Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File/Associated Press – FILE – In this Aug. 4, 2009, file photo, Washington Redskins helmets are displayed on the field during NFL football training camp at Redskins Park in Ashburn, Va. The Oneida Indian Nation tribe in upstate New York said Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013, it will launch a radio ad campaign pressing for the Washington Redskins to get rid of a nickname that is often criticized as offensive.
By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, September 5, 5:27 AM
ALBANY, N.Y. — An American Indian tribe in upstate New York said Thursday it will launch a radio ad campaign pressing for the Washington Redskins to shed a name often criticized as offensive.
The Oneida Indian Nation said the first ad will run on radio stations in Washington before the team hosts the Philadelphia Eagles in its season opener Monday night. In the ad, Oneida Nation Representative Ray Halbritter says NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should “stand up to bigotry” by denouncing “the racial slur” in the team’s name.
“We do not deserve to be called redskins,” the Oneida leader says in the ad. “We deserve to be treated as what we are — Americans.”
The radio ad said Goodell had rightly been critical this summer after an Eagles wide receiver was caught on video making a racial slur against African-Americans.
The ads launch as the Washington Redskins this year face a fresh barrage of criticism over their nickname, with local leaders and pundits calling for a name change. In May, 10 members of Congress sent letters to Redskins owner Dan Snyder and Goodell urging the team to change the name.
Snyder has vowed to never change the name.
League spokesman Brian McCarthy, in an email to The Associated Press, said they “respect that reasonable people may have differing views.”
“The name from its origin has always intended to be positive and has always been used by the team in a highly respectful manner,” McCarthy wrote.
There was no immediate response from the Redskins.
The Oneidas have been vocal opponents of the Redskins nickname — be it for NFL or high school teams. The tribe, which runs a casino and resort in central New York, this year gave $10,000 toward new jerseys to an area high school that changed its nickname from the Redskins to the Hawkeyes.
The Oneida said the first ad will run Sunday and Monday on several stations in Washington. Subsequent ads will run in Washington during home games and in the cities hosting the team when it is away. A spokesman for the Oneidas would not say how much the campaign would cost beyond “multiple thousands.”
Halbritter said that fans also are being urged to lobby the NFL in support of the name change at www.changethemascot.org , a website that debuted Thursday.
“We believe that with the help of our fellow professional football fans, we can get the NFL to realize the error of its ways and make a very simple change,” Halbritter said in a prepared statement.
This month, a tribal museum in Pendleton is going Pop Art. Tamastslikt Cultural Institute is the place that celebrates Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla tribal culture. But right now it’s exhibiting a series of Andy Warhol panels, in a collection entitled “Cowboys and Indians”. This is one of several events the museum planned to mark a milestone.
The ten panels and additional material are on loan to Tamastslikt from the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York. Tamastslikt curator Randall Melton says the images are evenly divided among the Cowboys – iconic western figures like General Custer and John Wayne – and Indians – images Warhol obtained from what became the National Museum of the American Indian.
Melton explains, “People kind of give you the ‘Huh? How does that fit into a tribal interpretive center?’ “
He says this show is a departure from the museum’s usual cultural program, but an intentional one. The Tamastslikt show marks the first time these works have travelled. They’re typical of Warhol’s style – photographs, done up in silkscreen, then painted with lots of vibrant color.
April Baer / Oregon Public Broadcasting “Zech” Cyr checks out an image of General Custer.
Dorothy Cyr a tribal member who works next door at the Wild Horse Casino, brought her 12 year old son Zech to see the show.
“It was nice,” the younger Cyr said, strolling amid the panels. “It was really odd the way he uses his art, how he made all the colors.”
Dorothy Cyr added, “I think it’s great opportunity for our tribe to have such works displayed on our reservation.”
The museum regularly pulls in visitors to the casino, but this exhibition, coinciding with Tamastslikt’s 15th anniversary, is intended in part to draw people coming to town for the Pendleton Roundup later this month, and anyone who may not have had the chance to see Warhol’s works before.
