Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File/Associated Press – FILE – In this Aug. 4, 2009, file photo, Washington Redskins helmets are displayed on the field during NFL football training camp at Redskins Park in Ashburn, Va. The Oneida Indian Nation tribe in upstate New York said Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013, it will launch a radio ad campaign pressing for the Washington Redskins to get rid of a nickname that is often criticized as offensive.
By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, September 5, 5:27 AM
ALBANY, N.Y. — An American Indian tribe in upstate New York said Thursday it will launch a radio ad campaign pressing for the Washington Redskins to shed a name often criticized as offensive.
The Oneida Indian Nation said the first ad will run on radio stations in Washington before the team hosts the Philadelphia Eagles in its season opener Monday night. In the ad, Oneida Nation Representative Ray Halbritter says NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should “stand up to bigotry” by denouncing “the racial slur” in the team’s name.
“We do not deserve to be called redskins,” the Oneida leader says in the ad. “We deserve to be treated as what we are — Americans.”
The radio ad said Goodell had rightly been critical this summer after an Eagles wide receiver was caught on video making a racial slur against African-Americans.
The ads launch as the Washington Redskins this year face a fresh barrage of criticism over their nickname, with local leaders and pundits calling for a name change. In May, 10 members of Congress sent letters to Redskins owner Dan Snyder and Goodell urging the team to change the name.
Snyder has vowed to never change the name.
League spokesman Brian McCarthy, in an email to The Associated Press, said they “respect that reasonable people may have differing views.”
“The name from its origin has always intended to be positive and has always been used by the team in a highly respectful manner,” McCarthy wrote.
There was no immediate response from the Redskins.
The Oneidas have been vocal opponents of the Redskins nickname — be it for NFL or high school teams. The tribe, which runs a casino and resort in central New York, this year gave $10,000 toward new jerseys to an area high school that changed its nickname from the Redskins to the Hawkeyes.
The Oneida said the first ad will run Sunday and Monday on several stations in Washington. Subsequent ads will run in Washington during home games and in the cities hosting the team when it is away. A spokesman for the Oneidas would not say how much the campaign would cost beyond “multiple thousands.”
Halbritter said that fans also are being urged to lobby the NFL in support of the name change at www.changethemascot.org , a website that debuted Thursday.
“We believe that with the help of our fellow professional football fans, we can get the NFL to realize the error of its ways and make a very simple change,” Halbritter said in a prepared statement.
This month, a tribal museum in Pendleton is going Pop Art. Tamastslikt Cultural Institute is the place that celebrates Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla tribal culture. But right now it’s exhibiting a series of Andy Warhol panels, in a collection entitled “Cowboys and Indians”. This is one of several events the museum planned to mark a milestone.
The ten panels and additional material are on loan to Tamastslikt from the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York. Tamastslikt curator Randall Melton says the images are evenly divided among the Cowboys – iconic western figures like General Custer and John Wayne – and Indians – images Warhol obtained from what became the National Museum of the American Indian.
Melton explains, “People kind of give you the ‘Huh? How does that fit into a tribal interpretive center?’ “
He says this show is a departure from the museum’s usual cultural program, but an intentional one. The Tamastslikt show marks the first time these works have travelled. They’re typical of Warhol’s style – photographs, done up in silkscreen, then painted with lots of vibrant color.
April Baer / Oregon Public Broadcasting “Zech” Cyr checks out an image of General Custer.
Dorothy Cyr a tribal member who works next door at the Wild Horse Casino, brought her 12 year old son Zech to see the show.
“It was nice,” the younger Cyr said, strolling amid the panels. “It was really odd the way he uses his art, how he made all the colors.”
Dorothy Cyr added, “I think it’s great opportunity for our tribe to have such works displayed on our reservation.”
The museum regularly pulls in visitors to the casino, but this exhibition, coinciding with Tamastslikt’s 15th anniversary, is intended in part to draw people coming to town for the Pendleton Roundup later this month, and anyone who may not have had the chance to see Warhol’s works before.
Pendleton resident Sue Petersen, who attended the opening, said she just missed a Warhol exhibition in San Francisco some years ago and was glad to see these works in town.
