EDMONTON – Aboriginal Elders hold prominent, vital and respected roles in their communities — positions that are bestowed on a select few.
This is why a local Elder is concerned with an apparent trend he has seen taking shape in Edmonton.
Jerry Wood, an Elder in Residence, educator and cultural facilitator at Grant McEwan University, says he is commonly encountering people of non-Aboriginal descent passing themselves off as Elders.
“This confuses people,” said the 72-year-old Cree First Nations Elder, who also sits on the Council of Elders with the Edmonton Catholic School District.
“Native people don’t want to see others play around with their culture, it’s very spiritual, something they hold sacred.”
Wood described two recent occasions where people self-proclaimed themselves as Elders. He calls these people “plastic” or “popcorn” Elders.
“I saw this happen in a women’s jail,” he said. “A woman self-proclaimed that she was an Elder and told the ladies everything they wanted to hear.”
People passing themselves off as Elders do not realize the harm it creates in their communities, Wood says.
“The young ones who are vulnerable and unknowing believe in the myth of who these people are,” he said.
Wood believes that Elders should only be Métis, Inuit or First Nation.
“It’s a way of life. I can’t be a priest, I haven’t been given that right,” he said.
Elders in Aboriginal societies are role models and share wise counsel. They provide advice and guidance about harmony and balance in a community. They are also considered the educators of heritage and language. Much like the differences in a doctor’s specialty, some Elders are teachers and some mentor youth or the community at large.
Others are Christian Elders, ceremonial Elders or they can take on the responsibilities while being a medicine man or woman.
But all Elders must be recognized by the community, Wood says.
“You just can’t be an Elder— it’s a process of becoming an Elder,” he said. “There is a process of learning, participation, ceremonies, such as sun dancing and fasting.”
Generally, Elders are older people in the community but sometimes youth can be “gifted” from the spirit world, Wood explains. Before being recognized as an Elder many people often act as “helpers” in the community.
Helpers, Wood says, are respected people who mentor under an Elder. All must also be alcohol and drug free.
But at the crux of the issue is that there is no Elder certification that proves people were “recognized by the community. You just can’t call yourself an Elder when you haven’t been given that right by the community,” he said.
“Even some Aboriginal people have not earned the title,” Wood said. “But there is a process… when people start calling you an Elder, seek your mentorship and you start sharing your knowledge in the community and you take on those responsibilities of Eldership, that is when you’re an Elder. You just can’t call yourself an Elder when you haven’t been given that right by the community.”
Alieja Elliot demonstrates his escape plan Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News
Article and photos by Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News
Students run from the big man in a bright red suit. No, it isn’t Santa Clause, it’s a stranger. Students of the radKIDS program at Tulalip Quil Ceda Elementary graduated on December 16th, taking turns displaying their defensive skills on Tulalip Police Officer Clayton Horne who wore a bright red padded suit.
The radKIDS program is an eight session program that teaches kids all about stranger danger as well as what to do about bullies. For the first part of the graduation, program instructors Rochelle Lubbers and Razi Liptich had the students circled up in the gymnasium shouting “STOP!” or “NO!” while reviewing their defensive moves like elbowing, toe stomping, kneeing, and kicking.
As the teachers wrapped up the review and explained to parents about the program, the kids suited up in minor padding.
“RadKIDS has gained attention nationally, being noted in several attempted abductions where the child was able to escape,” said Rochelle Lubbers, emergency management coordinator for the Tulalip Tribes.
For the final part of their graduation they were approached by officer Horne in the red suit as he tried to abduct them. The students had to choose their defensive move, then escape to tell an adult.
Grace Davis, now a radKIDS graduate, said, “I liked the program. I learned how to get away and how to tell if someone is a threat.”
Grace Davis. Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News
Students fingerprinted their certificates as they received them, which also had a recent photo printed on them. The certificates are now important profiles for authorities, making children easily identifiable. If anything were to happen to a child, the parents would be readily prepared with recent information to give to the authorities.
Tulalip Bay Fire Dept. annual Santa Run and food drive
Santa and the family of Christina Leea singing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
Article and photos by Andrew Gobin/Tulalip News
Tulalip Bay Fire Department brought a little Christmas cheer to the neighborhoods of Tulalip. A parade of the department’s two fire engines and ambulance had Santa riding along on an engine, jumping off to pass out hugs and candy canes to kids from one to ninety-two, all the while trumpeting horns and blasting sirens to let people know that Santa had come to town.