Pendleton resident Sue Petersen, who attended the opening, said she just missed a Warhol exhibition in San Francisco some years ago and was glad to see these works in town.
“I think this is just totally awesome,” Petersen said. “I’m blown kind of out of the park, I gotta see the rest of them.”
April Baer / Oregon Public Broadcasting Sue Petersen of Pendleton was among those who came early on opening night to check out the exhibition.
Warhol had suffered some health problems by the time these works were completed in 1986. He’d survived a gunshot wound, and worked with a lot of assistants. Some critics believe his later works lack some of the snap and wit of earlier pieces.
After seeing the panels, Jubertino Arranda, a young artist, said he shares some of those reservations.
“I personally do like a lot of earlier work,” Arranda said. “For me, it was very hit and miss after his brush with death.”
But Arranda still drove all the way from Walla Walla to see the show opening, and loved the technique, and Warhol’s elevation of everyday objects in some of the images. Speaking excitedly about seeing the works in person, Arranda broke off, saying, “Oh, gosh, he was so smart, I think he was really ahead of his time.”
Loretta Alexander is a retired painter herself, a Cayuse tribal member, and the mother of painter Philip Minthorne, whose has a vivid canvas hanging in an adjacent gallery room. She nods in approval at the Warhols’ temporary gallery.
“I liked it,” she said. “And the woman and the baby is the one I liked the best.”
That image, of an unidentified tribal woman with an infant on her back, is one of the few in the exhibition featuring an actual Native American person, notes Curator Randall Melton. Cowboys are represented with figures from Annie Oakley to Teddy Roosevelt. But, in choosing his tribal subjects, Warhol often opted for images like shield designs or an Indian head nickel. Melton wonders if the choice might have been intentional.
April Baer / Oregon Public Broadcasting Curator Randall Melton (second from left) and others pose for a group photo as well-wishers mark Tamastslikt’s 15th birthday.
“It’s interesting to me that he chose these people versus these objects,” Melton said. “I was talking with someone who said that’s how Indian people were seen, things to be moved out of the way for Westward expansion.”
Melton says a lot of people expressed surprise that a tribal museum might consider including a group of images with stereotypical imagery – sometimes painful imagery -for native people. He points to a panel featuring an iconic photo of Geronimo staring directly into the camera.
Melton says the photo was taken after the Apache leader was forced to surrender to the U.S. Army. But Melton says gallery viewers are invited to draw their own conclusions about Warhol’s treatment of the image, and consider what the artist was trying to say.
“The reasoning why he put these images together the way he did,” Melton said, “it’s a statement on the idea of the old west, how thats more myth than fact.”
Also, Tamastslikt’s Executive Director Bobbie Conner points out shows like this, open to interpretation, also present the museum another chance to do its job.
“One of the goals of the project,”Conner explains, “is to break down stereotypes, and to replace those stereotypes with new information.”
Tamastslikt’s regular exhibitions are geared toward cultural and historical exhibitions about tribes represented in the region.
Conner says the museum is doing pretty well, with over 600,000 visitors to the building. After 15 years, the museum is still paying down some of the debt associated with its construction. Conner says she takes deep pleasure seeing the direct access to history the museum unlocks for tribal members and others. Young people trained as teenaged tours guides when the museum opened now have young families of their own, and are bringing their own kids to shows like the Warhol exhibition.
Conner remembers riding horseback as a child in the field where the museum now stands, at the base of rolling hills, next to the tribe’s busy Wild Horse casino.
“Of all the things you could grow up to be,” she recalls, “this was never in my mind’s eye. Our tribe is less than three-thousand members, for us to have this 80 million resort here, including the museum is 180 degrees from when I was a child here. I’m still sometimes surprised I get to work here.”
Tamastslikt will keep Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians on display through October 26th.
