Press release, National Congress of American Indians
Washington, DC – Today marks the one year anniversary of a great victory for tribal nations and Native women. On March 7, 2013, President Obama signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (VAWA 2013). At the signing ceremony, the President underscored the “inherent right [of tribal governments] to protect their people.”
For the first time since the 1978 Oliphant decision, VAWA 2013 restored tribal authority to investigate, prosecute, convict, and sentence non-Indians who assault their Indian spouses or partners in Indian country. The law created a pilot project that enabled three tribes to begin exercising this authority last month.
Reflecting on the progress over the past year, NCAI President Brian Cladoosby remarked, “Today is a day to celebrate what we have achieved together and commit ourselves to ensure the ongoing success of this important law. It acknowledges that tribal nations are the best equipped to ensure public safety in our communities and provides the tools we need to protect Native women.”
“VAWA 2013 is a tremendous victory. I am grateful to those who have stepped up to take the lead in the implementation phase,” stated Terri Henry, Chairperson, Tribal Council of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and Co-Chair of the NCAI Task Force on Violence Against Women. “I want to congratulate the three tribes participating in the Pilot Project and remind everyone, we still have work to do.”
Juana Majel Dixon, Councilwoman, Pauma Band of Indians and Co-Chair of the NCAI Task Force on Violence Against Women added, “To all our Native sisters throughout Indian Country, we have given a decade of our lives’ work—and this could not have been done without all of you. We hold a sacred trust as sovereign Native women to our people.”
NCAI Executive Director, Jackie Pata added, “VAWA 2013 does not mark the end of our efforts to combat domestic violence in Indian Country, it is an important step along the way. Tribal nations remain steadfast In the important work of protecting our Native women and securing our communities.”
Youths’ suicides rattle Indian country: The silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer numbers of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times the average on some reservations.
By Sari Horwitz, Washington Post
SACATON, ARIZ. The tamarisk tree down the dirt road from Tyler Owens’s house is the one where the teenage girl who lived across the road hanged herself. Don’t climb it, don’t touch it, admonished Owens’s grandmother when Tyler, now 18, was younger.
There are other taboo markers around the Gila River Indian reservation — eight young people committed suicide here over the course of a single year.
“We’re not really open to conversation about suicide,” Owens said. “It’s kind of like a private matter, a sensitive topic. If a suicide happens, you’re there for the family. Then after that, it’s kind of just, like, left alone.”
But the silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer number of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times on some reservations.
A toxic collection of pathologies — poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcoholism and drug addiction — has seeped into the lives of young people among the nation’s 566 tribes. Reversing their crushing hopelessness, Indian experts say, is one of the biggest challenges for these communities.
“The circumstances are absolutely dire for Indian children,” said Theresa M. Pouley, the chief judge of the Tulalip Tribal Court in Washington state and a member of the Indian Law and Order Commission.
Pouley fluently recites statistics in a weary refrain: “One-quarter of Indian children live in poverty, versus 13 percent in the United States. They graduate high school at a rate 17 percent lower than the national average. Their substance-abuse rates are higher. They’re twice as likely as any other race to die before the age of 24. They have a 2.3 percent higher rate of exposure to trauma. They have two times the rate of abuse and neglect. Their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder rivals the rates of returning veterans from Afghanistan.”
In one of the broadest studies of its kind, the Justice Department recently created a national task force to examine the violence and its impact on American Indian and Alaska Native children, part of an effort to reduce the number of Native American youth in the criminal justice system. The level of suicide has startled some task force officials, who consider the epidemic another outcome of what they see as pervasive despair.
Last month, the task force held a hearing on the reservation of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Scottsdale. During their visit, Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-highest-ranking Justice Department official, and task force members drove to Sacaton, about 30 miles south of Phoenix, and met with Owens and 14 other teenagers.
“How many of you know a young person who has taken their life?” the task force’s co-chairman asked. All 15 raised their hands.
“That floored me,” West said.
A ‘trail of broken promises’
There is an image that Byron Dorgan, co-chairman of the task force and a former senator from North Dakota, can’t get out of his head. On the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota years ago, a 14-year-old girl named Avis Little Wind hanged herself after lying in bed in a fetal position for 90 days. Her death followed the suicides of her father and sister.
“She lay in bed for all that time, and nobody, not even her school, missed her,” said Dorgan, a Democrat who chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. “Eventually she got out of bed and killed herself. Avis Little Wind died of suicide because mental-health treatment wasn’t available on that reservation.”
Indian youth suicide cannot be looked at in a historical vacuum, Dorgan said. The agony on reservations is directly tied to a “trail of broken promises to American Indians,” he said, noting treaties dating back to the 19th century that guaranteed but largely didn’t deliver health care, education and housing.
“The children bear the brunt of the misery,” Dorgan said, adding that tribal leaders are working hard to overcome the challenges. “But there is no sense of urgency by our country to do anything about it.”