Kids and their families lined the streets on December 14th and 15th as Santa rolled through with his firefighting elves. The children’s faces lit up as soon as they saw him, or maybe that was from all the lights decorating the fire engines. A few times Santa and his elves joined families for a chorus of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Passing neighborhood traffic didn’t seem to mind Santa parading down the street, many times passing cars stopped to join the holiday festivities.
The Holiday Santa run started at 5pm each day and lasted five hours, all the while collecting food and monetary donations for the Tulalip Food Bank. Santa and his elves filled the ambulance with donations over the course of the weekend.
There are many photos of Santa visiting children and their families. To view them please visit tulalipnews.com, or see our new facebook page; search Tulalip News.
A dispute over enrollment has divided members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, which operates Oregon’s largest tribal casino about 30 miles west of Salem.
Members who no longer are enrolled in the tribe will lose their shares of tribal income — currently $3,600 annually — plus access to tribal housing, health care and schools. The tribe has grown by almost 50 percent since it opened its casino nearly two decades ago, although growth has slowed.
Similar disputes are occurring elsewhere in the nation.
The review of tribal rolls, although long planned, has touched off acrimony among some tribal members. One has gone to tribal court in an effort to block it.
The tribal government said an audit of enrollment is part of the tribe’s 2010 strategic plan. Members recommended for removal from the tribal rolls have to go through four steps, including appeals to the tribal court and its court of appeals, before any decision is final.
A tribal spokeswoman said the current enrollment is about 5,200, up from 3,500 in 1995.
“There is a procedure in place for affected individuals to work through the process and they have been informed about it,” Siobhan Taylor, the spokeswoman, said in a statement.
“Our enrollment department is working to the very best of their ability to help all those involved. Our purpose is to help tribal members clarify their records and strengthen the Grand Ronde family tree for future generations.”
Taylor said there was a previous review of the roll, the origins of which date to 1984, the year after the tribe re-established federal recognition.
“Over the years our tribal membership, through constitutional amendments, has consistently pushed for tightening our membership requirements,” Taylor said in an earlier statement.
The tribal council moved a few months ago to drop 13 members from enrollment, but referred the cases of 17 others back to a committee reviewing the roll.
“There’s potential that people might not even be Native Americans, but yet we spend our money every day on these people until we choose to correct this roll,” Reyn Leno, the tribal chairman, was quoted as saying in the Smoke Signals community newspaper after the council action in August.
Washington geoduck farmers and harvesters have turned to politicians to help overturn a Chinese shellfish-import ban that’s all but shut down the local industry.
Washington geoduck harvesters and government officials, including Gov. Jay Inslee, are scrambling to overturn China’s decision to ban some shellfish exports from the Pacific Northwest.
The ban has brought the geoduck industry here to a virtual halt.
Fish inspectors in China notified the U.S. Embassy on Dec. 3 that China was tentatively suspending imports of geoduck and other “double-shell aquatic animals,” such as oysters, because they found high levels of paralytic shellfish poisoning, or PSP, in a Nov. 21 shipment of geoducks.
PSP is a biotoxin produced by algae that shellfish eat and, in humans, in high levels it can lead to severe illness and even death.
The ban is a particularly nettlesome problem in Washington because China accounts for about 90 percent of geoduck exports from the state. And fisheries in the state harvest and farm 5.5 million to 7 million pounds of geoduck annually, according to Taylor Shellfish Farms, one of the state’s largest geoduck providers. Those companies generally sell geoduck, which is a burrowing clam, for between $7 and $25 a pound.
The ban also affects Alaskan shellfish.
Local fish companies, though, are struggling to understand the ban because testing by the Washington State Department of Health in the area where the geoduck shipments originated found PSP levels well below internationally accepted limits.
“We’ve gone back and looked at all records — they show results way below any human-health concern,” Donn Moyer, a health-department spokesman, said Saturday. “We don’t have any evidence or information whatsoever about any high levels of PSP in any shellfish.”
Geoduck harvesters believe the Chinese inspectors applied a standard for the level of toxicity that is well below what is considered safe for humans.
“The numbers I saw (that Chinese inspectors used) are just plain ridiculous,” said Tony Forsman, general manager of Suquamish Seafoods, a business run by the Suquamish Tribe.
To compound the challenge, communication from the Chinese government has been scant. State regulators and fishery executives say they have heard nothing more from the Chinese since the Dec. 3 notification. Press officials from the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to an email query Saturday.
That’s led the industry to turn to political leaders to resolve the issue. On Friday, the governor and Commissioner of Public Lands Peter Goldmark sent a letter to the heads of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asking them to engage in “direct interaction with the Chinese government” to determine the status of the ban and to gather information about the Chinese inspection.