When he set out to create a photo essay on “poverty in America” in 2005, photographer Aaron Huey had no idea what was in store for him. But what started as one story soon consumed his life as he became a committed activist devoted to raising awareness about Native American treaty rights. Just last month, he launched Honor the Treaties, a national campaign to combine art with advocacy on the topic.
Becoming an advocate for native rights wasn’t exactly his intention. A working photojournalist, Huey’s previous claim to fame had been walking across the United States with his dog. Yet he found himself constantly thinking about his work with members of the Lakota tribe living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the poorest places in the United States. Huey’s talk at TEDxDU in 2010 entirely focused on what he saw as the atrocities wreaked on the Lakota by the American government. He finished his talk in tears and with a powerful call to action: “Honor the treaties. Give back the Black Hills. It’s not your business what they do with them.” Mic drop. “Before that talk, I was still mostly just an observer,” he explained in a recent conversation with the TED blog. “I became an advocate on that stage. And that changed kind of everything for me.”
Honor the Treaties, or HTT, is Huey’s first foray into advocacy. With money from Fairey’s Obey fashion line — which supports one cause every year — HTT will provide grants to six Native American artists to help them distribute their work and spread their messages to a wider audience. HTT also plans to release free educational tools for middle and high school history teachers. Huey accepts his dream of the government actually returning land to the Lakota is unlikely, so he intends to focus on issues that might make a difference, such as campaigning against uranium mining, which exploits native lands to grave effects.
One of the most stomach-dropping moments in Huey’s talk is when he recounts that “wasichu,” the Lakota word for a “non-Indian” like himself, also means “the one who takes the best meat for himself.” For many Lakota, the color of Huey’s skin means he is not an appropriate person to advocate for these issues, and that has led to some difficult encounters along the way. Some have criticized him for depicting only the negative aspects of life on the reservation, others for exploiting the Lakota without giving them their own representation. As he puts it, “There is a lot of pain stored in this, and dealing with it in any way, you are releasing that. You’re triggering all of that pain again.” So why does he continue? He confesses he’s tried to stop a number of times. But he simply couldn’t forget about the injustice he’d seen. “I just couldn’t believe it was happening. It was like I’d witnessed a small version of Hiroshima and I kept having to go back to see it. Maybe for a long time I was just trying to understand it.” Now, he says, his goal is not only to focus on the Native American victims of treaty violations, but to build bridges with those who have no idea such violations even exist.
Has his experience at Pine Ridge changed the way he approaches his work? Huey, who still works on editorial projects as a photographer for National Geographic, is clear. “I don’t want to do stories that don’t have a heart,” he says. “I’m just not going to be satisfied with stories where I can’t be passionate about the subject, where I can’t make a difference.”
“Since the Talk”is a regular feature in which we go back to speakers at least one year after they gave their TED Talk. We explore progress and updates on the talk’s idea to find out what happened next. Read more Since the Talk posts »
Imagine a man dressed in stereotypically “traditional” Native American garb, donning a massive white feathered headdress, an ornamental tunic, and face paint. Now imagine that man performing mundane tasks in Washington, DC, like grocery shopping, riding an escalator or having lunch at a local restaurant.
The bizarre quandary is put forth by performance artist Gregg Deal, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe originally based in northwestern Nevada. In a striking film project titled “The Last American Indian on Earth,” Deal dresses himself in purposefully questionable attire and goes about his daily business, daring passersby to confront their own preexisting ideas about the modern Native American person.
“The purpose of this project is to raise questions about Native people, often viewed as a relic, and how they’re perceived
in the modern age,” Deal explains in a press statement about the work. “How will [people] react if they saw me, a Native dressed in buckskin and a headdress, doing something as mundane as shopping for cereal at the grocery store? How will they react if they saw me eating Chinese food in China Town or taking pictures of buffalo at the National Zoo?”