At the first hearing of the Justice Department task force, in Bismarck, N.D., in December, Sarah Kastelic, deputy director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, used a phrase that comes up repeatedly in deliberations among experts: “historical trauma.”
Youth suicide was once virtually unheard of in Indian tribes. A system of child protection, sustained by tribal child-rearing practices and beliefs, flourished among Native Americans, and everyone in a community was responsible for the safeguarding of young people, Kastelic said.
“Child maltreatment was rarely a problem,” said Kastelic, a member of the native village of Ouzinkie in Alaska, “because of these traditional beliefs and a natural safety net.”
But these child-rearing practices were often lost as the federal government sought to assimilate native people and placed children — often against their parents’ wishes — in “boarding schools” that were designed to immerse Indian children in Euro-American culture.
In many cases, the schools, mostly located off reservations, were centers of widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse. The transplantation of native children continued into the 1970s; there were 60,000 children in such schools in 1973 as the system was being wound down. They are the parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers.
Michelle Rivard-Parks, a University of North Dakota law professor who has spent 10 years working in Indian country as a prosecutor and tribal lawyer, said that the “aftermath of attempts to assimilate American and Alaska Natives remains ever present . . . and is visible in higher-than-average rates of suicide.”
The Justice Department task force is gathering data and will not offer its final recommendations to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on ways to mitigate violence and suicide until this fall. For now, West, Dorgan and other members are listening to tribal leaders and experts at hearings on reservations around the country.
“We know that the road to involvement in the juvenile justice system is often paved by experiences of victimization and trauma,” West said. “We have a lot of work to do. There are too many young people in Indian country who don’t see a future for themselves, who have lost all hope.”
The testimony West is hearing is sometimes bitter, and witnesses often come forward with great reluctance.
“It’s tough coming forward when you’re a victim,” said Deborah Parker, 43, the vice chair of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington state. “You have to relive what happened. . . . A reservation is like a small town, and you can face a backlash.”
Parker didn’t talk about her sexual abuse as a child until two years ago, when she publicly told of being repeatedly raped when she “was the size of a couch cushion.”
“A majority of our girls have struggled with sexual and domestic violence — not once but repeatedly,” said Parker, who has started a program to help young female survivors and try to prevent suicide. “One of my girls, Sophia, was murdered on my reservation by her partner. Another one of our young girls took her life.”
Stories of violence and abuse
Owens recalls how she used to climb the tamarisk tree with her cousin to look for the nests of mourning doves and pigeons — until the suicide of the 16-year-old girl. The next year, the girl’s distraught father hanged himself in the same tree.
“He was devastated and he was drinking, and he hung himself too,” Owens said.
She and a good friend, Richard Stone, recently talked about their broken families and their own histories with violence. When Owens was younger, her uncle physically abused her until her mother got a restraining order. Stone, 17, was beaten by his alcoholic mother.
“My mother hit me with anything she could find,” Stone said. “A TV antenna, a belt, the wooden end of a shovel.”
Social workers finally removed him and his brothers and sister from their home, and he was placed in a group home and then a foster home.
Both Owens and Stone dream about leaving “the rez.” Owens hopes to get an internship in Washington and have a career as a politician; Stone wants to someday be a counselor or a psychiatrist.
Owens sometimes rides her bike out into the alfalfa and cotton fields near Sacaton, the tiny town named after the coarse grasses that once grew on the Sonoran Desert land belonging to the Akimel O’Odham and Pee Posh tribes. She and her friends sing a peaceful, healing song she learned from the elders about a bluebird who flies west at night, blessing the sun and bringing on the moon and stars.
One recent evening, as the sun dipped below the Sierra Estrella mountains, the two made their way to Owens’s backyard. They climbed onto her trampoline and began jumping in the moonlight, giggling like teenagers anywhere in America.
But later this month on the reservation, they will take on an adult task. Owens, Stone and a group of other teenagers here will begin a two-day course on suicide prevention. A hospital intervention trainer will engage them in role-playing and teach them how to spot the danger signs.
“In Indian country, youths need to have somebody there for them,” Owens said. “I wish I had been that somebody for the girl in the tamarisk tree.”
On March 15, 2014 a very important vote will take place on the Deming, Washington Reservation of The Nooksack Indian Tribe. The Tribe has attempted a mass disenrollment of more than 300 enrolled tribal members. Represented by Gabe Galanda of Galanda Broadman, several lawsuits have been filed in tribal court and in federal court. Elections of the Tribal Council and its officers, however, could alter the balance of power and the attempted purge.
Galanda says that the elections are essentially a referendum on the disenrollment. “The results of the primary signaled that the current Council lacks a mandate for that mass disenrollment,” he says. “In the general election the Nooksack People, who have been silenced in all political forums for the last fourteen months, will rightfully have a say in the matter.”