In the meantime, local geoduck harvesters and farmers are curtailing operations. Suquamish Seafoods, which sends all of its geoduck, between $2 million and $3 million a year, to China, has idled its 24 divers.
“This is unprecedented,” Forsman. “The tribe really depends on it.”
Taylor Shellfish Farms, which sells some geoduck domestically, has had to reduce hours for its workers. And if the Chinese ban continues much longer, prices for geoduck sold domestically will drop because of a market glut.
“That may have an impact on domestic prices,” said Bill Dewey, Taylor’s director of public policy and communications.
Staff reporter Carol M. Ostrom contributed to this report. Jay Greene: 206-464-2231 or jgreene@seattletimes.com. Twitter: iamjaygreene
Originally published on Thu December 12, 2013 5:58 pm
By ASHLEY AHEARN AND KATIE CAMPBELL AND ANTHONY SCHICK
China has suspended imports of shellfish from the west coast of the United States — an unprecedented move that cuts off a $270 million Northwest industry from its biggest export market.
China said it decided to impose the ban after recent shipments of geoduck clams from Northwest waters were found by its own government inspectors to have high levels of arsenic and a toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning.
The restriction took effect last week and China’s government says it will continue indefinitely. It applies to clams, oysters and all other two-shelled bivalves harvested from the waters of Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Northern California. U.S. officials think the contaminated clams were harvested in Washington or Alaska. Right now they’re waiting to hear back from Chinese officials for more details that will help them identify the exact source.
State and federal agencies oversee inspection and certification to prevent the shipment of tainted shellfish. Jerry Borchert of the Washington Department of Health said he’s never encountered such a ban based on the Chinese government’s assertion that these U.S. safeguards failed to screen out contaminated seafood.
“They’ve never done anything like that, where they would not allow shellfish from this entire area based on potentially two areas or maybe just one area. We don’t really know yet,” Borchert said.
The biggest blow could fall to those who farm or harvest the supersized geoduck clams. In the Northwest, they’re concentrated in Washington’s Puget Sound, where about 5 million pounds of wild geoduck are harvested each year. Aquaculture accounts for an additional 2 million pounds, according to estimates from the Washington Department of Natural Resources.
Blake Severns inspects a wild geoduck just plucked from the bottom of Puget Sound. Severn is a diver with the the Washington Department of Natural Resources Aquatics Resource Division. Courtesy of KOUW news
A barricade around the Chinese consumer market means trouble for those in the Northwest who rely on Asian trade.
“It’s had an incredible impact,” said George Hill, the geoduck harvest coordinator for Puget Sound’s Suquamish Tribe. “A couple thousand divers out of work right now.”
The U.S. exported $68 million worth of geoduck clams in 2012 — most of which came from Puget Sound. Nearly 90 percent of that geoduck went to China.
Geoduck are highly prized in China, where the clams sell for retail prices of $100 to $150 per pound. Although geoduck are harvested year round, demand peaks during the holiday season leading up to the Chinese celebration of the lunar new year — which falls on Jan. 31 for 2014.
The geoduck (pronounced “GOO-ee-duck”) is a the world’s largest burrowing clam. It’s slow-growing, regularly reaching 100 years old and often weighing as much as 10 pounds.
Harvesters are waiting for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to negotiate with the Chinese government to come to an agreement on how to move forward and reopen shellfish trade. NOAA stopped issuing certification for shellfish exports last Friday.
Officials say the investigation is ongoing but the closure could last for months. While the industry awaits a resolution at the international level, it is adjusting to the new reality.
The Suquamish Tribe is trying to develop other markets in New York, California and locally at seafood markets in Seattle, Hill said.
Bill Dewey, a spokesman for the largest shellfish supplier in Washington said his company, Taylor Shellfish, is looking at other solutions.
“I was just talking to our geoduck manager and he’s got two harvest crews and three beach crews essentially doing makework,” Dewey said. “He’s too nice a guy to lay them off during the holidays but there’s only so much you can be charitable about making work for people and eventually you’re going to have to lay them off.”
In the emergency room of the Rosebud Indian Health Service Hospital, suicide attempts by drug overdose are seen nearly nightly. Alcohol-related car accident injuries fill many of the small hospital’s beds, competing for space with tuberculosis, pneumonia and liver and kidney failure. Diabetes is common, leading to loss of life and limb.
