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Fukushima crisis new blow to fishermen’s hopes

In this Aug. 26, 2013 photo, fisherman Fumio Suzuki watches the sunrise aboard his boat Ebisu Maru before the star of fishing in the waters off Iwaki, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, Japan. Suzuki's trawler is one of 14 at his port helping to conduct once-a-week fishing expeditions in rotation to measure radiation levels of fish they catch in the waters off Fukushima. Fishermen in the area hope to resume test catches following favorable sampling results more than two years after the disaster, though for now fishing is suspended due to leaks of radiation-contaminated water from storage tanks at the nuclear power plant. Photo: Koji Ueda — In this Aug. 26, 2013 photo, fisherman Fumio Suzuki watches the sunrise aboard his boat Ebisu Maru before the star of fishing in the waters off Iwaki, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, Japan. Suzuki’s trawler is one of 14 at his port helping to conduct once-a-week fishing expeditions in rotation to measure radiation levels of fish they catch in the waters off Fukushima. Fishermen in the area hope to resume test catches following favorable sampling results more than two years after the disaster, though for now fishing is suspended due to leaks of radiation-contaminated water from storage tanks at the nuclear power plant. Photo: Koji Ueda

By MIKI TODA and KOJI UEDA, Associated Press

YOTSUKURA, Japan (AP) — Third-generation fisherman Fumio Suzuki sets out into the Pacific Ocean every seven weeks. Not to catch fish to sell, but to catch fish that can be tested for radiation.

For the last 2 ½ years, fishermen from the port of Yotsukura near the stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant have been mostly stuck on land with little to do. There is no commercial fishing along most of the Fukushima coast. In a nation highly sensitive to food safety, there is no market for the fish caught near the stricken plant because the meltdowns it suffered contaminated the ocean water and marine life with radiation.

A sliver of hope emerged after recent sampling results showed a decline in radioactivity in some fish species. But a new crisis spawned by fresh leaks of radioactive water from the Fukushima plant last week may have dashed those prospects.

Fishermen like 47-year-old Suzuki now wonder whether they ever will be able to resume fishing, a mainstay for many small rural communities like Yotsukura, 45 kilometers (30 miles) south of the Fukushima plant. His son has already moved on, looking for work in construction.

“The operators (of the plant) are reacting too late every time in whatever they do,” said Suzuki, who works with his 79-year-old father Choji after inheriting the family business from him.

“We say, ‘Don’t spill contaminated water,’ and they spilled contaminated water. They are always a step behind so that is why we can’t trust them,” Suzuki said, as his trawler, the Ebisu Maru, traveled before dawn to a point about 45 kilometers (30 miles) offshore from the Fukushima plant to bring back a test catch.

With his father at the wheel, Suzuki dropped the heavy nets out the back of the boat, as the black of night faded to a sapphire sky, tinged orange at the horizon.

As the sun rose over a glassy sea, father and son hauled in the heavily laden nets and then set to the hard work of sorting the fish: sardines, starfish, sole, sea bream, sand sharks, tossing them into yellow and blue plastic baskets as sea gulls screamed and swooped overhead.

Five hours later, the Ebisu Maru docked at Yotsukura where waiting fishermen dumped the samples into coolers and rushed them to a nearby laboratory to be gutted and tested.

Suzuki says his fisheries co-operative will decide sometime soon whether to persist in gathering samples.

For now they will have to survive on compensation from the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant’s operator.

The cooperative also had plans to start larger-scale test catches next month that would potentially also be for consumption if radiation levels were deemed safe.

But those plans were put on hold after more bad news last week: authorities discovered that a massive amount of partially treated, radioactive water was leaking from tanks at Fukushima, the fifth and so far the worst, breach.

The water, stored in 1,000 tanks, is pumped into three damaged reactors to keep their melted fuel cool. Much of the water leaked into the ground but some may have escaped into the sea through a rain-water gutter.

On Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulation Authority upgraded its rating of the leak to a “serious incident,” or level 3, up from a level 1 on the international scale of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It remains unclear what the environmental impact from the latest contamination will be on sea life. Scientists have said contamination tends to be carried by a southward current and largely diluted as it spreads.

Nobuyuki Hatta, director of the Fukushima Prefecture Fisheries Research Center, said the trend had been positive before the latest leaks, with fewer fish found exceeding radiation limits.

The government’s safety limit is 100 becquerels per kilogram, but local officials have set a stricter bar of 50 becquerels, said Hatta, who still expects test fishing to resume in September.

It all depends on the type of fish, their habitat and what they eat. Out of 170 types of fish tested, 42 fish species are off limits due to concern they are too radioactive, another 15 species show little or no signs of contamination. Few, if any, show any detectable levels of cesium.

Tests take over a month and are complicated. The time lag makes it difficult to say at any given point if sea life caught off the Fukushima coast is really safe to eat.

Also, local labs lack the ability to test fish for other toxic elements such as strontium and tritium. Scientists say strontium should be particularly watched for, as it accumulates in bones. TEPCO’s monitoring results of sea water show spikes in strontium levels in recent weeks.

Suzuki has little faith in the future of his business.

“People in the fishing business have no choice but to give up,” he said. “Many have mostly given up already.”

___

Associated Press writers Elaine Kurtenbach and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

Cherokee Nation Youth Choir in Thanksgiving Parade

2013 Cherokee National Youth Choir (L to R): Front row: Sean Sikora, Austin Jones, Jessalyn McCarter, Brandon Doyle and Seif Drywater. Second row: Saundra Downey, Tabitha Fishinghawk, Skylar Glass, Bailey Justice, Cierra Fields and Chloe Martinez. Third row: Shay Downey, Lacie Melton, Alayna Harkreader, Makayla Hernandez, Marissa Williams, Madison Shoemaker, Garrett Million, Caidlen Dunham, Kaleigh Christie, Natalie Gibson, Roxanna Seay and Zakry Fine. Not pictured: Dalyn Patterson, Mariah O’Field, Jaycee Jackson and Diamond Rock.

Source: Grand Lake News

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. —The Cherokee National Youth Choir will trade their traditional Thanksgiving turkey and dressing meal to travel to New York City and sing in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

It’s the second time the Cherokee National Youth Choir has been invited to the parade. The choir participated in 2007.

“We are thrilled to be invited back to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,” said Cherokee National Youth Choir Director Mary Kay Henderson. “It is very humbling, and our students take the opportunity very seriously. They know they are representing the Cherokee Nation on the parade route.”

Henderson said the 2 ½-mile parade, with more than 4 million people in attendance and viewers watching nationally, is mind boggling and something the 28 choir members will never forget.

The group is practicing weekly and held numerous fundraisers. The tribe will underwrite the majority of the trip.

The Cherokee National Youth Choir was founded in 2000 to keep youth interested in the culture and involved with speaking the Cherokee language. The choir has produced 11 albums, with the most recent being “Cherokee America” in 2012. The song choice for the Macy’s Day Parade won’t be revealed until on the parade route.

The public can hear the Cherokee National Youth Choir during several concerts at the Cherokee National Holiday. The choir will perform during the art show at the Tahlequah Armory Municipal Center at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 30. They also perform at Principal Chief Bill John Baker’s State of the Nation address about 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 31, at the Court House Square, and 2 p.m. at the Tahlequah Armory Municipal Center. Admission is free.

For more information on the Cherokee National Youth Choir, contact Mary Kay Henderson at 918-772-4172 or marykay-henderson@cherokee.org.

MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ legacy celebrated in shared memories

Julie Muhlstein, The Herald

EVERETT — In poetry and song, proclamations, speeches and shared memories, the essence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was celebrated Wednesday night in Snohomish County.

An overflow crowd packed the Jackson Center at Everett Community College to hear leaders, young people and those who remember the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement reflect on King’s words, spoken in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963.

County Executive John Lovick, noting that King’s birthplace of Atlanta has adopted the slogan “a city too busy to hate,” suggested a positive variation: “Snohomish County — a county that is not too busy to love.”

