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Dozens of summer chinook stolen from Chief Joseph Hatchery

Aug. 30, 2013

BRIDGEPORT — Two months after the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation opened the Chief Joseph Hatchery, thieves made off with dozens of summer chinook being held for broodstock.

Losing an estimated 42 adult fish that were ready to produce more than 73,000 young salmon for later release was bad enough.

But even worse, tribal officials are warning that whoever took the fish have exposed themselves to a cancer-causing chemical.

The fish, in a broodstock pen below the hatchery, were treated with Formalin and should not be handled or eaten, a notice posted on the Colville Tribes’ website says.

“If you believe you have consumed or handled these fish, then it is recommended that you should immediately seek medical attention,” it says.

Colville Tribal Police are offering a $500 reward for information leading to conviction of the poachers.

Tribal Chairman said he people are cautious of any salmon that may have come from an unlikely source to be wary, and contact tribal officials.

“We’ve done all we can on our end to try to educate the public that those fish aren’t safe,” he said.

The loss of these fish is also significant to the tribes’ effort to bring more fish to the upper Columbia River for both tribal and non-tribal fishermen.

“There’s no doubt it’s going to set us back,” Finley said.

Salmon are collected all season and held until they’re ready to be spawned. To get a good sampling of salmon that are likely to return at different times of the spring, summer and fall, the adults from which the eggs are taken should also be gathered from different times of the spawning season, he said.

“We literally have to wait until next year” to get salmon that will return at the same time, he said.

Tribal police are investigating the case, and the tribe will close the North Shore Access Road at Chief Joseph Hatchery at sunset every day due to the theft.

Anyone with information can contact tribal police at 634-2472.

MicroGREEN Polymers Raises $10M From Increasingly Active Tribal Investors

Benjamin Romano 8/29/13

The cup that holds your morning coffee is a seemingly simple item to be used and discarded. It probably hasn’t changed much over the years. No big deal, except that Americans go through 137 billion disposable beverage cups each, generating a tremendous amount of waste.

That looks like a huge opportunity toMicroGREEN Polymers, a company with a distinctly Pacific Northwest mix of technology, innovators, customers, and investors, now including two American Indian groups, which represent a new source of venture capital and private equity nationally.

The Arlington, WA-based manufacturer is raising $10 million from investors including theConfederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. The financing is part of a $20 million round, which began early this year with a $5 million investment from the Stillaguamish Tribe, and is expected to close with another $5 million investment, also from American Indian tribes, says MicroGREEN president and CEO Tom Malone. The company plans to use the cash to expand its line of recycled and recyclable hot and cold beverage cups, and to increase production capacity.

The Stillaguamish and Grand Ronde are part of a growing number of American Indian tribes putting their newfound casino wealth to work in more sophisticated ways, including through direct investment in local companies focused on long-term sustainability, among other values that match their own.

MicroGREEN aims to make up to 500 million InCycle cups a year—still just a drop in the bucket of the disposable cup market, which is expected to grow to 159 billion units by 2016, according to the company, which cites research from The Freedonia Group. That would generate around $25 million in sales, and the company forecasts it will turn profitable by mid-2014, “largely because this round of financing enables us to put in place the final production equipment to hit that full capacity,” Malone says.

It plans to nearly double its staff to 100 people by the end of the first quarter of 2014, with a third shift to be added “almost immediately,” he says.

UW Technology

MicroGREEN’s manufacturing process—developed by Greg Branch and Krishna Nadella as graduate students in the University of Washington mechanical engineering department more than a decade ago—injects food-grade carbon dioxide into recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic inside a pressure vessel. The polymer is then heated, allowing billions of tiny bubbles to form in the core of the plastic, expanding it into a material that can be made into insulated beverage cups marketed as InCycle.

The cups have 30 percent the density of solid plastic cups, Malone says, reducing the cost and global-warming impact of the end product. Moreover, the cup is easily recyclable at the end of its life—adhering to “cradle to cradle” design principles—unlike plastic-lined paper cups found in many coffee shops, which are difficult to recycle in most conventional municipal systems.

“All we’re doing is allowing recycled plastic to take another trip through the economy,” Malone says.

And since the MicroGREEN process gives the cups great insulation properties, there’s no need to grab a second cup or sleeve to protect hands from the hot drink inside.

“We can compete against all the legacy producers in a way that enables us to give the consumer what they’re looking for and for us to make a profit,” Malone says.