The project began filming last month and so far the reactions to Deal’s out-of-place appearance have included a pedestrian shouting “How!” and holding up a hand in salute, as well as a teenage girl exclaiming outloud, “Look, a real live redskin.” Another bystander chanted “hi-a-wat-ah-hi-a-wat-ah” upon seeing Deal in costume, prompting a videographer, Emmanuel Soltes, to follow him up for an explanation. As you can see in the clip above, the man proclaimed that he was not trying to be offensive, and if he had, he would have mentioned the Dallas Cowboys.
In other shots, Deal can be seen carrying signs that read “Thank the creator for Johnny Depp” or “White guilt release station, inquire with indian.”
“The performances will include a number of things that are simple, mundane, funny, political, over the top, satirical, ironic, and even sad,” Deal wrote on his Indiegogo campaign.
Deal plans to submit “The Last American Indian on Earth” for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. In the meantime, you can scroll through images of Deal in action below. Let us know your thoughts on the concept in the comments.
Roberta Conner of Tamastslikt Cultural Institute benefits from audience participation as women from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla showcase traditional dances on the last day of the Oregon State Fair. / Thomas Patterson / Statesman Jou
The Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation took center stage on the last day of the Oregon State Fair today.
Four members of the tribe, wearing traditional clothing such as eagle feathers, moccasins, shell earrings and braids, performed their native dances on the Americraft Cookware Stage.
Roberta Conner, director of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute who led the dancers, described the dances before each demonstration.
Conner said the tribes have been in Oregon for 10,000 years and have always been welcoming to visitors. When visitors would reach the tribes they would be offered food and water along with a performance of the welcome dance.
Kirke Campbell, of Corvallis, said his daughter wanted to be at the fair today to see the Umatilla dancers.
Campbell was randomly selected from the audience to participate in the owl dance.
“I was honored to be picked,” he said.
At the end of the performance, all of the audience members were asked to join in a circle dance. About 50 took advantage of the opportunity.
“(This) has been the best turn out for the three performances we have done,” Conner said.
When Lucy Jackson was just 2-and-a-half years old, she seemed like a perfectly normal, healthy youngster. But that all changed on Thanksgiving day in 2007 while the Mill Creek family vacationed in Florida.
Lucy Jackson, 8, of Mill Creek (center) is one of 300,000 children across the country fighting the pain and debilitating effects of juvenile arthritis (photo courtesy Jackson family)
“She woke up and couldn’t walk,” says her mom Katie. She was in serious pain.
Lucy had been perfectly healthy up to that point in her young life. At first, her parents thought she’d possibly been bitten by a bug or something and went to the emergency room. There, the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong, except for some indicators she might have some inflammation in her joints. He mentioned the possibility of juvenile arthritis.
“We thought he was crazy. We just had no idea. We’d never even heard of juvenile arthritis,” she says.
When they got back home, doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital confirmed the diagnosis. Lucy had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA).
JRA is just one of more than 100 different diseases or conditions that fall under the umbrella designation of arthritis – a complex family of musculoskeletal disorders that destroy joints, bones, muscles, cartilage and other connective tissues, hampering or halting physical movement – according to the Arthritis Foundation. The word “arthritis” literally means joint inflammation, but can involve the eyes, skin and gastrointestinal tract as well.
In Lucy’s case, it is often painful and debilitating.
“I think she pushes through things she shouldn’t, but she limps a lot, her joints are sore at the end of the day,” says Katie.
“It is very hard because it hurts,” says Lucy.
At first, she had to get joint injections several times a year and take various medications. But as she’s gotten older, the arthritis has spread through her body, affecting a number of joints. Some days the pain, and stiffness, gets so bad she has a hard time moving. Now, she has to get weekly injections and take daily medications, which often cause serious side effects.
“She gets tired, nauseous. It just knocks her out,” says Katie.
Lucy’s not alone. Children’s Hospital estimates nearly 300,000 kids in the United States have some sort of arthritis. Unfortunately, there is no cure. The goal of treatment is to relieve inflammation, control pain and improve a child’s quality of life.