In the case of most American Indian tribes, historically the tribes have had the power to determine tribal membership. For centuries tribes “banished” people as punishment for serious offenses. In recent years, however, a trend has been evident with tribes canceling membership, or “disenrolling” tribal members due to claims of inferior membership qualification.
While the most recent trend evidences the most cases arising in California, the practice is not exclusive to California and there are cases throughout the United States. Recent mass disenrollments are spreading along the West Coast to Washington and Oregon as well. Although there is no way to know exactly how many Indians have been disenrolled, the numbers are substantial. One activist group says at least 5,000 tribal members were disenrolled in California alone between 2000 and 2008.
Motivation for the disenrollment trend nationally is hotly debated. Some experts point to internal personal squabbles or political factional differences as the source of the trend. Others point to the simultaneous enrichment of tribes from casino gambling. Tribal governments universally deny that greed or power is motivating disenrollment, declaring that they are upholding membership rules established in valid internal constitutions. As proof, they say they are removing people with tangential connections to the tribe, who joined primarily for benefits, services, scholarships and in some instances monthly checks financed by the casino profits.
Galanda believes that the federal law, the Indian Civil Rights Act and the Tribe’s own Constitution guarantees the Nooksack 306 constitutional rights that have been violated and he’s hoping to convince the courts that he’s right. So far he has been unsuccessful in the tribal courts but neither Galanda nor his clients are giving up.
KNOXVILLE – Tennessee’s got a state bird, a state flower, a pair of state rocks and several state songs. So why not a state artifact?
That designation likely will soon go to an ancient figure at the University of Tennessee’s McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture.
The 700-year-old Native American sandstone statue is called “Sandy” by the museum and is often used as a symbol for the center. It’s an ancient sandstone figure of a kneeling, older man carved sometime between 1250 and 1350 AD. The 18-inch figure from prehistory’s Mississippian period likely represents a chief.
“Sandy” was found in a Wilson County farm field in 1939. It’s on exhibit as part of the McClung’s permanent exhibit, “Archaeology and the Native Peoples of Tennessee.”
A bill that would make Sandy the official state artifact passed the state Senate and House and awaits Gov. Bill Haslam’s signature. The bills were introduced by legislators at the request of the Tennessee Council for Professional Archaeology.
“Naming Sandy as an official Tennessee symbol acknowledges the state’s ancient past, and will encourage Tennesseans to learn more about and work to help preserve our shared history,” TCPA President Tanya Peres, a Middle Tennessee State University associate professor of anthropology, said in an announcement about the bill’s passing. “Listing Sandy as the state artifact also honors the legacy and accomplishments of Native Americans who lived in Tennessee for more than 10,000 years before the arrival of European settlers.”
“The McClung Museum is thrilled to receive this recognition of Sandy and our museum,” said McClung Director Jeff Chapman. “Sandy is such an important example of prehistoric Native American art, and we are proud to be the stewards of this piece of Tennessee history.”
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Indian Land Buy Back Program has been lauded as the “hallmark” of the $3.4 billion Cobell v. Salazar settlement. As the Buy Back Program now lifts off in hurried fashion at Makah and Pine Ridge, the program dishonors both the letter and spirit of Cobell.
Cobell settled more than 500,000 tribal members’ trust land and asset mismanagement claims, dating back to the 1890s. Not tribal government claims; tribal member claims. Now, copy.9 billion in tribal member settlement monies has been allocated to help tribes “buy back” those members’ allotted or restricted fee lands. In practice, these “buy backs” are accomplished through the forced sale of tribal members’ ancestral lands. Injustice to individual Cobell class members aside, assuming that financially supporting a tribe will benefit that tribe’s members, one would hope that the buy-back wealth would be spread throughout Indian Country. After all, those 500,000 members of the Cobell class surely represent the vast majority of the 566 federally recognized tribes.
But it has recently come to light that Interior has limited the lion’s share of the copy.9 billion in buy back funding to only 40 tribes. Interior’s outside appraisers recently let it slip that “the program will exclude reservations east of the Mississippi and in Alaska.” Interior was quick to retract that statement, but the genie was already out of the bottle. If that were not bad enough, other swaths of Indian Country with large Indian populations west of the Mississippi, like all of California Indian country (save the Washoe Tribe, which is headquartered in Nevada), are excluded from the program.
Cobell, for better or worse, was fought for all of Indian Country, not just 40 tribes. For the sake of the 500,000-plus Cobell class members whose land and related claims were extinguished for eternity, tribal communities west of the Mississippi, in Alaska and California, and elsewhere, all deserve to share in the Buy Back wealth.