“I think this is just totally awesome,” Petersen said. “I’m blown kind of out of the park, I gotta see the rest of them.”
April Baer / Oregon Public Broadcasting Sue Petersen of Pendleton was among those who came early on opening night to check out the exhibition.
Warhol had suffered some health problems by the time these works were completed in 1986. He’d survived a gunshot wound, and worked with a lot of assistants. Some critics believe his later works lack some of the snap and wit of earlier pieces.
After seeing the panels, Jubertino Arranda, a young artist, said he shares some of those reservations.
“I personally do like a lot of earlier work,” Arranda said. “For me, it was very hit and miss after his brush with death.”
But Arranda still drove all the way from Walla Walla to see the show opening, and loved the technique, and Warhol’s elevation of everyday objects in some of the images. Speaking excitedly about seeing the works in person, Arranda broke off, saying, “Oh, gosh, he was so smart, I think he was really ahead of his time.”
Loretta Alexander is a retired painter herself, a Cayuse tribal member, and the mother of painter Philip Minthorne, whose has a vivid canvas hanging in an adjacent gallery room. She nods in approval at the Warhols’ temporary gallery.
“I liked it,” she said. “And the woman and the baby is the one I liked the best.”
That image, of an unidentified tribal woman with an infant on her back, is one of the few in the exhibition featuring an actual Native American person, notes Curator Randall Melton. Cowboys are represented with figures from Annie Oakley to Teddy Roosevelt. But, in choosing his tribal subjects, Warhol often opted for images like shield designs or an Indian head nickel. Melton wonders if the choice might have been intentional.
April Baer / Oregon Public Broadcasting Curator Randall Melton (second from left) and others pose for a group photo as well-wishers mark Tamastslikt’s 15th birthday.
“It’s interesting to me that he chose these people versus these objects,” Melton said. “I was talking with someone who said that’s how Indian people were seen, things to be moved out of the way for Westward expansion.”
Melton says a lot of people expressed surprise that a tribal museum might consider including a group of images with stereotypical imagery – sometimes painful imagery -for native people. He points to a panel featuring an iconic photo of Geronimo staring directly into the camera.
Melton says the photo was taken after the Apache leader was forced to surrender to the U.S. Army. But Melton says gallery viewers are invited to draw their own conclusions about Warhol’s treatment of the image, and consider what the artist was trying to say.
“The reasoning why he put these images together the way he did,” Melton said, “it’s a statement on the idea of the old west, how thats more myth than fact.”
Also, Tamastslikt’s Executive Director Bobbie Conner points out shows like this, open to interpretation, also present the museum another chance to do its job.
“One of the goals of the project,”Conner explains, “is to break down stereotypes, and to replace those stereotypes with new information.”
Tamastslikt’s regular exhibitions are geared toward cultural and historical exhibitions about tribes represented in the region.
Conner says the museum is doing pretty well, with over 600,000 visitors to the building. After 15 years, the museum is still paying down some of the debt associated with its construction. Conner says she takes deep pleasure seeing the direct access to history the museum unlocks for tribal members and others. Young people trained as teenaged tours guides when the museum opened now have young families of their own, and are bringing their own kids to shows like the Warhol exhibition.
Conner remembers riding horseback as a child in the field where the museum now stands, at the base of rolling hills, next to the tribe’s busy Wild Horse casino.
“Of all the things you could grow up to be,” she recalls, “this was never in my mind’s eye. Our tribe is less than three-thousand members, for us to have this 80 million resort here, including the museum is 180 degrees from when I was a child here. I’m still sometimes surprised I get to work here.”
Tamastslikt will keep Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians on display through October 26th.
When he set out to create a photo essay on “poverty in America” in 2005, photographer Aaron Huey had no idea what was in store for him. But what started as one story soon consumed his life as he became a committed activist devoted to raising awareness about Native American treaty rights. Just last month, he launched Honor the Treaties, a national campaign to combine art with advocacy on the topic.