The physical complications of poverty, joblessness and epidemic rates of alcoholism, diabetes and depression spill over into the wards here at the only hospital on the Rosebud Reservation, which has a population of 13,000 and stretches across 1,970 square miles of South Dakota prairie. Life is short, violence high and health care lacking in Todd County, the second poorest county in the nation.
Illustrations by Jeffrey Decoster
“There are three ‘spiritual’ paths here: Native Lakota, Christian or alcoholism,” says Rick Emery, a physician assistant here for the past 13 years. He’s hunkered down in command central, a small office in the ER, awaiting the arrival of an assault victim. It’s late March — spring break for the local schools. Drug- and alcohol-related cases are up. The staff morale, down.
“Bath salts, meth, Sudafed, anything that’s cheap,” Emery says. His hair is gray, his kind face weathered. “It’s worse when school’s out, when kids on the reservation have nothing to do. We get young people, 17, 18 years old, coming in with chest pains.” Sometimes they’re drug-induced, sometimes not. The night before, a 16-year-old came in with a severe anxiety attack. The night before that, a 25-year-old male who had hanged himself arrived too late to save.
Cursed with some of the highest suicide rates in the country, tribal leaders declared a state of emergency here back in 2007 making headlines in The New York Times. But today, six years later, not much has changed. Across the United States, American Indian and Alaska Native youth ages 15 to 24 are still committing suicide at rates three times the national average of 13 per 100,000 people for their age group, according to the U.S. surgeon general. On the Great Plains, the suicide rate for Native Americans is 10 times the national average. Unemployment hovers at 80 percent, and the life expectancy for males is in the upper 40s, about 30 years lower than the U.S. average.
The ambulance arrives with the assault victim — a middle-aged Native American male with a blood alcohol content of 0.2 and a wide gash across his skull. Someone attempted to choke him, then bashed him in the head with a piece of firewood. The patient before him was a 26-year-old woman and former meth addict suffering severe vaginal bleeding. The patient after him: a 2-year-old boy with a raging dental infection who will have to be helicoptered out to a hospital hundreds of miles away to get the care he needs.
“These were all Sioux land from the Missouri River in South Dakota west through eastern Wyoming into southern Montana,” says Emery, referring to the wide swath of land that stretches across the northern Great Plains. Emery is a member of the Lakota Sioux. He worked as an Army medic for 17 years before returning home to his reservation and this hospital. The military has provided a way out of poverty for many here. “Lakota were nomadic tribes who followed the buffalo. Then the government put us in these desolate places. ‘We’ll take all this land in exchange for health care forever,’ they told my people. They just didn’t say what standard of health care that would be.”
I can only wonder: How did things get so bad out here in the middle of the windswept prairies, land of majestic sunsets and home to once-proud warriors? Is there any hope for the future?
I’ve found my way into this emergency room as a writer covering Stanford students in a class on rural health care and Native American health disparities. The course ends with a weeklong trip to the Rosebud Reservation, where students volunteer in the hospital and help build low-income housing for Habitat for Humanity [see sidebar on the right].
Few communities in the United States, perhaps some in the outer reaches of Montana or Alaska, are so isolated. To get here, I fly from San Francisco into Sioux Falls, one of the two major cities in South Dakota, then rent a car and drive west across hundreds of miles of empty ranchland, Laura Ingalls Wilder territory. Traveling Highway 90, I cross the Missouri River, then turn left at the town of Murdo, population 468, and head into Indian Country. The Rosebud Reservation is at the end of a highway, down a road, around a bend that leads to nowhere.
Three hours of driving brings me to my destination, the town of Mission. The Indian Health Service hospital is situated midway between the two largest towns on the reservation, Mission and Rosebud, both with populations of about 1,500. The students are staying in the Habitat for Humanity dorms, and I plan to meet with Shane Red Hawk before connecting with them. Red Hawk is a community leader who, along with his wife, Noella, helps at-risk teens at the Buffalo Jump Cafe and Teen Center near the center of town. It won’t be hard to find, I’ve been assured. It’s on the street corner next to the only stoplight in town.
Illustrations by Jeffrey Decoster
Downtown Mission is about half a mile long with few landmarks. There’s a Wells Fargo, a Subway sandwich shop, a few express loan businesses, an Episcopal church and a post office. The buildings look both temporary and unfriendly — lots of aluminum siding, few windows — like a community was forced to move here that didn’t plan on staying long. There are no malls, no movie theaters, no bowling alleys. Leading into town, there’s a large, tribal-owned grocery store empty of both food and customers — no one seems to be able to tell me exactly why. The parking lot, on the other hand, is busy. Cars line up at the drive-through alcohol kiosk, and teenagers and families hang out, chatting. One young man, his boot resting on the bumper of a pickup, wears a T-shirt that catches my attention: “Not just another Third World country.” I drive on, turn right at the stoplight and park in front of Buffalo Jump.