The fact is that the Buy Back Program and its goal to consolidate fractionated Indian lands have little to do with what is right or fair. The program is not really about affording “benefits of those lands for the tribes and their members” as Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes once professed; or “expand[ing] tribal economic development opportunities across Indian Country” as Assistant Secretary Kevin Washburn said more recently. The program is designed to serve the best interests of the United States; to resolve “enormous administrative difficulties for the government” – and related liability – caused by fractionation. Cobell v. Salazar, 573 F.3d 808 (D.C. Cir. 2009). To feign otherwise is dishonest.
As to the letter of the law that is Cobell, the Buy Back Program fares no better. In 2004, the U.S. District Court for the District Court of Columbia in Cobell v. Norton, affirmed that “Interior may acquire land from individual Indian owners to consolidate fractional ownership interests and thereby ‘lessen the number of owners.’” 225 F.R.D. 41 (D.D.C. 2004). However, the court went on to hold that the United States’ trust-fiduciary responsibility requires that the “individual Indian owner of trust lands . . . give truly informed consent to the sale of trust corpus” before any sale is approved by Interior.
The Cobell court made clear that any such sale requires clear “communication between individual Indian trust-land owners and agents of Interior” and that “trust beneficiaries ought not have to make the decision to sell trust assets without access to all the relevant information,” including answers to any questions or concerns they may have. More generally, legal scholar Derek Haskew explains that the United States’ fiduciary duties to tribal member landowners includes consultation, which “can roughly be understood as communication by Indian beneficiaries of their desires to the federal trustees who make ultimate determinations about what happens with the lands Indians occupy.” 24 AM. IND. L. REV. 21 (2000).
Because the Cobell court found such consultation, communication and information wanting, it felt compelled, as a matter of law, “to guarantee that Interior adheres to its fiduciary duties, and to ensure that trust beneficiaries receive the full value of conscientious behavior by their Trustee.”
Yet, despite Cobell’s clear instruction, Interior now embarks on a hastily developed “plan” to cause the sale of individually owned Indian lands. “Mass appraisal valuation techniques” will be utilized, amidst “categorical exclusion” from any federal environmental review. Federal regulations that require Indian land sales to occur by “auction or negotiation” are not being brought to light. Cobell v. Norton, supra. Pivotally, “offer packages” will be mass mailed to individual Indian owners with, among other things, a cover letter, conveyance deed and related sale instructions, as well as “self-addressed return envelope, postage prepaid, if the individual chooses to return…the signed and notarized Deed.” In not so many words: “sign here.”
Mass mailings do not effectively facilitate “communication by Indian beneficiaries of their desires to the federal trustees.” Offer packages with self-addressed return envelopes do not afford a landowner “all the relevant information” to make any informed decision. These one-size-fits-all sale mechanisms do not “ensure that trust beneficiaries receive the full value of conscientious behavior by their Trustee.” In all, the buy back process is simply not designed to obtain “truly informed consent” from tribal member landowners. It is designed to serve federal interests – and it dishonors Cobell.
Gabriel S. Galanda is the managing partner at Galanda Broadman, PLLC, an American Indian-owned law firm.
Quilceda marsh, currently owned by The Tulalip Tribes, looking southwest down Steamboat Slough of the Snohomish River toward Port Gardner, Wa. Photo by K. O’Connell 2013
By Monica Brown Tulalip News Writer
TULALIP, WA-Wetlands are widely agreed to be some of the most beautiful places on Earth, with an array of wild and plant life that spark joy in the hearts of many.
“For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports.” -Sandra Postel, founder and director of Global Water and Policy Project, author of “Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity”, 2003.
Wetlands can be considered the hub of life, where land and water meet you will find an overabundance of life flourishing. Currently most wetlands are threatened with rising sea levels, pollutants and development.
A recent study conducted by Restore America’s Estuary, on the Snohomish estuary, begins to pinpoint the essential need for healthy estuaries and their link to global health. For the study, soil samples (from Smith Island, Spencer Island and Qwuloolt to name a few) were taken in order to establish a count of CO2 emissions that are captured and stored within estuaries that vary in health condition.
Image Source: Big Sky Carbon
There are numerous ways to remove carbon emissions, most are natural and work through plant life such as forests while others are less natural and work through power plants that capture CO2 and bury it back into the earth or ocean. Coastal wetlands have been labeled as Blue Carbon sequesters and have been found to greatly reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions. Throughout the USA, tidal marshes, tidal forests, saltmarsh grasses, seagrasses, and the mangroves along the Gulf Coast are more effective at sequestering carbon (up to a 100 times faster) and are able to store it for longer periods of time as compared to forests.
Image Source: bragio.com
“This report is a call to action. We need to invest more substantially in coastal restoration nationwide and in science to increase our understanding of the climate benefits which accrue from coastal restoration and protection efforts,” said Emmett-Mattox, Senior Director for Restore America’s Estuaries and co-author on the study. “Sea-level rise will only make restoration more difficult and costly in the future. The time for progress is now.”
Through this study a blue carbon working group can be established which will focus, for years to come, on restoring and monitoring Pacific Northwest region coastal wetlands in order to continue collectingand analyzing data which will help to influence better-quality land management, update policies that could one day apply to wetlands nationally.