Becoming an advocate for native rights wasn’t exactly his intention. A working photojournalist, Huey’s previous claim to fame had been walking across the United States with his dog. Yet he found himself constantly thinking about his work with members of the Lakota tribe living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the poorest places in the United States. Huey’s talk at TEDxDU in 2010 entirely focused on what he saw as the atrocities wreaked on the Lakota by the American government. He finished his talk in tears and with a powerful call to action: “Honor the treaties. Give back the Black Hills. It’s not your business what they do with them.” Mic drop. “Before that talk, I was still mostly just an observer,” he explained in a recent conversation with the TED blog. “I became an advocate on that stage. And that changed kind of everything for me.”
Honor the Treaties, or HTT, is Huey’s first foray into advocacy. With money from Fairey’s Obey fashion line — which supports one cause every year — HTT will provide grants to six Native American artists to help them distribute their work and spread their messages to a wider audience. HTT also plans to release free educational tools for middle and high school history teachers. Huey accepts his dream of the government actually returning land to the Lakota is unlikely, so he intends to focus on issues that might make a difference, such as campaigning against uranium mining, which exploits native lands to grave effects.
One of the most stomach-dropping moments in Huey’s talk is when he recounts that “wasichu,” the Lakota word for a “non-Indian” like himself, also means “the one who takes the best meat for himself.” For many Lakota, the color of Huey’s skin means he is not an appropriate person to advocate for these issues, and that has led to some difficult encounters along the way. Some have criticized him for depicting only the negative aspects of life on the reservation, others for exploiting the Lakota without giving them their own representation. As he puts it, “There is a lot of pain stored in this, and dealing with it in any way, you are releasing that. You’re triggering all of that pain again.” So why does he continue? He confesses he’s tried to stop a number of times. But he simply couldn’t forget about the injustice he’d seen. “I just couldn’t believe it was happening. It was like I’d witnessed a small version of Hiroshima and I kept having to go back to see it. Maybe for a long time I was just trying to understand it.” Now, he says, his goal is not only to focus on the Native American victims of treaty violations, but to build bridges with those who have no idea such violations even exist.
Has his experience at Pine Ridge changed the way he approaches his work? Huey, who still works on editorial projects as a photographer for National Geographic, is clear. “I don’t want to do stories that don’t have a heart,” he says. “I’m just not going to be satisfied with stories where I can’t be passionate about the subject, where I can’t make a difference.”
“Since the Talk”is a regular feature in which we go back to speakers at least one year after they gave their TED Talk. We explore progress and updates on the talk’s idea to find out what happened next. Read more Since the Talk posts »
Imagine a man dressed in stereotypically “traditional” Native American garb, donning a massive white feathered headdress, an ornamental tunic, and face paint. Now imagine that man performing mundane tasks in Washington, DC, like grocery shopping, riding an escalator or having lunch at a local restaurant.
The bizarre quandary is put forth by performance artist Gregg Deal, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe originally based in northwestern Nevada. In a striking film project titled “The Last American Indian on Earth,” Deal dresses himself in purposefully questionable attire and goes about his daily business, daring passersby to confront their own preexisting ideas about the modern Native American person.
“The purpose of this project is to raise questions about Native people, often viewed as a relic, and how they’re perceived
in the modern age,” Deal explains in a press statement about the work. “How will [people] react if they saw me, a Native dressed in buckskin and a headdress, doing something as mundane as shopping for cereal at the grocery store? How will they react if they saw me eating Chinese food in China Town or taking pictures of buffalo at the National Zoo?”
The project began filming last month and so far the reactions to Deal’s out-of-place appearance have included a pedestrian shouting “How!” and holding up a hand in salute, as well as a teenage girl exclaiming outloud, “Look, a real live redskin.” Another bystander chanted “hi-a-wat-ah-hi-a-wat-ah” upon seeing Deal in costume, prompting a videographer, Emmanuel Soltes, to follow him up for an explanation. As you can see in the clip above, the man proclaimed that he was not trying to be offensive, and if he had, he would have mentioned the Dallas Cowboys.
In other shots, Deal can be seen carrying signs that read “Thank the creator for Johnny Depp” or “White guilt release station, inquire with indian.”