The company names customers including Redhook Brewery and Alaska Airlines, which will begin using InCycle cups for beverage service on flights beginning Oct. 1. Other airline orders are also in the works, Malone says.

The Alaska deal has helped expose the company to one of the world’s biggest users of disposable cups: Starbucks, whose coffee is served by Alaska and, according to Malone, has approved the InCycle cup to hold its brew. (Starbucks, which uses 4 billion cups a year globally, has a goal of making 100 percent of them reusable or recyclable by 2015. It’s actually a quite complex problem, as explained in this post updating the coffee giant’s progress.)

With this latest investment, MicroGREEN has raised $42 million. Earlier investors include WRF Capital, Northwest Energy Angels, and Waste Management, the garbage giant.

Tribal Investment

The story of MicroGREEN’s investment from American Indian tribes starts with proximity. After receiving an order from the Stillaguamish-owned Angel of the Winds in Arlington, MicroGREEN invited tribal representatives to visit its factory.

Koran Andrews, CEO of the Stillaguamish Tribal Enterprise Corporation, took a tour last year and recognized an investment opportunity in keeping with her organization’s goals of economic diversification and long-term sustainability. Bill Lomax, president of the Native American Finance Officers Association (NAFOA), says of the Stillaguamish: “For one of the smaller tribes in the country that maybe doesn’t get out into the national media as much, they’re probably one of the savviest.”

Malone says Andrews opened his eyes to the opportunity presented by the growing economic might of American Indian tribes. And it was the Stillaguamish who introduced MicroGREEN to the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde at a conference in Seattle earlier this year, says Titu Asghar, director of economic development for the Oregon-based group of 27 tribes and bands.

“MicroGREEN’s philosophy aligns with the tribe’s philosophy of returning back to the Earth, being ecologically sustainable, looking into green investments,” Asghar says.

Those goals inform the Tribe’s investment focus, along with a geographic concentration on historic lands forcibly ceded in the mid-19th century, which stretched from Northern California, through the mid-Willamette Valley, to southwest Washington.

The Confederated Tribes formed an economic development arm in 2011 as a way to diversify and invest revenues from casino and timber operations. It made direct equity investments in two other companies in 2012 and is exploring a few more opportunities currently, Asghar says. The Confederated Tribes target investments in the $5 million to $10 million range, in companies that are sustainable environmentally and economically, with stable management and cash flows. He would not disclose the size of the fund to be invested.

Rather than investing as a limited partner in an existing private equity or venture capital fund, the Confederated Tribes decided to keep their investing activities in house, performing their own due diligence and relying on existing legal, finance, and public relations capabilities. That’s part of being good stewards of tribal dollars, a responsibility the Tribal Council—which has final say in all investments—would never leave to outsiders, says public affairs director Siobhan Taylor.

Malone says companies seeking investment from tribes must be aware that each one is different.

“One step is getting to know the tribe, getting to know particularly the decision-making process and the leadership council,” he says. “It’s also an investment based not only on due diligence, but also on trust in the management team. Getting to know them, them getting to know us—that’s very important to both parties.”

While they may indicate the beginnings of a trend, the Stillaguamish and Confederated Tribes’ direct investments in a cleantech manufacturer remain relatively uncommon nationally, says Lomax, of the NAFOA. “We haven’t seen necessarily a lot of investments like that to my knowledge,” he says. “We’ve certainly seen a big interest in clean energy.”

In the past, few tribes had much extra money, so venture capital investing wasn’t relevant. “And then the casinos came along and that created wealth for a great number of tribes,” he says.

In 2012, Indian gaming revenue was $27.9 billion, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission.

“We’ve seen a real evolution in the tribal acumen when it comes to investing over the last 10 to 15 years,” Lomax says. Over that time, tribes have accumulated significant wealth from their casinos and associated businesses. They are now looking to broaden their portfolios beyond plain vanilla investments in stocks and bonds, he says.

One of the most sophisticated efforts is Growth Fund Private Equity, the Durango, CO-based business investing arm of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which has invested in technology companies including Seattle-based RFID systems makerImpinj.

“I think generally, a lot of tribes are now starting to make allocation to passive private equity and venture-type investments,” Lomax says, though he cautions that tribes aren’t moving to this kind of investing en masse.

As in the case of MicroGREEN, tribes tend to focus investments locally, which makes them a promising emerging source to support local innovation, particularly in sustainability and cleantech, he says.