Due to human impact, coastal wetlands are disappearing at a rapid rate, “at current conversion rates, 30–40% of tidal marshes and seagrasses and nearly 100% of mangroves could be lost in the next 100 years.” (Estimating Global “Blue Carbon” Emissions from Conversion and Degradation of Vegetated Coastal Ecosystems.Pendleton et al., 2012). Although, both are time consuming, maintenance of estuaries is more cost effective than restoring and with rising sea levels (estuary health and life depend on average sea levels), estuaries are losing ground and time has become an issue as well. This national loss of wetlands has branded the Snohomish Estuary as an excellent case study for restoration and estimates of carbon storage.
“It is very fitting that we are implementing some of the world’s leading Blue Carbon research here in Puget Sound,” said Steve Dubiel, Executive Director of EarthCorps. “We have always known that wetlands are a kind of breadbasket, thanks to the salmon and shellfish they support. Now we are learning that they are also a carbon sponge.”
“Coastal Blue Carbon Opportunity Assessment for Snohomish Estuary: The Climate Benefits of Estuary Restoration” finds that currently planned and in-construction restoration projects in the Snohomish estuary will result in at least 2.55 million tons of CO2 sequestered from the atmosphere over the next 100-years. This is equivalent to the 1-year emissions for 500,000 average passenger cars. If plans expanded to fully restore the Snohomish estuary, the sequestration potential jumps to 8.8 million tons of CO2 or, in other terms, equal to the 1-year emissions of about 1.7 million passenger cars. In addition to the climate benefits outlined by the study, healthy and restored estuaries act as spawning grounds and nurseries for commercially and recreationally important fish and shellfish species, provide storm buffers for coastal communities, filter pollutants, and provide habitat for numerous species of fish and wildlife, as well as recreational opportunities for hundreds of millions of Americans annually.
Billy Frank junior, a Nisqually Tribal elder passes out hugs in 2011 to students at Wa He Lut School in Nisqually. The school sits just off the Nisqually River at Franks’s Landing, once the frontline of the Northwest fish wars in which Billy Franks was arrested many times for fishing off the Nisqually reservation. (The News Tribune file) DEAN J. KOEPFLER
By Lisa Bauman, Associated Press
OLYMPIA, Wash. — American Indian tribal members arrested while exercising their treaty fishing rights before 1975 would get the chance to clear their criminal records under a bill headed to Gov. Jay Inslee’s desk.
House Bill 2080 passed the Senate unanimously Wednesday. It passed the House in February.
The measure would allow tribal members to apply to the sentencing court to expunge their related misdemeanor, gross misdemeanor or felony convictions. Family members and tribal officials could also seek a vacated criminal record on behalf of a deceased person. The court would have the discretion to vacate the conviction, unless certain conditions apply, such as if the person was convicted for a violent crime or crime against a person.
Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, said the bill corrects a mistake.
“It’s the closest this branch of government can come to an apology,” he said.
Tribal members and others were arrested in the 1960s and 1970s while asserting their right to fish for salmon off-reservation under treaties signed with the federal government more than 100 years before. At the time, however, those acts violated Washington state regulations, and there were raids by game wardens and other clashes with police. The Northwest fish-ins known as the “Fish Wars” were modeled after civil rights movement sit-ins and were part of larger demonstrations to assert American Indian rights nationwide.
Sen. John McCoy, D-Tulalip, said he knew a tribal elder who wanted to travel to Canada but couldn’t due to a felony conviction for asserting his fishing rights.
“He’s passed away but I’m sure his family members would appreciate it,” he said of the bill.
Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2014/03/05/3018302/senate-oks-fish-wars-bill-heads.html#storylink=cpy
Klamath, Calif – Abby Abinanti squints at her docket. “The court is going to call — the court is going to put on its glasses,” she says dryly, reaching to grab her readers and snatch some candy from a staff member.
As chief judge of the Yurok Tribal Court, Abinanti wears no robe. On this day, she’s in jeans and cowboy boots, her silver hair spilling down the back of a black down vest. In contrast to her longtime role as a San Francisco Superior Court commissioner, she doesn’t perch above those who come before her; she shares a table with them.
“Hi, big guy. How are you doing?” she softly prods a 29-year-old participant in her wellness court, which offers a healing path for nonviolent offenders struggling with substance abuse.
Abinanti has watched Troy Fletcher Jr. battle bipolar disorder and methamphetamine addiction, land in jail and embrace recovery under the tribe’s guidance. She’s known his grandmother since before he was born.
Though that would be cause for recusal in the state system, here it’s pretty much the point. Her most common question for court newcomers: “Who’s your mom?”
“Here we have a village society,” Abinanti says of California’s largest tribe, “and the people who help you to resolve your problems are the people you know.”