The sounds of video games ping from the corner of the dark, cozy cafe. Two teens laugh together. Red Hawk, tall and imposing, with a long, brown ponytail, sits alone at a corner table. He nods me over and waits for questions. Red Hawk grew up on the reservation, then left to join the Navy at 17. He returned home in 2006 after hearing about how young people were killing themselves here. He came back with Noella, opening the center as a safe place for kids to hang out and to introduce them to the forgotten ways of Native spirituality.
“I’ve had kids brought to me after being cut down from trying to hang themselves,” he says. “It’s humbling when a teenager arrives with swollen lips and fingers still blue.”
He continues: “My heart’s always been here. But dysfunction and oppression, alcoholism are a way of life here.” Our interview ends abruptly, interrupted by a phone call. Red Hawk apologizes; he has to leave for the funeral of a child in a neighboring town. For the rest of the week, a sign hangs in the Buffalo Jump window: “Gone to funeral.” I head off to check in to a hotel.
The next morning, I wake to the sound of native drumming from the radio alarm clock. I’m staying in the Quality Inn Rosebud Casino near the Nebraska border, about 40 minutes from the hospital, and worry about finding my way there before dawn in the dark. The weather’s turned colder, spitting icy rain on the windshield of my rental car. Tumbleweeds skitter across the highway as dawn breaks, a long, thin orange line drawn across the horizon. There are few addresses on the reservation, mostly P.O. boxes; GPS rarely works, and cell phone service is spotty. Mostly I rely on friendly tips for directions.
The Rosebud hospital is a modern building constructed inadvertently on top of a rattlesnake nest, surrounded by open land. Patients travel sometimes 100 miles over rough roads to get here, though finding transportation often isn’t easy. Still, the 35-bed hospital is consistently over capacity. Getting an appointment can be difficult to near impossible because of a lack of staff and an overabundance of patients.
I join the Stanford students at the morning staff meeting, listening to Ira Salom, MD, chief medical officer, talk about impending cutbacks of about $200,000 due to the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration which have hit the already underfunded Indian Health Service hospitals and clinics especially hard.
“We’re looking for quarters under seat cushions,” says Salom, who was recruited to the hospital from New York City where his wife still lives. “If I don’t make these cuts soon, we’re going to run out of money.” A staff member pokes his head into the room to inform him that the technician who runs the CT scanner is out sick with a migraine, leaving no one to fill in. Also, there’s no night staff available to cover the first week of April in the ER. He sighs and turns the meeting over to the chief pharmacologist, who discusses options for cutbacks, such as lidocaine patches, Lubriderm lotion and statins — non-lifesaving supplies.
The Rosebud hospital is run by the Indian Health Service, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The IHS is responsible for providing health care to 2 million Native Americans and Alaskan Natives who belong to more than 557 federally recognized tribes in 35 states. It was set up by the federal government to honor a long history of treaties in which Indian tribes exchanged land with the United States in return for food, education and health care.
“For tribes here, health care is a right,” says Sophie Two Hawk, MD, CEO of the hospital and the first Native American to graduate from the University of South Dakota medical school, in 1987. “They were promised health care ‘for as long as the river is running.’”
Illustrations by Jeffrey Decoster
It’s well-documented that the government’s attempts to meet its obligations to the Native Americans have failed miserably; the primary cause is insufficient funding. Currently, prisoners receive significantly higher per capita health-care funding than Native Americans. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reports the federal government spends about $5,000 per capita each year on health care for the general U.S. population, $3,803 on federal prisoners and $1,914 on Indian health care.
One of the most pressing inequities of the federal government’s attempts to meet these obligations, according to advocates such as the National Indian Health Board, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., is that while the biggest federal health and safety-net programs such as Medicare, Social Security and veterans’ health are protected from sequestration cuts, the IHS is not. It stands to lose 5 percent of its $4 billion budget this year, a percentage that is expected to increase next year if sequestration continues, IHS administration officials say. These cuts will be devastating for many tribes.
Other Native health-care advocates, led by the Association of American Indian Physicians, push for greater funding for the federal government’s student loan program for health professions.
“One of the main goals of the AAIP is to increase American Indian representation in the health-care workforce,” says Nicole Stern, MD, AAIP president and Stanford University graduate, who points to the perpetual labor shortages faced on reservations, which hover at 15 to 20 percent for physicians.