“This is a tricky disease, it doesn’t have clear boundaries,” Katie says.
While it can be overwhelming, luckily Lucy’s family doesn’t have to manage her arthritis alone. The Arthritis Foundation is there to help her and the one in every four Washington residents who struggle every day with this serious health epidemic.
“Our goal is to help reduce the unacceptable pain, disability and other burdens of arthritis and related diseases. We offer information, events, research funding, advocacy activities and other vital programs and services,” says Dr. Steven Overman, a nationally renowned Seattle-based rheumatologist and Arthritis Foundation of Washington board member. “We believe the heavy toll arthritis takes is unacceptable, and that arthritis must be taken as seriously as other chronic diseases because of its devastating consequences.”
For Katie, the Arthritis Foundation has been a “blessing” for the entire family. “It’s opened up a community of people that were going through similar stuff that we were. It helped us connect and feel normal because they knew what it felt like. It felt like a family,” she says. “It is a blessing. They are such kind people. And their goal is so narrow focused. They want a cure. I love that they have this optimism and they have a plan.”
“I hope they can come up with a cure because I want to be a veterinarian,” Lucy says hopefully.
There is no cure on the immediate horizon. But with increased research, more doctors focusing on arthritis and advances in treatment, Dr. Overman says the goal is to reduce by 20 percent the number of people suffering from arthritis-related physical activity limitations. But they can’t do it alone. The Arthritis Foundation needs your help, whether it’s donating to one of their fund-raising events or volunteering.
“Not only will you make a world of difference now in the lives of people who are disabled by arthritis. You will also be paving the way for a future free of arthritis pain,” Overman says.
“I would love my daughter to grow up and not have this pain anymore. I would love for her to be able to share her story and have it be a recovery story,” says Katie.
That’s why KIRO Radio 97.3 FM, 710 ESPN Seattle, AM 770 KTTH, Les Schwab Tire Centers and Carter Subaru are proud to recognize The Arthritis Foundation of Washington as our Charity of the Month. You can learn more and how to help here.
Bahnhof — the Swedish Internet Service Provider embroiled in international controversy because it houses the Wikileaks servers — took another stand in support of leakers Tuesday, when it announced that it would endorse Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The U.S. has charged Snowden with theft and espionage for leaking secret documents that outline the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance programs. But to many, he’s a heroic whistleblower who has shone a light on a shadowy and excessive government effort to track our personal behavior online.
That’s how Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung sees it. To those who know him, that’s not a surprise. Three years ago, he was both a hosting provider and vocal supporter of Wikileaks, helping to house the operation in a Cold War-era nuclear bunker. His company hasn’t recommended people for Nobel Prizes before, but he says he decided to name Snowden because the former NSA contractor’s leaks have been so important.
Karlung admits that he doesn’t have high hopes that the prestigious award, set to be announced October 11, will be awarded to Snowden. He’s also not the first to suggest America’s latest leaker for the prize: a left-wing Danish party and aSwedish professor have already tossed Snowden’s name into the ring.
President Barack Obama, who has been put on the defensive by Snowden’s leaks,won the prize in 2009. There’s no doubt that awarding the prize to Snowden would be a seen as a major snub to him by the international community.
Chelsea Manning, the soldier who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified cables and intelligence documents to Wikileaks while stationed in Iraq, is another hero for government accountability groups. A petition to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Manning — who has been nominated for the award each of the past three years — has over 100,000 signatures. Earlier this month, Manning was sentenced to over three decades in prison.
But Manning’s leaks primarily concerned the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.
Snowden revelations, on the other hand, exposed actions against U.S. citizens and American allies. Secret documents revealed by Snowden routinely contradicted privacy assurances given by the Obama administration. A recent round of revelations showed that the NSA had monitored upwards of 50,000 conversations between U.S. citizens, not just between citizens and foreigners as the government had claimed.