Native American jurisprudence has evolved since tribes began to regain their sovereignty, returning to traditional values of respect, community support and responsibility, and collective healing — for victims, perpetrators and the circle of lives they touch.
Abinanti, who in 1974 became the first Native American woman admitted to the State Bar of California, has been at the forefront.
Yurok Tribal Court Chief Judge Abby Abinanti presides over a session of wellness court in Klamath, Calif. Wellness court, a part of the tribal court, offers a healing path for nonviolent offenders struggling with substance abuse. Click for more photos
“When you’re looking to heal, you look wherever you can to find medicine, and one of those places is in the culture and practices of the community,” says retired Utah appellate court Judge William A. Thorne Jr., a Pomo-Coast Miwok who teamed with Abinanti in the 1980s to train tribal court personnel nationwide.
Now, at 66, Abinanti has returned to her home on sacred Requa Hill above the fog-wisped mouth of the Klamath River. (Though she tried to retire from the San Francisco bench in 2011, she was recently asked to return every other week, so she commutes.)
“What happened is we lost touch with our responsibilities,” Abinanti says. “You take responsibility for what you did…. And if you can ask for help, I’m willing to give you a hand. I won’t ever say you’ve used up your chances.”
Abinanti speaks often of “historical trauma” — wounds passed wordlessly through generations with an accumulating grief and the urge to salve it with alcohol and drugs. It is what Yurok tribal Chairman Thomas O’Rourke calls “the sickness of this land.”
Her family had its share. Her maternal grandfather, Marion Rube, was described in press accounts as among “the notorious criminals of early California.” Captured after a 1922 bank heist, he escaped six years later from a San Quentin prison road camp and was shot to death in southern Oregon.
Ostracized, his wife and three daughters fled their village. The girls were shipped off to government-run boarding school. Sorrow shadowed them; harsh deaths claimed them. One, intoxicated, froze in a snow bank; another, newly sober, caught on fire after backing into a heater. Abinanti’s mother, who struggled with alcohol, depression and forced electroshock treatments, died while detoxing.
Her history, rarely shared, informs Abinanti’s compassion. “It’s painful to be a drunk, to not meet your promises, to not look your kids in the eye,” she says. “To disrespect them on top of that doesn’t do any good.”
Abinanti was studying journalism at Humboldt State University when she saw a flier for a program for Native American students at the University of New Mexico School of Law.
Thorne met her in 1975 when he was interning at the Ukiah office of California Indian Legal Assistance. Just two years out of law school, she was the group’s board president.
“In walked this powerful Indian woman,” Thorne recalls. “She was this image of what I could seek to become, an Indian person who was a force to be reckoned with and yet just very kind.”
Appointed to the San Francisco bench two decades ago, she has specialized in family court and juvenile dependency. She has also served as a judge or magistrate for four other Western tribes.
She first came home to Yurok country in 1978 to set up the tribe’s fishing court, then again in 1993 when the tribe earned federal recognition. The Yurok Tribal Court was launched three years later, and in 2007 she became its chief judge.
Among her innovations: the first tribal-run program in the nation to help members expunge their criminal records; and California’s first tribal child support program, which allows for non-cash alternatives to support payments — such as donations of fish or manual labor.
Yet her greatest impact has arguably come through wellness court. Some participants seek out the program on their own in the course of recovery; others, like Fletcher, come through a rare partnership with the state criminal justice system: Abinanti’s decades on the bench have earned her crucial credibility with judges, prosecutors and probation officials, allowing her staff to pull tribal members out of criminal court and bring them home.
Fletcher was facing an arson charge for burning brush when a tribal court attorney secured his release from a Eureka jail cell in a pre-trial diversion agreement and brought him into Abinanti’s program. He is now stable on psychiatric medication, off meth and in a sober-living home.
“I used to be afraid to go into court, afraid that they were going to take something from me,” Fletcher says outside tribal headquarters, his large hands working a rope into a monkey’s fist. “Here, they’re trying to give something back.
“I’ve got the whole tribe behind me,” he adds. “When I have to answer to my people, it makes me want to do better.”
Abinanti never swears in witnesses, explaining: “If you’re Yurok and you lie, that’s on you.”
On this day, her general court is in session, arranging restitution for various infractions. Participants can demand a trial, but most tend to tell Abinanti what they did. Then they talk about how to best “settle up.”
So it goes with Taos Proctor, 32. Towering and broad-chested, with full-sleeve tattoos, he sits across from Abinanti, looking unhappy. His violation: fishing after the season had closed.
Of 73 fish seized, she orders that 53 be donated to a program for elders. The rest, which belonged to a relative of Proctor’s, will be returned to him to give back to the rightful owner.
Proctor is also a wellness court client. Though Abinanti pokes him harshly with a long finger during a court break and quips to a visitor that he has “the manners of a stump,” she is fiercely proud of him.