IHS administrators say they are hopeful that the passage of President Obama’s health-care law, the Affordable Care Act, will ease these ongoing budget and staff shortages. The law, which began providing government-subsidized insurance plans Oct. 1 to low- and middle-income individuals, makes permanent the reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, which authorizes Congress to fund the Indian Health Service — a positive step, Native health advocates say.
Also, by providing health insurance to many of the same low-income patients that the IHS currently cares for, the new law should allow the IHS to seek reimbursement for services that it would otherwise pay for itself.
“The act should free up more funding for referred inpatient and specialty care,” says Margo Kerrigan, California area director of the IHS. “We hope it does, but Indian people will need to apply for these alternate resources.”
One afternoon during a visit to the hospital, I walk from the ER to a separate wing to find the CEO, Two Hawk. Her door’s ajar, and she waves me in. She’s dressed in the military-style uniform of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, her long, gray hair pulled back in a braid that drops down her back. She’s doing paperwork — denying a pile of requests from her physicians for additional care for their patients. The requests are appropriate, she says, but the hospital just doesn’t have the money to pay for the care.
“If someone shows up with a torn ACL, we can’t afford to fix it,” she says. “He will walk with a limp.”
Two Hawk, like many others, links the poor health statistics of Native Americans not only to the lack of adequate IHS funding but to the community’s tragic history. The hopelessness, the despair — it’s rooted in history.
For Rosebud, that history began in 1868 when under the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty the Lakota Sioux, known as Sicangu, were placed on one large reservation that covered parts of North and South Dakota and four other states. After defeats in the Plains Wars of the 1870s, 7.7 million acres of Indian land were taken by the federal government and smaller reservations were created. The Sicangu Lakota were sent to live on the Rosebud Reservation. It’s a familiar story, repeated over and over again, throughout the American West: massacres, followed by relocations, followed by broken treaties. About 500 reservations remain today spread across the nation.
The term “historical trauma” is used to name the psychic wounding caused by massacre, destruction of culture and dislocation of the Native Americans in the name of Manifest Destiny. This history is still felt strongly on the reservation, Two Hawk says.
The forced relocation of Native American children to faraway boarding schools is a particularly ugly chapter in this history, which deeply damaged the Sioux. Native children were sent to boarding schools where they were forced to wear white man’s clothes and were beaten for speaking their native language. Almost every Lakota had a close relative who had been taken from home by white government agents in the early 1900s and sent to one of these schools. For decades, there were reports of abuse and malnourishment.
The long-term effects on health have been disastrous. The National Rural Health Association in a 2006 study reports: “The forced relocation of children into Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools … led to cultural distortion, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and the ripple effect of loss of parenting skills and communal grief.”
Leaving Two Hawk, I head to the office next door where another Native American hospital employee, psychologist Rebecca Foster, PhD, works. When I knock on her office door, she’s taking a break to cradle her week-old grandson. Foster and her husband, Dan, also Native and a psychologist at the hospital, have 14 children — seven of those adopted from relatives on the reservation who were unable to care for them. All seven of those children are special needs, like the baby’s father, who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Foster’s goal was always to get an education, then return to help her people. She has served as a role model over the years. Young people gape at the degrees she’s hung on office walls, she says.
“They are always amazed to see a Native person who has accomplished things. I went to reservation schools. My parents stressed education. We came back to the reservation. … There are a lot of very positive and wonderful things on the reservation, the strength of the community’s ties, the connections with ceremonies and traditions. I grew up in a community where you are related to hundreds of people. We take care of one another. We perform ceremonies together. There are real deep ties with home.”
She, too, attributes much of the destitution and despair on the reservation to history.
“I’m Blackfeet Dakota, from Montana,” she says. “We had Glacier Park. The government took it. The population was decimated from 60,000 to 6,000 from disease. … We are the only group in the U.S. still under the jurisdiction of the federal government. We didn’t become U.S. citizens until 1924; freedom of religion was not granted until 1978.”
Tribes like the Sioux that followed the buffalo lost both their way of life and their food source due to western expansionism. Forced to live on the most desolate land and to turn to unfamiliar agrarian lifestyles, they were left with food from the government’s commodity program — flour, pasta, rice, peanut butter, canned food — a diet distributed from warehouses on reservations, devoid of fresh food. Today, it’s still nearly impossible to find fresh fruit and vegetables on the Rosebud Reservation.
