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Jackson Katz: Violence against women—it’s a men’s issue

Jackson Katz asks a very important question that gets at the root of why sexual abuse, rape and domestic abuse remain a problem: What’s going on with men?

Why you should listen to him:

Jackson Katz is an educator, author, filmmaker and cultural theorist who is a pioneer in the fields of gender violence prevention education and media literacy. He is co-founder of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), which enlists men in the struggle to prevent men’s violence against women. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, MVP has become a widely used sexual and domestic violence prevention initiative in college and professional athletics across North America. Katz and his MVP colleagues have also worked extensively with schools, youth sports associations and community organizations, as well as with all major branches of the U.S. military.

Katz is the creator of popular educational videos including Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity. He is the author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help and Leading Men: Presidential Campaigns and the Politics of Manhood. He has also appeared in several documentaries, including Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and MissRepresentation.

“After I watched this talk, my first thought was, ‘If only every man, woman and teenager could see this video and hear this message.'” – Daily

Help for American Indian Entrepreneurs

By Karen E. Klein

May 24, 2013

Bloomberg Business Week

Question: My husband and I want to start a small business out of our home in Washington State. We are both Native Americans from Montana. Where can we get help and advice?

Answer: There is general help for entrepreneurs provided through the U.S. Small Business Administration. For American Indians, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians, the SBA’s Office of Native American Affairs offers specialized help, entrepreneurial development training, and lending and procurement programs.

A free, self-paced business training course, developed specifically for American Indian business owners, might be a good place for you to start. It’s called Native American Small Business Primer: Strategies for Success, says Chris James, assistant administrator of the Office of Native American Affairs.

The course covers basics such as business planning, market research, raising funds, borrowing money, and ownership structures. It also includes a section on how to realistically estimate startup costs, James says.

Contact the SBA office in Spokane or Seattle for counseling or mentoring from an SBA representative or outside adviser, he says. Through the district office, you can learn about what’s offered through the SBA’s Minority Enterprise Development and Score programs.

Another source of specialized help is available through the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Indian Affairs office. Its Division of Capital Investment administers the Indian Loan Guaranty Program, says spokeswoman Nedra Darling. It “maximizes limited budget resources by providing a guarantee to lenders, providing access to capital to Indian-owned businesses,” and can assist you after you develop a business plan and determine what kind of funding your startup will require.

“Specifically, this program provides a risk mitigant to a lender who would provide the startup capital necessary to get your business in operation and stabilized,” Darling wrote in an e-mail. “DCI is the only federal guarantee program with the specific mission of promoting economic development on Indian reservations and tribal service areas. There are requirements your business must meet to be eligible for this program.”

Until this year, the Indian Affairs office sponsored annual training sessions for American Indian and tribal entrepreneurs in Montana, but federal budget cuts under the 2013 sequestration legislation have eliminated those events. The cuts also canceled meetings that linked native business owners one-on-one with prime contractors and government procurement officers who are potential buyers of native goods and services, according to Darling.

To get more information on how the Bureau of Indian Affairs might provide you with help, contact its Northwest regional office in Portland, Ore. Good luck!

Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues

Health Care Is Spread Thin on Alaskan Frontier

Jim Wilson/The New York TimesA plane arriving with a patient at the airport in Bethel, Alaska. — Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A plane arriving with a patient at the airport in Bethel, Alaska.

By KIRK JOHNSON

May 28, 2013 The New York Times

BETHEL, Alaska — Americans in some rural places fret at how far away big-city medical help might be in an emergency, or at the long drives they are forced to make for prenatal care, or stitches, or chemotherapy.

Dr. Ellen Hodges only wishes it could be so easy.

She oversees health care for a population of 28,000, mostly Alaska Natives, here in the state’s far west end, spread out over an area the size of Oregon that has almost no roads. People can travel by boat or snow machine at certain times of the year, but not right now: the Kuskokwim River, which wends through Bethel to the Bering Sea, is choked with unstable melting ice in late May, magnifying the isolation that defines everything in what may be America’s emptiest corner.

“If you have a road, you’re not remote,” Dr. Hodges said.

The complex machinery of health care is being reimagined everywhere in the nation through the combined prism of new regulations and shifting economics, even here on the continent’s frosted fringe.

The grandly named Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, for example, where Dr. Hodges is chief of staff, is scrambling this spring to install a new electronic medical records system. That is a hallmark of the federal health care overhaul, compounded out here by the fact that computers run by generators in far-flung villages are subject to brownouts and fuel shortages.

