an uncle when she was 7, and she and her older brother would pull each other across the rugged terrain.

She never imagined a snowboard would carry her to the Olympics and let her make history in the process. Chythlook-Sifsof is the first Native Alaskan – from the state’s indigenous cultures – to make the U.S. Winter Olympic team. Even she’s a little amazed by it all.

“When you come from where I come from, the Olympics are just something you see on TV. It’s never really real,” she said. “For everybody living there, I’m really proud to show to people that this isn’t just something that you see on TV. That real people can do this. It’s for everybody.”

It’s not that Native Alaskans have a disdain for the Olympics. Chythlook-Sifsof said the remoteness of the land doesn’t exactly lend itself to having Olympic dreams come true.

Even now there isn’t a snowboardcross course in Alaska. Her family moved to a ski resort in Girdwood – about an hour outside Anchorage – when she was 12, a move that allowed her to hone her craft.

And when she saw Girdwood native Rosie Fletcher take bronze in the parallel giant slalom in 2006, she knew the Olympics were suddenly a very real possibility.

NPR on the Olympics and First Nations

February 13, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From NPR (article, transcript, and audio) (H.T. to A.K.):

And organizers of the Winter Olympics have made a big deal about including Canada’s Indians. Four native groups in the Vancouver area are official co-hosts, and native art is the basis for a lot of this year’s Olympic merchandising. But as NPR’s Martin Kaste reports, some native people accuse their leaders of selling out.

MARTIN KASTE: Last week, a small crowd of Canadian natives gathered in Vancouver to watch a bubble inflate.

Unidentified Group: Three, two, one.

Unidentified Man: (Singing in foreign language)

KASTE: This inflatable dome is the Aboriginal Pavilion, a showcase for native arts and culture located on prime Olympic real estate, just a couple of blocks from the hockey arena.

Tewanee Joseph is a member of the Squamish nation. His people have land in and around the city of Vancouver. And from the start, he says, they’ve insisted on being full partners in the Vancouver Games.

Mr. TEWANEE JOSEPH (CEO, Four Host First Nations Society): Our chief said, we’re not going to be just brought out for beads and feathers. This has to be meaningful participation.

Continue reading →

Mackinac Bands Constitution Developed

February 12, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher3 Comments

From Indianz:

The Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians of Michigan are asking the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be treated as a federally recognized tribe.

The Mackinac Bands are considered a part of the federally recognized Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. But the bands say they are a distinct and self-governing tribe.

The bands wrote a new constitution to reflect their status.

Get the Story:

New Anishinabe Constitution presented (The Cheboygan Daily Tribune 2/12)

Kellogg Foundation Contributes $1.4 Million to Preserve Montana’s Indigenous Cultures

February 11, 2010February 11, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From PND:

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has awarded a three-year, $1.4 million grant to Salish Kootenai College educator Julie Cajune to create classroom materials focused on preserving Montana’s Indian history and culture, Char-Koosta News reports.

With the grant, Cajune plans to make a film that focuses on the cultural sovereignty of Native tribes and create a “parallel history” that discusses American-Indian historical events and contributions on the timeline commonly taught in U.S. history classes. In addition, Cajune will prepare a children’s book, illustrated calendar book, and seminars and workshops for teachers.

Cajune was recently named one of the “fifty visionaries who are changing the world” by the UTNE Reader for her efforts to gather histories of the twelve recognized tribes in Montana as part of the state’s Indian Education for All Act. Although Montana passed the legislation in 1999, it did not approve adequate funding to enact it in school districts across the state until 2005. Since then, Cajune has partnered with Indian Law clinic professors and tribal attorneys and historians to preserve American-Indian histories.

“As an Indian person, it’s time the United States engages in truth-telling of its own history,” said Cajune. “Even in the higher education sector the Indian history is distorted; it’s shameful.”

Upham, Lailani. “Julie Cajune Awarded Grant to Preserve Indigenous Cultures.” Char-Koosta News 2/04/10.

Brian Upton Letter re: John Petoskey

February 11, 2010February 11, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the Traverse City Record-Eagle:

Attorney was valued

I was disappointed that the Grand Traverse Band let go its general counsel, John Petoskey.

It is hard not to believe that this will have negative repercussions for the band. As John Wernet, Gov. Granholm’s deputy legal counsel, recently stated, John Petoskey is a highly regarded attorney.

Under his legal guidance, the band developed a productive and progressive government overseeing crucial economic development initiatives (crucial, since GTB has little land and thus no tax base with which to fund public services).