“The performances will include a number of things that are simple, mundane, funny, political, over the top, satirical, ironic, and even sad,” Deal wrote on his Indiegogo campaign.
Deal plans to submit “The Last American Indian on Earth” for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. In the meantime, you can scroll through images of Deal in action below. Let us know your thoughts on the concept in the comments.
All that combustible fuel being produced by America’s fracking boom has federal transportation safety officials on edge.
Inspectors have started scrutinizing train manifests and tank car placards on trains departing from North Dakota’s Bakken region. The region is producing copious quantities of fracked oil, which is being carried to refineries in railway cars — many of them in a railcar model that’s prone to explode.
Operation Classification, aka the Bakken Blitz, was launched last month, just weeks after one such train carrying Bakken oil derailed and exploded in Quebec, killing 47 people and leveling much of the formerly scenic town of Lac-Mégantic. The U.S. Department of Transportation says it began planning the inspections in March after officials noticed discrepancies between the contents of rail cars and the hazardous warnings they bore. From Reuters:
“We need to make sure that what is in those tankers is what they say it is,” Cynthia Quarterman, administrator of the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, told reporters.
Highly combustible, light crude from the Bakken region is particularly dangerous, Quarterman said, and inspectors will make sure the fuel is properly labeled and handled with care.
Officials want to make certain that those responsible for the shipments know how dangerous their cargo is.
“The flashpoint needs to be taken into account,” Quarterman said, referring to the combustibility of flammable liquids that can vary according to the type of crude.
The Obama administration is also mulling new safety rules to address the boom in oil hauling; a draft version should be released within weeks. On Friday, the administration introduced temporary emergency rules designed to prevent a repeat of the Lac-Mégantic disaster on American soil, including a ban on leaving vehicles unattended if they are carrying hazardous materials.
Sitting in her teepee on Ottawa’s Victoria Island in December 2012, Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence was officially starting her hunger strike, breathing fire into the Idle No More movement and setting off a chain reaction that would eventually force Ottawa into talks on the nature of Canada’s relationship with First Nations. Meanwhile, five blocks away as the crow flies, the federal government’s security and emergency nervous system was ramping up its efforts to keep tabs on the movement. Just how extensive, and often ham-handed, the surveillance was is only now coming to light with the release of thousands of new documents.
The little-known Government Operations Centre ran that surveillance program from Ottawa’s Laurier Avenue West. Half of the program included public “situational awareness reports” on the protests. But the government also prepared secret “restricted distribution addendums” that were forwarded to CSIS, the RCMP and the Defence Ministry’s Canadian Joint Operations Command. They included exclusive information on proposed economic disruptions, such as bridge and rail blockades. One classified report released Jan. 2 noted the joint American-Canadian-operated Blue Water Bridge “would not tolerate any bridge closures/slowdowns.”
CSIS’s involvement is revealed in other ways. On Jan. 17, representatives from Aboriginal Affairs, the RCMP and the spy agency’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC) met to discuss the “potential for escalation” for the movement. The centre, created in 2004 and housed within CSIS, does threat assessments for domestic and foreign terror attacks. According to a CSIS spokesperson, ITAC was only involved due to a threat against Idle No More itself. “ITAC does not monitor Idle No More, as they do not meet the definition of terrorism from the Criminal Code of Canada,” the spokesperson says. Meeting notes suggest officials feared that outside groups were attempting to infiltrate Idle No More. “Non-Aboriginal movements [are] starting to move in,” the notes stated, including “anarchists” and the “black bloc.” CSIS would not comment on the specifics of their concerns.
Charlie Angus, the NDP MP for Timmins-James Bay—which includes Spence’s Attawapiskat reserve—is not surprised at the resources Ottawa poured into its response to the protest. “The message was always that these manifestations of outpouring of First Nations were something that needed to be managed, something to contain and possibly a threat,” he says. He accepts there may have been more radical elements in the movement. “Of course there are other left-wing groups that might join, but there was never any sense, as far as I can see, of menace or threat.”