Cost controls are also the way of the medical frontier no matter where you look. In other places, such constraints may be driven by insurance companies; here, by sequester-driven budget cuts to the federal Indian Health Service. The agency is the 50-bed hospital’s main support in treating the tribes and villagers who have lived for thousands of years in the boggy crescent of lowlands where the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers carve their paths to the sea.

The 56 tribes in the region voted in the mid-1990s to bundle their health care money from the federal government to finance the hospital. Grants supplement the work.

But the one thing that shapes every care decision, from the routine to the catastrophic, is the map. Triage in medical decisions, logistics and money is all filtered through an equation of time and distance on a vast and mostly untracked land.

Is air transport justified for medical reasons? Too slow to make a difference? Too dangerous in bad weather to attempt? What should a health worker on the ground — in most villages a local resident trained by the hospital — be told to do, or not do?

“There are judgment calls that you never have to make in the lower 48,” said Dr. David Bielak, 31, a family medicine practitioner who started coming here last fall in temporary stints from his home near San Jose, Calif.

And many of those decisions, often based on telephone descriptions from a villager, can be weighty. None of the more than four dozen communities served by the hospital have a doctor in residence.

“It’s the middle of the night, and you get a call from a clinic way up in the middle of nowhere where something very, very strange has happened,” Dr. Bielak said. “A lot of it is dark: a lot of alcoholism, suicidal ideation, a lot of abuse.”

A lack of running water and sewer systems in many villages in turn compounds the struggle to make, or keep, people well in a place long marked by poverty and isolation.

Take a glimpse, for example, into Alexandria Tikiun’s world: At age 25, with four children at home to care for, she is a community health aide, the closest thing to an M.D. in her village, Atmautluak, population about 400.

The aide system itself is uniquely Alaskan. It was developed in the 1950s, during an outbreak of tuberculosis, when the first health aides were trained to dispense medicine. Now, in sessions here at the hospital, Ms. Tikiun and 150 other aides, mostly women, learn medical skills that include trauma response, pregnancy testing and vaccination, all based on a book that they call their bible, which walks them through a kind of algorithm of step-by-step questions leading to treatment protocols.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of tribes that voted in the mid-1990s to bundle their health care money from the federal government to finance a hospital. It was 56, not 58.

Federal Recognition for VA’s Indian Tribes

400-Year Wait

Tue May 28, 2013

By Matt Laslo in WVTF.org

A bipartisan group of Virginia lawmakers is fighting to win federal recognition of six tribes in the commonwealth.

The tribes have treaties dating back to the 1600s. But there ‘s a catch: the agreements are with the King of England. Even now, the UK recognizes and honors these American tribes, while the US government doesn’t. That’s partly because in 1924, a law was passed that declared Virginia contained no Native Americans and wiped the commonwealth’s record books of their history.

The six tribes are fighting for federal recognition that would provide them educational and health care benefits enjoyed by other tribes. That also would allow them to collect their ancestors remains kept in the Smithsonian.

The House has passed legislation recognizing Virginia ‘s tribes twice. So has a Senate committee, but the full upper chamber has never recognized the tribes.

While optimistic, supporters say the legislation won’t likely come up until near the end of this session. Which means after about a 400-year wait, these tribes continue to wait.

No end in sight for Skywalk troubles

5/27/2013 10:00:00 PM
Editorial in The Daily Courier

If you want to look straight down at one of the Seven Wonders of the World, be sure to take a wallet full of cash.

The Hualapai Tribe Skywalk at Grand Canyon WestPhoto courtesy of Hualapai Tribe — The Hualapai Tribe Skywalk at Grand Canyon West
Photo courtesy of Hualapai Tribe

The glass-bottomed Skywalk at Grand Canyon West, a horseshoe-shaped bridge that juts out from the Canyon walls some 70 feet into pure, empty space, has seen its share of difficulties since long before it opened in 2007. The Hualapai Tribe, which owns and operates the tourist attraction, has battled forces both internal – factions within the tribe argued that the structure was defiling sacred ground – and external. Environmentalists believed the bridge was an incongruous eyesore and the original developer of the $31 million project, Grand Canyon Skywalk Development of Las Vegas, won a $28 million judgment against the tribe. The court agreed with David Jin, creator of the spectacle, who maintained that his contract called for GCSD to receive half of the attraction’s revenue in return for fronting the money to build it.