The leaks also revealed extensive collaboration with British authorities. On Sunday, German magazine Der Spiegel announced that documents provided by Snowden show that the NSA was monitoring the United Nations complex in New York.
All this makes Snowden a likelier pick for the prize than Manning. But both are up against a slate of less controversial nominees, including teenage education activist Malala Yousafzai, and Russian human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva.
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leaks about the Vietnam War, which went public through the New York Times in 1971 (though he received the Gandhi Peace Award in 1978 and the Right Livelihood Award in 2006).
“In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago,” Ellsberg wrote in The Guardian earlier this year.
A whale-watching platform made of and sitting on sea ice north of Barrow. Photo by Ned Rozell.
Despite taking up as much space as Australia, the blue-white puzzle of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean is an abstraction to the billions who have never seen it. But continued shrinkage of sea ice is changing life for many living things. A few Alaska scientists added their observations to a recent journal article on the subject.
By Ned Rozell | Geophysical Institute
08/26/2013
Since 1999, the loss of northern sea ice equal to the size of Greenland is a “stunning” loss of habitat for animals large (polar bears) and small (ice algae and phytoplankton that feed a chain of larger creatures leading up to bowhead whales). So write the 10 authors that teamed to write “Ecological Consequences of Sea-Ice Decline,” featured in the August 2, 2013 issue of Science.
Eric Post of Penn State University, a former graduate student who studied caribou at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is the lead author on the paper. When sea ice hit its minimum extent in the satellite era about a year ago, it got him thinking about how the loss of ice affects living things. That’s when Post, now the director of the Polar Center, rallied other contributors, from polar bear biologists to atmospheric scientists, to bring their results together.
“I think all of us as authors learned quite a bit about the importance of sea ice loss,” he said by email. “Individually, we each had a pretty clear idea of the implications of sea ice loss for certain parts of the arctic system, but none of us really grasped the full scope of the problem.”
Starting at the smaller end of things, the scientists point out that freshening of the Arctic Ocean caused by melting of sea ice may cause smaller types of plankton to thrive.
Arctic foxes, great wanderers of sea ice, will be limited by less of it, which would decrease the spread of rabies they sometimes carry from Russia’s mainland to Svalbard.
Walrus, which suck clams out of their shells with piston-like tongues, use sea ice as a resting spot between dives to the ocean floor. In recent years, people have seen more walruses using shorelines as haul-out spots; U.S. Geological Survey scientists counted 131 carcasses at one of these sites in September 2009. They wrote that the deaths, perhaps because of exhaustion or trampling, “appear to be related to the loss of sea ice over the Chukchi Sea continental shelf.”
In Canada’s arctic, “later freeze-ups and increased shipping traffic should shift or prevent the annual migration of the Dolphin and Union caribou herd,” the Science authors wrote. Parasites that feed off the caribou might increase because of this, but diseases spread by wandering caribou might decrease.
Polar bears need sea ice to hunt their favorite food, seals. As the sea ice shrinks, polar bears may be driven to land, where brown bears might outcompete them or hybridize with them.
The two UAF scientists who added to the report are Uma Bhatt, who studies the atmosphere, and Skip Walker, an expert on tundra plants. They have both done work to prove that the loss of sea ice has made the Arctic a greener place.
How might that happen? With less ice acting as a mirror for sunlight, the darker ocean absorbs more heat, which in turn warms the coastlines touching the Arctic Ocean. That warm air encourages plants to convert sunlight into growth at a higher rate and lengthens the growing season. Woody shrubs are becoming more numerous and taller, shouldering out smaller tundra plants. And the most extreme region of far north plants — a swath of bryophytes, lichens, blue-green algae and a few other non-woody species that make up what Russians call “polar desert” — seems to be headed for extinction.
The study helped lead-author Post envision northern sea ice as he would a great boreal forest or caribou herd scattered across an arctic plain.