Emails to and from Aboriginal Affairs staffers cite social media and “open-source reporting” as main sources of information—something Pamela Palmater, a political science professor at Ryerson University and a First Nations activist heavily involved in Idle No More, saw first-hand. She’d suspected government staffers were watching her social-media profiles. “They’re easy to pick out on Facebook,” she says. They’d add her as a friend and offer counterpoints to her posts that bore a striking resemblance to departmental talking points. “Who is it they’re watching? They’re watching people like me, who have no criminal record, doing nothing violent.”
Palmater says that at one talk she gave about Idle No More, she jokingly said that if any government staffers were in the audience, they were obliged to come forward. By the end, three staffers from Aboriginal Affairs and Justice had lined up to out themselves.
At one point, a group of developers created an Idle No More app that allowed activists to share information and plan protests, flash mobs and round dances. Deputy Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Michael Wernick contacted his communications director to see if the office could surreptitiously piggyback on the app to get its own message across. “Is it in any way feasible to get our backgrounders into the flow of this app without the appearance of [government] ringers calling into an open-line show?” he asks in one document.
Whether the government actually followed through is not clear. However Steven Bryant, who co-created the app, says, “We definitely did wonder when we had some of our signups.” He says a slew of the addresses came from downtown Ottawa, and he suspected that government staff were using his app.
Media lines from the department stress that the federal government does not operate as Big Brother to First Nations: “[Aboriginal Affairs] does not perform any type of ‘surveillance’ of any individuals, groups, or communities,” says one communiqué. Palmater scoffs at that, citing the case of Cindy Blackstock, a First Nations child rights advocate who was under surveillance by the government’s own admission. With Idle No More, it’s snooping, not spying; still, “I don’t think they should be treating us like domestic terrorists,” says Palmater.
Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission A dike is removed from Illabot Creek to restore its historic channel, one of several initiatives under way by Northwest tribes to bring back salmon habitat. This effort is by the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes under the auspices of the Skagit River System Cooperative.
As Indigenous Peoples of the Northwest work to restore salmon habitat and with it lost culture and treaty rights, they are grappling with the reality that continued development is undoing their efforts as they go. In September 2012 the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission released a report, “State of Our Watersheds,” documenting the results of local and state planning that have been in conflict with salmon habitat-recovery goals. Below are the principle findings as to what salmon habitat faces.
1. Estuaries are losing functional habitat because of population increases in lower portions of watersheds. “In the Suquamish Tribe’s area of concern, there has been a 39 percent loss of vegetated estuarine wetland area and a 23 percent loss of natural shoreline habitats, particularly small ‘pocket’ estuaries,” the report states. “Moreover, there are now 18 miles of bulkheads, fill and docks armoring the shoreline and degrading near-shore salmon habitat.”
All told, some 40 percent of Puget Sound shorelines have some type of shoreline modification, with 27 percent of the shoreline armored.
2. Rapidly increasing permit-exempt wells threaten water for fish. Since 1980, there has been an 81 percent increase in the number of new wells being drilled per 100 new Puget Sound residents moving into the area. The number of exempt wells in the Skagit and Samish watersheds since 1980 has increased by 611 percent, from an estimated 1,080 exempt wells to approximately 7,232.
“When more water is extracted from an aquifer than is being recharged, aquifer volume is reduced and the natural outflow from the aquifer decreases,” the report states. “This reduces the amount of fresh water available to lakes, wetlands, streams and the Puget Sound nearshore, which can harm salmon at all stages of their life cycle.”
3. Degraded nearshore habitat is unable to support forage fish. “In the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe’s focus area, according to studies since the 1970s, herring stocks have decreased from a status of healthy to depressed,” the report states. “In Port Gamble and Quilcene bays, which contain two of the largest herring stocks in Puget Sound, approximately 51 percent of spawning areas inventoried by [the] Port Gamble [S’Klallam] Tribe have been either modified or armored.”
4. Timber harvest has removed vast amounts of forest cover throughout all watersheds. In the Stillaguamish watershed, only 23 percent of the 1,777 acres of riparian area currently have any forest cover. In the Snohomish River basin, the Salmon Conservation Plan recommends that 150-foot buffers on both sides of fish-bearing streams be at least 65 percent forested. In 2006, those buffers were just 41 percent forested, with no gain since 1992 and little increase since that time.