South Carolina officers in Oklahoma for Indian custody case

Charleston County Sheriff Al Cannon sends deputies, SLED agent to Oklahoma in Veronica case

Glenn Smith The Post and Courier

August 29, 2013

Charleston County Sheriff Al Cannon confirmed today that he has sent two of his deputies and a State Law Enforcement Division agent to Oklahoma in connection with the contentious custody case concerning 3-year-old Veronica.

Cannon confirmed the information in response to questions from The Post and Courier. He said the team, which left this morning, was dispatched as a precautionary measure in the event their assistance was needed in connection with upcoming court proceedings in the case.

The sheriff stressed that he has not been informed of any major development or action in the case. Rather, his office has been in ongoing contact with a variety of law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma and felt a responsibility to have some presence on hand to provide assistance, he said.

Cannon would not say when hearings in the case have been scheduled or what specific proceedings deputies planned to attend.

On Aug. 16, an Oklahoma judge barred attorneys and their clients from discussing the dispute pitting Veronica’s adoptive parents Matt and Melanie Capobianco of James Island, against her biological father, Dusten Brown of Nowata, Okla. A mediation agreement was reached during a three-hour hearing that day, but the details have remained under seal.

The Capobiancos flew to Oklahoma earlier this month and have remained there ever since. It appears they have been allowed to visit with the girl who lived with them for 27 months, but it’s unclear when or how often that has occurred, The Tulsa World reported this week.

The newspaper also reported that an attorney appointed to represent Veronica’s interests has asked a Cherokee County court to suspend those visits until further hearings can be held.

Adding to the confusion, Holli Wells, the judge who brought the two sides together for the April 16 hearing and imposed the gag order, recently filed an “order of recusal,” removing herself from the case, The Tulsa World reported.

Brown, a member of the Cherokee tribe, used the heritage he shares with Veronica to get custody in late 2011 through the Indian Child Welfare Act. The 1978 law was meant to keep Indian children connected to their native cultures.

But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this summer that the ICWA didn’t apply to him because he hadn’t been in Veronica’s life. He has argued that the child’s mother had refused his attempts to get involved when she brushed off his marriage wishes.

Courts in South Carolina later finalized the Capobiancos’ adoption of Veronica, but Brown has refused to give up the girl. His attorneys said he should be allowed to challenge the decree’s enforcement in Oklahoma, where Veronica has lived for the past 19 months.

Brown is wanted on a Charleston County custodial interference warrant for failing to turn over Veronica to the Capobiancos. His attorney has said he plans to challenge the legality of that warrant.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has said she would speed along Brown’s extradition to Charleston if he didn’t let the Capobiancos see the girl.

Reach Glenn Smith at 937-5556 or Twitter.com/glennsmith5.

Undercover officers to patrol Seahawks games

August 29, 2013

The Associated Press

SEATTLE — Seattle police say they will deploy undercover police officers at Seahawks games this year after multiple reports of unruly fans last season.

The department says patrols will begin with Thursday’s pre-season game against the Oakland Raiders. Officials say police received complaints about fan-on-fan violence and harassment in and out of the stadium, some of which was witnessed by off-duty officers attending the games, last year.

One of those episodes involved two off-duty Bellevue police officers who used profanity at a uniformed Seattle police officer and stadium workers and were later escorted out.

Police officials say officers will be looking for people taking team rivalries too far.

Native American issues that go beyond the Redskins controversy

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images

With football season on the horizon, the usual headlines commence: injuries, trades, and…style guides? Slate, The New Republic, and Mother Jones have all said they will no longer use the term “Redskins” in their publications, citing its long history of offensiveness to Native American readers.

Well-recycled AP poll numbers suggest that four out of five Americans think the Redskins should keep their name as it is. It’s an issue, many Native activists agree – but certainly not the only one. Here’s what activists point out the public also needs to know:

By Ariana Tobin

August 27, 2013 Bustle.com

Mascot stories can be a distraction.

Adrienne Keene, a member of the Cherokee nation and the PhD student behind the high-traffic blog Native Appropriations, says these team mascot stories are usually all the same.

“Because [it] affects non-native folks, mostly,” Keene told Bustle. “So that tends to make the news. And most of the coverage of Native peoples in it has been portraying us as whiners or as people who need to get over it.”

But as Keene has argued many times, the story misses the larger point: For Native Americans, this isn’t a new conversation, and it has never been just a question of one sports team name’s racist etymology. It’s a question of understanding the larger context that allowed the team to be called the Redskins in the first place. Among the many nuances of dynamic, diverse, and contemporary Indian culture, there is the bigger point: Cultural appropriations are way more widespread than mascots.