Two presenters were given standing ovations, one representing a new generation, the other an Everett elder, former City Councilman Carl Gipson Sr.

Gipson, first elected to the City Council in 1970, recalled harsh realities of his youth in Arkansas, when he wasn’t allowed into restrooms or restaurants. In Everett, he knocked on doors for a job, finally talking his way into one at a car dealership.

Gipson’s expressed gratitude to Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson for his efforts in naming the city’s senior center in his honor.

Many expressed a common theme, that King’s dream is not yet fully realized.

As they did for Gipson, the audience stood to applaud at the end of a poem recited by Rahwa Beyan, a 17-year-old leader of the youth chapter of Snohomish County’s NAACP organization. Her powerful recitation centered on the shooting death of black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

Lynnwood Mayor Don Gough spoke about a new “Let Freedom Ring” event earlier Wednesday in his city. Bells rang, and members of the public were given a minute each to say what King’s speech meant to them. Gough said social justice and civil rights “must meld with labor and worker rights.”

Shirley Sutton, of Lynnwood, read proclamations from her city, from Everett and Snohomish County officially recognizing the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington.

Tulalip Tribal Chairman Mel Sheldon offered a brief history lesson about his people.

It was 1924, he said, before American Indians were granted the right to vote. Sheldon praised current leaders of local government for forging strong relationships with the Tulalip Tribes.

There were speakers representing “Yesterday’s Wisdom,” “Today’s Focus” and “Tomorrow’s Dreams.”

Angelina Karke, a student at Discovery Elementary School in the Mukilteo district, shared an ambitious dream of her own:

“My dream is to be accepted into Harvard Law School. I will get my law degree and become president of the United States,” the girl said

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.

After Offensive Fiasco, Paul Frank Collaborates With Native Designers

Kate Crowley, Jezebel.com

Imagine this: After producing an event offensive to Native Americans, Paul Frank is now working with Native American artists and designers — going from cultural appropriation to cultural appreciation.

This time of year about 150,000 people descend on Santa Fe, New Mexico for Indian Market and it’s a pretty big deal as leaders and artists from the United States and Canada get together for an extreme exchange of creative thoughts. This past Friday evening before the official start of Indian Market, about 200 fashion-forward folks gathered at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts to celebrate the release of the “Paul Frank Presents” collection, featuring work by four Native designers.

Unlike previous get togethers, this one didn’t include tomahawks, “war paint,” or cocktails with tacky neo-native names. Instead it celebrated a high profile “win” for all who challenge cultural appropriation.

The event launched the collection and included a panel discussion and receptions with some of the movers and shakers involved in the Paul Frank/Beyond Buckskin/Native Appropriations saga proved that sometimes social change can be an outcome of fashion design, blogging, and community action. Whoa. The event centered on a dynamite panel with the collection’s designers (Candace Halcro, Plains Cree/Metis, Louie Gong, Nooksack, Autumn Dawn Gomez, Comanche/Taos and Dustin Quinn Martin, Navajo), powerful female writers and bloggers Adrienne Keene, Cherokee, and Jessica Metcalfe, Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and VP of Design for Paul Frank, Tracy Bunkoczy.

Part academic, part celebration, the atmosphere at the beginning of the event was serious: a quick 10-minute rehash of previous events, including the party Paul Frank held where Native appropriation was flaunted, in front a mostly Native crowd was likely the source of Bunkoczy’s cautious nervousness. “It must be hard to sit here and listen to this over and over again,” Keene playfully said of the rehash to the group in attendance from Paul Frank. However Keene also noted that the ladies from Paul Frank really spent extra time working with Metcalf, Keene and the artists to make the collaboration line a reality.

“This happened because of people in the Native American community and our allies who want us to be represented properly in popular culture,” said Dr. Metcalfe.

“I’m not used to there being any sort of response back to me….I was just blown away, ” says Keene of Paul Frank’s large-scale action, which included facilitating a licensing webinar for those in the industry as well as extensive action on items that had already been licensed.