Shortly after the Skywalk opened, though, the tribe took it back from Jin’s company, claiming GCSD hadn’t finished the job. Jin countered by blaming the lack of completion on the tribe’s failure to provide infrastructure, and the back-and-forth ultimately resulted in the tribe’s choice to invoke eminent domain and seize the bridge.

The loss of the court battle earlier this year was a huge blow to the Hualapai, who have seen other business ventures fall by the wayside on their sprawling reservation south of the Canyon and west of the National Park.

This past weekend, a neighbor dealt the tribe another blow. Nigel Turner, owner of the 168-square-mile Grand Canyon Ranch, said he was tired of the tourists and the traffic that crossed his land on the way to the Skywalk, and that’s why he decided to start charging a $20 toll. For that fee, tourists, primarily those coming from Las Vegas, can enjoy a rodeo show and other ranch activities, but the already hurting tribe says the charge is inappropriate, based on a 2008 settlement that netted Turner $750,000 and gave the tribe an easement across his land.

Once again, the Hualapai and their ambitions seem certain to be headed for court in this dispute. It’s hard to say which side has right on its side, but it certainly begs the question of whether the tribe’s minority was right in objecting to the building of the attraction in the first place.

Potawatomi bingo casino’s sustainable energy project

Food manufacturers evaluate Potawatomi digester option for waste.

Manufacturing, Food & Agriculture

By Molly Newman in Biztimes.com

May 27. 2013 2:00AM

Southeastern Wisconsin food and beverage manufacturers recently had a chance to tour the anaerobic digester being constructed at Potawatomi Bingo Casino during a “first look” event hosted by Advanced Waste Services and the Forest County Potawatomi Community in Milwaukee.

The tour introduced interested businesses to the digester project, which is being coordinated by FCPC Renewable Generation LLC and would serve as a community food waste recycling facility. Its proponents are encouraging food and beverage manufacturers, grocery stores and other large organic waste producers to send their waste product to the digester instead of landfills.

The Potawatomi Community, which is adding a service road near the Milwaukee casino for the increased truck traffic the digester would bring, expects the digester to be completed by July and start accepting industrial, commercial and institutional waste by September.

There would be a tipping fee for contributors, which the tribe says it plans to price competitively with local alternatives.

“What we’re trying to do here is put a little twist in the model you’ve been working with and hopefully it will be a win-win,” said Jeff Crawford, attorney general for the Forest County Potawatomi Community. “We want to be able to build this thing so it’s good for the environment, making energy, but we’re not trying to make money off it.”

The digester would offset 30 percent of the energy costs for the Forest County Potawatomi Community.

Before beginning the project, the Potawatomi Community completed an energy audit, after which it purchased renewable energy credits and installed a 132-panel solar array on the FCPC administrative building in Milwaukee.

In addition, local food waste that’s currently being dumped could be converted to energy in the Potawatomi digester, Crawford said.

The energy produced by the digester will be sold back to Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Energy Corp. under a special tariff to offset the Potawatomi Community’s energy costs throughout the state. The Potawatomi tribe has about 17,000 acres of land in northern Wisconsin and in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee-based Titus Energy has been developing the digester for three years, said Bryan Johnson, renewable and sustainability leader. The $18.5 million project will include two 1.3 million gallon tanks that will generate 2 megawatts of continuous power, enough to power 1,500 homes. A $2.6 million Department of Energy grant awarded to the FCPC in 2011 is contributing to the project.

The tanks are 50 feet tall and 80 feet in diameter. General Electric Waukesha Gas Engines has provided the engines for the conversion process. The controls were made by Rockwell Automation.

Smaller feed tanks will accept individual waste streams that have been converted to slurry. The slurries will be combined into the proper mix of materials to meet certain carbon, nitrogen, pH and chemical levels. When the mix is right, it’s fed into the digester tanks, heated to about 100 degrees and held in the tanks for about 30 days.

The digester will turn the waste into methane gas to power an on-site biogass engine that will produce electricity. Heat recovery and fertilizer are also byproducts.

The facility will accept between 100,000 and 130,000 gallons of waste material per day, Johnson said. Tipping fees will be based on each customer’s situation and shipping costs. The casino will not be an initial supplier, because its waste stream is too small.

Project organizers have been targeting the meat, cheese, dairy, grocery, produce and bakery industries to participate in the process. Many types of feedstock, including dry ingredients like spices, can be converted to energy.

“About any type of food waste has fairly high energy potential in it,” Johnson said.

West Allis-based Advanced Waste Services has been testing potential feedstock samples and marketing the digester to local businesses.