5. Streams lack large woody debris. Large woody debris plays an important role in channel stability and habitat diversity. Estimates of large woody debris in the Green and Cedar rivers are 89 to 95 percent below the levels necessary for “properly functioning conditions” for salmon habitat.
6. Barriers cut off vast amounts of fish habitat. Despite extensive restoration efforts, many fish passage barriers, such as culverts, tide gates and levees still block salmon from accessing many stream miles of habitat. In the Quileute management area, culverts fully or partially block more than 168 miles of stream habitat. Most of these culverts are located on private forestlands. Culverts in the Chehalis basin block or impede salmon access to more than 1,500 miles of habitat.
7. Agricultural practices negatively impact floodplains and freshwater wetlands. Diking, draining and removing trees have resulted in a loss of stream buffers, stream channels and wetlands, and resulted in increased sediment and polluted runoff from agricultural activities.
In 1880, the Nooksack basin contained 4,754 acres of wetland to 741 acres of stream channel. By 1938, nearly 4,500 acres (95 percent) of off-channel wetland area had been cleared, drained and converted to agriculture. As of 1998, the lower mainstem retained less than 10 percent of its historical wetlands.
As of 2006, riparian areas of the Skagit River delta region are 83 percent impaired. Of that amount, only 12 percent are developed; the remaining 71 percent of impaired lands support crops and pasture.
8. Sensitive floodplains are being overdeveloped. In the Lower Elwha Tribe’s area of concern, 37 percent of the Morse Creek floodplain has been zoned for development — from utility rights of ways to single-family homes. Downstream of Highway 101, nearly half of the floodplain has also been zoned for similar development.
9. Puget Sound-area impervious surface increased by 35 percent from 1986 to 2006. It is projected that by 2026, the amount of impervious surface will increase another 41 percent.
“The Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Plan (2007) lists ‘Minimize impervious surfaces’ as a key strategy for protecting habitat,” the report states. “Impervious surface causes increases in stream temperatures; decreases in stream biodiversity, as evidenced by reduced numbers of insect and fish species; and contributes to pollutants in storm-water runoff, which can contaminate local aquatic systems.”
10. Loss of forest cover continues. From 1988-2004, Western Washington forestlands have declined by 25 percent—a loss of 936,000 acres of state and private forestland converted to other uses. Recent research from the University of Washington indicates that nearly one million more acres of private forestland are threatened with conversion.
The Skagit River System Cooperative—operated by the governments of the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe and the Swinomish Tribe, in partnership with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Forest Service, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Pacific Salmon Commission and the state—recommends no new construction of riprap without mitigation. However, since 1998, at least one mile of riprap has been added to the existing 14 miles of riprap shoreline along the middle Skagit River.
“Shoreline armoring contributes to river channel degradation by impeding natural bank erosion and river meandering, and disconnecting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, directly impacting salmon habitat,” according to the NWIFC’s report, “State of Our Watersheds.” “Young juvenile chinook have been shown to use river banks modified with riprap at densities five times lower than natural banks.”
Roberta Conner of Tamastslikt Cultural Institute benefits from audience participation as women from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla showcase traditional dances on the last day of the Oregon State Fair. / Thomas Patterson / Statesman Jou
The Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation took center stage on the last day of the Oregon State Fair today.
Four members of the tribe, wearing traditional clothing such as eagle feathers, moccasins, shell earrings and braids, performed their native dances on the Americraft Cookware Stage.
Roberta Conner, director of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute who led the dancers, described the dances before each demonstration.
Conner said the tribes have been in Oregon for 10,000 years and have always been welcoming to visitors. When visitors would reach the tribes they would be offered food and water along with a performance of the welcome dance.
Kirke Campbell, of Corvallis, said his daughter wanted to be at the fair today to see the Umatilla dancers.
Campbell was randomly selected from the audience to participate in the owl dance.
“I was honored to be picked,” he said.
At the end of the performance, all of the audience members were asked to join in a circle dance. About 50 took advantage of the opportunity.
“(This) has been the best turn out for the three performances we have done,” Conner said.