The relocations of masses of people onto the least profitable lands in South Dakota have resulted in some of the lowest living wages in the country. The average family income is $18,000. Housing is poor, with family members crowded into unheated trailers; there are few jobs beyond some in minor agriculture and ranching; the difficulty recruiting teachers to the isolated location has resulted in poor schools with high school dropout rates of 50 to 60 percent. For the few Natives who do make it to college throughout Indian Country, a staggering 98 percent return within the first two months, homesick for the close community and culture that doesn’t exist for them in the outside world.
“I see a lot of kids who are depressed, who talk about suicide,” she says, then pauses to look into the eyes of her grandbaby. “And yet, kids are still resilient. They still have a desire to have a good life, to be happy, to accomplish things. No matter where you come from, you can never completely destroy that. There are very few kids here who don’t have a dream.
“What I tell young people is that there is a difference between having to stay here because you are trapped and choosing to be here because you have something to give. One’s a prison, the other is a home.”
Nearing the end of the week, the Stanford students make bison fajitas for dinner at their dormitory and discuss their experiences — the good and the bad, the tragic and the heroic.
“It opened my eyes,” says Roxana Daneshjou, an MD/PhD student. “I don’t think I had a very good understanding of what living on a reservation was like. It was shocking. Just seeing a health-care delivery system not working. We are not taking care of our people.”
Daneshjou talks about the patient she helped treat who had returned to the hospital after suffering a severe fracture in her arm two months ago. Because of the lack of orthopedic care, the patient was back again, her arm still in pain.
“It’s just awful. If we were at Stanford, she’d go see a very good orthopedic surgeon and it would be fine. It’s the worst feeling in the world to know that the ability exists to fix something, and just not see it get done.”
But undergraduate Layton Lamsam, Osage, who grew up getting care at Indian Health Service clinics on a reservation in Oklahoma, felt differently about his day. The hard-working, short-staffed professionals who provided the best care they could in some of the worst circumstances impressed him. His goal: to help improve this care someday.
During my flight home, my thoughts wander back to the Buffalo Jump Cafe and a 15-year-old Native American girl who walked in just before I left, a pink-strapped travel bag thrown over her shoulder. Two years ago, the girl had threatened to hang herself. School officials sent her to Shane and his wife to talk. She joined us at our corner table. When I asked about suicide, she covered her face with her hands. Tears leaked slowly between her fingers.
Since she was too upset to talk, we left the cafe to walk around the neighborhood, past the worn-out drunks, the church, the high school basketball courts. She’s more hopeful about the future now, she said. She’s thinking about becoming a nurse. But it’s hard to get to school most days. She lives with a large family in a small home with little money. Alcohol use is high, and family support low. She desperately wants to leave the reservation some day. But, then again, this is her home. It’s all she’s ever known.
“This is where my heart is, where I belong,” she said. “Of course I want to leave. But I want to come back and help my people.”
The wide open prairies disappear from my view as the plane takes off, and I catch my breath at the memory of the beautiful landscapes on the Rosebud Reservation and the brave people left behind there — at the end of a highway, down a road, around a bend — fighting hard for a brighter future.
There have been so many great women in Virginia’s 400-plus-year history that it would seem nearly impossible to settle on 12 to immortalize in bronze for a monument in Capitol Square.
That was the task for the Women of Virginia Commemorative Commission, which made its final selections last week — and not without some disagreement.
Some picked for the list — compiled at the commission’s request by a panel of historians and narrowed by an executive committee to a dozen names — may be unknown to many Virginians, while others who did not make the cut are household names.
Martha Washington is in, but Dolley Madison is out.
The niece of Powhatan, Cockacoeske is believed to be the first female chief of the Pamunkey Indian tribe, who joined a number of Virginia’s tribes to sign the Treaty of Middle Plantation in 1677, establishing peace between the tribes and English settlers.
Pocahontas, of course, was credited with saving the life of Jamestown settler John Smith in 1607. She married tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614, and the marriage was considered beneficial to peace between Native Americans and the settlers.
Her name also appears on a state park, a parkway and public schools throughout the commonwealth, not to mention numerous book titles and an animated Disney movie.
The omission of Pocahontas prompted one member of the commission, Mary Abel Smith, to take out a full-page ad in the Thanksgiving edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch urging readers to appeal to board members for her inclusion in the monument.
“Pocahontas spent her life in support of the peaceful merging of cultures,” the ad states. “She deserves a prominent place in the history of accomplished women in Virginia.”
According to commission members familiar with the process, the 18-member panel was provided a list of about three dozen names to consider. An executive committee of roughly half of the commission narrowed the list to 12 names and decided that a Native American addition should be considered by the full commission.