Just walk into Urban Outfitters.

As a student at Harvard, the California-raised Keene often found herself frustrated by her classmates’ ignorance about Native issues. One day, walking by a Cambridge Urban Outfitters, she realized why.

“They had all of these dream catchers, and totem poles, and moccasins, and I kind of put things together, and realized the reason that most of the folks I encountered out here didn’t ever think about contemporary native people as a living, breathing part of their society was because the only images they ever encountered were these things,” Keene said. “They didn’t ever see pictures of real native people, so because of that our real challenges and issues didn’t exist in their minds.”

She decided to start cataloguing images of Native cultures that had little connection to what she knew as “Nativeness”: generic approximations of beaded-and-feathered Plains Indians from a past era; fictionalized characters that had little to do with tribes past or present; hyper-sexualized Pocahontases that spared no thought for the 1 in 3 Native women who have been raped or sexually assaulted. As she expected, she didn’t have to look far. From the runways of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, to the hipsters at Coachella, to the ice-cream freezer at Safeway, she found caricatures of tribal cultures passively condoned.

In response, Native American activism is alive and well.

In the U.S. alone, there are 566 tribes with a wide array of issues and histories specific to each community. However, as younger members of these tribes connect through a new, social-media based conversation, there does seem to be at least one common concern: The continuing, passive ignorance of wider American culture, which has not yet noticed — let alone registered — this new moment in Native American activism.

And most of it’s online in in plain view. According to Native leaders, bloggers, and advocates of all ages, never before has there been such a wide swath of Indian country paying attention to representations of their cultures. Keene and her cohort are not Native American protestors frozen in the late nineteenth-century, building fortresses against invading armies of outsiders. Nor are these the militant, disenfranchised American Indian Movement protestors of the 1970s, burning down buildings and pointing guns at FBI agents. AIM does still exist, but in growing numbers, another group of Native Americans are operating alongside their traditional counterparts: they are lawyers, comedians, designers,professors, journalists, flash mob organizers, and even federal U.S. government staffers. They are Internet-savvy 20-somethings engaged in a thoroughly modern, hashtag-heavy conversation with other indigenous peoples around the world.

Through now-infamous live-in “acculturation” schools, coerced adoption and foster-care, many young Natives were cut off from their tribal communities by practices that supposedly ended with the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. Less well-known, however, are the consequences of the U.S. government’s 1956 Indian Relocation Act, designed to encourage assimilation. With a combination of funding cuts to Reservations and incentives for those who chose to leave, tribal members left for cities from Denver to Minneapolis. As the New York Timesreported in April, the trend has continued: 70 percent of registered Native Americans live in cities, as opposed to 45 percent in 1970.

“The relocation effort and campaign by the U.S. government — it’s falling apart right now because of social media,” journalist Simon Moya-Smith told Bustle. “You know, that’s how we’re reconnecting. Through social media, through things like Twitter and Facebook, we find each other, we socialize, we converse, and that divide and conquer begins to dissolve. It’s a wonderful thing to watch as it happens.”

Still, mainstream media doesn’t do a great job covering other Native issues.

Twitter can only do so much.

More than a generation of Native Americans grew up away from the centers of their communities, often attending public schools with standard American history curriculums that rarely mention tribes after the turn of the twentieth century. Indian reservations are also some of the most under-connected spaces in the country, limiting the conversation’s reach.

“What media misses in general is that we are extremely diverse. We don’t all have the same opinion on issues. It’s just like American politics, and the more access we have to social media, the clearer that becomes,” Managing Editor at Native Sun News in South Dakota Brandon Ecoffey said.

The U.S. government has work to do, too.

Of course, there are still-lingering wounds from the years of forced adoption, alcohol restrictions, and land battles.

And then there’s the big issue: Poverty. According to Kevin Blackbird-Steele, the youngest member of his tribal council at Pine Ridge, the sequester in Washington has had a disproportionate effect on Native American reservations, and it’s worrisome. Statistics from Pine Ridge put unemployment at 85 percent.

But figuring out why poverty continues to plague wide swaths of Native America demands nuance. Without it, poverty and alcoholism becomes the flip-side of the idealized “Pocahontases” sold all over; creating what blogger Rob Schmidt calls a “poverty vs. pageantry” dichotomy. That said, poverty remains a major issue for Native country — and it’s exacerbated by less-than-consistent coverage by mainstream news organizations.