Having been lucky enough to work closely with John for five years, and having many good friends in the Grand Traverse Band community, I hope that circumstances arise so the band does not lose the resource it has in John.

His ethics and ability to combine street smarts with larger policy considerations, and community realities with the dictates of law, could be why Vine Deloria Jr., one of this country’s pre-eminent (American) Indian scholars, valued his personal and professional relationship with John.

Vine saw something in John that many others of us have also recognized — quality.

I hope the next chapter in this story recaptures the band’s decades-long history of a highly successful relationship with John. Both parties deserve nothing less.

Brian Upton
Missoula, Mont.

ABA: Race & Gender Make Large Differences in Judicial Decision-Making

February 8, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Why Indian Country must continue to press President Obama on federal judicial nominees….

From the ABA via How Appealing:

A judge’s race or gender makes for a dramatic difference in the outcome of cases they hear – at least for cases in which race and gender allegedly play a role in the conduct of the parties, according to two recent studies.

The results were the focus of a program about “Diversity on the Bench: Is the ‘Wise Latina’ a Myth?,” sponsored by the ABA Judicial Division at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Orlando on Saturday afternoon.

In federal racial harassment cases, one study (PDF) found that plaintiffs lost just 54 percent of the time when the judge handling the case was an African-American. Yet plaintiffs lost 81 percent of the time when the judge was Hispanic, 79 percent when the judge was white, and 67 percent of the time when the judge was Asian American. Continue reading →

Angela Riley NYTs Op/Ed on “Twilight” and the Quileute: “Sucking the Quileute Dry”

February 7, 2010February 8, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

From the NYTs:

ALL the world, it seems, has been bitten by “Twilight.” Conservative estimates place revenue generated from Stephenie Meyer’s vampire chronicles — the books, movies and merchandise — in the billion-dollar range. Scarcely mentioned, however, is the effect that “Twilight” has had on the tiny Quileute Nation, situated on a postage stamp of a reservation, just one square mile, in remote La Push, Wash.

To millions of “Twilight” fans, the Quileute are Indians whose (fictional) ancient treaty transforms young males of the tribe into vampire-fighting wolves. To the nearly 700 remaining Quileute Indians, “Twilight” is the reason they are suddenly drawing extraordinary attention from the outside — while they themselves remain largely excluded from the vampire series’ vast commercial empire.

Just last month, MSN.com issued an apology to the Quileute for intruding on its territory while videotaping a “Twilight” virtual tour in September. MSN.com sought permission from the Chamber of Commerce in nearby Forks, Wash., but didn’t pay the same courtesy to the Quileute. The video team trespassed onto a reservation cemetery and taped Quileute graves, including those of esteemed tribal leaders. These images were then set to macabre music and, in November, posted on MSN.com. The tribe quickly persuaded MSN.com to remove the Quileute images.

But this was only one episode in the story of the tribe’s phenomenal, and apparently increasing, new fame. “Twilight” has made all things Quileute wildly popular: Nordstrom.com sells items from Quileute hoodies to charms bearing a supposed Quileute werewolf tattoo. And a tour company hauls busloads of fans onto the Quileute reservation daily. Yet the tribe has received no payment for this commercial activity. Meanwhile, half of Quileute families still live in poverty.

It’s important to point out that the outside uses of the Quileute name, from the “Twilight” books to the tattoo jewelry, are quite likely legal. American intellectual property laws, except in very specific circumstances, do not protect indigenous peoples’ collective cultural property.

Continue reading →

News Coverage of NW Shoshone Massacre Memorial

February 7, 2010Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the NYTs:

PRESTON, Idaho (AP) — Tribal members descend in late January each year to the burial ground near the Bear River where soldiers felled hundreds of their ancestors in one of American history’s bloodiest– but little remembered– massacres.

Descendants of the Northwestern Shoshone who were decimated in their winter encampment in a surprise attack 147 years ago, they stamp their feet in the cold and offer songs and prayers to the dead.

Bodies from that distant morning were never officially counted, and the bones were long ago scattered to the surrounding hills.

The commanding Army officer involved counted 220-270 dead. Settlers who went in later found many more bodies in ravines or under deep snow and put the number as high as 500, a figure cited in a National Park Service history. The tribe estimates 400 of their number were killed. No more than 60 survived.

Any of those numbers are larger than the much more well known massacres at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, where some 146 Lakota Sioux were gunned down in 1890, and at Sand Creek, Colo., where an 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed in 1864.

And yet, history books make little mention of Bear River, perhaps because the nation was elsewhere engaged in the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg with its estimated 51,000 casualties was later that same year, one of the bloodiest ever on American soil.