At its full meeting Nov. 25, the commission agreed to add Cockacoeske to the list and remove one name. Two members present thought Pocahontas should be added, but they were the only two who voted to support her inclusion, so Cockacoeske was added.
Abel-Smith, who phoned in to the meeting and could not vote, hopes that people appeal to the commission to rethink their decision.
“I think (Pocahontas) is one of the most important persons in Virginia,” she said. “She saved the first colony of settlers.” Abel-Smith said she was “horrified” to learn at the meeting that Pocahontas would not be included.
“The tradition of Virginia has to be promoted, and Pocahontas is one of the great ones.”
Lisa Hicks-Thomas, Gov. Bob McDonnell’s secretary of administration and chairwoman of the commission, said that “there was no way we were going to be able to come up with a list that everybody was happy about.”
She noted that famous entertainers from Virginia such as Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey and Patsy Cline were among those who will not be cast in bronze, but said many, including Pocahontas, will be memorialized on a glass panel that will ring the monument space.
“We have a lot of people that should have been on there but we can only get 12,” Hicks-Thomas said. “(Pocahontas) didn’t make the vote. There is nothing we can do about that.
“One of the points of the monument is to educate the public about some of the contributions of the women of Virginia that people aren’t aware of,” she said. “It’s not about who the most famous people are — it’s about accomplishments, and Cockacoeske is very accomplished. I think it’s going to be a teaching moment for all of us.”
The commission has selected an artist and design for the monument. Now the panel must raise money for the monument, which is expected to cost $3 million and is targeted for completion in March 2015.
“I think Virginians will be very proud of this monument,” said commission member Mary Margaret Whipple, a former state senator from Arlington County. She predicted young women in particular would be inspired by the monument, which will feature 12 female figures cast in bronze milling about an open circular space located northwest of the steps of the Capitol.
A separate monument honoring Virginia’s Indian tribes is in the planning stages but will feature no specific individual.
Who’s on the list
17th century
Ann Burras Laydon of Jamestown (circa 1595 to circa 1637) — first married female settler
Cockacoeske of James City County (died circa 1686) — chief of Pamunkey Tribe
18th century
Clementina Rind of Williamsburg (1740-1774) — publisher of the Virginia Gazette
Martha Washington of Fairfax County (1731-1802) — first lady
Mary Draper Ingles of Southwest Virginia (1729-1813) — frontierswoman who was abducted by Shawnee Indians, escaped and traveled 600 miles to get home
19th century
Sally Louisa Tompkins of Mathews County (1833-1916) — Confederate hospital administrator
Elizabeth Keckley of Dinwiddie County (1818-1907) — former slave, seamstress, confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln
Sarah G. Boyd Jones of Richmond (1867-1905) — African-American physician who earned a medical degree at Howard University, returned to Richmond and became the first Virginia woman to pass the state’s medical board examinations
20th century
Virginia Estelle Randolph of Henrico County (1875-1958) — educator
Laura Lu Copenhaver of Smyth County (1868-1940) — entrepreneur
Maggie L. Walker of Richmond (1867-1934) — first black woman to charter a bank in the United States
Adele Goodman Clark of Richmond (1882-1983) — suffragist
What started in Saskatoon one year ago with a small teach-in grew into a global movement whose founders were recently named by Foreign Policy magazine to its top 100 global thinkers list.
The founders — Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean, and Nina Wilson — are on the list with other notables such as NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, Pope Francis, teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The group’s entry on the list explains how the global movement started when the four women started emailing each other about concerns with proposed federal legislation affecting land management, water management and several other issues related to First Nations, Metis and Inuit people. They started a Facebook page called “Idle No More” to coordinate local meetings and events.
“Before long, #IdleNoMore was trending on Twitter, and protests under the same name spread across Canada. Solidarity demonstrations also occurred in the United States, Europe, and Australia,” the entry states. “The protests in particular targeted Canada’s extractive industries, asserting that new pipelines and other projects would destroy land and disrupt ecosystems. One protest delayed exploratory drilling in British Columbia.”
This is the fifth year the magazine has put out the list.
“This (is a) remarkable list of people who, over the past year, have made a measurable difference in politics, business, technology, the arts, the sciences, and more,” the magazine states on its website.
The niece of Powhatan, Cockacoeske is believed to be the first female chief of the Pamunkey Indian tribe, who joined a number of Virginia’s tribes to sign the Treaty of Middle Plantation in 1677, establishing peace between the tribes and English settlers.
Derrick on December 10th 2013