Pulled into the meth life, he was committed to a county boys’ ranch at 16. Next came the California Youth Authority and prison. Released at 25, he bounced in and out of jail before he found himself facing a third strike.
The charge turned out to be unsubstantiated, and with help from the tribal court’s criminal attorney, he pleaded to a lesser count. It marked the first time Del Norte County Superior Court Judge William H. Follett agreed to hand a felony case to wellness court as a condition of probation.
“I know I can trust her,” Follett says of Abinanti. “If people are continuing to not do their program or to do drugs, she’ll know to send them back…. She’s taught me that there’s another way of doing things.”
Proctor became a fish buyer, took a job felling trees and, at Abinanti’s insistence that he give back, hosts a weekly Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He has been off meth for 15 months.
“Judge Abby knows me. She works with me,” he says. “I’ve still got a lot of issues that I’m working on, but I don’t have to hide them anymore.”
Court staff members are pulling for him. “I don’t want to let them down,” Proctor says. “I want to help my community because for so long, I didn’t.”
Abinanti also presses participants to remember — or discover — what it means to be Yurok. It’s a journey the tribe is taking collectively, as the language and ancient dances are revived.
On a recent day, she asks one man who has been drumming and stoking the fire at sweat lodge ceremonies if he’d listened to the CDs of Yurok songs she had compiled for him.
“I’d like you to hear ’em,” she tells him. “I think that would help.”
Abinanti could use a rest. Next to her armchair is a stack of books she longs to devour. But important work remains.
Of more than 5,000 Yurok tribal members, only a handful are bar-certified attorneys; and of the attorneys working for the tribal court, Abinanti is the only Yurok.
The tribal council recently approved a pilot project that Abinanti brokered with online Concord Law School- Kaplan University. Under the agreement, 10 tribal members will enroll by September, receiving tailored supervision to help them pass the bar exam. Four began last month. In return for tuition, which Abinanti must now raise from donors, participants agree to continue working for the tribe for five years once they pass the bar.
“I don’t want to be diverted,” she says. “I want to do what needs to be done at home that right now only I can do. If I do a good job, then that won’t be true anymore…. I’m here. I need people behind me.”
She knows, after all, that she won’t be around forever.
Last summer, Abinanti established a family burial ground on her Requa Hill property, and after more than four painful decades brought her mother’s remains home.
One day Abinanti will be buried next to her, and she hopes the resting place — filled with the music of the Pacific — ends the suffering of her maternal family line.
Marine mammal researchers have learned over the years that the gray whale spring migration from their breeding grounds in Baja, Calif., is not all black and white. It’s, pardon the expression, several shades of gray.
More than 20,000 of these marine giants start out each year in the late winter and early spring on a 5,000- to 6,800-mile journey to their feeding grounds in the Bering, Beaufort and Chukchi seas. It’s one of the longest mammal migrations worldwide by creatures that reach 50 feet long and can weigh 40 tons. They don’t all make it nonstop or in its entirety for a variety of reasons.
John Calambokidis, an Evergreen State College graduate and one of the founders of Cascadia Research, a well-respected, Olympia-based marine mammal research group, has more than 25 years of experience figuring out what the gray whale migration is all about. Generally, it breaks down into four categories of whales, he explained to me.
The vast majority of the grays do make it to the three seas that ring northwestern Alaska, spending the summer months opening their filter-feeding mouths to feast on a varied diet of crustaceans, crab larvae, small fish and marine worms. These are some of the same whales that draw the oohs and aahs of whale-watchers at land and at sea all along the ocean migration route.
But there’s another genetically distinct group of grays — they’re known in scientific circles as the Pacific Coast Feeding Group. As their name suggests, they spend the spring, summer and fall spread off the outer coast from Northern California to northern British Columbia, exhibiting feeding behavior apparently learned from the maternal side of their lineage.
A third and smaller group has become known as the Puget Sound Group. This group of about a dozen, primarily male gray whales veers off from the larger migratory return like clockwork each early spring to hang out in the shrimp-rich waters of Possession Sound between Whidbey Island and Everett.
The first of the Puget Sound visitors was seen this past weekend. This old bull whale is nicknamed “Little Patch.” He’s been the first to show up for the past two years. He’ll soon be joined by others, many of them individuals that Calambokidis and his colleagues first starting seeing nearly 25 years ago.
Marine mammal scientists rely on the unique and stable pattern of mottling on each whale’s body to tell the individuals apart.
The dozen or so whales in the Puget Sound Group complete the migration. They hightail it to Alaska in late May or early June.
The Puget Sound Group provides one of the best chances of seeing gray whales in the wild. Island Adventures has been offering gray-whale-watching tours out of Everett for the past decade. They’re currently scheduled to run through May 18. The company claims a 99.5 percent success rate at seeing a gray whale. It just goes to show that Little Patch and his companions are as reliable precursors to spring as the Lenten rose, daffodils and crocuses in the flower beds at Horsefeathers Farm.