After a recap of the previous transgressions, the artists spoke to the audience about their work for the collaboration inspiring laughter and head-nodding from the audience. Gomez, wearing a crown from her Paul Frank line, stressed a duty to her community while Gong said his work for the line was directly inspired by the situation that led to the collaboration including “sustainable relationships.” Canadian designer Candace Halcro, with a hairstyle that likely was the inspiration for Miley’s new ‘do, said she loves looking “crazy and cool and trendy.” She’s known as the “sunglasses girl,” and experimented with how to incorporate Julius, the Paul Frank mascot before deciding to stay true to her brand’s most well known look. Dustin Quinn Martin, the first designer to speak ended his portion with this thought: “I hope especially the Native people in the crowd are proud of what we came up with, and feel like there’s a little bit of us in every single one of these designs and that we didn’t sell out to the man.”

Indeed, you might be wondering what the deal with profits is here, since it was earlier noted that the designers “consulted” for free. At the event it was revealed that the designers themselves will receive the profits from the new line, but also that much of the work concerning the manufacturing and creation of the items was left to the artists. This wasn’t out of the norm for the female designers, since none of their work can easily be mass-produced. Still, the items showcasing the graphics that the male designers created essentially needed to be outsourced for mass production. “Normal” Paul Frank collaborations involve a split of the profits between the company and the other designer. This time around Paul Frank will not profit from the sales and all of the profits from the collection will go to each of the designers. The items are sold through the Beyond Buckskin Boutique and the Paul Frank items at the MoCNA seemed to be selling well and attracting attention this weekend.

Autumn Dawn Gomez; Dustin Martin; Candace Halcro.

The crowd was a who’s who of creatives in Indian Country and Santa Fe. Just like any other fashion party, guests were anxious to mingle, meet the designers and try on items from the line. This time though, everyone in attendance was appreciative of the work and aware of what can happen when a community challenges appropriation.

The artists and panelists pose with the Paul Frank crew.

Kate Crowley is a blogger in the Southwest who writes for New Times’ Chow Bella and Jackalope Ranch blogs. Follow her on Twitter: @KateCrowley.

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.

Yakama Nation Strikes Historic Agreement With DOJ, FBI To Settle Litigation Over 2011 Reservation Raid

FBI Agrees To Communicate With Yakama Police Before Entering Yakama Indian Country

Source: Intercontinental Cry

AUGUST 26, 2013 – Toppenish, WA – The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation have reached an unprecedented, out-of-court settlement with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), principally the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The settlement fully and finally resolves Yakama’s lawsuit against the FBI and several of its sister law enforcement agencies, as well as various county and municipal police agencies from Washington State, Mississippi and Virginia. That suit arose from a federal task force raid of Yakama Reservation trust lands that commenced at dawn on February 16, 2011. Upon word of the settlement on August 15, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Rosanna Peterson closed the case.

“Today is historic. The United States has agreed to honor the law enforcement protocols set forth in the Yakama Treaty of 1855. That is unprecedented.” said Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman and former police chief Harry Smiskin. “From today forward the FBI will communicate with Tribal Police before they enter Yakama Indian Country. I am confident that the resulting cooperation between federal and tribal cops will greatly improve public safety throughout our territories.”

Through Article II of the Yakama Treaty of 1855, the Yakama Reservation was set apart for the exclusive use and benefit of the Yakama Nation. To that end, the Yakama Treaty makes clear that no “white man” shall be permitted to reside upon Yakama Indian Country without permission from the Yakama Nation. Federal Treaty negotiators explained to the Yakama that Article II meant that no one – not even United States agents, with the lone exception of today’s Bureau of Indian Affairs agents – would be permitted to step onto Yakama Reservation lands without the Yakamas’ consent.