Andrew Vondall, a member of the Crow nation and a Georgetown student who interns on Capitol Hill, says it’s sometimes difficult even to convince legislators that their Native American constituents exist, let alone pay adequate attention to their issues. In his words:

You’ve got all these newspapers planting big stories from New York and California about how much money they have. You see the big huge casinos in Connecticut or just outside of L.A. And then there are stories in the news about how oh ‘Every single tribal member gets this much money’ or ‘Every single tribal member gets free college,’ and lo and behold, they come to find out later on that those tribes consist of maybe only 300 people, where a tribe like mine, the Crow tribe in Montana, or the Sioux tribe in South Dakota, consist of thousands of members who get no money. So it just makes it, if people see that, when they see a bill about Indian spending, they call their Congressman and say, ‘Those Indians get money already, why are we giving them more?’

Editor’s Note: Everyone quoted in this piece either explicitly gave the author permission or put their words in the public domain. However, our author has asked us to pull a section featuring an open letter and Tweet from a Native activist uncomfortable being highlighted on our site. Ethically, there is nothing wrong with including statements made in public. But sometimes misrepresentation is in the eye of the beholder, but at the request of the speaker, we’ve now removed her quote.

34 wild bison released on Montana Indian reservation

34 genetically pure bison were released into a 1,000 acre pasture Aug. 22, 2013, on the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana.(Photo: Rion Sanders, Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune)

These bison have no cattle genes, are closest to ones that used to roam the Great Plains.

Karl Puckett, Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune August 23, 2013

FORT BELKNAP AGENCY, Mont. — Genetically pure bison are back at Fort Belknap Indian Reservation after a century’s absence.

Tribal officials released 34 wild bison Thursday that were free of cattle genes.

“It’s a great day for Indians and Indian Country,” said Mark Azure, who heads the bison program for the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes that call the 1,055-square-mile reservation home.

Soon, animals in the herd were just brown specks on the horizon.

The bison were transported from Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Last year, officials from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks transplanted 70 bison from Yellowstone National Park to Fort Peck, ultimately planning to transport half of those to Fort Belknap. The Yellowstone animals are remnants of pure bison that once roamed the entire state.

Legal action from ranching and property-rights interests held up the transfer to Fort Belknap. But earlier this summer, the Montana Supreme Court said the transfers were legal, setting up Thursday’s bison return.

“It helped us, our ancestors, survive out here on the prairie,” Azure said of the bison. “So to be able to take that next step and return the favor, so to speak, it feels good.”

Of the 34 bison released in a 1,000-acre pasture with an 8-foot fence, all but two were hauled in a semi-trailer. Two big bulls were separated from the herd and transported separately. One cow was injured and was not released.

Tribal officials see the animals as a way to help manage bison that leave Yellowstone Park each year and are hazed or killed. They also hope to perpetuate long-term survival of the species in Montana.

Fort Belknap will manage a herd of about 150 of the wild bison and use them as seed stock for other agencies or tribes looking to reintroduce bison, said Mike Fox, a tribal councilman for the northern Montana reservation that has about 7,000 enrolled members.

“On the cultural side, they took care of us at one time, and now it’s time for us to take care of them,” he said.

Blood tests were taken Tuesday and Wednesday, and results came back Thursday with all of the animals negative for disease. When the results arrived, the bison drive from Fort Peck to Fort Belknap ensued.

Rows of pickup trucks and cars lined up Thursday as if they were at a drive-in movie to watch the animals charge out of the trailers through a chute and then to freedom. Some of the animals snorted and stomped inside the trailers while a few had to be prodded to escape. A pipe ceremony was conducted to welcome the animals.

“I wouldn’t miss this, gosh,” said Patty Quisno, a tribal council member.

Warren Bell, driver of the semi-trailer that hauled most of the bison, said he departed Fort Peck Indian Reservation 30 miles north of Wolf Point, Mont., for the 180-mile journey west to Fort Belknap. Azure, driving a pickup truck hauling a trailer with the two large bulls, was following about an hour behind.

“Well, they’re pure buffalo. They’re not mixed with anything,” Bell said of the high interest in the animals as kids and adults peered through slits in the trailer to get look at the big beasts at Horse Capture Community Park.

The bison were trucked first to a community gathering at the park, then on to the horse pasture, which is 16 miles south of Fort Belknap Agency. A police vehicle with a flashing light led the semi-trailer down the highway followed by a long line of vehicles.