“Sea ice is a living system,” Post said. “And not only does it harbor and sustain life, which is obviously affected by its loss, its disappearance influences the climate systems that affect life on other parts of the planet. We’ve come a long way in understanding how the loss of vast areas of mature tropical rainforest affects everything from indigenous cultures to species to ecosystems; our views of sea ice loss need to catch up with that understanding.”
Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.
State and local politicians along with environmentalists toured the estuary while learning about the extensive undertakings that are part of the complex project that will restore the estuary to it’s natural function. Photo by Monica Brown
Tulalip, Wash. –
Restoring 400 acres of estuary land is not a mediocre task and has required years of dedication from many groups. The complexity of the restoration project has spanned fourteen years and is nearing completion. With just over a year left in the project the, the final stage is to lower the southern levee and remove the tide gate.
The tide gate and levee drain the fresh water from the land and prevent any water from flowing back into the estuary. With the completion this winter of the setback levee on the western side, the southern levee, which runs along the northern edge of Ebey Slough, will be breached and the tide gate removed allowing the saline and fresh water to mix.
The Tulalip Tribes, along with the City of Marysville, Army Corps of Engineers, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Washington State Department of Ecology, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service have collaborated on this project and representatives were invited along with local and state politicians to view the progress that has been made.
Visitors were led into the estuary and taken on a brief walk to view the channel opening. Afterwards they were invited to the Hibulb Cultural Center for lunch and a discussion the estuary project in its final stage.
The restoration’s completion is expected to increase the salmon and migratory bird population and bolster the native vegetation in the area.
The collaboration between tribal, local, county, state, and federal agencies will restore the natural water flow in the 400 acre estuary. Photo By Monica Brown
Mel Sheldon, Tulalip board chairman, reminisced during the lunch after the tour about when the project was just getting started 14 years ago. Photo by Monica Brown
History Colorado has made the right decision by closing, temporarily at least, its exhibit on the Sand Creek Massacre while officials consult with the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. We’re just sorry it had to come to this.
The clear lesson from this episode is that museum officials should have reached out earlier to the tribes and given them fuller opportunities to voice their concerns.
The History Colorado Center closed its Sand Creek Massacre exhibit earlier this year while it consults with tribal families. (Brennan Linsley, The Associated Press)
First, the very name of the exhibit, “Collision: The Sand Creek Massacre,” was offensive to many tribal members, who believed the event was being portrayed as an inevitable clash of cultures rather than an indefensible massacre.
On Nov. 29, 1864, U.S. Army soldiers led by Col. John M. Chivington attacked a village along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. Soldiers savagely butchered more than 160 Cheyenne and Arapaho, the bulk of them women, children and the elderly.
The massacre was defended at the time as revenge for Indian attacks on white settlers, including the bloody murders and mutilations of a family near present-day Elizabeth.
Nevertheless, a congressional commission later labeled the Sand Creek attack as “foul, dastardly and cruel.”
One of the most damning eyewitness accounts of the massacre came not from the survivors, but from Capt. Silas Soule, who wrote to Gen. Edward Wynkoop afterward.
“I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized,” Soule wrote. “One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain.”
Soule, who refused to participate in the massacre, was branded a coward and murdered the following year.
Originally, only an excerpt of his letter was included in the exhibit. The full letter was added after complaints from tribal representatives.
But tribal members still say they wanted more time to discuss the exhibit, which was opened over their objections.
The museum now says it is committed to working with the tribes on how to appropriately depict one of the most tragic events in American history.
That’s a good idea. However, the end product must reflect the best historical consensus of experts.
For the sake of history, and to respect those murdered and their descendants, we hope the museum gets it right this time.
The History Colorado Center closed its Sand Creek Massacre exhibit earlier this year while it consults with tribal families. (Brennan Linsley, The Associated Press)
When he set out to create a photo essay on “poverty in America” in 2005, photographer Aaron Huey had no idea what was in store for him. But what started as one story soon consumed his life as he became a committed activist devoted to raising awareness about Native American treaty rights. Just last month, he launched 