Also, in Article VIII of the Yakama Treaty, the United States and Yakama Nation set forth a process for delivering Yakama criminals or suspects who are in Yakama Indian Country to federal authorities. Federal Treaty negotiators explained to the Yakama that Article VIII meant there would be a consultation process between the Head Chief or all of the Yakama Chiefs, and the United States, relative to any Yakama alleged to have committed a wrong, before they might be delivered up to federal authorities.

The settlement agreement between Yakama and DOJ is called, “Recitals of Joint Law Enforcement Goals.” It recites that:

• “The Parties have a common interest in preventing violence, fighting crime in, and ensuring the safety and security of Yakama Indian Country…”

• “The United States embraces the federal government’s special trust responsibility to and relationship with the Yakama Nation, consistent with the Treaty of 1855, federal law, Executive Orders, and judicial decisions.”

• “The United States acknowledges that the Yakama Nation has no interest in promoting, condoning, or protecting criminal activities by its members; as such, the Yakama Nation will not intentionally harbor fugitives and desires to partner with the United States in law enforcement matters.”

• “The United States recognizes that maintaining a close and cooperative relationship with the Yakama Nation is essential to preventing and combating crime and assisting crime victims.”

• “The United States recognizes that in an age of increasingly complex criminal and national security threats, the common interests of the Yakama Nation and the federal government are best served by appropriate coordination, communication and information-sharing between the Parties.”

• “The Parties agree that it is in the best interests of both governments to identify practical ways to coordinate and communicate effectively with respect to law enforcement matters.”

• “Both Parties commit to acting in good faith to advance and act consistently with these goals.”

The operative provision of agreement provides:

In keeping with its law enforcement duties, DOJ law enforcement remains committed to communicating with Yakama Tribal Police concerning its law enforcement activities in Yakama Indian Country, as operational integrity concerns, including officer and public safety, permit, and will communicate with tribal police at the earliest prudent and practicable opportunity about enforcement operations undertaken in Yakama Indian Country (emphasis added).

In March 2011, the Yakama Nation sued federal law enforcement agencies and several local governments for violating these federal Treaty provisions when raiding a Yakama member-owned business on Yakama trust lands without providing any advance notice to Yakama authorities, and in turn barring Yakama Nation cops who arrived at the scene of the raid to help keep the peace.

Since the summer of 2012, the parties engaged in settlement discussions and negotiations. In June 2013, Yakama reached out-of court settlements with Yakima County, Benton County, and the local governments from Virginia and Mississippi (Yakima Herald Republic).

It’s time for civil rights and environmental activists to join hands

Brentin Mock, Grist

Somehow environmental justice got lost at the rally commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Freedom & Jobs. The 50-plus speakers at the Aug. 24 gathering, which drew tens of thousands of people to the nation’s capital, spoke out about restoring voting rights, fighting “stand your ground” laws, and pushing for stronger worker wages. But little was said about how people of color suffer disproportionately from polluted air and water, and are the first to suffer because of climate change.

That was unfortunate. Whether the organizers of last weekend’s rally knew it or not, the 1963 March on Washington inspired some of the pioneering activists who created the modern-day environmental movement. Some of those environmentalists participated in the civil rights movement that birthed the 1963 March. Since that time, however, the environmental and civil rights movements have never fully gelled together, despite some efforts to make that happen along the way.

There were signs that the organizers of last weekend’s rally were again trying to connect the dots. The National Action Network, the civil rights organization that lead the 50th anniversary rally, listed environmental justice as one of the issues motivating the march:

In Los Angeles, African Americans are twice as likely to die in a heat wave. 68% of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal plant and this creates more incidences of asthma. Latino children are twice as likely to die from an asthma attack as non-Latino children.

Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus made climate change and the proposed Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline cornerstones of his short speech, and U.S. Senate-hopeful Cory Booker touched on the environment. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace supported the march, both individually and through the Democracy Initiative, a coalition of progressive policy groups that also includes the NAACP.

But those two speakers were but a tiny sub-set of a sub-set of speakers, and the green posters of the Sierra Club were but small ponds among the ocean of attendees. Organizers largely missed an opportunity to recognize the longstanding connection between civil rights and environmental protection, and to forge a stronger alliance moving forward.