The tribe has a commercial herd of 500 bison, but they have cattle genes. They’re kept in a separate pasture.

Fox said the last few bison that remained in the area disappeared around 1910.

“It’s a homecoming for the animals,” Fox said.

Elite Native American Firefighters Join Crews At Yosemite

by KIRK SIEGLER npr.org

August 27, 2013

Listen on NPR here

One of the firefighting teams trying to contain the Rim Fire in and around Yosemite National Park is the Geronimo Hotshots team from San Carlos, Ariz., one of seven elite Native American firefighting crews in the U.S.

On the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, firefighting jobs are one of only a few ways for many young men to earn a living. For team member Jose Alvarez Santi Jr., 25, the work is rewarding — but being away from home fighting fires can be tough.

“I don’t really see it as a job. Being out away from my family — that’s the part that I’m down about, is just being away,” Santi said not long before the team got the call to fight the Rim Fire.

Santi has a 3-year-old son. He’s only seen him for a dozen or so days this entire spring and summer. The 20-member crew works a fire for 14 days, then it’s a long trip home for maybe one or two days of rest, then back out again. This late in the season you can see this is starting to take its toll on a lot of the guys. But they know it’s also good money. In a good year, you could make $40,000. That goes far here.

The Geronimo Hotshots are one of seven elite Native American firefighting crews in the country.Kirk Siegler/NPR — The Geronimo Hotshots are one of seven elite Native American firefighting crews in the country.
Kirk Siegler/NPR

“Of course the wife’s lovin’ it,” said senior firefighter Tom Patton. “Right now, just can’t wait to get out of here. I wanna go on another fire. It’s our only means of supporting our family.”

As on most reservations, jobs are hard to come by, and most families live well below the poverty line. There are a few jobs with the tribal government or at the small casino on the outskirts of the reservation. But much of the community is dependent on the fire season.

“It’s Essential”

The only restaurant in town is the San Carlos Cafe. It’s in a worn stone building built by the U.S. government at the turn of the 20th century. The menu on the wall features the hot shot breakfast burrito. The owner, Jo Lazo, says the firefighters are looked up to here.

“I like to say our Apache men are the strongest of all firefighters. I think it just goes down through genealogy and the struggle that we had many, many years ago. We never go down without a fight,” she says.

Lazo is proud and pragmatic. The Hotshot crew members are regulars here, and that’s good for business. But the tribe and the Bureau of Indian Affairs also employ hundreds more seasonal firefighters. During a big fire year, everyone has more money in his or her pocket, including Lazo. Her cafe caters all the meals for the crews if there’s a wildfire near here.

“And it’s sad when there is a fire because we do lose a lot of vegetation, but it’s essential and it’s been essential for years,” Lazo says.

It’s hard to find someone around San Carlos who doesn’t have a father or brother or sister who’s a wildland firefighter. In fact, by late last week, the town seemed almost empty of anyone between 18 and 35.

“Yeah, right now everybody’s out on the fire. They’re up in Idaho, up in Oregon, up in Washington,” says Frank Rolling Thunder. He has fought fires since the ’70s. He says for a lot of people here, firefighting isn’t just good money — it’s a ticket off this isolated reservation. And opportunities like those don’t come along that often.

“First time we went out to Yosemite National Park … there were sequoias and I’d never seen them,” Rolling Thunder says. “It gives me the opportunity to go see all kinds of different places — the Cascades, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood.”

Representing The San Carlos Apaches

The team had only a short two days of R&R before getting the call to go to Yosemite. As word spread from man to man at the tribal forestry office, the buzz in the room changed. A little anxiety was added to the anticipation. A few guys drifted away to make last minute phone calls. A couple more moved their motorcycles into the garage. They’ll be gone for a while.

“Right now’s the time where everybody kinda double checks, makes sure they got everything they need, make their last calls to their family,” Santi says.

For Santi, this is the moment when it becomes clear what it means to be a Geronimo Hotshot. “I hold the name up high. Wherever I go, my family, they’re proud of what I do,” he says.

Santi says it’s not just about fighting fire or saving people’s homes. It’s about representing his people off the reservation. He says the crew meets a lot of people who have never heard of the San Carlos Apaches or their history.

“We come from a people that were pushed around, shoved into reservations, and to me, I want our people to show that we can do a lot of things other than being pushed around and shoved around,” he says. “It’s a good feeling.”

The white trucks with blue letters spelling out Geronimo are all packed. No more time to talk. Ten men to each “buggy” as they call them. They’ll drive through the night to California and then it’s on to the front lines of the Rim Fire.