FCPC has retained Advanced Waste to transport the waste and slurry from producers to the digester. AWS may also oversee the slurry production, though the offsite conversion process has not been finalized.

Right now, AWS is using its industry connections to approach potential feedstock generators, said Joe DeNucci, marketing manager.

“We see this as opportunities for companies to be known for their green initiatives,” Johnson said. “We expect at any one time to have more than 20 suppliers for this project. That all depends on the size of the waste material coming in.”

More than half of those suppliers have committed to the project, he said. The digester is on track to be at capacity by fall.

Gilbert Jasso, plant maintenance director at Kemps in Cedarburg, attended the tour to find out more about the digesters.

Kemps currently sends about 6,000 gallons of dairy waste per day from its Cedarburg plant to digesters in West Bend, and is exploring the alternative digester at Potawatomi.

“We’re just trying to be a good neighbor, because we do produce waste and we’re not going to change that,” he said.

Michael Keleman, lead environmental engineer at InSinkErator in Racine, also attended the informational meeting to learn more about the digester.

InSinkErator produces both residential and commercial waste disposal products, mostly on the home kitchen end.

But the company may be able to assist with the industrial, commercial and institutional sector’s waste-to-slurry preparation.

“We see this as a tremendous opportunity to be involved in feedstock preparation for anaerobic digestion,” Keleman said. “Our appliances have mainly been sold for convenience in kitchen hygiene, and really we’ve only been focused on the residential side, and that’s only about 50 percent of the food waste generated in the U.S.”

Read previous article here.

Arizona tribe claims bank mismanaged investments

By FELICIA FONSECA Associated Press

Posted: 05/23/2013 02:58:25 PM MDT

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz.—The Hopi Tribe of northern Arizona claims that advisers at a national financial services institute schemed to cheat the tribe out of tens of millions of dollars by lying about the value of tribal accounts, making risky investments and collecting fees to which they weren’t entitled.

The tribe has filed more than two dozen claims against Wachovia and some of its former financial advisers with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. It is seeking nearly $190 million in penalties and damages through arbitration that is expected to take more than a year to run its course.

“This is not a case involving a disagreement about a few investments,” tribal attorneys wrote in a statement of claims. “This is the limiting case of greed by a national bank and its agents, which despite their status as fiduciaries, created a risky, dangerous portfolio in which almost all investment assets in the portfolio violated Hopi investment guidelines.”

A spokesman for Wells Fargo & Co, which acquired Wachovia in 2008, said Thursday that the bank will present its side during an arbitration hearing.

The Hopi Tribal Council approved opening a $10 million line of credit at Wachovia in September 2007, which tribal attorneys claim the financial advisers used as a lure to gain access to then-tribal treasurer Russell Mockta and the Hopi assets. Even before the resolution was passed, the advisers worked with Mockta to transfer $2.5 million into a Wachovia account without the council’s approval and made non-permitted and unnecessary investments.

Tribal Chairman Le Roy Shingoitewa said that Wachovia had authority only to make low-risk investments that would guarantee a steady income to finance capital improvements on tribal lands, like a hotel and restaurant in Moenkopi. Instead, the tribe alleges that former Wachovia advisers opened a margin account and quickly purchased high-risk investments, including hedge funds that were barred by tribal policy. By October 2007, more than half of the Hopi’s portfolio had been moved out of fixed income investments, the tribe claims.

Mockta, who was removed from office over what the tribe said was significant financial losses during his tenure, did not return a call for comment Thursday. Tribal attorney Norberto Cisneros said the tribe doesn’t believe that Mockta or other tribal officials knew of the alleged scheme at the time.

Among other claims is that the Wachovia advisers lied to Hopi officials in monthly statements and performance reviews—at times sent from personal e-mail addresses—by overstating the value of the tribe’s assets to keep the Hopis as a client, and overcharged for advisory services on tribal accounts that weren’t subject to management fees. One of the investments was structured so that losses were locked in from the date of purchase regardless of how the financial market performed, the tribe alleges.

Some of the investments related to bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. The value of the CDOs plummeted after the housing market peaked in 2007, sparking panic that caused the global credit system to seize up.

During that period, Wachovia charged other clients, including the Zuni Tribe of New Mexico, 70 percent more for CDO investments than the bank believed they were worth, the Securities and Exchange Commission has said. Wells Fargo settled a case in 2011 that claimed Wachovia Capital Markets LLC misled investors to sell the mortgage bonds to the Zuni Tribe without admitting to or denying the allegations.