To be fair, environmental protection wasn’t a registered demand at the 1963 march. Those organizers were justifiably more concerned with the frothing, attack-trained fangs of Jim Crow. But the 1963 march is in many ways responsible for at least midwifing the event that brought the modern-day environmental movement into existence: the national Earth Day “teach-in” of 1970.

The concept for the April 22 Earth Day rally came from Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson. But the committee that brought it into fruition was made up of seven people, most of them students, and most either civil rights organizers or people with strong ties to the civil rights movement.

One of them, Arturo Sandoval, was a Chicano activist from New Mexico who was completely clear about racial justice in the new environmental organizing. As a student at the University of New Mexico, he worked to establish a Mexican-American students union and a Chicano Studies program, and fought discrimination against minority workers at the college. He led the Earth Day rally in the barrios of his home city of Albuquerque, where sewage plants and pollution-heavy factories besieged poor communities.

In his Earth Day speech, Sandoval schooled the crowd on the concept of “la raza,” or “the race,” which he said didn’t just apply to Chicano Americans. “We command ‘la raza’ to live, because humanity is dying,” he said. “And America — white America — has lost its ability to cry, and laugh and sing and love and live.”

Steve Cotton, the national Earth Day committee’s press outreach person, had left Harvard to work for the Southern Courier, a civil rights newspaper in Alabama started by Freedom Summer activists. Sam Love, the group’s Southern coordinator, was a Mississippi State University student who helped register black voters in the state where three white Freedom Summer students were murdered. In 1968, Love joined Fannie Lou Hamer and civil rights leaders at the Democratic National Convention, where they challenged Mississippi’s sitting delegation. The national Earth Day coordinator, Denis Hayes, was an ecologist who wanted to marry science with social justice activism.

In the lead-up to the first Earth Day, some African Americans criticized the effort, saying that a day of environmental protests would distract people from the civil rights injustices that were still occurring. But Hayes addressed those concerns upfront. In a press conference, Hayes said that organizers’ “goal is not to clean the air while leaving slums and ghettos, nor is it to provide a healthy world for racial oppression and war.”

At an Earth Day event in Washington, D.C., black civil rights activist Channing Phillips said he was participating “out of a deep conviction that racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitive economic system.”

Of course, the 1963 March on Washington led the way to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and later the Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act, and helped elevate the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development into a Cabinet-level agency. The 1970 Earth Day helped win to passage of the Clean Water Act, a new Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Given what each of these movements produced independently, it’s scary to think about what they might produce in unison.

This week, I spoke with Quentin James, national director of the Sierra Club Student Coalition, who has also worked with the NAACP. During the week-long March on Washington 50th anniversary events, he co-convened a climate justice workshop, training young people to launch campaigns in their own communities that address climate change and the right to vote. Previous to this, he brought 10,000 students to a rally at the White House to urge President Obama to address climate change and stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. He also helped organize a college student-led campaign that successfully pushed 20 universities across the nation to switch from coal plant-powered energy to renewable energy sources. He has effectively married the best of both March on Washington and Earth Day worlds and achieved results.

James told me he was not bothered by the lack of environment mentions from the speakers at the Aug. 24 rally. While the connections between civil rights and the environment weren’t made at the podium, he said they are being made in communities, where it counts.

“Sure, we could have had 10 speakers on climate and environmental justice issues” on stage on Saturday, James said. “But it’s not about words and speeches, it’s about the actions. We do need a groundswell of communities to uplift our work, but I know that that work is already happening, so I don’t need someone to speak about it on stage to know that it’s real.”

Still, the two movements couldn’t need each other more than they do right now. As Rev. Yearwood said, standing before the Lincoln Memorial at the 50th anniversary rally, with “#NOKXL” stitched in his baseball cap, “The issue of the 20th century was equality, but the issue of the 21st century is existence.”

Or, as he told me when I caught him shortly after his speech, “Climate change may not have been a problem in 1963, but it certainly will be a problem in 2063.”

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.”