By Billy Frank, Jr., Chairman, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
OLYMPIA – A crumbling 103-year-old fish-blocking diversion dam and inadequate fish passage system on the White River near Buckley need to be replaced because they are leading to injury and death for hundreds of threatened salmon, steelhead and bull trout, slowing salmon recovery efforts in the river system.
It’s common for some adult salmon to display a few cuts, scrapes and scars by the time they complete their ocean migration and return to spawn. That can take two to six years depending on the species.
But more and more fish are now being found at the foot of the diversion dam with gaping wounds and other injuries caused by exposed wooden boards, steel reinforcement bars and other parts of the deteriorating structure. Many of those fish later die from their injuries.
At the same time, an explosive revival of pink salmon has overwhelmed the inadequate trap-and-haul fish passage system operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. At two years, pink salmon have the shortest life cycle of all salmon and are abundant in the Puget Sound region. Pink salmon returns to the White River have shot up in the past decade from tens of thousands to close to a million.
That’s led to massive crowding of returning adult spring chinook, steelhead and migrating bull trout at the foot of the diversion dam where salmon continually try to leap over the structure – injuring themselves in the process – in their effort to move upstream and spawn. All three species are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The diversion dam, constructed in 1910, sends water from the river to Lake Tapps. The dam prevents adult salmon from reaching the Mud Mountain Dam farther upstream, which is also impassable to salmon. Instead, fish are collected in a 73-year-old trap just below the diversion dam, then trucked upriver and released above Mud Mountain Dam.
There’s been a lot of talk but no action to fix the fish passage problem in the river.
Back in 2007, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued a biological opinion under the Endangered Species Act requiring the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to upgrade the fish trap. So far, the Corps has ignored the order, claiming that it doesn’t have the money. NMFS, meanwhile, has turned a blind eye to the Corps’ documented illegal killing of ESA-listed salmon.
In 1986, only a handful of spring chinook returned to the White River, but today those returns number in the thousands because of the cooperative efforts of the Muckleshoot and Puyallup tribes, state government and others.
The Corps and NMFS need to step up to the plate and do their jobs. When they don’t, what they are really saying is that salmon, treaty rights, and years of effort and investment by so many of us here in Puget Sound don’t really matter.
Youth involved in the University of New Mexico’s Honoring Native Life initiative want to be heard. The Native American Suicide Prevention Clearinghouse, a resource to tribes in New Mexico for suicide prevention and suicide response, today helped their voices reach far and wide with the release of a video directed toward tribal leaders and policy makers.
“What we need from our tribal leaders and policy makers is more sympathy towards the different generations that exist in our communities—the elders, parents, adults, youth, adolescents,” says a participant in the video. “Something that will bring those groups together but also recognize their differences.”
The video, which can be viewed at http://honoringnativelife.org, is meant to direct attention to the needs of Native American youth and strengthen tribal leadership and tribal policy makers’ involvement in suicide prevention.
The video was created at the recent Honoring Native Life Summit, an event specifically focused on addressing suicide in Indian Country. The Summit included involvement from the Pueblos of San Felipe and Zuni; Navajo Nation; Mescalero Apache Nation; Albuquerque Area Indian Health Service; New Mexico Indian Affairs Department; White Mountain Apache Tribe of Arizona; and several other tribal communities throughout the State.
“The message that we are hearing from tribal youth is that they want a voice, and in that respect, they want to feel like a priority to leaders and policy makers,” said Sheri Lesansee (Pueblo of Zuni), UNM, Department of Psychiatry, Center for Rural & Community Behavioral Health.
More than 30,000 people in the U.S. die by suicide every year. It is this country’s 11th leading cause of death. New Mexico consistently ranks among the top five states in the U.S. for its suicide rate, which is 1.5 to two times the national average. Suicide is the 9th leading cause of death for New Mexicans.
When he set out to create a photo essay on “poverty in America” in 2005, photographer Aaron Huey had no idea what was in store for him. But what started as one story soon consumed his life as he became a committed activist devoted to raising awareness about Native American treaty rights. Just last month, he launched 