Cisneros said that regardless of how the financial market behaved at the time, the Hopi Tribe should not have lost its money.

“These are investments the tribe never should have been in to begin with, particularly in a volatile market,” he said. “Even when they did good investments for the tribe, they took the money from the tribe by marking them up.”

Cisneros said the Hopi Tribe realized its losses within the past six to nine months after thoroughly examining its investments. The Wachovia accounts now are with Raymond James & Associates, but they’re no longer in the hands of the advisers who went to work for Raymond James after Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia, Cisneros said.

Source: CurrentArgus

Asteroid 1998 QE2 to Sail Past Earth Nine Times Larger Than Cruise Ship

The orbit of asteroid 1998 QE2. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

May 22, 2013

By NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

On May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles, or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

While QE2 is not of much interest to those astronomers and scientists on the lookout for hazardous asteroids, it is of interest to those who dabble in radar astronomy and have a 230-foot (70-meter) — or larger — radar telescope at their disposal.

“Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be an outstanding radar imaging target at Goldstone and Arecibo and we expect to obtain a series of high-resolution images that could reveal a wealth of surface features,” said radar astronomer Lance Benner, the principal investigator for the Goldstone radar observations from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin. We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid’s distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise.”

The closest approach of the asteroid occurs on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC). This is the closest approach the asteroid will make to Earth for at least the next two centuries. Asteroid 1998 QE2 was discovered on Aug. 19, 1998, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program near Socorro, New Mexico.

The asteroid, which is believed to be about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) or nine Queen Elizabeth 2 ship-lengths in size, is not named after that 12-decked, transatlantic-crossing flagship for the Cunard Line. Instead, the name is assigned by the NASA-supported Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., which gives each newly discovered asteroid a provisional designation starting with the year of first detection, along with an alphanumeric code indicating the half-month it was discovered, and the sequence within that half-month.

Radar images from the Goldstone antenna could resolve features on the asteroid as small as 12 feet (3.75 meters) across, even from 4 million miles away.

“It is tremendously exciting to see detailed images of this asteroid for the first time,” said Benner. “With radar we can transform an object from a point of light into a small world with its own unique set of characteristics. In a real sense, radar imaging of near-Earth asteroids is a fundamental form of exploring a whole class of solar system objects.”

Asteroids, which are always exposed to the sun, can be shaped like almost anything under it. Those previously imaged by radar and spacecraft have looked like dog bones, bowling pins, spheroids, diamonds, muffins, and potatoes. To find out what 1998 QE2 looks like, stay tuned. Between May 30 and June 9, radar astronomers using NASA’s 230-foot-wide (70 meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, are planning an extensive campaign of observations. The two telescopes have complementary imaging capabilities that will enable astronomers to learn as much as possible about the asteroid during its brief visit near Earth.

NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. In fact, the U.S. has the most robust and productive survey and detection program for discovering near-Earth objects. To date, U.S. assets have discovered over 98 percent of the known NEOs.

In 2012, the NEO budget was increased from $6 million to $20 million. Literally dozens of people are involved with some aspect of near-Earth object (NEO) research across NASA and its centers. Moreover, there are many more people involved in researching and understanding the nature of asteroids and comets, including those that come close to the Earth, plus those who are trying to find and track them in the first place.

In addition to the resources NASA puts into understanding asteroids, it also partners with other U.S. government agencies, university-based astronomers, and space science institutes across the country that are working to track and better understand these objects, often with grants, interagency transfers and other contracts from NASA.

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, manages and funds the search, study, and monitoring of asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them close to Earth. JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

In 2016, NASA will launch a robotic probe to one of the most potentially hazardous of the known NEOs. The OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid (101955) Bennu will be a pathfinder for future spacecraft designed to perform reconnaissance on any newly-discovered threatening objects. Aside from monitoring potential threats, the study of asteroids and comets enables a valuable opportunity to learn more about the origins of our solar system, the source of water on Earth, and even the origin of organic molecules that lead to the development of life.

NASA recently announced developing a first-ever mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid for human exploration. Using game-changing technologies advanced by the Administration, this mission would mark an unprecedented technological achievement that raises the bar of what humans can do in space. Capturing and redirecting an asteroid will integrate the best of NASA’s science, technology and human exploration capabilities and draw on the innovation of America’s brightest scientists and engineers.

Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

New rules to address fracking on Indian lands

$fracking_graphic_120418$ By Alysa Landry
Navajo Times

WASHINGTON, May 23, 2013

Hydraulic fracturing on Indian land may become more difficult under new rules proposed by the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management.

The Interior Department on May 16 issued new draft rules for hydraulic fracturing on public and Indian lands.

Fracturing, or “fracking,” is the process of drilling and injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals into the ground at high pressure to crack shale formations and unlock oil and gas.

The process is controversial because fracking releases methane gas and other toxic chemicals, which can contaminate nearby groundwater. This can be especially dangerous on the 56 million acres of Indian land in the country. On the more isolated reservations like the Navajo Nation, people and livestock depend on well water for drinking, cooking and washing.

Approximately 500,000 oil and gas wells are active in the United States. That includes 92,000 on public and tribal land, where about 13 percent of the nation’s natural gas and 5 percent of its oil are produced, according to statistics from the Interior Department.

Ninety percent of wells drilled on federal and Indian lands use fracking. Yet the BLM’s current regulations governing fracking on public and tribal lands are more than 30 years old and were not designed to address modern fracking technology. The revised rules would modernize management of the industry and help establish baseline safeguards to help protect the environment and reduce the human risk.

“We are proposing some common-sense updates that increase safety while also providing flexibility and facilitating coordination with states and tribes,” said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. “As we continue to offer millions of acres of America’s public lands for oil and gas development, it is important that the public has full confidence that the right safety and environmental protections are in place.”

The new draft rules come after an initial proposal last fall. The Interior Department received more than 177,000 public comments on those rules. The updated draft proposal will be subject to a new 30-day public comment period.

The updated draft keeps the main components of the initial proposal, which requires operators to disclose the chemicals they use in fracking on public or tribal land, verify that fluids are not contaminating groundwater and confirm that management plans are in place for handling fluids that flow back to the surface.

Yet the draft already has drawn criticism from both environmentalists and industry leaders.

Industry officials object to what they call redundant regulation, while environmentalists say the standards do not adequately safeguard drinking water.

A coach as Vader?

Director unveils cast of Navajo ‘Star Wars’

By Shondiin Silversmith
Navajo Times

WINDOW ROCK, May 23, 2013

T he Force proved to be strong with this group of Navajos as they earned the seven primary roles in the upcoming Navajo-language version of “Star Wars.”

Terry Teller, of Lukachukai, Ariz. will be the voice of Luke Skywalker.

“It is pretty pretty awesome,” Teller said happily, adding that he enjoyed the audition because it required him to really act. “Since it was going to be the first movie in Navajo I wanted it to be the best,” he said. “I challenged myself to play the role, as it needs to be. It was hard because I have never done anything like that before.”

Anderson Kee of Cottonwood, Ariz. will be the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Kee said the way the Obi-Wan Kenobi talks about the Force in the movie reminds him of a Navajo medicine man, especially when he says the words in Navajo.

“It was a new experience for me,” he said.

Clarissa Yazzie of Rock Point, Ariz. will be the voice of Princess Leia.

Yazzie said she enjoys Princess Leia’s sarcastic and dominating personality because she feels that her personality closely resembles Leia’s.

“I was excited to just be a part of the whole experience,” she said.

James Junes of Farmington, N.M. is the voice of Han Solo – and one of the very few experienced actors to win a part. Junes is part of the comedy team James and Ernie, and has had roles in low-budget films on the Navajo Nation.

Marvin Yellowhair of N.M. is the voice of Darth Vader.

Yellowhair said he wanted to be Darth Vader because he is the main character he remembers from Star Wars, mostly due to the fact that the villain is always in control and he is a leader. He said it related to him as a coach at Rock Point High.

“It felt so good being involved with this project,” he said.

James Bilagody of Ariz., another experienced performer, is the voice of General Tarkin.

The Navajo voice of C-3PO is a “surprise,” said director Ellyn Stern Epcar. “It will be unveiled on July third.”

“All the people that were cast fit the voice perfectly and they gave awesome performances,” said Manuelito Wheeler, Navajo Nation Museum director. “The directors, they chose the right people.”

Epcar is from Epcar Entertainment, a company based out of Los Angeles, Calif. She was hired under Deluxe Entertainment to direct the dubbed film. She said she has been doing this type of work for over 30 years.

“This isn’t a film this is about saving a language, this is about preserving a language,” said Epcar of the Navajo-dubbed Star Wars. “This takes on more importance of anything I’ve ever done. I feel profoundly humbled to be a part of this.”