NASA Will Crash Helicopter for Science Wednesday: Watch It Live

The dummies will test seatbelts and other technologies during a crash test in which the helicopter will be dropped from a height of about 30 feet.Credit: NASA Langley / David C. Bowman — The dummies will test seatbelts and other technologies during a crash test in which the helicopter will be dropped from a height of about 30 feet.
Credit: NASA Langley / David C. Bowman

[WATCH LIVE @ 1:00 p.m. ET: NASA’S Helicopter Crash Test]

LiveScience Staff | August 27, 2013 05:17pm

In the name of science and safety, NASA researchers on Wednesday (Aug. 28) will drop a dummy-packed helicopter from 30 feet in the air and you can watch it wreck live.

The test, which is aimed at improving aircraft safety features like seats and seat belts, will be broadcast at 1 p.m. ET from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. FULL STORY: NASA Will Crash Helicopter for Science Wednesday

Students reject healthy school lunches, forcing U.S. districts to drop out of multibillion-dollar program

BY CAROLYN THOMPSON, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, AUGUST 28, 2013

After just one year, some schools around the country are dropping out of the new federal healthier lunch program, complaining that so many students turned up their noses at meals packed with whole grains, fruits and vegetables that the cafeterias were losing money.

Federal officials say they don’t have exact numbers but have seen isolated reports of schools cutting ties with the $11-billion National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for meals served and gives them access to lower-priced food.

Districts that rejected the program say the reimbursement was not enough to offset losses from students who began avoiding the lunch line and bringing food from home or, in some cases, going hungry.

In this Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 file photo, a select healthy chicken salad school lunch, prepared under federal guidelines, sits on display at the cafeteria at Draper Middle School in Rotterdam, N.Y. After just one year, some schools across the nation are dropping out of what was touted as a healthier federal lunch program, complaining that so many students refused the meals packed with whole grains, fruits and vegetables that their cafeterias were losing money. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink, File)

“Some of the stuff we had to offer, they wouldn’t eat,” said Catlin, Ill., Superintendent Gary Lewis, whose district saw a 10 to 12 per cent drop in lunch sales, translating to $30,000 lost under the program last year.

“So you sit there and watch the kids, and you know they’re hungry at the end of the day, and that led to some behaviour and some lack of attentiveness.”

In upstate New York, a few districts have quit the program, including the Schenectady-area Burnt Hills Ballston Lake system, whose five lunchrooms ended the year $100,000 in the red.

Near Albany, Voorheesville Superintendent Teresa Thayer Snyder said her district lost $30,000 in the first three months. The program didn’t even make it through the school year after students repeatedly complained about the small portions and apples and pears went from the tray to the trash untouched.

Districts that leave the program are free to develop their own guidelines. Voorheesville’s chef began serving such dishes as salad topped with flank steak and crumbled cheese, pasta with chicken and mushrooms, and a panini with chicken, red peppers and cheese.

In Catlin, soups and fish sticks will return to the menu this year, and the hamburger lunch will come with yogurt and a banana — not one or the other, like last year.

Nationally, about 31 million students participated in the guidelines that took effect last fall under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

Dr. Janey Thornton, deputy undersecretary for USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, which oversees the program, said she is aware of reports of districts quitting but is still optimistic about the program’s long-term prospects.

“Many of these children have never seen or tasted some of the fruits and vegetables that are being served before, and it takes a while to adapt and learn,” she said.

The agency had not determined how many districts have dropped out, Thornton said, cautioning that “the numbers that have threatened to drop and the ones that actually have dropped are quite different.”

The School Nutrition Association found that one per cent of 521 district nutrition directors surveyed over the summer planned to drop out of the program in the 2013-14 school year and about three per cent were considering the move.

Not every district can afford to quit. The National School Lunch Program provides cash reimbursements for each meal served: about $2.50 to $3 for free and reduced-priced meals and about 30 cents for full-price meals. That takes the option of quitting off the table for schools with large numbers of poor youngsters.

The new guidelines set limits on calories and salt, phase in more whole grains and require that fruit and vegetables be served daily. A typical elementary school meal under the program consisted of whole-wheat cheese pizza, baked sweet potato fries, grape tomatoes with low-fat ranch dip, applesauce and 1 per cent milk.

In December, the Agriculture Department, responding to complaints that kids weren’t getting enough to eat, relaxed the 2-ounce-per-day limit on grains and meats while keeping the calorie limits.