Calambokidis said Island Adventures has been helpful with gray whale research over the years, helping researchers to identify individual whales.
The fourth group of migrating grays whales is known as the stragglers. Whales that fall into this group are often sick or injured and die without completing the migration. The southern end of Puget Sound is often their final stop before they wash ashore.
I’ve grown to dread news of a gray whale in South Sound waters. Invariably, the story of gray whales in our midst has a sad ending.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF MOVE
This just in from the Capitol Land Trust: Eric Erler, executive director of the Olympia-based nonprofit, is stepping down from the post after 13 years. Erler will remain with the land trust in a new capacity, working to build financial support and new partnerships for the land conservation group.
The land trust board is accepting applications through March 24 to fill the director role. For more information about the job description and how to apply, visit the land trust website at capitollandtrust.org.
Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2014/03/06/3018911/sorting-out-the-feeding-habits.html#storylink=cpy
Provision enables tribal leaders to call on President for major disaster and emergency response
Press release: United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs
(U.S. SENATE) – U.S. Senators Jon Tester (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and Mark Begich (D-AK) this week expressed concern over the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) lack of timely implementation of their tribal disaster declaration provision in the Sandy Recovery Improvement Act (SRIA).
Tester and Begich’s letter to FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate emphasizes the need to ensure Native American tribes and Alaska Natives are true partners in the emergency management community. In January 2013, Congress passed Tester and Begich’s provision, which allows Indian tribes to directly request federal assistance after a natural or man-made disaster. Under previous law, tribes had to work through state governments to seek assistance after a disaster on their land.
“We are disturbed by the long delay in promulgating guidance and urge FEMA to move quickly to finalize it,” Tester and Begich wrote. “As the original authors of legislation to amend the Stafford Act to allow the Chief Executive of a federally recognized tribe to make a direct request to the President for a major disaster or emergency declaration, we recognized the importance of promoting tribal sovereignty and highlighting the pressing needs of tribal communities. As with any new federal provision, guidance from the relevant agency is an important step in ensuring the policy is applied consistently across the country.
“Following the release of draft guidance, FEMA must move swiftly to implement an effective outreach strategy that recognizes the unique needs of different Tribes across the country. Tribal communities range in membership, geography, and organizational structure and a “one size fits all” approach to consultation will not produce meaningful feedback. As members of both the HSGAC and Appropriations Subcommittees with jurisdiction over FEMA we are keenly aware of the need for adequate resources to conduct critical outreach and we urge you to keep us informed of any resource gaps that may affect your ability to meet your required targets.”
Full text of the letter sent by Senators Tester and Begich to FEMA Administrator Fugate is below:
March 4, 2014
Federal Emergency Management Agency
Dear Administrator Fugate,
We are writing to you today to acknowledge the work FEMA has done to implement the direct tribal disaster declaration provision of the Sandy Recovery Improvement Act (SRIA), P.L. 113-2 [Sec. 1110], but to also strongly encourage faster action, more outreach and better communication with tribal nations as guidance is developed.
As the original authors of legislation to amend the Stafford Act to allow the Chief
Executive of a federally recognized tribe to make a direct request to the President for a major disaster or emergency declaration, we recognized the importance of promoting tribal sovereignty and highlighting the pressing needs of tribal communities. As with any new federal provision, guidance from the relevant agency is an important step in ensuring the policy is applied consistently across the country. We are disturbed by the long delay in promulgating guidance and urge FEMA to move quickly to finalize it.
Following the release of draft guidance, FEMA must move swiftly to implement an effective outreach strategy that recognizes the unique needs of different Tribes across the country. Tribal communities range in membership, geography, and organizational structure and a “one size fits all” approach to consultation will not produce meaningful feedback. As members of both the HSGAC and Appropriations Subcommittees with jurisdiction over FEMA we are keenly aware of the need for adequate resources to conduct critical outreach and we urge you to keep us informed of any resource gaps that may affect your ability to meet your required targets.
While consultationwith tribal communities on the SRJA provisions is the most urgent matter at hand, FEMA must sustain its efforts to work with Alaska Native and Native American tribes. In order to ensure tribal communities are true partners in the emergency management community, we urge FEMA to hire full-time, tribal liaisons for each FEMA region. As members of both the Committee on Indian Affairs and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, we are uniquely positioned to advocate on behalf of tribal communities across the country and understand each FEMA region must approach outreach differently. By positioning a tribal liaison in each region, communities can be active partners and provide localized expertise on disaster related issues. They must be involved in the development and execution of policy from the beginning and cannot simply be used to validate decisions made internally at FEMA.
We appreciate the work FEMA has done to address the unique needs of Alaska Native and Native American tribal communities and we look forward to working with your Agency as new policies are implemented. Thank you again for your efforts and please contact my office with any questions or concerns.