At Wallace County High in Sharon Springs, Kan., football player Callahan Grund said the revision helped, but he and his friends still weren’t thrilled by the calorie limits (750-850 for high school) when they had hours of calorie-burning practice after school. The idea of dropping the program has come up at board meetings, but the district is sticking with it for now.

“A lot of kids were resorting to going over to the convenience store across the block from school and kids were buying junk food,” the 17-year-old said. “It was kind of ironic that we’re downsizing the amount of food to cut down on obesity but kids are going and getting junk food to fill that hunger.”

To make the point, Grund and his schoolmates starred last year in a music video parody of the pop hit “We Are Young.” Instead, they sang, “We Are Hungry.”

It was funny, but Grund’s mother, Chrysanne Grund, said her anxiety was not.

“I was quite literally panicked about how we would get enough food in these kids during the day,” she said, “so we resorted to packing lunches most days.”

Payday lender Western Sky Financial to stop funding loans on Sept. 3.

By Danielle Douglas,

August 26, 2013 The Washington Post

Western Sky Financial, a prominent online lender that offers short-term loans at triple-digit interest rates, said it will stop funding loans on Sept. 3 amid mounting legal battles with authorities in several states, including Maryland.

The decision arrives as state and federal regulators are clamping down on payday lending, a burgeoning industry that operates under a patchwork of laws. These loans carry high interest rates and balloon payments that can trap Americans in a cycle of debt, critics say. Industry groups say payday lenders are being persecuted and argue that they serve a need that is not being met by traditional banks.

Officials at Western Sky did not respond to requests for comment, but the firm explicitly said on its Web site that it will no longer provide loans as of September.

Western Sky has been the subject of several lawsuits challenging its lending in states with strict usury laws that cap interest rates on loans. The company is owned by a Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member and operates on the tribe’s South Dakota reservation. It claims that the tribe’s sovereign immunity makes the company exempt from following state law.

This month, New York state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, sued the company, alleging that it violated state licensing and usury laws that cap interest rates on loans at 25 percent.

Schneiderman accused the company of charging New Yorkers annual interest rates upward of 355 percent. The lawsuit aims to stop Western Sky from engaging in lending in the state and to void the loans it has already made. The attorney general’s office said the case will go forward despite the company’s decision to stop lending.

Similar actions have been taken against the firm in Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota and Maryland. In 2011, the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation issued a cease-and-desist order against Western Sky after receiving a barrage of consumer complaints.

“There has been significant expansion of online lenders, and the driver is technology,” said Mark Kaufman, Maryland’s commissioner of financial regulation. “There is no doubt that the economics of the business change when you can sit behind a computer and make thousands of loans, versus sitting behind a desk and make a few in a day.”

Advocacy groups have long been concerned about the ability of payday lenders to circumvent state laws. Once states began introducing interest rate caps, some lenders migrated online or moved their operations offshore to sidestep laws. Other lenders began forging relationships with Native American groups to take advantage of their sovereign-nation status.

State authorities have stepped up efforts to go after the lenders, especially those operating under Native American sovereignty, with more enforcement actions and lawsuits.

Benjamin M. Lawsky, head of the agency that regulates banks in New York state, this month ordered 35 online and Native American lenders to stop providing online payday loans in the state. In response, two Native American groups filed lawsuits against the state last week, saying its actions violated their federal status.

As states redouble their efforts to police payday lenders, consumer and industry groups are waiting to see what steps the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will take to enhance federal oversight.

The bureau has supervisory and enforcement authority over storefront, online and bank payday lenders. In April, it took a step closer to imposing rules to govern the industry with aresearch report on the payday-lending landscape. In one key finding, the report said the average borrower took out 10 payday loans in a year and paid $458 in fees.

Peter Barden, a spokesman for the Online Lenders Alliance trade group, said the backlash against payday lenders could deprive millions of Americans of access to small-dollar loans.

“If regulators pressure banks to stop processing these legal payments, it would cut off an important credit choice for millions of underserved consumers,” he said. “It could also send a chilling message to banks who are legally processing these and other transactions.”

Uriah King, vice president of state policy at the Center for Responsible Lending, contends that community banks and credit unions offer small-dollar loans at better rates than payday lenders. Payday loans, he added, are often used to cover recurring expenses, which can trap consumers in unsustainable loans.

“A two-week balloon loan priced at 400 percent is just inherently unsuitable for people who are in the red every month with their basic expenses,” King said.